| PRIMATES IN SPACE
To meet is fundamental,
we are not entirely determined
by what we are,
but by what we meet.
ALAIN BADIOU
“Do aliens exist?”, I have been asked by one of my
students. “I
have never met them”, I answered right away. How can I answer
without losing the principle of truth? The only way is to highlight
our own sense of limits and acknowledge our ignorance.
“
I don’t know, this is the answer”. “But can we
accept it as probable?” Of course we can, well, maybe. I
try to find the courage to look for the right words, the right
expression to indicate that maybe
they’ve been with us and we did not realize it. Primates
who put on space suits and wandered
around the universe in the search for intelligent life. When they
reached the earth, they found a junk of lost cultures grounded
on creative religions, full of stories that finally turned into
a series of prohibitions concerning sex and food.
They were astonished,
and yet they didn’t give up: they kept
wandering, and met ancient dictators in chains, singing hymns to
their lost power, sweat-dripping soldiers listening to crazy music
in a desert boiling with rotten black stuff, boxes transmitting
images in many languages, undeniably identical. Boring to death.
Where
was the bravery and the courage they heard of in the ancient songs
that had reached their planet? They praised a youth abandoning
roots and turning into the first engine of a
start, of traveling, of everything new. Instead of that our poor
primates met children growing up in suffocating houses, tied with
transparent chains. People queuing in strange shopping malls, full
of bags filled with useless things and purses loaded with garlands
of credit cards. The
travel of the primates became definitely boring when they saw a
political debate on tv, from a motel room near a multiplex cinema.
They tried hard, but the sense of extreme vacuity and the lack
of happiness and dream that they sensed really made them miserable.
The taste of palm-oil cornflakes stuck on their palate, dried with
astonishment. And they left, without showing themselves.
I just
can’t tell this to my students. I can not choke the
theoretically plausible idea of an alien looking at us, whose gaze
makes us presume a form of intelligent life in space. “Maybe
they do exist, but I don’t know”. It’s hard to
acknowledge your own ignorance. Truth is that it has occurred to
me to meet stories that kind of looked over to us with the same
gaze of primates
from space. In this issue you will find a few.
Elettra Stamboulis |
