In the beginning, God was alone…….
Why would an all-powerful, Creator/God, decide to make “human copies of Himself” in order to create Mankind and subject His Own newly-invented bits and pieces to the uncertainty of an Earth Life.
It was necessary for The Great Creative Force to put Himself out into creation in the vulnerable form of matter containing His Own consciousness in order to see how He would actually react to a myriad of personal situations. The entire range of possible situations. Each human being, is therefore, a test tube, demonstrating to their Creator the answer to that very question. Until someone is actually in a particular place themselves, they can´t know how they would react to it. They can speculate but they cannot be sure.
For instance, I am a stranger to Fear and I also believe that I will welcome death when it approaches. But, I´m now in a state of very good health and safety; so I can only speculate about how I would react if I were in a dangerous situation. What if a gunman were to threaten to shoot me unless I obeyed his commands? Sure, I´d give him my purse, but I would not jeopardize another life. Say, surrendering a child to his grasp.
But, here´s a more-probable situation that one might find themselves in: sometimes a drowning person will climb all over anyone who reaches out a hand to save them. In their panic, they could wind up drowning that citizen or lifeguard, if the helper doesn´t sock them in the jaw to force them to relax and let go.
Years ago, in the Cold-War fear days, I knew a man, who had a huge stockpile of survivalist food and water supplies in a large storage unit. He truly believed that the Biblical Great Calamities were about to hit at the millennium. He took many pills and herbal medications but his constant fear caused him to overeat and to dote upon red wine. His purposes all collided within himself. Fear of the future caused overindulgence of the present moment. In spite of all his training and reading about emergency preparations, he was overreacting, like anyone else, when up against his own mortality. It was fear-based behavior!
Then, when the consequences manifest in poor health and alcoholism, such people go to all sorts of frantic lengths to find the best doctor or specialist to cure them. They may even write to friends and family with tales of woe and anxiety; seeking support to help them get through this Terrible Tragedy. Heavy smokers who get lung cancer are good examples of this self-induced panic state. Strangely, the sick person is blind to his own fault; and has the gall to blame others if they fail to respond. He collects upon their “love obligations” in heavy measure and expects them to “be there” for him.
Okay, all of these situations illustrate the existential requirement that each human being must solve for himself the balance between utter solitude and obligations to others. Between one´s own personal needs and those of society. How does one act when surrounded by people? Too many people, sometimes! What would I, myself, do in each situation? Though I need a lot of solitude for my writing and thinking, I´m also a very social being. I truly enjoy meeting and relating to a great many people. How can each human being balance these opposite needs?
This was in the early days of space travel, when landing on the moon suddenly seemed possible. Space ships had not yet appeared on Earth, but they were in many movies and books and had quite captured our conversations. I knew people who were planning to be astronauts. So, I began to play with the idea of designing my spaceship, as a way to focus upon this question of loneliness versus social overwhelm.
Someday, I surmised, we will want to send a colony to Mars. We would need a very large spaceship to accommodate enough people to assure an enduring planetary population; as well as to bring in enough supplies in case there was nothing edible on the red planet. I had no idea where to begin in terms of spaceship design but once I got started, I defined it down to the smallest detail. In my fertile imagination, I wound up with a whole Star Fleet, even assigning duties, purpose, and personnel to those ships. I came to know my prototype vessel, intimately, within my imagination; and even became familiar with some of the major occupants. I can still see the interior of my original ship. It is described in detail in my movie script: “Go With The Floe!”
Now, reminiscing about that gorgeous and b usy period in my life, I remembered the living quarters that I had come up with for the occupants of that ship. I visualized the crew´s quarters, as well as more luxurious housing for the passengers. There were many Mars-bound travelers because the specialized task of these ships was to move vast populations to new places in the cosmos as their own polluted planets died out.
So, the space vessel´s interior was a vast landscape, filled with small, circular, one-cell units, serving as very efficient, well-designed homes. All home-furnishing needs were set up around the interior edges and the bed was at the center, as a nucleus. When the resident spent half of its time in sleep; energy would flow in from above, and penetrate the sleeping body. All tension, fatigue, and negativity, would drain out from below the bed, in a circulatory movement. Each room was a single cell in the great body of the ship. Each occupant was also a cell of another sort, free to move about through the ship´s enormity, which contained villages, forests, streams and even, urban areas. Transport was achieved through a complex system of traffic arteries, river vessels, individual carriers. Walking paths and skyriders decorated great food-producing areas and endless tours carried the occupants to the many corners of this interesting universe. No one ever though of escaping the bounds of this ever-purring home of theirs. Outer space could be admired from vast windows at the navigational, forward end of the ship; but there was no interest in escaping the bounds of the interior.
Everything was designed to fit the pattern of a biological, living being. The large, containing the small. But all elements served as both the container and the contained; happy and secure within their assigned roles. When my ships finally landed upon the new planet to be colonized, the gigantic ship would serve as a first home until permanent ones could be erected. But this cellular pattern would be followed there, too; simply expanding it into the more generous space available.
So, even way back then, in my naivete, during the year after my divorce when I had gained my solitude and relished living alone in my darling little apartment in Deland, Florida, I was already pondering the need of being surrounded by others. I saw the repeating cellular structure of all creation; as well as the containment of each, within every level. I loved aloneness. But, I also adored family, community, and the planet, itself!
My literary experiment with science fiction had become clearly-defined; not only within my mind, but within my immediate reality. My Spaceship of Self had finally taken off!
