Albedo Features
Friends, Comrades, Revenants,
A late-summer transmission, hopefully reaching you at your beachside vacation retreat.
Last weekend I participated in a 48-hour event-slash-exhibition taking place in Kaunas, Lithuania titled “Mars Returns.” As regular readers of this space know, I have been working on a project about the planet Mars for some time now. The event, curated by Raimundas Malašauskas, included contributions by poets, musicians, and visual artists loosely thematized around the Red Planet.
My own contribution—two short, new videos extracted from the larger project—are included here for your viewing pleasure. Paired with the videos are two texts written for this newsletter.
As usual, thank you for reading and watching. If you like what you see here, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Best,
J
PS. Clicking on the stills below will open the videos on Vimeo.com. Alas, most email apps do not allow for native video playback.
Albedo Features
The images come back a confusion. Mars has been photographed thousands of times by rovers and orbiters, its surface long ago familiarized into barren regolith, but little appears as expected. These images, shot by the latest orbiter, downloaded over millions of interplanetary miles, show Mars in a bewildering disarrangement of black and white. Smears of jellylike blacks, humps of gray, snarls of veined snow.
As the scientists look at the timelapse photos, they observe unbelievable changes. Deserts constantly perturbed by unseen forces. Volcanic ravines disappeared between orbiter revolutions. The scientists try to explain this planetary commotion by resorting to standard exometeorology. Surface changes are obviously due to atmospheric changes, these scientists say. It is just the Martian weather.
Others disagree. Another force is at work, they say. A force psychological, perhaps psycho-geographical. These dissidents form a working group devoted to testing their hypothesis. The working group shows the images to students selected at random from the local university. A questionnaire asks the students to describe what they see. Some of the student-subjects report seeing the outlines of extinct species: mammoths, passenger pigeons, a kind of gazelle. Others recognize family members long dead, drawn in black-and-white profiles. The remainder struggle to see anything at all and confess to feeling fatigued, possibly depressed.
The scientists ask: The morbidity of the test results is obvious, but does this morbidity belong to the subjects or the planet? Are the Martian albedo features a kind of planetary Rorschach test? Or is it something more deliberate, something like a cosmic communication device?
The majority of scientists finds this hypothesis ridiculous. The planet is dead matter, they say. Precisely, the minority answers. All matter is dead—life, too, is matter and is therefore dead. The planet is communicating that fact to us. Their colleagues laugh, not knowing whether to take this statement seriously. After some debate, the study is ended. However, the dissident minority—a splinter group within the splinter group—continue their work off-campus, eventually drafting their findings in a paper titled, “Mars and Necrotic Signaling: Martian Geology as Negentropic Communication.” As of this writing, the paper has yet to be published.
Doesn’t an old thing know when a new thing arrives?
Who will be the first human to die on Mars? Perhaps they will be the first human to land there, an astronaut-pioneer famous on two worlds. Or maybe they will be a minor character in the planet’s history—the first decent Martian tailor.
Hollywood astronauts often die while attempting to land on the Red Planet, usually in tragic and preventable accidents. The dead astronauts are then buried under piles of rocks like in a cowboy film, sometimes with a cross and improvised headstone. Martian soil is rocky, sterile, and toxic, so one assumes these astronauts’ bodies will be interred, fully fleshed, for eternity.
Cinematic Mars is a tomb, riddled with unlucky space travelers, alien ships, and, in a more realistic example, the Pathfinder probe. In one film, the soil itself is alive, the stones forming a conical superorganism, what one character calls an “alarm system.”
Perhaps Martian soil will become sacred to some of the Terran pioneers. They will ingest the soil in secret, magic rituals. This will be a new religion in the making, one that could not have existed before humanity landed on their new home. A new world needs new gods.