'Signatures Of All Things'
14-10-99
Hello Astronomy Interest Group members & general others
One of our members, Jenny Marais in Morgan Bay, sent me this wonderful esoteric piece
about the Universe, the human mind and our modern networked society.
As the piece mentions the Veil Nebula, I've attached an image of that beautiful
phenomenon.
Enjoy.
Regards
Mario
Signatures of All Things
The experience of a mystic and the wisdom of James Joyce converge in a single phrase:
"Signatures of all things I am here to read," wrote Joyce, quoting the words of
Jacob Boehme, a German mystic. Boehme struggled to articulate the meaning of the symbols
he saw emblazoned on the transparent skein of reality at which he gazed transfixed.
Through the skein he saw the drift of starlight intimating something more even than its
own elusive meaning.
The Universe is a gesture, and our symbol-making minds interpret its shrugs or smiles
through the narrow aperture of ourselves, opening like a lens to let in just a little
light.
Last night was another magical summer night. Far from the city lights, we visited the home
of a master telescope maker who creates some of the instruments through which we try to
read the symbols written in the sky.
Dave Kriege makes Dobsonian telescopes. Dobson was a monk who believed with single-minded
intensity that he had a calling to give a wider lens to people with which they could see
the sky. He made a telescope out of scrap that was a feather to the touch yet so grounded
in its casing that it moved only when you moved it.
Kriege is obsessive too. He calls his business "Obsession Telescopes," selling
them all over the world.
( www.globaldialog.com/~obsessiontscp
). He has written THE book on how to make Dobsonian telescopes. But his genius is
background, nuts-and-bolts that disappear as he slides back the roof of his observatory
and we look up at numberless stars brightening as our eyes adjust to the darkness.
The quiet conversation among the astronomers - Kriege, two editors of Astronomy Magazine,
an airline pilot - is a matrix in which the meaning of our evening adheres.
"The two streams of that veil are 109 light years apart," he says as I climb a
ladder and gaze at the filaments of the Veil Nebula (see attached), the luminous
bow of the shock wave of some exploded star encountering the resistance of inter-stellar
matter.
"The stars in that globular cluster are widely dispersed," he says as I lose
myself in millions of stars in the deep black well of the scope. "Their skies would
be darker than you think."
We see the first edge-on galaxy with its bright bulge. Then we look head-on at the
Whirlpool Galaxy and its secondary spiral. Then a double star is resolved into its
components, one blue and one gold. Then we watch a star nursery distribute its energy
millions of years ago among thousands of new-born suns.
The only sound now is "Wow." And "Wow." And "Wow." again. We
are reduced to the monosyllabic response of excited children. I think of the SETI
scientist in the movie "Contact." "I had no idea," was all she could
say, stunned by the pattern of life and its deeper context.
Humankind cannot bear too much reality, Eliot wrote. Our wonder and awe dissipate in quiet
conversation, the tendrils and filaments of our own kind of nebulosity. Our restrained
energy is information too, as radiant as the night sky and just as impossible to translate
into words.
Clouds move slowly wholly over the sky from the north. Jupiter is rising but we can't see
it. We go inside for drinks and sleepy conversation. We talk of quantum physics, the
ultimate destiny of black holes, the inability of the information that is the universe to
travel faster than the speed of light.
We are trying so hard to say what we saw written in the sky, but we have no Rosetta stone
with which to decipher the pattern of light. So the images devolve into symbols we
exchange as if with our words we can manage the mystery, make it behave.
We anticipate a landing on Titan in a few years. We look forward to the exploration of
Mars and its ultimate colonization, leaving the moon to those who prefer its bleak gray
hills to life in a red desert. We speculate about the wide array telescope that we hope
will be deployed beyond Jupiter, where the light pollution of the inner planets will not
prevent the resolution of the small rocky planets near neighbouring stars, the continents
and seas of others' worlds.
The Internet is a wide array of modular nodes catching the wisdom of our species in a
skein of symbols, even as that skein is tearing. The million eyes of our hive mind look
into the images of the universe and see out there, in here, the signatures of all things.
In our hearts we still believe that the earth is the centre of the universe and everything
else the edge. Webs work that way, putting everyone at the centre and everyone else at the
edge. But we see too that we are included in something beyond our ability to say, that we
too are information and energy, alive against all odds, radiant and incomprehensible. We
too are a "Wow." that patterns our collective dreams in symbols of possibility
and great promise. But we are the spoken, not the speakers, we are the energy of a web
irradiated by its own shock wave, encountering the resistance of ourselves as we explode
outward at the speed of life.
Where is the vision that will animate our outward expansion, our migration into the
universe from the deep cave of the earth? Where is the fractal coherence of the spiral of
life striving to transcend its inheritance and destiny?
Silence.
This is the unspeakable moment before we drift back into our ordinary humanity, into the
conversation of our culture that tames the symbols of self-transcendence. Signatures of
all things, we are here to read. What is this moment, but the bow-shock of the spirit,
glowing with its own inner light. Our minds the calipers plotting the immense distances
between our hearts and our hearts.
Richard Thieme
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