We're looking to the skies this weekend. People have always looked to the skies. I suppose, in the past, they could actually see them! Astronomy and astrology used to be one and the same. We looked at the skies and to the skies, for information on seasons, agriculture, fishing, origins, stories, portents of doom, signs of hope. It's a natural thing to look up and to look out. I'm a huge fan of space. I love that I live in a time when we know so much about the universe. I would love to see a day when our moral stature lived up ot that knowledge. We've gone so far and we've looked back in awe at the tiny 'Blue Dot' that is our own planet, and that should teach us just how special humankind is and that we should be working together to preserve this home of ours.
But I've always found poetic inspiration in the skies too. That too is our nature; to make of things more than the sum of their parts, to paint pictures, make up stories, represent what we experience to the gaze of others. We look up and out and say: Hey -- this is what I made of that! And we look at what others have made of it and together we gain more understanding, not of the thing itself, but of our collective consciousness. This for me is what it's all about. That is the worth and purpose of art and science; and they are not separate for me. They are one and the same.
So I give you some space stuff today. One of my favourite stories that I ever wrote: Closer to the Truth, first published in Every Day Fuction in 2008. I love it because it says all I have just said above -- only better -- and because it is a tribute to all the Mental Health professionals (some of whom my husband trained) who this year are needed more than ever.
And a series of poems written to go with NASA pictures of the day in Bewildering Stories where there's a huge archive of space stuff! Youll have to click on the links for the poems though the first poem should lead you to the rest. I've done this because the pictures need to be seen too!
Enjoy my Armchair Observatory by just clicking on this link and then using the drop down arrow v and 'GO' to the right of each poem to get to the next. You can also follow the link to each NASA picture.
With the caution of a hunter, Brian approached the diminutive figure standing by the dark tree-line of firs. No need to startle her. She might run for cover. He was close enough now to see her back to him, to hear her whisperings and see the soft, white vapour of her breath rise like a spirit released. She was looking up steadily into the October sky, holding her thin cardigan stretched over her fast at the neck with both hands. Like a saint at prayer she looked. Like an angel on the grave of a child, her gaze fixed on heaven. She was little more than a child herself.
Brian stepped on a twig.
“Have you come to take me back?” she said without turning.
“Is it me you’re talking to, Mary?”
“Aye, it’s you.” She didn’t move at all–just kept staring up at the cold stars. The wildness had gone from her eyes. She seemed calm now but her face was stained with tears.
“What are you looking at, Mary?”
She pointed to the equatorial plane.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Shooting stars. The Orionids. They happen every year. And that’s Orion, Mary.” He closed a bit on her, crouched and pointed. “Those three bright stars are his belt.”
“It’s a he?”
“Yes. The Hunter. He was a bit of a womanizer, Orion–always out to impress the girls–not a bit like me…”
Mary sniffed and giggled and looked at him.
Eye contact. That was a start, he thought. “So anyway, Orion bragged he could kill any animal, thinking this would get him a wife, but all his tearing about didn’t sit well with the women and their fathers only thought he was a big-head. But he was irrepressible, Mary, and do you know what he did?” With one hand Brian gestured to the other two with him that they could retreat. “He threatened to kill every wild animal on the earth. The earth goddess wasn’t happy about that and she sent a scorpion to bite him on the foot and…”
“He killed it?”
“No.
It killed him. But the gods felt sorry for the shortness of his life
and put him high in the sky with his two dogs to hunt the bull
forever and they put the scorpion far away from him so that it
couldn’t harm him ever again and he couldn’t harm it.”
Mary
wiped her face with a fistful of cardigan. “It’s not true,” she
said.
“No. Orion is really a vast region of space covering light years and full of stars and places where stars are born and if you approached it, it would look nothing like it does from here. You would be past some bits of it before you got anywhere near the others–they’re that far apart. It would be like you were inside a giant snow storm frozen in time all around you, above and below, and different from every point of view. But to us he’s the hunter. And it’s a good story, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
He stood up. She wasn’t going to run. “The way I see it, there are as many stories as there are people, Mary. Same star field, different points of view.”
“Do you think we need all those stories?”
“I
don’t know, Mary. What do you think? Maybe it takes all the
perspectives together to make up the truth, and the more stories we
know, the closer we get to it.” He took off his white coat and
slipped it over her shoulders. “Shall we go in now? And tomorrow if
you like we can come out and look at Orion again and maybe you’ll
tell me your story, Mary. Deal?”
He placed one
hand on her shoulder directing her away from the woods across the
frosty grass in her bare feet, towards the well-lit buildings and the
warmth and safety of the ward and tomorrow.
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