This Eerie, Starless Sky

This Eerie, Starless Sky  - Cameron Byerly 

Published in St. John College's The Gadfly February 24th, 2016

Suppose, for a moment, that I could pluck a man from Ancient Athens, and bring him to this night. Suppose that I placed him next to me, on a hill overlooking our city. I imagine that he might look above us, then down to the hundreds of lights below, and conclude that we had succeeded in stealing the stars from the sky.

I wouldn't have the heart to disagree.

One often forgets that light pollution is a central characteristic of our night sky. Perhaps a reasonable percentage of us have seen pictures of the sky’s appearance to hikers far from electricity, but I’ve spoken to many that have not. The stars we look to are pathetically lacking compared to the naked sky. Until the 20th century, the sky humanity slept under had thousands of stars we can no longer see.


photo credit: Hong Kong 22° 17' 55'' N 2012-03-23 Lst 14:54 THIERRY COHEN/DANZIGER GALLER

No one seems to talk about that anymore.

To look to the stars is be shot by light. This is not poetry, this is scientific truth. There is not one flicker of starlight you can see in the sky that has not been travelling through space for less than two hundred years, or more than two thousand. And I urge you to remember that this light particle you are receiving is not so much hitting the planet you are sitting on, nor is it hitting your cheek, it is hitting your pupil.

Suppose with me something different, that I were to shoot an ancient Grecian arrow at you from the top of the Parthenon, and you were able to catch it in America. I imagine you would be overwhelmed by three aspects, not including the physical feat. First, you may be overwhelmed that what you now hold in your hands was once far away, in an exotic and distant land so different from your own. Second, you may marvel on the arrow’s historical nature, and how it had aged for hundreds of years, thinking of how different the world was when the arrow was created, and what it had lived through. And finally, you might marvel that the arrow hadn’t just fallen somewhere in the ocean, or even a few feet to the left of you, but to you, and just where you could catch it.

This is what it means to see a single star in the sky. And to look upwards is to see thousands of stars. The pupil is the collision-point of thousands of web-thin strands, connecting all the stars in the sky to you. Picture some strands yellow after two thousand years of travel, and others white with the relative youth of two hundred. The enormity of this no longer frightens me, as I’ve long stopped trying to comprehend it. But the precision? The precision chills me somewhere in the back of my chest.

I look to the sky tonight and I see less than a hundred stars. It was never humanity’s intent to cover the stars, but we have done it all the same. This feels isolating, when considered, and separates us to the entirety of our ancestors. Next time you step outside at night, see if you catch a glimpse below the tree line; there is an honest canary tint hovering above the ground, a thin buttery edge. This is a surprising feat of man in its own right. To walk or sleep beneath stars without these edges of the sky, these yellow reminders of humanity's impact, means to be naked and bullied by the black. Rather than the unconscious feeling of security, somewhere at the center of a snow globe of light built by man, the true night sky makes one feel inconsequential and surrounded, resting on a petri dish in true, complete blackness.

The sky appears simple and two-dimensional at first glance. In reality, it is the most three-dimensional presentation an eye will ever see. While some aspect of me would appreciate more stars in the sky, I must admit that when I look up to either the ancient vastness or modern sparseness of stars, I don’t feel anything but humility, and a curious disquiet.  Historically, I don’t think I’m alone in this.

It seems an integral aspect of our nature to be humiliated by that which we can’t understand, to feel a well-deserved sense of insignificance below a sky bursting with light that could not be explained. I understand a central aspect of our character being how we supplant our own reason in place of this unknown. To present a full sky to a person is to provide a rorschach test to the psyche. Are the lights from the fires of the gods’ palaces, shining through many holes in the fabric of the sky, as was told to the Greek man I have brought? Are meteors embers the gods threw down for amusement, and the Milky Way the ‘River of Heaven’? Are they outlines of heroes and beasts? Should patterns be imposed to the dots, meaning to the ink-blots that you have been stared at too long? Is there a beautiful importance of design to that which is laughably formless?

To understand my discomfort with man’s mind in this new environment, I consider the moth. The moth developed in a world where it used stable light as a foothold in life, relying on the moon and stars as stable light-sources to orient itself forward. To see a moth’s pathetic, repetitive thump against a screen or lamp is to see the perversion of grace, eons of success unable to respond to sudden surplus. I do not congratulate the moth for having more light, it doesn’t need light, light is only a means towards an end. To give it what it wants is not helping it, only spoiling it, and depriving it of its nature. The moth is now no longer a moth, and this realization disquiets me in the same way as when I look to the stars we have stolen from the sky.

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“I remember once a transport from Holland, it came in the middle of the night. 3,000 people arrived, and when they were already taken out of the gas chambers to be burnt, I remember thinking it was a beautiful night, the stars – and 3,000 people died. Nothing happened. The stars are in the same place.”
Toivi Blatt