To the editor:
On Saturday, March 3rd, anticipation arose County-wide with hopes of seeing the first total lunar eclipse since October, 2004. The weather proved stormy and overcast without the slightest hint of lunar light to wow and amaze the curious. The only successful eclipse report personally conveyed to me arrived from a friend currently residing in coastal Mississippi! Not until Feb. 21, 2008 and then again on Dec. 20, 2010 will we County characters enjoy another glance at such a spectacle.
Prior to Saturday, I arranged a television interview to fuel your interest in the eclipse because I know many of you, and I care about your connection with the cosmos. Since leaving Chicagoland in 1988, I’ve truly enjoyed all the mustered magical moments we’ve shared staring at comets, planets, meteors, and of course, sun and moon in eclipse.
However, it remains easy to write off my bald cosmic sentiments as the strange sputterings of a kooky character with lots of hair. The immense scale of space and sky fail to generate lasting impressions and commitments upon most of us. We stay more comfortable and preoccupied in the discomfort of managing the necessary small spaces of life — kids, bills, homes, marriage, family, transportation and assorted ambitions and grudges. And I confess, I’m no different than any of you.
Nevertheless, the Universe teems with a living interest in you and I. Heightened interest in this sky stuff intends, I believe, to strengthen our sensitivities to the environment and beyond the infinite. What’s wrong with that? I try to state again and again to you that astronomy fuels three engines within our space soul. First, we can learn to embrace a sense of awe of this great grandeur called the Universe. Second, we can stimulate the scientist within us all in sparking curiosity regarding what we see and sense. Finally, we come into contact with the beautiful and the sublime, words bleached and diminished to near nothingness in the current commercial climate.
Let me offer an example. On Monday, Feb. 19th at approximately 5-6 p.m., I stood in the yard of a beautiful home on the Chapman Road in Presque Isle. The thinnest slip of a crescent Moon emerged out of the wash of twilight with a diamond-hard starpoint approximately 5 degrees beneath — the planet Venus. Together, these two orbs so vastly separated in distance danced towards the horizon, transformed in clarity and contrast moment by moment as twilight triumphed over sunlight.
The temperature, bitterly cold, felt cruel against my bones, but the juxtaposition of the rural and the remote suddenly created a call beyond myself upward. Those worlds were moving! Moving with such a subtle, sublime stateliness that my mind rejoiced. Yes, our planet rotated, the Moon shifts eastward, Venus dances along a 225-day orbit at 35 kilometers per second. But, it’s not the facts of orbital mechanics which impress. No, the experience of participating with the motions impresses. There you go: astronomy requires your participation for real effectiveness. It is not a study to cosmetically apply with brush to your surface but an actual meal digestion and personal growth, event by event.
But more than growth, I suggest, astronomy offers transformative power — a redefinition personally. In 1899, the then young unknown Jewish composer, Arnold Schoenberg penned a remarkable tone poem for strings, “Verklarte Nacht” — “Transfigured Night”. It was to be one the great declarations of expressionism in which, muscially expressed, love’s sublimity overcomes reproach, guilt, and shame turning a tragic, blasted moonlit night into a transfigured revelation of hope and promise. Anyone with ears to hear could not listen unmoved to such a modern musical masterpiece. And similarly, anyone with eyes to see cannot remain unmoved by the exquisite sky and its richness and immensity available to transfigure your personal night gloriously. And in this sense, perhaps the absence of an eclipsed moon on Saturday, March 3rd County-wide offers more hope and promise to heart and mind based upon faithful longing and unseen imaginations. The Universe speaks! Are we not obligated to listen?
Mr. “B” submits “Transfigured Night” for your inspection from the offices of the Francis Malcolm Science Center.
Call 207-488-5451 for further flights of public programming in the northern most planetarium in the continental United States.
