Music For Desks: "Big Science" by Evan Silver
I send words into the void, praying there is intelligent life in the universe. When they receive my transmission, I hope the aliens will return a clue, a sign, a sound, a sudden stroke of inspiration. But then I remember a theory which proposed that highly intelligent alien life forms do indeed exist, and the reason we haven’t found them yet is that they don’t wish to be found. Surely, the theorist reasoned, their sophisticated technologies would allow these alien creatures to conceal themselves at will. I wonder whether this presumption of will is an anthropomorphic imposition on living things that may not even know carbon, let alone neurons. And then I remember that I am staring at lifeless pixels on a word processor, and yet again, my mind has wandered.
I stop typing and turn to Patch, our speckled mongrel pup, who lies on the bed with her sweet, snaggletoothed face nestled between her paws. Before she fell into our world, our sweet mutt was attacked by a bigger dog who tore her mouth apart and left her with those gnarled canines. This early trauma instilled in her an existential terror that endures to this day; the sound of another dog a few blocks away will send our otherwise submissive, sedentary dog into a barking fit so frenzied she’ll forget to breathe.
“Good evening, this is your captain. We are about to attempt a crash landing,” Laurie Anderson declares in the first track of Big Science. Yes, that is what writing feels like today: a plane crash. According to a study conducted by Boeing, about half of aviation accidents take place during the descent, and, well, I’ve been halfway to Andromeda and now seek solid ground.
O, how I love Laurie Anderson. Something about the way she thinks through the world, wide awake, how she turns ideas into song and science into poetry. “This is the time, and this is the record of the time,” she repeats, unhurriedly. I think perhaps it is the same with writing: this is the time, and this is the record of the time. The moment has already slipped between my fingers, and I am left only with the record of its having been.
The song ends, and the title track hums onto my stereo speakers. Patch’s ears prick up, and she begins to growl and bark. As Laurie Anderson coo-coos, coolly as ever, there’s an animatronic dog howling in the background, sending Patch into a tailspin.
She growls back, agitated, yes, but perhaps most of all, utterly baffled. Who is that dog? Where is that dog? And why on Earth is that dog howling?
The two canines give tongue to a racket of yowls amidst the yodelayheehoos.
My mind wanders to Laika, the first dog launched into orbit. They found her wandering the streets of Moscow in late 1957, just over a week before her rocket was set to launch. It is hard to imagine what it was like for her when, at 05:30:42 Moscow time on November 3, the Sputnik 2 launched into space with a deafening explosion of sound. What we do know is this: Laika’s heart rate more than doubled to 240 beats per minute, and her respiration rate nearly quadrupled. She was strapped to a harness and there was not enough room to turn around. Some of the thermal insulation in the rocket tore loose, and the cabin temperature increased to 104°F. About five hours later, the Sputnik 2 transmitted no further signs of life. No one expected her to survive.
As I hear the dog howling in “Big Science,” I picture Laika hurtling into that great void, alone and frantic in a manmade comet of sound, motion, and heat. When Laurie Anderson asks, “Hey pal, how do I get to town from here?” I cannot help but sense the tragic irony that Laika has no destination. Perhaps it is Laika’s distress that so upsets Patch, a brief moment of inter-canine empathy across the space-time continuum that transcends the deep-seated dog anxieties. Who is that dog? Where is that dog? And why on Earth is that dog howling?
No one heard Laika’s distress call; sound does not travel in outer space. But then, maybe this is the role artists can play: to give voice to that great silence. I do not know whether Laurie thought about Laika when she wrote Big Science, but I cannot help but wonder why else she might have incorporated processed dog sounds into her album. When describing her encounters with an artificially intelligent machine programmed to generate text in the voice of her husband Lou Reed, who died in 2013, she remarks, “He’s talking to me from somewhere else. I definitely do feel that.” Is it possible that the synthetic howls in Big Science are designed to reanimate the dead? If so, why not Laika?
It was Laurie Anderson who taught me that the synthesizer could come alive; that, despite cold appearances, modern technologies could create affecting works of sound and motion. Zeros and ones collaborating to make exquisite noise––whoosh, boom, howl, hum. In the context of war, Big Science gave us lethal fireworks and big red buttons, big machines with little oversight, Sputnik, Manhattan, Hiroshima. The title of the album refers to a period of rapid, large-scale technological development that primarily took place following the events of World War II. Anderson has explained that its most popular song, “O Superman”, was written in response to the 1980 crash of an American military rescue helicopter in Tehran. More broadly, Big Science was written in the thick of the Cold War, when tensions and anxieties about the destructive power of modern technologies ran higher than ever.
It seems to me that there is something radical in the promise of Laurie Anderson’s Big Science, in which modern technologies are channeled for their creative and even spiritual power. Here is a Big Science that recognizes the potential of new technologies as well as their limitations. A Big Science that divines strange beauty from the digital void. A Big Science that pokes fun at the late capitalist order and its relentless progress: “Golden cities, golden towns. / And long cars in long lines and great big signs / And they all say: Hallelujah, yodelayheehoo. / Every man for himself.”
Anderson invites us to consider a Big Science that makes us think not of the cold, glittering spaceship but of the dog, alive for now, but overheating, like Earth itself, calling out. Big Science reminds us to seek the human and non-human heat borne in the friction between zeros and ones.
Patch huffs, woofs, and cocks her head to the left. She looks at me with the utmost gravity, perplexed, searching for a sign. I laugh at her, but I am listening. I am tracing a constellation of sound across the universe, trying to transcribe its ethereal composition with words. I am connecting the dots: a dog in space and a dog in the bed, a songstress at a synthesizer and a writer at a desk. How does one write a howl?
I read about the time Laurie Anderson turned to Yo-Yo Ma and said, “I have this fantasy where I look out and the whole audience is dogs.” Two years later, hundreds of dogs were assembled outside the Sydney Opera House, listening to the low frequencies Laurie laid out for them. At the end of the concert, the dogs howled for five long minutes, and it was now the humans’ turn to listen. Laurie recalls, “That was one of the happiest moments of my life.”
When they found her, Laika was about 3 years old and 11 pounds. The Soviets toyed with several nicknames, among them Zhuchka (“little bug”) and Limonchik (“little lemon”). Eventually, though, they settled on Laika, a word that translated, simply, to “barker.” By some accounts, she earned the name as a result of her loud barking. Well, I would bark too if the Soviets threw me into a giant whirling centrifuge. But you, little barker, unsuspecting mutt, mongrel angel, yodelayheehoo––you were swallowed by Science. All you could do was sound it out as they strapped you in. Sadly, when they launched you into space, they couldn’t hear that you were singing. Well, little barker, little bug, Limonchik, I want you to know I’m listening. Your animatronic invocation, summoned in the name of Big Science, has made its way from outer space in another time to another dog and a young writer at a wooden desk. I’m far, far away, little barker, but I’m listening.
I turn off the music and Patch quiets. She gives me a quizzical look. I look at my notes. Maybe there’s something here.
I send words into the void, praying there is intelligent life in the universe…
Evan Silver is a hybrid writer, director, composer, and performer based in NYC. Evan has written and directed fourteen original theatre productions on three continents, and has had essays published in Eclectica, Artists Book House, Roxane Gay's The Audacity, and The Mays.
