On an airplane, I will always request the window seat. I like a better view than the back of someone else’s seat inches from my face; I always slide up the window shade and crane my neck in the slightest to peek out. Admittedly, I most enjoy descending in an airplane in the evening; from my modest window seat, I can see a vast expanse of lights stretching above and below me. The city and night sky reflect each other as I sit sandwiched between the two lucent landscapes. Glancing out, I can’t help but daydream constellations between the lights.
I blame my adoration of this view on my dad. My dad is a dedicated collector of hobbies: close-up magic, photography, and chess all warrant his enthusiasm and dedication. When I was in the first grade, my dad decided that astronomy was yet another hobby worth his attention, so he built his own Newtonian telescope and began stargazing in our backyard. Over the next few years, our family vacations would include attending “star parties”—gatherings where astronomy geeks get together in really dark, vacant places and look through each other’s telescopes.
To be perfectly honest, at age seven the thought of sitting and looking at the stars late into the night seemed awfully boring and incomparable to my friends’ vacations traversing the national parks or meeting princesses at Disneyworld, even if star parties permitted me to stay up past my bedtime. My attitude changed, however, when my dad gave me H.A. Rey’s book, “Find the Constellations.” The book is a children’s guide to astronomy that focuses on making the night-sky comprehensible by outlining the shapes and characters that make up the constellations.
After reading Rey’s book, when looking up at the sky, I no longer felt that the lights were vast and unfamiliar, but instead saw them as dots to be connected, stories to be told. As I grew older, I realized that H.A. Rey was not the first to think of tracing stories onto the stars. Rather, his book grew out of a vast legacy ranging from the Almagest to MUL.APIN, from Nakshtra to Uranometria. Turns out, humans have been looking to the stars and seeing stories since the dawn of humankind.
Today, there exists a very official organization dedicated to the storytelling of the stars called the International Astronomical Union. The IAU, as it is more commonly known, is a group of professional astronomers that act as the authority on celestial bodies. (They are most [in]famous for ruling that Pluto was no longer a planet.) One sub-entity of the IAU is the Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature, a group that decides the official constellations. In a sense, they are juggling histories as they decide which stories take precedence in outlining the stars: Quadrons or Draco? The Azure Dragon or the Crayfish?
However, a cursory glance at any gossip magazine will reveal that to this day others believe that we are not telling the star's stories, but that they are telling ours. I went through a very brief, melodramatic period in my adolescence where I was bothered by the fact that my birthday fell around the winter solstice, thus fating me to an indeterminate Zodiac sign: Seventeen magazine claimed that I was a Capricorn, but Teen Vogue assured me that I was a Sagittarius. To me, this wasn’t just the difference of identifying with one formation of the stars over another, it was the difference between being one person or another: was I the responsible, deeply emotional type or the adventurous, non-committal type? Some days I’m convinced that I am the former, other days the latter.
This is the central tension between astronomy and astrology: in the former, we are mapping the stars, but in the latter, the stars are mapping us. Perhaps, like Narcissus, we become infatuated with our own reflection in the sky. But when we find that infatuation reflected back at us, it is hard not to feel as if the currents of the universe move within us. We are stardust, Joni Mitchell croons in ‘Woodstock,’ We are golden. Carl Sagan would agree: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” But this all begs the question: who was more beautiful, Narcissus or his reflection? When sitting in Row 3, Seat A, on my Southwest flight, peering out at the two landscapes of light, any significant difference between the two is lost on me.
H.A. Rey taught me that constellations are relational; the stories they create force stars into communion with each other and us into communion with the stars. After realizing I could trace stories in the stars, I began connecting dots in other parts of my life in order to make stories: I drew constellations in the freckles on my arm to resemble rabbits, naming them Bill and Flora and showing them to my friends on the playground. I also began to see constellations between people. I would daydream connections between myself and the strangers I passed on the street: a long-lost cousin, someone who would later save my life, or perhaps a future lover twenty years down the line. I began mapping stories in my life, or perhaps stories began to map my own life—but it becomes apparent to me now that my relationship to the stars begets my relationship with storytelling.
My hope for all of you this summer is that you gaze up at the stars or out at the city lights and you tell stories, allowing yourselves to trace and thread constellations between the stars and the stories you see. It is two human legacies at work at once: the proclivity to stargaze and the inclination to story-tell. I hope you indulge both.
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