Filling the Cosmic Vacancy
An Institutional Autobiography
When caught in the midst of reading, Writing at the End of the World, a book by Richard E. Miller, an English professor at Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, one may be enraged with frustration because he asks the question, “Does writing matter?” Miller investigates the role of certain forces and influences that infect certain people, and intellectually summarizes their stories, using these articles of text as a means of substantiation for his provocative and controversial questions that he proposes. In the broader picture, his goal was to instigate debate and reinforce the powers of the literary arts.
One such question was, “Is it possible to produce writing that generates a greater sense of connection to the world and its inhabitants?”(Miller 441) To achieve this, Miller introduces the concept of an institutional autobiography that highlights these connections to the world and its inhabitants. So the experiment of drawing connections between the institutional forces that surround an object or piece of writing, or practically anything significant, allows one to make an attempt to prove that we are capable of producing writing that generates a greater sense of connection to the world and its inhabitants, using the institutions as a medium for the global connection. This leads me to employ this practice with an object of my own personal significance—that object being an autographed photo of Neil Degrasse Tyson, who has always been an idol for me. It is with this small personal object that I will highlight its connections to the institutional forces that surround it, using other pieces of writing to reinforce the connections. In this essay I will generate a greater sense of connection to the world and its inhabitants by highlighting connections between similar institutional forces that apply to my autographed photo of Neil Degrasse Tyson and to one of the “certain People” that Miller looks at, in this case Descartes, a sixteenth century French philosopher, as well as the forces that surround the Palestinians described in Edward Said’s book, After the Last Sky: Palestinian lives.
A sixteenth century French philosopher named Rene Descartes, spent six days dismantling and reassembling his whole understanding of the universe. He claimed to do so by this process, “ to get to the essence of anything be it a man or a piece of wax, we must strip it of its clothing and look at it in its nakedness. We must remove all outward appearances and get to that which does not change.”(Miller 434) This ideology of finding fundamental truth is the same ideology explained by Neil Degrasse Tyson in the television series Cosmos. Cosmos takes you on a ride through the universe through the lens of a microscope, pealing away all outward appearances to investigate cosmic phenomenon in their nakedness. Two men separated by a span of half a millennia find themselves dwelling on the same institutional force of inquiry. Yet, it isn’t just Neil Degrasse Tyson that recommends using these type of glasses, it is the entire scientific institution that teaches this way of looking at the world.
Digging deeper into the institutional connections between my photo of Neil Degrasse Tyson and Descartes, it becomes apparent that, “ Descartes contributed to the larger effort to liberate reason from the prison of religious dogma and he did this in part, by driving a wedge between the mind, which traffics in clear and distinct ideas, and the body , which transmits and receives the innately imperfect data of the senses.” The institutional forces that separate Bill Nye and Ken Ham are seemingly mutually exclusive but 500 years prior to their debate, Descartes’ six days of meditation, foresaw the conflict of their institutional forces. Today Neil Degrasse Tyson stands as an icon of modern astrophysics, as Ken Ham stands at the head of the creationist philosophy. Their belief systems are separated by the mind and the body, and yet Descartes was troubled by the same conflicting ideologies that we deal with today and most likely will continue to deal with for eternity. No matter how different their understanding of the universe is they both have to look at the world in its nakedness, drawing them closer together than ever before.
The next piece of writing I will look at is Edward W. Said’s book After the Last Sky: Palestinian lives, which although is described as not an objective based essay it is an attempt by Said to enlighten us to the truth behind the exile of Palestinians. The same institutional forces are evident with the Palestinian conflict as are evident with Cosmos. In After the Last Sky: Palestinian lives, Said explains one of the most devastating consequences of exile, “Identity — who we are, where we come from, what we are — is difficult to maintain in exile.”(Said 16)If one was to explain a major goal, or the major goal of the series Cosmos, one might say, to try to find out what it means to be human, who we are, where we come from, what we are. The institutional force of identity is apparent on all planes of life, including the field of astrophysics and the political and geographical exile of the Palestinians.
Palestinians are stuck without a state, without representation, without a voice and, as such, begs to ask the question, “Do they have an identity even in the absence of all these necessities that we associate so closely with identity?” Now of course some Palestinians are more radical than others and try to take matters into their own hands, to give themselves an actual identity, but they are not alone. Cosmos tries to give humanity an identity, not just the Americans, or the Jews, or the Russians but to grant all of us a fundamental identity based on science and mathematical truths that can never be taken away with exile.
Another force at play is the relationship between the Palestinians and the Jews, and between Cosmos and the church. As Said put it, “ We have no holocaust to protect us with the world’s compassion.”(Said 17) The Palestinian people don’t have such an atrocity (or do they?)to gain the world’s sympathy and protection. This is analogous with Cosmos and the church. Cosmos doesn’t have a global society backed by thousands of years of tradition, power, holiness, and faith, to gain the world sympathy and compassion. Both Cosmos and Palestinians ironically lack a powerful identity they they both strive to prove there is. In a sense they both lack the institutional force of doubt. Furthermore, the institutions behind space exploration are brethren with the Palestinians. For further explanation, Said states, “Most other people take their identity for granted, not the Palestinians.”(Said 16) Producing an intergalactic identity for humans is synonymous to producing an international identity for Palestinians. Both, the cosmically inspired and the internationally inspired, share the same absence of identity.
Now unlike Said’s essay being not objective based, this essay otherwise is. I ask you to look at the world not as segregations of nationalities and separations of faith but as a unity. A globe fixated on the question of identity should strive to produce one. Hence, a globe divided by personal discrepancies will be viewed as futile and underdeveloped, in the eyes, be it, an intelligent designer or an alien being. The differences we instate between us as a people does nothing but drive us further from unity and evidently identity. After all, who were the Mayans, where did they go, where did they come from?
Now one of the most ironic aspects of the global community is, as soon as we venture off our little planet and only in near Earth orbit, we don’t isolate ourselves as individual entities. We work as a team, as humans, in the international space station to achieve a unanimous goal. We are all human. What’s the point of dividing us into little categories that do nothing but hinder our progress as a race? With this, I prove that it is possible to draw a greater sense of connection to the world and its inhabitants, as I have drawn connections between the institutional forces applying to Descartes and my photo of Neil Degrasse Tyson as well as the institutional forces between Palestinians and Neil Degrasse Tyson.
Works Cited
Books:
Miller, Richard E. “Dark Night of the Soul.” Writing at the End of the World. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh, 2005. 418–43. Print.
Said, Edward W., and Jean Mohr. “States.” After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. 3–49. Print.
