Analysis of the text The stars

                                                        The stars

                                                                       Eliot Weinberger

 

The stars: what are they? They are chunks of ice reflecting the sun; they are lights floating on the water beyond the transparent dome; they are nails in the sky; they are holes in the curtain between us and the sea of light; they are holes in the hard shell that protects us from the hell beyond; they are the daughters of the sun, they are the messengers of the gods; they are condensations of flaming air that are wheel-shaped and roar through the space between the spokes; they sit in little chairs; they are houses scattered across the sky; they run errands for lovers; they are compositions of atoms that fall through the void and entangle each other; they are the souls of dead babies turned into flowers of heaven; they are birds whose feathers burn; they impregnate the mothers of great men; they are shining concentrations of spiritual breath, made of the leftover residues of the creation of the sun and moon; they augur war, death, famine, pestilence, good and bad harvests, the birth of kings; they regulate the prices of salt and fish; they are the seeds of all creatures of the earth; they are the flock of the moon, scattered across the sky like sheep in a meadow, which she leads to pasture; they are crystal spheres whose motion creates music in the sky; they are fixed and we move; we are fixed and they move; they are the stray seal hunters; they are the footprints of Vishnu, hunting through the sky; they are the lights of the palaces where the spirits dwell; they are of different sizes; they are funeral candles, and to dream of them is to dream of death; they are like everything material, of four kinds of matter: protons, neutrons, electrons, neutrinos; they are all the same size, but some are closer to us; they are interaction by means of four forces: gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force; they are the only gods, and among them the sun is the first; they are the ostrich hunters, who are out all night and at dawn huddle near the sun to warm themselves, and so they are invisible; dew and frost descend from the stars; winds, hot and cold, come from the stars; the stars descend from the sky into the lap of a maiden; they are the embers of the fire of creation; they never change; they are the white tents where the Star People live; they are the innumerable eyes of Varuna, who rides through the sky Makara, half bird and half crocodile, or half antelope and half fish; they are that which is in a state of continual change; sacrifices must be offered to them to bring rain; they are the Never Fading, swallow-like creatures that feed on the fruit of the Tree of Immortality, that which grows on the island of the Lake of the Green Hawk; they glow, gleam, gleam, flash; they are delicious; they are bearers of evil; they are the eyes of Thjasse that Thore cast into the sky; they are the white ants of the anthill erected around the motionless Dhurva, who meditates eternally in the depths of the forest; they are a kind of celestial cheese beaten into light; they are, they simply are; the stars are a huge garden, and if we do not live long enough to witness their germination, their flowering, their foliage, their fecundity, how they grow old, wither and corrupt; there are so many species that every stage is before our eyes; we and all the stars we see are only the atom in an infinite whole; a cosmic archipelago; the sky is like a mill wheel turning, and the stars like ants walking on it in the opposite direction; the sky is the canopy of a carriage, with the stars hanging like beads suspended from one end to the other; the sky is a massive orb and the stars the perpetual illumination of the volcanoes above it; the sky is of pure lapis lazuli, sprinkled with pyrite which are the stars; every star has a name and a secret name; the only word we hear of them is their light; man will never encompass in his conceptions the totality of the stars; under a starry sky on a clear night, the hidden power of knowledge speaks to us a language that has no name; goodness and love flow from them; if we were not situated in a galaxy, we would not see any stars; if gravity were not so weak, the stars would be smaller, and if the stars were smaller they would not burn long, and if they did not burn long we would not be here; they have no chance or random elements, no erratic or useless motion; evil and misfortune flow from them; their existence is improbable; their infinity induces us to count them; their marvelous regularity is beyond belief and is a proof that in their bosom resides divine intelligence; the eternal silence of those infinite spaces is terrifying; the more comprehensible the universe seems, the less sense it seems to make; all the stars move and shine to be more fully what they are: light emits light because it is its nature; knowledge of the stars is fundamental to the understanding of poets; if the stars did not radiate light, they would explode; after death souls dwell in the stars: the shining of a new star could therefore indicate that the soul of a gan man or woman has reached its destination; "disaster" means "astral misfortune"; the only explanation why there are so many stars that we cannot see is that the Lord created them so that other creatures, farther away, can admire them at a closer distance; we are the center of the material universe, but we are on the perimeter of the spiritual universe, condemned to watch from afar the spectacle of the celestial dance; unlike the other animals, man was created to stand upright to gaze at the stars; King Arthur is up there, awaiting his return to rule England again; up there is K'uei, the brilliant scholar born with a frightful face; up there are the Manger, the Mist, the Little Cloud, the Hive; look: The Tower of Babel and the Bliss of the Tents; up there are the highwaymen and the doves that bear ambrosia to the gods, and the twin horsemen of the dawn; up there, the daughter of the wind mourns her husband lost at sea; yonder is the Strong River and the Palace of the Five Emperors, the Kennel of the Barking Dogs, the Straw Road, the Way of the Birds, the Snake River of Sparkling Dust; up there are the nymphs who mourn their brother Hyas, killed by a boar, and whose tears are shooting stars; there are the Seven Portuguese Towers, the Boiling Sea, the Place of Reverence; behold: the friendly Ostriches; Cassiopeia, queen of Etypia, who thought herself fairer than the Nereids, is there, as well as her hapless daughter Andromeda, and Perseus, who rescued her with the head of Medusa hanging from his girdle, and the monster Cetus, whom she slew, and his mount, the winged horse Pegasus; yonder is the bull that plows the Furrow of the Heavens; up there is the Hand Dyed with Henna, the Lake of Plenitude, the Empty Bridge, the Egyptian X; and once there was a girl who married a bear, and in horror her father and brothers killed the bear, and she became a bear and killed her parents and chased her brothers across the mountains and across the streams, and cornered them before a tree until the youngest pointed high with his magic bow and each brother took an arrow and was shot into the sky, and became a star; up there; up there is the Butcher's Shop, the Armchair, the Broken Tray, the Rotten Melon, the light of Paradise; Hans the coachman, who carried Jesus, is up there, and the lion who descended from the moon in the form of a meteor; up there, once a year, ten thousand magpies form a bridge so that the Weaver can cross the River of Light and meet the Boar; there are the braids of Queen Berenice, who sacrificed her hair to ensure her husband's protection; up there is a ship that never reaches safe harbor, and the Whisperer, the Sobber, the Brightener of the Great City, and look: the General of the Wind; the Emperor Mu Wang and his charioteer Tsao Fu, who went in search of the peaches of the Paradise of the West, are yonder; the beautiful Callisto, doomed by the jealousy of Juno, and the goddess Marichi, who drives her chariot drawn by the boars across the sky; yonder is the Sea Goat, the Dane Elephant, the Long Blue Cloud-Devouring Shark, and the White-Boned Serpent; up there is Theodosius become a star, and the head of John the Baptist become a star, and the breath of Li Po, a star which his poems make shine brighter; there are the Two Gates, one by which souls descend when ready to enter human bodies, and the other by which they ascend to death; there a puma leaps upon its prey, and a Yellow Dragon climbs the Stairs of Heaven; up yonder is the Literate Woman, the Glacial Maiden, the Wet Daughters, and the Head of the Chained Woman; yonder is the Thirsty Camel, the Striving Camel in Search of Pasture, and the Free Grazing Camel; yonder is the Crown of Thorns, or the Crown that Bacchus gave Ariadne as a wedding gift; behold: The Navel of the Horse, the Lion's Liver, the Bear's Nuts; yonder is Rohni, the Red Gazelle, so fair that the moon, though she had twenty-seven wives, loved her alone; up there the Proclaimer of the Border Invasion, the Child of the Waters, the Pile of Bricks, the Exaltation of Stacked Corpses, The Exceedingly Minuscule, the Dry Lake, the Coal Sacks, the Three Guardians of the Forced Heir, the Tower of Wonders, the Overturned Chair; up there is a cloud of dust raised by a buffalo, and the steaming breath of the elephant lying in the waters surrounding the earth and the muddy water stirred up by a turtle swimming across the sky; up there is the broken circle that is a chipped plate, or a boomerang, or the entrance to the cave where the Great Bear sleeps; up there are the two asses whose braying caused such a din that it scared away the giants who were rewarded with a place in heaven; yonder is the Star of a Thousand Colors, the Hand of Justice, the Single and Uniform Way; yonder is the Double Double; yonder is the Highway Inn; yonder is the State Umbrella; yonder is the Shepherd's Hut; yonder is the Vulture; behold: the Fan to Vent yonder the Waning Crescent; yonder the Court of God; yonder the Quail's Fire; yonder the Ship of St. Peter and the Starfish; yonder: look: up: the stars.

 

 

 

Analysis of The stars 

Diego Valdivieso

 

 

I consider The stars by Eliot Weinberger to be an essay because the author carefully observes something, the stars: he thinks about them, analyzes them, reflects on them. To stop at something and observe it is a characteristic of essays. To say that something is many things, not to reduce it to a single definition, is also characteristic of essays, which move away from concrete and definitive, scientific definitions.  

 

Although scientific language is used to define what the stars are and the characteristics that in different cultures and through time have been given to the stars are exposed, the author contributes his own definitions, and even speaks of the stars as houses, ants, like a garden; there is a game between scientific language and a more familiar one that we use to name things. Within this play of words, using scientific language and common words to define the stars, a sort of prose poem is created. There is an enumeration, a kind of list, which looks like the stanzas of a long poem, a poetic language where any number of definitions and words fit. To say that this text is an essay is perhaps an understatement, or not, as long as it is said that poetry also dwells in it.

 

 

The resource of enumeration works to expose the immensity of the stars: because their characteristics are so many (they are not just one thing, they are many, and at the same time they cannot be defined, "they just are"), and they are so many and so powerful that they are bigger than we can imagine, because understanding them in their totality is beyond the limits of reason, no matter how much some have tried to define them. Likewise, the resource of enumeration brings a certain tone to the text that brings it closer to poetry, to a prose poem: there is no metric but there is musicality. 

 

In this essay the author makes use of repetition: words such as "there" or "up there" are repeated at the end of the text, which creates a certain rhythm and tells us to look up there, since "unlike other animals, man was created to stand upright in order to contemplate the stars". The author constantly uses metaphors ("they are nails in the sky"), since science alone cannot explain to us what the stars are, while poetry helps us to feel them closer: not to see them as far away from us as they are.