A picture hides 1000 words
On capturing a universe unseen
Astronomy is a science rooted in pictures. Our knowledge of the universe grows out of the light captured in our cameras, yet, under the brilliance of vast galactic spiral arms swirls a whole universe of light unseen. We now know a galaxy’s light is dominated by its hottest, biggest stars, which render invisible, even in Hubble’s best pictures, a vast array of tiny fainter stars – 1000 hidden pulsing churning balls of fire for each star we see. Taken together, these hidden stars heavily outweigh the visible ones: the evolution of galaxies is driven less by the light we can, and more by the light we cannot, see.
Sitting alone by a sun-sparkled mountain stream in eastern Oregon in early July, I thought to snap a quick picture and send it to my wife. The scene was so beautiful, and I thought it would say more than some quick text: “It’s so beautiful here - miss you heart emoji heart emoji bearface emoji” – or something like that. I dug my phone out of my pocket, wiped the little bit of pocket sweat off the screen, and shifted around on the rocks a bit, trying a different setting, just that right angle. A picture is worth 1000 words, they say.
I’d been thinking a lot about words, since I was in Oregon for a writers workshop. Words – these complex vehicles layered with meaning – there’s a lot more to them than meets the eye. Like when someone says “No, no, I’m good - let’s do it your way.” Mhm, right. Words carry around with them a great and powerful undercurrent, resonances that can only be felt, rather than seen. You feel that red, scarlet, and cherry are not, despite what the thesaurus says, the same thing. Or like that famous story about the for sale sign: baby shoes, never worn. Or perhaps that “one word poem” I read the other day: Tundra. Words: our efforts to make the unseen seen, flashlights into the vast night of human experience. “Write what you mean, but be aware of the shadows,” my teacher once said.
And I’ve been thinking about all the unseen – behind the scenes – effort to create words. Leisa gets up every day at 5, Jamie wrote each day between 10pm and 1am after the kids were asleep. Picture these typing scribbling margin hour warriors: what’s going on inside their heads? What experiences, what texts, what deep joy or fear drives their pen across the page? Perrin Kerns shares a story about her mother, who always wanted to write, sitting in a play pen in the middle of the living room, her typewriter whirring furiously, kids outside the play pen, doing whatever kids do.
Kids aren’t the only thing she had to keep out. Nothings bursts your will like a barbed offhand comment, a small, but pointedly critical word. Just enough to tap into that vacuous inner space of despair we each, I think, contain. You’re not good enough. These words suck. You suck. I look around me and wonder at all the people forging ahead: what walls, what barricades do they hold against those critical voices, within and without? “Writing is less creative and more courageous,” our instructor had said. I suspect it’s more than writing for which these words apply.
As far as astronomer can tell greater than 95% of the known universe – to say nothing of the unknown universe – consists of material we cannot see. Material we have no access to, other than its effect on the visible world. Material that is dark – a mystery. Ninety-five percent. That’s at least 19 things unseen for every one seen.
I’d attempted to write a few word about the scene I was witnessing, a small pile of stones to mark this little moment in the fabric of space, life, and time. Some nice words, like soft brush strokes, about the lush bubbling scene, the sun-washed pure blue sky, the green brown relief of the mountain ridge, so sharp in the view of my camera it might draw blood if touched. I’d wanted 1000 words to do the picture justice, to emulate the swirl of whites, greens, reds, and blues digitized as pixels on my phone display. A stupid want, really. Because that didn’t capture the 95% of it. Digitized pixels, I find, sometimes hide light. They hid, for example:
The deafening sound of the river, like some middle school symphony that hasn’t learned the musical value of silence, rest, or at least pianissimo. There’s the deep constant base rumble, like traffic on I-94 in Chicago or thunder from lightning that never retreated back to the clouds. But then there’s that higher, lighter splashing sound, like that moment about 5 seconds after you add fresh vegetables to a stir fry, and not just one of these, but a chorus of hundreds, from each direction, each cooking their own life giving – or is it taking? – meal.
I hate horseflies.
Of course, from the moment I finally got out here and sat on this rock, I’ve had to pee when I literally didn’t like 8 minutes ago passing the pit toilet.
I’d gotten an autograph from a writing professor who encouraged me to come to this workshop in the first place. He considered himself a writing evangelist. “People are desperate for story,” he’d told me. “Writing is little beacons to others that let them know: you are not alone.”
It was only later I’d learn that this professor’s father hand been brutally murdered on a trip to withdraw the funds to send him to college. A story which got picked up by a famous author, and launched my professor’s career. “My father’s final gift,” my professor said.
I don’t really care for spiders either.
Speaking of professors, I have to leave this place early, drive 6 hours, take a red-eye, and drive another 5 hours to attend a memorial gathering for my late thesis advisor, Riccardo. Riccardo, when I knew him, walked slowly, and spoke in a raspy, quiet voice, his Parkinson's already diagnosed. While still an intellectual force bundled with incredibly dry humor and a love of prosciutto, I’d only catch glimpses, perhaps something in the eye, of the man who was knighted in Italy, and who built a house himself – in just 52 weekends – because he thought he could.
Riccardo had a story he’d tell about a little photon that left a galaxy millions of light years away. It traveled through space, year after year, avoiding getting absorbed by floating clouds of hydrogen or deflected by a stray dust particle or redirected by a rogue black hole. It traveled through those millions of trillions of miles of space almost entirely in blackness, till it sees in front of it a pale blue dot. The dot gets bigger. Part of it is bright, illuminated, with white clouds on blue and green, and part, directly ahead, is in shadow, pricked by twinkling spots of yellow light. The photon hits the atmosphere at 670 million miles per hour; as it approaches the ground it sees it’s headed toward the opening of a large telescope. It will be detected, contribute to science! Closer and closer it falls, almost there, and then splat, it lands on the ground, mere millimeters away from the telescope opening, just outside the astronomer’s frame.
Just outside the frame of the picture I sent Katelyn is a cabin in need of, among other things, some paint, and with a kinda ugly flag pole in front. A bit of a detraction from the wilderness of the scene. Best to hide it, leave it unseen. Which may, of course, be the problem.
There’s an ant crawling over the knee of my jeans and I keep swiping my hand back to tuck in my T-shirt because my brain keeps creating the itchy prickles of ants in my pants and in the hard to reach spot just back of my left shoulder.
Why do my feet smell like that man on the subway after a rainstorm? Did they always smell that bad? Is this normal aging? Am I dying? Well, yes, I suppose I am, but hopefully not for many years. It makes me a little hollow, and perhaps angry to think about it. Damn death.
Death – what’s behind that curtain? Socrates says that “fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown; since no one knows whether…” – WTF is that bug?! It’s like an earwig and giant tarantula had a baby. Um, maybe I should move farther to the right. Now where was I?
Talking about invisible stuff, I guess, like the white cotton fluff things floating through the air, light passing through them, bubbles under the see of sky, invisible to my Google Pixel camera. They float like confetti; I wonder: what are they celebrating?
Or are they more like snow, the big puffy flakes on a cold, partially sunny day? I sometimes wonder why it so often seems that the nature of life is to be partially sunny. Our best days, like delicious fruit, contain the seeds of our discontent, and our worst days plant deep seeds for future germination.
When you sit on a rock your left butt cheek falls asleep rather quickly.
I’ll have slept in 13 beds in three weeks when I return home. I’m starting to recognize the privilege of the one, comfortable bed that supports me most weeks of the year.
How blind we can be to our painful world of microaggressions, macroaggressions, othering, unkindnesses – intentional and not – that make it difficult for us to live together. Yesterday in my workshop, reviewing an amazing piece by an Nigerian-American author, an older white person said “why don’t you make your names more normal, more American?” Racism can be a death by 1000 cuts.
Why is living close to people so amazing and so fucked up? At least half the people here are channeling their family trauma. Maybe they all are – we all are. What might my future kids write someday? “You just don’t know what people are carrying,” a friend said to me yesterday. No, no you don’t.
Have I mentioned I still have to pee?
The visible wavelengths of electromagnetic light make up only a tiny fraction of the full electromagnetic spectrum. It has only been in the last century that astronomers have begun to develop technologies to observe galaxies at the plethora of other wavelengths, from radio to infrared to X-ray.
“Astronomy is learning to look differently,” I told my friend the other day. “That’s all of what art school was,” was her response. Of course, I thought in hindsight, that’s really just how we all grow: life seen in successive shades of light.