Star Struck
Notes & Scales - 116 Fathoms Deep - Circles - Ra - Khayyam - Quadrant by Quadrant
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Notes and Scales
A cave man bangs out a harmony with a dry femur against two bearskin drums,
singing of the stars and moon.
Chu-I teaches his students, in absentia (all they see are his footprints
leading upward into the snowy hills,
pine boughs almost buckling beneath the weight).
Aristarchus looks up into the Greek sky, wondering if that really could be Diana with her bow, or Andromeda on a rock.
The astronomer adjusts an angle on one of the 115-tonne antennas and peers into the centre of the Milky Way, past the anarchy of swirling suns.
He wonders if what lies in the middle of it all is in fact a supermassive black hole.
He shudders to think that this is only one of hundreds of billions of galaxies.
He shivers in his lab coat, though the room is warm in the ALMA Observatory, five kilometres above the Atacama Desert.
Along thin, brief lines of human time we connect the dots.
Phantom Landscape III, by Yang Yongliang, 2007-8, in the British Museum (clipped photo by RYC)
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116 Fathoms Deep*
Portside (Into Darkness)
Looking into the dark water, the blue gleam / that he thought was from a nether strand / (of stranded mermaids, candles, and rum) / was only the light of the moon,
bobbing in its lust for solid land / and for a castle with a moat and keep. / As a wave crashed across the deck, / he reached for his sextant to see if this was doom,
for he feared that hope was but the figment of a dream / in a vast and watery universe of sleep.* / Who among us can see the stars and milky stream / as clearly as a doomed sailor gaping at the deep?
If this be error, and upon me played, / I thought too deeply and my thoughts will fade.
Starboard (Into Light)
Scanning the vast water, the blue speck / he thought was from an angel’s heel / (as he fell to plain and fire and burning stake)* / in fact was light, like eiderdown to touch,
floating inside him so that he couldn’t see / what life was like without love and rank. / As the blue starlight washed over him, / he plucked the string of a harp for old Time’s sake,
and yet he knew no music could grace the deck / so sweetly as a beaten cross or weathered ankh. / Who among us knows the meaning of gold or wreck / like he who of the milk of Paradise has drank*
If this be error, and upon me weighed, / my words are dust and the stars will fade.
*
116 Fathoms Deep. These two poems rework Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116”: Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments. Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove: / O, no! it is an ever-fixèd mark, / That looks on tempests and is never shaken; / It is the star to every wandering bark, / Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. / Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle’s compass come; / Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom. /If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved. — sleep. See Hamlet: “To die, to sleep; / To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause.” — Angel’s heel. An allusion to the fall of both Achilles and Satan, but mostly Satan, who falls from Heaven after rebelling against God. — the milk of paradise has drank. See Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”: “Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honey-dew hath fed, /And drunk the milk of Paradise.”
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Circles
We exist at the centre of many points: self, family, society, world, solar system, galaxy; points that can become circles or not.
If we want, we can insist on our own point, telling partners and friends what is what; telling dissenters, rednecks, communists, greens, gays, religions, countries, entire cultures to get in line.
Or we can refuse to tell others to get in line, refuse to draw a line between us and them, refuse to draw lines in the sand, or toe the line.
We can refuse to draw any lines at all. We can circumvent lines altogether by drawing circles, outward from the self, beyond sex and colour, beyond colour and politics, beyond national will, wider and wider; circles beyond our water supply and factories, beyond our GDP and national interest, beyond even our deepest allegiances to friends, family, religion, language, culture. Circles beyond our own definitions.
Circles, endless circles, round as the turning world.
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Ra
You who are always beyond our reach,
you who are sixty times sixty times sixty leagues from the earth,
yet still we can’t look you in the eye.
You who are the origin of all life,
who created man from the compassion of your rays.
Why look further for an image of God
than this perfect circle of blinding light,
wrapping the world in its spinning flight?
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Khayyam
The meaning of life may well lie somewhere else, but until it does, genetic codes and facts will have to do. It’s a working theory that Farid ud-Din* had yet to scent — an attar of the field rose, uncapitalized, undressed in gauze or gold.
The dream of an ordered cosmic space —from the Sufi’s twirling Atoms to Augustine’s City of God, with its golden spires piercing the firmament, and Vishnu floating in outer space — must yield, for now, to the telescope’s prying eye. The wondrous union of soul and sense must yield to medicine, habit, and chance events.
The circle of life may yet be found to make a greater meaning, round and round. One day all things incomplete may make some greater Scheme of Things complete. Yet time has never been a prophet’s friend, and where we started is not, alas, where we will end.
They told him God would be his friend, and be there with him to the end. They told him seek and he would find, yet when he got there in the end he didn’t know what God was, nor what was mind. The human machine runs up, runs down, and leaves us hobbling on the ground.
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* Farid ud-Din Attar was a Persian Sufi poet who wrote The Conference of the Birds (1177). He was a pharmacist, and the word attar (fragrance) comes from Persian. While Attar shared some of Khayyam’s imagery, he didn’t share the latter’s secular and sensual bent.
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Quadrant by Quadrant
God sat back in his easy chair and laughed, a jovial laugh, when he saw the atheist, with no reason beyond the firing of his neurons, and with no vision, save the seeing of his eyes, proclaim the infinite richness of the universe.
And he laughed when he heard the pundits puzzle over the idea of eternity, and how in the heavens space could go on forever without end.
He laughed so hard that he created three more quadrants of infinity — three quadrants including all the other quadrants and everything else. He did this long before consciousness sparked in the brain of homo habilis, and long after two determined fingers pressed the buttons of two machines in the capital city of what both sides called the inviolate sanctity of our nation.
He could barely place the three quadrants down at the proper angles because he was still in the aftershocks of laughter, turning over in his mind their perplexity which had something to do with a father and a son and what they called the afterlife.
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