NASA photo

heaves and pukes up sulfurous gas and smoke through volcanoes that appear reddish orange in color-enhanced Voyager photos. Io is persistently referred to as being "alive," which is an astronomic metaphor for geologically active. In scientific terms, it would be absurd to ask if Io is literally alive, or if Mimas is literally dead. Alive and dead are merely convenient descriptive terms. Spheres of rock, ice and gas cannot be said to live or die the way a human body lives or dies. From a very generalized point of view the materials of moons and humans can be described equivalently as active or inactive, but humans, of course, are sentient, where moons, of course, are not. But if sentience makes some qualitative difference in what we mean when we speak of different pieces of the universe, then when we say Mimas is dead, are we telling ourselves what Mimas is like, or what death is like? Perhaps the metaphor wobbles a little when we unfold it to a question like this. Science uses tropes like "dead" and "alive" to convey what a situation or moon is, not to express a literal fact. The trouble, however, is that the moment metaphors are introduced, the mind's rational processes are influenced or outright disrupted by other elements of the psyche. In particular, metaphors involving something as personally disturbing as death affect the emotions, and emotions in turn affect thoughts. And so imagining Mimas as a figure of death -- or death as a figure of Mimas -- disrupts logical thought with the agitation we all feel, in our different ways, about our own personal deaths. If we dwell too much on the deathlike quality of Mimas, then logical thought can break up altogether, causing all the steps to disperse and the thought to come to pieces. The image of a tiny, crater-covered rock and ice moon whirling around Saturn, itself looming gigantic and yellow-banded in the moon's sky, can crease your chest with anxiety. If you persist in thinking of Mimas as being dead, like a pasty, wound-gouged corpse, and this fear disperses your ability to reason clearly, then you are no longer in the world of science, but in the world of actual, unmediated human experience, fearing something profoundly personal -- death. Fear, however, is not science. The metaphor tilts out of control. It's as if Mimas' deadness becomes all but real at this point. We have spoken of it so concretely and so empirically, with its rock and rocklike ice, its enormous crater mountains and its visible, almost touchable rocky chasms, that we have almost given a concrete form to death. A way to override the stark reality of it is to distance ourselves with more metaphor, creating a different sense of the same reality by invoking a myth of some sort. The myth has the peculiar value of keeping us close to the emotional impact of Mimas' deadness while at the same time allowing us the latitude to

understand, scientifically tutored as we are, that the myth is not strictly true, or factual. It is comforting to think things so distant truly are this separate and different. For example, we know that the mythical Mimas was not an actual living giant who (as Robert Graves tells us) went to war against the gods for imprisoning their brothers the Titans (Ouranos, Iapetos, Kronos (or Saturn), and so on).

The god Hephaestus did not literally fling a ladle of red-hot metal into the face of Mimas, long hair and beard flying wildly in the battle, and Hercules did not literally finish him off. But it's a good story, and it retains the horror of disfigurement and finally death which originally disturbed us in our scientific metaphors about the qualitative condition of the moon Mimas. The myth is still not science, however, and if we insist on the pre-eminence of the scientific mind, then our thoughts travel logically back to the facts of Mimas' rock and ice stillness, its pockmarked surface, its natural history of repeated accretion and annihilation. With the myth fresh in memory, a play of logical connection might call to mind the idea that sometimes mythological stories seem to chronicle natural events. For example, Hesiod's eighth century BC description of the violent battle between Zeus and Kronos (in Roman terms, Jupiter and Saturn) could well be his transcription of an account of the massive volcanic explosion of the Aegean island Thera in about 1450 BC. Even more pertinent is the Velikovskian notion that the widespread myths concerning the war in heaven are descriptions or accounts of another natural cataclysm, the bombardment of Saturn and its moons. Of course the ancient storytellers, such as Graves' fifth century BC source Apollodorus, never knew anything about a bombardment of Saturn by asteroids, comets and interplanetary debris. Apollodorus never saw or even imagined moons orbiting Mars, Jupiter or Saturn, not to mention Next page Previous page First page Fires of the Sun home The Mind Errant

Fear of Mimas