Something out of this world
The story of OJ Simpson — one we’re doomed to repeat ad infinitum — is as baffling as the garbled messages being sent to Earth by Voyager 1
In 1977 Nasa launched Voyager 1. Ed Stone, the lead scientist on the project, explained that it was “the first computer-controlled spacecraft ever launched and it still flies itself, it runs itself, it checks itself and it can switch to backup systems by itself”. Just last week, this self-propelling wonder rig started sending garbled messages back to Earth for the first time in its storied trajectory out past the heliosphere into the space beyond anywhere we’ve gone before — on track to reach the nearest star 40,000 light years away.
Voyager 1 may have stopped making sense for now, but give a space probe a break — it’s travelled more than 24-billion kilometres. It takes about 22 hours to send or receive a message from this vestige of the past and that’s with technology that has 240,000 times less memory than the smartphone in your hand.
Sent out into the great vast unknown along with the Voyager 1 was a gold disk onto which was etched prototypical figures of humans — a man and a woman (we’d obviously amend that now given the mutations in gender binaries) and human cultural artefacts of our time on the planet as it was in 1977, as decreed by Carl Sagan. He was once the high priest of all things space, whose declamations about what was out there propelled the imaginations of the TV-watching public into some unfathomable future.
I’m sure that in some strange, mysterious calculation where quantum physics meets the physical world, the messages from Voyager 1 are coming from a time and space that’s warped into both the future and the past.
I seem to recall Carl explaining that when astronauts would return from their sojourn on a different planet they’d still be young, and us terrestrially bound humans of the same cultivar would have aged or died out because time works differently in space (Einstein had much to say about this sort of thing).
I had an epiphany about the nature of time and strange messaging from the conjoined past and future this week when I heard that OJ Simpson had died. It was an odd synchronous moment worthy of a text message from the Voyager because I knew the universe was telling me something — I just wasn’t sure exactly what.
I was in Cape Town for the opening night of Othello at the Baxter Theatre and somehow, in the same time space continuum, the strange latter-day Othello replicant, whose tale of jealous rage gripped the public imagination, died in real time, as we were contemplating a story that was written 421 years ago. But, like the garbled messages from the Voyager trying to make sense of these threads of information, I found it all baffling.
All I can say for sure is that OJ and his illfated wife, Nicole, where the very picture of the gold-plated outlines of human prototypes representing in a galaxy far, far away. Nicole Brown was 18 when OJ met her. He was a hall-of-fame athlete onto whom Americans projected ideas of success, celebrity, riches and, crucially, some kind of raceless state of grace, a glorified being all could embrace.
That he was clearly fallible and racked by human concerns like those of insecure Othello, and that he took them out on the pretty girl he married who then divorced him, is the nitty gritty stuff of humanity which, I’d hazard, doesn’t appear on the gold disc. No, on the disc we come out glowing as our better selves — transmitting hope in humanity in a multiplicity of languages and musical interludes.
To be fair, we’d already exploded several nuclear devices and remained embroiled in long-lasting wars. This gold disc of humanity is like the wishful thinking of OJs fans.
As US President Jimmy Carter said on the disc: “This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilisations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.”
When I think of OJ as an archetype representing all sorts of dreadful human impulses, both his own and the projected impulses of human society behaving badly with its racism, its bids for social justice even in the flawed person of OJ, and the bipartisan gender politics at play in this sad story, I think less of universal attributes and more about how there are a few stories that play over and over again. Maybe because our wiring is old school and we’re doomed to repeat the same garbled messages ad infinitum.
US activist Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about his complicated relationship to OJ in light of the news. He concludes that OJ was like Houdini, the great escape artist, breaking free from the chains of expectation, definitions, and his own self — always resisting comforting explanations. I see him now: a fallible man standing next to the woman he’s forever linked to. An outline of a human being, flying off into the vast darkness, unknown and unknowable.