I am not an alien

For decades I believed I had come from the stars. For many of them I would recount my adventures as Zandor, Master Explorer, first to my younger sister and brother, then to my daughter. But what I truly am is far more astonishing than the fancy of a lonely boy with an eye to the stars.

Andrew Garton
Dec 22, 2018

“Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the ‘walks’ of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.” ― Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

For decades I believed I had come from the stars. What I believed to be memories waned in my 30’s, re-surfaced in my early 50’s and came to a necessary halt around the time I turned 56. But it was that first decade when the backyard walks of my childhood fired my imagination so much that the outer space adventures of Zandor the Master Exporer lived both in me and the stories I would share with my younger sister and brother. Our mother would have us bed down early — as children we slept in the same room as our parents — and I would recount my memories of adventures across the cosmos to them.

As I grew older I knew I was not of Earth. How could I be human when I had such little in common with anyone I knew? I’d move about schoolyards from infant to secondary, often alone and when not taunted, pushed about and ridiculed for my accent, blond hair or lisp I would be in the library cultivating my stories with the many others I found there. We lived across the road from the primary school I attended in Sydney’s outer western suburbs. On the few days I would have lunch at home, my mother would often wait for me at our front gate . That too was a source of much harassment. Mummy’s boy, they would taunt.

It took several decades to realize how much I yearned for an extended family, a village, a collective happening beyond the perimeter of the school yard or that of my home. My parents migrated to Australia from Europe, arriving in 1950 escaping their world war memories and trauma. They arrived in suburbs where homes were fenced off from each other. The White Australia Policy was still in play. My father was of mixed Ukraine heritage and my mother grew up in a mountain village in Austria. My genes may not be of Australian soil, but I would come to realise that I am not an alien.

I am not an alien. I did not arrive on Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago, keeping myself alive by evolving through plant and animal DNA. No, I am not the galactic adventurer, Zandor, who mastered English in this life, but somehow had forgotten the hundreds, perhaps thousands of others he would have spoken across the eons including his own alien mother tongue. I had not originated in the Mentas System nor was I stranded on Earth, crash landing here waiting for my people to come.

I am not an alien. But what I truly am is far more astonishing than the fancy of a lonely boy with an eye to the stars. What I am and what you are is of those stars, and that is the remarkable achievement of life.

If I were such a creature from the stars I would know how to navigate the galaxies and understand something of the technologies that brought me here. My stories of a crystal powered spacecraft is not evidence enough.

I would also know of the flora and fauna of my home world, its linguistic capacities, its historical achievements, but I have no recollection of any. What I do have is a loosely constructed narrative of an adventurer with a child’s view of their inner and outer world; a child that had grown apart from his family, neighborhood and a small cohort of school friends. A child mesmerized by science and astrophysics, consoled by music and radio plays, creatively restored by filmmaking and writing. A boy whose head was not in the clouds, but among the stars from where he knew, with all his being, all life had emerged from.

Here we are, on Earth, bound to it by the atmosphere and gravity that prevents us from falling in every direction into space.

Here we walk, sleep, stand and flourish as flesh wrapped to bone stood upright, with skin that heals itself when cut, with eyes embedded within a unique hominoid skull housing the very same human brain from where both the fictional Zandor emerged and the perceptive thinking of the Greek philosopher Aristotle.

It is extraordinary that not only have we the historical records to prove this, but that we exist at all. That we literally evolved from cosmic dust, from the essence of the numinous we can barely fathom, that our telescopes and radio scopes scan the heavens to fuel our curiosity for, marvels beyond the stratosphere and our imagination; that is the making of me and the making of us. All of us.

Consider the atmosphere; a thin triple-decked pancake comprised of troposphere, stratosphere and the mesosphere. Astronauts have described the atmosphere as thin as a slick of oil, astounded at how fragile it appears from space.

That thin slick protects us from the random violence of the entire universe, from asteroids smashing into celestial objects, stars collapsing, black holes devouring everything including light. Thankfully, we are too far from the nearest black hole to be sucked into it.

The atmosphere has its limits, and yet it protects us from our own sun, mighty and supercharged whipping solar flares across our galaxy. And here we remain, protected from this unruly cacophony and the deep chill vacuum of space. Such is the fragile nature of all that keeps us from oblivion, but sadly the atmosphere cannot protect us from ourselves and the penchant for extinction oligarchs the world over appear to prefer than a life palatable for all.

I grew up with a cocktail of stories of a life beyond this planet. Stories that helped me survive school, that gave me the courage to travel beyond the domestic fence boundary, a troposphere of wire and concrete, that filled a longing for my traumatized father who left us too young, for laughter, and for love. And I took those stories with me into adulthood where they became less necessary, somewhat embarrassing and finally extinguished when I longed for my daughter whom I had been separated from in her early teens, for laughter still and again for love.

At fifty-six, all that had been imagined collapsed. No, I am not an alien from Alpha Centauri, 4.22 light years away from us here on Earth. No, I am not. But I and we, are of all that Alpha Centauri is comprised; we are of the stars. But we did not come here in a spacecraft, we arrived through the most incredible confluence of protons and neutrons. At the atom heart of our bodies resides the very stuff of stars and that is an astonishing thing to behold!

There are wonders enough out there, said the astrophysicist Carl Sagan, without our inventing any.