Fleshly Odysseys

By Michael H. Kew

Supine on the soft grass encircling my guesthouse, a rickety old Niuean home, my ears prick to a neighbor’s television—a game show, perhaps, or a raucous film. The faint tinniness is extrinsic to the dull thump of falling coconuts and the chirp of crickets tickling the silken sky of nocturnal humidity wherein with binoculars I again bask in southern astrovisions, the firmament here full of tremendous asterisms exotic to my northern-hemispheric memory.

Amid these clear Niuean nights I stargaze at 3 or 4 a.m., just beyond moonset, to observe galactic objects I cannot see at home in the United States. After diurnal Venus shone brightly, past sunset it plunged southwestward with the waxing gibbous Moon and was trailed by Mars, ecliptically flanked by invisible Pluto and Saturn. As the Moon threads Sagittarius and Corona Australis, I note the descents of Crux, Libra, Circinus, and Lupus. I smile after spotting inside Centaurus the magnificent 13 billion-year-old Omega Centauri, our biggest and most luminous globular cluster (many astronomers believe it to be a dwarf galaxy nucleus). I can also see Alpha Centauri, the Sun’s nearest group of stars and, at just six light-years (25.2 trillion miles) from Earth, it is our first stop from home.

Alpha Centauri’s two main stars are the binary Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, both 4.3 light-years from Earth, while the third, Proxima Centauri, is a red dwarf just 4.2 light-years away. Though I cannot see it, this is Earth’s absolute closest star, orbited by Proxima B, a rocky exoplanet astronomers first sighted in August 2016. Spinning in Proxima Centauri’s so-called “habitable zone” (the range of distance in which on their surfaces planets can retain liquid water), Proxima B’s size rivals Earth’s and is possibly an Earthlike world, the most similar we have found.

Peering into the black beyond, I’m swept by a sensation of floating, of succumbing to pure wonder, and I lose temporality of my location on this, another kind of star, our soupy-aired terrestrial one, a metaphorical image against the infinities of space. The cosmos holds at least 100 billion galaxies, great archipelagos of gas, dust, and stars. I often fantasize about the eyes of animate sentient beings staring back at us from another spiral galaxy, those eyes studying Earth, marveling at its greens and blues and mystified, just as we are, by this enigma, this fleshly odyssey that most of us like to call Life.

Adapted from “Rainbownesia,” available via Amazon.

Photo: Tunç Tezel.