night sky

That sky was beautiful last night. But I didn't appreciate it like I used to. The stars have always been the same distance away - more or less, discounting the expansion of the universe and the orbits/rotations of earth, sun, and galaxy - but I used to feel more...connected with it. I used to have a kind of 'imaginative engagement' with the night sky, I guess.

I think I must have learned a certain kind of relationship with the night sky from the stories I had read to me as a child. I don't remember the stories, but I back-project onto them an image of five-pointed stars, big and yellow and lonely, with swirls of deep blue and blue grey around them. I remember the pages of picture books I read, their smooth pages, the pictures that were always the same every time I came back to them, but which were always suffused with a sense of wonder, projected out of my little head and its unfettered imagination. (Whenever mum was cutting my hair after my bath, creating a crooked fringe with blunt scissors, there was always something going on in my head, some silent or spoken story; making sense of my day, or spooling something out of the mystery of my part-formed personality. I can remember her fingertips on my skull as she gently pushed my head into position, and I remember the cold, hard scissors, smooth against my hot forehead as they sheared reluctantly through my fringe. I'd feel the wet curls of falling hair tickling on my eyelashes, but I couldn't lift my hands from under the towel I was draped in, so I'd stick out my bottom lip and blow upwards. The hair's long gone, but I'm still sticking that lip out.)

The Apollo programme was aiming to put a man on the moon (I only knew this later, of course). But I was aware of something about space, about the way that people were exploring it. There were images of rockets everywhere - adverts, films, ice lollies - and that seeped in. That's the first 'hardware' interest/obsession I can remember: being excited by anything to do with 'space'.

Then there was a book about Mickey Mouse and Pluto going up in a space ship, and being threatened by their arch-enemy (a brutal-looking, unshaven creature with four teeth like broken white rods, one at each corner of his mouth). I remember that that villain filled me with a sense of dread as I approached the pages where he menaced Mickey and Pluto, but at the same time there was a fascination there, too. I can recall being frightened, reading that book on the landing at Uncle Peter's house. I can't remember why.

There were films too. I remember seeing "2001: a Space Odyssey" at the pictures - I guess that was in 1969 or 1970. At that age, the big themes of the film would have meant nothing to me, but the cold, arid imagery of Kubrick (and cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth?) struck me profoundly. I projected that cool, utilitarian look onto the American and Russian spaceships when I thought about them. That internal imagery made the actual stuff feel closer to me - I felt a connection with the metal, the plastic, the fuel, the plumes of flame, the heat haze as the Apollos climbed into the unfocusable distance after lift off. It was firmly a part of my imaginative world now. (Years later, when I read some of William Gibson's grungey short stories, this cold white/silver imagery morphed into something a little more detailed, gritty, and grimy. It accreted another layer of (imagined) reality.

I got a telescope for Christmas in 1973, a smooth white tube with a metal tripod that snapped after a few months. I loved that instrument, even though it didn't have anything like the magnification or clarity of the pictures in the (increasingly scientific) books I was reading at that time - "The Look-it-up Book of Stars and Planets" and, later, "The Observer Book of Astronomy" (I think), by Patrick Moore. Looking back, I can see that this was the time when my imagination started to drift away, replaced by a much more rational view: I wanted to understand, to engage with the night sky intellectually, rather than imaginatively.

On the cusp of adolescence, I must confess that my emotional energies were starting to turn elsewhere: that telescope afforded my tantalising, half-imagined glimpses of 'ladies' undressing at half-curtained windows under yellowish electric light bulbs. This held more attraction than a blurred, reddish, oscillating image of Rigel, or the dazzling white - but shaky - surface of the moon. London's light pollution did the rest, and my thoughts moved from the stars to the earth. I focused on plastic models, ignorant fantasies of girls, dreams of pop stardom, and thoughts of joining the RAF as a navigator. I stayed indoors a lot in the evenings.

I remember being on holiday in the US in 1990, the autumn before Desert Storm, camping somewhere near Niagara. After a strange pasta dish cooked by some Dutch fellow-travellers, I sat out in the dark, finishing of the beer from the group's cooler. As all the lights in the camp went out, the starlit sky faded up to a clear, glorious beauty. I remember talking to myself, providing a commentary on my amazement. But I was ignorant now - I'd forgotten the science and logic - and I felt that my mind was moving numbly, with nothing to hold onto. I couldn't get the sky to stand still, and I couldn't focus on it (that wasn't just the beer).

And now...now I sometimes feel awed by the sky, like last night, with the half-moon, and the clear stars shining in profusion above the rooftops and the silhouetted buildings at the top of the hill. But there's something missing. I still can't fix them, hold them in my mind in a comprehensible way. I want to get that sense of engagement back, to not feel estranged from the sky. But I don't know how.