DIALOGUE

While looking at David Malin’s photo

            A few months ago, I could feel their invisible pull as I leafed through David Malin’s book Ancient Light: A Portrait of the Universe and paused to look at his photo of the galaxy M-83, a companion to our Milky Way. This photograph, executed on a large format glass negative in silver emulsion, appears as a muted whorl of light composed of little dots on a dark background. This seemingly “air-brushed photograph” took on a surreal cast as I read Malin’s words: “galaxies are vast collections of stars, scattered across the sky in infinite variety. The larger examples (like M-83) consist of thousands of billions of stars” (2009, p.033). I considered this number, “Thousands of billions” letting its magnitude trickle into my mind. This is a very large number of anything, let alone stars. In another of Malin’s ancient light exposures on silver nitrate I see our home, known to the Greeks, as “a stream of milk spurting from the breast of the goddess Hera,” now known simply as The Milky Way, companion of M-83, also a possessor billions of its own stars, similar to our sun. To consider such large arrays and configurations of stars necessarily involves a unusual amount of imaginary mental stretching while visualizing these sorts of large spaces, causing our minds to re-imagine the size of what is thought of as: “our lived natural world.”

Dimensional stretching.

            I became conscious of this concept of topographic depth and dimensional stretching when I first encountered Freud’s thoughts encased in his famous Rome metaphor with which he described the depth of hidden aspects within our unconscious minds. I also came to see topography in the depth of my own thinking and memory. We create depth and stretching each day when we encounter an unknown idea or thought and through consideration create an understanding that becomes “ours.” For instance I place within my memory the previously unknown fact that: our Earth is traveling 490,000 mile an hour around a strong signal at the center of the Milky Way. The mechanism of the placement of this memory object within my thinking creates, or is part of, an unexpected string of thoughts. This concept: that these strings develop or can be developed is a pathway to what Thomas Berry refers to as: The ultimate creative modality of any form of earthly being. We are not here to control. We are here to become integral with the larger Earth community. The community itself and each of its members has ultimately a wild component, a creative spontaneity that is its deepest reality, its most profound mystery.

 Engagement with certain facts

            Our ultimate wildness is the universe itself (or psyche), which finds an expression in large numbers of stars, now stated, examined and thought about somewhat routinely as a kind of macro-ecology. The sensation of this isotropic emergence is as visceral as the smell of the rose, a kiss or aging. It is a fact that can be explained but it is more succinctly experienced as felt. I imagine the Earth spinning, slightly tilted on her axis. This primary movement I know as day and night. We sense this as a primal rhythm of our species. I could also explain that Earth is rotating at a speed of about one thousand miles per hour and the movement is felt as the change of day and night. A larger movement is brought on yearly through the wobble on Earth’s axis as it circuits the sun every 365.2424219 days. We interpret and feel this rotation as seasonal change. These are wild forces at work on and through us. Our sun is located two thirds of the way out on a spiral arm of our home galaxy the Milky Way, which rotates at 490,000 mile per hour around its center causing our sun together with our Earth and presumably our species to rotate once every 250,000,000 years. The entirety of this wildness is curving through the effects of gravity, expanding at an immeasurable rate. Felt as a function of this primal wildness: “is the curvature of space that causes matter to move under the influence of gravity, according to Einstein. Because gravity curves space, light no longer travels a straight line.

             In short, I am to understand that this light that appears as dots and whorls in the photograph has come to us from the distant past having traveled incalculably large, somewhat curved, distances to reach Mr. Malin’s photographic emulsion. These ideas are difficult for me to imagine in spite of having considered the facts over and over through reading and research. This concept of antiquity becomes even more difficult to understand as I lay upon my back, on a warm, clear August night on Whidbey Island, observing the Perseid meteor showers. Peering straight up into the dark night, I witnessed a variety of long streaks of light. Some of the meteors so large that we exclaimed in unison: ”Did you see that one?” As we stared up into the Milky Way waiting for the next flash, I gamely tried to imagine that the starlight above was ancient and coming from our remote past. Indeed, this is a distant past carried by the light of thousands of billion stars; a light that predates even the formation of the Earth. The vast number and scale of this antiquity continually challenges my imaginative capacities but at the same time seems to be a source for future thoughts and ideas.