algol31

you are saying. With Socrates the truth is always revealed to be
elusive, and in his discussion with young Phaedrus Socrates
strongly suggests that the truth emerges not from those who
seem wise and scientific, but from those who seem mad. There
are different kinds of madness, and among them the madnesses
inspired by gods, such as love, poetry and philosophy, are
madnesses in which the world is seen in its reality. The truth, in
this view, is that some kind of divinity inheres in the universe,
and no statement can approach the truth unless it accounts for
that underlying mystery.
The absolute self, that 'you' which is possible to know, is far
more complicated than any of us would like to imagine. In fact,
it is probably nothing like what we believe, and beyond our
capacity to understand by ourselves. The whole notion of "god"
or "gods" is no idle or hasty metaphor for the sentiment, "Gee,
that eclipse is strange." It is not a figure of speech which
happened, tenor twenty thousand years ago, to stick. It is a way
of saying that things happen in the universe which surpass
human comprehension and, at some level, investigation. It is a
way of saying that the nexus of our understanding achieves
something both in and larger than ourselves; to try to see it
would be like trying to view the whole ocean from a dinghy in
the trough of two waves a thousand miles from shore. To have
this view you would need to rise completely above your tiny
dinghy, and the sight would be impossible to describe:
tremendous triangular glistening blue waves, whitecapped,
spray-ridden, extending infinitely in all directions, so extensive
your eyes shut auto-matically, and you realize that the glare of
the Sun on the sea-surface is so bright you have in any case
been blinded, in a colossal prescience of dazzling azure.
That would be a kind of madness to avoid. There would be no
words to represent such an experience. You would be thrown
back on yourself, tiny there in the midst of enormous breaking
rollers. You would know intuitively that the whole of it was
unimaginable to you, and therefore unreal in any objective
sense. It occurred all in your mind, somewhere, deep in the
unsurveyed deserts and boreal forests of your psyche, near its
most violent earthquakes and volcanoes, under Algol.

* * *

There is an aspect of reality which, when glimpsed from just
the right angle, is maddening. Often, as in a nightmare, it is
nothing tangible or solidly visible, but simply a presence or a
force lurking in the brush. Sometimes it is more direct, like the
sudden awareness of exactly how enormous and how empty
interstellar space is. Algol's distance of 100 light years seems in
a relative sense inconsiderable, the entire galaxy being 100,000
light-years across, and the next sizable galaxy being 2.2 million
light years away. But one light year alone is an incomprehensible
span; in fact it isn't even useful to think of a light year as a
distance, which is why we speak of it as a year. The distance to
Algol, mostly blank except for patches of dust and gas, is truly
fearful because it is so unreal.
We come to grips with the dread of such an emptiness by
reducing it to terms more our size. "100" is a manageable
number; its spatial counterpart, 100 years x 180,000 miles per
second (or 100 x 5,800,000,000,000 miles), is not. We create
facts and categories which stand for these colossal notions, and
they seem objective to us because we have reduced the horror
of them. This is not away of knowing ourselves, really, but of
evading ourselves. Socrates would accept this terminology as
easily as he accepted the mythological terminology, and with no
more nor less belief in it. The facts, in other words, are not the
truth.
They are an element of the truth. The second element is that
part of the mind which joins the interstellar void and creates a
monster out of it. The mind plays on the night sky, on
constellations, on single stars, Algol. It is not the spectral class,
visual magnitude, distance in light years, or mass relative to the
Sun that works on the mind; those are merely facts which we
use to comfort ourselves by assuring that stars are not gods but
gases. It's the searing of its light on the inner mind which is

memorable. The sky full of stars is beautiful, and one star, at
least, is frightening. These experiences are all of a piece, at one
point.
I myself have frozen in terror under Algol. I spend as many
clear nights as I can in the alfalfa field behind the barn near my
house. It's a big field, for Maine. Thick maple, popple, pin
cherry, and hophornbeam woods line its two ends, a quarter of a
mile apart. An old cemetery rests beyond the trees on the north
end, and paved camp roads skirt the sides, half a mile or so
apart, with pine woods on the edges of those two roads. The
farmer hays the field two or three times every summer.
At dusk the field is tremendously beautiful. The wind stills.
Swallows and swifts chip and dart, bobolinks sway precariously
on weeds, and on clear evenings the sky goes deep slowly, violet
all along the eastern line of trees, reddening and then silvering
puffy clouds to a profound gray-blue in the west. By late
September the field has that cool nut smell of fallen leaves, the
air is sharp, the alfalfa's cut, and the grass is brown and stiff.
One September night, as on many nights, I drove my truck
before dark into the middle of the field and set up my small
black reflecting telescope. I pulled out the legs of a card table
and a half-shredded lawn chair, and piled on the table a
cardboard sheaf of star maps which I can hardly read, a small
flashlight, binoculars, a planisphere to see what time a star or
galaxy will rise, and a hardbound book with smaller and less
reliable maps. I sat at the card table for awhile, letting the
sunlight fade and the darkness deepen. By September the
mosquitoes have been frost bitten themselves, and that night
the air was dry, and the night sky transpired to that panorama of
crystal fires which burns in the psyche of every human being.
The whole pattern of stars is probably genetically encoded and
inscribed in us as the archetype of heaven.
The more darkness there is, the more sounds there are. The
rush of cars along the Bangor Road was magnified, even though
the trees obscured their lights. Dogs barked occasionally in the
nearby dairy farm, and their voices carried for what must have
been miles. Owls hooted, and loons ululated desperately from
the lake a half mile down the camp road. As always there was
movement sometimes in the alders a football field away, or in
the brush beside the barn. The darker it gets, the louder
everything seems.
With the binoculars I spotted M31, a brush-stroke of flight
southeast of Cassiopeia. This is the nearby galaxy, 2.2 million
light years away. It provides my mind, I fantasize night in and
night out, a comfort in the deep black. This is a fortunate mark
on the map. Sweeping easterly I ran straight into Perseus, and
Algol, the Gorgon's eye, is the lead star.