asterism

Blinking balefully between the barlights and billboards. “that one’s Deneb,” he said, “and that’s Vega, and the third making the long point in the Summer Triangle is Altair.” It wasn’t a constellation, but it’s shape, drawn out of our peculiar penchant for pattern recognition, was one of the only asterisms visible in the city sky. “though i might be wrong which are Deneb and Vega, but it doesn’t really matter.” it’s not like we were trying to go sailing. He pulled out a piece of paper and began drawing clusters of dots, “let me show you something. you know where the big dipper is, right? well trace up from the lower side and you’ll find the Pole Star in the little dipper. Up from there, Cassiopeia, which looks like a crooked M. continue that arch and you’ll hit Andromeda and from there trace the longer arm down to Perseus. I’m not sure if that’s clear, oh wait, i’ve got a book of star charts in my bag.”

I flipped through it, mesmerized by the map of spectral points lines, like some secret forgotten tome of connect the dots, while he turned back and continued the winding conversation about comic books, snakes on a plane, the current debacle in Israel. Around the tables others stood in the summer sweat, drinking and talking and looking for some meaning in each other’s faces but none of them looking up. I wanted to take the book and use it for what it’s for, to find a way out of here. I wanted an antique telescope (even if the magnification wasn’t enough), a tall hill, a rock to bust the streetlamps, and all the heavens spread wide before my gaze. I sighed and lit another cigarette.

For the past several years I had made it a habit to go out at night and look up, try and familiarize myself with the few constellations i could find and name and watch their course as the earth spun through the year. as if being able to orient myself to the universe i could know where i was, or what i was supposed to do with my life. for centuries man has thus looked up and seen the vast oceans of light in which we are only the barest speck of dust. we have based whole societies off these configurations, determined harvest times, sailed around the world, created mythologies in the movement of figures in which we could understand the process of life, even if the constellations only appear as congruent, due to our perspective looking out into space, one could be spread out across billions of light years distance. but i suppose it was reassuring, and still is, to imagine the sky as a large dome of night on which the stars are drawn. a sense of center, of importance. but now we have forgotten even that, and walk around as if there was nothing outside ourselves, no greater reality on which to plot our lives, like we could no longer find a place or meaning beyond that small internal starlight that pushes us through the days.

the next night, another bar, another restless longing. “i want to go on an adventure, but where? how far is there to go?” eventually remember the Perseid meteor shower and we head off to the cemetery, which though still in the city is the closest darkest place, and even if we don’t see anything it’s still a nice walk. down the path between tombstones, like the black road of the Milky Way mapped on earth. i look up, try and orient myself, excited to use this new knowledge so soon. my companions are talking, adjusting to the dark. “ok, there’s the big dipper, there’s the pole star, Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Perseus, we should be looking there… oh, fuck yeah! there’s one now!” a streak of light falling through the clouds, caught between a tree branch and an obelisk. i start jumping up and down, running backwards. “there’s another!” no one else has seen them yet and i take off running, zig-zagging through the graves to the tallest hill where i plop down on a headstone and stare up rapt. an hour passes in the drift of clouds and the overfull moon. i keep on reorienting myself but there are no meteors. eventually we head out, and on the way see a couple more, but that’s it, as if they only fell when we weren’t actually looking for them. i feel ecstatic, radiant like a star myself, but saddened that that’s the best it would get this night, this century. back on the streets it’s impossible to see anything up there and someone says, “well, now what?” Perseus may have slain the gorgon and turned Cassiopeia to stone to wed her daughter Andromeda, freed from the rocks, but now he is fading, forgotten, dying out as his story turns to dust and his stars fall, dead long before he was imagined. i wonder how long might we last, who aren’t already emblazoned in the heavens?


this following little ditty was based off key lines in the above piece, much like the deconstruction exercise...

a star fell off the map
and got tangled in the treetops
i wondered what myth had crumbled
while we kicked among the tombstones,
some warrior-god forgotten
between barlights and billboards
and finding fate in faces
and not one looking upwards.
if i had a telescope
and a rock to break the streetlamps
i'd sail the constellations
to see if it was my own