What I Learned From Golden Records About Being Known
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Welcome to What I Learned From… a newsletter that offers short essays, resources, and reading suggestions to help writers and essayists improve their writing craft. It's nice to see you here! If someone forwarded you this email because they love your writing, you can subscribe here. Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes “They should have sent a poet” ― Jodie Foster as Dr. Ellie Arroway in Contact What I Learned From …In 1977 NASA launched two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, each carrying a shimmering gold-plated phonograph known as the Golden Record. Tucked inside were greetings in 55 languages, whale songs, brainwaves, the sounds of a kiss and a heartbeat, plus music ranging from Bach to Blind Willie Johnson to Bo Ya. There were also images of trees and mountains, newborn babies, sprinters in motion, elephants, flowers, diagrams of DNA, and an outline of Earth’s position among the stars. The Golden Record wasn’t designed to explain humanity. It was meant to represent it. It wasn’t made because we thought an extraterrestrial civilization would pick it up anytime soon. If anything, the odds are that no one will ever find it! Voyager 1, traveling at 38,000 miles per hour, will drift for another 300 years just to clear the Oort Cloud (the outer edge of our own solar system.) It won’t pass near another star, AC+79 3888 in Ursa Minor, for at least 38,000 more years. Even then, who’s to say anyone will be there to listen? But still, we sent it. A golden "hello, Universe" tossed like a bottle into the cosmic ocean. Reading about the project, you can’t help but notice the careful curation by noted space-phile Carl Sagan and his team. The first sections of the record are scientific: mathematics, DNA structures, planetary knowledge. All designed to say, “Look, we’re intelligent, we know things!” Right after that, though, the tone shifts. Suddenly we’re showing off our music, our landscapes, our animals, our people from every corner of the planet. We’re not just smart. We’re alive. We’re beautiful. We’re trying to be known, not just respected. It’s what makes us human. Even here on Earth, we’ve uncovered ancient quipus—knotted cords used by the Inca to convey information—and we’re still only guessing at half their meanings. There are carved stones in the Middle East scrawling a form of writing called cuneiform, largely interpreted to be a series of ledgers and shopping transactions. We admire Paleolithic cave paintings as the first “writing” of humanity, stencils and drawings that tell us their stories and how they saw the world around them. If you think waiting 40,000 years for this Golden Record message to potentially reach another planetary system sounds ridiculous, just remember that the oldest cave paintings we’ve found on Earth are in Maltravieso cave, Spain and date back almost 64,000 years to our Neanderthal ancestors. Again and again, we keep trying to leave evidence of who we are. Which raises an interesting question for writers: if you had to make your own version of a Golden Record, not for Earth, but for your writing life, what would you choose to include? What pages, phrases, obsessions, and imperfect-but-honest pieces of yourself would you want floating out there for someone, someday, to find? With my newest update to Become a Master Writer, this is where we begin. Not with templates or tricks, but with identity. With the hard, human work of asking: Who do I want to be as a writer? And later (after 2 quick months of study, practice, and exploration) we’re asking it again: Who have I become? Because mastery isn’t just about writing better sentences. The Voyager missions will likely stop tracking scientific data sometime in the next year or two. They’ll stop communicating with us totally in the next decade. (What else can you expect from 1970s era computers?!) But the spacecraft themselves will keep traveling. Past the edge of our solar system. Into the great unknown. With our heartbeats, our kisses, our science, our music, and our stories…still spinning through the dark.
What You Missed …Our writing has the same mission we do — to help you to make your writing even better.
In Other Reading This Week …Need more insights and inspiration for your writing and mindset?
Weekly Writing Tip …A quick chance to learn from the masters. “The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it… If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write. I’m an old-fashioned writer and, despite the odds, I want to change the world.” — James Baldwin, New York Times, 1979 Bygone …Exquisite words from years gone by. Gest [jest] (n.) – From the 13th century, borrowed from Old French geste, meaning a daring deed or an epic story. In Middle English days, a gest was the kind of tale you passed around a fire or tucked into the corners of a song about brave acts, wild adventures, and the kinds of stories meant to outlast the people who lived them. It shares roots with the Latin gesta ("deeds, achievements"). Sorta synonyms: feat, saga, adventure, legend This Week’s Writing Resource …Why not use the tools at your disposal? Voice & Vision Questionnaire — This is the first thing I have new writing clients do when they sign on with us. It tells me more about what you want to say, and how you want to say it, as a writer. You can make a copy for yourself, for free! For the Upcoming Week …Because we all need a good chuckle to start things off right! I mutter this to myself at least thrice-weekly. ‘Til next time ~ Elisa |