One Weird Night: A Short Story

Janine is a heavy sleeper. I read somewhere years ago of a house getting blown up in a gas explosion. The only occupant was asleep in bed at the time. The explosion had blown the bed, with him still in it, up in the air and out into the street where it landed, still right way up. I truly believe that if this happened to Janine, she'd go on sleeping. Pedestrians would have to walk round her and cars pull out to avoid her until she woke up, as she usually does, if she doesn't set both her alarm clocks, sometime mid-morning. When I told her this, she gave me a withering look. She pointed out that she was the brains of the outfit, the one with the job. If she was hard to wake up it was because she was the one who needed her beauty sleep. Who was I to argue? She was right.

Me, I wake up at the slightest thing. If Janine rolls over, or the beams creak as the house cools down, or the cat jumps off the kitchen table downstairs with a soft thud, I'm likely to wake up with a start. And once I'm awake, there's no getting back to sleep. I can lie awake for hours. I'm not making light of it: insomnia can make your life a misery I know but, to be honest, it doesn't bother me as long as I don't have a busy day coming up. I quite enjoy it. Being awake when most people are asleep means your phone doesn't ring and you're free to spend your time as you wish. People generally hold to the view that we sleep night in order to lead fulfilling lives during the daytime. I take a rather different view. It's my belief that everything we do during the day we do to prepare ourselves for the seven or so hours we devote to sleep or, if we can't sleep, solitude. Night is my favourite time of day.

Janine and I always sleep with the bedroom window slightly open. I suffer from asthma and a constant flow of fresh air helps me breathe. Of course, it does mean that I'm more likely to be woken up by passing aeroplanes and barking dogs but being able to breathe is more important than being able to sleep and, as you probably realise by now, I don't mind that much about being woken up. The other night, though, I was disturbed by what sounded like someone moving about in the garden. I thought I could hear footsteps walking through the dead leaves that tend to swirl in piles on the lawn at this time of year. Twigs cracked. I got up and went over to the window. The moon was out, the sky was clear – it was one of those nights when you can see almost as clearly as you can in daytime. There was no-one out there as far as I could see but, just to make sure, I decided to go downstairs. I'd get a better view, I thought, through the patio doors.

I pulled on a jumper over my pyjamas and took the old cricket bat I keep for such eventualities out from under the bed. I could never bring myself to actually hit anyone with it but I hope the sight of it might scare people off. Okay, it's probably not a good plan. I hurried downstairs. I pulled back the curtains and peered out of the patio windows. Nothing. Perhaps, I thought, the sounds had been made by an animal – a fox, or even a badger. Moving about without being seen was second nature to them. I decided to go outside and take a look around.

I slipped my shoes onto my bare feet and let myself out through the patio doors. Our garden, like all the others in the terrace, is a long, narrow strip of land. I've never been a keen gardener. Neither has Janine. I did make something of an effort, once, though. As a result, a line of planters made out of old car tyres painted white still stands along the edge of the patio. They've been full of weeds for the last year or two. Janine says I really ought to do something about them but neither of us goes out into the garden much. Beyond the patio, there's a lawn. One thing I do still do is mow the lawn now and again. A forest of bushes stretches beyond it that gets more ill-kempt the further away from the house you go. Right at the end there's a patched-up wooden fence. Beyond the fence lies the canal tow-path and beyond that, the canal. I made my way across the lawn, half-expecting some animal hiding in the shadows to break cover and run for it. I carried on through the bushes, past a rotting pile of grass-cuttings, all the way to the fence. I stood – I'm not sure for how long – gazing over it at the dark, shiny surface of the canal.

I turned back to the house. A rectangle of yellow light on the upper floor told me I'd forgotten to turn off the bathroom light when I went to bed the previous evening. Windows lit up like that always remind me of my childhood, of playing out with my friends, and of coming home in the evening at the last possible minute, or possibly a few minutes later. My mother would be running a bath, assuming, probably rightly, that I'd be covered in mud. It crossed my mind that if I were living in the kind of story I used to read back then, I'd go back into the house now and back to bed. I could imagine how it might go:

 

After what seemed like only a few minutes, he thought he could hear noises coming from the garden again. He jumped up and ran to the window. The moon was still high and there was no doubt about it this time. Someone was moving about in the bushes at the bottom of the garden. He picked up the cricket bat again and hurried downstairs. Looking out through the patio doors, he saw that whoever it was had left the bushes and was now walking across the lawn towards the house. It was a man. He was carrying a cricket bat. To his horror, he realised it was himself. Powerless to stop himself, he opened the doors and walked out across the patio, passing his oblivious, zombie-like alter ego walking in...

It would almost certainly go like that. The writer would have him trapped in some sort of weird time-loop. He'd have no life beyond the house, the garden and the moonlit canal. Janine, like a princess in a failed fairy story, would sleep for ever.

Dominic Rivron

Read More

Weird Physics

I’m writing this in the week that we lost Professor Peter Higgs who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2013 for discovering the Higgs Boson (The God Particle). I wrote about this in a blog a few months ago. Here is the link: God

That, in itself, is weird but it gave me the idea to have a brief look at some other aspects of physics that are even weirder but I decided that I would miss out gravity, time dilation and Quantum Entanglement to concentrate on the following and I have to thank Daisy Dobrijevic, Space.com for most of it.

The double-slit experiment is one of the most famous experiments in physics and definitely one of the weirdest. It demonstrates that matter and energy (such as light) can exhibit both wave and particle characteristics — known as the particle-wave duality of matter.

Christian Huygens was the first to describe light as travelling in waves whilst Isaac Newton thought light was composed of tiny particles. Thomas Young designed the double-slit experiment to put these theories to the test.

Light passes through the slits. On the far side of the divider, the light from each slit diffracts and overlaps with the light from the other slit, interfering with each other.

If you were to carry out the same experiment and fire grains of sand or other particles through the slits, you would end up with a different pattern on the sensor screen.

If you block off one of the slits, so it is just a single-slit experiment, and fire photons through to the sensor screen, the photons will appear as pinprick points on the sensor screen, mimicking the particle patterns produced by sand in the previous example. From this evidence, we could suggest that photons are particles.

If you unblock the slit and fire photons through both slits, you start to see something very similar to the interference pattern produced by waves in the light example. The photons appear to have gone through the pair of slits acting like waves.

But what if you launch photons one by one, leaving enough time between them that they don't have a chance of interfering with each other, will they behave like particles or waves?

At first, the photons appear on the sensor screen in a random scattered manner, but as you fire more and more of them, an interference pattern begins to emerge. Each photon by itself appears to be contributing to the overall wave-like behaviour that manifests as an interference pattern on the screen — even though they were launched one at a time so that no interference between them was possible.

If you fire photons through both slits whether it be all at once or one by one, they appear on the sensor screen in a wave-like interference pattern. It's almost as though each photon is "aware" that there are two slits available. How? Does it split into two and then rejoin after the slit and then hit the sensor? To investigate this, scientists set up a detector that can tell which slit the photon passes through.

Again, we fire photons one at a time at the slits, as we did in the previous example. The detector finds that about 50% of the photons have passed through the top slit and about 50% through the bottom, and confirms that each photon goes through one slit or the other. Nothing too unusual there. But when we look at the sensor screen on this experiment, a different pattern emerges.

When the detector is turned on, the photons produce a particle-like pattern on the sensor screen. This pattern matches the one we saw when we fired particles through the slits. It appears that monitoring the photons triggers them to switch from the interference pattern produced by waves to that produced by particles.

If the detection of photons through the slits is apparently affecting the pattern on the sensor screen, what happens if we leave the detector in place but switch it off? This is where things get really, really weird.

Same slits, same photons, same detector, just turned off. Will we see the same particle-like pattern? No. The particles again make a wave-like interference pattern on the sensor screen.

When the detector is switched off the photons make a wave-like interference pattern on the sensor screen. The atoms appear to act like waves when you're not watching them, but as particles when you are. How? Well, if you can answer that, a Nobel Prize is waiting for you.

This video may help. My hero Professor Jim Al-Khalili has a go in: Double-slit experiment explained

This may not explain things:

Probably a Poem about Quantum Mechanics

I
In Classical Mechanics
a reader is presented
with words forming a pattern
on a single page
and by following the lines
formed by these words
will confidently expect
that at the end of the last line
there will be a verse

II
In Quantum Mechanics
a reader is invited
to close their eyes
as words are printed
on a single page
then when told to look
will see a familiar pattern
and by following the lines
will confidently expect
that at the end of the last line
there will be a verse

III
In Quantum Mechanics
a reader is encouraged
to keep their eyes open
and observe a word
while it is being printed
such encouragement may be needed
as the act of interacting

with any word in any way
will lead to the collapse
of the verse pattern
and thus a poem may
or may not occur
we just don’t know

First published in The Journal, August 2019

Thanks for reading, Terry Q

Read More

Weird - In My Crazy Dreams

‘Venus is the only planet that spins clockwise.’ Is that weird? As long as it doesn’t knock me over, I don’t care. I don’t take much notice of planets, apart from what the National Curriculum sets out to teach children, but I don’t think Venus is alone there. It might be Uranus that also spins clockwise, something to do with toppling over on its axis. No? Well, that will be just me on my statin induced weird dreams, then.

I blame the statins, like I do for everything else, but it could be the chocolate. Just try Cadbury’s ‘Darkmilk’, though maybe not too much before bed. I’m not having nightmares, thank goodness. My dreams are vivid and just weird, sending me into odd situations, like trying to figure something out at work in a dental surgery. I retired nearly three years ago, and I didn’t work in surgery, I was on reception. I dream about my family, including those who have passed away. Years ago, when I was having chemo, I regularly dreamt of going into a room full of people. It was welcoming and cosy. I was greeted with affection. This was where I belonged. The people were my family, my passed away family. There was my mother, young and pretty as I remembered her before she was ill, and my grandparents with aunts who were special to me, taking me into their fold. The dream was always much the same and with the same missing person. My dad wasn’t there. It upset me to think that if I died, my dad wasn’t waiting for me. It was disturbing, to say the least, as if there wasn’t already enough going on. It was just a very weird, recurring dream brought on by the chemicals that helped to save my life. As I recovered, I stopped dreaming so much and stopped worrying.

Imagine waking up in a spotlessly clean and tidy bedroom, bathed in sunlight filtering through tilted blinds. Outside, the neighbour who never speaks to anyone, smiles and calls out a cheerful ‘good morning’. On the main road, a few cars go by, carefully observing the twenty mile per hour speed limit and the pavement slabs are even with no trip hazards.

This would be too weird for words – or I had died and gone to Heaven.

Meet the Weird-Bird

Birds are flyin’south for winter.
Here’s the Weird-Bird headin’ north,
Wings a-flappin’, beak a-chatterin’,
Cold head bobbin’ back ‘n’ forth.
He says, “It’s not that I like ice
Or freezin’winds and snowy ground.
It’s just sometimes it’s kind of nice
To be the only bird in town.

                           Shel Silverstein (1930 – 1999)

Thanks for reading, Pam x

Read More

Weird: The strange, unusual and surreal

There’s a lot of weirdness that has shaped my life, ultimately influencing the creative work I produce: Dad constructing non-conventional furniture, Psychology Today and National Geographic magazines and last but not least the Surrealists.

I have written about my father before. My blog Luggage had a photo of him strapping a pile of furniture four feet high onto the roof of the blue Buick during our family vacation. This in and of itself was weird and almost could have been likened to a mobile assemblage artwork. Much of the furniture that he brought home from that trip was eventually transformed. Wood was stripped, revarnished or painted and chairs were caned with loving hands.

About ten years later, Dad (a Presbyterian minister) went above and beyond, and decided to dismantle a church organ (not from our church) with all its bells and whistles and reassemble it in a spare bedroom in our house. My guess is he had caught wind of the instrument in need of a home through his professional connections.

Now this activity could have been deemed a bit weird, it was certainly unusual – none of my friends had a church organ in their bedrooms but it was ‘normal’ in our household and I revel in that memory.

With the leftover wooden pipes, he made two coffee tables. One of them graced our lounge where the latest issues of Psychology Today and National Geographic were carefully placed for leisurely light reading. Both of these publications I would regularly peruse. I found Jung’s philosophy to be particularly interesting and the photographs that appeared on the pages of both magazines were serious eye candy.

The creation of the pipe organ tables showed me how to use objects in a way not originally intended. Add this to an interest in unusual old objects (thanks to my parents), the inspirational imagery from the magazines as highlighted above along with an introduction to Jungian theory focusing on the unconscious, made for my own unconscious gravitational pull towards the Surrealists when I was doing my undergraduate study in Art.

We have André Breton and his colleagues (i.e. Dalí, Duchamp, Man Ray) to thank for the Surrealist movement established in the early 20th century. The Surrealists are known for their juxtaposition of diverse imagery, influenced by the unconscious often from dreams manifesting in various imaginative creative outputs including: paintings, sculpture using the found object (objet trouvé), collage, film and of course poetry.

Sarane Alexandrian writes:

the surrealists set out…to create new demands on reality…to liberate the workings of the subconscious, disrupting conscious thought….creat[ing] a new form of sensibility….it set poetry at the centre of everything, and used art to make poetry into something which could be seen and touched…

Michel mentions that if one takes surrealist imagery/poetry at face value, that the creative works appear to be weird and random. He also puts forward how these types of artworks resist simple meanings and concrete interpretations. The Surrealists he says:

confronted viewers and readers with bizarre imagery that avoided no fixed cultural meaning or else subverted established meanings….One might argue many don’t accept that life doesn’t make sense…

Thus, it seems that the Surrealists’ audience back in the day and perhaps today as well, had issues with the works because of their weirdness and non-depiction of a known reality - a fear of the weird, Fear of the Surreal, as Michel’s blog post title is called. I got lost in further reading about the Surrealists for this article, definite food for thought, however I became distracted as I began to reflect on my own work, my own weirdness and creative development.

Untitled (Alarm Clock Case) 1983

In my first drawing class at university I was making juxtaposed images such as a cigarette metamorphosing into a pencil. Later in my third year I used a box full of alarm clock cases found at a local thrift store as foundations to create a series of 15 artworks (see example above). These were to be a pivotal series. I continue to use clocks today in my work.

Insect Hotel (Grandfather Clock Case)Manchester Museum 2020

My later assemblage works purposefully make connections between different elements, like visual poetry. They often tell non-linear stories focusing on place and identity. In the case of the Insect Hotel, created during my Artist in Residence at Manchester Museum in 2020, I also incorporated poetry into the work as well and created a collection of insect themed poems.

Insect Hotel Detail Manchester Museum 2020

Often with surrealist art and my own assemblages because the viewer can’t read the works with immediate recognition other than a main object/s (i.e. clock shape) they will not take time to explore and discover the many layers of meaning and connections within them – this also goes for some types of poetry. It’s taking time with a creative piece. There’s no wrong or right way to read something no matter how weird, although one might think there is. Everything is open for interpretation and each viewer brings their personal experience when engaging.

Enough rambling - to finish off, I thought I’d have a go at creating more weirdness, surrendering to the unconscious through automatic writing, one of the Surrealists’ methods of creating poetry. I found this not as enjoyable and more difficult than other Surrealists’ methods I have experimented with (collage and blackout poetry). It was an interesting exercise and quicker to do than the other types. I set a timer for two minutes, with the first two, and three minutes for the last. Here are the results:

1)
what moon bright star
giraffe feet clumsy
sink into soil a sandpit
a dark hole swallow
whole and grains like
timer oh the flowers arched
droop stems petals are
gone as dust flies into the
wind my eyes pop out roll
along the hill on a journey beyond
the horizon

2)
homeward bound dogs run past
the prairie dogs on grass by
trees alone she stands among
men who circle the feet with
dogs barking cars racing down the
long straight road to nowhere
somewhere another she lights a
fire to keep warm opening a tin
of beans

3)
onto the shore seaweed slime
open eyes diamonds shine
red or white at night and day
squint moon squint
can you see through black abyss
the owl fluffs its wings
brown speckled feathers
one is lost floating free
to land in moss and fungi
ants crawl spiders weave
squirrels climb the cat stalks
rodents hide

Thank you for reading, 

Kate J

Sources
Alexandrian, S. 1989. Surrealist Art. 2nd Edition. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd Cambridge Dictionary, 2024
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/weird Accessed 14 April
Language is a virus, 2024. Automatic Writing.
https://www.languageisavirus.com/creative-writing-techniques/automatic-writing.php 
Accessed 14 April
Michel, L., 2023. Fear of the Surreal.
https://countercraft.substack.com/p/fear-of-the-surreal Accessed 15 April 2024

Read More

Stars

When you look up at the stars they sometimes seem to be within touching distance. This may be due to their familiarity and reliability of always “turning up” in the sky. According to NASA each star has at least one planet rotating around it and some of these may be able to support human life. The planets that could support human life are known as exoplanets and they must be in the “Goldilocks zone” – not too hot, not too cold, just right. 

However, there is an exoplanet called Proxima Centauri b which could sustain human life and is located near the closest star to Earth, the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri which is 4.25 light years away. This is some distance to say the least. To put this into perspective, if such a journey to Proxima Centauri b was conducted using Apollo11 technology it would take 100,000 years to get there. 

False colour image of Proxima Centauri taken from the Hubble Space Telescope 2013.
The bright lines are diffraction spikes.

These days space vehicles are faster and Nasa’s Parker Solar probe has reached speeds of 400,000 miles an hour, which is 0.67% of the speed of light, as it travelled towards orbiting the sun. Even at this speed, it would take 6,300 years to get to Proxima Centauri b, requiring a multi-generational crew.

Such a crew would have to be carefully selected and issues like pregnancy rates, fertility, prevention of inbreeding, illness, collision and accidents among others would need to be considered. An algorithm called Heritage worked out the minimum number of spaceship crew needed for such a journey would be 100 settlers or 50 breeding pairs of males and females to ensure humans made the 6,300 year journey. Once in Proxima Centauri b there is no guarantee it would be habitable for humans so there is an element of risk as there will be no return journey to Earth.

Clearly interstellar travel will require some speedier form of transport if journey times are to be drastically reduced. Fusion rocket spaceships powered by nuclear fusion reactors may reach 10% of the speed of light but would take several thousand years to reach the Proxima Centauri star.

Image of NASA’s Discovery 2 Fusion Rocket concept

Intriguingly, there is an engine called the Helical engine which was proposed by NASA scientist Dr David Burns in 2019. This engine could, in theory, travel at 98% the speed of light at which relativist time dilation would be apparent, thereby making time pass slower for those travelling compared to those not travelling, such as people on Earth.

Travelling to Proxima Centauri using the Helical engine spacecraft would take only seven months whereas for those on Earth the journey would seem to take 4.25 years. However, the Helical engine defies the laws of physics and may never be realised.

The star Proxima Centauri is better observed from Earth’s southern hemisphere. However, if we look at the Orion constellation in Earth’s northern hemisphere, we can see that the interstellar distances involved are even greater. When viewing the Orion constellation it is best to look for Orion’s Belt, the three stars that appear to be in a straight line. From Earth, these three stars seem to be close together, but they are far apart.

For example, Alnitak, on the left-hand side of Orion’s belt is 800 light years away. Alnilam, in the middle of Orion’s Belt is 1300 light years away. Mintaka, on the right-hand side of Orion’s Belt is 900 light years away. Even travelling at the speed of light it would take hundreds of years to reach these stars and it would require multi-generational space craft and space crews to reach them. The same would apply for Betelgeuse at 550 light years away and Rigel at 860 light years away.

Of further difficulty for interstellar space travel is the fact that the universe is expanding. Galaxies are moving further away from each other so that even if we could travel by the speed of light, we would never reach them because they are already too far away. The question as to what the universe is expanding into can be viewed by the analogy of baking a ball of raisin bread dough. As the dough leavens, it expands but the raisins within do not.

In essence, the raisins move further away from each other in all three dimensions. From a single raisin’s point of view, local raisins move away slowly, intermediate ones move quicker and the furthest move fastest of all. The bread mimics the fabric of space and the raisins mimic individual galaxies in an expanding universe.

However, theories as to what the universe is expanding into include that the universe is expanding into a higher dimension which cannot be seen or comprehended. The universe could also be stuck in a black hole of a bigger universe and from which it cannot escape.

Image of a map of the known universe

It has also been suggested the universe will expand until the galaxies and stars are so far apart there is only darkness left. If the universe expands too quickly it may tear itself apart. The universe may also collapse due to gravitational forces reasserting themselves.

It may be that the universe is expanding into itself. That the universe is all there ever has been, all there is and all there ever will be. In essence, the universe is all the matter, radiation, particles and all the emptiness and nothingness of space and time itself.

From this viewpoint there are no boundaries or spaces to expand into as the universe does not require them as it is expanding into itself and it will expand into itself for all eternity and infinity. So, the next time someone asks you what the universe is expanding into you can say the universe is expanding into itself. Nothing more, nothing less.

To Proxima Centauri

We are travelling, we are
on our way to a new galaxy,
a new dawn, a new day,
past conglomerations of
constellations, old stars
viewed from new perspectives
as we become interstellar
detectives, with curiosity and
resolve we will watch the
new solar systems evolve
before our eyes and record
and collect data for those who
follow us later and follow us
they will to make history and
resolve the mysteries of life
as they unfurl in the
expectations and revelations of
distant stars and different worlds.

Thanks for reading the blog and the poem. Please leave a comment as they are all appreciated.
Dermot Moroney 2024

Read More

Photographing The Stars

"Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood ". Ah yes, that was when I taught English and Drama at a comprehensive school in north London in the late 1970s.  And there and then is where I set today's somewhat fictionalised cautionary tale. Thanks, by the way, to Bob Dylan for the kick-off quote, which also opens his song "Shelter From The Storm" (from 'Blood On The Tracks', my favourite Dylan album, if you wish to check it out).

Justine (not her real name) was a student in my A-level English class. She didn't go a bundle on D.H. Lawrence ('The Rainbow') or Thackeray ('Vanity Fair'). I wondered if that was because she was Canadian, too culturally removed. Her father was on assignment in London working for some record company (EMI possibly). It did occur to me that maybe those novels were just too long for her transatlantic attention span! But she didn't much like William Blake either ('Songs of Innocence and Experience'), couldn't accept that the poet saw and conversed with angels. And as for Shakespeare...

In fact she didn't have a lot of time for English Literature, period (as she would have put it). Art was what she did have an enthusiasm for, her main subject. I think economics was the third one but I'm not sure. Her attendance and attention were sporadic at best over the course of eighteen months. She came across as a rich girl doing us a favour by filling in time in class, when what she really wanted to be doing was photographing the stars.

expensive camera gear

Mummy was said to be an actress, though she might as well have been from Arcturus, she seemed so spaced out on the occasions I saw her at parents' evenings. Daddy was clearly firmly of this planet, and concerned for his daughter's prospects, though he indulged her, bought her a load of expensive camera gear, including a home darkroom, and through his industry connections got her on the invite list for a raft of gigs in London, which had a thriving punk and new wave scene going at the time, and which proved a constant distraction from her studies.

Justine, it seemed, was fixated on becoming a rock photographer, a female Mick Rock or Anton Corbijn (two rising stars of the medium). I don't know if she'd heard of Jenny Lens who was making a name for herself in Los Angeles and New York at the same time, covering the emerging US punk scene, or Lynn Goldsmith who left Elektra Records in New York in the mid-1970s to concentrate on rock photography. 

Justine derived her simple self-belief from the DIY ethos of the punk bands she photographed and though she'd tried submitting her work to the music press, it seemed the editors were less than impressed. In truth it was (and probably still is) a highly competitive field and you have to have talent. I know personally of only one female photographer from that era who managed to establish a lasting reputation in the field, and that is Penny Smith. 

To move this story on, Justine's father apparently decided to break his daughter's cycle of rejections by arranging for her to be the official photographer for a newly signed band on the label he worked for. She was to go on tour with Slowly Boiling Frog, document their shows and offstage antics and shoot the cover for their debut long-player. This was, conveniently or otherwise, in the Easter holidays just months before A-level exams.

Hearsay is that the project didn't go well. Justine never retuned to school after Easter. I gathered from the rumour mill of her school friends that she's had some sort of breakdown, possibly involving sex and drugs, and that her father had placed her in a sanitorium in Switzerland. 

As for Slowly Boiling Frog, nothing much was ever heard again. I surfed the net for any information and all I could turn up was one very poor quality unattributed photograph. I wonder if...

Slowly Boiling Frog

The last I heard from or about Justine was a postcard that arrived addressed to me at the school bearing a Swiss stamp. It read: "The stars are very beautiful here. Their color amazes me. I have finally seen angels. I thought you would like to know. J"

I'm not sure why I decided to share all that with you. I hadn't given her any thought in nearly half a century. Of that class at least one went on to become an author and another appeared on the Christmas series of University Challenge a few years ago. I'd like to think we are all stars in our own nighttime.

the real stars

In lieu of a new poem this week, I'm linking you to something I posted seven years ago because it contains one of my favourite poems, 'Stephanie Re-Maps The Stars'. If you've not read it before (or even if you have) please take a look. The blog is hyperlinked here and is called: Saturday Night Surveillance

Finally, as a musical bonus, a beautiful song by one of my favourite bands of that long ago era. I'd happily have this played at my funeral. It's by the fabulous Plummet Airlines and it's titled: Stars Will Shine.

Thanks as ever for reading my stuff, S ;-)

Read More

Stars

Back in my twenties I used to work nights and sometimes during my break used to go outside at about 3 am and look at the stars and wonder. One night I brought in binoculars and eagerly pointed them at the clear sky. I was staggered. All I could seem to see were points of light surrounding me. I got a bit claustrophobic and gave up. So, it’s just as well I never had the chance to experience images from the James Webb Space telescope.

If I had just kept to my own vision I could have, over the years, counted about 5,000 stars and not known the names of more than half a dozen which is a bit pathetic.

Prehistoric star maps were found in the Lascaux Caves in France dating from 15,000 BCE and a possible image of Orion on a mammoth tusk is dated to, at least, 30,000 BCE. Except that all those years ago the stars would not have had names.

 

5,500 year old Sumerian Star Map

We are, as usual, indebted to the Sumerians (see above) and Mesopotamians for starting this practice. A practice that developed through the ages until it was recorded in the First Dictionary of the Nomenclature of Celestial Objects in 1983, that there well over 1,000 different naming systems then in use, mostly for faint objects studied by professionals. Its editors despaired of the list ever being made orderly, reasonable, or complete.

In 2016, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) organized a Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) to catalogue and standardize proper names for stars. Composed of an international group of astronomers, the WGSN is expected first to delve into worldwide astronomical history and culture, with the aim of cataloguing traditional star names, and approving unique star names with standardised spellings.

In 2019, the IAU organised its IAU 100 NameExoWorlds campaign to name exoplanets and their host stars. An additional two star names were approved on 4 April 2022. In June 2023 an additional 20 names where approved in the NameExoWorlds 2022 campaign bringing the current total to 471 named stars.

But hang on, I can hear some folk say, there are companies that advertise they will name a star after you or a loved one for about £50. You get a certificate and papers.

A myriad of stars in the constellation of Virgo (seen via the James Webb telescope)

Name-It-Yourself Stars Are a Hoax.

With just as much validity, you can step outside on a clear night, choose any star you like, and name it for anyone you want. For free.

One of the companies advertises that it keeps the star names in a Swiss bank vault, as if that means something. If that appeals to you, you can put a piece of paper with a star name in your own bank's safe-deposit box.

Only the IAU can officially name stars, and that’s it. So these companies will, most likely, sell you the same star they have already sold a hundred times over. Who’s going to check?

There isn’t one single thing about it that you couldn’t do yourself. Pick a star at random, name it, Google a star map to it, print that out on nice paper, mount it in a nice frame with a nice matte board.

Sometimes planetariums "sell" stars on their domes to help raise needed funds. They are careful to tell donors that the certificate they get denotes a contribution to a worthy institution, not the purchase of a real star name.

The Pleiades (seen through binoculars)

I rather fancy a ‘named’ star in the Pleiades as it’s one of the only constellations I can recognize.

The Pleiades

By day you cannot see the sky
For it is up so very high.
You look and look, but it's so blue
That you can never see right through.

But when night comes it is quite plain,
And all the stars are there again.
They seem just like old friends to me,
I've known them all my life you see.

There is the dipper first, and there
Is Cassiopeia in her chair,
Orion's belt, the Milky Way,
And lots I know but cannot say.

One group looks like a swarm of bees,
Papa says they're the Pleiades;
But I think they must be the toy
Of some nice little angel boy.

Perhaps his jackstones which to-day
He has forgot to put away,
And left them lying on the sky
Where he will find them bye and bye.

I wish he'd come and play with me.
We'd have such fun, for it would be
A most unusual thing for boys
To feel that they had stars for toys!

                                          Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

Read More

Furthest, Fairest Things

Furthest, fairest things, stars, free of our humbug,
each his own, the longer known the more alone,
wrapt in emphatic fire roaring out to a black flue.
                                                                   Basil Bunting, 'Briggflatts'

When I was was a kid, somebody bought me The Observer's Book of Astronomy, one of many books written on the subject by the late Patrick Moore. I was intrigued by the pictures of constellations, although I must admit I spent more time looking at the book than into the night sky. More than once, I must've thought it would be interesting to be an astronomer, but I was lousy at maths and just don't have the sort of mind that's good at remembering long lists of names (I tried a few times to memorise the main features on the moon, but they never stuck).

Years later, when I moved to the Yorkshire Dales, I found myself living in an area free of light pollution. For most of my life, the sky had been no more than an orange haze. All of a sudden, there was so much to see.

I got hold of a star map (the Observer's Book had disappeared a long time ago) and actually managed to memorise a few constellations: Orion, Cassiopeia, Taurus, Cygnus, Auriga, Draco, Leo. It felt good, being able to recognise them, just as it did to know the names of the local hills. And it's not just the constellations: there's a lot of other things up there you can discover without a telescope, too. Peripheral vision is more sensitive to light than central vision. You may know this trick already, but if you don't, try looking just to one side of the second star in the handle of The Plough (look at it out of the corner of your eye, in other words) and you can see there are, in fact, two stars. A binary system. (In fact, there are four stars, but only two are visible to the naked eye). 

Talking of such things, Andromeda, I discovered, is a good constellation to know: the Andromeda Nebula (M31 pictured above) is the nearest major galaxy to our own and if you can recognise the constellation, it's easy to locate the nebula from it. If you know where to look on a very dark night, you can just make it out in the corner of your eye. Binoculars reveal it to be a mysterious-looking smudge. As for seeing our own, the Milky Way Galaxy, we're in it, of course, but as everybody knows, at the right time of year on a dark night you can see the distant, inner part of it as a long, silvery band stretched out across the sky. When it's really dark in the Dales, you can even make out the dust-clouds near it's centre. It's like your standing on the outskirts of a forest, staring into its depths: the stars you see when you look up are the foreground, the individual trees that immediately surround you; the distant band of the Milky Way, the green-brown haze of the more distant trees that merge into a single mass. 

Of the constellations I learned to spot, one of the ones that most resembles the thing it's supposed to depict has to be Leo. For those who don't know it, the prominent group of stars known as the Sickle is clearly the lion's mane. Look behind it and all the other parts of the beast readily fall into place. Once seen, never forgotten.

The thing is, though, any intelligent species living on a planet orbiting the star Denebola would have no idea that their sun was, to us, a lion's back end, that the ancient Egyptians worshipped the constellation – which they called knem – or that the ancient Greeks associated it with the Nemean lion, a monster killed by Hercules. And it would never occur to them that superstitious Earthlings today think that if their sun is in the same part of the sky as our sun when someone is born, it makes that person ambitious and confident. I'm assuming here that this species has optical vision, not unlike our own, cultures, myths and languages we might recognise and are able to see the night sky much as we see it. These are big assumptions. They may, of course, have completely different ways of perceiving the presence of our star and ascribe it a significance we can't even begin to imagine. Nevertheless, it makes you wonder. It begs the question, if our sun is a visible star in the night sky of other intelligent species, what cultural significance, if any, do they attribute to our star? Are we, without knowing it, orbiting the body part of some mythological alien animal?

We might, of course, be of significance to more than one civilisation – and on more than one planet. I say 'be' but which tense we should use begins to get very complicated when we start contemplating these things. All that we do know, whichever planet we live on, is that star-light takes centuries to reach us and, whatever significance we might ascribe to each other's home-stars, all of our species probably exist for a mere blink of a cosmic eye. I say probably, because our lives are mere snapshots of evolution: we're still evolving. Who's to say what we're evolving into? And who's to say what other species elsewhere in the universe, perhaps millions of years ahead of us, have already become? As for the stars, though, as Basil Bunting put it:

Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone,
its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane
spider floss on my cheek
                                                                        Ibid.

I wrote this poem below a few years ago. It was first published in The Passionate Transitory magazine which, sadly, though passionate in its promotion of poetry, itself turned out to be transitory. I think, when I wrote it, Pluto was still a planet. Don't get me going on that.

News from Pluto

Something's about to happen. I'm not sure what.
I've watched for long enough and, yes, I get
Impatient, as the months slip by. And yet
This is important. In a way, I'm not.
Earth, erratic, crosses the ecliptic;
By day, the sun's scarce bigger than a star:
It makes you realise just how small we are.
Will I get home? I must be realistic.
Gravity's low. Perhaps my bones grow thin.
I jog the corridors, try to keep fit,
But face the fact (there's no escaping it)
I have become this waiting game I'm in.
One day, it'll happen, I've no doubt.
Exactly when, I don't know. I'll find out.

Dominic Rivron

Read More

Lancashire Dead Good Poets' May Open Mic Night

Here's the poster for our May virtual open mic night...

Hoping you'll be able to join us.

Steve ;-)

Read More

Stars

It is true to say that I read a fair bit of poetry. And it seems to me that a recurring theme that many poets have in common, is a fear of dying. Psychoanalysts would agree that this is a primitive unconscious drive that ensures that we survive. In the last few years, I have been exposed to quite a few family and friends dying, not just through or because of the covid times, but because it is a fact of ageing, that the births and marriages in my personal social column have reduced and been replaced by more in the death column, a reminder of my own mortality. Finally getting to state pensionable age brought me closer to the reality that the Grim Reaper is no longer lurking in the shadows, but grimly out in open, my soul in his sights, ready for a spot of reaping.

So I am beginning to understand more why poets are so preoccupied with the fear of death. It is a recurring theme, dating back eons, like this anonymous lament from the thirteenth century, telling of the poet’s three worst fears and worries - that he must die; that he does not know when this will happen; and that he does not know where he will go after death. Eight hundred years later we still ask the same questions. It may not look it – but it is still English – try reading out ‘out loud’ and starts to make sense:

Ech day me comëth tydinges thre,
For wel swithë sore ben he:
The on is that Ich shal hennë,
That other that Ich not whennë,
The thriddë is my mestë carë,
That Ich not whider Ich shal farë.

Death itself doesn’t scare me, other than time is running out for all the places I want to still see and things I still want to do. What really scares me, apart from mundane worries about growing old, having enough money to live on and what the future holds for the next generations, is ‘the dark’ and horrors from my own imagination. These tend to come with the dark, a reminder of feeling scared of the darkness when, aged 6, on my first visit to my grandmother’s house in rural Poland, I was left alone to go to sleep - with no street lighting and no moon. And I woke to pitch black.

My grandmother's house

Too scared to cry out, every stick of the furniture in the shadows assumed a life and potential hiding place for some sort of monster to lurk behind. When dawn finally came, I had slept very little, Finally telling my father of my fears, a cousin was dispatched to share the bed with me the next night – when neither of us got much sleep due to my incessant talking.

My grandmother passed away over fifty years ago, but last summer when we revisited her village in Poland, and saw her house, the memory resurfaced and with it a residual fear of the dark.

It is paradoxical that I should have been be so afraid of the dark, because darkness brought me so many pleasures. My parents were never too strict with a “lights out” policy so loved by the parents of my school friends. My mother was, by nature, a lark not an owl and often in bed before I was. My father, when not at work because of his shift patterns, would stay downstairs with the television on, retiring only when the small dot appeared to close viewing for the night.

I was regretfully spared the secret illicit delight of using a torch under the bedclothes to finish the chapter of a book. I tried it a few times, but found the claustrophobic experience uncomfortable. In any case, it was unnecessary. If my father, on finally coming upstairs to bed, if he happened to see I still had my light on, would poke his head around the door and merely tell me not to be too much longer.

Bedtime was the time I was left, safe in bed, to my own devices, when I could escape into other lands and lives opened by books and stories. Sometimes I would work on my homework – we were given a page a day of some 20 mathematical problems to do, so I would polish off a month’s worth in one go. Sometimes this strategy would backfire when my teacher, Miss P would announce that instead of the next page being that day’s homework task, it would be two or three pages on. But I liked the problems, so other than a mild feeling of being ‘cheated,’ I did not really mind. My copious amount of indiscriminate reading of anything in print, included “the Gambols” in my father’s Daily Express, the Readers Digest and The National Geographical Magazines, which took care of spelling and most other subjects.

After that, I could always look out of the window, at the dark skies and the stars, until sleep finally overtook me. I would stare at the moon, looking for the fabled man there. Although I never saw him, I was convinced that, with the help of slightly stronger binoculars than those I had temporarily purloined from my father, I would be able to spot people whizzing in their spacecraft between the stars and the moon. In those days, they were not called aliens though, but “little green men.”

Perhaps this is where my fascination with the stars first started, encouraged when I was awarded a £5 book token for English when I was 10 years old, I bought three books – all on the planets and stars. This culminating 35 years ago when, despite a failed Physics ‘O’ level and only the remnants of long forgotten maths ‘O’ level to my name, I undertook to read for a part time degree in Astronomy. I do not know what possessed me.

Much to my husband’s amusement my mother kept referring to this as “Yvonne’s Astrology studies,” and while I became known in class for asking sometimes very stupid questions, some of which turned out to be relevant, I never stooped to asking about star signs. However, I was somewhat disappointed when I found out that there was plenty of maths, equations and staring at computers, but precious little of looking at the stars. None the less, I knuckled down, and some 7 years later managed a not very credible result – to this day convinced I was allowed a pass simply to get rid of me and my stupid questions.

Now, my astronomical studies are back where they belong, preferably at the end of a day at my brother’s beautiful home in Spain, when we sit on the terrace, spending the evening chatting with friends, over a glass or three of the local wine. As the sun goes down, it will turn the distant mountains into golden reds and orange, the crickets will come out to play, trying to compete to be heard over our perusing and laughter. As the sun finally disappears, followed by ever changing shades of twilight that darken into ink black skies devoid of any light pollution, we are reluctant for the night to end.

This is especially so when there is no moon, because we are loathe to miss out on more entertainment by picking out the planets and the various constellations amid the streak of what appears to the cloud – and that is actually the Milky Way. It is incredible to think that what we are seeing is already in the past. The light coming from the stars started its journey to us thousands, perhaps even millions of years ago. Indeed, as we look at them now, they may no longer even exist.

Constellation of Orion

I always look out for the three bright stars that make up Orion’s belt, as this is where my rudimentary attempts for my final year Astronomy degree project focussed. Through a telescopic it is possible to see that this area is home to what is known as a “stellar nursery” where stars right this very minute may be bursting into life. Some stars will never be seen, because they are so far away their light will only reach earth a long, long time in the future.

When we look at the stars of the night sky, we see them not as they are now, but as they were thousands, perhaps even millions of years ago. We are peering into the past. Our planet, and the sun will eventually die and our entire species will go the way of the dinosaurs and the dodo. After eons of time as measured by our life span, the sun, our home star will live out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a white dwarf, taking with it everything we have ever known. All the beauty, all the cruelties and even the perfect Fibonacci sequence of the pine cone will be as if they had never existed.

The world

Staring up at the black heavens,
At the myriad of flickering stars,
Our world circles but one average star.

Hanging delicately by a force
We cannot comprehend,
We are an infinitesimal speck of life.

You and I are here,
Our existence formed by the dust of atoms
In the furnace of a dying star.

That is everything.
One day we too will die,
In the universe of time, becoming our star’s dust.

Yvonne S.

Read More