Stars

     I had heard that before the time of compasses, conventional navigation, and GPS, sailors used to navigate by the stars.  But when I finally saw the stars for the first time in my life, and I mean really saw them, without any rude interruptions from floodlights, or flashlights, or firelight, and not just a glance, a vague impression of pinpricks or dots, but a good long look, I felt all the emotions our bodies are made to trap, contain, and struggle with, drain away.  My emotions, the things I had spent my life gathering and hoarding together, trying to identify, categorize, and describe, had left me, leaving nothing in their wake, leaving me staring, spellbound, up into the sky.  I had seen stars before, from the street at home, I would shield my eyes from the streetlamp and I could pick out Orion and his belt, Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper, the little one, Saturn, Venus, and sometimes Mars.  But never before had I seen stars like this, the stars, as I stood there thirty miles from Canada, on the shore of a crystal clear lake. 

The act of seeing cannot describe what happened to me that night.  I tipped my head back, and let every feeling I had ever had in my entire life be sucked out of me, into the stars.  I did not feel their loss, I could feel nothing; the stars were flooding my every sense, flooding like a great tidal wave into me, and I was drowning.  I lost track of what was up or down, right or left.  I drank in the stars through my eyes, tasting their unique, crisp sweetness.  There are not just millions and billions of stars, what a cold way to describe them.  There are forests of stars, boatloads, armies. There are as many stars as there are raindrops, or grains of dirt.  There are just enough stars to fill a pair of cupped hands and more than would fit in the deepest ocean.  There are as many stars as there are cells in my body, and I could feel the stars floating through my veins, too, like an addictive substance.  I could hear the stars, like a great symphony, an intricate yet simple melody that never ends and has always been playing.  I could feel this music wash over me, a baptism, a caress. 

I had seen the great paintings of Van Gogh, Monet, El Greco, things considered to be some of the most beautiful works of man, and now, gazing at the stars, I saw what they had been trying to achieve.  No work of man, however great, complicated, advanced, praised, or insightful, could ever accomplish something like the stars.  Not even God, a figment of man’s imagination, because man always has to have the last word, could have designed this. Only the random beauty of nature, which suffers all sorts of insults and plagiarisms by man, could possess the power for this kind of display that reaches inside a person and grabs ahold of their soul.

And I could only stand there, on a dock, feeling, tasting, breathing in, and listening to something that could never be captured through a lens, could never be drawn, painted in its entirety, given justice by description. I thought, when I could think again, how entirely daring humankind had been, to try and name individual stars, to send satellites to blunder heedlessly around up there, and how in the world could anyone navigate by these?

Slowly, little by little, I felt the stars give me back my body, I felt them relinquish my emotions after sampling each and every one of them.  And even more slowly, I felt my soul drift unwillingly back to me, though something was wrong.  The stars stole a piece of my soul while I was distracted, while I was drowning in them.  It doesn’t matter how big a piece it was, first they had stolen my emotions, to examine, tear apart, and scatter, then they had made a souvenir out of my soul.

After several years of thought, I am still pondering this strange occurrence. When I look up at the stars these days, I start to feel myself getting lifted up, becoming weightless, I feel my surroundings slip away.  I feel my carefully compartmentalized emotions tremble in their seats.  And then I trip on a crack in the sidewalk, I feel a bug bite me, someone calls my name. Or worst of all, a light turns on, and then it’s the stars who turn away first.  They could still have that piece of my soul, if so I must go up there and find it someday.  But what if, as the Earth was idly spinning, self-absorbed on its axis, they decided to spitefully hurl it down and see where it landed?  I suppose this means, before I leave, I must search the world and see if it’s hidden somewhere.