My Hammers: The Telescope and the Pen (Part 1)
On the tools of reflection.
“If I had a hammer. I'd hammer in the morning. I'd hammer in the evening. All over this land….” – Lee Hays and Pete Seeger
I’ve been thinking recently about the tools I use. How do they work? What is their use, and function? And when I use them, what do I accomplish? In my journey from astronomer to author, it’s perhaps interesting that I seem to have just replaced one tube for another: telescope for pen – but, in my quest for light, have found one no less useful than the other.
Telescopes work by gathering light together from many different places, using the curved surfaces of finely polished mirror and lenses to direct light from many angles toward a single point. The collected light combines to form an image of something far away. It’s a clever approach to making visible what we couldn’t see before. Rather than letting light fall to the ground on either side of our eye, it collects the great cosmic rain like runoff to a cistern, from which I might fill my cup.
Good writing, I think, is not that different. It works in the collection of little moments, grabbing those that would have fallen to the ground willy-nilly and directing them to one place, assembling, one word, sentence, paragraph at a time toward an image, before invisible, but now for us all to see.
That is, of course, if we know how. Astronomer Chet Raymo writes that “seeing through a telescope is 50 percent vision and 50 percent imagination.” The collection of light is just half the battle, the rest is left to the interpreter.
The other day one of my writing professors, Dr. Mazza, was handing out books she got for free from publishers. I really wanted one, but you don’t want to be the person whose always obnoxiously putting themselves in the front of things. But then she looked right at me: do you want this one? Sure, thanks. A random choice, but looked interesting. The following night I cracked it open, still crisp in its newness, and started looking through it a bit. Some of it was kinda blah blah and a silly story that didn’t really do anything for me, but then this sentence: “To write is to talk to strangers. You want them to trust you. You might well begin by trusting them…”
When light leaves a star it travels through the vastness of space, light years upon light years, with no clear destination. Where it lands will be a strange world, different by parsecs and megaparsecs from its original home. In the early 1970s Carl Sagan and Frank Drake used the Arecibo telescope to beam the formulas for the nucleotides of DNA toward a glob of stars more than 25,000 light years away, with no control, in the end, where it lands. And this, of course, is the author’s problem, and the problem of all who try to communicate through the great voids of our existence. In the end we have only the message, and we must trust to what others might make of it.
To be continued in two weeks!