What You Miss When You Don’t Look Up… and Don’t Stand Still

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At the page at the Popular Science site where I first saw this video, the author says:

The video below was captured by Stephane Guisard and Jose Francisco Salgado at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile’s Atacama Desert. And it might make you cry.

What makes this time lapse particularly amazing — because we’ve all seen plenty of time lapse videos of the night sky — is the four telescopes in the foreground. Watching these instruments work against a black background would be endlessly fascinating on its own. Unfortunately you won’t be able to pay them too much attention. Because damn, what a sky.

Yes. Damn. What a sky.

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“An Echo That Did Not Die Away”

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[Image: a communications “satelloon.” For more information,
see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you’ve been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw — but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you were transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of — something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it — tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

(C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain [source])

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Spark of Interest

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[Video: “Musical Tesla Coils: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies.” For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you.

Your first parent was a star.

(Jeanette Winterson)

…and:

I won’t get any poems written during these weeks either. It’s not the first time this has happened. And I won’t go on about it. There isn’t much to say. Victor Hugo once summed it up as follows (Karol Berger told me about this as we strolled through Paris, the sixteenth arrondissement). When someone asked him if writing poetry was easy, he said, “When I can write it, it’s easy; when I can’t, it’s impossible.”

(Adam Zagajewski)

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How to Stupefy a Small Dog

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[Image: not The Pooch. Depicts the desired outcome, however.]

In the Harry Potter wizarding universe, most spells are cast using incantations of a vaguely Latin(ish) form: Cruciato! Expecto patronum! Wingardium leviosa! and so on.

The sole exception which I can think of off the top of my head: Stupefy! When cast in magical combat, you will recall, this spell renders the target incapable of movement. Combatants who have been Stupefied fall, rigid, to the floor or the ground — effectively (albeit temporarily) removing them from further battle.

I don’t particularly care in my everyday life that I cannot, say, summon my Patronus. But Stupefy? Oh my. Let it be so. (Especially if it can be fine-tuned, like a handheld Star Trek phaser, from disorient all the way up to vaporize.)

I’m still trying to work up the nerve to attempt Stupefaction of a human being. But I’ve tried it many times with The Pooch… and I can report that it’s not as easy as it looks in the movies. (Neither is being shot out of a cannon. A topic for a later post, perhaps.)

Still, it can be done. Herewith, results of my research to date.

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Landscapes, Perceived

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[Image: a view of the Preseli Hills in north Pembrokeshire, West Wales. See the note below
for more information.]

From whiskey river:

Landscape and Soul

Though we should not speak about the soul,
that is, about things we don’t know,
I’m sure mine sleeps the day long,
waiting to be jolted, even jilted awake,
preferably by joy, but sadness also comes
by surprise, and the soul sings its songs.

And because no one landscape compels me,
except the one that’s always out of reach
(toward which, nightly, I go), I find myself
conjuring Breugel-like peasants cavorting
under a Magritte-like sky — a landscape
the soul, if fully awake, could love as its own.

But the soul is rumored to desire a room,
a chamber, really, in some far away outpost
of the heart. Landscape can be lonely and cold.
Be sweet to me, world.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and (additional text italicized):

You have consented to time and it is winter. The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget.

You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind.

And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.

(Wendell Berry, from Hannah Coulter [source])

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Well-Fancied Choices

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[Video: “custom movie trailer” for the 1945 film Detour. A piano player hitchhikes across the United States to be with his girl. On the way, he crosses paths with The Wrong Woman…]

From whiskey river:

Bees

In every instant, two gates.
One opens to fragrant paradise, one to hell.
Mostly we go through neither.

Mostly we nod to our neighbor,
lean down to pick up the paper,
go back into the house.

But the faint cries — ecstasy? horror?
Or did you think it the sound
of distant bees,
making only the thick honey of this good life?

(Jane Hirshfield, The Lives of the Heart [source])

…and:

What we have deduced about the Big Bang is almost exactly wrong. Instead of a Big Bang, the genesis of the universe consisted of the uneventful, accidental, hushed production of a single quark.

For thousands of millennia, nothing occurred. The solitary particle floated in silence. Eventually it considered moving. Like all elementary particles, it realized that its direction of travel in time was arbitrary. So it shot forward in time and, looking back, it realized that it had left a single pencil stroke across the canvas of space-time.

It raced back through time in the other direction, and saw that it had left another stroke.

The single quark began to dash back and forth in time, and like the individually meaningless actions of an artist’s pencil, a picture began to emerge.

If it feels to you that we’re connected by a larger whole, you’re mistaken: we’re connected by a smaller particle. Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time. Our little quark sweeps like a frenetic four-dimensional phosphor gun, painting the world: each leaf on every tree, every coral in the oceans, each car tire, every bird carried on the wind, all the hair on all the heads in the world. Everything you have ever seen is a manifestation of the same quark, racing around on a space-time superhighway of its own invention.

It began to write the story of the world with sagas of war, love, and exile. As it spun out stories and allowed the plots to grow organically, the quark became an increasingly talented storyteller. The stories took on subtle dimensions. Its protagonists engaged in moral complexity; its antagonists were charming. The quark reached for inspiration into its own history of loneliness in an empty cosmos: the adolescent with his head on the pillow, the divorcee staring out the coffee shop window, the retiree watching infomercials — these became the prophets of the quark’s text.

(David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives [source])

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Another Looney Tunes Stereotype Bites the Dust

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So I just got back from having this test done. It wasn’t a big deal but it held a certain academic interest for me: it was an echocardiogram. Not electro-. Echo-.

Say what?

As the, um, echocardiogrammatical technician (or whatever her title is) led me to the room where the test would be performed, I asked, “So is this like an MRI or something? Or an EKG?”

She didn’t answer that question directly; she just told me what it was. “It’s an ultrasound. Like pregnant women and babies?”

But I wasn’t, uh—

“No.” She smiled. “You’re not pregnant. This is an ultrasound of the four chambers of your heart and a couple of blood vessels in your neck.”

In the examining room, she had me take off my shirt and lie flat on the bed/examining table/whatever they call that thing. She did the gel thing which you see them on TV doing (yes) to pregnant women’s swollen bellies, only to my chest and neck, and then she rolled me on my side and held a wand to the gelled spots, one at a time, for a few minutes each.

I couldn’t see the monitor of the machine from where I lay, so I don’t know if it showed an image of what lay inside. But I do know it had a speaker.

You know how in old Tex Avery (and other) cartoons, when a guy (I think often a wolf, literally) sees a woman he thinks is hot stuff, and his eyes bulge out of his head, and he howls and sometimes says something like Hubba-hubba!, and this heart-shaped protrusion pushes rhythmically in and out of his chest? You know the sound? Right: ba-BOOM… ba-BOOM… ba-BOOM…

For real? What the human heart actually sounds like is, well, say you got a tiny microphone, and you inserted it into a convenient orifice or cavity in the surface of a live snail, and you put the snail on the ground with a wire leading to a powerful stereo speaker, and you touched the snail — gently, repeatedly — with the sole of your foot. That’s what the human heart sounds like:

squ-WISH… SQUOORT… squ-WISH… SQUOORT…

Just in case any of you were wondering.

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The World Turned Inside-Out

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Just saw this on the BBC’s YouTube channel. Sobering, exciting, fascinating… and sobering. The economic progress of 200 countries over the course of 200 years — demonstrated and discussed in a four-minute video:

As always with simple presentations of complex issues, especially statistics, there’s such a thing as reading too much into this. Politicians and ideologues of all stripes can likely find support for their points of view here. For the rest of us, maybe it’s just the ideal opportunity to contemplate the age we live in.

(Coincidentally — and I swear this really happened — last night a monster cold-front rainstorm passed through. As I was getting ready for bed, I thought, Two hundred years ago, people would have thought it a miracle that I’m getting into a dry bed.)

I’ve been working on a regular post, off and on, for a couple days now. This was just too interesting not to pass on to you!

Update: For a really absorbing view of these statistics, go here. You can track individual countries’ paths of progress (or otherwise), change the statistics used, and so on.

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Hanging in the Sky

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[For information about this image, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

This is the Dream

This is the dream we carry through the world
that something fantastic will happen
that it has to happen
that time will open by itself
that doors shall open by themselves
that the heart will find itself open
that mountain springs will jump up
that the dream will open by itself
that we one early morning
will slip into a harbor
that we have never known.

(Olav H. Hauge, translated by Robert Bly and Robert Hedin, from The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems)

…and:

Wonder begins with the element of surprise. The now almost obsolete word “wonderstruck” suggests that wonder breaks into consciousness with a dramatic suddenness that produces amazement or astonishment. Because of the suddenness with which it appears, wonder reduces us momentarily to silence. We associate gaping, breathlessness, bewilderment, and even stupor with wonder, because it jolts us out of the world of common sense in which our language is at home. The language and categories we customarily use to deal with experience are inadequate to the encounter, and hence we are initially immobilized and dumbfounded. We are silent before some new dimension of meaning which is being revealed.

(Sam Keen, from Apology for Wonder)

…and (italicized portion):

You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world. At this moment, you are breathing some of the same molecules once breathed by Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Anne Bradstreet, or Colette. Inhale deeply. Think of The Tempest. Air works the bellows of our lungs, and it powers our cells. We say “light as air,” but there is nothing lightweight about our atmosphere, which weighs 5,000 trillion tons. Only a clench as stubborn as gravity’s could hold it to the earth; otherwise it would simply float away and seep into the cornerless expanse of space.

(Diane Ackerman, from A Natural History of the Senses)

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Real-Life Dialogue (Awkward Moments Edition)

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[The scene opens in the waiting room of Super Mega Giant medical center in a mid-sized city in northern Florida, USA. He is a middle-aged male, and has been for some time. This report includes two Shes: A, a medical assistant; and J, a nurse practitioner.]

A: Mr. He?

He: Right here.

A: Very good, come with me. [She leads him to an alcove with a scale, weighs him, makes note on chart.] All right, now, here’s the exam room you’ll be using. [Extends hand.] My name is A, and I’m Dr. B’s new medical assistant.

[He does not know what a “medical assistant” is, or where people with that title reside on the medical hierarchy, but believes He will be able to guess from what follows. He is right.]

A: Let me just take your blood pressure and your pulse…

[She does so, then moves to computer, sits down, and asks series of very basic questions about His medical history as she keys in His answers. He concludes she’s some sort of trainee. She checks computer screen.]

A: Okaaay… Looks like you’re due for EXAM* today, is that right?

[He wasn’t expecting it. He never is; its various surprises, after all, are essential features of EXAM.]

He: Um, I guess, sure.

A: Well, I’m pretty much done here. I’m not sure if J will do EXAM or if Dr. B will. I’ll let them sort that out. J will be in in just a minute. Nice to meet you!

[She exits. Five-ten minutes later, J, the nurse practitioner, enters.]

J: Good morning. Mr. He, nice to see you again.

[She sits at computer terminal. Asks him many questions about his prescriptions’ status. Asks if he has any questions about his lab results.]

He: Nope, I think I understood what I was looking at.

J: [Standing up.] All right then. I’ll just take care of this one last thing…

[She approaches the table on which He sits. He dismounts from the table, turns to face it, unfastens his belt and pants, lowers his pants—]

J: Wait! What the hell are you doing?!?

He: Uh, well, A said that either you or—

J: Oh, she did, did she? Well I’ll just straighten her out!

[She leaves exam room. He waits perhaps a minute and concludes that he should refasten his pants.]

[Five-ten minutes more, J re-enters exam room.]

J: Now, as I started to say, let me just get this stethoscope off the wall here so I can check your heart and lungs…

He: Ah. So then you aren’t going to, umm, do EXAM?

J: [Shakes head violently, makes “time-out” sign with both hands.] NO. Dr. B will be in when I’m done and he will take care of you.

He: You have to admit, this is pretty funny—

J: [Says nothing, but shudders exaggeratedly, and leaves.]

_____________

* Details of EXAM need not be spelled out, need they?

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