It’s the classic sci-fi scenario: an alien craft finally lands on earth, the population crowds round, waiting in trepidation as the landing doors open and the aliens appear for the first time, having travelled countless light years from a distant planet. We ready ourselves for the profound shock of cosmic unfamiliarity.
It strikes me that there could be no alien deformed or be-tentacled enough, slimy or malign enough to match the truly cosmic horror of encountering a couple of humans stepping off this inter-galactic vessel. More of the same! This would, I think induce a sort of subtly catastrophic diffusion of existential dread in human culture (as it would in the bewildered non-terrestrial humans). It would be much worse for us in the long run than the ordeal of encountering some murderous eleven headed acid-spitting inter-planetary colonists. Radical unfamiliarity would give us something to sink our teeth into, metaphorically speaking. But finding out that the cosmos was permeated by the familiar, this is a chilling thought I think.
I must admit I’ve always been lukewarm when it comes to a lot of John Cage’s music but I very much like the story of how excited he got when Morton Feldman, early into his career, showed him a new composition. When Cage asked how he wrote it, Feldman replied “I don’t know how I made it”, to which Cage jumped up and down with excitement and said “It’s so beautiful and he doesn’t know how he made it!”