Visualizing the Soul of the Night

[Image: “Termination Shock: The Ends of Everythings,” by artist Andy Gracie. Found it on Flickr, where it was posted in the Ars Electronica photostream, and use it here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) This is one panel of a “triptych” depicting the gradual disintegration, over billions of years, of matter, light, gravity, and time; you can also view the triptych as a single, animated, eleven-minute video at Gracie’s Web site or on YouTube. I’m pretty sure both plural nouns in the work’s title are plural by intention.]

For no particular reason as far as I know, I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction about astronomy and related matters recently. Some of it is personal (astronomers’ bios and memoirs), some more technical (the history of telescopic observation), some more lyrical. So when I came across this passage, courtesy of whiskey river, I sat right up:

I am a child of the Milky Way. The night is my mother. I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom in my body was forged in a star. When the universe exploded into being, already the bird longed for the wood and the fish for the pool. When the first galaxies fell into luminous clumps, already matter was struggling toward consciousness. The star clouds of Sagittarius are a burning bush. If there is a voice in Sagittarius, I’d be a fool not to listen. If God’s voice in the night is a scrawny cry, then I’ll prick up my ears. If night’s faint lights fail to knock me off my feet, then I’ll sit back on a dark hillside and wait and watch. A hint here and a trait there. Listening and watching. Waiting, always waiting, for the tingle in the spine.

(Chet Raymo [source])

Now, as so often when I come across something unfamiliar but eye-catching at whiskey river, I immediately seek out its source — the surrounding context, if prose; if poetry, other poems by the same poet or in an anthology with poems by others. (I’ve acquired a lot of books that way!) So it was with the above passage, which, as it happens, appears way down almost at the end of the book. But here’s the opening of The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage:

Yesterday on Boston Common I saw a young man on a skateboard collide with a child. The skateboarder was racing down the promenade and smashed into the child with full force. I saw this happen from a considerable distance. It happened without a sound. It happened in dead silence. The cry of the terrified child as she darted to avoid the skateboard and the scream of the child’s mother at the moment of impact were absorbed by the grey wool of the November day. The child’s body simply lifted up into the air and, in slow motion, as if in a dream, floated above the promenade, bounced twice like a rubber ball, and lay still.

All of this happened in perfect silence. It was as if I were watching the tragedy through a telescope. It was as if the tragedy was happening on another planet. I have seen stars exploding in space, colossal, planet-shattering, distanced by light years, framed in the cold glass of a telescope, utterly silent. It was like that.

During the time the child was in the air, the spinning Earth carried her a half mile to the east. The motion of the Earth about the sun carried her back again forty miles westward. The drift of the solar system among the stars of the Milky Way bore her silently twenty miles toward the star Vega. The turning pinwheel of the Milky Way Galaxy carried her 300 miles in a great circle about the galactic center. After that huge flight through space she hit the ground and bounced like a rubber ball. She lifted up into the air and flew across the Galaxy and bounced on the pavement.

It is a thin membrane that separates us from chaos. The child sent flying by the skateboarder bounced in slow motion and lay still. There was a long pause. Pigeons froze against the gray sky. Promenaders turned to stone. Traffic stopped on Beacon Street. The child’s body lay inert on the asphalt like a piece of crumpled newspaper. The mother’s cry was lost in the space between the stars.

How are we to understand the silence of the universe? They say that certain meteorites, upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere, disintegrate with noticeable sound, but beyond the Earth’s skin of air the sky is silent. There are no voices in the burning bush of the Galaxy. The Milky Way flows across the dark shoals of the summer sky without an audible ripple. Stars blow themselves to smithereens, we hear nothing. Millions of solar systems are sucked into black holes at the centers of the galaxies, they fall like feathers. The universe fattens and swells in a Big Bang, a fireball of Creation exploding from a pinprick of infinite energy, the ultimate firecracker; there is no soundtrack. The membrane is ruptured, a child flies through the air, and the universe is silent…

Yesterday on Boston Common a child flew through the air, and there was no protest from the sky. I listened. I turned the volume of my indignation all the way up, and I heard nothing.

Needless to say, I now have another book about astronomy (laughing (silently)).