Setting aside cognitive impairment, how much of human cognition is dependent on stardust and photons? For a playful take on issues like thinking, physiology, mind-body dualism, astrophysics, and the distortions of time / sense perception / reality that might go back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, or Aristotle’s Poetics, check out Cassiopeia’s Dust, a short piece in the 2021 academic journal Philosophy and Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press).
Background [not radiation]: Queen Cassiopeia, mother of Princess Andromeda in Greek mythology, is the constellation that looks like a big distorted “W”, looking North / East at night (~ 11pm from Seattle). The constellation is close to the Andromeda Galaxy.
One of the Cassiopeia’s stars blew up, creating a spectacular supernova (Cas A). Because of its emissions, the remnant is portrayed on images from space ‘scopes with false color representations (the NASA title image above). Its “dust” has been the subject of research, including the creation of a cool virtual reality (VR) 3D walkthrough model. Click on the link for a VR simulation, done at Brown University [warning: it can be dizzying!]. The Astrobites article link on the VR production is also linked by underlining.
Cassiopeia’s Dust
[A dilettante admires a constellation from a hot tub, and considers it the next day. Is it a prose poem, creative nonfiction, or “light” verse; phenomenology, astrophysics, metaphysics, or half-lit paronomasia?]
A photon hit my retina. Again, again; others also hit. The sensation seemed continuous, albeit twinkling, rather than as discrete and separated points. It was like dust, but I didn’t blink.
It came from a thing I would call bright, in front of me, over my head, on a dark night; it is said to be a star from the cluster of a pattern I learned to call Cassiopeia, and just in a similar way, I learned about my retina, and I learned about photons, and I learned that some consider them a duality of either wavering or unwavering continuity or perhaps some discretion, meanwhile calling attention to my own uncertainty, and from a source thought to be over 10,000 years away, if one could ever travel at the speed of light, traveling for at least that long, starting before my retina existed to be hit, somehow seeming yellowish to me, when I perceived it, if you made me explain that almost forgotten moment, using the prosaic unmusical vernacular that you are reading as I am using it today. That moment might have been poetic.
Using the word “again” implies a passage of time, but I am not counting. It is as if the photon that hit at least one of my retinal rods, and started the cascade of physicochemical, neuroelectrical events that culminated in my striking down, with my left fourth fingertip, the key for the letter “w” on this keyboard, already the next day, to finish the word now, was aimed for that rod. Perhaps the photon distinguished itself, then extinguished itself, right then, or perhaps, like a visitor in disguise, now seems native, absorbed in my own fabric somehow.
Maybe it was not a single photon or many photons, but another particle or energy some say is also emanating from Cassiopeia, bathing my whole being but evading the notice of my other senses, without an evocative hum or aroma or taste or texture or temperature or pain, motivating my biological machinery from sedation to this creation, although no matter nor energy was created nor destroyed, I do not think, in typing this, but I really have no way of knowing.
This whole conceptual construct might be debatable, if one would bother. The construct fits into my head, if that’s where a construct can be found, if findable, and if a construct has dimensions, if measurable, to be fitted, as I am using the word right now. Yes, some demand that reality be measurable and repeatedly so, but as I write, again, I am not counting.
Good science allows me to declare that I am being conditional about it all, and about how I am communicating this way, allowing an exercise of my seldomly used subjunctive voice, as if there were a statistical aspect, perhaps a freedom, if that is how one can characterize a possible lack of inevitability, involved in my typing this period.
How you might read this or say this, with what sound or accent of your own, with what connotation or nuanced memory, is of minuscule interest to me, yet here I am typing it for you. If human bodies are made of stardust, or at least contain star photons, from stars like Cassiopeia A, as that remnant might be called, does it follow that this conceptual construct, perhaps labelled a prose poem, perhaps creative nonfiction, is then necessarily stardust, or not necessarily.
Ron Louie / Univ. of WA
[Author’s manuscript version, not final published version, to fulfill JHUP publishing agreement…]