To: Occupants of Interplanetary Craft

From: An Informant

Re: Fore!

03 • 19 • 06

Dear Occupants:

A quick note to advise you that if you are planning any visits to Earth over the next few months, you should navigate with caution. It's not that we're feeling especially hostile to visitors; you will find us in our usual temper. It's just that a handful of us have plans to do some golfing in inner space in the next while, so there may be some unusual projectile activity around the International Space Station. For the sake of your most extraordinary craft, I wanted to warn you.

In case you have not had occasion to probe this aspect of life on earth, golf is a game my species has developed in response to certain characteristics of our terrestrial home, such as gravity, trees, topographic irregularities, and searing despair. Like many of the things we do, golf is tremendously demanding but makes no secret of its pointlessness. The game's futility is even more glaring in space, where it is stripped of its familiar trappings: dedicated terrain, a ballet of etiquette, beer cart girls.

You might justly ask, in light of the obvious frivolity of the activity I describe, why we would choose to golf in space. We are doing it, my alien friends, to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the last time we golfed in space. (There are also some merchandising tie-ins, but never mind about those.) As to why that first swing was swung in 1971, there is no consensus. The golfer/astronaut himself, Alan Shepard, made the following revisionist claim 23 years after his lunar 6-iron: "I was searching for a way to indicate to schoolchildren the reduced gravity field and the total lack of atmosphere." Indeed. For the children.

Oh, some of my kind might wish to convince you that our space-golfing is part of some worthy pedagogical project. But I will be straight with you, brave explorers. What we are doing is every bit as trivial as it looks. We golf in space not because it has any use, but precisely because it does not. We pull this embarrassing stunt because space--and our implausible ability to reach it--causes us to freak out. It's not that we're oblivious to the vastness and mystery of the universe. It's the vastness and mystery that are the problem. When we whiff the sheer quantity of humility they demand (the odour becomes especially pungent as we exit our gentle atmosphere), we panic. You don't have to be NASA to explain the embarrassing results: anyone who has been fifteen knows that nervous energy + insecurity = dopey behaviour.

Techno-scientifically speaking, we, like Major Tom, make the grade: we are able to propel ourselves beyond the bounds of our atmosphere to explore the mysterious ether. But spiritually, we are just making saliva-spewing blastoff sounds in a refrigerator box on the lawn. Space-golf is one more awkward manifestation of an abiding problem: our hopelessly mismatched reach and grasp.

We earthlings run into trouble with this mismatch not infrequently. We exert ourselves magnificently to scale a mountain and then at the climax, instead of falling to our knees in ecstatic prayer, we effectively urinate on the summit and scatter our PowerBar wrappers on the disappointed wind. (Sorry about all the space junk, by the way.) We blow the world's mind with art, and all we can think to do as an encore is overdose in our hotel rooms or choke on our own vomit. Like a toddler shifting a car into neutral or someone cheating on a Zen koan, our lives often articulate the stubborn gap between what we can pull off and what we can take in.

Space is especially tricky terrain for us in this regard. It is the place where our contemplative deficit is displayed most glaringly. Our ability to get things done is often quite impressive; our ability to sit still long enough to gain some intimation of what we're really up to is somewhat less reliable. As a result, our activities, emotions, efforts, ideals, and satisfactions often assume fun-house-mirror relationships with one another, taking on inexplicable proportions which shift willy nilly with the slightest movement.

Here on earth, we have a little coping mechanism that helps us get a handle on the meaning and scale of things as we go about our business: we remind each other to "keep things in perspective." By this we mean that if you cut your finger and get blood all over your favourite sweater, instead of getting upset you should instead consider how much worse it would have been had you somehow severed your entire arm and been forced to behold it there on the kitchen floor, still poignantly encased in its share of the sweater. Or when you lock your keys in your car you should think about genocide. These are good little tricks, aliens; they can really help to keep a person calm.

When it comes to space, the imperative to keep things in perspective achieves more or less the opposite of what it does on the earth's crust. For my kind, it is a violent demand, and one that we ignore more or less as a matter of life and death. If we arrived in space and fell to our knees in prayer, we are reasonably certain we would never stop falling. And then where would we be.

Hence the golf. Although space alarms us terribly, we can't quite bring ourselves to ignore it. (Ovid blames anatomy: "all other animals are bent, head down" but our creator "had man stand erect, his eyes upon the stars.") We must, therefore, frantically pretend that the portion of the cosmos we can reach is just some place--as amenable to goofing around as anywhere else--not the gateway to an infinite universe that may or may not have ever heard of us. Most days, Woody Allen's narcissistic read of the cosmos--"I awoke on Friday and because the universe is expanding it took me longer than usual to find my robe"--is the only one we can tolerate.

Fortunately for humanity, most of us appear to be literally, cognitively incapable of getting things into any perspective that might incorporate space. Indeed, some scientists believe that our exaggerated sense of our own importance--and ergo, presumably, our inability to fathom anything like space that would lay such dramatic waste to our egotism--is a trait that has been favoured by evolution. (Yes, aliens, we are the descendants of the deluded and the self-important. The most humble and thoughtful of our kind perished millenia ago, virgins.)

Oh wise aliens, I bet the humble and thoughtful among you have thrived and multiplied bountifully! I bet your reach and grasp fit hand in glove! You surely travel through space with pure, clean spirits, in a sober quest for knowledge and cosmic communion. You, my alien friends, would never be caught golfing in space. I just know it. I wilt when I imagine the contempt you must feel for our antics.

Even so, please try not to judge us too harshly. We may appear ridiculous to creatures of your sophistication, but despite all appearances our hearts are pure. Beneath our stunts is an awe we can't yet manage, a wonder that convulses us into unflattering postures, a terror so profound we cannot look it in the eye--we can only moon it. Give us a few hundred years and we might be able to share a lab with you. In the meantime, you will find us at our present coordinates in this cold and endless universe, golfing for our lives.

See you around,

An Informant