Dark Cloud Country: Chapter 2, Stardust & Drunken Daydreams

"Stars speak to infinitude, but they also speak of a luminescence lit in the chaos of life and death.".

This is Chapter 2, “Stardust & Drunken Daydreams” of my newest book, Dark Cloud Country: The Four Relationships of Regeneration. You can buy the book here.

Stardust & Drunken Daydreams

How do things begin? Scientists believe they understand how stars are born, those resplendent spheroids of plasma and pain and gravity that our recalcitrant racket has altogether made invisible in the night sky. They tell us that chaotic clouds of stardust—or "nebulae” they call them as assuredly as if that is what they call themselves—form when another star explodes or implodes, they do not really know which. That is the strange thing about science, you know. It knows what it knows but even that which it knows appears to be unknown, or at least drifting toward the unknown. Science is like good friends who know what the other is thinking but often get it wrong. But good friends are important, and science is trying its best. It tells us that the death of one star is the birth of another, and perhaps, regardless of if we know it or not, that is the very best place to start.

“I celebrate myself,” begins Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Heaven’s bard begins his earthly work by talking about stardust. I am here, Whitman is saying, here in the embrace of myself and in this presentness, you are also here, for “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Not you, the reader. That is too simple, and simplicity is too mysterious. Whitman’s poetic viscosity is an enigmatic formula beyond mystery itself. He is talking about the universal you and he is postulating the foundational cornerstone of civic virtue: commonality. He is speaking about stardust and clouds and nebulae and death. He is thinking about death and its chaos, the harmonious homogeny of life. But he is not thinking about individuality, as even the child knows that every twinkle in the night’s sky is peculiar and named but is somehow most special in its constellational community.