Took awhile to perfect my composition for #MessageToVoyager. Wanna go through revision history? Let's!
At first I was thinking about Voyager, brainstorming off of that, this idea of this pebble we fling into the grand canyon, how vast space is. Carl Sagan, in talking about Voyager 1, used the metaphor of sending a message in a bottle out from this island earth; that's the kind of thing I wanted to go for. Maybe something about how time moves fast down here but slow up there, how bright and loud it is down here but quiet and dim up there. The idea is to have the message be uplifting, so, what's the thread that connects us and Voyager, in spite of these differences? Hope. Why was it in Pandora's vessel in the first place? Maybe explore that.
But these ideas were all far too complex to fit into the character limit, so I tried a different tack:
Space: a place of mystery. We voyage far and far into an undiscovered land, to discover that land. We look into space and see blackness… of stars!
Still too many characters, and cutting back on it is impossible- it would just throw everything off; I think each part of this is essential. I didn't write it; it was a roommate on my mission, who just sort of, made it up on the spot, and I thought it was so good I wrote the whole thing down. It's supposed to be a Star Trek opening monologue-type deal. I think I'm the only one who gets quite as much a kick out of it as I do, but each detail about it is pitch-perfect and slays me. Calling space a "land," the darkness being of stars somehow... it just opens up like an onion of riot.
Couldn't go with that one, anyway, so I decided to focus my effort on something I wrote for something else, which I realized was poetic enough to go where I wanted, while also focusing on the dichotomy of earth and space:
From the dreamy half-light, to the sleepless darkness, this world of light, wakefulness and sleeping in between.
A metaphor for, life and the world or whatever, but just focusing on the first part I could iterate it into something fitting the stingy character count, while also meaning roughly"voyager."
Our dreamy half-light, into the sleepless darkness.
"Our" to make it clear it's the earth, it's us, I don't know. Into the sleepless darkness. Launching forth. Launching what? Hope.
Hope from the dreamy half-light to the sleepless darkness.
Or not. Weaky. I started carving the sound of the words, eliminating "ness" from "dark" and arranging the words to fit an iambic form. Sticking Voyager at the end after the natural pause of the colon: perfect number of characters, and adding in that note of hope.
From the dreamy half-light, into the sleepless dark: Voyager
Tried also Voyager: from the dreamy half-light, into the sleepless dark, sticking the word at the front, but that distracted from the meter, so I went with the first. Few words, but deep they are. The metaphor of half-light and science, dreaminess and creativity, standing in for the world, the sleepless dark signifying the ultimate unknown while also reflecting the color of space. Hopefully others will see the depth of it???
Anyway. Also got a couple of cartoon pilots to share! The first is the DuckTales new thing, whose first two episodes were put up on YouTube (legally!) yesterday, on Disney XD's channel. It is amazing and hilarious and I squeed nonstop during the themesong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP0Neif7Y4E
Olan Rogers's FINAL SPACE, meanwhile, is also great, and far shorter (in case you only have time to watch one of these.) The full show is coming to TBS this winter.
Plus it's still about space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Yco11ZQ0UE
BTW, I loved what you came up with so much that it's now the scrabble phrase on our fridge. :)
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