Star Gazing

For Michael’s sixth birthday last week we game him a telescope – a 76-mm reflector mounted on a tripod. I assembled it Tuesday morning but still can’t figure out how to use it. It was manufactured in China and the instructions are composed in a species of pidgen English I had assumed was unique to menus in Chinese restaurants:

“2. Connect each leg and mount base (15) wity [sic] long screw and wing nuts (see fig 2a) but not tightening.”

“Wity long screw” is especially pleasing. When we figure out how to operate it, I’ll take my son some evening to the fringes of Houston, past the shopping malls, where light pollution is less compromising. He wants to see the moon, of course – the craters and, because he’s six years old, evidence of the man in the moon. He wants to see Mercury, Venus, Mars and the rings of Saturn and, on a grander scale, he wants to see galaxies so he can prove beyond argument the Big Bang Theory.

Children recapitulate early man’s wonder and fear at the celestial spectacle. Peering at the sky on a clear night is intoxicating. It is humbling and induces a sense of metaphysical vertigo. Within us, awe and reason wrestle for dominance. I remember, about 15 years ago, lying on my back on at the end of a wooden dock in a lake in the Adirondacks. It was mid-August, about 10 p.m. The sky was more stars than not-stars, a milky wash of star matter and gas, punctuated by meteors. One feels insignificant, of course, yet somehow linked to something greater. We are, after all, nothing but highly evolved star-matter, walking, thinking carbon. The experience reminds me of lines from R.S. Thomas’ The Echoes Return Slow:

“He looked over
the world’s edge and nausea
engulfed him.”

Nausea, like Pascalian horror, is akin to awe. I remember an English professor who characterized Shelley’s and Keats’ differences this way: If you took a walk with Shelley, he would look upward and rhapsodize the cosmos, singing the praises of planets and stars, stoned on creation. Keats’ gaze would be turned downward, observing in minute detail the flowers, grasses and insects along the path. I’ve always felt closer to the Keats end of that wonder spectrum, but Shelley’s vision is not entirely alien. I hear that mingling of science and poetry – never an absolute dichotomy -- in “The Astronomers of Mont Blanc,” by Edgar Bowers:

“Who are you there that, from your icy tower,
Explore the colder distances, the far
Escape of your whole universe to night;
That watch the moon’s blue craters, shadowy crust,
And blunted mountains mildly drift and glare,
Ballooned in ghostly earnest on your sight;
Who are you, and what hope persuades your trust?

"It is your hope that you will know the end
And compass of our ignorant restraint
There in lost time, where what was done is done
Forever as a havoc overhead.
Aging, you search to master in the faint
Persistent fortune which you gaze upon
The perfect order trusted to the dead.”

In the second stanza, Bowers seems to acknowledge the reality of an expanding universe, and the paradox of far-away stars remaining visible to us millions of years after their annihilation – “done/Forever as a havoc overhead.” R.S. Thomas shares with Bowers’ astronomers a vision of the merely human in the infinitely distant, cold, empty space. Here’s a passage from Thomas’ “Autobiographical Essay”:

“The problem I have always had difficulty in coming to terms with is the majesty and mystery of the universe and the natural world as a kind of symbol of God over against the domesticating urge of man. To kneel in my furnished room with its chairs and books, and then to look out and see Orion and Sirius rising above the bay makes it difficult to hold the two in proportion. I know that mind in the case of exceptional human beings is capable of a range beyond Orion…it would seem that the deity has chosen to mediate himself to me via the world, or even the universe, of nature.”

After Ursa Minor, the first constellation I could recognize was Orion, with his conspicuous belt. Michael can already find them in the night sky, up there with the Man in the Moon and the Big Bang.