We are sorely lacking, I think, the right word for a kind of story whose purpose is not tragedy, lament, pessimism, criticism, not even a warning, cautionary tale, parable, whatever, no, but, something more like a clarity. Not a prophecy, which looks forward, but a vision of a whole equation.
I no longer set the tone of things
in this crevasse between to seem and be.
And no one came requesting an illusion.
We all had seen through what there was to see.
...That being said, this thing is pretty grim. I can't say if it will be helpful to any given person, so please be careful with whether or not you want to dive into it. And that's not meant as a cheap lure—I'm not trying to front-load this blog post with unnecessary gravitas or a brag of stomaching it. I mean this: Don't read/watch this thing if you're near the edge.
Aniara is an epic science fiction poem by Harry Martinson, written out in 103 cantos in Swedish between 1953 and 1956. It tells of an Earth–Mars colony ship, the Aniara, carrying 8,000 people who become lost at sea, in a manner of speaking, in space for many years, drifting off hopelessly into the void and attempting to reckon with the ordeal and its symbolic meaning at the finale of a ruined Earth.
The parallel Aniara draws between the journey of the ship and the doomed arc of progress that created it—an arc where we reach the stars just as we destroy our home, only to carry that destruction with us, in our dubious escape, into what turns out to be the cold darkness of space—is clear. "A lightyear is a grave" is likely the hardest thing any work of science fiction has ever said.
THE MIMA (basic, early info spoilers for Aniara 1956)
Less immediate, and easy to miss in the spectacular and succinct bleakness of that very typical plot summary above is any mention of the "mima," a fantastic machine equal in power to the ship and just as central to the telling. The mima is a deified piece of mystic visionary technology, a sort of hallucinatory VR temple that imparts upon its visitors scenes of incredible things pulled from all around the universe. The mima is a lot of things; it's a summary and exaltation of all art, culture, collective memory, individual/varied experiences and forms of life, escapist entertainment, hope and powers of imagination and envisioning of infinite possibility.
The mima tuned us in to signs of life
spread far and wide.
But where, the mima gives no word of.
We pull in traces, pictures, landscapes, scraps of language
being spoken someplace, only where?
She fishes metaphorically her fish
in other seas than those we now traverse,
netting metaphorically her cosmic catch
from woods and dales in undiscovered realms.
I tend the mima, calm the emigrants,
cheering them with scenes from far-flung reaches
of things in thousands which no human eye
had ever dreamt of seeing, but the mima tells no lies.
As the story itself, Aniara, is a work of art which also deals with these things, the mima therein is a neat little meta-thingy, and its caretaker, the "Mimarobe," could be seen as a stand-in for the author or for the kind of figure that he is, and indeed she seems to be the main narrator.
The mima also sees Earth (called Doris or Dorisvale in the story). Sometimes it shows Earth's history and present. Eventually, having borne witness to the nightmarish desecration and destruction of the Earth and its human cities, the mima "beg[s] deliverance from her vision," begins to decay, and ultimately self-destructs.
Now, in the name of Things, she wanted peace.
Now she would be done with her displays.
This is a story where art itself dies of grief, and a cult of grief forms around it. The steward of art (the artist) is threatened with trial, punishment, and death if she cannot fix what they have broken.
THE MOVIE (lots of spoilers for Aniara, the film)
Aniara (2018) was pretty good. I will admit right off the bat that I don't understand what they decided to do with the ending / the last shot. It doesn't make a big difference to me, though.
The film also makes some changes to the mima. The movie version of the machine is apparently intended to do one thing, and that is to show its visitors idyllic scenes of nature from Earth's unspoiled past, ostensibly as a similar kind of spiritual experience as in the source text, or at least simply a soothing balm for these people on an [anticipated] weeks-long voyage in space. This is probably a good choice for a feature film. It's different, but it's more accessible. I feel there is much more to study with the original mima, but I can't really complain about a more immediate and timely message in a 2018 film.
Other aspects of their depiction of the mima are more exciting: Visually, it appears as a fiery, hellish, nebula-like sky undulating on the ceiling of the room—for a while, it's the only other notable vfx in the film other than the ship cruising through dark space, which is an effective contrast. Also, I love the fact that using the mima requires visitors to lie flat on the floor, face down. Both these choices are amazing. It looks like a startup bought an Oblivion Gate and turned it into an employee wellness room where you can go to nap on your lunch break.
The overall art direction / production choices that make the film possible are genius. Almost everything interior is shot in entirely normal and familiar public spaces like malls, food courts, theaters, bars and nightclubs, hotel hallways, dry-cleaning facilities, conference rooms and CEO's offices, etc., and the ship's crew wear uniforms that look just like passenger airline crew of our current day. Not only does the familiarity of this environment highlight the urgency of the situation in its direct parallels to parts of our real lives that we're trying really hard not to think about, but it allows the terror of the windowless mall world they're trapped in to sneak up on you.
And the fact that they are still using disposable plastic in fucking outer space, I just- It's made so clear that these people "have everything," that their needs are abundantly met. The administration has strategic planning meetings to keep the restaurants open. Everyone's "fine," and they're ready scream, we're all ready to scream. The captain calmly announces the disaster. Later, at about 21 minutes in, there's this scene where the protagonist asks an officer of the crew, "Do you know how long it'll be before we turn around?" He doesn't reply, was already walking away, done with the conversation. They don't know! They don't even care!!! They don't have a plan and they're not going to turn this thing around!!!
Occasional cuts to views outside, a dark city skyline drifting off into the void. The resident poet and astronomer-prophetess is murdered to shut her up. Children touring the algae facility. Hope wielded as a tool of control. STEM kids recruited into the machine. Self-care regimens. Waiting.
Playing the infinite in mortal chess,
there they fiddled with their deathly problems
BACK TO THE TEXT
After setting up its main tent poles, the poetry of Martinson's Aniara proceeds to take us to the circus, deliriously recounting various horrors of human history: Martian tundra penal colonies and wasteland atrocities of old Earth, vignettes of random characters' lives, somebody named Nobby(???), cults forming on the ship, intense despair, despair, despair, social stratification and old cultural grudges resurfacing, taking on uncomfortable poetic meaning that I don't want to try and parse, an authoritarian captain, prison inside a prison world, etc. It's kind of just Everything Again, this time on a ship in the void.
...There's also some sex cult thing, which I don't really understand, but frankly I doubt Martinson fully understood his focus on it either (it's not any clearer in the film), so I'm forced to move on.
I won't lie, I was skimming and skipping passages from before chapter 50 until 70 or later, and I am not ashamed to say that this was a difficult read for me. I was reading aloud and repeatedly talked myself to sleep, even as I was being horrified. Martinson makes extensive use of sci-fi neologism, which can be great, but sometimes goes to a near-unreadable extreme. I'm not really qualified to critique poetry, and I understand I'm reading a translation, but it's dense with invented jargon lacking context clues. Sometimes Martinson is just kind of saying epic stuff with no intention of letting you knowing anything about it. "The tower of Han," for example, comes up. What is that? Literally no one knows. It sure sounds epic, though.
Anyway, it's dark. Rescue pods become funeral vessels. They find a twin of the Sun burned out like a coal floating in space. Their hopes that the mima would sustain them were dashed early on, things only got worse, and eventually everyone dies in a colossal sarcophagus hollowed out of meaning, no one there for it to mean anything.
Mima gets the penultimate canto:
We crashed into the Law’s precise command,
and found our empty death in Mima’s dens.
The god whom we had hoped for to the end
sat wounded and profaned in Doric glens.
Art could not be cut loose from its roots, mechanized, kept in a box and absconded with away from the earth they killed. So how is this not just doom? What was I on about in the first paragraph? The message, I think, can be this: You are on Earth right now.