from the journals of the Kirk (1992?)
I ran home in the moonlight with firm strides; for the sun-love made me strong. Down through the junipers; down through the firs; now in jet shadows; now in white light; over sandy moraines and bare, clanking rocks; past the huge ghost of South Dome rising weird through the firs; past the glorious fall of Nevada, the groves of silhouette; through the pines of the valley; beneath the bright crystal sky blazing with stars. All of this mountain wealth in one day! One of the rich ripe days that enlarge one's life; so much of the sun upon one side of it, so much of the moon and stars on the other.
John Muir - Steep Trails
Tonight, the moon on the sky is football, tilted for the kick.
I try to envision where the sun should be, given the angle of the thing. Sometimes though, it doesn’t make sense. The sun couldn’t be where it seems it should be given the angle of everything. Does the distance create an illusion or distortion? It seems that it should be just under my knees and to the left and casting something of the same blast on the earth; but then, you’d have to be in space to see it.
I had an odd thought tonight. There, in the dark, in the part that hangs between the moon and me, runs a great river of light. Not just a stream, but a racing ocean. In fact, I am looking through that very flood, to see the lit plane of the moon. And this is strange. Looking through light to see light? Does the light clash?
We know that the moon is not a light unto itself. It bounces a cold bone flame, borrowed from the sun and modified on a surface of chalk. But what if the moon weren’t there. That ‘place’ -- apart from stars -- would be dark. And what if we swung the moon closer, into the present dark between us. It might refract even harder. So it hit me. Light is flowing though that space between the moon and I. And not only there, but all about the moon. Up, down, forward, back. Indeed, If we were to litter the night with moons, every one bending light from the dark, our night might shine like the noonday. But how can this be -- the thing that we call night and see as dark is not a “true” dark at all. The thing is a bastion of unseen light!
So what is the night, but the day, just waiting for a hundred moons to reveal it! HA!
How does this work? Invisible light is coursing through space … dark bright light, with hardly a trace of temperature (?) – I don’t know about this. And not just the local part where our moon is … but the whole sun, star, and galaxy-soaked universe. This whole bastion of darkness is so soaked in light that just a speck of dust in the vacuum of space would weed out the light like a blinding atom.
Frankly I don’t get this. I guess it belongs to vacuums – that light can zoom through space and leave no trace till “lit” by some particle of matter. Is light made known, only by the presence of matter? And then what does it do …. to reach my eye? Does something of that same light bounce from the object to my eye? Certainly my eye does not go to the moon to gather the light. So something from the moon comes to me.
Given the phase of the moon, something of that light would have to spray off of the surface at about an 80-degree angle from the full-lit side. The light would then have to cross a channel of raging unseen light and not get swept away in the process.
I know that light is spoken of in terms both particle and wave. Is there a chance that some of those rays collide in the intersection? And just what IS a ray of light. A speeding dot, a single line, or a continuous stream or pulse of particle?
For the moment, I will think of it as a zooming powder, so fine that each part is like a proton. In fact, I think they call it a photon. I understand that light has mass. Not much, but mass nonetheless. And I’m glad that is does. Apart from Spirit, it seems impossible to think of something without the qualities of “substance.”
So what kind of mass does light have? If cotton candy shrivels on my tongue to indicate the size of the source.. Does light compressed equal something like a pea in the Universe? Is all that “powder” at once everywhere and thin, and how does it pass through glass?
(Splice)
On the first Day, God made light. But what does that mean? No eye but His to behold it? Had He been in the dark before? And if there were no thing for that light to strike --- would it look like the light of space – pure black. Or, on the contrary – pure white. Now here is the thing. When I see the sun, what do I see? A kind of zooming photon ocean spitting from the flame that has no meaning in the dark until it collides with some dust or water hanging in our air which burst it to life so that it can be seen – in the bluing of the sky – but even more as it pours into my eye and collides with blood and nerve. . Does some piece of energy direct from the sun really bullet through space into the back of my eye? And if it does, how does my eye contain it? It would seem anything traveling that fast should blow out the back. … A shotgun of light against a cobweb of retina. And maybe that is why no one can see God. Maybe His light is denser and really would blow out our eyes like an arc-welding fist.
Tulips moon, or bullet train
Today I think about the strangeness of all that dark space, soaked in light.
What for the moment, if we were to plant tulips on the moon? They (the flower part) would drink in the green and reject the red, just as they do on earth. The full spectrum of color laced light flows over the moon. And this is a shame. A waste. All those buckets of empty dark, those great voids in-between without moons or tulips … nothing but dark to show for all that light. If there had only been tulips, the light might make a colored show!
And then another thought came on it. Our earth speeds through space. While I know, given a larger reference, even the orbital path of the earth is not a static hoop, but wheeling or moving out with relation to some larger thing … I will think for the moment of that space, just before the advancing earth as fixed.
A fixed cube, just dangling and stuck in space. I don’t know how many miles per second the earth plummets down its path, but then, I think for the second. That space, which had been dark, just before the bow of the speeding planet, smashes with light. For some brief millisecond, that cubed inch of void flashes with the color of thin air then thick, maybe a strobe of gnat wing or pollen, then something like a red hot flash -- as tulips careen into space on the driving edge. Then, a billionth of a second later the inch goes dark and hard as the earth moves through it. Then to heavy, hot, and molten. Out the other side and with the pale of setting day.
Think! That Square inch of space goes from almost zero mass and little energy to one thick spot of activity. The earth is a match, igniting unseen light hiding in the dark, then passing, giving glory to some square of space if even for a blink – and leaving it again silent and maybe forever. How does the inch survive it?
Ugh. A corollary thought. Dark deep pure space. An ocean of unrealized light. And then. SLAM for a
millisecond. A slice of a knife… the stain of a thought, lust and greed careening and igniting the virgin dark with a passing pulse of sin. A square inch of defiled space.
The next day: corollary odd thought number 527.
Today, all day long, millions of little cubes of former dark space passed through my body.
Today I think about the strangeness of all that dark space, soaked in light.
What for the moment, if we were to plant tulips on the moon? They (the flower part) would drink in the green and reject the red, just as they do on earth. The full spectrum of color laced light flows over the moon. And this is a shame. A waste. All those buckets of empty dark, those great voids in-between without moons or tulips … nothing but dark to show for all that light. If there had only been tulips, the light might make a colored show!
And then another thought came on it. Our earth speeds through space. While I know, given a larger reference, even the orbital path of the earth is not a static hoop, but wheeling or moving out with relation to some larger thing … I will think for the moment of that space, just before the advancing earth as fixed.
A fixed cube, just dangling and stuck in space. I don’t know how many miles per second the earth plummets down its path, but then, I think for the second. That space, which had been dark, just before the bow of the speeding planet, smashes with light. For some brief millisecond, that cubed inch of void flashes with the color of thin air then thick, maybe a strobe of gnat wing or pollen, then something like a red hot flash -- as tulips careen into space on the driving edge. Then, a billionth of a second later the inch goes dark and hard as the earth moves through it. Then to heavy, hot, and molten. Out the other side and with the pale of setting day.
Think! That Square inch of space goes from almost zero mass and little energy to one thick spot of activity. The earth is a match, igniting unseen light hiding in the dark, then passing, giving glory to some square of space if even for a blink – and leaving it again silent and maybe forever. How does the inch survive it?
Ugh. A corollary thought. Dark deep pure space. An ocean of unrealized light. And then. SLAM for a
millisecond. A slice of a knife… the stain of a thought, lust and greed careening and igniting the virgin dark with a passing pulse of sin. A square inch of defiled space.
The next day: corollary odd thought number 527.
Today, all day long, millions of little cubes of former dark space passed through my body.
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