NIGHT / LIGHT
At night, in solitary isolation, the lighthouse keeper lights up the sky, warning ships of the hidden perils in the vast blackness. The light beams out into the velvet darkness. The limitless sea and sky become an infinitude, an endless, engulfing mass of black.
Another inky blackness, and another solitary confinement: the astronomer, too, sits alone in the dark. The light pours in through the pinholes in the sky, each one revealed to contain a magnitude. The astronomer is constantly in awe of the sublimity of the night sky; it is daunting, consuming, he falls upwards into it, like Antoine de Saint Exupéry in Wind, Sand and Stars …
When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver … …
The lighthouse keeper and the astronomer are Saturn’s children. The triad of Saturn, melancholy and geometry is a central one, as is the connection to astronomy - the most “melancholy geometry.” Occupations related to water also belong to the children of Saturn. Despite their allegiance with the dryness and hardness of earth, in a temperamental sense, the paradoxical nature of the Saturnine draws them to water and vastness.
Observatory on Mount John, Tekapo.
January 2007, JB
