The other night, while looking up at the sky filled with stars, I think I saw something move.
The experts tell me that there is a lot of majestic chaos up there, with galaxies colliding, stars exploding, wobbly planets, rampant radiation, flares, dust storms, gas bags, and those sinister black holes lurking in the shadows, ready to chomp down on everything that passes their way, swallowing it whole, digesting it, then vomiting it out into a make-believe world devoid of time and space, where everything becomes once upon a time and far far away, but I am not talking about that.
What I mean is, there are some things we take for granted, like the sunrise, the sound of birds, or the sunny side of the moon. What would it be like if one day the moon rose above the horizon and presented a new look? Instead of that tarnished silver face, suppose it waxed green, displaying a visage of pestilence, pocked with pustules, a death mask, feverish with pox - just the way I was told it would appear someday - in those terrifying nursery rhymes I was forced to read as a child. What then? I suppose markets would crash, armies would disband, politicians would bow their heads, clerics would cover their faces in shame. We could only hope.
My aunt and uncle lived in the state of New Jersey. They had a dog named Prince. I saw him when I was in first grade. He was a big collie. I could reach out and hug him around the neck. I did not visit them for another ten years, not until I had reached the eleventh grade. I stepped into their house and a dog came running up. A small shaggy dog about knee high. My aunt said, "Oh don't mind Prince."
I said, "No. That's not Prince."
She said, "Yes it is."
"No. It can't be."
"Yes, it is."
I coughed, "Who pulled the plug and let him out?"
I was stunned, he looked like a small scale replica of the original, something you pulled out of a box and glued together and put up on the bookcase. Was he shrinking all these years I was away? Were they feeding him? Was he disassembled? Was I going mad? That night I had a very bad dream upstairs in my cousin's bedroom. Perhaps.
If you take something for granted, you won't pay attention. If you don't pay attention, you don't notice things change.
So there, above me are the heavens, the big fireworks factory torched by arsonists, the spilled bag of gold and silver coins, the silent war movie. And as chaotic as it appears, it is not chaos. Chaos is in the eye of the beholder. Chaos describes knowledge beyond our grasp, the ignorant man's thesis, a dismissive slur. But in reality, everything is on schedule and on track. Split second precision, sub-meter accuracy, fully synchronized. Law abiding matter. These are highly trained rocks! So why would anyone with breeding higher than that of an organ-grinder prostrate himself to these dim-witted balls of ice fire and rock? It is beyond me. Might as well worship the mail service. That alarm clock you set last night. The one-eyed cat that shows up on the front step each morning begging for a dish of milk.
And all of the sudden, there was a shift.
At first I thought I lost my footing. But I was standing still, leaning up against a White pine in our front yard. Then I thought it must have been an earth tremor and my position on the planet moved a foot or two. But everything was still, nothing swayed. That is when I noticed everything had set back in the sky, slipping to the east several degrees, almost as if time had lurched backward a half hour. The moon fell down behind the trees. Everything moved, the planets, the stars, and I assume the sun. It did come up later the next morning, too much later to be accounted for by the tilt of the earth. I overslept.
In the dark ages they thought everything revolved around the earth, an egocentric notion that belied the notion that humans were the most important thing in existence. Along came some astronomers who deduced that, with the exception of our modest moon, nothing revolved around the earth, in fact, the motions of the planets, stars, comets, and sun was essentially independent of the earth. This was shocking. For this, these men were garroted and stretched like salt-water taffy.
The ball thrown from the train traveling through a vacuum appears to be on a straight line to the person on the train, but to the man on the ground, the ball travels on a curved trajectory. Eventually both men succumb to oxygen deprivation, but not before they discover an important truth: It is a matter of perspective. The sky appeared to shift to me, but to the poor man floating about in space, it was the earth that moved.
I have heard that this is impossible. 'Nothing could possibly bump the earth, jostle it, give it a nudge. Certainly, it cannot be us. It is too big. We are too small. The planets do not revolve around us. The universe is independent of us. We have no significant impact. This is a fact. To suggest that man has fundamentally altered the nature of the earth is shocking. Some things never change.'
You said it.
The experts tell me that there is a lot of majestic chaos up there, with galaxies colliding, stars exploding, wobbly planets, rampant radiation, flares, dust storms, gas bags, and those sinister black holes lurking in the shadows, ready to chomp down on everything that passes their way, swallowing it whole, digesting it, then vomiting it out into a make-believe world devoid of time and space, where everything becomes once upon a time and far far away, but I am not talking about that.
What I mean is, there are some things we take for granted, like the sunrise, the sound of birds, or the sunny side of the moon. What would it be like if one day the moon rose above the horizon and presented a new look? Instead of that tarnished silver face, suppose it waxed green, displaying a visage of pestilence, pocked with pustules, a death mask, feverish with pox - just the way I was told it would appear someday - in those terrifying nursery rhymes I was forced to read as a child. What then? I suppose markets would crash, armies would disband, politicians would bow their heads, clerics would cover their faces in shame. We could only hope.
My aunt and uncle lived in the state of New Jersey. They had a dog named Prince. I saw him when I was in first grade. He was a big collie. I could reach out and hug him around the neck. I did not visit them for another ten years, not until I had reached the eleventh grade. I stepped into their house and a dog came running up. A small shaggy dog about knee high. My aunt said, "Oh don't mind Prince."
I said, "No. That's not Prince."
She said, "Yes it is."
"No. It can't be."
"Yes, it is."
I coughed, "Who pulled the plug and let him out?"
I was stunned, he looked like a small scale replica of the original, something you pulled out of a box and glued together and put up on the bookcase. Was he shrinking all these years I was away? Were they feeding him? Was he disassembled? Was I going mad? That night I had a very bad dream upstairs in my cousin's bedroom. Perhaps.
If you take something for granted, you won't pay attention. If you don't pay attention, you don't notice things change.
So there, above me are the heavens, the big fireworks factory torched by arsonists, the spilled bag of gold and silver coins, the silent war movie. And as chaotic as it appears, it is not chaos. Chaos is in the eye of the beholder. Chaos describes knowledge beyond our grasp, the ignorant man's thesis, a dismissive slur. But in reality, everything is on schedule and on track. Split second precision, sub-meter accuracy, fully synchronized. Law abiding matter. These are highly trained rocks! So why would anyone with breeding higher than that of an organ-grinder prostrate himself to these dim-witted balls of ice fire and rock? It is beyond me. Might as well worship the mail service. That alarm clock you set last night. The one-eyed cat that shows up on the front step each morning begging for a dish of milk.
And all of the sudden, there was a shift.
At first I thought I lost my footing. But I was standing still, leaning up against a White pine in our front yard. Then I thought it must have been an earth tremor and my position on the planet moved a foot or two. But everything was still, nothing swayed. That is when I noticed everything had set back in the sky, slipping to the east several degrees, almost as if time had lurched backward a half hour. The moon fell down behind the trees. Everything moved, the planets, the stars, and I assume the sun. It did come up later the next morning, too much later to be accounted for by the tilt of the earth. I overslept.
In the dark ages they thought everything revolved around the earth, an egocentric notion that belied the notion that humans were the most important thing in existence. Along came some astronomers who deduced that, with the exception of our modest moon, nothing revolved around the earth, in fact, the motions of the planets, stars, comets, and sun was essentially independent of the earth. This was shocking. For this, these men were garroted and stretched like salt-water taffy.
The ball thrown from the train traveling through a vacuum appears to be on a straight line to the person on the train, but to the man on the ground, the ball travels on a curved trajectory. Eventually both men succumb to oxygen deprivation, but not before they discover an important truth: It is a matter of perspective. The sky appeared to shift to me, but to the poor man floating about in space, it was the earth that moved.
I have heard that this is impossible. 'Nothing could possibly bump the earth, jostle it, give it a nudge. Certainly, it cannot be us. It is too big. We are too small. The planets do not revolve around us. The universe is independent of us. We have no significant impact. This is a fact. To suggest that man has fundamentally altered the nature of the earth is shocking. Some things never change.'
You said it.
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