The Sky Calls to Us

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

The landscape opens its eyes and sits up,
sets out walking followed by its shadow,
it is a stela of dark murmurs
that are the languages of fallen matter,
the wind stops and hears the clamor of the elements,
sand and water talking in low voices,
the howl of pilings as they battle the salt,
the rash confidence of fire,
the soliloquy of ashes,
the interminable conversation of the universe.
Talking with the things and with ourselves
the universe talks to itself:
we are its tongue and ears, its words and silences.
The wind hears what the universe says
and we hear what the wind says,
rustling the submarine foliage of language,
the secret vegetation of the underworld and the undersky:
man dreams the dream of things,
time thinks the dream of men.

(Octavio Paz [source])

…and (italicized portion):

If you had never been to the world and never known what dawn was, you couldn’t possibly imagine how the darkness breaks, how the mystery and color of a new day arrive. Light is incredibly generous, but also gentle. When you attend to the way the dawn comes, you learn how light can coax the dark. The first fingers of light appear on the horizon, and ever so deftly and gradually, they pull the mantle of darkness away from the world.

(John O’Donohue [source])

Not from whiskey river:

On a clear day one should look west to see the dawn. On the Pacific Coast, a little south of Big Sur, is a spot known as Willow Creek where a rivulet pours out of the mountains into the ocean. I was there early one morning as a thin white fog was lifting to show the western sky full of light from the rising sun — a sky far and deep, a luminously blue transparency with a few flat-bottomed clouds hanging over but beyond the horizon. Into such a sky the mind expands without actually seeking or visualizing anything beyond, such as the South Sea Islands or the China Coast. Simultaneously one goes out and stays put. The view is from here, and in Hawaii it is still the night; yet such a sky is like the green mist of buds buds breaking in a spring woodland, when it is almost a pity to think of it turning back into the thick foliage of summer.

(Alan Watts, In My Own Way: An Autobiography [source])

…and:

September 6, 1985

Dear Cecil:

Ever since I was a tiny infant, I have sneezed when going out into the bright sun. My momma confirms this fact, but can’t give me a more satisfactory cause than the empirical statement that I’ve always done it.

Three decades later, I still produce the obligatory two or three sneezes seconds after walking into bright sunlight. (It doesn’t happen on a cloudy day or at night.)

I remember several years ago reading in the paper that some percentage of people experienced sun-induced sneezing fits, but they didn’t say why. What’s the deal?

– Alan C., Dallas

Cecil replies:

You are thinking this is a matter of idle curiosity, Alan? Au contraire–it’s a threat to our national security.

Listen to this frightening headline: “The photic sneeze reflex as a risk factor to combat pilots,” Military Medicine, Breitenbach et al, 1993.

“Photic sneeze reflex” is the medical term for what you’ve got. Researchers fear they’ll get a guy like you in a screaming dogfight, you break through the clouds into bright sunlight, you sneeze, your eyes snap shut, and the next thing you know they’re picking you up off the landscape with a rake.

Photic sneeze reflex occurs in something like one-sixth to one-quarter of the population. It occurs more often in Caucasians than Afro-Americans or Orientals.

According to a Johns Hopkins medic named Stephen Peroutka, the trait is passed along genetically, with a 50 percent chance of inheritance.

Researchers in Sweden found that out of 460 subjects, 24 percent sneezed in bright light, and 40 percent had at least one sneezing parent.

Sixty-four percent of children with one sneezing parent were themselves sneezers, but two nonsneezers never produced a sneezer. (Isn’t it amazing how I can make these things so easy to understand?)

Nobody’s exactly sure what causes photic sneeze reflex. I see here in one of the journals we have an impressive discussion of the role of the trigeminal nerve nucleus.

Basically what this is saying is that you’ve got a lot of nerves crammed together in the front of your head, and maybe there can can be leakage of sorts from one nerve pathway to another. So perhaps the reflex is just a case of congenitally crossed signals.

At this point nobody’s prepared to go in there with a pliers and fix it. So your best bet is to wear sunglasses and stay out of fighter jets.

(from The Straight Dope [source])

And for today’s last free association…

Symphony of Silence Science is one of those idiosyncratic little back corners of purpose which the Web seems to cultivate. From the About page:

Hey — I’m John Boswell, the head musician and producer behind the Symphony of Science. The goal of the project is to bring scientific knowledge and philosophy to the masses, in a novel way, through the medium of music. Science and music are two passions of mine that I aim to combine in a way that is intended to bring a meaningful message to listeners, while simultaneously providing an enjoyable musical experience.

Here’s the project’s first effort, “A Glorious Dawn”: Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking meet electronica (“lyrics” below):

Lyrics:

A Glorious Dawn
by Symphony of Silence Science
(verbal contributions by Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking)

[Carl Sagan]
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch
You must first invent the universe

Space is filled with a network of wormholes
You might emerge somewhere else in space
Some when-else in time

The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars

A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way

The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature

I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky

But the brain does much more than just recollect
It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes
it generates abstractions

The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has its own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world

[Hawking]
For thousands of years
People have wondered about the universe
Did it stretch out forever
Or was there a limit

From the big bang to black holes
From dark matter to a possible big crunch
Our image of the universe today
Is full of strange sounding ideas

[Sagan]
How lucky we are to live in this time
The first moment in human history
When we are in fact visiting other worlds

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we’ve waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting