Listening To History
“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”
I have always dreamt of space. Science fiction as a genre, was my first true literary love after I learned to read. I loved the action-packed books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. I learned to extend my viewpoint and perspectives as I gained empathy from Isaac Asimov, and to relish the suspenseful intrigue of character development and strange, imagined worlds through the story telling of Arthur C. Clarke and Frank Herbert.
In my dreams as a child, I would often float in the dark tranquility of space. I think the expansiveness of the open sky on a road trip now touches those childhood experiences in a deeply visceral, neurologically electric way for me. Like a star, I feel both completely immersed and enveloped in that largeness yet at the same time, I realize how infinitesimally tiny I am in the scale of life and of the universe.
Space is relative and also a construct. As an artist, like a god or a science fiction writer, I bend its perspective constantly, with no regard for the realities or rules I break. Clouds and stars and nebula all live together in a deep and dreamy sky. Pterodactyls glide over the Very Large Satellite Array in the bucolic high desert of central New Mexico. Those devices listen to the birth of the universe, but do they hear the swoosh of those mighty wings, do they move in their wind? I reach to embrace an expansive universe while also honing in on human scale detail - the need to connect and know where we are in the placement of space. This represents A spiritual conundrum. I can be both big and little in every moment of my life. I yearn to learn how to be at peace with that conflict before the death of this star in history.
