Written in and about the Stars

We love our stars and look up to them, literally and figuratively. We are star-struck, starry-eyed, star-crossed, our flags feature stars. Sailors steer by them, and poets praise them . . .

Twinkle, twinkle, little star

How I wonder what you are!

Up above the world so high

Like a diamond in the sky.

The centuries old rhyme still lulls babies to sleep and we are still gazing in wonder at the night sky. ‘What is the stars?’ muses the drunken Captain Boyle in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. According to NASA a star is a giant ball of hot gas, which might also be a description of Captain Boyle.

Just as the stars are thought to exert an influence on our lives so they have inspired writers for millennia. Not only writers, consider all the ways we use stars: – from the gold stars that marked school homework well done, to the star ratings for military generals, books and films, the stars of stage and screen and, in these Olympics weeks, of the sports arena, where star quality and stellar performances shine.

 As for the concept of following your star that stretches from the ancient practice of navigating by the stars to taking advice from astrologers based on your star sign. Even if we don’t believe in astrology most of us nevertheless know our sign (mine is the crab). In his poem ‘Against Astrologers’ John Fletcher (1579-1625), better known as the other half of Jacobean playwriting duo Beaumont and Fletcher, chides the credulous thus:

Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.

Zodiac Clock (Photo by Micky White on Unsplash)

One way or another, however, the star is the guiding light, whether in the sky or in our souls. Our old friend Cicero (see What’s the Story? February 6) devoted a long passage of his treatise On the Nature of the Gods (45 BCE) to an account of the zodiac, using lines from his translation of a Greek work, Phenomena by Aratus of Soli (early third century BCE). The quotes are spoken by his friend Balbus – which enables Cicero to praise his own work! – in defence of the Stoic philosophy which adduces from the natural world proof that the gods exist:

Any one, therefore, who thinks that there is no intelligence in the marvellous order of the stars and in their extraordinary regularity, from which the preservation and the entire well-being of all things proceed, ought to be considered destitute of intelligence himself. 

(from On the Nature of the Gods, II, XXI, trans. Francis Brooks)

By this reading the stars satisfy our pattern-making/seeking impulse and flatter our intelligence. Assigning the shapes of animals to the constellations enables us to tame them to our purposes. Hence our star signs are said to define our characters, our compatible partners and our fates. (Mine is the crab . . .)

In the seventh circle of hell Dante’s pilgrim meets his old teacher, Bruno Latini, who advises him ‘Follow your constellation/and you cannot fail to reach your port of glory’ (Canto XV).[1] Latini follows up with warnings against the enemies who will try to ‘devour’ the pilgrim, evoked in rough earthy images, of rocks, bitter berries and a goat. The stars of glory are remote and aloof from this base squabbling.  

Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash

I was drawn to this topic when recently I came upon the poetry of astronomer Rebecca Elson (1960-1999).[2] Working at Cambridge University her special area of research was star-clusters, using data from the Hubble telescope. At one point in her all-too brief career she thought of abandoning astronomy in favour of writing. Happily for us she didn’t. The wonder of her poetry is the way she presents her scientific work in a lyrical and witty light for the lay reader:  

The way they tell it

All the stars have wings

The sky so full of wings

There is no sky

(from Aberration - The Hubble Space Telescope before repair)

We partake of the same matter as the stars and so, instead of mapping their alignment in the sky through our lives, Elson uploads us into their sphere:

I am telling him how light

Comes to us like water,

Long red waves across the universe,

Everything, all of us.

Flying out from our origins.

(from The Expanding Universe)

And echoing those lines, come these, from her best-known poem, written in the face of her terminal illness:

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself

Into a universe still young,

Still warm as blood:


No outer space, just space,

The light of all the not yet stars

Drifting like a bright mist,

And all of us, and everything

Already there

But unconstrained by form.

(from Antidotes to the Fear of Death)

The ‘long red waves’ of the first poem become the blood of the second. The light ‘like water’ in the first becomes the ‘bright mist’ of the second and where in the first ‘all of us’ are ‘Flying out from our origins’ in the second we are returning, dissolving like sugar stirred into a warm drink, into the ‘not yet stars’. For all that she suggests form is a constraint the poem is held together by its patterned repetition and variation of sounds ‘stir’, ‘still’, ‘stars’, ‘mist’ which enacts that dissolution till outer and inner space are conflated in a thereless there.        

  In ‘Constellations’ she dismisses the traditional anthropomorphic interpretation of stellar configurations as museum ‘specimens’ and chooses instead the energetic and erotic image of lambada dancers (playing on and upending Einstein’s theory of lambda, the ‘cosmological constant’). Space is never still.

  Conversely, writing poetry helped Elson find new ways to express the results of her astronomical research, says Sophie Heuschling:

The poetry she writes, with its vivid imagery and speculative metaphors, encourages her to train her scientific mind. Her poetry fosters a freeing up of imagery, which encourages her to think outside the box.  

(‘Rebecca Elson’s Astronomical Poetry’ Journal of Literature and Science, 12, 2019)

Dark Matter (photo by NASA)

This argument, as the publication’s title suggests, is of a piece with the move to break down barriers between science and art, allowing the two disciplines to be mutually beneficial. Heuschling’s term ‘speculative metaphors’ alludes to the genre of speculative fiction and yet Elson’s work shows that, with imagination, the science can be grounded in our banal daily experience. Our knowledge should be expansive and not constrained by rigid adherence to schools of thought.  

  Examples of this approach include Lucy Kirkwood’s play, Mosquitoes, set in 2008, which translates the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider into a family collision featuring mother and daughter physicists. They might have benefited from family constellation therapy. In Constellations (2012) by Kirkwood’s contemporary, Nick Payne, a physicist, Marianne, and a beekeeper, Roland, run through various permutations of their relationship bearing out her proposition that in the quantum multiverse or we are just ‘particles governed by a series of very particular laws being knocked the fuck around all over the place.’ She asks him to imagine rolling a dice 6,000 times. Despite the apparently random outcome of this theory, it retains the concept of a guiding cosmic principle(s) that shapes our lives.

 Even for Elson the stars retain a metaphysical attraction:

Whatever they turn out to be,

Let there be swarms of them,

Enough for immortality,

Always a star where we can warm ourselves.

(from Let There Always Be Light (Searching for Dark Matter) )

This prayer is the cry of humanity finally acknowledging its perilous state, which would not be news to Cicero and his peers, for whom philosophy was also science. They understood that one day the earth would dry up and the universe expire. As we face that calamity now we have need of artists like Elson who can describe the origins of our universe, and how it will end, in intimate human terms that make both real.

   The final little-known verse of the old lullaby sums up our plight and our hope:

'Tis your bright and tiny spark,
Lights the trav'ller in the dark:
Tho' I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.

[1] The Divine Comedy: Inferno (1314) Trans. Mark Musa, Penguin, 1984.

[2] I found her through the striking work of visual artist, Mary Griffiths, who draws inspiration from Elson’s poetry, see her prints titled for a line of Elson’s poetry here: Mary Griffiths

---

I’m sure the star-gazers among you will have much to add to or correct in this article! So here’s your chance:

---