The Constellation Bewilderus

At one time or another nearly every child has gazed up wonderingly at the night sky as some star-wise adult points out the constellations and their ancient names – The Great Bear, The Great Dog, Taurus the Bull – and asked himself, ‘what in the world is this fine person talking about?’

It is a lost art, this constellation-gazing business, and seems to have been the province of ancient people who, for all their many admirable qualities, didn’t really have enough to do all day. Certainly they didn’t have enough to do all through the night.

The practice, as seen from these many centuries later, seems to depend on the notion that if you stare at anything in the universe long enough it can start to resemble almost anything else in the universe.

This may point to the underlying mystical connectedness of every last damn thing in the cosmos, or it may be the result of the eye’s tendency to water and the vision to blur after the first three or four hours of looking at the same thing.

By these tactics – though I haven’t tried this – I could gaze at a certain segmented subquandrant of the night sky and see the ’72 Comet I used to drive, inclusive of the rear view mirror affixed with duct tape to the interior of the front windshield, and inclusive as well of its tendency in its later years to burn oil. See that gauzy galaxy cloud behind the double stars I have designated the tailpipe? That’s the oily exhaust I speak of.

In this situation – I’m back to the kid looking up at the night sky with the adult pointing out the constellations to him – the only polite, not to say practical, thing to say after a while is, “yes, yes, now I see it!”

(This line by the way will serve the child well throughout his entire juvenile scientific career. It can be used with abandon for instance when he is asked to look through a microscope and give some reaction, “yes, yes, now I see it!” This holds true even though he has closed one eye and inadvertently used that one eye to look through the instrument. It is not a moment that you can retreat from, this business of having been horse’s ass enough to carefully close the eye that you are meant to be looking with, so your reply – I’ll say it again, for I’d like the young people in the audience to memorize the line: “yes, yes, now I see it!” – turns out to be a perfectly adequate if completely false response. In all cases it is the type of remark that draws an end to the current situation and lets you get on with your busy day.)

Many of history’s jobs were quite demanding – I would not have wanted to be a test missile for a catapult prior to storming a castle, for one – but I wouldn’t have minded being one of the guys who first latched onto the stargazing thing. No, I wouldn’t have minded that job at all.

These people, ancient sheepherders by all accounts, had free run of the place, and once the names were publicized and out there they were impossibly hard to change.

They are in the position of the fine people who invented chess and set up the common rules to play by.

It doesn’t take long – I would guess about three weeks – for it to seem as if the rules had always been in place and there’s no sense questioning them now, and anyone who wanted to make small adjustments to the rules of play, perhaps on occasion giving pawns the ability to take out an entire row of the opposition’s players in a manner similar to a bowling ball plowing through a string of bowling pins set up in a row, will find few ears ready to listen.

The same with the man who seeks to modify the rule in baseball governing how many times a player must spit per inning, or the protocol in professional wrestling determining how many times a player must whack a folding chair over the unsuspecting head of his opponent before a win can go into the record books without an asterisk placed against it.

No, once in place, these regulations are inviolable.

This is unfortunate as you get the feeling that someone – anyone – could have done a better job of this constellation-naming business.

I don’t know if you have ever, regretful now of the time you wasted in this regard as a youth and now intent on reclaiming the knowledge that you watched go floating by at the time with so little interest, taken the time as an adult to look up into the night sky with wonder and, sky map in hand, walk around the backyard with your head craned backwards nearly horizontal while trying to match the image on the map with the stars in the sky, but it is a real experience.

It’s your life but if you are considering doing this you might want to think twice.

It is one of those exercises that makes you not only wonder about the purpose of this particular use of your time, but expands in a way to make you wonder about the purpose of any particular use of time at all, by anybody anywhere, constellations or not.

It also calls into question your own underlying intelligence. There’s enough of that in the air these days as it is, this questioning that I speak of, and at this stage of the game you don’t want to give your mind any more dissatisfaction to work with.

Much of adult life consists of staying far away from areas of endeavor that shine a light on your mental shortfalls. Why make it easy on the people who point these shortfalls out by standing in the backyard looking up at the sky like some sort of nut?

Have you ever seen these maps? I would say first of all that it calls for an imagination operating at just short of the Fever Dream or Category 5 level, to claim with a straight face that this or that smattering of stars looks like, say, Cassiopeia’s Chair. 

I have seen this Cassiopeia’s Chair constellation, my friend, or rather I haven’t. 

I have looked at this cluster and with the most open mind in the world. I have to say it’s just not there.

I suppose that in the known universe there must be some smattering of stars somewhere that looks less like a chair than these bits of light pointed out so helpfully to us, but not many. Not many.

The same is true of Leo and Pegasus and Orion and Perseus and Ursa Major, the Great Bear.  Also Canis Major, the Great Dog, Aries the Ram and Taurus the Bull.

You may gaze upon them until you glaze over and tears spring to your eyes. You may lie backwards upon the wet grass looking directly up and bring to bear the magic of sarsaparilla or brews even stronger upon the situation. You may introduce telescopes into the experiment. It makes no matter.

The only time that these stars can be said to resemble these bears and dogs and archers and such is when there is a complete cloud cover, and you can let your mind convince itself that if only that cloud cover were not there, these images would spring in front of your eye in all their evident glory.

I think with a little imagination of our own we can imagine when this entire topic came up.

It would be a clear night, and as I picture it one shepherd comes upon another shepherd, this second fellow looking up into the air as though he is about some purposeful business or other.

First Shepherd: Whachya doing?

Second Shepherd: Naming the constellations.

First Shepherd: What’s a constellation?

Second Shepherd: Oh, it’s a group of stars that look like a picture of something.

First Shepherd: How come?

Second Shepherd:  How come what?

First Shepherd: How come you’re doing it at all?

Second Shepherd: There’ll come a time when it becomes important for navigation and such.

First Shepherd: What’s navigation?

Second Shepherd: You ask a lot of questions, anyone ever tell you that?

First Shepherd: So you don’t know what navigation is any better than me. Hmm. Why don’t you give me an example?

Second Shepherd: Well, you see those three or four stars over there in the corner of the sky? They kind of remind me of a bear, so I’m going to call it Ursa Major, the Bear.

First Shepherd: Hmm.

Second Shepherd: What do you mean, hmm?

First Shepherd: I must be looking at the wrong stars.

Second Shepherd: No, that’s the right set of stars.

First Shepherd: Oh, of course then, then I must have misheard you. I thought you said that little cluster of stars looked like a bear.

Second Shepherd: I did.

First Shepherd: Hmm.

Second Shepherd: Hmm me no hmm’s. Speak up; you have something to say?

First Shepherd:  A bear, you say.

Second Shepherd:  That’s exactly what I say.

First Shepherd: I see. [Long pause.] And you’ve done this with all these stars I imagine.

Second Shepherd: Yes, exactly, I’ve got an archer and a big dog and a little dog and this flying horse I just invented.

First Shepherd:  I see. Listen, do you get a royalty or something every time someone uses one of these names?

Second Shepherd:  That is an idea that I never thought of. A fellow could do all right for himself if so.

First Shepherd: Yes, the first couple of shepherds who got these names in place could make a tidy profit over time.

Second Shepherd: Couple of shepherds?

First Shepherd: Well all I’m saying is that there are a lot of stars up there. You might need a little help. For instance, see that cluster over there? The very image of Cassiopeia’s Chair.

Second Shepherd: Who’s Cassiopeia?

First Shepherd: Don’t know, don’t care. It just came to me that that is what it looked like. And as long as I’ve said it looks like Cassiopeia’s Chair no one can come along later and name it something else. 

Second Shepherd: I think I see where you’re heading with this.

First Shepherd: Just protecting our intellectual property. There are advantages to getting in on the ground floor of something like this.

Well, this is what we said near the very beginning of this learned essay.