The stars, while we wonder

I feel slightly scared – and even shy – to say it, but it’s true, I’d never really cared to look at the stars. Like almost everyone around us today, I could blame it on my childhood – on the first English nursery rhyme that was forced into me.

‘How I wonder what you are...’ As soon as ‘wonder’ had been used as a ‘word’, all sense of wonder sublimated (it’s the reason there is no wonder in the questions asked at academic conferences, most of which now begin with ‘I was wondering...’). But it’s just my laziness – it must be my temperament that leaves me uninterested in things that don’t meet me at eye-level or below it.

Gradually, as I came to live in poem and song, where there seem to be more stars than are visible from the earth, I began to tire of them – as one does of the cliché. I will confess that I began to feel something close to pity for them as well, that poetry had taken away their biography by turning them into metaphor and symbol.

No one I knew did business with the stars. Until I met this poem by the American poet Tracy K. Smith:

‘When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said /They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed /In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.’

The verbs stunned me: ‘scrubbed’ and ‘sheathed’. Though Smith doesn’t use the verbs for the stars, the proper noun, and its dividend in the public imagination, abets this reading – we know only one ‘Hubble’, just as we know only one ‘Google’, and through it, like the scientists, we try to see the stars. It is as if the father was a little closer to the stars than the daughter. It’s not the stars that are ‘scrubbed and sheathed’ but the stargazers, the scientists. The room from which they look at outer space is ‘a clean cold, a bright white’. It seems necessary, this cleanness of cold white, before one slips or launches into the dark unknown – as if it were analogous to cleaning or embalming the dead human before they are set off into the powdery unknown of death. Smith calls this outside ‘the never-ending Night of space’.

Against this ‘never-ending’ is the life on earth, all these happening as Hubble looked at the stars: ‘These were the Reagan years’; ‘Prince Charles married Lady Di’; ‘Rock Hudson died’; ‘We learned new words for things. The decade changed.’ One feels overcome by tender pity for the human species, for its mind, its need for antonyms – life on earth defined and periodised into events, pit-stops of the historical mind, different from the life imagined in ‘space’. ‘Space’ – Smith uses the word only once, I think, to summarise what refuses summary. Though the poem is called My God, It’s Full of Stars, we don’t really see the stars. In that sense, the poem is not the Hubble telescope. It refuses to be – for the business on earth is no less interesting: the father reading science fiction, ‘Larry Niven’, ‘drinking scotch on the rocks’, ‘tying postcards to balloons for peace’. The little girl sees, observes, notices. She looks at the engineers the way the men look at the stars; her attention makes them human, and thus of this planet: they are ‘like surgeons’, but also ‘cheerful engineers’, a phrase used almost with jest, as if it could be an oxymoron. ‘Cheerful engineers’ – how language turns them into boys with toys.

How much more the girl sees on the planet compared to how little her ‘father and his tribe’ do when they look outside, ‘bowing before the oracle-eye’ Hubble. ‘The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed.’ Shame – a word used here to express disappointment, for causing disappointment. By using the word, the girl in the poem sees her father and his colleagues from the outside, like the latter do outer space. ‘The second time,/The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is –/So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.’ The stars of the ‘never-ending Night of space’ cannot see, but they can ‘comprehend’. Perhaps because of losing someone close recently, I read these lines that conclude the poem as the difference between life and death – we the living, like the little girl, see the dead, often like ‘cheerful engineers’; the dead cannot see us, but they are ‘so brutal and alive’, they can ‘comprehend us back’.

The writer is an author and poet. Her books include How I Became a Tree and Provincials.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.