Overview Institute Unveiled

A long day in DC yesterday, making the formal public announcement of The Overview Institute, an organization aimed exploring the ramifications, implications, and the possibilities for changes in perceptual and consciousness that arise (as it were) from our ability to rise from our planet.

The Institute is named, and its concerns and avenues of inquiry and speculation flow from, the exemplary work of Frank White, whose The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution marked, upon its publication in 1987, the first sustained and consistent attempt to examine how human perception is altered (and perhaps transformed) by off-Earth experience.

Frank's book was of (groundbreaking) necessity anecdotal -- reminiscences, accounts, insights from individuals who'd been to space, all of them at the time astronauts or cosmonauts. To those anecdotes Frank brought and brings his sharp analytical intelligence and clear, focused thinking.

An indispensable book, and one that has refused to release its hold upon the imaginations and scientific curiosity of those who've read it.

Twenty-one years later and the handful of people who's been off-planet in 1987 has now swelled to more than 500, a number that will itself grow dramatically as various private-enterprise human space transport enterprises come on-line over the next few years.

At yesterday's event we unveiled our Institute's Declaration of Vision and Principles as well the other members of the Institute's Core Overview Group.

Most importantly, we called for others to sign our declaration, and join us in exploring the issues, opportunities, and areas of scientific, cultural, artistic, spiritual, philosophical inquiry raised by the Effect's effects.

As Frank pointed out in his eloquent remarks, the Overview Institute doesn't have an ideology or agenda -- the implication of his work and findings is that 500, or 500,000, or 500,000,00 people experiencing the effect in orbit might well manifest 500,000,000 different personal responses to and manifestations of the experience.

What we're hoping to apply quantitative scientific methodology to is whether or not the Effect itself exerts measurable neurophysiological/cognitive effects on the brain.

But we're also quite deliberately seeking to engage the vision of artists from all media, cultural and thought leaders, activists, and above all interested individuals of whatever stripe and profession in exploring the question of just what space means -- and can mean -- to and for us here on Earth.

In my remarks I noted that it's now close to forty years since Norman Mailer launched his magnificent (if magnificently underrated) Of A Fire On The Moon with the words:

"Are we poised for a philosophical launch?"

As I said yesterday, and believe, "Now we are."

Take a look at our Declaration and, if it appeals, sign up for The Overview Institute (it's free.)

And tell others about it.

Buckley

Add to your blog as infrequently as I do, and the risk is that it become a necrology. My last entry marked Norman Mailer's death; today William F. Buckley died.

What a pair of blogmarks! And what reminders of the virtues -- and rewards -- of the productive life.

Reminders as well of a time in American political discourse now long past, and long since in need of resuscitation if not outright resurrection.

They were giants in those times -- the 1950s and 1960s -- and not just in retrospect. Buckley and Mailer each perceived and understood (not the same thing at all) both the readiness in America for a revolution, and also the need for one. That each pursued his revolutionary goals with wit and bonhomie as well as intellectual audacity and literary zeal gave the era a frisson sadly missing since.

I remember my father and myself watching Mailer on Buckley's Firing Line sometime in the latter Sixties. They went at it, they did -- at one point Mailer (my memory tells me) remarking that Fidel Castro was his idea of a great man, and Buckley falling most uncharacteristically silent.

But he was never silent for long.

What has stayed with me since that night was Dad's remark that, after all the fireworks, it was easy to imagine the two of them going out for dinner together. A distance and then some from the levels of invective hurled witlessly from both sides today.

My first professional publication came around that time, a review for the Raleigh News & Observer of Buckley's essay collection The Governor Listeth. I liked the book and Buckley's writing then, I like his writing now.

Politically, I was in his orbit if not his thrall for awhile, but only for awhile.

The revolution he sought -- and that so largely succeeded, or appeared to -- seemed to me to become derailed around the time Buckley (and a substantial portion of the electorate) became captivated by the Actor (I use the term loosely, to say the least) whose depth of inauthenticity in the wake, a decade later, of Barry Goldwater's genuineness, turned out to be exactly what America, and most but not all American conservatives wanted, or thought they did.

But Reagan was electable -- and how! And with his election -- which, to hear his name invoked during this year's primaries was the Ascension made American -- so much of what intrigued me about intellectual conservatism as propounded by Buckley, most vivaciously, disappeared, subsumed by Reaganism which rested its multifold cruelties and criminalities on an anti-intellectualism so severe and yet so charming (and marketable) that even the truest and most philosophical conservatives chose to follow the tide, Buckley chief among them.

Yet I never stopped reading him -- the essays, the novels, the wonderful sailing books and the exuberant memoirs. His ferocious productivity never fully flagged, and when he was found dead today it was at his desk in his study.

Where he wanted to be.

Mailer

He changed the life of his times, back when times could be changed by a writer. No writer of his generation had Mailer's ambition -- or, fortunately for his ambition and his readers, his range.

I was 13 or 14 when I first read him, Barbary Shore, whose first sentence --

"Probably I was in the war."

-- struck me then and strikes me now as a marvelous, frightening gambit, a hook that's also an existential jab, a signal that we are not embarked upon anything like a traditional novel.

Nor were we, nor was he.

The vastness of his gifts was matched by the acuity of his eye and ear: while the political writing is rightly celebrated for his sense of how things work, Mailer was also an acute social novelist and observer. The societies of which he wrote best in fiction and nonfiction -- ancient Egypt, the CIA, soldiers on patrol, the familial and social structures and strictures surrounding young Adolph Hitler, the astronaut /engineer corps in the summer of the first moon landing, marchers approaching the Pentagon, murderer and murdered in Utah, more -- were from his perspective and in his prose representative of the cosmic as well as the common, the divine as well as the bedeviled, the orgiastic and the disciplined, the brilliant and the brutal, the contemporary and the timeless.

He tried to get it all between the covers of his books, each of them different, each informed by a mind relentless in its pursuit of the ultimate, its sense of language, its adherence to the importance of writing not only well but also challengingly.

No less in the last year of his career than the sixty years of work and words that preceded it. He wrote once:

Every moment of one's existence, one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

His own moments now ended, his moment, that moment of history that was our times from The Naked and the Dead in 1948 to On God published a few weeks before his death, remains alive and lively, his voice ongoing in his books and his essays and all the rest, themselves though now artifacts of a time and of times when writing and writers mattered more to the culture than they do now.

Which itself doesn't matter: he did his work and did remarkable work, and through it all was engaged in an exploration the equal of any writer one cares to name, nearly every page reminding us of his commitment to a journey best described by one of his best narrators:

We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.