Aroostook skies — Confronting the twilight zone
“We are who we are, we cannot and should not hide or evade the reality of personal histories”.
So, fearlessly I step into a peculiar darkness — engendered by American commercial television. “Time previously devoted to reading, visiting, playing or movie-going was now spent in front of the electronic hearth! Along the Chicago lakefront, I remember, years ago, encountering a statue of Shakespeare. The Bard stared ahead, solidly coated green with oxidized copper. Upon his base and pedestal, scoured and scraped an inscription — “What a piece of work is man. How noble in thought: How infinite in faculty!” I lived a boyhood within the bright promises of that unparalleled exploration called the early 1960s. “It was wide-open territory, like the frontier. You could just go in any direction you wanted.”
Yet 2011 offers little hope for Americans in Maine or elsewhere — especially for children’s wonders replaced by a gnawing worry, adventures replaced by confinement. Personalized poetry’s replaced by the potty-mouth. Adults need to offer doors and windows for the hearts and minds of children.
In our day, television offered quasi-theatrical, horror and mystery. Evening channeled viewers into “The Twilight Zone”, “One Step Beyond”, “Way Out”, “Science Fiction Theatre”, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Outer Limits”. A sensitive, intelligent child reacted to the surface of this technological romanticism with tangible awe and horror. Doors of emotion quivered — inexplicable but profound — tweaked by the opening strains of unforgettable theme music and stentorian narrators.
What does this legacy induce within our lives today? Can such melodrama kick-start our creativity to new levels of self-understanding and expression? I offer a few insights. The mystery fantasy genre of the early- to mid-1960s on commercial television sought to achieve a new-found sense of humbleness and humility into our culture while entertaining us at the same time.
During this late lazy July night, the sun already prepares tomorrow morning’s loll through the summer sky zone of Cancer the crab’s faint stars. July should always recognize, too, the moment when two humans first set foot upon the moon, the only world to-date visited by representatives of our planet. Last scratched by American astronauts in December 1972, the moon appears abandoned of human reach and opportunity for exploration of new freedoms, frontiers, opportunity and peace.
It is time now for our arts/entertainment to join hands with our governmental leadership to evoke a new vision for the personalized presence of our solar system settlement. Let us bravely return to the earnest challenge posed by President Kennedy to “evoke the wonders of science rather than its terrors.”
Larry Berz is the astronomy educator and planetarium director of the Francis Malcolm Science Center in Easton.
