“The Aesthetics of Blue Starred”
Once in a very great while, the intractable questions posed by humanity to itself and to its surroundings (among them: what is our status in reality; what is the ethical, the just, the beautiful; what is death and the after-death; what is the origin of the body and of the psyche and its dilemmas; what entity, if any, invisibly monitors the universe?) prove to be tractable questions after all. The previous answers suddenly vanish, as if eclipsed, or as if we were moving in transit across a much larger body of knowledge.
Discoveries in several disciplines during the last forty years interconnect now to offer a Copernican-scale re-definition of the interior as well as exterior worlds. Every freighted noun (water, tree, death, emotion, childhood, moon, thought, et al.) has acquired a context and meaning different from what it owned prior to this generation—specifically, prior to confirmation of the Big Bang model and the discovery of the origin of the elements.
As a poet extravagantly fortunate to be alive in this moment, it is my conviction that a need will remain in the future for all the arts, including many varieties of verse. However, serious poetry, in order to avoid sentimentality, solipsism and irrelevance, will have to describe our actual contexts, and do so with tropes that grow organically out of the precise and fresh language of reality. “Blue Starred,” “Little, Worked Stones” and “Cor Caroli” are assays in that aesthetic. They come from Where Have We Come From, Who Are We, What’s the Point?, a collection that poses a number of the old questions, followed by poems based on the new answers.
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Little, Worked Stones
To Sharon T., research biologist, environmentalist and mother of three, who remarked with some uncertainty and sadness that space colonization may be undesirable because “I’m not sure the human race has the right to propagate itself that far. We might not deserve to go on.”
But we are young, just some generations
from the white winds and little, worked stones
of the Pleistocene.
And we have time. At fourteen
billion years, the universe is crisp
and fresh, we’ve changed down to the grist
and have immensities
of more green time for change. It may be
one of your descendants—deft,
confident, reliable in emotional depth,
able to master, for instance, ancient Greek
and most of its literature in a few weeks,
seriously ill only twice
in a two-hundred-year life, spliced
with braking genes to inhibit,
a little, recidivist
brain-stem violence and maladaptive
selfishness; better, then, at love
but incomplete still, like all
the sprawling future—who will
discover, say, non-baryonic dimensions
connected to matter, their alterations
constant and pretty and the result of interaction
with the organic; or some station
of other knowledge that shows
our every summation of life and growth
was based on a scarcity
of variables and too little time. It may be
a child of your child, beautiful,
whose face will grow still
thinking of humanity now, so sweet
and terrible, of our desperate
and patient persistences, efforts we thought
might be pointless, vain, but
continued through each refrain
and long-ago variety of loneliness and pain.
NOTE: “We have come to realize, through developments in astronomy and cosmology, that we are still quite near the beginning. The history of creation has been enormously expanded—from 6,000 years back to the 13.7 billion years of Big Bang cosmology. But the future has expanded even more—perhaps to infinity…[which] leads us to a new view of the human species.” Introduction, The New Humanists: Science at the Edge, John Brockman, ed.
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To Cam, my godson, age thirteen, advanced-placement student in math and English, who complains that “nothing makes any sense.”
1. Cor Caroli
While looking at dense stars above the telescopes at Kitt Peak Observatory
Welcome home.
These are the curved streets of the western Milky Way, your home
suburb. Any spot of light your blue eyes see is hom-
ing toward you from some family member: a gawky, home-
ly molecular cloud, a strapping red cousin, a nursing-home
ancestral cluster—all having puffed out metal soots and home-
spun elements that swept into and stacked in ways that made the small home
base of current Earth, every atom now at home
in your body, your surroundings, your dreams. You’ll leave home
often: the nova-invented carbon doors of many homes
will click at your back. Some rented rooms will feel home-
like, old friends will gradually become the unguarded home
of your mind, you might for a while be one of those funny home
owners obsessed with star-made turf. You’ll feel home-
sick and uncomfortable, I’m sorry to say, you might feel home-
less and hunting. But always, of course, you’ll be already at home.