Ice Can Burn
long poem/short story repost from Feb 2022
The writing below spilled out of me in February 2022. It wasn’t accepted at the one place I submitted it, so I’m posting it here. We’re in Urania’s time - Aquarian season.
I quite like it.
You can listen to me reading it here.
(The soundtrack to this story, if you can imagine such a thing, is a sturdy acrylic fingernail staticly tapping a stainless steel surface, in the pace of a human heartbeat. With a backing track of eery theremin thrumming.)
Where are you from?
(tap-tap….thrum…)
An annoying question because nearly everyone asks it when I'm traveling. Isn't it obvious it's why I'm traveling? To reach the place I've all ways been.
No one yet has asked me, “How wide is your space? How long is your time?” No. The same old same old, “Where are you from?”
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Eventually I learn to answer, "Most recently? Originally? Or philosophically?" Which helps me filter out those worthy of a considered conversation. Just like when I go to leave a gathering in a British commonwealth country, and several someones inevitably ask, "Are you off?"
I always answer, "Slightly."
So I usually start exiting about an hour before I want to, to allow for the possibility of someone actually getting my joke and making a connection.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Which is what it's all about, isn't it? Making a connection.
Yet the bulk of the world I've encountered is blazingly avoidant of intimacy. And don't tell me the sex-swamped marketing sludge we swim in nowadays is intimacy. It's nearly the opposite. Intimacy demands vulnerability. To be known in all senses by an other is what most seem to drunkenly crave and yet religiously avoid.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Yet where is any of us from? Really? The place our ancestors come from? The people that birthed us and brought us out of infancy? The land we long to never leave? We all will though. We will all leave these bodies. Some of us even do it before death.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
There are gatherers. And weavers. And scouts. Often, eventually, all three. If it's your fate to scout the future, then no doubt you will gather the data needed to relay it in such a way that those who stayed behind can grasp it. And that's where the weaving comes in.
The most skillful of us weave spacetime itself. Wrapping the warp and weft of what’s left of linear timelines into multidimensional non dualism.
But that only comes with the self-awareness of sifting through the memories that surface, and the dreams drawn into view long enough to be drafted into visions of the future.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Urania is my name.
Holding the whole world in my gaze is my game.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
In this current human life, I started running away before I could even talk. At least running away is what it looked like and what I had to navigate explaining to my mother. Now I know, and so does she, that I was scouting, gathering, and weaving. Not leaving.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
There is no leaving, even though there is dying. It’s all here. Even what you humans call the past. Even what you cannot currently see or touch or taste. Your ancestors are what you now call dark matter, your descendants dark space. With exponential expansion and cumulative time, it becomes easier to convey to you what’s really going on. In the “past” it was all so much slower, quaintly glacial.
Now glaciers are quickening. Are you?
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Luckily I like costumes. Change the clothes, adjust the accent, et voilà! I’m a new wo/man. Though often I don’t know why I’m in a timeplace until it’s time to carry on to the next. And sometimes the movement across zones means I lose track of the mission. Amnesia can be helpful. Too much awareness can prevent assimilation, which is usually key for infiltrating with future visions intact. To filter inwards into the peoples, I’m often granted beauty and grace. It’s just easier to get folks to listen when their eyes are happy.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Where did I start? Well again that’s an existential question. There is no start. Or if it helps to conceptualize, think of me coming from the far, far “future” as that’s the only direction in your strange linear time concept that would encompass it all. If I started in the “past” how could I convey the unknown millennia “ahead”, the future yet to come?
(tap-tap….thrum…)
If it helps to locate me in the space that you know, try Sedna. It’s as far out as you can currently see with your curved lens scopes. So far out, my icy homeland was last closest to our shared sun at the last ice age of your earth. The gifts I bring are for the sturdy and slow—the Greenland shark, the tardigrade, those glorious glaciers. And the seeds that sprout from ancient dormancy. I’m a star-bearer and a seed-sharer.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Did the myths of me come before, or after, me? How can you definitely say a thing originates here at such and such a time when your own tools for determining such things keep evolving? You couldn’t even see half the planets you can now until 20 Earth years ago. And they’ve all ways been there, waiting for you to grow the means to make their measure.
So am I as old as my Roman name, Urania? Or did “I” introduce my name to the Romans from another timeplace?
(tap-tap….thrum…)
One day, long long ago/ahead, I walked out of where I was wed. I would have wept with relief, had I known there was such a thing. Instead I said, “I am drawn elsewhere. I don’t know where exactly and certainly I have no clue why, but I must move on. I’ll be back around I’m sure.”
(tap-tap….thrum…)
But as one life leads to another and the water really does run under the bridges, as you say, there is no stepping into the same river twice. This might explain why so many recognize me in that soulful way that seems so meaningful to them. While, for me, no one stands out as specific, the way a queen would know her subjects as familiar faces but without deep connections. I can’t afford too many of those. In order not to be deposed of my divinity, I remain aloof, aloft, afloat.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Which is why I empathize with your Anthropocene era lack of intimacy. I know how painful it is to care enough to connect, only to have your care quashed by increased mortality. All eras I’ve known so far have had their dire straits, but this one takes the cake. You’ve really outdone yourselves this time humans. Ironically if you had cared more—if you had been brave enough and vulnerable enough to have your heart broken by existence—you might, just, could save yourselves.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
You’ve been so besotted with his-story that most of you have missed all that she has seen and done. What’s that saying you have, ‘If you don’t know history, you’re doomed to repeat it?’ But can’t you see you are repeating it? I reckon you need to pay more mind to your dreamers and visionaries, the remarkable freaks on the fringes.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
If you don’t know your futurism you’re bound to miss your chance at a future by repeating your past. Which is perhaps what some would like, as it serves their interests best. But does such short-sightedness serve the bigger picture? Or does worshipping the past put blinders on an already-established blindspot?
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Does it even serve the viewing you have of your own individual life?
Do you have vision yet?
‘You see, but you do not observe,’ said your Sherlock.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Observe how I came to be within En Hedu Anna. Not so very long ago—only a little longer in time before your Christ as you are after him now—in Mesopotamia, she kept precise astronomical recordings of the moon’s phases. She looked to the heavens, as I have for-ever. As, in fact, there are only heavens every where. Only space, and within it conjunctions of elements we call earth, moon, stars. Bodies of heaven.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Observe how I came to Athirte in her dreams, leading her to study those bodies in heaven, so she could guide her father, Sesostris, Pharaoh of Egypt, in predicting the future 1900 years before Jesus appeared on the scene. With her wider view, she knew, the Nile and how it grew at the highest point of every summer. And so her people planned accordingly.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
But then observe how these arts and sciences of looking up and out, of seeing the celestial bodies (that their own earth swims in wide space with), made women suspect, instead of revered. Theano rarely credited for her contribution to The Golden Mean, 600 years before your kindly Christ. How mean of the men, though her husband Pythagorus placed her by his side. And when he died she took their schooling of young thinkers, of any gender, in her stride.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Aglaonice was known both as the first female astronomer of Ancient Greece, and also as one of the witches of Thessaly for accurately predicting the time and place of lunar eclipses 200 years before Jesus walked on water. Hypatia, maker of astrolabes and hydrometers, was cruelly cut to pieces by newly-converted Christians, only a few hundred years after their own martyr was hung from a cross.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Observe how many centuries I came to women in their dreams and they, in turn, came to their men in muse-like ways. How many centuries were we humans in the dark for not letting the light of woman shine through? Too many. So many we call them the Dark Ages. I say we. I mean you. I am a muse, though so often not amused. You use me. As you have used so many women. As vehicles for your own luster. But you are lackluster, at best. Here’s your true behest—to quest and wrest the rest from the fullness of mother, mater, matter.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
No matter. Most of your lives are short. And so was the way of it for some of those in the warmer climes. But not so for Sophie Brahe whose desire to commune with the stars so inspired her to assist her astronomer brother, that he wrote “Urania Titani” with her in mind. He at least honored his muses. She lived a long time, perhaps slowed like the cold-water fish around her Denmark home.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Just after Sophie’s death in 1643 (year of someone’s lord), Elzbieta was born. I could lose no time between them in acclimatizing to the loss of one form, before transposing into the next. Poland now. Through childhood dreams that pulled her gaze upwards and outwards to the stars, sixteen year old Elzbieta married ancient Hevelius in order to see those sparkles more sharply through his observatory. Mother of moon charts she became, as well as mother of three maidens.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Meanwhile, the moon, leader of women the world over, led young Wang Zhenyi of the Qing dynasty of China to write her wonder-gleaned wisdom in these books before she died at twenty nine years old: Dispute of the Procession of the Equinoxes, Dispute of Longitude and Stars, and The Explanation of a Lunar Eclipse. And Huang Lü, too, knew that magic lay in looking up so she amplified her seeing by constructing a telescope. With these two contemporary Chinese scions of the stars, my muse-o-meter ranged high as I danced between them. Huang Lü’s prototype for a camera came into being only ten years after her death in 1839.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
More and more I learned to multi-task my muse-dom. Simultaneous to China, I slipped into Scotland with Mary Somerville. Just after Huang Lü left her body, Mary included in her musings that there must be a planet perturbing Uranus’s orbit in her book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. Which led to the “discovery” (by a man) of Neptune. All this time it’s taken for a single woman to be officially recognized as a reader of the stars, and when one was finally included in the Royal Astronomical Society, it was a bumper crop of two, with Caroline Herschel in 1835.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
I had a wee breather before I skipped on over the lowlands to Ireland, to breathe life into Annie Russell (later Maunder, as we’re still having to meander about with men to get our wisdom out, ain’t we?). She ran with the camera that Huang Lü first dreamed of and became an expert in eclipse photography. “For ‘the heavens are telling’ stories of interest, stories of wonder, if we but have the eyes to see and the ears to hear,” she wrote in her 1905 book The Heavens and their Story.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
We’re catching up now to what you call the present. Only recently has Nancy Roman passed out of her body after a long and legacied career as the first Chief of Astronomy in NASA's Office of Space Science. From the lowly unwaged mother past generations had seen as unclean, even evil, a woman has been elevated to the "Mother of Hubble" for her role in planning the Hubble Space Telescope. You see farther now thanks to these visionaries, these dreamers and drafters of technologies. So far now I venture to introduce myself.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
My name is Urania.
My game is holding the whole world in my gaze.
Without losing a single granule of stardust, no matter how long and dusty and deadly the human path to enlightenment might be,
I am with thee.
Even in the coldest nights. Moreso there I burn bright. To hold the lights up for you to see all of eternity.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Where am I from?
From deepest darkest coldest space.
A place no one would face
without the grace
of a muse.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
You think your winters nearer to the poles are cold? That your poles themselves are frigid and uninhabitable, except by well-insulated scientists? Well try the beautiful blue, yet brrr-inducing Uranus, who shares my heavenly name. Or deep space, where you would freeze solid in less than an Earth-day. It might help you to call the Boomerang Nebula, as you mistakenly named it, my home, for being so close to the zero temperature point. And for being so symmetrically bipolar.
(tap-tap….thrum…)
Ah, I forget that bipolar is unpopular, even considered dangerous, by you. But ‘they’ are often your visionaries, the ones who can see into the extremes of existence and bring it back to you singing, if not singed. Often scorched rather. Burned through, burned out, by the fires of inspiration. Isn’t that why they say you can’t say the true name of the creatrix (although they who say such things would say, “God”) or look the divine in the eye, without dying?
(tap-tap….thrum…)
You’d incinerate in the the cauldron of cold hard truth, of all-encompassing is-ness. You’d come to know how ice can burn.
(tap-tap….thrum…)