This afternoon, I got to see the "most exciting, transformative rare celestial happening ever" (or at least since the super moon and various eclipses of the past month) through a convenient 11-inch telescope available on campus. Through it I got to observe (but was unable to photograph) the rare Venus Transit which I will now forever and fondly remember as a black Sharpie pen dot on the skin of a very ripe and radioactive tangerine. That's exactly what the view through the scope looked like. Much better images than I could have photographed are available here and compliments of NASA, the best animation and false-color agency in the world.
According to a lot of buzz on the more astrological and supernatural parts of the web, the transit is associated with the return of the Divine Feminine and Aphrodite, Goddess of Love (who according to the lectures I'm listening to right now is not EXACTLY the goddess of love, but more the sexual rapture part of the equation;the Venus Transit is thus a kind of New Age Rapture). How some people will attribute legendary significance to this bit of synchronized clockwork in the sky.
Mark Your Calendar!
Curiously, at about noon, just before the transit started, my own current dreary mood suddenly abated. I had an uplifting chat with a colleague, a professor of history, about decay and death and global warming and zoo pandas and our insignificant place in the universe, although my mood was probably elevated because I had just completed a difficult draft of a document that has an imminent deadline (with drop dead dates and all that.) After a little lunch, I was more than prepared to watch a tiny uninhabitable planet get in the way of our own direct view of the sun.
Never mind that the transit looked nothing like the image above. We stood in line in blazing heat for a chance to peer at our nearest neighbor's day in the sun. And then returned to our air-conditioned offices to look at on-line images, which were much more dramatic. Still, I can say I was there for something that won't occur again for another 105 years.
So, nothing else much on the horizon until my birthday when another big celestial alignment is set to occur. I hope it doesn't mean I'm to be sacrificed or something!
Giza, Dec. 3, 2012.
**And now, in honor of Venus, something else that won't come around again for a long time:
"Hey, Venus Oh, Venus...
...Venus, make her fair A lovely girl with sunlight in her hair And take the brightest stars up in the skies And place them in her eyes for me
Venus, goddess of love that you are Surely the things I ask Can't be too great a task."
During a moment of anger and self-doubt (yes, I have my share), I came across a poem in Shambhala Sun, one of the four free magazine subscriptions I got a few months back for filling out a marketing survey. I should say they weren't exactly free--they came with a $2-apiece shipping and handling charge, but still, eight bucks total for a year of Time, Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, and the aformentioned Buddhist review, not a bad deal really.
Shambhala Sun is probably the only subscription renewal I will likely accept...well maybe Atlantic, but it takes so long to read that one, and so much socio-politics.
Anyway, in one of those moments of synchronicity when it seems as if everything in the universe is converging on a particular place in your own mind or brain or skull, whatever, there came this poem that just spoke to just me. Synchronicity is just being open to everything that's all connected anyway. But in moments of stress, it does feel like the universe is talking to you, and you alone. **********
When they invite you to the party remember what parties are like before answering. Someone telling you in a loud voice they once wrote a poem. Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate. Then reply.
If they say We should get together say why?
It’s not that you don’t love them anymore. You’re trying to remember something too important to forget. Trees. The monastery bell at twilight. Tell them you have a new project. It will never be finished.
When someone recognizes you in a grocery store nod briefly and become a cabbage. When someone you haven’t seen in ten years appears at the door, don’t start singing him all your new songs. You will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second. Then decide what to do with your time. **********
Did I mention anger and self-doubt? Well, we all have moments like that, brought on by pressure or its opposite, whatever that is, (what is it? a sucking vacuum?) that undoes the glue of the things that hold our identities together, the things like marriage, career, health. (And no, my marriage is fine, my health is okay, my career...well, another story.)
In an earlier post about change, where I said how nice it would be to just have a reset command for the shuffle of our life, an issue not completely articulated has to do with free will and determinism. One of the big questions that comes up from time to time. In the Philosophy of Mind audio course I'm "taking" during my morning commute, this issue was nicely dealt with: we do have free will, in a deterministic universe. Kind of like my iPod analogy. We can make all those choices moment to moment, reshuffling, but still there is only a limited library of songs, a limited program, to shuffle.
In addition, we observe how our lives are like and unlike others'. We can identify, or not, with the tragic intellectual tortured by the peasant during the Cultural Revolution; we can relate, or not, to Lucia di Lammermoor, first of the suicidal victims in the opera of the same name, with its archaic Romeo and Juliette plot. (Pretty music though; Friday's performance was enjoyable, pre-Verdi, not so energetic and emotional, except for the madness scene.) Pretty extreme examples, but archetypical plots.
But right now, I think I just want to become a cabbage.
