February 18, 2013

All day it's been trying to rain, sunny in patches, but mostly gray and windy and getting colder.  We've had the darkest gray, almost to thundery black, and sunlight for a minute or two before being extinguished by flat smooth cloud cover again.  It's almost ludicrous for sunlight that traveled 93 million miles to be blocked by some random water vapor creation.  We do not often get clear nights, too much of that water vapor, too many lights, but Saturday when we were out, Brian remarked on how clear the night was and how many stars we could see, and he was right.  You could see a lot more stars than usual.  And it made me think of Marianne's idea for her next class, star stories, telling the stories associated with the constellations, and having the students pick stars for constellations and make up their own stories, or stories about constellations we recognize already.  I bet she gets some terrific stories.  I find that letting the students make up their own stories about familiar things really tends to fire up their imagination.  If you don't give them some place to start, like a constellation, they tend to flounder with too many ideas or not enough.  They need an . . . anchor; adults may be able to create things off the top of their head, but I find children often do not have enough experiences yet to be able to make up something out of whole cloth as it were, but give them a prompt, a jump start, and they do great. 

For today, when we are unlikely to see stars tonight, a poem about stars . . . 

Stars 

I sit and rock my son to sleep.  It rains

and rains.  Such as we are

both asleep, we swim past the stars,

bad stars of disaster, good stars of the backbone 

of night.  We know these stars as they are

and as we'd wish them to be, Milky Way,

Dog and Bear, hydrogen and helium, the 92

elements which make all we know of beauty.

 

We know nothing of angular size or

of the inverse square law of the propagation

of light, and swim through a cold, thin

gas, between and among stars, 

which swim likewise between two creations

like children who know sleep intimately.

                   *       *     * 

First the collapse of the interstellar gasses,
then the final collapse of the luminous stars

like eyes turning backward in their sockets

returning the atoms they have synthesized 

back into space, to dust, back to what they were.

We look from some kind of opening to nothing.

We locate the red giant and the dwarf star

for nothing.  They are going away -- 

their explosions from within and their luster,

their mixed-up views on time and space.

I know that those I love are some

of the falling objects, and those dark waves

rise toward us from the past, dark

that falls with any particle of light. 

Ralph Burns 

It's that line that reminds me of today, "dark/ that falls with any particle of light" like the sunlight dimmed by clouds, like how often a tiny annoyance will dim the radiance of a perfectly lovely day.  I like how there were two kinds of stars, "bad stars of disaster, good stars of the backbone/ of night."  And how we wish the stars into constellations, and don't have to know the science of them to know their beauty, but it's nice if you know a little about them, just makes them more wondrous.  Every culture has star stories, not one missed looking up at the stars and wanting to know them.  We are all falling objects, all in orbit, all falling through gravity, personal, planetary, and universal, all swimming though space spangled with stars of all kinds, all those stars making everything we are.