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The Soul of Night
An Astronomical Pilgrimage
Chet Raymo
In the wintertime, the dark and cold time, the stars are more present. It is the time of year to go outside and look at the stars. And it is a time to stay inside by a fire and read about the stars in the sky.
Chet Raymo wrote this book of reflections about the night and the stars with graceful sentences and transcendent meaning. This book of essays cannot be summed up. It can only be read slowly, and savored.
Each chapter, which is hauntingly titled, begins with woodcuts that are exquisite. There is lots of space around the words and empty pages here and there, reminding me of the vast space in the world he talks of. The book is a work of art.
In the beginning he warns that we might experience ‘spiritual vertigo.’ These pages are a personal pilgrimage into the darkness and silence of the night sky. Raymo is a pilgrim in quest of the soul of the night.
Raymo creates images in the mind’s eye, juxtaposes one image with another, sandwiches the images with poetry and tells you about his life. The journey from a creekbed to the moon to the milky way to the outer limit of physics and back to the stream in his backyard is breathtaking. To read this book, you must pack lightly, and be ready to leave the beaten track. The journey is not a straight line. Indeed, the journey left me dizzy and breathless. And the journey took a very long time. This was not an easy read, merely wonderful.
His most mystical chapter may well be Chapter 5, Beginnings. “Beginnings,” Raymo says, “wear their endings like dark shadows. Fifteen billion years ago there was nothing and then God laughed and there was The Big Flash, The Big Bang, The All Splitter. An infinitely dense and infinitely hot seed of energy sprang into being from nothingness and flowed instantly into matter. The universe began to expand.
“But now cosmologists say our universe may be just one among many and universes are popping into existence all the time and our starry night is the interior of a single bubble of galaxies in an ongoing spontaneous creation. God’s laugh is no snicker but a roaring belly laugh.” Raymo suggests that God’s final laugh sounds like a bird and he offers an extended metaphor about the meadowlark and the red winged blackbird.
Chapter 14, "Follower of the Pleides," begins with the premise that nowadays there is little incentive to learn the names of things. But, the names of stars are archives of other intelligences. Most names are Arabian; some are Greek; others Latin. Some are just numbers and letters. Whatever name they bear, the stars burn in our intelligence.
The night will not be empty as long as we name the stars, Raymo concludes.
Aldebaran, El Nath, Rigel, Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, Alpha Centauri. We ourselves give the stars their invisible reality, beyond the visible. By watching. By naming. “They depend on us,” says Rilke. “We are their transformers.”
I had no names for stars when I was young. But when we lived on Puget Sound in Washington State, there was time (and more than enough dark time) to watch the movement of the night sky and wonder who the different stars were. In that dark time I scoured the skies for light and learned the names of constellations and their stars.
The study of the night sky is large enough for a life time. Star Date, published by the University of Texas, teaches neophytes the names of the stars and the nightly dramas that occur. For example, this year the winter solstice will occur on December 22 at 1:44 am CST. The sun is furthest South, the night is longest and winter begins. But this year, there will also be the Long Night Moon, or the Moon Before Yule. This full moon will be at perigee, its closest point to the earth. So, we have the lowest sun, the longest night, and the closest moon which will also be a full moon. The last time the full moon, lunar perigee and winter solstice fell on the same day was in 1866.
Chapter 15 considers "The Infinite." Night has a shape, says Raymo. The earth’s shadow is cone shaped, and is a tall pyramid of darkness receding from the globe. Earth wears night like a wizard’s cap.
Night is a cone because the earth is round and smaller than the sun. All of the planets wear caps of night. Every object near a star casts a pyramidal shadow. Every particle of dust in the space of the solar system casts its own tiny pyramid of darkness. It is through the crack of the night that we glimpse the Infinite.
In the chapter titled, "Waiting for the Comet," Chet Raymo quotes the poet Rilke who said, “Praise this world to the angel. Do not tell him the untellable. Tell him things. Perhaps we are only here to say “house, bridge, fountain, gate, comet.”
The author then praised Comet Kahoutek and Comet West for their ineffable beauty. A comet is the stuff of our imagination. Language stretches to encompass it. Comets have their origins in light, in the OORT cloud, a spherical aura of life-stuff blown off by the awakening sun. In the outer reaches of the OORT cloud, there are billions of comets waiting to fall toward the sun. Once a comet begins periodic visits to the inner solar system, it must eventually be blown away.
If analyzed this book would also fall apart. So, just take a deep breath, grab hold of Raymo's coat tails, and follow him on his astronomical pilgrimage. He will stagger you with facts, melt you with poetry, confound you with images, and slip around language like a thief.
He convinced me, in the end, that I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom of my being was forged in a star. His ending is pure poetry, every word connected with ideas he fleshed out before. There is a connection of images and ideas and words that act like a prayer, a hymn of praise.
See also: Star Date, published by The University of Texas at Austin McDonald Observatory, call 800-STARDATE. On line at http://stardate.utexas.edu .
Copyright©1999 Mary Jo Kelly Wilhelm
The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage by Chet Raymo. (Hungry Mind Press. St. Paul, MN 1996) ISBN 1886913110. Wood Engraving by Michael McCurdy.
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