The first thing we did when we got to the Moon.

One small step.

          

            When Neil Armstrong`s boot disturbed the basaltic surface of the Moon on July 21st 1969 it was indeed one small step for one man. But behind that single step lay a series of other small steps that all came together in order to form that giant leap for Mankind. If you ran the film backwards, the boot would go up the ladder into the Lunar Module which would then leap back onto the massive rocket powerful enough to take us out of Earth's jealous grasp. The boot and the rocket would land in Delaware and then the rocket alone would travel on to Nazi Germany, painted with light by Fritz Lang, before disappearing into the minds and imaginations of human beings as far back as people go.
       This action was the fulfillment of an idea that our species had dreamed upon since first we raised our gaze to the heavens and began to question: What is that thing up there? and how can we get there?  As well being the natural consequence of the evolution of explanations to those same questions.
        In the oldest surviving tale of a trip to the Moon, Lucian of Samosata's 2nd Century True History *, the voyagers are lifted to the heavens on a giant waterspout. Apollo 11, lacking lacking a sea-tornado of that size, had to make do with a Liquid-propellant rocket that was powerful enough to escape Earth's gravity.
        More generally speaking , Apollo 11 was carried aloft on the highest wave of the 400 year long tide of modern scientific history.  It was appropriate, then, that when reaching their goal, these modern astronauts would come down safely in the Sea of Tranquility.
           
      Armstrong's boot, and the high-tech costume it was attached to, as well as providing that one small step, also offers an answer to the important musical question of What did Delaware ?  As It turns out, she may very well have worn a space-suit; as the manufacturer of all Apollo suits was ILC Dover, based in the state.
     Delaware is also known as the first state because it was the first of the original 13 U.S. states to ratify the Constitution; thereby supporting the ideas that had come hand-in-hand with the scientific revolution : all of which would help make the U.S. the eventual winner of the space race.**
     Drawing back from that first foot-step, a strange spider-like machine comes into sight. This vehicle that had carried Armstrong and Aldrin to the Moon, designed and built by Grumman, not only had to deliver the astronauts to the surface of the moon, but to escape the Moon's own significant gravity in order to return to the Command/Service Module.
     One of the most significant design aspects of the Lunar Module would be its weight. The engineers at Grumman were continually in a battle to make this spider fly. One important victory in this battle came when somebody offered the simple question: Do they need seats ?  Thus it was that this vital idea for weight reduction was created by a question that any passing 5-year old could have asked. Perhaps then, our education systems might consider why they have so little interest in questions?
     Anway, the story of the first and only manned space-ship to never have had a test-flight (as it could only be flown in space) is told here-





The rocket that took us to the Moon was the fruit of various branches of the tree of knowledge. One of the most famous of its gardeners was Wernher Von Braun, the man who would come to be known as The Father of Rocket Science; as well as famously being known as an ex-Nazi and member of the S.S.
    Von Braun's abiding passion was not, however National Socialism and would be expressed clearly when he had the chance, as a young student, to meet the high-altitude pioneer Auguste Piccard in 1930: "You know, I plan on travelling to the moon at some time."
    It is clear that Von Braun's dream was space travel, and it was the grim anti-communicative structure of the Nazi regime that would ensure that some of his earliest rockets would contain war-heads and be aimed squarely at London instead of the Moon.***
   
    As the war finished, Von Braun made a choice to surrender to the Americans rather than the Russians. He stated: 
"We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.” ****
   Von Braun was one of a group of rocket scientists who were quickly and covertly brought to the United States. This journey (after his first small step onto American soil in Delaware+), would eventually lead to his overseeing the design and construction of the Saturn V rocket for NASA.

     

   Frau im Mond- The first man; and woman; and boy, on the Moon.  

      The direct ancestor to the Saturn V was the V2 rocket used by the Nazis during the war. The first one to be successfully launched had the words Frau in Mond painted upon it. Frau im Mond was a 1929 German science fiction movie directed by Fritz Lang++ and concerned a voyage to the Moon. It contained such an accurate portrayal of rocket technology that it was to have a great influence on the rocket scientists of Germany; so much so that they offered the daubed tribute when they took Lang's dream and made it reality.
      Things created are often first seen in the realm of the imagination. The human mind plays with ideas in dreams and stories and then those dreams can become reality. Any authority that takes and uses its power without consent can only retain its power with censorship of ideas. Thus it is that human history has always been, most basically, a struggle for better communication.
      The natural and necessary effort at explanation that constitutes part of communication has improved over time. Our ancestors did their best with the information they had, but if you actually want to travel to the Moon, a water-spout is less practical than a rocket. The idea of the Moon as a predictable rock is more useful than the Moon as Selene.

      In other contexts however, it may well be useful to acknowledge that, although communication always works as Information -------> Idea, any information can always produce more than one idea.
      And there have always been many ideas about the Moon.
  
      In the Kabbalah, the traditional esoteric explanation of how the universe works, there is a map, containing the 10 Sephiroth, the aspects of God, which offers a basic guide to existence.


                                                          

 

           

             At the root of this Tree of Life  sits the attribute of God usually known as Malkuth. This represents the physical world, the Earth and the planets. Above Malkuth lies the realm of Yesod. This is the attribute of connection where concepts of the imagination can become actions that unite us with God. Yesod is usually closely associated with the Moon, and the world of imagination.
           
            And so it was, on the 19th July 1969, that men made reality the dream of Lucien and Fritz Lang and Werner Von Braun and countless others besides, as an Eagle - the bird who had carried prayers to the Great Spirit in the Spirit World for the Native Americans - came to rest at Yesod.
        The tide of communication had risen high enough to carry us to the Moon. Although we had been visiting there in our imaginations forever.

   
          Imagination + Will = Creativity.
    The Dreamtime + The Right Stuff = A man on the Moon.

     From the first question asked of the Moon - what is it ? - to the first explanations - a place. A god. The realm of dreams. From the first new information from telescopes to the new explanations - a celestial body, a satellite, a moon!  From the first tales of travels by water-spout up to the discovery of the Monolith; and finally through the ideas and dreams made flesh by the new science and technology: the new magic.
We were now here. Walking in heaven with the gods. 
              

And so, after all that; what WAS the first thing we did when we got to the Moon ?


   After the Lunar Module had safely touched down,+++ and just before the astronauts were to step onto the surface, Buzz Aldrin brought out a small container of wine along with some altar bread; symbols of the blood and body of a man Aldrin believed to be the son of God. After saying: "This is the LM pilot. I'd like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way"   Aldrin took Communion.

   Having arrived at Yesod, the first thing we did was to communicate with God.

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   * Baron Munchhausen would also claim to have been to the Moon, but he is, let us say, an unreliable narrator. Mention of the great man, however, allows us to remind ourselves of what a good movie can be full of -




** Soviet science was hampered by the Soviet system which was, basically, more anti-communication than the American one.

*** On a related note, when is a rocket a missile? The usual definition is that a missile is a rocket that contains a war-head. North Korea has launched a series of tests involving rockets over the past few years causing alarm in many countries. However, the reporting in, for example Britain, is notably different from that of Japan.
Here is the BBC on the North Korean test

Here is the Japanese state broadcaster NHK reporting the same story

The BBC story is about a "rocket" and the NHK story is about a "ミサイル (missile)".
Of course, any rocket test is also, basically, a missile test, yet the difference in definition is striking and the reference to a "missile" is constant throughout the Japanese media. Why would the media do this? One simple idea is that a story about a North Korean "missile" being tested near Japan gets the punters attention. Another idea is that it suits the agenda of certain powerful groups for the general Japanese public's attention to be focused on a non-concrete threat rather than elsewhere....

**** So, What did Delaware? A nazi de-mob suit?

+ One wonders at this point if the great Werner Von Braun was fully aware of some of the less well-known ideas in the Bible. Perhaps, like so many, he'd never read it. All of which allows me to say: C'mon Werner! It's not Rocket Science!

 ++ Frau im Mond was, remarkably, filmed entirely in Delaware.+++

+++ No it wasn't ! - Ed.

++++ As told in Andrew Chaikin's book: A Man on the Moon.
 Of course, as all information gives any number of ideas one might argue that the first thing we did when we got to the Moon was: turn off the ignition switch, or breathe a sigh of relief, or convert Oxygen into CO2. You could also argue that getting to the Moon should be defined as the voyage of Apollo 8, or even Luna 2.#

# If your idea is Luna 2##, then the first thing we did when we got to the Moon becomes made a big mess. Now that is another very pertinent idea about humans.

## In what may be the greatest attempt at a thunder-heist in history, the Soviet Union crash-landed an un-manned space-craft onto the Moon while Apollo 11 was still on the surface. Who remembers Luna 15?###

### The Soviet effort to land their craft at the same time as Apollo 11 might also be described as the worst (or best) attempt at a  photo-bomb in history. The effort was, of course, information intended to suggest the qualities that was the idea of the Soviet Union. An effort at communication. What else can we expect from people? Communication is, after all, the only thing we ever do.

The Pope's no to the People's yes: The tide of British history. (11).

 

Worth fighting for? Tommy Atkins enjoys a tasty Beveridge.

                                     
     In 1942, at the height of World War 2, the British coalition government produced a report on social welfare that contained the promise of a better society for everybody contributing to the war effort. The Beveridge Report recognised 5 Giant evils that needed to be dealt with; these evils were: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease. The conclusions of this report were widely accepted across the political spectrum and its recommendations for producing the better world that people were supposedly fighting for would strike a chord amongst the general public that would resonate most strongly in the country's general election of 1945.
     Only two months after VE Day, the British people overwhelmingly said yes to the Labour Party's promises to implement the recommendations of the Beveridge Report. The war leader Churchill and his Conservative party - that wished mostly to conserve the traditional social order - were dismissed by people who, after all the hardships of battle, quite reasonably thought they deserved a better Britain.
     As always, the better Britain could only be built on new ideas. New ideas borne on the rising tide of information.
   

"The book that won the 1945 election for Labour."

   
    One important packet of information that would help generate these new ideas was the novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The writer Alan Sillitoe, in his foward for the novel,  tells how he was first introduced to the book with the promise that "this was the book that won the ' 45 election for Labour".
    As Britain struggled into the second half of the 20th Century, general society was still very much ordered according to traditional mores. The workers worked until they dropped, thought of as little more than beasts of burden by the ruling class who lived lives of ease thanks to this system. This novel explored the society of Edwardian Britain by describing the lives of a group of house painters. In a pivotal scene, one painter attempts to explain to his colleagues how they are being exploited by the system, but his explanation fails as the others are simply unable to recognise the bars of their cage. Lacking an education that would have encouraged their innate communicative skills, these men are unable to process information in order to get new ideas. Thanks, however, to information like The Ragged- Trousered Philanthropists,  as World War 2 drew to a close there were new ideas that were poised for victory.
    The general social order of the time would not have been unintelligible to Henry the VIII, but what would have baffled the old king was the great shift in communication that allowed ordinary people a voice. More than 400 years after the Pope said no to Henry's divorce, the British tree of knowledge, grown strong on better communication, had produced the voice of the people.  And unremarkably, people generally wanted a better Britain, that is to say, a fairer and more just society.
    
     The end of World War 2 also saw the beginning of the end of the British Empire. One of the pillars of the Empire had long been the simple idea that the British were somehow superior and had the god-given right to be lords of the Earth. As the tide of communication rose around the world, the inevitable flood of new ideas caused whole societies to push for the same kind of independence that had once been only the preserve of Kings.
     As was the case after World War One, the support that had been given to Britain in the war effort, the fighting for freedom,  naturally led Indian people to the idea that their own country should be free from Britain's colonial yoke, that India should have freedom of its own. Churchill argued that the Indian political elite were incapable of good government, but any acknowledgement that Indian people should  govern India is notably lacking from the man who made such great efforts for Britain's own self-determination. It is interesting to consider how Churchill could so fervently fight for freedom for Britain while denying it to others.
     The imperial idea of racial superiority, which would be a normal idea for someone of Churchill's background, would shrivel in the light of post-war questions and the corresponding new concepts. The Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1976 would have been exceedingly difficult to explain to the historical architects of the British Empire, but these new ideas would inevitably burst the artificial levees put in place by the traditional social order. Information continued to flow more and more freely across the land, and no longer would the old concepts seem so right and just as ordinary people began to expect basic services like health and education and continued to question old ideas that had sat in haughty dumb judgement for centuries.
 
    With the introduction of the National Health Service along with better housing and a more democratic educational system, the great social reforms of the post-war period would push British society through another important revolution in communication.The traditional hierarchy was under threat as never before as the traditionally enslaved Morlocks become healthier and wiser and began to encroach on their mastersterritory' . Naturally, the traditional Eloi began to concoct their own ideas and plans within their gilded halls in order to deal with the new situation.
     This push-back by the traditional power-holders in Britain would be marked by the rise of Margaret Thatcher, and her government would be marked by its veneration of Mammon
and its attacks on communication.
      Mammon, who had always been lurking ready to scoop up the fruits of the British tree of knowledge, began to take up a throne cut from the tree's branches themselves, as science began to become increasingly the servant of profit. This construction for the new god's seat would necessitate an attack upon the tree that would stunt its growth. The results of which have been playing out in the last thirty years.
     Simply put, the modern economic system must, for its own survival, make people less communicative. The rise of Thatcherism and its grotesque heir in Blair's Labour party* would involve a rise in status for PR, that child of Propaganda, and a concurrent take-over by the management class that would result in a steady solidification of the capitalist system of fascism light. The increasing dominance of the single idea of profit before all else would see a steady decline of the accumulated wisdom of the 500 year rising communicative tide.
     Bela Lugosi's pyramid would suffer erosion, as the mighty would look on, far from despair. The simple question of "what is it?" Would increasingly be met with bemusement and aggression if anyone dared to exercise that fundamental tool of critical thinking - definition of terms.

    A good example of the Thatcher government's war on communication occurred  in 1988, when the British government banned the broadcasting of the voices of representatives of Sinn Fein and other groups designated as "terrorist". The stated reason was to prevent these groups from airing their arguments. Clearly, the Thatcher government did not want to allow the British people the freedom to form their own ideas from the information available. Famously, broadcasters got around the ban by dubbing the likes of Gerry Adams with an actor, resulting in this kind of farce.     
                       
    Late 20th Century Britain's tree of knowledge would produce other exotic and strange fruit. One would be  Ofsted: The Office of Standards in Education. Back in 1640, The Royal of London for improving Natural Knowledge took as its motto: "Take nobody's word for it."  Ofsted titles itself the office of standards in education, yet states clearly that it "has no definition of education." Consider that for a minute.  No definition of the thing that it is supposed to be measuring.  No clear idea of what it's looking for,  yet it continues to go around with its mystical measuring tape, measuring education.  And we are all supposed to take their word for it.**
   

     The things we do for love, our friends, families, hobbies, those things that are truly important to us, we do not do for money. Those things that make us most human, we do not do for money. So how did this creeping idea that profit comes above all things manage to entwine and strangle large parts of the tree of knowledge on its way to becoming  the major rule that we live by?
       The answer, at base, is very simple. Communication has been under attack for the last 30-odd years. Bela Lugosi is kept locked in the dungeons of Mammon, and naturally, if people are not asking and checking then describing and explaining become simply the servants of propaganda. The manipulation of information and ideas by the Blair government would have impressed veterans of the Soviet Union. It would also have surely impressed Henry's old enemy Pope Clement VII.
     
      
    

  

       Observing that tide of British history that ran from the Pope's no to the people's yes, we might note the following:

       1: Independent thought is a good thing for a country. Independent thought is a result of     better communication         

     
        2: Science is encouraged by better communication.

        3. All improvement in society is connected to better communication.
      
       So, naturally Britain's leaders are spending a great deal of energy encouraging better communication. Aren't they?

                                              Aren't they?
      
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 * The heir Blair bunch?

 ** On a historical, albeit completely fabricated, note OFSTED*** formed a band at one point. This one was a personal favourite-

 

 *** I personally would find it difficult to measure standards in, for example,  Semprini, wouldn't you?   

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     Post-war, the New England   would continue to tend a tree of knowledge so great that, by the late 1960s it would reach all the way to the moon. Humans would begin to set foot in the realm of the gods.
     So what was the first thing we did when we got there, I wonder?
 

The Pope's no to the People`s yes: The tide of British history.(10)

 Dresden 1945,  corpses from the Allied bombing are piled to be burned.
Reaping the Whirlwind or Slaughterhouse?

     In September 1939, following the German invasion of Poland, Britain declared war on Germany. In the years that followed, incredible leaps of technology would see the Second World War go from Polish troops on horseback to one single bomb that could destroy an entire city. The ever Increasing industrialisation of war would be typified by the horrors of the Nazi Concentration Camps, an idea initially borrowed from the British and taken to new depths. War planners and people who could have been spending their time doing other things, poured their energies into figuring out even better ways to kill others.
      At the heart of all this destruction was the struggle of ideas:  whose we should live by. After the fighting, the people of Britain would process the information of these events and have some new ideas of their own. But during the war, the ideas with the most currency were those that helped to destroy the enemy. Once again, strong and beautiful branches of Britain's tree of knowledge were chopped off and used as burnt offerings to Mars.
      

Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur Harris- Bomber? Butcher? Hero? 

      Sir Arthur Harris had very firm ideas about how to win the war. Having studied the Nazis own tactics, he decided that the way to victory would necessarily involve area bombing: a tactic which meant deliberately targeting German cities and their civilian population. This tactic would most famously culminate in the bombing of Dresden when over a thousand allied bombers destroyed the center of the city and at least 22,000 lives were lost.
      The Dresden bombing makes for various ideas. Those responsible for organising it would see it as a practical step towards victory. On the other hand, British P. M. Churchill wrote about how " the question of increasing the terror...should be reviewed." How many history books speak of Churchill as: "the self-confessed terrorist."?
       The testimony of survivors of the bombing offer a different perspective to the "terror":
  It is not possible to describe! Explosion after explosion, worse than the blackest nightmare. We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.
                                                                                                      - Lothar Metzger
     
   To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire.   Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then—to my utter horror and amazement—I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. (Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen). They fainted and then burnt to cinders.
                                                                                                    - Margaret Freyer
   

    Across the globe, the war in the Pacific reached a climax on the 9th and 10th of March 1945 with the single most destructive bombing raid in history as 1665 tons of destruction rained on Tokyo. About 100,00 people lost their lives. But, as usual, abstract numbers often fail to generate ideas of reality.

　　Here's some people in Tokyo in 1944. A proud father, a happy mother, a not-particularly easy-to-please baby.
                 
    

    
 
   
                              Here's some people in Tokyo after the bombing:


     

Tokyo 1945, a mother and her baby burned alive.

   
        In this war, this war as a choice between two evils that George Orwell spoke of, this is what the good guys did.

        And as our cultures encouraged most of its finest minds to produce weapons of death, we weren't finished yet.
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Ares and Aphrodite discovered by Hephaestus.

   On 16 July 1945, Aphrodite's long passion for Ares would reach a shuddering climax. The jealous Hephaestus would smash atoms upon his anvil and a mushroom-shaped cloud rose from the desert in New Mexico. The following month, the gods of love and war would both come again, twice, as the new bombs were dropped on people. Some victims would diappear in a flash, leaving only their shadow on a wall. Survivors would scream for water as their skin fell from their bones. This is what the good guys did.

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      World War Two resulted in at least 50 million dead; a staggering necropolis. During the conflict, Aphrodite and Ares's children, Phobos and Deimos, both ran amok. Since that time, human beings have used words and light and sound in attempting to try to deal with the awful information, the terrifying ideas, that are contained within this massive slaughterhouse.
    Yet, we often don't want to look too closely. It would take Hollywood, for example, 50 years to produce a realistic account of the Normandy landings.
     However, when looked at intelligently, the human carnage in this field of Mars is a vast encompassing mirror.
　　　Observing fｒom one angle, our heads culturally-clamped, it may please us to see honour and glory. On closer inspection we may see designated demons at night ralleys, wondering not where their ideas came from, or how they managed to crawl out of hell.
     For if we are to start asking, if we are to examine the mirror more closely, there are disturbing notions of Fascism Light vs Fascism Dark, that it wouldn't do to think about, as images of segregated soldiers and British colonies play in the background.
     For if we have the courage to look square and honestly into this looking glass we can see what, looking askance, we may not wish to see..... ourselves, looking back.
     Not God, not Satan, nor some glorious fight between good and evil; just us. Just us.