brainrow

The words are famous now.

They weren’t famous thirty-seven years ago this evening, when they came down from the spacecraft Odyssey, the Apollo 13 command module. Astronaut Jack Swigert said, “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”

CAPCOM Jack Lousma radioed back, “This is Houston. Say again, please.”

On the private voice communication loops of the flight controllers, you can hear this:

Astronaut Swigert: Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.

Unidentified voice #1: What’s the matter with the data, EECOM?

Unidentified voice #2: We’ve got more than a problem.

And “Houston, we have a problem” became a part of American language.

Lead flight director Gene Kranz told the team of flight controllers working to solve the problem that “Failure is not an option,” and that phrase, too, has become a part of the language. It is a phrase that has been mightily misused.

Kranz did not say “Failure is not a possibility.” At that moment, failure seemed highly probable. The astronauts were about 200,000 miles from earth, headed away from home and safety. They had only the supplies and equipment aboard the spacecraft. The flight controllers had to figure out how to make those supplies last long enough to bring the spacecraft all the way back to earth.

Nobody knew whether success was even possible. It might have happened that there was simply not enough air, or water, or electricity. It might have happened that the spacecraft’s heat shield was fatally damaged by the explosion that had rocked the ship. It might have happened that the Apollo 13 astronauts never had a chance.

Kranz’s point was this: if your calculations say there’s not enough water, try again. Did you make a mistake? Did you overlook something? How about the cooling water that circulates through tiny tubes in the moon suits? Is there enough if we come back faster? What can we can do to come back faster? Maybe this task is impossible. But if we lose these astronauts, it won’t be because we stopped thinking.

Advocates of the continuing tragedy in Iraq like to say, “Failure is not an option.” But George W. Bush has made failure the only option. The Iraq Study Group worked the problem and came up with new approaches that might have offered just the ghost of a chance of salvaging the situation. Their recommendations — including diplomacy with Iraq’s neighbors — were bipartisan and unanimous. Bush crumpled up those recommendations and ordered up more of the same policies that had utterly failed so far.

If George W. Bush had been lead flight director 37 years ago, he would have insisted that the Apollo 13 moon landing go ahead as scheduled.

We’ve got more than a problem.

In A Man without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut wrote:

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC

From Cat’s Cradle:

I did not know what was going to come from Angela’s clarinet. No one could have imagined what was going to come from there.

I expected something pathological, but I did not expect the depth, the violence, and the almost intolerable beauty of the disease.

Angela moistened and warmed the mouthpiece, but did not blow a single preliminary note. Her eyes glazed over, and her long, bony fingers twittered idly over the noiseless keys.

I waited anxiously, and I remembered what Marvin Breed had told me — that Angela’s one escape from her bleak life with her father was to her room, where she would lock the door and play along with phonograph records.

Newt now put a long-playing record on the large phonograph in the room off the terrace. He came back with the record’s slipcase, which he handed to me.

The record was called Cat House Piano. It was of unaccompanied piano by Meade Lux Lewis.

Since Angela, in order to deepen her trance, let Lewis play his first number without joining him, I read some of what the jacket said about Lewis.

“Born in Louisville, Ky., in 1905,” I read, “Mr. Lewis didn’t turn to music until he had passed his 16th birthday and then the instrument provided by his father was the violin. A year later young Lewis chanced to hear Jimmy Yancey play the piano. ‘This,’ as Lewis recalls, ‘was the real thing.’ Soon,” I read, “Lewis was teaching himself to play the boogie-woogie piano, absorbing all that was possible from the older Yancey, who remained until his death a close friend and idol to Mr. Lewis. Since his father was a Pullman porter,” I read, “the Lewis family lived near the railroad. The rhythm of the trains soon became a natural pattern to young Lewis and he composed a boogie-woogie solo, now a classic of its kind, which became known as the ‘Honky Tonk Train Blues.'”

I looked up from my reading. The first number on the record was done. The phonograph needle was now scratching its slow way across the void to the second. The second number, I learned from the jacket, was “Dragon Blues.”

Meade Lux Lewis played four bars alone — and then Angela Hoenikker joined in.

Her eyes were closed.

I was flabbergasted.

She was great.

She improvised around the music of the Pullman porter’s son; went from liquid lyricism to rasping lechery to the shrill skittishness of a frightened child, to a heroin nightmare.

Her glissandi spoke of heaven and hell and all that lay between.

Such music from such a woman could only be a case of schizophrenia or demonic possession.

My hair stood on end, as though Angela were rolling on the floor, foaming at the mouth, and babbling fluent Babylonian.

When the music was done, I shrieked at Julian Castle, who was transfixed, too, “My God — life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?”

You can find audio samples of Meade Lux Lewis here.