Semester in the West

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Gwen Marbet: Perihelion

“Be ready for ceremony, it’s coming today.” 

The barely visible, arching elliptical of Tsushinchan’s orbit reaches down towards the undulating mesas of ancient river sediment just as indigo begins to streak the orange-cast sky. The comet is old, believed to have been born of the spherical veil of icy space debris on the boundary of the Kuiper belt. Tsushinchan, in an 80,000 year orbit, intersects our Earthly orbit nearly perpendicular, at 139 degrees of inclination. 

In those 80,000 years, the apsidal precession of the moon will occur nearly 9,000 times – its axis of elliptic orbit rotated to the east from the magnetic pull of the northern constellation of Draco and the southernly constellation of Dorado. It will form 8,888 overlapped orbits ringing Earth before Tsushinchan retreads her blazing path through our solar system. 

The persistent, self-perpetuating spiral of our galaxy is sent into a spin from the gravitational imbalance of the continuous cycling of interstellar life: nebulas, black holes, and stellar nurseries join together in a cavalcade of symphony. Our Earthly existence is situated in the midst of it all, on the Orion spur of the Milky Way galaxy. The outer reaches of it are the smear of stars and gasses appearing across our night sky. Looking up into its hazy depths is a rippled reflection of being, which stares right back at you, born from the very churning existence which sustains our fragile lifeforms. Within it, the recycling of molecules are embroiled in a ceremony of rebirth spinning at 515,000 miles per hour. 

Life finds a home in this constant movement and follows suit. Mimicking its mother as she stirs about the kitchen in the morning light: making the coffee, reading the newspaper, going about life. Outside, the ponderosa spirals on the ridgeside – the xylem tissues developing in windy conditions, taking on a helical shape, and sculpting the fibers into a spiral as the tree grows. As it ages, weathers many a storm and is licked by fire, it eventually becomes a snag – the bark falling away, slabbing off and sloughing down the now shiny bare wood. Piling like clothes cast off in the heat of the moment in a rumpled pool on the forest floor. What’s left is the exposure of the effort of all this growing, the spiral of wood tapering down to a single branch, made flexible by its grain. 

Downvalley, in the rivers, the salmon have returned to spawn in the cool waters – driven back to the point of their birth. Geographically, this looks like an orbit, completed once through, driven by Earth’s magnetic core. Navigating the ocean and rivers by way of the pencil-thin lateral line running from operculum to tail fin, salmon sense variations in the Earth’s magnetic field, finding their way back to their spawning grounds. But, the magnetic field of the Earth itself is not stagnant. Rather, like the moon, its telluric current is subject to geomagnetic reversal – electrical currents hummock and swale, driven by convection in the mantle. Salmon are able to sense these minute changes, adjusting the trajectory of their path to still return to their spawning grounds. An individual salmon’s journey may appear as a singular orbit, completed once before the fish spawns, its body is destined to decay aside the redd; eventually left as a

bleached skull of razor-like teeth, a snout-like jaw, and the hollow of the eye giving way to the cranial cavity. To overlap the migration trajectories of a certain group of salmon over time from the same spawning grounds may illustrate a trajectory pattern not unlike the apsidal precession of the moon over astronomical time. Thousands of skulls line the river beds. 

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We know processes like these to be a linear notion beginning with “life” and ending in “death.” There is vague understanding that at some point the cycle starts anew but still there is a desire to settle this matter in the linear. So, the placecards are decidedly set at opposite ends of a long mahogany table to avoid conflict. The two contrasting opposites designed to make us cherish one and fear the other take their seats. The feast shall commence, or will it end just as the gesture of beginning has ushered in its first breath? For we attach these ideas to a moment forced into stagnation by our pointing finger. The body attached to it squints and tilts its head, focusing, and wrought with hesitation at the naming of such an event, says in a wavering voice – “this is the end.” 

But is it? When two opposing forces, pressure and gravity, are in equilibrium, they create a circle: a continuous motion, self persistent, and never ending. So perhaps, we look at the agreement of life and death as we do the creation of circles – grown from the balance of two interconnected opposites. Think of it as cosmic duality. The contrary becomes the complimentary. They are set at the same pace, in the same harmony. 

Already, cyclical ideas are represented in religion: in the halos of Catholic holy figures, the Dao De Ching’s introduction of the daoist principles of Yin and Yang, Buddhist teachings of enso – perfectly empty yet completely full. Across religions and geographic boundaries there is a recurring harmony between the cyclical and the divine, and through ritual observance the cyclical divine ushers in ceremony. It’s meditation as an act of attention-giving to the universe. The inspiration that rises from attention given to the unseen and the ordinary, the brief and the drawn out, is what opens us to the principle of the cyclical as the divine. Pick it up and see what it tells you, for ceremony is birthed from the attention to the passing – the continuous vigil held for the details often overlooked. 

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Eons of river sediment hold one another in an embrace adorned with a filigreed arc accelerating tenfold from its center. Scientifically, spirals like these are understood as a curve emanating from a nucleus, advancing in a constant outwards motion and never once revisiting the same point. Ancient Pueblo rock art depicts them as a motif of migration. Both speak to the movement of being as a migration from a center, as a consistent solar return, or as an agreement between opposing forces. It is understood that these processes are continuously cyclical, but there is a point in which the spiral ends, the sphere stops expanding, and the orbit terminates. It is the moment of attention held that dangles these processes taut in our consciousness – which we in turn try to emulate, groping and feeling our way through murky depths. The ruination, the collapsing inwards, is the realization that it is a fleeting moment in time in which all hangs in the cyclical precession of being: at some point there will be an end, an abandonment of the continuation, if there is to be a day anew. 

You must know now that the spiral arms of the Milky Way are not in fact solid arms, but rather are a mesh of interstellar fabric briefly woven for a moment in time, only to be quickly unraveled through the deft flick of the wrist that is the constant flux of stellar orbits. 

At perihelion, Tsuchinshan may feel the heat and the solar wind generated by the fiery mass of the sun, or be pulled into its magnetic field and blown apart, or perhaps sucked into a hyperbolic orbit from Jupiter and expelled to the outer reaches of interstellar space — 

but most likely she will just vanish. 

Though, in this moment, indigo and purple are daubed across the sky by the spine of Comb Ridge as she dips with grace below the horizon.