On Personal Astronomy
When my mentor says, “Your work is interested in exploring identity,” I am taken aback. Exploring identity. Would you believe me if I told you I’d never considered identity once in all of this?
**
Astronomy is the most essentially human of sciences. To look out into some void, where things have no relation to each other—no meaningful relation to each other, to see this and to impose measure is as admirable as it is tragic. There is one night sky, and eighty-eight constellations, each defined by their distinct boundaries.
**
I’m eight years old; my grandma’s basement is flooded. The carpet is ripped up, piled up in damp heaps. I’m on top of one, I’m screaming, “I’m King of the Carpet! I’m King of the Carpet!” When I topple over, an exposed nail impales my hand deeply. Without realizing, and like young boys do—I hop up quickly, tearing my hand wide open. For a while I owned a nasty scar across the length of my palm. This was never a mark of pride, neither a mark of shame. All the same, when it began to heal, I was stricken with an inexplicable sadness. I had come to identify with this scar. It felt like my history in flesh, fading away.
**
The nymph Liriope lays with a river god, and gives birth to the handsome child Narcissus. She brings him to the seer, Tsirius, to see his fate. Tsirius prophesizes that the boy will lead a long and fruitful life, so long as he never discovers himself. Essentially, this isn’t about anything more than what happened in the Garden of Eden.
**
Error analysis is one method used by astronomers in order to determine the location of specific stars. It is done by averaging all misreported celestial sightings. At times, definition is hard bought by difference.
**
Narcissus grows into a fine young hunter. Picture him, knowing nothing of himself, beautiful, Edenic. One day, out in the woods he is pursued by the goddess, Echo. Upon being spurned by him, she wastes away until merely an echo of sound remains. I will wonder if she became more or less her essential self but, I will not seek out the answer.
**
One can hardly cut a lonelier figure than Adam. Imagine the sixth night’s sky, its constellations naked. The animals they take after not yet named themselves. Imagine this night sky enormous, above him, threatening to swallow him up. Imagine the audacity, begat by his sheer loneliness, to be demanding of another. Imagine his relief, imagine the first time he hears his own name, “Adam—” all teeth, and tongue, and wet eyes looking back.
**
Astronomers who use error analysis know that the uncertainty associated with a measurement is just as important as the measurement itself. “A measurement without error is next to useless. In astronomy and astrophysical research, most initial uncertainty estimations come from the limitations of the telescope used in the observations. Other sources of uncertainty could be the position accuracy of a source.”
**
I try to trace a constellation between the marks that remain: draw a line from the oddly shaped mole in my right eye, down to the brown lump on my left pinkie, a gravestone for a dead finger, to the immutable calluses on my palms, from years of playing football, to the small mole just north of and between my nipples, which my mother once spent an hour pulling at with tweezers because she thought it was a tick, to the strange mark on my penis where a circumcision was left unfinished, to the cigarette burn on my left thigh, given to me by a person I once thought of as my best friend—just below my only tattoo. I trace the points, but I can make no shape. Camping on the beach at night, a friend takes my hand and traces the outline of Orion’s belt. Of course, there are natural limits to what we can come to know by ourselves.
**
On witnessing the death of Echo, Nemesis—the daughter of Aphrodite—could not leave Narcissus unscathed. She leads him to a pool, where he finally comes face to face with his own reflection. In the story retold by Ovid, Narcissus believes he is looking at someone else entirely, and is immediately smitten. Narcissus, melted by the heat and weight of his passion, is turned into a flower on the spot.
**
Stars, like flowers, I fear, know nothing of themselves, or their constellations. They communicate light from things that have burned up lightyears ago. In this way, they are literally haunting. In this way, the existence of the celestial bodies that litter the night sky are not predicated by their being; what I mean is I fear I’ve nothing new to say, just derision, echo, and happenstance.
