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Watch the Stars
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Pictures of the birth of a new star thrill all ages,
and increasing knowledge of the origin of the Universe
does not dim the magic
of thinking
- Stephen Oppenheimer
Eden in the East
“A philosopher once asked,
"Are we human because we gaze at the stars,
or do we gaze at them because we are human?"
Pointless, really...
"Do the stars gaze back?"
Now, that's
- Neil Gaiman
Stardust
hazy cosmic jive
There's a starman waiting in the sky
He'd like to come and meet us
But he thinks he'd blow our minds
- David Bowie
Starman
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“Have you ever heard the old folk saying, ‘Stars are like old friends, always watching over you’?”
Edward Christian Love stared up at the myriad twinkling points of light in the night sky above him.
“Every time I hear that, I feel paranoid.”
He laughed cheekily as he looked over and winked at the woman everyone on board The Brew D'Agon called "Momma". An almost larger than life personality, a voluptuously curving body, her exact age impossible to pin down: she radiated a dark, otherworldly beauty that Christian found damn near impossible to resist. He swore neither his feet nor hers moved, and yet, he seemed to inch closer to her with every passing moment. It felt to him as if she were some massive heavenly body and Sir Isaac Newton’s Law of gravity drew him unwaveringly into her orbit. Who am I to resist to such a majestic force of nature? Mr. Love thought as a wry smile crept across his face.
His forearm brushed against hers and, as always, the resulting surge of emotion shocked him with its strength. He felt the polar shift that happened every time he touched her. The earth moved, again. She smiled softly, eternally. He stiffened and pulled away. Dear Merciful God, our Father who art in Heaven, protect me from my own sinful lust. In Your Holy Name, I pray. Amen. Even as he prayed silently, he knew he was being blasphemously sarcastic.
Born and raised in a New England fishing village, the son of a hypocritical Hellfire-&-Brimstone minister, Christian had run away from home – taking to the Sea when he was fifteen –, not to flee his Heavenly Father, but to escape his own far too earthly one. The hard and precarious life aboard a whaler served only to reinforce his deep-seated religious convictions, and eventually he bowed to Destiny and took up what is known as “The Calling”. Like his father before him, Edward, decided to become a preacher. Unlike his father, Edward decided to be as righteous as humanly possible.
To his dismay, he found too many of the teachers at the Boston seminary were exactly like his father, far more righteous in word than in deed. His belief in humanity grown even more jaded by his educational experiences, he ran away from school and religion like he had once run away from his father. Edward Christian Love escaped into the welcoming arms of the Ocean, again.
In the years since he had signed on with The Right Honourable Reverend Doctor Heronimus Jones and the Brew D'Agon Traiding Compagnie, Inc., Christian believed he had managed to move beyond the mere dogma of his previous religious convictions and into the realm of deep, oceanic reality and yet…. And yet…. His mind wandered sideways temporarily, reflecting on images of things that could have been.
He tried to shift back to the “here and now” through sheer force of will. Christian focused on the stars – how fiercely they must burn to be seen from so far away. He could almost hear them roar with light. Was it something in the air, he wondered, in the space and time between the stellar fires and the visible light that finally reached his eyes that so enhanced their vividness? Even with his eyes closed he could still see them.
He would always see them. He would never be able to not see them, that visionary experience seared so irrevocably into his synapses that it was truly his mind and not his eyes that produced the illusory phenomenon that on lonely nights often kept him from finding solace in any repose. The effect could be described to one who had not experienced it as being similar to – but, oh, so completely different from – staring into the sun for hours on end and then turning away. Would you not still see the dark after-image of the solar disk before you? How long before the shadow sun faded from your mind?
Now, imagine all the stars of our galactic arm are equidistant from the earth, as if all the visible stars were set into the inside surface of an enormous celestial sphere. Imagine you are in the center of this sphere, afloat in the middle of a vast ocean, without even a solitary terrestrial light to pollute your view of this heavenly star-globe. Of course, in this imaginary example, earth-bound lights would not matter one iota; as each one of these myriad stars is a sun of varying magnitude, and each of these suns is only as far from you as our own Sol.
Now, you must understand that a fraction of the infinite suns assembled in our imaginary celestial-sphere are so large that they would encompass you and the Earth within their girth. In this hypothetical example, you and the smaller suns are swallowed up wholly by these behemoths. The smaller and dimmer suns thus seem invisible to you, because they and you cease to exist as individuals; the fires of many suns would merge into one: a Uni-Sun.
Now, I must apologize; my admittedly feeble attempt to illustrate this phenomenon can only serve as a blurry snapshot of a partially glimpsed reality and therefore lacks any expression of the fabric of time. Each moment is a snapshot, a single frame in a series. The actual experience itself includes many ‘frames’, a word I use only because I, the author, lack the appropriate vocabulary. The reality of the experience, is more than 2 or 3 dimensional and therefore eternally defiant of a simple black & white summarization – but, being caught up in the egotism inherent in trying to synopsize any mystical experience or meta-physical insight for ‘others’, I will attempt to do so; albeit, in the spirit of sport and with a wink and a nod in homage to Poetry and Metaphor, I will limit my description of the texture of the experience to two words: sidereal cinema.
Once we factor Time into our multi-dimensional equation, the stars themselves can be correctly perceived as pulses of energy that expand and contract in measurable life cycles. From this newfound gnosis, we can now fathom and extrapolate the light from these stars as an experience external to our being, and then as a wholly internal phenomenon where we become one with the stars, and vice versa. The cycle repeating from the birth of the stars until their death and, perhaps, even beyond death to be born again.
For Mr. E. Christian Love, this was the working model he used to try to comprehend his mystic experience. It wasn’t a perfect model, but it helped him to grasp the ungraspable, to imagine the unimaginable, to eff the ineffable.
Christian laughed inwardly and shook his head, as if he could shake the everpresent after-image like he might shake water from his hair. This mental imagery is, itself, a finely wrought piece of irony since the first mate sported what I, your (humble) author, playfully label a “cul-de-sac coiffure”. In simpler words, Christian was bald on top of his head with only a fortnight’s worth of deep black growth that started at his right temple and traveled around the back of his skull, finally ending its hirsute journey at his left temple. An imaginary mariner could sail up the first mate’s forehead and then harbor his miniature craft in the hairless cove atop that illustrious cranium. Two-Patches O’Kaine, The Brew D’Agon’s blind lookout, was known to joke that 'four-head' was a misnomer, “seein’ how Mr. Love’s goes up to eleven”.
“Ha ha! Dear Lord, does my mind ever love to wander.”
He marveled out loud.
“And the prodigal sun returns.”
Momma’s voice was warm, welcoming, caring, forgiving, loving.
Mr. Love closed his eyes peacefully, a small yet telling smile upon his lips – as the wise folk say, “Love, like a cough, cannot be hid”. He turned toward the source of the soothing sounds. He could see her even with his eyes closed. Had she grown like his hypothetical stars to encompass him in her haunting light, or had he fallen into her like a stone cast into her bottomless wishing well? He didn't know which. He only knew he could stare into her eyes until he was no more. Love opened his eyes.
Momma was on her knees, her hands resting on a red-haired child's shoulders, the same child Louis had seen perched atop the cannon so long ago. The pair stared lovingly into each other's wide-open souls. Her laugh twinkled in concert with his eyes. A smile like a crescent moon graced his lips and the child was home again, safe within her all-encompassing embrace. Like every child ever, Adam loved being hugged by Momma.
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Who are we?
We’re who we are
- Lenny Kravitz
Believe
We are the music makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams
- Arthur O’Shaughnessy
The Ode
We are the stars which sing
We sing with our light
We are the birds of fire
We fly over the sky
Our light is a voice
- Dead Can Dance
Song of the Stars
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