Rebecca Begins Eating the Earth Again

It is our biological wiring to exist — and then not; it is our psychological wiring to spend our lives running from this elemental fact on the hamster wheel of busyness and the hedonic treadmill of achievement, running from the disquieting noesis that the atoms huddling for a catholic glimmer effectually the shadow of a self will one day disband and return to the "aloof stars" that made them. If we still ourselves for a moment, or are bestilled by circumstance, nosotros glimpse that fact, and so hasten to avoid our gaze. We keep belongings it as an abstraction, an unproven theorem; go on casting spells against the proof in stone and wood and promises; go on building houses and egos, signing xxx-year mortgages, trading the forged mint of forever as contractual currency in marital vows. And and then ane day, some certitude fissures — in the broken surface of a split up lip, a dissever love, a separate in Earth's quaked crust; in the tiresome-burning wildfire of a pandemic, smoking its way across the world until it blazes into a shared inferno; in the cold blade of a final diagnosis, sudden and close to the bone. Nosotros wake upward to unalloyed reality with a scream, a silence, a hollow hallelujah.

The astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson (January 2, 1960–May 19, 1999) was xx-9 when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma — a blood cancer that typically invades people in their sixties and seventies. Throughout the bodily brutality of the treatment, throughout the haunting uncertainty of life in remission, she met reality on its own terms — reality creaturely and cosmic, terms chance-dealt by impartial laws — and made of that terrifying meeting something uncommonly beautiful.

Rebecca Elson, 1987

When she returned her atoms to the universe, not notwithstanding forty, Elson bequeathed to this world 56 scientific papers and a slender, stunning book of poetry titled A Responsibility to Awe (public library) — verses spare and sublime, fatigued from a consciousness pulling the balloon cord of the infinite through the loop of its ain finitude, life-affirming the way only the near intimate contact with decease — which means with nature — can be.

Elson's crowning achievement in verse is the verse form "Antidotes to Fear of Death," beautifully brought to life here as a trailer of sorts for the 2020 Universe in Verse — our annual charitable celebration of the science and splendor of nature through poesy — past astrophysicist, novelist, Pioneer Works Managing director of Sciences, and devoted enchantress of poesy Janna Levin, with music by cellist, composer, and music revolutionary Zoë Keating based on her original soundtrack for The Edge of All We Know — the forthcoming documentary about the Upshot Horizon Telescope, which in 2022 captured humanity'south historic first glimpse of a black pigsty. (Janna works on black holes; Elson was among the select scientists tasked with studying the first images returned by the Hubble Space Telescope, that pioneering emblem of our nigh ambitious tool-making and our longing for intimate contact with the nature of reality.)

Janna prefaces her reading with a Bohrsian reflection on the human relationship between science and poetry, betwixt the objective and the subjective, last with an exquisitely insightful and exquisitely phrased ascertainment of how the tension between these seeming dipoles can dissolve upon closer inspection:

We are all navigating an external world — just only through the prism of our own minds, our own subjective experience… The majesty of the universe is merely ever conjured upward in the heed.

Please enjoy:

ANTIDOTES TO Fright OF DEATH
past Rebecca Elson

Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching night
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe withal immature,
Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a vivid mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already at that place
Simply unconstrained by form.

And sometime it's enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long bequeathed bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: any left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.

Couple with Regina Spektor reading Elson's "Theories of Everything" at the 2019 Universe in Poetry and Janna reading Maya Angelou's cosmic clarion call to humanity at the 2018 Universe in Verse, so join us for the livestream of the 2022 show for more beauty and consolation by calibration of perspective, featuring Neil Gaiman premiering some other original poem, Patti Smith bringing Emily Dickinson to life, astronaut Leland Melvin reading Neruda'south love letter to World's forests, and thirty other magnificent constellations of atoms celebrating the majesty of the universe and the irreplicable splendor of our Pale Blueish Dot.

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Source: https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/04/10/antidotes-to-fear-of-death-rebecca-elson/

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