| The observatory assistant swung around the lens of the giant telescope on top of Armerding Hall, bending over and fiddling with it – up, left, right – all right, now it was ready. It was focused on Saturn’s rings; I had never really seen them before, and they looked yellow and astoundingly delicate in front of the giant, gaseous planet. I found myself cursing (as I sometimes do) the invention of the camera and the textbook – the fact that my eyes were not quite virgin to the sights of space. (It was like that at the orchestra concert on Friday, too – an eerie sense that I would have cried during the Prokofiev if the London Symphony were not always at my fingertips.)
I let the others have a turn at the telescope, and let the assistant show me some of the major stars and planets in the sky. He pointed out Orion and Andromeda and Cassiopeia and the Pleiades and my eyes executed, made pictures out of the clusters of stars. He said, “It’s better if you don’t look at it straight – just look a little to the right or the left, the star becomes a lot clearer.”
I looked a little to the left of Orion’s belt and the points of light (“the silver pepper of the heavens” will always be my favorite descriptor) slid into sharp focus. When I looked back, they began to wink at me, mischievous, mysterious, dancing away.
Over gyros, Dr. Davis said, “Postmodern poetry is only valuable in the way that it shows the brokenness and the mystery of humanity. That’s it – how much you depend on the mystery. I was thinking the other day – look, as you look at me, your eyes are constantly moving. My left eye, my righ eye, the bridge of my nose, maybe my forehead or my mouth or my hands occasionally. Because you can’t see it all. I was thinking about that the other day, when I was looking at my wife. I can’t ever fully see her face – I can’t see the whole. I can focus on a part. And the harder I focus on seeing the whole – the more I have to see a part. But there are glimpses – when I look at you, when I look at her, when we look at other people – when we’re not looking at them directly, usually, we can see their whole faces. It’s the mystery. We see the best when we’re not looking directly. Think of the Bible – there’s so much more that we want to know than is in it. It’s not Dickens – I’d love to have a few more pages on Jesus the boy, or Jesus the adolescent – we have to go to the gnostic gospel of Thomas, if you believe in that sort of thing. I don’t. It unwraps the mystery, and the holy symbolism. It’s only when we’re looking to the side, or through a metaphor, or at our most unconscious that we truly are able to access the mystery and paradox that is Christianity.” |
