the wholly rational theory that moons and planets accrete from rock and ice. Most ancient people believed the planets were literally gods. They did not invent a metaphor for something theydid not know or even speculate existed. Still, the similarity of the stories of a war in heaven to the bombardment of Saturn and its moons is peculiar. To round out the play of logic with mythology, crater Herschel with its disfiguring splashlike mountains looks remarkably like the scald-wound Hephaestus gave the giant Mimas. But even John Herschel, who in 1847 named the tiny moon his father William had discovered in 1789, never saw the huge crater that was in the 1980s named after him, and so he could not have created that parallel, or figure, out of the mythological story. There can be no rational connection between the sharp-edged craters of Mimas and the wars of the gods and giants. In the same way, there should be no emotional connection between the fact of Mimas andthe descriptive term "dead." Yet if we are paying attention, an emotional connection unfolds whether we like it or not. It's as if deadness is enfolded in Mimas almost before we examine it, the way the story of the catastrophic war in heaven is enfolded in the catastrophic bombardment of the Saturn system almost before the story emerged. To dispel any confusion at this point, we can always return to the empirical facts. Mimas is 243 miles in diameter. It is only slightly denser, overall, than water. It revolves around Saturn once in just under 24 hours, and like most moons in the solar system, rotates with one face always toward the planet. If we could stand on Mimas, Saturn would gleam in the sky across an area 5,000 times the area our full Moon covers in our sky. The rings would be an elongated ellipse before our eyes, at narrowest nine times the Moon's apparent width in the night sky. When Saturn did not obliterate it from sight, the Sun would be about the brightness of a beach bonfire. Ancient mountains surrounding craters would tooth up around us, miles high, at the disconcerting angles in vorticist line drawings. No wind or air or atmosphere or movement of any kind. From this viewpoint it is very difficult not to think of the final stillness of death. The hard, cold facts of existence can be held off only for so long until it becomes clear that they are so hard and cold, particularly in this case, that even despite their distance they are affecting us somehow. And the effect is not of the facts or rocks themselves, but of something they seem to contain that our minds seem somehow to coincide with. They for all intents and purposes mimic something commonly knowable to us. The physical existence of Mimas, specifically that violent and droplike giant crater, seems to mimic or unfold in our minds into the mythological metaphor; if there was ever a fact or an actual image to correspond to Hephaestus disfiguring the giant Mimas, this

crater is it. Similarly, it's inevitable that a scientist or any other human being would refer to Mimas as being "dead," because it mimics death so precisely and purely. Whether Mimas itself is or is not dead becomes almost irrelevant to the sense that it either enfolds or is an unfolding of the condition or state of death, or death itself. There is the sense, when facts and metaphors lead us into the fear these thoughts can engender, that we are not actually talking about the same world science talks about. We are talking about some other order of existence, if the realities of the mind -- including thoughts, emotions, intuitions, other kinds of sensibilities and apperceptions -- can be termed "real." Somewhere, either in the physical object "Mimas" or in the play and reaction of the mind to Mimas, if the two things are different, there is a delusion of powerful verisimilitude. We have been wondering all along not about the physical parameters of the moon Mimas, but about its uniqueness and peculiarities. And having noticed that its peculiarity is that it resembles death, we are face to face with the reality of death, with our own fear of death, and with our need to somehow understand or come to terms with death. To generalize radically, it must be true that death is the one significant preoccupation common to the minds of sentient beings. What happens atthe moment of death, and after death? In scientific terms, these questions are empirically and mathematically unanswerable, and it is commonly extrapolated, therefore, that death is a total and final oblivion, a nothing. Science, in a positivist incarnation still very much current in our age, assumes that where there are no empirical facts, there is nothing. It would be delusive to think there is anything else. Still, a death which is empirically nothing is frightening to most people. Nothing, here, has distinct and effectiveverisimilitude. Perhaps Mimas is so disturbing because for something, it is bewilderingly like nothing. And yet Mimas must have been truly nothing during those times when it was dispersed, with no physical being at all, annihilated by bombardments of mysterious entities from in or outside Saturn's moon system. Then it did not exist at all, eitherin anyone's mind or in empirical fact. But can even this be true? Because the natural history of Mimas is that it has accreted and exploded perhaps five times -- it has lived five different lives. This suggests that even during the absence of a spherical body of rock and ice there was still a potential Mimas -- that Mimas still existed in what we might call an enfolded form in a particular region of spacetime (the vicinity of Mimas' orbital distance from the surface of Saturn), in a particular set of water ice and rock particles in or on their way to that Next page Previous page First page Fires of the Sun home The Mind Errant

Fear of Mimas