When I was boy, I was obsessed with space.  I remember once running out to a bookshop and spending all my birthday money on a giant glossy colour hardback space encyclopaedia.  Such a wild child.  I’d spend nights sitting in my bedroom gazing at the pictures, tracing the rings of Saturn with my finger, remembering the names of the constellations.  I can still pick out the Pleiades and Cassiopeia, even if I can’t spell them.  Nebulae and galaxies held me in awe – the shapes, patterns, colours; strange astral geometries writ large across the heavens.  Fractals and spirals, insane forces holding them together and ripping them asunder.  Thinking about their physical and temporal (dis)location made my young brain spin at the speed of light, leaving me confused and dizzy.

I’d watch the documentaries and science lectures on TV, and would puzzle over red giants, white dwarfs and black holes. I’d hear of stars being devoured by black holes, falling into them at an unimaginable speed imperceptible to even the most powerful telescope.  I felt small.  Hey, I was small.

This small boy got a small telescope one xmas.  Such excitement, straining at the fetters imposed by having to wait ten hours for nightfall.  I had a star chart cut from a magazine, concentric wheels which when rotated revealed the evening’s celestial scene in a window; how easily the whirl of the earth was neutralised by cardboard disc.  I’d wonder at my expanded constellations, marvelling at how their stars seemed to get no larger, just further apart and with hundreds of new specks appearing within their boundaries, until my eyes would lose their earthly sense of purpose, the world becoming visible only through uncomfortable Vaseline-smeared glasses.  I’d always hunt down Jupiter and its moons; one, two, three, four…five….six….is that seven?  The diffuse star in Orion’s sword became the pool of his nebula, my pleasure undiminished by my being unprepared for its decidedly unbooklike monochromaticism.

But the moon…I always had trouble with the moon.   Too big, too bright, especially if it came into my field of vision unexpectedly.  I’d have to set my telescope up pointing in its general direction, then step well back from the telescope.  I’d line my eye up and inch towards it, ever so slowly, the moon getting bigger and bigger until it was all I could see.  It looked so different magnified; I’d try with little success to reconcile the seas and craters I could see with the man-in-the-moon image I had carried in my head for so long.  I’d get a bit scared, always, it felt too big, too close, I could feel its gravity snatching at my pyjamas and I’d have to stop and pack up, reverting to gazing unaided, tracing the constellations in my chart.

I’m still small.  Occasionally I’m reminded of this. 

Listen to “Apreludes (in C Sharp Major)” courtesy of Brainwashed.

And “A Meaningful Moment Through A Meaning(less) Process” courtesy of the good folks at Green Clothes