intergalactic dust

huzzah, readers! a friend of mine pointed out to me just an hour after my last post that today is Carl Sagan day. so, in honor of our galactic dreamer, i'm posting his famous "Pale Blue Dot" quote about the in/significance of Earth in the broader context of our universe.

to the stars, friends.

-stephan!e

a photograph of Earth from the Voyager spacecraft, taken on its way out of the solar system. Earth is the tiny dot located halfway down inside the brown beam on the right.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

per aspera ad astra

i decided today that if i ever get a tattoo i'd want it to be of the phrase per aspera ad astra - a Latin phrase meaning "from hardships to the stars." there are so many beautiful reasons i would want this on my body, that i'm tempted to rescind my prejudice that tattoos are tacky and have it inked into my inner arm.

first, i'd like to think that when i die, i'll be borne into the stars. and the idea of my body bearing this phrase, this philosophy, through life until death is exactly what i want my tattoo to be, a comment on im/permanence.

furthermore, this phrase was one of a few audio messages selected to be cast off into space aboard the Voyager, to represent peaceful intentions from humanity. this message was encoded into morse code and recorded on the Voyager Golden Record, along with samples of music, greetings in 55 different languages, animal and nature sounds, and a meditative message from Carl Sagan's wife.

i've never been terribly interested in astronomy nor fascinated with the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life. and yet, i find myself regretting the lack of this kind of fantasy and curiosity in our modern collective imagination. it seems my generation was the last to experience the height of the american space program, and current youth are perhaps untouched by the influence of these ideas and the accompanying sense of infinite exploration, as well as unquantifiable humility in the impossibility of ever being certain in the great big galactic scope of things.

i think that humility, that unknowingness, accompanies a healthy sense of imagination that in turn keeps people from being too ... material in their living. what i feel like we have now is lots of kids growing up and becoming bankers and not enough dreaming of being astronauts.

today's Voyager research (i got lost in a research loop on wikipedia today that started with me trying to sort out my tracklisting for the Dark Was The Night compilation, which led me to read about Blind Willie Johnson and his wailing gospel-blues slide guitar and how it was included as an example of loneliness on the Voyager record to be, potentially, discovered by future extraterrestrial lifeforms) also led me to consider the absurd task of writing and communicating messages to infinite space. in the Voyager capsule, Carl Sagan et al. included a letter from then-president Jimmy Carter:

We cast this message into the cosmos... Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.

i think it's somewhat indicative of the zeitgeist of the 1970s that our president took time out of his schedule to write a letter to the cosmos. imagine what that conversation must have been like, "uh, hey jimmy, we want you to write a letter to the future. to be read by aliens. state our intent as a galaxy. btw, humanity may be completely gone by the time this is picked up by anyone. kthxbye." but that's what i'm talking about, you know? we're missing a little galactic humility and imagination in our present-day thinking.

the day the earth moved

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

i was wrapping up my lesson today and collecting assessments, trying to quiet everyone down, when i felt a sudden jolt. the ground felt like it was moving in waves. it was amazingly wavy. i never thought an earthquake would feel like this. i didn't notice shaking, like i'd expected, but felt it most in my feet and my legs. it felt like i was getting dizzy from the feet up, my head and torso were where i wanted them, but i felt my feet moving on their own. i thought i could hear the earth moving, the whole world around me creaking.

at the same time, i have 30 young pairs of eye focused completely on me. i see their expressions changing to mirror mine. i imagine my face and the look of horror that must be on it.

as soon as i realize what is actually happening, as soon as i can find the words to put to it, the kids are already there too, screaming "earthquake" and doing the drill we practiced just the other day. duck and cover! everyone scrambles to fit under a tiny middle school desk and get themselves as close to the ground as possible. i make sure all the kids are properly tucked under their desks and then dive under one myself, trying to calm everyone down as i try to gather my own thoughts. "keep calm, even tone, don't panic or you'll make things worse." the kids are screaming, some of them are shaking their desks. a voice comes over the loudspeaker, "this is not a drill." how could this be a drill?! i wonder. some things you can fake, but i can feel the tile and concrete rippling below me and rest assured, the last thing i was thinking was that this was a drill!

crouched under my desk, my shins flat against the classroom tile, a million thoughts are rushing thru my head: first, amazement at the seismic waves, which in that moment, i can actually feel. when i'd imagined earthquakes before this, i always thought of – what else? – the movies. i thought of The Land Before TIme, the earth erupting and shifting around itself, huge columns of earth and rock jutting out around me, huge chasms appearing suddenly to divide and separate people. i was imagining a textbook hypothetical earthquake – the kind that separates populations and results in genetic drift.

instead, what i actually experienced was quite different, and thus probably more terrifying and confusing ("what is this strange feeling?") but in retrospect, my confusion was merely a product of my fascination, my pleasant surprise: here was something far more pleasant and less violent, more a rocking than a shaking. never would i have imagined such fluidity – i could feel the building's materials actually undulating under my body. i can feel the pulsing of earth and steel and concrete below me, and for a moment i am painfully aware of the earth's mantle and the layers of pulsing magna on which all of us float – unaware – everyday.

then, sheer wonder at the elasticity of the ground below me. i can practically feel it stretching with the moving earth. things i once thought were solid, immovable, dense and hard were now apparently bending with the flow of the earth below. i'm amazed and surprised by the newness of my understanding of the earth and the materials around me, interacting with and witnessing it in new capacities as i wait for the ground to split around me.

i imagine the earth opening up and swallowing us whole. i imagine my parents freaking out when they hear or see it on the news. i think about Lexington, KY and that sweet foundation of limestone on which it sits, and how growing up i checked earthquakes off my mental list of things i had to worry about/ natural disasters/ unfortunate ways to die, b/c limestone bedrock basically meant 2 things: 1) SOLID AS A ROCK; and 2) strong horses (limestone = calcium-enriched bluegrass = strong and healthy bones). i tell my students Fernando and Lillie about it on the way back from the gym blacktop to our classroom, and they tell me that KY sounds nice right now (no truer words, Fernando. no truer words...)

i remember kneeling on the floor, seeing all my summer school students huddled down with me, looking to me with large, pleading eyes, watching to see what i did. never have i been so scared or worried, feeling at once that child-like instinct to look for protection, to call home, to curl up in a fetal position, but also feeling suddenly adult, the gaze of 30 children's eyes.

i remember, as i felt the rippling earth below me, thinking that we'd gotten the drill all wrong: in an earthquake, the ground is the last place you want to be. i kept thinking, if the ground splits and opens up beneath me, i don't want to be close to it, i want to be by the ceiling, dangling monkey-style from the fluorescent lights, watching it all open up beneath me. sudden panic gripped me: in all other situations in which safety is an issue, your first instinct is to run, to get as far away from the thing causing you stress and harm as possible. crouching on the floor, i realized that i was staring my immediate danger in the face. i was basically eskimo-kissing it. the earth – the way it was moving, these disconcerting waves, the unpredictability, the unknowing of how long it would last, how bad it would be, what to do besides wait – had me trapped. i was struck by a sense of paralysis, vulnerability. i could run, but no matter where i went, my feet would be on the ground. i cursed gravity for keeping me earth-bound.

i manage to get the students lined up quietly inside the room. we walk single-file to the blacktop in the middle of Watts, me counting students and accounting for everyone (my heart nearly stops when i remember that i let Javier go to the bathroom just moments before the earthquake, and the thought of him getting hurt or lost in the chaos is enough for me to justify a stricter no-bathroom policy). we walk onto the steaming blacktop, and sit down in a group. an administrator comes by to take down numbers and names, while students are clamoring for information. teachers are frantically calling relatives and loved ones on cell phones, only to find the lines jammed. i try to keep my students calm by talking to all of them. they ask me if i'm scared. i tell them i'm being honest when i say i've never been more scared in my life, but that i also knew things were going to be ok, and that i'm glad it happened at school, that it's probably the safest place to be right now. they begin telling me how scared they were. Kevin is anxious to run home and see if his granny is ok. Miguel wants to go, he doesn't want classes for the rest of the day. Deandre is complaining about the hot hot blacktop and how his legs are burning. i tell all the kids to pull out their journals and write about the earthquake today, how they felt, what went thru their minds, to write about it so they could remember years from now and tell their kids about the day they were at summer school with their new teacher Ms. Lee when an earthquake hit. i told them that this made today special, that because of what happened today, i would never ever forget them, or forget Markham, because we shared this scary moment together. i told my students that when i got home, i was going to write a journal just like the one i was asking them to write, so i could share it with my own kids when i had them.

Lonnisha looks at me and asks "do you have kids, Ms. Lee?" i pause, i smile, and i say, "not yet, Lonnisha. but some day, i hope i do. and i will tell them about my first earthquake, and about all of you..."

-stef

earthquake!

this happened today:
an earthquake of 5.4 on the Richter scale. (when it first happened, we heard reports of it being a 5.8)

i'm ok, just a little shaken (no pun intended).

thoughts in a few,
stef