The Tiny Bee That Hovers at the Center of the World by David Searcy

Author:David Searcy [Searcy, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, philosophy, Political, Social Science, essays
ISBN: 9780593133644
Google: v1Q0EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-11-15T00:17:59.692524+00:00

1

I’VE BUILT A LITTLE OBSERVATORY on the deck in my backyard. It’s not a proper observatory, insofar as it does not provide an isolated concrete pier for the instrument. So, whenever my dog Rocky, in his doghouse there on the deck, decides to scratch his butt, the image goes to hell. Vibrations multiplied by a factor of four or five hundred through the eyepiece, you just take a break and wait for things to settle down. It’s frustrating and yet kind of sweet in a way, to sense these intimate concerns projected out into the heavens. Which may serve to represent a point of principle here, I think.

It is, moreover, a lousy place for an observatory. Under all these trees. A very limited patch of sky straight overhead and to the north. And just enough of a slot to the south to give me half an hour or so of Mars in its course so low in its current, otherwise favorable opposition. If I’m out there by one-thirty in the morning, shutter open, scope turned on, I’ll catch it coming through the leaves. Then Rocky stirring. As if everything were shivering, straining with me to receive some hint of surface features, polar regions, something like our world up there, displaced. Removed from us. It feels a little like averted vision, somehow. In a broader sense. That trick, if you remember, whereby objects in the telescopic field too faint to be observed directly may be glimpsed out of the corner of your eye. You look away and there it is—the star, the shaky, leafy ordinary world. Up there. Removed and reacquired. I have a little folding drawing table set up in the dome next to the telescope, where I attempt to go directly at the indirection, as it were, with brush and ink, straight through the eyepiece. Paint the strain, the longing even, by the loosest possible means—to get these brushy, smeary, un-Lowellian renderings of the planet. One per night. Try not to lie. Yet try to fix it in the inky-black surrounding. Let the edges of the disk seem to emerge. Do not assume it’s really there. Or not so clearly, matter-of-factly as those templates with preprinted disks that amateurs would use back in the days when drawing still could capture subtleties the simpleminded cameras of the era overlooked. That low in the sky, you’re looking through a lot of fluctuating atmosphere. You bring to it a squint—as through a crack in the fence at something. What is that? As if you weren’t quite sure. Be quiet, Rocky. What did Nancy say? As if the pencil or the brush were “on the thing itself.” To bring it “into you.” Well, I can’t manage that. So try to paint the squinting. Paint the blur. The in-between, I guess, in a way. She says that opening of the dome, the shutter—that slit in the smooth white hemisphere—reminds her of a hatching egg’s first crack with something peeping out. I wish I’d thought of that.

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