That Writer's Block

 

I don't have anything to write about today. Or for the past few days, actually. It's a bit of a writer's block but not quite. I've been itching to write except I don't know what to write about.

There have been stray thoughts floating about here and there. When the Integrity crew showed us the image of the sun eclipsed by the moon, from their position on the far side of the moon, I was drawn in by the utter blackness of space. It's a realization registered by quite a few of us. Astronaut Christina Koch commented on the pitch black of space:

"What struck me wasn't necessarily just Earth, it was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbed in the universe".

"I found myself noticing not only the beauty of the Earth, but how much blackness there was around it and how it just made it even more special".

I want to say that the feeling that vast blackness evokes is similar to what I felt on a cold December's night gazing up at the tall American Sycamore outside my fitness center. The clouds seemed to be reflecting a brown-grey that matched the patchy brown-grey bark of the tree. The dark, cold sky seemed eerie and menacing. It also seemed strangely enchanting - like a siren-song, beautiful and dangerous. 

A few weeks ago, after that Artemis II mission, amidst Iran commentary on social media was one striking image of the traditional architecture in Isfahan. It was an arched opening with a latticed screen filtering in light, breaking up the darkness in a clean line break on either side of the opening. It's what would be called a jaali in my neck of the woods. The darkness on either side of the opening was inky black. Its juxtaposition with visible beams of light allowed in made me feel the same eerie enchantment.

Mulling over the darkness of that eclipse picture, I came across information about a physicist by the name of Aaron Freeman who spoke in a June 2005 NPR interview about energy changing and existing in a different form. It was scientific poetry as a way to console a loved one's passing. That interview is often referred to online by his opening statement, 'You want a physicist to speak at your funeral'. He said, 

“…all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you".

And that idea intrigues my mind. That's what the blackness of space is - nothingness to interrupt the photons of light out there. Yeah, that menacing quality comes not just from the darkness but a subterranean knowledge that there's emptiness where there's that black night and space.