Sensawunda

“Things are getting worse,” my director, Ryan, declares. It’s a hot, mid-summer day and I am lounging with a dozen other women on the floor of one of the old, empty houses on Governors Island. We’re participating in an artist’s residency for a devised theatre production called The Great Filter.

The name derives from one of the theories associated with Fermi Paradox—the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and high likelihood that not only do such civilizations exist, but that, by now, they should have visited or made contact with earth. 

The Great Filter posits that something, either in a civilization’s past or future, blocks the evolutionary development necessary to achieve contact with other life-supporting planets. That Filter, of course, would also apply to the evolution of humanity on Earth. 

I raise my hand, “Actually, things are getting better.”

“Well, I’m talking about the big picture,” Ryan replies.

Well, so was I. Though our 24/7 news cycle may imply otherwise, statistically, fewer people live in extreme poverty than ever before, child mortality rates are falling, and there’s been a decline in conflict world wide. 

“Ask a person of color, an LGBTQ person, or a woman whether things are better or worse than they were before,” I mentally retort, for days, months, years after this conversation takes place. 

I tuck the memory into my ever-expanding file of “episodes of l’esprit d’escalier after an incident of mansplaining.” But I’m reminded of it again as I read Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars.

Smith’s poetry collection alternates between the cosmic and the intimate, sometimes within a breath. In her poem, “The Largeness We Cannot See,” she chronicles the way we as humans often move through life, oblivious to the big picture—the life force that acts on a scale greater than the minutiae of our laughter, our breath and our days. 

Smith mines this tension between better or worse, big or small, and timeless or ephemeral to evoke what is perhaps the defining feature of all science fiction: A sense of wonder. 

“Sense of wonder,” as it relates to Sci-Fi, is defined as “a feeling of awakening or awe triggered by an expansion of one’s awareness of what is possible or by confrontation with the vastness of space and time, as brought on by reading science fiction.” 

It is often compared to numinosity, or that which arouses spiritual or religious emotion. It dances with the divine.  

Smith asks, “Is God being or pure force? The wind / or what commands it?”

Ryan told us that his inspiration for The Great Filter emerged from a revelation that rocked his world: After thirty years of marriage, his conservative, Evangelical father had come out as gay. The disclosure created a rift in Ryan’s family and ultimately set him adrift from his religious faith, causing him to search for answers among the stars. Our performance imagined what it might be like to encounter the Great Filter and then pass through it. 

As I was reading Life on Mars, it occurred to me that uncertainty plus a longing for answers is a key ingredient to evoking a sense of wonder. Life on Mars is peppered with questions: I count at least 42, and those are just the ones with question marks. The questions Smith poses are rhetorical—they expand the text, rather than narrow it. Through them, she approaches the aesthetic sublime, that which refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. 

But the text is not all wide open spaces. In Part 3, Smith kicks up dark matter—a man who keeps his daughter locked in a basement cell for decades; the gassing of flocks of geese at JFK; a fleet of murders committed over the span of a few months. 

Five years later, I’m not sure that I would claim with such certainty that things are getting better. The big picture doesn’t always tell the whole story. One of the flaws of big data is that it turns real personal tragedies into statistical nonentities. “It’s getting better” may be true in some senses, but tell that to the people, flora, and fauna, for whom it’s getting worse. Smith warns us of the dangers inherent in such absolutes: 

“Who understands the world, and when

Will he make it make sense? Or she?

Maybe there is a pair of them, and they sit

Watching the cream disperse into their coffee

Like the A-bomb. This equals that, one says,
Arranging a swarm of coordinates 

On a giant grid. They exchange smiles.

It’s so simple, they’ll be done by lunchtime,”

In Part 4, Smith returns us to earth, sharing intimate moments of everyday life. And yet, within these small moments, she discovers a sense of wonder as great as the galaxy is wide. She finds the universe in a baby’s cry. She senses God’s presence in the shape of a dreaming dog. She measures the infinite in the span of our own, short lives. 

In our performance, we sought ways to transcend the Great Filter. We traded scientific theories and expounded on centuries of philosophy. We questioned. We danced. We fought. We tipped over a bucket of piebald bouncy balls and sent them cascading down the stairs. Then we chased them through the empty, sun-filled rooms.