The solar system has changed again: it’s all in kilometres now, and all the facts I learned at school are out of synch (oh Bottom, thou are translated). In the planetarium at Greenwich, the lights go down slowly, so slowly, as our eyes adjust to their diminishing, and the dome around us melts into as starry a night as I’ve ever seen, but with a fuzzy, restricted field of vision that makes even the Great Bear unfamiliar.
Sometimes now on the patio in my home in Hampshire, where the trees are tall and intermingle with the houses and there are no streetlights for miles, I see skies like this. Sometimes I think that if the human race kills itself tomorrow as Teasdale and Bradbury foresaw*, the vegetation and the foxes will reclaim these commons within months, and the stars will sharpen once more.
Once, on a sheep station way, way out in the Outback, where the lights of the next homestead were many hundreds of miles over the horizon, I saw stars harder and brighter than anyone in England ever sees; but for that, you need an empty continent. Overflying en route to Sydney, the land was vacuum from Darwin till Alice Springs came into view, a populous, unnaturally symmetrical constellation grounded in invisible hills: is anyone awake in Alice to see it at 3 a.m. on a weekday morning?
But here in the planetarium, my daughter is invisible in the near blackness of the Milky Way, while a disembodied voice spins Greek myths and scientific data about the speed of light and the long drive to Arcturus, interspersed with small scholarly jokes like pinholes in black where the light comes in, as Leonard Cohen** almost said. Yet this microcosmic, blurry galaxy still gives me the vertigo I remember experiencing as a child, realising that only transitory local gravity stops me floating off into the darkness towards infinity. Unimaginable aeons later, would I beat in frustration at the walls of the universe?
Two nights later, drowning my 4 a.m. insomnia in orange juice, I turn off the lights that pepper the ceiling: as they slowly die, gravity fails me at the recollection of distant dizziness.
*Sara Teasdale’s poem ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ and Ray Bradbury’s story of the same name. Not to mention my setting of the poem. Which I may yet record properly.
**’Anthem’