Guidance is Internal
A prompt for you this week.
One of my favorite ways to spend an evening is live-note-taking in my sketchbook while I watch documentaries. I’ve been doing this for years as a way to think on the page about what I’m watching and, because I live out of my notebooks in general, I love how these notes interact with my other poetry and pictures.
This week we watched Apollo 11 (2019) Dir. Todd Miller featuring unseen footage from the first moon walk in the summer of 1969.
As an experimental documentarian & somewhat unwitting archivist (more on this soon), my heart beat a little faster imagining gaining access to massive amounts of un-seen 70mm film and 30-track audio recordings from one of the most mind boggling moments in human history. It makes me feel a little bit power-drunk just thinking about what it was like peeking into that footage for the first time and being like:
I GET TO DO WHAT I WANT WITH THIS.
I, of course, had to rummage around on the internet to learn more about the production of this film. At first I was scandalized to read that the “I promise to let you know if I stop breathing” audio bit was edited in out-of-sequence and instantly questioned how much of the rest of the narrative was trustworthy. We really want to accept documentary as factual! But really, I think the reason why documentary is so gorgeous an art form is actually because it’s not “fact”. It is, as with any other art form, a series of choices and intentions.
Most documentaries don’t come with an “accuracy” footnote, but if they did I think it would get complicated pretty quick. Is a timeline of events inherently more truthful than the gesture of truth, the emotional truth, that might otherwise be conveyed? What is “accurate” when your intention is to convey the feeling of a moment?
[If you’d like to keep thinking about reliable narrators and the fallibility of memory we also loved this creative documentary.]
Let me pass you a few more threads I’ve been pulling on…
Did you know you can read NASA transcripts?
I love this moment at the end, when the Apollo 11 astronauts are barely back on the planet and Nixon is on the scene doing press and they have this banter in which Mike Collins, the “poet in the group”, is razzing aeronautic pioneer Frank Borman about overused adjectives “fantastic” and “beautiful” in describing the experience of space travel. To which Nixon says,
“…the speeches that you have to make at this dinner can be very short. And if you want to say fantastic or beautiful, that's all right with us. Don't try to think of any new adjectives; they've all been said.”
Wikipedia says of Collins, the so-called “Loneliest Man in the Universe”,
In the 48 minutes of each orbit when he was out of radio contact with the Earth while Columbia passed round the far side of the Moon, the feeling he reported was not fear or loneliness, but rather "awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation".[90]
A Prompt For You…
“Don't try to think of any new adjectives; they've all been said.” CHALLENGE ACCEPTED, NIXON!! Imagine you’re solo, floating in a tiny metal capsule around the moon in the vast expanse of space. Find three new adjectives to describe the space experience. Comments are on!
Watch Apollo 11: First Steps Edition wherever you get your movies and do a little live-note-taking! Let yourself just use up a whole sheet of paper. Snag quotes, doodle, think on the page— don’t worry about composing the page. These pages compose themselves. Then share it with us in this thread. I look forward to seeing how this film lands in each of your notebooks!
