by Barry Lopez
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ON CLEAR SUMMER NIGHTS at the cape, I’d sometimes set up the catadioptric telescope to explore the night worlds above. I’ve no real skill with this, navigating the night sky; it was little more than a way to sense the great umbrella of space I was under. Most often I went to well-known stars like Polaris or to the constellations of my childhood like the Big Dipper in Ursa Major, or to curiosities like the Horsehead Nebula in Orion. Other times I felt no challenge to locate, say, a particular star in a complicated constellation like Perseus, but drifted instead toward constellations completely unfamiliar to me—Auriga, Boötes, Lyra. How might the suns in these constellations be connected in a way to suggest, by lines and dots, respectively, a charioteer, a herdsman, and a musical instrument? And whose were these ideas, anyway, that I was to begin with?
One night I was trying to resolve the stars between Deneb and Albireo into the shape of a swan, the form in which Zeus seduced Leda. I’d first come to know these stars as the Northern Cross, a counterpart to the Southern Cross visible in the opposite hemisphere. Deneb, the brightest star in this constellation, marks the top of this cross. To Inuit people in northeastern Canada, Deneb is an unaffiliated brightness, a lone primary guiding star, which they call nalerqat. They perceive no Latin cross there. No swan, either. Their “constellations” are, for example, tukturjuit (part of our Ursa Major), representing a few caribou. And udleqdjun, hunters pursuing a polar bear, the bear represented by nanuqdjung (our Betelgeuse), the pursuers by Orion’s Belt, and the hunters’ sledge by kamutiqdjung (Orion’s sword). Inuit constellations, for the most part, are tableaus instead of single schematics.
In crossing star fields with the telescope—Babylonian astronomers referred to the twinkling expanse of the Milky Way as “the celestial flock”—you find it difficult to remain conscious of the fact that what you’re seeing is not a flat surface, a two-dimensional chart. It’s a volume of space, something with a third dimension. This of course complicates everything for someone trying to read the skies. The stick figures we call constellations exist only for someone looking outward from Earth. If you were to ask which is the top or bottom of anything out there, or what constitutes left and right within the starry dome, the problem of delineating constellations becomes only more confusing.
With regard to Deneb, then, what is the correct, the trusted, point of view?
For some cultures, like ours, constellations memorialize the appetites of Zeus. For others, it is the importance of hunting caribou. For all cultures, the individual stars, it seems, and the designs in which they are arranged, stand in for important elements in a fundamental guiding narrative. Like Cook’s stark and reassuring designations of latitude and longitude, the celestial narratives make the ordinary vicissitudes of life manageable. Without these references, the path through life can seem confusing. The constellations soothe and affirm.
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IN DAYLIGHT I sometimes used the telescope (with a filter) to pore over the surface of the sun, looking for solar flares and trying to imagine the scale of these tongues of flame spewing into the sun’s corona against the blue background of Earth’s atmosphere, which scatters the sun’s stupendous outpouring of light. Occasionally I studied the topography of the moon with a map of its surface to hand, trying to get a third dimension out of the Ocean of Storms, the Montes Jura, the Lake of Dreams. Once resolved in the lenses of the telescope, the face of the moon has for me a vivid and charismatic presence. If one could stare back in time and see in as much detail, say, the weathered face of Marco Polo, or of Nefertiti in private contemplation, or of Montezuma confronting Cortés, it would, for me, be very like these evenings with the yellow moon.
I once experienced a direct primal connection with the Earth’s lone satellite, during a walk over an ice sheet in West Antarctica. I was traveling with a friend, John Schutt, in Antarctica’s southern Victoria Land, eight thousand and some miles south of Cape Foulweather, when he offered to show me the place where the first piece of the moon lying on Earth’s surface was identified. On January 18, 1982, he and another scientist, Ian Whillans, spotted a meteorite the size of a golf ball on the surface of the Allan Hills Middle Western Icefield, about 940 miles from the South Pole. Seventeen years after he and Whillans collected this small space rock, with its partial tan-green fusion crust (the residue of its burn through Earth’s atmosphere), we walked the furrowed surface of that blue-ice field together. The meteorite itself was long gone. (It’s stored at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, with moon rocks from the Apollo missions.) In the barren desolation of the Middle Western Icefield, west of an outlier of the Transantarctic Mountains called the Allan Hills, and despite the fact that the ice that had once held this piece of the moon had since moved farther along on its trajectory to the Ross Sea, I felt the doppelgänger of it. Its ghost.
John, a geologist and mountaineer, didn’t know at first that the meteorite he and Whillans found on that day was a piece of the moon. Before then, no one had imagined that a piece of rock might be blasted off the surface of the moon with enough force to land it on the surface of its companion planet. Scientists have since found more pieces of the moon (and Mars) sitting on the ice in Antarctica.
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VERY EARLY ONE MORNING at Cape Foulweather, on what would become a clear spring day, I set up the telescope and intentionally began working the ocean’s horizon from right to left, starting from a point beyond Depoe Bay, on the coast to the north of me, and coming around to a spot beyond Yaquina Head to the south, a sweep of about 160 degrees. (As was so often the case, I was only trying here to expand my frame of reference.) I anticipated it would take no more than a few hours to focus intently on each successive minute of that arc, the beckoning line where the dark edge of the ocean trembled against the sky. Passing beyond this line, ships disappear; on this side, they rise up from the water. This was the mapmaker’s liminal line, the edge of the known. Heidegger called it “the place from which something begins its essential unfolding.”
The western horizon began to emerge at first light, a little after five. At the sky’s zenith, a deep blue hue was following the last half of night’s dome westward into the water, leaving evaporating stars in its wake. The western horizon began to broaden both to the north and south of me, its rising pastels forming a kind of chrysalis that soon defined sharply the whole of the western horizon.
To thoroughly inspect this simple declarative line took me not a few hours but from breakfast until dusk.
The startling power of this elementary tool, the optical telescope, to resolve what is distant and unreachable into readable images might have been what initially induced me to order a book called Hubble: Imaging Space and Time. I’d brought it out to the cape with me once and had perused its photographs while relaxing in the greenhouse comfort of the front seat of my truck on a chilly, windy day. The images of nebulae and galaxies were wondrous. Mesmerizing. With images like these before us, I remember thinking, our direst problems as a species—desertification, collapsing fisheries, barbarism, poverty, species extinction—might shrink down into something conceivably manageable. These images of timeless creation, carefully contemplated, might unfreight a depressed soul. They prompted in me a sense of the impossible having given way to the possible, a feeling as intense as the despair I’d once felt before I looked at Fernando Botero’s drawings of tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib, or before I looked at Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of broken families, victims of drought, famine, and war. I was uplifted by Botero’s and Salgado’s witness. As I turned the pages of the Hubble book, however, this feeling of transcendent awareness slowly faded. I became weirdly uneasy.
The imagery of the earliest Hubble photographs is immediately familiar to most Americans because it mimics the landscape paintings of Hudson River School artists like Albert Bierstadt. Their romantic portrayals celebrated the splend
or of the American landscape; and the artists colored and framed their large canvases in ways to suggest that these supposedly intimidating North American wildernesses were actually more beautiful than threatening. Man, clearly, was an insignificant observer here, an intruder; but the underlying theme of these paintings was that mankind’s destiny, which at the time was widely believed to be divinely directed, was to take possession of these places.
These were commercial landscapes then, not portraits of the unknown.
One of the curiosities of the Hubble images is that they don’t actually exist as photographs, as that term is commonly understood. The authors of Hubble: Imaging Space and Time write that these photographs are “mediated views of the universe, and [in creating them] astronomers and image-processing specialists employ a degree of artistry to make the universe more understandable and attractive.” The Hubble “photographs,” in other words, are “impressions, based on scientific data.” They reflect the desire of their creators “to balance science, aesthetics, and communication.”
One wonders what the images might have looked like if the raw data—the streams of binary information collected outside as well as within the spectrum of visible light by the Hubble telescope—had been handed to visual artists to “balance,” let alone frame and color, instead of being given to “image-processing specialists” inclined toward a version of pictorial beauty that mainstream viewers would be immediately comfortable with and find reassuring.
A sense of having been misled, however, didn’t cause me to close the book. The images do represent someone’s effort to make interstellar space beautiful, and they show a certain reverence for what is not known, admirable qualities in a world that in many quarters has grown suspicious of beauty and of reverence for anything not made by or for human beings. If we could see past what our eyes can take in, envision energy in realms beyond the infrared and ultraviolet, and therefore see radio waves and gamma rays coming toward us from out of what the British astronomer William Herschel once called “the shining fluid,” then maybe these same manipulated images would enthrall us, and we would hold them in higher regard.
Romanticism gave Western cultures inspiring literature and art, much of it indelibly inscribed in our imaginations. What we seem to crave now, more than this kind of inspiration, is the authority of the dependable, inspiration that comes from what is authentic. And we also desire, I think, a species of beauty different from the conventional one.
The rationale behind the creation of the Hubble images seems to confuse the authority of science with the authority of art, co-opting the latter to elevate the standing of the former. To employ metaphor purely as instruction is didactic. And to treat art as utilitarian, a means to an end, is to dress materialistic ideology in a seductive disguise.
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EARLIER, I DESCRIBED an eight-real Spanish silver coin I keep on my writing table, a reminder of how, in a quest for material wealth, darkness might so easily corrupt one’s efforts. One of the hard lessons of travel, I think, is having to accept that the human impulse toward the sort of exploitation and fundamental dishonesty the coin represents, not just outright thievery but a tendency to, for example, acquit the well-connected or wealthy criminal, or to accept misrepresentation in the promotion of products, is prominent in nearly every developed country. The evidence forces us to think that American culture is not an exception, that the general cover-up and denial of responsibility that we see regularly in commerce and government in the United States is just as challenging to root out as we might imagine it to be in cultures more often cited for their waywardness and lack of integrity. The only question in a world like ours, starting to run short of vital supplies while attempting to support a burgeoning population, is whether these injustices will eventually be so severely condemned that they will cease to be a source of cynicism and distraction and become instead an inducement for social change. A world in which all public dealings are just, where no refugee camp is ever built, is not to be had, of course; but it is possible, I think, if the stakes are high enough, to forge a world in which there is less tolerance for the self-serving abuse government and business too often endorse.
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HERE AT CAPE FOULWEATHER, as I watch the ocean for days at a time, marking the passage of loaded freighters, container ships, and fishing vessels in these heavily fished seas, the memory of the eight-real coin from the wreck of the Nuestra Señora occasionally comes into my mind. The coin suggests the cultural density of human history, and how little of that richness was recorded before much of it was wiped out, how judgments about who is the primitive and who the real barbarian forestalled further inquiry into the complexity of human cultural life. The coin reminds me that the urge to condemn the conquistadores and other miscreants in world history, the witless and avaricious mobs who followed the leads of the Genghis Khans, the Pizarros, and the Trujillos, might be countered today by refusing to define as evil any other culture, or even the wayward in our own. If we don’t, we risk ending up in a wasteland of uninformed dogmatists, the same shortsighted, narrow-minded belligerents who rise up in every era of human history.
It might have been useful once to identify and denounce enemy cultures, those that were seen as ruthless and exploitive, obsessed with wealth and indifferent to social justice at the highest levels; but looking out over the measureless Pacific from this cape late one afternoon, sipping my coffee and waiting for the storm, I feel that this time has passed. People in every country today can identify with the very same threats to their lives and to the lives of their progeny. And many know their governments, elected or self-appointed, are too cowardly, too compromised, or too mean-spirited, to help them.
There are among these citizens some who believe it is not a technological miracle, not the emergence of a philosopher-king, that is called for here. It’s something altogether different, some capacity to perceive a reality that is hinted at but not yet realized in modern Homo. And because most are having trouble imagining more than two or three generations ahead of them, they’re wondering who will step forward right now to face the obvious threats, the obvious menace.
Are there not among us, they are asking, those who will act on behalf of all, people who will attempt to do the things that need to be done, and who do not need to be supervised as they address these problems?
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AT THE TIME Cook raised Cape Foulweather, this particular stretch of the northwest coast of North America was a lifeground for Alsean and Tillamook Indians—Siletz people living just to the north of Cape Foulweather, and counted among the Tillamook (TILL-ah-muck), and Yaquina people, living just to the south, between what are now Yaquina Bay and the Alsea (AL-see) River people, and counted among the Alseans. Archeological evidence suggests that both these coastal tribes had “sharing traditions” with tribes living inland along the Columbia River, so cultural anthropologists have been comfortable including them with the so-called Lower Columbia tribes, the most prominent of which, in Euro-American histories, are the Chinook.
It’s guesswork to say when exactly ancestors of the Siletz and the Yaquina began permanently to occupy this stretch of the Oregon coast. By about three thousand years ago, however, probably both cultures were thriving here, depending on estuarine shellfish, marine mammals, blacktail deer, fish, and the eggs of shorebirds for their food. It’s not known, either, when Tillamook and Alsean people might first have become aware of Europeans. Sixteenth-century Spanish galleons en route from Manila to Acapulco might have been driven this far north off their customary route by storms, and they might have been seen by Indians or, having foundered, been salvaged by them. João Rodrigues Cabrilho and Bartolomé Ferrelo might have been offshore near here in 1542. It’s unlikely, but some historians place Sir Francis Drake off the Oregon coast in 1579. Sebastián Vizcaíno and Martín de Aguilar could have pushed this far north in 1602 o
r 1603; but all of this is speculation. Such claims were originally advanced by the English and the Spanish to establish their rights to whatever of value might be found and appropriated here. Until the time of Cook, the geography of these coasts was of little interest to maritime nations. The primary—sometimes only—interest of the colonizing nations was to secure trading advantages and to take control of the sources of material wealth, mostly through private commercial enterprises.
The traditions of the Yaquina, the Siletz, and other coastal tribes were gradually completely undone by commercial exploitation and cultural subjugation. What was lost to humanity with the passing of these unique epistemologies and ontologies (understandings of being), though lamented by some, has been ridiculed by most in the “civilized” nations as an inconsequential loss to the collective wealth of human knowledge. The loss of an entire way of knowing, however, is a tragedy hard to reckon.
A people’s way of comprehending the fundamental mystery we call “the real world” is most clearly and succinctly obvious in the vocabulary, syntax, and tropes of their language. The linguist K. David Harrison has written that the sibilants and clicks, the fricatives, tones, and ejectives of each human language comprise “a singularity of conceptual possibilities.” Some languages are so place specific that it is not possible, he tells us, even to speak them intelligibly apart from the landscapes in which they arose. He emphasizes that languages are more than mere words and grammar, that they reveal ecologies and potentialities unrecognized in other languages. He makes it clear that each language brings with it another history, another mythology, another set of technologies, another geography. In The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages, he writes, “We will need the entire sum of human knowledge as it is encoded in all the world’s languages to truly understand and care for the planet we live on.”