Sky Bears and Kissing Planets

Just look what I’ve got…

The Stargazers’ Almanac! Isn’t it beautiful? It gives a month by month account of what can be seen in the night sky, with lovely clear maps looking north and south, so you won’t miss anything. I have Lynne at Dove Grey Reader to thank for this discovery, because she mentioned it here, and I bought it because I thought it would be the perfect partner for this…

Stories in the Stars, An Atlas of Constellations, by Victoria Hislop, is exactly what it says on the label. It’s packed with tales about the stars, explaining how they got their names, and it’s a lovely mix of myths and legends, as gods and goddesses rub shoulders with heroes, heroines, villains, and some very odd creatures. And there are snippets about astronomers, scientists, explorers, mathematicians, mapmakers and mariners, all helping to show how successive cultures have viewed the stars, from early times right through to the modern age, with references to the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Japanese and many more, interspersed occasionally with the author’s childhood memories.

I fell in love with this book when I heard it on BBC Radio 4 – it was the Book of the Week at Christmas, and it was beautifully read, by the author and a cast of actors. It was abridged by Jill Waters, who also directed and produced the five episodes, and having now read the book (I splashed out on a brand new hardback, which is very unusual for me) I can say I think she did a brilliant job. Sadly, the BBC programmes are no longer available for listening, but if it’s ever broadcast again you really should tune in.

Hislop, who describes herself as an actor, writer, theatre-maker and juggler of things, stresses that ‘Stories in the Stars’ is not about ‘astronomical rigour’. It’s the stories of the stars she knows, not the science. And she adds:

 “This is the glory of stargazing for the storyteller: above us a blank page in negative. A jet canvas pricked with white dots, and a rag-bag of myths, religions, lullabies and fairy tales with which to join them up. A whole universe of stories ready to steal, which are as unstable as the stars themselves – shining and magical, but soon to explode and re-form the dust and gas of history into new stories altogether.”

Purists may not like this dot-to-dot approach, but I do: I feel it helps make sense of all those weird and wonderful stories, some of which I already know, although others are new. The science bits Hislop does include are put across very simply, and the whole book has really whetted my appetite to learn more about stars and planets and so on, so I've dug out a not terribly good pair of binoculars, and a very tiny compass (a souvenir from the Natural History Museum) because I have no sense of direction!

At this point I must mention the illustrated maps created by artist Hannah Waldron – after all, an atlas wouldn’t be an atlas without its maps! These are lovely and clear, one for each constellation, showing a picture of what it’s meant to be (hunter, swan, dog etc), it’s position in the sky, and the magnitude of the individual stars.

The ‘Stargazers’ Almanac’ also boasts some wonderful illustrated maps of the night sky, with details of what you see each month, and brief information about the sun, moon planets and meteors, as well as the stars, all of which makes it slightly more scientific than Hislop’s book. However, it’s quite easy to understand. And the compiler has a lovely turn of phrase. This month, for example, I learned that: “The Little Bear (Ursa Minor) hangs by its tail, at the tip of which is Polaris, infallible guide to the north.”

Isn’t that magical? Never again will I fruitlessly search the sky for something as humdrum as a small saucepan with a bent handle. Instead I shall welcome the sight of a playful bear cub hanging upside down and swinging from a star! And he here he is in the Almanac, more or less in the middle of my not very clear photo:

And here he is in Hannah Waldron's rather splendid illustration in the Constellation Atlas.

However, according to Hislop the Little Bear has a sad story to tell. He is Arcas, son of Callisto, a wood nymph who was seduced by Zeus, King of the Gods. As you might expect, Zeus’ wife Hera was not at all happy about this, so she changed poor Callisto into a bear, which seems a little extreme (and very unfair – after all, it wasn’t Callisto’s fault).

Fast forward more than a decade, and the teenaged Arcas is about to kill the bear, unaware she is his mother. But Zeus comes to the rescue (if you can call it that)… and turns Arcas into a bear as well! However, I’m not sure this solution pleased either mother or son. According to Hislop, to avoid being scratched by their sharp claws, Zeus picked both bears up by their tails, swung them round and round, and flung them into the sky. Which is why Sky Bears have longer tails than Earth Bears!

So, having got all enthusiastic about the night sky, and alerted by a line in the Almanac, I went into the back garden early on Saturday evening and managed to locate the planet Venus, shining brightly, and red Mars, a tiny, dull dot just a hair’s breadth away. They looked incredibly close - they could have been kissing or hugging! But apparently that’s an illusion, all to do with the alignment of the two planets as they’re seen from earth (once back in the warm I resorted to Google to find out more). In reality Venus is 134 million miles from Earth, and Mars is even further away - 203 million miles. So there must be a pretty good distance between them! Anyway, I gather it’s quite rare for these two planets to pass so close to each other: the last time was in 2008, and won’t happen again for another two years.

I tried very hard to take some photos, but it’s quite difficult trying to hold the camera steady and focus on something all that distance away, so my pictures were very wobbly indeed:

And when I did manage to get a clearer shot Mars wasn’t there at all, which is very disappointing. But you can see the thinnest of thin crescent moons, and Venus… but you have to click on the picture to make it bigger

 

 

However, even if I haven’t got a proper record of the occasion I’m glad we saw it, because we are surrounded by buildings, and there’s a lot of light pollution – the Man of the House, who was a bit of an astrology enthusiast in his youth (long before I met him), thinks we may be able to find somewhere nearby which offers a better view for stargazing observations. 

Peas, Bears, Birds and Stars...

Pea tendrils sweeping the air for lattices.
(Pic from Anglia Farmer).

Peas are clocky children who become spoony adults. Once they grow long-limbed, they start to teeter, because they possess more self than they can support. Then they grow madly wending tendrils to sweep the air for lattices – just as marionettes will grow marionette cords to sweep the air for marionetteers. Yearning begets yearning: the pea plant yearns for a lattice, so it grows tendrils – then every tendril too yearns for a lattice. Yearning draws tendrils out of the spindly green pea-shoot only to find itself compounded, elephantine. 

I just love that image of teetering pea plants, and the idea of them possessing ‘more self than they can support’, which could apply equally to humankind. It’s a perfect description of teenagers, desperately trying to come to terms with the new ‘me’, bewildered by their size and appearance as they shed their childhood skin and head for adulthood. And quite apart from the physical aspect, what about the emotional implications of possessing too much ‘self’? There’s an identity crisis here I fear, just as there is if you have too little ‘self’.

And that comparison with marionettes is so apt. On a first reading I thought, how odd, but when I considered it I realised it was spot on, and it will make anyone old enough to remember string puppets see that the way pea plants grow and stretch out their curling, quavery tendrils really is very like the tottery movements of marionettes, and the way their limbs waver and tremble.

Add caption

The passage comes from Things That Are, Encounters with Plants, Stars and Animals, by Amy Leach, which held me so enthralled when I came across it in a bookshop that I ended up sitting on the floor so I could read it. Then, of course, since I couldn’t stay there until I’d finished, I had to buy it. Budgetary restrictions mean I don’t often buy brand new hardback books, so when I do it has to be something pretty special that I really, really want, and that is what this is. 

It’s a series of essays on Life, the Universe and Everything (divided into two sections, Things of Earth, and Things of Heaven), in which Leach reflects on the natural world and makes observations which, as I said earlier, could just as easily be applied to people. She’s not at all introspective, and certainly isn’t preachy. She may be examining individual creatures, plants or stars, but she takes a broad view as she meanders from topic to topic, reaching out from one thought to another to another, making her comments, drawing conclusions, but leaving readers free to make their own minds up and imbue the subject in hand with any meaning they choose.

Leach rejoices in the quirky and unusual, in little known facts. Back to the peas again, did you know the tiny plant produces two minute matching leaves every four and a half days, regular as clockwork, until it reaches that point where it starts to topple under its own weight and height, and starts producing those stretching tendrils.

Then there are other plants, like the mouse-eared cress, which suddenly go ‘batty-bat; and send their shoots burrowing down into the ground, while their roots rise up into the air (a phenomenon known as gravitropic mutation), which prompts Leach consider, among other things, losing one’s way, lilies, water lettuce, a hippopotamus, lotus plants and seeds, and what it feels like to lie dormant for a thousand years. See what I mean about one thing leading to another?

And how about the blackpoll warbler, just four inches long, weighing a third of an ounce (that’s forty-eight to the pound) that does not winter on earth at all. Instead, it flies 2,000 miles from Nova Scotia to Venezuela, then back again (another 2,000 miles) pursuing the sun from season to season. Leach writes:

We winter, we summer, we winter, we summer; while the warbler flies from summer to summer to summer to summer.

The tiny blackpoll warbler chases the sun so it never has
to face a winter.

Some of the tales are so fantastical you wonder if they can be possibly be true, but they are. Initially I kept looking things up, then decided Leach is obviously correct, and ended just taking her word for it: truth, after all, is stranger than fiction. It’s not only the snippets of bizarre information that sent me scuttling off to do some research, for Leach is as fond of odd words as she is of odd facts, and a decent dictionary is a huge help, along with an encyclopedia.

But she uses words and language like a poet, with lists, descriptions and stories that cry out to be read aloud, creating images that make you look at things in a new way. Take her account of the constellation Ursa Major which, she says, is sometimes mistaken for a ladle or a prawn, although personally, I think it looks like a saucepan. Anyway, she tells us:

The big starry bear is trailed by a little starry bear, about the same size as an autumn cub padding around on plantigrade paws. Late autumn is when Earth bears and their children run out of fresh apples and honey, when they might come across a heap of fermented apples, and devour them, and lose their bearings. Bears on the ground are the most sweepable bears off their feet.

Who else would draw such an analogy between the Great Bear and the Little Bear shining high in the sky, and a mother bear and its cub down on the Earth below? And what a wonderful picture it evokes, of a bear gorging on fallen apples, which are beginning to rot, giving off that winey smell they develop, and being toppled by the alcohol, losing their bearings, teetering like the pea plants, or losing their way, like the mouse-eared cress. And, in case you wonder, yes, bears do eat fermented apples, and yes, they do get drunk as a result… 

Bookmark bears...  I love these Earth Bears with their
Starry Bear kites linking Heaven and Earth. (Big Bear, Little Bear by Kristiana Parn for Oxfam)

I must mention that the book is published by Canongate, because that’s the company which produces that lovely series where modern authors retell old myths, including The Penelopeiad, Margaret Atwood’s slender but superb account of the story of Odysseus’ wife Penelope, and her maids.