The central thesis to Mailer’s book is that the “cold, sexless” way with which the U.S. Government and NASA approached the 1969 moon landing took all the heroics out of the endeavor and only made our world proportionately that much smaller. It’s a beautifully written, densely thick book (414 tightly packed pages in my copy) with a poignant, distinct idea at its core. Almost all other commentary on the Apollo Space program focused either on the Life Magazine angle – “man’s greatest achievement” or human interest articles on the astronauts’ wives – or else criticized that the $28 billion dollar cost of the program (in 1960’s currency) was far too extravagant given our nation’s current domestic short coming.
Mailer narrates the book from the perspective of his ego – he speaks in the third person, opening his pages to protracted flights of self analysis, beginning with his own reaction to news of Hemingway’s death and grazing past such other personal tidbits as his campaign for mayor of New York City and the night he stabbed his wife. Few but Mailer could turn such an enormous story as the moon landing (no human bring has ever – not before or since – left the gravity of Earth) into a personal tale. But his sense that it was achieved not through bravery and gaul but by mechanical, automated processes was a personal idea. The pure facts about the Apollo program would not in themselves lead one to state the effort was “cold and sexless” – this kind of statement comes from having an ego that felt squashed up against such a gargantuan achievement. At the same time, it’s that ego – a personality in anxiety over losing its significance – that gives us such a beautifully unique perspective.
Mailer felt that, by their Boolean definition, computers reduced a task to its lowest common logical problem – thereby avoiding the real human challenge of overcoming an issue. And he sees nothing but lack of passion in the men that made this flight possible. Mailer is aghast that Neil Armstrong said he never had dreams about the historic flight he was about to take, nor could he adequately answer to “why are we going to the moon?” when questioned by reporters. None of the astronauts ever admitted to fear, either; they just marched along in their space suits and spoke of “obtaining maximum possible advantage” and “peripheral secondary objectives”.
Mailer counters this precise logic of NASA with an odd mythical undertone. He’s constantly wondering if there’s not more to this trip, more to leaving our known earth and conquering such a long-standing object of myth and romance as the moon. He seriously entertains the irrational (and somehow doesn’t make a total fool of himself). He conjectures that there may be a magical ether to space and that there might be a real psychology to machines (a whole chapter is devoted to this last idea). It’s all very fanciful and quite a rationalization in defense of his own opinions, but it’s also entirely compelling given the intelligent way he elucidates on these matters.
There’s an account of computers in Of a Fire on the Moon that I find completely fascinating. It’s certainly a naïve view (if Mailer hadn’t received a degree in engineering, I’d say it was the view of someone who’d never learned how to use a computer) but I feel it’s just as valid because of his force of language and thought.
The digital computer had the power to run man’s mind through an accelerator which could catapult him out to the universe or explode the remains of his mind on earth; perhaps for this reason [Mailer] could never pass through a room containing a bank of computers without a moment of woe, as if he had just walked through an amphitheater where some species of higher tape-worm was quietly ingesting the vitals of God.
The digital computer was a diabolical machine, or the greatest instrument ever handed to man, but it could hardly be both for it was constructed on the implicit promise that all phenomena might yet be capable of capture by statistics. The digital computer was based upon millions of switches, all primed individually to say one or nothing, yes or no. If the switch allowed a current to pass, the answer was one, or yes; absence of current was zero. 1 and 0 became the simple building blocks upon which numbers could be recreated. The entire decimal system was replaced by two numbers, 1 and 0, rather than 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Thus the figure of 111 in this new system stood for 7 because it was a way of writing 22 + 21 + 20 or 4 + 2 + 1. And 8 in turn was 1000 or 23 + 0 + 0 + 0. The binary system was then obviously more unwieldy than the decimal system, much more unwieldy – a number like 437 could only be written as 110110101 – but since every number, no matter how large, became some combination of 1 and 0 and since one or zero could always be indicated by a pulse of current or its absence, numbers could therefore be transmitted in a stream of electrical impulses like Morse Code.
[…] The computer became the new frontier, a frontier of airconditioned windowless rooms with fluorescent panels in the ceiling and electronic whirrings and gurglings. […] If a problem could be programmed, that is, if it could be broken down into a form which could be inserted into the computer, then the problem could be solved. Sometimes it could only be solved to a degree. Translations from foreign languages were lamentable, computers which played chess were only average players and the poem which follows – well, it was written by a computer.
Children
Sob suddenly, the bongos are moving.
Or could we find that tall child?
And dividing honestly was like praying badly,
And while the boy is obese, all blast could climb.
First you become oblong.
To weep is unctuous, to move is poor.Perfect plastic poem, for it left the same aesthetic satisfaction in the heart as the smell of vinyl.
It’s all a bit of a rationalization, of course, but I find it compelling nevertheless. It’s more rhetoric than argument; you could counter-argue just as easily by listing the immense benefits of computers, especially living today, thirty years after these words were written. But Mailer’s language and expression is, I feel, very strong and it gives his points more significance than they’d otherwise have. He’s on the side of sentience, of aesthetics and moods, which I find very much logical and vital.