By Roxie Gosfield

Share:

A story about martians, but mostly, about humanity.

My moon boots, the trendy kind that likely provide no meaningful assistance in traversing across craters but are very nice to look at, crunch as I march towards the Martians. My heart pounds as I procure my preferred medium for saving humankind. It feels light in my hands, I guess due to a lack of gravity, as I thrust my boombox, Say-Anything-style, into the air. Click. 

Didn’t know what time it was, the lights were low-oh-oh, I leaned back on my radio-oh-oh

I hear the Martians excitedly mutter in what I chauvinistically assume is the only extraterrestrial language I know, Klingon: “Qelpu’DI’ ghaH ‘ej Dochmeyvam’e’! (this human’s laying down some rock and roll!)”

Somehow, on Mars, the 1972 hit single off of David Bowie’s Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars sounds different. I’m reminded of the first time I listened to “Starman”—really listened. I’d already heard it upwards of 100 times, as a result of my parents keeping just one CD (Best of David Bowie) in our old-school Jeep that still had a cigarette lighter. At the Brooklyn Museum, at the David Bowie Is exhibit, Istumbled into an empty dark room with a single screen, right as a young Bowie, shielded from time and cancer, was beginning his second verse of the song. I felt, for reasons I hadn’t yet uncovered, compelled to sit down and watch, and an hour later, when my concerned parents found me, I recited every word for them, complete with mimicked choreography. Let the children boogie, right?

I remember staring into Bowie’s blown-up face, his spiky red hair falling into his eyes, in which one pupil was more dilated than the other. My mom told me that this contrast was because he’d been punched in the eye in elementary school. I thought about the schoolyard bully who might’ve done that, and wondered if he’d ever sat in a bar,\ later in life,\ and heard one of Bowie’s smash-hits. I bet the guy’s greatest accomplishment was getting to touch the future superstar. But really, I mean, one day you’re David Jones, a scrawny kid getting a knuckle sandwich. And the next, you’re the David Bowie. 

That transformative spirit, by which anyone can be anything, is unique to humankind. A fly is just a fly; a lion just a lion. But we can change our names, hair, outfits and values; we can change our whole world if we dream it hard enough. I think the Martians are starting to get it when Bowie breaks into the first chorus: there’s a starman, wAiTiNg in the skyyyyy. They can hear the fundamental yearning, even if they don’t understand it. They can sense that there’s something worth fighting for. 

And there must be. We’ve been waiting for the elusive starman since long before 1972, thinking if we can sparkle brightly enough, he might finally come down. Not all of us—some of us are like Bowie’s bully, some of us don’t like sparkles. Saint Paul didn’t; he said: “a woman…must be silent.” And for a long time, we were. But there was always something underneath, just waiting to bubble up…thrumming through every woman was a soft voice that told us if we upheld the very social fabric of the globe , we should be allowed to have a role in it. And so, we made one. But the long walk, which often seems more like a crawl towards gender equality, has no end in sight. There’s no light in the sky, or at the end of the tunnel, or in Andrew Tate’s eyes when he says to a surprisingly unsurprisingly receptive audience that women belong in the kitchen. And yet still, we hope. 

When the Nazis cleared out the Jewish ghettos of Europe,, not every Jew got on the train. Many who did even jumped off, scurrying into the cold, tall woods that promised nothing but loneliness and fear. But those who survived the initial raids found each other, and they called themselves the Partisans. A girl my age killed her former prom date to save her brother; a boy learned to make splints, casts, and relocate bones; they looked danger right in the eye and held its gaze. It seemed like a lost cause—handfuls of Jews versus millions of Nazis. But the stupidity of humankind is perhaps its biggest virtue; the Partisans were dumb enough to hold out hope, and tens of thousands of their descendants were born because of it. 

I look at the Martians and wonder if they can feel the years of the history of hope, the most acutely human feature—what keeps us alive through it all, what sends us out into the woods, or the streets, or up to the podium or to the laptop to press publish. We should know by now that there is no starman, he’s not coming. But our undying belief in him comprises our spirit, we fight for survival, respect, equality, humanity, freedom, a better world—we fight to not blow it, so that we might get to see the light in the sky one day. 

Somewhere, David Bowie’s iconic “Starman” performance on BBC ushers in a new generation of rockstars, a young girl survives the Holocaust, a woman becomes a leader. Silenced Soviet writers build an underground system for speaking out with Samizdat, a preacher has a dream, a woman emigrates to America so her child can go to college. Why do we do it when we know there’s no extraterrestrial being flying down to make it all worthwhile? 

Let all the children boogie! Bowie finishes strong. 

The Martians are looking at me like they want to hear the song again and again for hours straight. I know the feeling. They huddle and mutter amongst themselves and return to me with a question. “​​toH, be’nI’puq DaghojmoHlaH’a’? (you humans are the starmen?)”

“Yes,” I reply, “I guess we are.”

Process

I wanted to encapsulate the acutely human notion of hope and progress. But I was struggling to put it into words, so I elicited some help from the great David Bowie. I learned that oftentimes, it can be great to start writing by examining someone else’s words!