I walk every day that weather permits. If I am alone, I listen to music on my iPod. It’s quite an eclectic mixture. I’ve put a little Led Zeppelin into it lately.
I have my own little circle of the world that I visit one a walk each day so that I can push the blood around the course of my veins and arteries. As part of this, I walk a stretch of Pine Street between Euclid and 4th. Pine is covered by a canopy of trees south of Rose, and as I emerged from beneath them one particular evening, the sky was exposed to me in full from west to east. I saw every shade of blue known to man. On the west, it was so light to almost be white and on the east as dark as black. Decorating the blue was a garment of clouds which the setting sun had colored pink.
As a way of clearing my head I try to get my mind in a place to see the world in a way it might’ve been seen by our ancestors in the days before Wikipedia, before books, before the written word. I try to understand from a first person point of view how the ancients understood the coming of night and the return of day before we had the model of the world as a spinning ball in space that was lighted on one side by a glowing ball of gas almost a million miles across.
It’s quite frightening, really. The sun goes down, but how do you know it will come up again? It always does, but will there come a time when it stops and you will be left to die in the cold of eternal darkness. We might laugh at the silliness of this notion because the sun does come up every day, but don’t we worry about things today that we don’t have any control over?
With the clouds pink and the sky blue, I began to think of the feminine and the masculine, the woman and the man. A god and goddess in the heavens, him wearing a mantle of blue and her tresses colored pink as they flow behind her. The night falls, and under the cloak of darkness they sire an offspring that gives light to the new day.
As the sun goes down and the sky became totally navy, the birds began to settle into their nests. I saw a platoon from Pittsburg’s legion of grackles make camp atop of the Methodist Church. Birds bed-down early and rise early. On those precious few mornings when I am allowed to lie in bed so that light and warmth and the sounds of nature awaken me without the aid of an alarm, I listen to the birds.
Jean has noted that they don’t sing at sun up, but while the sky is still dark. It is as if they are worried about whether the sun will return and are singing to bring it up. Though we don’t have the power over our world, it is comfortable to think we do.
This season of year with the sun’s reign in the sky becoming shorter each day and the domain of the night increasing, we need the comfort. I can imagine our ancestors seeing this happen to their world. We are losing about 2 minutes of light per day. If that continued for a year there would be no light left, and we would be in eternal darkness. Clearly, right thinking men and women have to do something. Maybe building a big bonfire to create a simulacrum of the sun in order to lure it back by sympathetic magic. Of course, once you have a bonfire, you could roast the flesh of whatever hoofed mammal you had handy. Then, you would need some mead to wash it all down with... but I digress.
I am tempted to compare this to the concern over global warming, but my time runs short. It’s better simply to let it go and listen to the music.
“Dance in the dark of night / Sing to the morning light.”
Bobby Winters is Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Mathematics, and Acting Chair of the Department of Chemistry.
