The brightest star on the coldest night
The night is cold, and because it is cold, the air is clear; it is a northern night. With the car turned off, and no light yet in the house beyond, the stillness seems to descend, as though stillness were a thing of the heavens – is it not? – a tangible substance, instead of the lack of one. The ancients knew there was an Ether; we proved that their Knowledge could not stand side-by-side with our Fact, so the tangible stillness vanished, leaving behind only a trace of memory.
The stillness descends as soft as snow, or smoke, and coats the branches and the grasses. The warmth of your breath as you exhale touches silence, and becomes its voice. Nothing moves unless you move, nothing but the stars, and you would have to remain standing long, become stone, to notice that even as stone you are turning in space, turning to face each neon pinprick in turn.
I am northern born. My childhood was the throbbing dance of seasons from chill to still to urge to surge, and I stood equally in awe of the summer storms – which lifted themselves up upon the walls of the Great Divide, like giants pulling themselves from sleep, to rumble over the plains as though in a footrace toward the sunrise and the sea – as of the moonlit winter nights, whose frozen ghosts stood on their heads and walked on their hands, cartwheeled over the snowbound lawns and opened a single wide eye to look through each crystalline icicle, as silent as light can be.
The same light drew me out to the frigid darkness of January, when the chill sipped the last drops of water from the air and laid them out in patterns against glass and steel. It was then that the jewels of the sky shone most brightly, with no moisture to catch at their luminous thread as it passed, from a million million million miles, from as far away as imagination, from the end of life to me.
How could I not look? And looking, not desire to see more closely…
At one time, thanks to my father’s spoken or unspoken support, I found myself the owner of a fairly large telescope. The owner may have been a member of the church community, or perhaps someone known to the community. Or perhaps it was one of my desires which reached out a hand and held it there, until the universe spilled a coin into the palm? In any case, may father was involved economically and transportationally, and in the Autumn or early winter I became an astronomer.
When stillness descends as soft as snow, and the cold takes the breath of life from the world and holds it, then the air is as empty as space, and an eye you turn toward heaven finds heaven, while the heat gradually drains from your fingertips, until they begin to prick with complaining blood vessels, and from the toes until they feel as though each had a small vise tightening on the end, and you stamp your feet to shake those vises off, and clap your hands to remind your fingers they exist. The dim red light teases your eyes to remain open, the pupils wide to allow every photon – a photon one syllable in the language of a star? – every photon possible touches a cell at the back of your eye, together painting an image of many years’ travel, of age, or power… that is mirrored in your heart at the instant you take it in.
With a telescope you can turn your eye to the moon, and the mottled wight of its surface gains body and dimension: a hairs-breadth of gray stands up and announces itself to be a mountain, a circular splash to be ancient rubble from a fallen meteor… and shadows! The suns light itself angles across that ancient spirit’s face and shows its wrinkles, its eyes, its smile.
Train your lens on a planet, and the stretched blur that was Saturn becomes – my god – a ball many times larger than our little comfortable earth, and rings spun round it like a necklace, just waiting for our whispered breath of delight. Spin the lens larger and Jupiter flashes into view, with its coterie of pretty friends circling round him… and his bold red eye looking right at you, large as in the pictures… but this is no picture, you are staring into the eye of a living, spinning sphere, while every second of their orbital dance shouts, smiling and winking to those who attend: I was placed here as a model of all life: you are not the center of the universe!
Go further, then, to discover the center. A fuzzy dot, under the wide-stretched eye of your telescope, becomes a galaxy, becomes a swirl of stars, which is a near twin of our own spiral arms of the via lactea, the milk road… carefully arranged to best display the lace of her being, a galaxy like our face in the mirror. And you, standing in the frigid silence of a windless northern night, shaking but not for the cold, realize that this, too, is not a picture. The light from a million million individual stars – they were called heavenly bodies, weren’t they? – arrayed as they are in a dance whose steps must last as long as time itself, and whatever slow melody they create in their performance… all of that written on the thread of light the reaches out in every direction, falls on every object, quick or static, falls too through the opening lens of my eye, is carried at the speed of thought through my body, to be engraved there in my memory like the word of God.
And in an ecstatic ritual of discovery and delight, as what you thought was so complete – your Self which jealously covets every sense and movement as part of itself – the bloated and impossibly heavy shell of your Self is stripped away, star by star, miracle by miracle, until you stand naked as a heart in the depth of the ice, finally free of the burden of your significance, arrayed in starlight as though welcomed into the company of angels, the smallest speck of matter imaginable loosing the greatest blast of heat and light, a ray emitted as an answering call to every singing beacon of the sky, shining out in all directions, for any one in attendance to behold.