And When the Stars are All Alight
Side note, I downloaded a post client, but guess what, I still can't use a god damned tab to put in a tab. Is that so much to ask?
I was given six themes, so lets get back to it, shall we? Lets talk about stars.
One of the pretty consistent things about living here in Kansas is that it is a very simple matter to escape all major light pollution in about 25 minutes traveling at non relativistic speeds through the inky dark. Staying in town is still a very pleasant view of the sky, living as I do in a crater on the top the hill in the woods. Its not hard also to get distracted by the constellation stretching out below my feet, the city below me quiet and mostly unassuming. The good/awful thing about Kansas skies is that they tend to cloud over when the sun goes down, except in the height of the unpleasant summers. Get to far away from the cities under the naked sky and it does not take long before you start to feel the sky reel above you, the whole of it ticking away, moving in its beautiful and terrifying clockwork majesty. There is a very magical feeling depending on the substances you have taken on while listening to a band in a barn and then lying down just out of the light of a bonfire because that moonshine you were given was probably more then 90 percent alcohol.
Times like this, flat out on your back under the naked sky, is to feel like the first men felt, think like the first men thought. The sky reels around on its axis, you hear the lapping of water, the warmth of fire, listen to it crackle and spit. You feel the old gods asleep in the ground beneath you, old and malevolent, but long silent. You want to make up stories and sing them to the dark to keep them asleep, keep their dreams good ones.
The depths of the sky can simply erase the time spent looking at it. The depths of that cluttered field are dangerous. "All we see of the stars are their old photographs," is not a bad description, but to me, I don't think it captures quite enough of the inherent fear that you feel, should feel, at any rate, with the weight of all the time between you and those points of light, images back filtering to us from the start of the universe, as impossible to fathom as the distance.
Ever since reading "The Color out of Space," I have always had minor reservations about being alone under a naked sky. In all that time there is simply to high a probability that there is something out there that defies all of our simple expectations and perceptions, some black, luminous, incongruent thing, eternal but youthful, living in the dark between the stars, brother and sister to whatever dark that sleeps below the earth, waiting for the stars to come right again.
But all of this is of course why they are beautiful and almost intoxicating, like about 80 to 90% of things that can kill us (plants, drugs, fire, water, girls, etc.). So much brilliant chaos on display operating under such perfect order. The starry machine ticking away, impassive, omniscient and forever silent, impossible to decode, so we just get to watch the fireworks.
Do not hunt for monsters, less you become a monster as well, do not stare into the void, for the void peers back at you.
Oh yeah, optimistic cause school is about to start up and I have some fun projects coming up, and well, some other things, they know who they are :)
I was given six themes, so lets get back to it, shall we? Lets talk about stars.
One of the pretty consistent things about living here in Kansas is that it is a very simple matter to escape all major light pollution in about 25 minutes traveling at non relativistic speeds through the inky dark. Staying in town is still a very pleasant view of the sky, living as I do in a crater on the top the hill in the woods. Its not hard also to get distracted by the constellation stretching out below my feet, the city below me quiet and mostly unassuming. The good/awful thing about Kansas skies is that they tend to cloud over when the sun goes down, except in the height of the unpleasant summers. Get to far away from the cities under the naked sky and it does not take long before you start to feel the sky reel above you, the whole of it ticking away, moving in its beautiful and terrifying clockwork majesty. There is a very magical feeling depending on the substances you have taken on while listening to a band in a barn and then lying down just out of the light of a bonfire because that moonshine you were given was probably more then 90 percent alcohol.
Times like this, flat out on your back under the naked sky, is to feel like the first men felt, think like the first men thought. The sky reels around on its axis, you hear the lapping of water, the warmth of fire, listen to it crackle and spit. You feel the old gods asleep in the ground beneath you, old and malevolent, but long silent. You want to make up stories and sing them to the dark to keep them asleep, keep their dreams good ones.
The depths of the sky can simply erase the time spent looking at it. The depths of that cluttered field are dangerous. "All we see of the stars are their old photographs," is not a bad description, but to me, I don't think it captures quite enough of the inherent fear that you feel, should feel, at any rate, with the weight of all the time between you and those points of light, images back filtering to us from the start of the universe, as impossible to fathom as the distance.
Ever since reading "The Color out of Space," I have always had minor reservations about being alone under a naked sky. In all that time there is simply to high a probability that there is something out there that defies all of our simple expectations and perceptions, some black, luminous, incongruent thing, eternal but youthful, living in the dark between the stars, brother and sister to whatever dark that sleeps below the earth, waiting for the stars to come right again.
But all of this is of course why they are beautiful and almost intoxicating, like about 80 to 90% of things that can kill us (plants, drugs, fire, water, girls, etc.). So much brilliant chaos on display operating under such perfect order. The starry machine ticking away, impassive, omniscient and forever silent, impossible to decode, so we just get to watch the fireworks.
Do not hunt for monsters, less you become a monster as well, do not stare into the void, for the void peers back at you.
Oh yeah, optimistic cause school is about to start up and I have some fun projects coming up, and well, some other things, they know who they are :)