{"id":13721,"date":"2017-03-15T07:00:18","date_gmt":"2017-03-15T14:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=13721"},"modified":"2017-03-17T12:28:54","modified_gmt":"2017-03-17T19:28:54","slug":"chris-hadfield-the-nexus-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2017\/03\/15\/chris-hadfield-the-nexus-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Hadfield: The Nexus<\/em> interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

What more can a person accomplish after orbiting Earth? Chris Hadfield has the answer to that, and many other questions, in this, our Q&A with the first Canadian to man the International Space Station. He\u2019s also the first Canadian to complete a work of art from space, with his 2015 album Space Sessions: Songs from a Tin Can<\/i>. <\/i>He\u2019s also written three books and is playing in town with the Victoria Symphony at an event where he\u2019ll share his ideas and experiences through a unique artistic lens; Hadfield will be in Victoria performing with the symphony on March 24 at 8 pm and March 25 at 2 pm and 8 pm at the Royal Theatre.<\/p>\n

Hadfield\u2019s experiences have taught him how to lend much of what he knows to the world for the taking. But talking to him felt like any other conversation I had that day… until he would throw something out there really profound and unique about the human condition, or human progression, or his incredibly one-of-a-kind experiences, and up, up, up we\u2019d go.<\/p>\n

So, strap in and dive into this conversation between a Camosun student and the Rocket Man.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
This article originally appeared in our March 15, 2017 issue (photo by Max Rosenstein)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hadfield: How are things on the west coast? Did you get any snow?<\/p>\n

Nexus: Yeah, we did; I took the four-wheel-drive truck into work today.<\/i><\/p>\n

That\u2019s unusual. Toronto has none. It\u2019s been warm here. We haven\u2019t had snow on the ground in weeks; it looks like late April.<\/p>\n

Really? Wow. Interesting how things are reversed.<\/i><\/p>\n

If you want weather to stay the same, you\u2019re on the wrong planet.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a good segueway into talking to you. Tell me about your role in the Victoria Symphony, and what audience members might expect at the event.<\/i><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve had a chance to play with several symphonies in the United States and Canada. It\u2019s a wonderful way to share stories and ideas. What we\u2019re planning for the three concerts with the Victoria Symphony is music, but also images. I\u2019ll talk about various ideas, [and there will be] a chance to interact with the audience. It makes for a really unusual and interesting evening that I very much enjoy personally, and I see a lot of reflected pleasure in the audiences.<\/p>\n

What kinds of images are going to be relayed on the screen?<\/i><\/p>\n

If you listen to The Blue Danube<\/i>, it\u2019s lovely. You can picture it. But you\u2019ve got to think about the composer: what were they looking at when they wrote it? And what was in their mind? So I think about that when I\u2019m putting together a symphony show. Is it just the music, or is it also the ideas behind the music and the reason the music was written? There are a variety of songs about the Earth, about personal experiences, about the history of Canada, but also about space travel itself and where we are in that history. And there\u2019s imagery to support all of those musical ideas, so it\u2019s kind of a tapestry of individual stills, as well as some of the videos that we\u2019ve taken from the spaceship. And I think it just makes the music more poignant and more thought-provoking.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the most interesting part of playing music without gravity? Do you find that it affected your performance back on Earth?<\/i><\/p>\n

I think the place is extremely provocative, artistically. To be floating weightless is an entirely different human experience from the rest of your life. And to go around the world every 92 minutes, to see every place that exists, and to see the history\u2026 In a glance, you can see the entire length of the Nile. So you think about ancient Egypt and the pyramids, right through to the search for the source of Nile, and Livingstone and all of the explorers. And then, if you turn your attention the other direction, you are immersed in the universe. So it\u2019s an extremely thought-provoking place to create any sort of art, and as musician, in my case, to be able to create music up there is one way to try and explain it to yourself, but then to try and hopefully capture a sense of it for other people also. Then there\u2019s the straight mechanics of music. It\u2019s a noisy place. It\u2019s a complicated place to play an instrument that\u2019s designed for gravity. Some instruments would be impossible to play up there, like a steel guitar, where you need gravity to help you. But then you can, of course, evolve instruments. Our art and our technology move with us and they evolve depending on where we are. And none of that has changed as soon as you\u2019re aboard a spaceship.<\/p>\n

So what can you say about the effect on your psyche in terms of being in space? I know in 2012 you went up for a longer period of time. What was that like for you?<\/i><\/p>\n

It\u2019s intriguing to see that a lot of artists have used space flight as a metaphor for loneliness. If you listen to \u201cRocket Man\u201d<\/i> by Elton John, it\u2019s not about space flight at all. It\u2019s about being a gay man in a very public persona in the 1970s. Even [David] Bowie\u2019s original \u201cSpace Oddity\u201d was all about loneliness. They somehow think that being an astronaut is lonely. But I\u2019ve never met a lonely farmer. The loneliest people I\u2019ve ever met are the ones who live in the middle of cities. So I don\u2019t think loneliness is a geographical thing, I think it\u2019s a psychological thing. If you go around the entire world in 90 minutes, you see all 7.5 billion people every day, so it\u2019s not lonely at all. It\u2019s the opposite. I\u2019ve never felt more connected to the world. You get to see the whole thing. It\u2019s right there in front of you. I think it\u2019s a wonderfully deepening perspective to be able to travel and see the world that way.<\/p>\n

Did anything physiologically wacky happen while you were playing?<\/i><\/p>\n

If you want to picture what it\u2019s like, imagine you were playing guitar floating in a swimming pool; it\u2019s sort of like that in that there\u2019s nothing to stabilize you and there\u2019s nothing to stabilize the guitar, and gravity\u2019s not going to hold the guitar in place in front of you. The mechanics of playing guitar have to be relearned. And also your vocal chords are swollen and your sinuses are full because there\u2019s no gravity to drain the fluid out of your head. So what\u2019s it like to play music on a spaceship? Put your guitar down on the ground next to the wall and then stand on your head, and then stand on your head for about three hours so that you really have a chance for the fluids in your body to shift into your upper body and into your head, and then, while you\u2019re upside down, pick up the guitar and then play; that\u2019s what it feels like. It feels that unfamiliar, and also that much more difficult, and your voice is that much changed.<\/p>\n

just the pressure exerted when you\u2019re singing using the diaphragm and voice control and everything else, it becomes similarly complex. So it\u2019s not an easy place to record music. It\u2019s a noisy place. On my album, all of the vocals and guitar were recorded and we didn\u2019t modify them, because it was important to me as the first complete work of art ever done off the planet to make it representative. So all of the songs on Space Sessions<\/i> are just my voice and guitar from the space station, and then we just added in instrumentals back on Earth.<\/p>\n

How did that feel?\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a new human experience. We\u2019re just starting to leave Earth and live permanently in other places. And it\u2019s just the beginning of something. With Elon Musk\u2019s announcement of having paid tourists with the ability to go around the moon late next year and what the Chinese are speaking about, building that habitation permanently on the moon, all of that is just natural human exploration. How we record it and celebrate it in art kind of defines who we are.<\/p>\n

So what do you see in the future of space travel? And how does it feel knowing that you kind of started it for Canadians?<\/i><\/p>\n

Well, I sure didn\u2019t start it. Marc Garneau was the first Canadian in space in 1984, and we pioneered space-to-space communications and space satellites and space robotics. We\u2019re world-class in space flight. I\u2019m just part of all that. Where are we going next? We\u2019ve been living on the Space Station for over 16 years. If anybody in the audience during the three shows [in Victoria] is 16 and a half or younger, they have never been alive when human beings weren\u2019t living off of the Earth. And we tend to miss that, I think, in the day-to-day, that we ceased being a purely planetary species as of November of 2000. We remember 1492 as a significant year, when a particular European came across to make North America part of that history. That happened in fall of 2000 as well: we left Earth. So all the stuff we\u2019re learning on the Space Station is enabling us to, with confidence, go further. And we\u2019ll go to the moon next. It\u2019s only three days away. It allows us to get stuff wrong. It takes time. But it becomes part of normal fairly rapidly. Right now six people live off the Earth. The natural, relatively inevitable progression is from the Space Station to the moon. Eventually we will have learned enough things and tested our equipment well enough and we\u2019ll have the confidence to be able to go even further\u2014to asteroids, over to Mars, and beyond. That\u2019s the natural progression. It\u2019s all driven by our ability to imagine and then turn our imaginations into reality. And a lot of that, to me, comes with art. David Bowie was inspired by the space program. It was the undercurrent to a lot of the music he wrote through his whole life. And he absolutely loved the version of \u201cSpace Oddity\u201d that I did on the Space Station. He said it was the most poignant version of the song ever done, and, to me, that was the best part. It\u2019s lovely that hundreds of millions of people have seen the recording, but to me, it was just delightful. As he was dying, [that song] put a great big smile on his face at the end of his life. To me, that was the best part of it: how dreams become reality.<\/p>\n

Did you ever meet him?\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

We just emailed back and forth. When I released the album, he sent a lovely congratulatory note. He was exactly like everyone would have hoped him to be. He was kind and funny and original and considerate and respectful and everything.<\/p>\n

So what are your future plans? And how do you keep growing after you\u2019ve made it to space? That\u2019s one of the biggest things that humans can do.<\/i><\/p>\n

Well, I\u2019ve written three books, and the first was to try and take the ideas that underpin what you just asked and write them out so that people could try and absorb it into their own lives, and that\u2019s why I\u2019ve called it An Astronaut\u2019s Guide to Life on Earth<\/i>. <\/i>Because that\u2019s all that really matters: how do these thoughts matter to other people, and is there anything useful in them? And then the second book was just straight imagery. So much of our impression of the world is only through a filter where someone tells you what to think, where there\u2019s an agenda to a documentary or a book. I don\u2019t want to give people a preconceived agenda in order to understand our planet. They should have an honest and frank assessment of it themselves. So You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes<\/i> is that. The third book, The Darkest Dark<\/i>, is [about] how you deal with fear\u2014specifically, to let a five-year-old know that it\u2019s okay to be afraid. It\u2019s how to deal with your fear that is going to help determine what type of person you\u2019re going to become. I\u2019m by no means finished. I will write other books. I think the next one will probably be targeting people eight to 12 years old, trying to present useful ideas to young adults, but we\u2019ll see. And then the Generator project of trying to bring ideas as a form of evocative entertainment has been extremely successful in the two shows we did in Toronto. <\/b>I tie in with classrooms all the time using Skype because I think Q&A with students is important. I consult. I\u2019m helping choose the next Canadian astronauts with the Canadian Space Agency. And I\u2019m hosting a series on BBC. I\u2019m also hosting a Darren Aronofsky series on National Geographic called One Strange Rock<\/i>. Just because you\u2019ve done one thing in your life doesn\u2019t mean that your life is over. It\u2019s the opposite. Your life is a continuing development of what you\u2019ve done and learned so far, and how does that position you to do the things that you want to do next? Playing the symphony in Victoria is the embodiment of that. I used to live in Victoria. I spent two years at university there at Royal Roads. I bought my first car there. It\u2019s really the sharing of ideas, the taking of what I\u2019ve done so far and trying to present it in a way that is as intriguing and thought-provoking and compelling to people as possible, and to not keep life to oneself; that\u2019s kind of a waste.<\/p>\n

You mentioned fear and how people deal with fear being up to them. How do you deal with it? If something were to go wrong, in space or in your life, how do you deal with the fear so that it will be beneficial to you rather than destructive?<\/i><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a really important question to sort out inside yourself, the difference between fear and danger. Fundamentally, fear and danger are not the same thing. Often, people phrase it as if they were; they say, \u201cOh, that space flight must be scary,\u201d because they realize there\u2019s danger and therefore they think that the right way to deal with it is to be afraid. But just because something has a level of risk doesn\u2019t mean you need to be afraid. And there are also examples in each one of our lives that counter the argument. When you first learn to do anything, often it\u2019s daunting. It makes you fearful because you don\u2019t have any skills yet. But once you\u2019ve learned how to do it, then you\u2019re no longer afraid. Then you can take advantage of the danger because you\u2019ve managed the risk, so now you can do something that used to be outside of your capabilities, like riding a bike. Flying a rocket ship is essentially just an extremely complex version of learning to ride a bike. But astronauts are not thrill seekers by any means.<\/p>\n

What do you mean by that?<\/i><\/p>\n

The last thing you want in your veins when you\u2019re about to fly a rocket ship is adrenaline. That\u2019s a million-year-old primitive way to allow us to run faster than the bear that is chasing us. That\u2019s not how you want to fly a spaceship. You don\u2019t fly a spaceship based on instinctive reaction and luck. It\u2019s a much different process. But once you\u2019ve learned to do something, then you can reap the benefits of it. Anything worth doing in life has risks. So the real question is what risks do you choose to take, and how do you modify who you are so that your way of dealing with the risk is not just crossing your fingers and shaking and chattering [your] teeth? That\u2019s not how you want the astronaut to fly their rocket ship.<\/p>\n

So how did you stay calm through that process?\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Through decades of preparation. On March 24, if they grabbed you out of the audience and put you up front and said, \u201cYou are playing lead violin, and if you make a mistake, then one person in the symphony dies. And if you make another one, then another person in the symphony dies, and if you mess up enough, everybody in the entire auditorium dies. Go!\u201d it would cripple you with lack of preparation and the enormous consequence of your errors. But instead if you said, \u201cWhat I really want to do in life is play with the symphony and I\u2019m going to start now, at five years old, to study music and to study the violin and gain my skills so that when I\u2019m now 50 and the moment comes and I get to my solo and I have practiced and learned it and I have the skills\u2014not just the skills, but the depth of love and appreciation\u2014so that I soar with the song and bring it to life,\u201d then you\u2019re not creating\u2014you are, in fact, revelling in the wonder that your skills have brought you. That\u2019s how you fly a rocket ship.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s one piece of advice that you have for younger generations or aspiring astronauts or musicians?<\/i><\/p>\n

To find what it is that you would love to be able to accomplish in life, and then start turning yourself into a person who can do that. Deliberately, step-by-step, piece-by-piece, change who you are to move closer to who you dream about being. To me, that\u2019s the very essence of life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What more can a person accomplish after orbiting Earth? Chris Hadfield has the answer to that, and many other questions, in this, our Q&A with the first Canadian to man the International Space Station. He\u2019s also the first Canadian to complete a work of art from space, with his 2015 album Space Sessions: Songs from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13723,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,184],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-issuemarch-1-2017"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13721"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13724,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13721\/revisions\/13724"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}