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Abstract

heered for the good guys and booed the bad. From afar, I watched my generation, booming with hope and brave without reason. As Jimi strolled along the watchtower, I raised a toast to Mrs. Robinson and this prayer to the goddess Athena: free me from exile to join the battle, where I may ride the wooden horse to Troy.<h1 id="8603">Journey</h1>In the springtime, my prayers were all answered while cursed Poseidon fed his vices. Father traveled on business to the East and I tagged along to visit Uncle. We were three sailors, salty and profane, blown into the center of the free world, the place where democracy lives and dies, the city Uncle called, simply, D.C.Pulling G’s in an ancient blue Plymouth like a rocketship held to the freeway, Uncle passed Father a small silver flask and they swapped dirty jokes in the front seat. I heard the N-word, the F-word, and more, but the punch lines I didn’t really get. So I asked Uncle where we were headed.He said, “The Uptown boy, is where it’s at!” He had somehow scored free tickets to see a movie that none of us had heard of. A new film’s premiere whose title he’d lost but a friend said it might be a good one.We drove to the city center that day and into a world I had never seen. There were men in business suits tipping the beggars and buskers on every corner. Horsemen in uniform cantered beside three topless ladies arm in arm, singing, as if that were the most natural thing. We all squealed and howled like drunken schoolboys while Uncle drove around the block again to make sure we hadn’t imagined it.<h1 id="6ed1">Odyssey within an odyssey</h1>When we entered the Uptown Theater, a man with an eyepatch showed us our seats then pulled the heavy doors shut behind him. As the house lights dimmed and the show began I soon knew why Athena had sent me.But how to describe my voyage that day? I am but a mortal, a nobody. How does one explain La Gioconda’s smile? If nine billion names cannot capture God, how can these few syllables suffice to define this unwordly experience? The answer: nobody can even try.Twas the paradox of old versus new, of humankind’s trek through the long tunnel where both time and space converge into one. It spoke of the old days when we were young and the shiny new world where we grow old.There was space aplenty there, to be sure. Space chimps, spaceships, space between the kettl

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es booming in Also Sprach Zarathustra. And yes, vast spaces when nobody talked. No banter or voiceover to explain the sights, sounds, and actions that depicted the gestalt of a lifetime impression.Even when HAL uttered menacing words a polite calmness conveyed the terror, not what he said, but what he didn’t say. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.” “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”For just those few hours among thousands, I felt my life was part of history. That night, I rushed to the TV to watch my old friend Walter talk about our day.“And that’s the way it was,” the oracle said, Tuesday, April 2, 1968.<h1 id="aecf">Homecoming</h1>I can’t say for sure the journey changed me, only that I was not the same after. Maybe I was altered by its message. Or was it just the fulcrum of my years, childhood’s end balanced precariously against the city and the fall of night?When I returned to that southern island, it seemed more like my dear home, Ithaca, than Calypso’s lonely place of exile. I saw guards and gates as suitors to slay, obstacles as ogres to be conquered. I learned the sciences, read the great works, practiced the ciphers of Cantor and Gauss and used them like arrows piercing axes.But the world is dangerous and bigger than when Odysseus sailed the Greek Isles. More powerful gods rule our lives today, immortal concerns with evil intent and amoral pranksters who change their names to walk among mortals, steal our resolve. The past is forgotten, future ignored, and the gales blow ever harder toward the blankness of the singularity.The mood of the decade of hope and peace lasted as long as the gods allowed it. Our giddy speeches and starry intent dashed on the sharp shores of reality, heroic words spilling into the sea like ruined relics on the rocks of time. “Free at last,” they gasp, “we are free at last.”The quietness of space tells a story, my story — the whole truth — I’m glad to say. Words are condensed out of nonsense and strung together like pearls on a zig-zag wire or strewn asunder like shells on a beach, spilling off the page and into — The End.Two days after the world premiere of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered for his dream words. Two months later, Bobby Kennedy was also assassinated.Jim Dutton © 2021</article></body>

NONFICTION

1968: A Space Odyssey Odyssey

The pictures between the words

Exposition

Sing to me of a year in my life, Muse. Those heady days of adventure and discovery, tragedy and war, when the world of men held such promise, even as gods interposed. Help me write this story that’s no story — though nothing that happens to us in life can be merely a work of nonfiction.

There’s a time machine in my head that shows a dark theater, where I sit enraptured, between Uncle and Father, watching a screen. There are images and sounds but few words. Uncle whispers to Father across me, “What the hell does that mean?” He frowns, baffled. But I see the universe in pictures, a blank monolith tumbling through darkness, telling man’s epic without dialogue.

The blankness taunts me now as I write this, yet we’ll embrace the void, Muse, knowing that every page we pen is mostly empty. As I am able, my words will be hewn from the truth of the tale I am telling, and we’ll let the spaces speak for themselves.

Exiled

For fourteen long years I languished, entrapped in a land south of all things that mattered. Younger even than fair Telemachus, I was enfant terrible protected by a goddess who meddled and mothered. Alone on an island of ignorance while the world spun around like a dervish, my only connection every evening was a wise old oracle named Walter.

The oracle gave me news of the day — the scorecard of deaths in heroic wars, at My Lai and Tet where the Hueys flew. Black gloves raised high, Captain kissed Uhura, and a man with a dream spoke to my heart. I glimpsed the future on fat jumbo jets and Concordes as sleek as rockets with wings. The rockets themselves flew up to the moon; you can get anything you want, it seemed. Fresh-faced young boys burned their cards in the yards, while Johnson promised us guns and butter and Bobby waited, patient in the wings.

I cheered for the good guys and booed the bad. From afar, I watched my generation, booming with hope and brave without reason. As Jimi strolled along the watchtower, I raised a toast to Mrs. Robinson and this prayer to the goddess Athena: free me from exile to join the battle, where I may ride the wooden horse to Troy.

Journey

In the springtime, my prayers were all answered while cursed Poseidon fed his vices. Father traveled on business to the East and I tagged along to visit Uncle. We were three sailors, salty and profane, blown into the center of the free world, the place where democracy lives and dies, the city Uncle called, simply, D.C.

Pulling G’s in an ancient blue Plymouth like a rocketship held to the freeway, Uncle passed Father a small silver flask and they swapped dirty jokes in the front seat. I heard the N-word, the F-word, and more, but the punch lines I didn’t really get. So I asked Uncle where we were headed.

He said, “The Uptown boy, is where it’s at!” He had somehow scored free tickets to see a movie that none of us had heard of. A new film’s premiere whose title he’d lost but a friend said it might be a good one.

We drove to the city center that day and into a world I had never seen. There were men in business suits tipping the beggars and buskers on every corner. Horsemen in uniform cantered beside three topless ladies arm in arm, singing, as if that were the most natural thing. We all squealed and howled like drunken schoolboys while Uncle drove around the block again to make sure we hadn’t imagined it.

Odyssey within an odyssey

When we entered the Uptown Theater, a man with an eyepatch showed us our seats then pulled the heavy doors shut behind him. As the house lights dimmed and the show began I soon knew why Athena had sent me.

But how to describe my voyage that day? I am but a mortal, a nobody. How does one explain La Gioconda’s smile? If nine billion names cannot capture God, how can these few syllables suffice to define this unwordly experience? The answer: nobody can even try.

Twas the paradox of old versus new, of humankind’s trek through the long tunnel where both time and space converge into one. It spoke of the old days when we were young and the shiny new world where we grow old.

There was space aplenty there, to be sure. Space chimps, spaceships, space between the kettles booming in Also Sprach Zarathustra. And yes, vast spaces when nobody talked. No banter or voiceover to explain the sights, sounds, and actions that depicted the gestalt of a lifetime impression.

Even when HAL uttered menacing words a polite calmness conveyed the terror, not what he said, but what he didn’t say. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.” “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

For just those few hours among thousands, I felt my life was part of history. That night, I rushed to the TV to watch my old friend Walter talk about our day.

“And that’s the way it was,” the oracle said, Tuesday, April 2, 1968.

Homecoming

I can’t say for sure the journey changed me, only that I was not the same after. Maybe I was altered by its message. Or was it just the fulcrum of my years, childhood’s end balanced precariously against the city and the fall of night?

When I returned to that southern island, it seemed more like my dear home, Ithaca, than Calypso’s lonely place of exile. I saw guards and gates as suitors to slay, obstacles as ogres to be conquered. I learned the sciences, read the great works, practiced the ciphers of Cantor and Gauss and used them like arrows piercing axes.

But the world is dangerous and bigger than when Odysseus sailed the Greek Isles. More powerful gods rule our lives today, immortal concerns with evil intent and amoral pranksters who change their names to walk among mortals, steal our resolve. The past is forgotten, future ignored, and the gales blow ever harder toward the blankness of the singularity.

The mood of the decade of hope and peace lasted as long as the gods allowed it. Our giddy speeches and starry intent dashed on the sharp shores of reality, heroic words spilling into the sea like ruined relics on the rocks of time. “Free at last,” they gasp, “we are free at last.”

The quietness of space tells a story, my story — the whole truth — I’m glad to say. Words are condensed out of nonsense and strung together like pearls on a zig-zag wire or strewn asunder like shells on a beach, spilling off the page and into — The End.

Two days after the world premiere of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered for his dream words. Two months later, Bobby Kennedy was also assassinated.