…we are kin to stars

I’ve been reading a book called ‘Ahab’s Wife’ by Sena Jeter Naslund. I’ve been entranced by the language in the book and I can’t seem to put the thing down. Here’s a passage from p558 of my copy, and you’ll see what I mean about the language. The whole book is line one giant poem. I bought it on a whim, because I am a fan of Melville’s Moby Dick and I wanted to see what this woman had done with a character that is mentioned in maybe two lines of Moby. I am not disappointed.

     There is a great journey yet to be taken. Let my mind be a ship that sails from starry point to starry point. In my brain, I feel those cold black spaces containing nothing. I approach a pinprick of light closer and closer till it is a conflagration of such magnitude that I am nothing. And yet with my mind I caliper it with contemplation.
     Where is my place before this whirling ball of star mass, edgeless and expansive, without horizon? Where is my place, when I know that this is but one of ten billion? Here the categories crack. Beauty -that gilt frame - burns at its edges and falls to ash. Love? It’s no more than a blade of grass. Perhaps there is music here, for in all that swirling perhaps harmony fixes the giants in thier turning, marches them always outward in thier fiery parade.
     That I can see thier glory, that is my place. That I have these moments to be alive - and surely they are alive in some other way. Perhaps it is only being that we share. But something is shared between me on the rooftop and them flung wideand myriad up there. What was the golden motto emroidered on the hem of my baby’s silk dress? We are kin to stars.
I reach my hands toward them, spread my fingers and see those diamonds in the black v’s between my fanning fingers. To think I could gather them into my hands, stuff them in my pockets, is folly. But I can reach. it is I myself, alive now, who reach into the night toward stars. Thier light is on my hands.
     Thier light is in my hands. I gasp in the crisp air of earth and know that I am made of what makes stars! Those atoms burning bright - I lower my hands - why, they are here within me. I am as old as they and will continue as long as they, and after our demise, we will all be born again, eons from now. What atoms they have I cannot know. I cannot call thier names, but htey are not strangers to me. I know them in my being, and they know me.
     Little scrap, little morsel, the stars sing to me, we are the same.

I’m sad I’m almost done!

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I know where my towel is, do you?

“The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”

~The Hichthiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

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“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

“Art also has its morality, and many of the rules of this morality are the same as, or at least analogous to, the rules of ordinary ethics. Remorse, for example, as as undesirable in relation to our bad art as it is in relation to our bad behaviour. The badness should be hunted out acknowledged, and, if possible, avoided in the future.To pore over the literary shortcomings of twenty years ago, to attempt to patch a faulty work into the perfection it missed at its first execution, to spend one’s middle age in trying to mend the artistic sins committed and bequeathed by that different person who was oneself in youth - all this is surely vain and futile…”

~Aldous Huxley, 1946 [from the forward to the 1950 edition of Brave New World]

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