Four Times That Night (1969)

40 Years – a short time to forget our dreams

40 Years – a short time to forget our dreams.

The moon in the sky like a big pizza pie, that’s amore!

But we seem to have lost the love, forgotten the romance.

The moon shines down, rising at dusk, it has provided each and every one of us with memories that we will treasure forever. But today we are looking inwards, not outwards toward the stars, a sad state of affairs.

In 1969, a only 40 years ago, a terrified generation looked up to the heavens for the first sign of nuclear attack, and many of us, especially in South Africa were terrified of the communist menace, its teeth bared at our borders, its armies ready to reduce us to a state of borscht and grey concrete. Our segregated schools held drills with children hidden under desks, the majority of our population under the jackboot of Apartheid. Parents everywhere wondered what the future held for the next generation.

Almost miraculously humanity reached upwards, and on that pillar of fire we felt that we could touch the stars. There were heroes that transcended nationality, there were giants in the sky; and suddenly we felt that we were standing on their shoulders.

On the moon human beings touched down on an alien world and we all gasped in wonder. We were no longer earthbound, we traveled! We weighed less than any other human being had before, we saw craters created by rocks flung by the force of the sun millions of years ago, and we looked down on our planet as no one else had before, clear, blue, bright and unsullied by the dust that blankets our own sky.

It was as if someone flicked a switch, the Beetles, the Rolling Stones, the summer of love was around the corner and a sense of wonder gave us new hope.

On that day we were above nationality, wrapped in wonder, thinking of things above politics, beyond race, and even as our own country teetered on the brink of catastrophe there was a moment when nothing seemed beyond belief.

But we seem to have lost sight of the magic; we’re earthbound, stuck on a place which is humdrum, day to day, each of us in neutral, the same grey and tuneless dirge being sung. The terrible sameness of news reports filled with a overly familiar horror that makes us look to the sky with a longing that still needs to be fulfilled, a need of new heroes, new giants.

We have above us, not so far away, a space station, a Hubble telescope that gives us sights that could not have even been imagined a generation ago, we have, as humanity great heavenly ships that show us wonder that our parents could only dream of, yet the passion seems to have dimmed.

However, a six year old is singing another song, one that can teach you everything you need to know about the cosmos. If you want to listen and if you want believe that we can be more than a species that’s stuck to the ground like swallows stuck in traps made of lime and glue, a child’s’ eyes can show everything.

Think back to when you were a kid, look upwards, through the fog of light and pollution that keep away the stars that blanket the night sky, think back to when you looked at a sky that had both beauty and secrets and you’ll realise that a child’s eyes can reveal everything in the universe.

In 1969, humanity threw off gravity like an old suit, put on a new one and stretched their gloved hands to the stars and flew.

As my daughter asked (and a wise man once told me that children have all the answers, or, in this case all the questions that matter)

‘Dadda, if we can only see some of the stars in the sky when we sit in the garden, then where are all the other stars that you told me about?’

Good question.

They’re out there, winking at us, waiting.

We can all look to the coming night sky as dusk grows and a pink sunset settles into the night and know that tomorrow’s darkness will bring something new, something bright or something challenging, but questions still nag at those who long for humanity to harness its imagination once again – where are all the other stars, where’s tomorrows moon, and when will we get there?

The answer is, of course, that we can reach out, we have reached out. We touch the stars today and dream of what will one day be as common as a trip to the corner supermarket. Mars, the red planet already has a human presence, in the form of two lonely, presumably homesick vehicles, Spirit and Opportunity, whose meanderings discover new wonders every day. These tiny outposts of human inquisitiveness have already found evidence of water flowing in the distant past, paving the way for a planned trip by new giants in 2020.

Our presence is felt as far as the outer reaches of our solar system, Voyager 1 is a 733-kilogram probe launched September 5th 1977. It still sends faint calls home, reaching out to us from the cold, 9.87 billion miles from the embrace of our sun. It has reached such velocities that it will never again visit its home system. It will sail on into the inky void, lonely, but alive, carrying proof of our being far into the cosmos.

The stars are waiting for us, and waiting for our children, they’re there, someone is going to stand on an alien surface once again and look up at a new sky. It might just be someone from a small quite corner of Africa, it might be today’s six year old looking up at a different night sky.

So next time the sun sets and a child looks up at you, think of the stars and explain that the what we see today is only a fraction of what tomorrow will show us, we have, we can and we will.

About the Author

PRABHUPADA NYC 1969 1 of 2 MAHAMANTRA

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