The Dreams of Icarus
Dear Susannah
I want to tell you about Saturn and her Rings. If only you could see this view. The greatest glory in creation. Nothing begins to compare with this. I’m no believer, you know that. Still, thoughts of divinity are common here. Saturn is the best evidence for a Creator that I have ever seen, or expect to see. Don’t worry. I’m not going all religious on you; but if the divine can find expression anywhere in Nature it’s here, in Saturn lunar space, beneath the sweep of these majestic bands, so much like wings, as if the planet is about to take flight. If Jupiter is the king of the planets, then Saturn is his consort. Mother to all the other planets.
This planet changes forever the way you think about scale and colour and grandeur. Beneath these bands I feel utterly inconsequential, totally insignificant. Even the mission objectives seem irrelevant. What does humanity matter? Life is important, yes, but not any one species, especially one on the brink of extinction. Our affairs and concerns seem petty and ludicrous Out Here. Perhaps that’s why we have such a miserable record in terms of space exploration. I know it’s been said before but if only the politicians and religious leaders could see this view. It would change even the dullest and most obstinate amongst them.
The view I’m gazing at now, the one I can so seldom take my eyes from, produces an after image of sorts, a visual echo that remains in your blind sight for hours afterwards, as though the planet is imprinting itself upon your memory, remaining with you long after your attention has moved elsewhere. But it never stays elsewhere for long. You always have to go back and look again. There’s something almost erotic in the curve of the Rings, their sweep and elegance. Saturn is female, no doubt about that. Bold and sensuous. Don't laugh but she reminds me of you.
I have never seen anything so beautiful as those Rings. This is the one sight that might inspire me to believe in the numinous. Objectively, I know they are rock and ice, most likely the remnants of a moon destroyed by the huge tidal forces exerted by the pull of Saturn’s gravity. But objectivity has no place beneath the sweep and tilt of these delicate confections, beneath wings that might have inspired Icarus to dreams of flight. If this is not the work of a higher power then there is no evidence for god elsewhere in the universe. The wonder they inspire is inevitably tinged with sadness, with the knowledge that they are not a permanent feature. The rings are a mere three-million-years-old (having been born yesterday in cosmic terms) and will be gone in another three.
Astronomy is full of delicate, almost sensuous locutions, a secret language all of its own, imbued with almost medieval incantations, as though the language of Copernicus and Kepler, Newton and Tycho Brahe has survived to the modern day; evocations and imprecations, canticles and epiphanies. The language of creation, a code which when spoken aloud summons the solar system into being. It’s easy to believe that Sir Isaac (an alchemist as much as an astronomer) uttered these words, inscribing and encoding each in the Principia Mathematica. Words that can be used to conjure the mightiest of the planets. Words like circumplanar and translunar. The gods themselves may have used such words to create the planets.
You always believed magic was for the feeble minded, for the intellectually lazy (just wave a wand and the problem’s solved); but this is Hawking’s magic, the magic of an intellect advanced enough to summon planets from the void with a few words derived from a codex that no magician or astrologer could ever unlock.