The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, December 24, 2024

Notably: If you need any proof at all that we are or ought to be a borderless world, Santa Claus’s origins go back to the somewhat legendary figure of Nicholas of Myra, a bishop of the fourth century from Anatolia, present-day Turkey, who saved girls from prostitution, who survived the persecution of Dioletian, who chopped down a demon tree, who traveled on pilgrimage to the Levant–so he must have learned of gift-giving from gift-wrapped Lebanon–and who was “the patron saint,” Wikipedia tells us, “of sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, children, brewers, pawnbrokers, toymakers, unmarried people, and students in various cities and countries around Europe.” I especially like that he was patron saint both of toymakers and brewers: St. Nick, the first craft brewery aficionado. He apparently had a habit of giving gifts to children in secret. This must’ve been before the days of strangers bribing kids with candy and horny Catholic priests posing as a generous Nicholas. So was the legend of St. Nick born. The bishop was not known to be fat. Blame that on Santa’s western incarnation. I’m not sure and it’s too far to go to wonder when Santa started flying through space with his sleigh. I suspect Macy’s had something to do with it. But reading Sarah Harvey’s Orbital, I thought it wasn’t that far a stretch to go from the Anatolian Nicholas of Myra to the International Space Station as a metaphor for the ideal Santa, the Santa of a borderless world eying creation as creation eyes itself–of the ISS as the sleigh, forever circling earth as earth should be, as  the poetry of borderless earth as it always was through millions of years until the so-recent emergence of “civilization, that all too human disease” (to quote William Cronon in that gifted essay on wilderness from 1995). The International Space Station as our platonic ideal, outside of Earth yet of it, beyond Earth’s reach but chained to it. Were you aware that in fact there is gravity on the space station? That it’s 86 percent of the gravity on earth? And that the only reason the astronauts don’t feel it is because the ISS is perpetually falling at 17,500 miles per hour, the same speed at which Earth is whirring away from it, thus creating that perpetual sense of suspension even as the station falls? In other words, it is the same illusion of gravity as when astronauts train aboard an empty, free-falling 747. Like Santa, it is all illusion, and it is all real, because illusion, too, is of us, of Earth. But a borderless earth is not illusion. It is the borders that are (borders almost as recent as spaceships: humanity is a few seconds’ worth of Earth’s history). It is our diseased civilizations that have made it so. Hubris is the ultimate illusion. In space, we are back in time, looking down at that wonderful world as it always was and as it ought to be. 

—P.T.

 

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Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It’s the desire – no, the need (fuelled by fervour) – to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It’s not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ran-sacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend? Yet they hear the news and they’ve lived their lives and their hope does not make them naive. So what do they do? What action to take? And what use are words? They’re humans with a godly view and that’s the blessing and also the curse.

–From Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (2023). 

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.