They say that astronauts become more of themselves the longer they’re in space. The capsule becomes an echo chamber, one’s quirks bouncing off the walls, reverberating back, amplified and boosted. Rocketed to infinity, the starman’s personality is off-leashed, let free of the dampening effects of daily deference, not cowered by kowtowing routines.
His thoughts spin untethered, are loosed upon the void: that vacuum which all matter seeks to fill, that both Nature and Ego abhor.
In Houston, they say this is good. When the man recedes, it spells trouble. When he becomes distant, when his lights dim, happiness and mental health are soon on the wane. The hearty explorer radiates. The diseased spiral inward, fall into themselves. Collapse like a black hole.
These days there’s been a little less of me. A little loss of me. The last years were full of cutting, unhealthy pruning past bushy growth to the quick of the blood-let soul. The spirit sapped, the veins tapped. The ruby red elixir shed and drunk by greedy men.
Oh yes, I think I need some time. (“Time to heal, desire time,” to quote Bono.) Some real time, some space time. Days and nights on end time. Not retreat time, mind you, quite the opposite: proper time to push off past and focus on next breaths, to inhale and reclaim the present.
When astronauts come back down, they say it takes a day on the ground for every day up there. Days to retrain the body and mind to normalcy, to find land-legs and sure footing against the unrelenting tug of gravity. If that’s true, perhaps the opposite is true too: For every day here in the earth, I need a day to shoot off to space. To let the soul grow back to its right shape and find place, among the stars.
