Watch what the body does with a wish. The child inhales before the candles, holds the secret behind her teeth, then gives it to the room with one hard breath. Lovers press lips to a palm and push the kiss off the hand like a paper boat, up toward a window, a balcony, a departing train. A meteor scratches the dark and everyone beneath it makes the same silent motion, hurling a private want after a falling rock. Mourners lower the casket and lift their eyes. Whatever hope is made of, it has a launch angle, and the angle is up.
Nobody kneels at a storm drain to whisper a wish into the dark water. No liturgy instructs the faithful to press their mouths to the soil. We bury plenty, the dead and the waste and the secrets and the hatchets, yet petition runs the other way. The throat opens, a vessel tipped to the sky, and the words climb. Even the gestures we make without thinking obey the geometry. A wave at a leaving ship rises from the shoulder. A blessing descends from raised hands. Grace comes down, want goes up, and the whole vertical economy runs on faith that somebody at altitude keeps the books.
Two Letters, Two Directions
Humanity has composed two great messages for strangers it will never meet, and they point in opposite directions. The first rides aboard the twin Voyager spacecraft launched in the late summer of 1977: a gold-plated copper phonograph record carrying ninety minutes of music, greetings in fifty-five languages, the song of a humpback whale, the cry of a newborn, and Chuck Berry. Jimmy Carter’s printed message travels with it: “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” The record’s cover holds an electroplated patch of uranium-238, a radioactive clock with a half-life of four and a half billion years, so that whoever finds the thing can date the senders. Its makers judged the disc could stay legible for a billion years in the interstellar cold. It remains the longest letter our species has ever mailed, and every line of it says find us.
The second message points down. In 1993, a panel convened by Sandia National Laboratories drafted language to mark the nuclear waste repository in the New Mexico desert, words meant to warn whoever digs there ten thousand years from now. The drafters strip the site of any honor before proceeding through a litany of repulsion: nothing valued lies here, “what is here was dangerous and repulsive to us,” the danger persists, shun this place. Every long message we have aimed at the ground says flee; every long message we have aimed at the sky says come. Down receives our poison with a curse carved over it. Up receives our music with our home address etched on the lid, a map of fourteen pulsars triangulating one small planet, in case anyone out there wants to visit.
The Transparent Direction
Part of the answer is optics. Stand on a dark lawn and the naked eye collects light that left the Andromeda galaxy two and a half million years ago; a modest telescope reaches billions of light-years past that. Face the other direction and vision dies at the first inch of topsoil. Soviet crews spent two decades drilling the deepest hole in human history on the Kola Peninsula and stopped near twelve kilometers, defeated by heat that softened the rock and chewed the bits; the site today is a rusted cap welded over a borehole, seven and a half miles of question mark. Voyager 1, sent into the transparent direction, has passed fifteen billion miles and still answers the phone, its voice arriving nearly a full light-day late; this coming November it crosses the threshold where the delay reaches twenty-four hours, the first object we have ever thrown that far. The earth resists inquiry with pressure and fire. The sky charges nothing at the door.
Our budgets confess the preference. The American space agency spends in a year several hundred times what the federal ocean exploration office receives, and the imbalance shows: roughly a quarter of the seafloor has been mapped at modern resolution, while cartographers finished the surface of Mars years ago. Twelve people have walked on the Moon. For half a century that number exceeded the count of human beings who had reached the deepest point of the sea, and the ledger evened only after a private financier bought his own submersible and began ferrying passengers down. We know the far side of another world better than the floor of our own bathtub, and no accident produced the asymmetry. Attention follows hope, funding follows attention, and hope filed its change of address a long time ago.
A deeper reason sits under the sightlines. Everything that governs a field arrives from overhead: rain, light, frost, the sliding angle of the sun that makes a season. The ground is where consequences pool; causes keep their offices upstairs. A farmer buries seed with his own hands, and then the enterprise leaves his hands and passes to the clouds. Agriculture made our ancestors students of the vertical, and petition is what study becomes when the subject holds power over the student. Prayers skip the harvest and go straight to the weather, and the weather keeps no ground floor.
The Ascending Word
Language kept the receipts. Spirit descends from the Latin spiritus, breath. Psyche began as Greek breath, anima as Latin wind; the Hebrew ruach and the Greek pneuma both name moving air before they name the soul. When the Hebrew Bible wants a word for the burnt offering it uses olah, from the verb to go up: the sacrifice is, literally, that which ascends, matter converted into rising smoke, a technology for translating the earthly into the vertical. The Psalmist asks that his prayer “be set forth before thee as incense,” and half the liturgies of the world still burn something fragrant so the eye can watch the request climb. Among the oldest fixed exchanges of the Christian rite is a stage direction aimed at the ceiling of the world: lift up your hearts; we lift them up unto the Lord. In the Roman catacombs, painters decorating the underground dead drew them in the orans posture, arms raised, palms open, figures interred in rock and portrayed mid-ascent of the hands. Meanwhile the ground got the humbler vocabulary. Human, humus, humility: one Latin root, the soil itself. We are named for dirt, and we have spent the history of the species declining the name.
The stars colonized our verbs of wanting. To consider carries sidera, the stars, inside it, a fossil of augury, the reading of the sky before a decision. Desire descends from desiderare, which philologists trace to the same root, longing framed as the ache of an absent star. Disaster arrives through the Italian disastro, an ill star, calamity as bad astrology. Three of the most ordinary words in the vocabulary of the heart turn out to be astronomy in street clothes, and when a man says he desires something, the etymology says he misses a star.
Wilde compressed the posture into a line in Lady Windermere’s Fan: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” The line is anatomy before it is sentiment. The gutter is a given; the variable is the angle of the neck. Eyes at ease settle slightly downward, and lifting them costs a small measurable effort, which means hope, in Wilde’s mechanics, is a muscle movement, work performed against the skull’s resting droop, the cheapest exercise in the world and the least practiced.
The Grammar of Holes
We do send things down, and what we choose to sink is the strongest evidence of all. Into the ground go the dead, the landfill, the bunker, the missile in its silo, the secret. Ovid tells of the barber who discovered the ears of an ass under King Midas’s crown; forbidden to speak and unable to hold his tongue forever, the man dug a hole, whispered the scandal into the earth, and filled it back in. Reeds grew on the spot and repeated the sentence to every passing wind. The tale knows two things at once: shame gets deposited downward, and the earth makes a poor vault for anything that wants to live.
Even our rare buried hopes wear the posture of hedges. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault holds more than a million seed samples in Arctic permafrost against the failure of harvests, hope with its eyes closed, insurance interred. A time capsule goes into the ground only because a scheduled exhumation is written on its lid; its faith rests in the shovel of a descendant, in continuity, in people already imagined. The launched hope answers to a wilder addressee. Coins go down into fountains, true, and the exception explains itself on inspection: the coin is the toll, payment to whatever administers the water, while the wish itself stays airborne, held in the mind or spoken over the surface. Every child who has leaned over a well knows what waits at the bottom of the shaft: a circle of sky. The well is a periscope, and wishing into one, we aim, as ever, at the reflected up.
Whole cultures decline the ground even for their dead. Zoroastrians raised their towers of silence so vultures would carry the body away on wings, earth and fire held too holy to receive a corpse, the funeral itself routed upward. Tibetan sky burial runs the funeral upward again on a mountainside. Where the grave does win, the rites talk over it: ashes to ashes goes the formula, while the mourners stand and look at the clouds.
The critic points at the archaeologist’s trench and the oil derrick, and the objection ends up sharpening the rule. We dig for what was: fuel, fossils, foundations, the buried past, stored energy and stored time. Digging is retrieval; the fling is proposal; the ground holds the world’s memory and the sky holds its subjunctive, the entire grammatical mood of might and may and someday.
Descent, in the stories we kept, is an ordeal rather than an errand. Hesiod measured the underworld with a falling anvil, nine days from heaven to earth and nine more from earth to Tartarus, the cosmos calibrated in units of plummet. Virgil’s Sibyl warns that the road down to Avernus is easy and the labor is the climb back. Orpheus goes under to retrieve a hope and loses it by looking backward, the underworld’s native direction. Persephone’s annual ascent gets a warmer name: spring. Even the seed, our one routine deposit of hope in soil, is narrated as a death, the grain falling into the earth to die so that it need no longer abide alone; burial, in that telling, is the toll paid for rising.
Dante, the great cartographer of down, built his Hell as a funnel narrowing to Satan frozen at the dead center of the earth, and in the poem’s physics that center is, as Virgil explains to the pilgrim, the point toward which all weights are drawn. Evil sits at the bottom of gravity. Escape requires climbing along the Devil’s own flank past the midpoint of the world, where down inverts into up, and the canticle ends with the two poets emerging to see again the stars. Dante closed all three canticles of the Commedia on one final word: stelle. Fourteen thousand lines touring the whole moral universe, and the poet arranged the architecture so that Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise each hand the reader back to the night sky at the door. Nobody writes that ending three times by accident.
The Last Commons
Property law drives the fling as surely as optics does. Every acre of the planet’s surface now sits inside a border, a deed, a claim, a registry. The sky alone remains unenclosed: the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 forbids any nation to appropriate the Moon or any other celestial body, which leaves the heavens the one wilderness adjacent to every backyard on earth, the last commons, free to view from a prison yard and a penthouse alike. Hope migrates toward the unowned. When Thomas More needed a home for his perfect society in 1516 he used an island, because the oceans still held blank space; once the maps filled in, utopia went vertical. The strangest chapter of that migration ran through a Moscow library, where a self-effacing librarian named Nikolai Fyodorov taught that the common task of humanity was to resurrect every human being who ever died and, since a resurrected humanity would need room, to settle the cosmos as housing for the recovered dead. Among the young men he tutored was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who went on to derive the rocket equation and to write that the earth is the cradle of the mind and nobody stays in the cradle forever. The line from a mystic’s resurrection dream to Gagarin’s orbit runs through documented hands. Russian rocketry began as a plan to give heaven back its tenants.
Even our lies about direction bend upward. The digital archive of the species, every photograph and love letter and ledger, lives in windowless buildings on cheap land, cooled below grade, threaded through cables lying on the seabed. We call it the cloud. The name began as an engineer’s doodle, the puff sketched on network diagrams to stand for everything beyond the local machine, and marketing kept it because nobody would entrust their memories to a product named the basement. The instinct is ancient; the original cloud storage was the constellations. Greeks translated their heroes upward as a filing system, catasterism, the placing among the stars, and when Queen Berenice’s dedicated lock of hair vanished from the temple, the court astronomer announced its promotion to the heavens, where Coma Berenices hangs still, a hairpiece with twenty-two centuries of uptime. Aboriginal astronomers read an emu into the dark dust lanes of the Milky Way and stored law and season in its posture. Enslaved Americans fleeing north steered by the Drinking Gourd, and Frederick Douglass named his abolitionist paper The North Star, after the one light that holds its post all night. An archive, an atlas, an escape map, and, once we filled it with the translated dead, a gallery of eyes looking back: the sky earned the traffic. Hope goes where hope has previously been redeemed.
Twenty-One Days in 1977
The most concentrated season of skyward hope in recorded history lasted three weeks. On the night of August 15, 1977, the Big Ear radio telescope in Ohio recorded a narrowband burst from the direction of Sagittarius so strong and so strange that the astronomer reviewing the printout circled the characters and wrote one word in the margin: Wow. Five days later, Voyager 2 left Cape Canaveral. Sixteen days after that, Voyager 1 followed. Within twenty-one days of one August, the species heard what remains its best-known candidate for a whisper from elsewhere and mailed its two longest letters outward, ear and mouth working a single season, and almost nobody at the time connected the events, because the behavior felt too natural to remark on. Of course we were listening. Of course we were sending. The signal never repeated. The letters never stopped.
Voyager 1 is dying now the way spacecraft die, one instrument at a time, its plutonium heart cooling toward silence early in the 2030s, after which it flies on anyway, deaf and mute and outbound, on course to pass within two light-years of a red dwarf called Gliese 445 in roughly forty thousand years. The record it carries will outlast the senders’ civilization, plausibly the senders’ species, conceivably the senders’ sun. And the machine’s most famous act, across five decades of leaving, was a look backward: in February 1990, at Carl Sagan’s urging, its camera turned and photographed the earth from beyond the orbit of Neptune, a fraction of a single pixel, the Pale Blue Dot. The probe we flung farthest produced, as its signature image, a portrait of home. In 2013 the maneuver became a planetary gesture. When the Cassini spacecraft prepared to photograph the earth from beneath Saturn’s rings, its handlers announced the sitting in advance, and on the appointed July afternoon some twenty thousand people stood in yards and parking lots and waved at Saturn, the first air kiss in history with an interplanetary flight plan and a confirmed camera on the far end.
The Escapement
A word exists for the mechanism that makes a clock tick, and the word is escapement. A weight-driven clock is a controlled fall: gravity pulls the weight down, and the escapement’s whole art is releasing that fall one measured increment at a time, converting a plunge into a pulse. The tick of a clock is the sound of down, resisted. Horology and the heavens grew up in one cradle. The first clocks were the stars themselves, and the first mechanical escapements in Europe went into monastery towers to sound the hours of prayer, which is why the machine took its name from clocca, the medieval Latin for bell: the instrument that meters our time is named for the summons to lift up hearts. Children preserve the whole complex in a folk custom, calling a dandelion seedhead a clock and telling the hour by how many breaths it takes to send the seeds flying, timekeeping performed by launching living cargo on exhaled air.
Fling a wish at the sky and you perform the office of the anchor and pallet in a grandfather clock. Gravity is the standing verdict; the flung hope is the escapement, releasing the wound spring of a life in survivable ticks, one candle, one kiss, one wave, one launch window at a time. A person who never sends anything upward is a clock with a jammed wheel, fully wound and telling nothing.
The Perfect Witness
So what do we think is out there? The honest answer: an audience. Hope is a performance, performance requires a witness, and the sky is the only witness that has never once interrupted. It attends every hour, holds every horizon, outlives every regime, and files no reply, which makes it the one confessor whose absolution can never be revoked. Silence, from the right altitude, reads as patience. The ground answers immediately, and its answer forecloses: dig anywhere and within a body’s length you strike stone, water, dark, an end to the question. A hope needs an address where refusal can never be confirmed, and the sky holds infinite vacancy at that address. The wish on the star carries no risk of a returned envelope; this is the actuarial secret of the upward fling.
And the sky holds our dead. The smoke of every cremation went up, along with the catasterized heroes and the souls of most cosmologies that bothered to draw a map, and the ordinary bereaved of every century have tilted their faces back to talk to the missing. When a woman stands in a field at night and waves at the dark, the plain reading is that she waves at everyone who left. Forgiveness lives at that altitude too, and the old covenants say so in their own iconography: the sign sealing the truce after the flood was hung in the clouds, a bow, a weapon of the sky unstrung and displayed overhead as a signature. We look up to check that the signature is still there. Grace, manna, rain, the descending dove, the tongues of fire: the traffic of mercy runs downbound on the one vertical highway our petitions ride up, two-way commerce on the only road out of town.
The figure completes itself in orbit. Ask the few hundred people who have gone up in the flesh what moved them, and they report a surprise the psychologists have had to name: from that altitude, awe points down. Astronauts hang at the window staring at the earth, the blue coast of everything they love, and the sensation has entered the literature as the overview effect. Hope, it turns out, aims at elsewhere, and altitude was only ever the local name for elsewhere. The compass of longing points away from wherever the feet are planted. On the ground that means up. A hundred miles up, it means the ground.
Chemistry gives the loop its last turn. The iron in your blood, the calcium in your teeth, the carbon in every cell was forged in the cores of stars and scattered by their deaths; Sagan put it in five words, we are made of star-stuff, and the spectroscopes back him. The dirt is star ash too, all of it, yet the forges themselves still burn overhead where anyone can watch, so a wish flung at the sky is matter addressing its own foundry. Under that chemistry, the child at the cake, the mourner at the grave, the lover on the platform, and the engineers of 1977 with their gold record and their launch stack all perform one gesture with one meaning: the atoms are writing home.
Tonight, somewhere, a girl will hold a dandelion clock to her lips at dusk and empty her lungs into it, and the seeds will ride her breath over the fence and out of the yard, each one a wish with a parachute, while twenty-three light-hours out a machine nearing its fiftieth year drifts through the dark between the stars with a record of her species’ music bolted to its hull. One breath, one tick. The spring stays wound. The sky stays open.
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