star struck

 

It came up recently in a conversation, I didn’t bring it up, but someone else was talking about the clear blue sky of September 11. 

I recall leaving the house that morning before dawn to go to the Trade Center and seeing Orion bright and dominating the Eastern sky over the house across the street. My father taught me how to identify Orion and how to follow the line drawn by the three stars of his belt to identify the Dog Star, Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. I read that the ancient Egyptians called that constellation Osirus. I think nomadic hunters looked for the rising of Orion the Hunter as a sign of summer’s end and the coming of autumn and time to head for the winter home.

September mornings before dawn I see Orion out my kitchen window when I’m making my oatmeal. Orion is my 9/11 memorial, so even those phantom towers, whatever they’re called, that light display in Lower Manhattan is irrelevant, although those twin beams always takes me by surprise — Yikes! — they still do that?

That day, after the attack and I got safe distance, I needed to call my parents to tell them I was OK, but none of the pay phones  or cell phones worked. When I finally got home to my landline there was a voicemail from my father.

His voice said, “I know the Lord is blessing you today.”

Many heavenly lights, you might say, are hidden in the city light, so my stargazing is limited to a handful of celestial objects. The sun, moon, Orion, some of the planets. I keep track of the lunar phases by looking out my windows.

I wonder about that time in human evolution when people began naming heavenly bodies they recognized and began to discern regularity in their movements until they could chart the paths of the sun, moon and other stars and begin contriving ways to organize their time, creating sciences and belief systems. But the driest physical description of the mechanics of our solar system doesn’t distract me from the amazingness of it all.

I get star struck by the miracle of a celestial array. Heaven is not really “Out There” and apart from us because we are part of it, flying on another celestial object flying around one of the stars. The heavens are among us and within us in our stardust bodies — this whole crazy scheme of matter in motion — this constant cosmic metamorphosis we are undergoing together. Radiant emptiness or whatever.

The veils of urban light pollution only reveal a handful of stars, nothing like the explosive light show of the night sky in upstate rural places. Only the biggest stars appear in the Manhattan sky. The smaller ones disappear in the city lights. If you’re walking in Midtown at night you might look up and see a planet like Jupiter or Venus or bright star like Sirius, the brightest star, which, as you can recall, you can identify by following the line of stars that are in Orion’s belt. I mean you can see stars in New York City but many people never look up at them. Sometimes I see shooting stars. I was walking on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint one night and saw the fiery trail of a meteorite. I looked around me and saw that no one else had noticed.

A monk is reading scripture to a corpse:

Hey, star child!

Now you have arrived at so-called “death.”

You should conduct yourself according to your conception of the spirit of enlightenment.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.

Behold, I tell you a mystery!

We will not die, but we will be changed.

Whether or not the departed is still in some sense present and can hear the words and be liberated by them, the monk who is reading these words could hear them as a call to pay attention, to this holy moment in the presence of this corpse to whom he is reading, this holy moment of so-called death, I want to believe. 

I wanted to be able to say this without too much transcendental schmaltz.

A few weeks ago I in fact saw a man who might have been dead. He was flat on his back on Broadway. Not the famous Manhattan Broadway, but the gritty Broadway of North Brooklyn. I couldn’t see his face. He was in a black suit and he had black leather shoes and he was lying on dirty pavement, his ankles crossed like he was taking a nap on a sofa. He was surrounded by concerned neighbors and strangers who watched the police officer try to administer CPR. 

I don’t know if the resuscitation effort was successful or if the man was taken straight to the morgue. My own thoughts surprised me — that might not be a bad way to die. Maybe better than a hospital bed with sorrowful loved ones present. 

I was in this morbid frame of mind because at the time I was waiting for the results of a biopsy. Something on my shoulder had caught the eye of my dermatologist. She murmured something about melanoma. She cut the pimple off and sent it to a lab and meanwhile I thought about it a lot. This might be it. 

I wasn’t afraid of death, but I wondered what dying would be like. Rather than a slow lingering hospital death, dropping dead on Broadway didn’t seem so bad.

I made a End of Life To Do list, things I want to get done before I die:

First, finish assembling my book and make a few copies.

Second, put house in order, clean the studio and organize my art work so whoever has the task can easily take it to the dumpster when I’m dead.

Last, gather the required paperwork for death — a contact list, a DNR, a will and testament or some written statement of intention regarding my possessions, insurance,  cremation and interment costs, arrangements, etc. Get the place organized so it’s easy for my loft mates and neighbors to deal with.

I imagine I’m at my own graveside. Why do I seek the living — myself — among the dead? 

Why do you seek your life in your death?

My legacy will mean nothing to my ashes. It is hopeless to look for immortality in your work, but you can look for life while alive, if you truly live, and here I go into schmaltz.

Creator Spirit, or Spirit Creator, inspire me to write or paint something true, something that is worth being thought about for a while after I’m gone. Something that does not obstruct human evolution and is somewhat beneficial to the entire space full of sentient beings.

The lab report came out negative. It was a benign growth called a seborrheic keratosis.

After too many overcast days, there is a perfectly clear pre-dawn sky and I see Venus has arisen over a rooftop.

Hail morning star! 

Identified with Isis and Christ, the Queen of Heaven and the Bridegroom.

One night right after I turned twenty, half a century ago, I took some LSD and watched television with some friends. TV was a trip into the inferno so I went home and read the Revelation of St. John.

 After wrestling with the psychedelic angel all night, I sat at my bedroom window and waited.

I was certain something was going to happen, 

cosmic metamorphosis, the great unification, or my even own ascension or death. 

I was looking out my window into the dark before dawn and a light appeared over the Eastern horizon. I could almost see it move. I didn’t know if it was the Mothership or an ICBM or the Comet of Doom. 

I woke up my father. 

There is something in the sky, I said.

“That is the Morning Star,” he said. “The planet Venus.”

He had even written a song about it.

50 years later, I still look for it when it is there, and there it is. 

I raise my hands.

Hail, Morning Star!

What name do I use for the creative source of our lives?

Spirit Creator? Creator Spirit? God?

Or better to give no name to the abyss of the creative ground?