Meet Me In Eternity

Jack Horkheimer: Star Hustler, is dead.

The world hurries on in spite of this fact.

Annie Dillard wrote the following in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

“People say that a good seat in the backyard affords as accurate and inspiring a vantage point on the planet earth as any observation tower on Alpha Centauri. They are wrong. We see through a glass darkly. We find ourselves in the middle of a movie, or, God help us, a take for a movie, and we don’t know what’s on the rest of the film.

Say you could look through John Dee’s mirror whizzing through space; say you could heave our relief globe into motion like a giant top and breathe life on its surface; say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: What would you see? Transparent images moving through light, ‘an infinite storm of beauty.’

The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and dissappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up – mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale – the ice rolls back.

A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then spreads red again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames.

Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth that no root can suck, and wither in an hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the earth’s surface, are a wavering blur whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any image but the hunched, shadowless figure of ghosts. The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys like slag, and trickle back, and pour, a brown fluid.

Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.”

Jack Horkheimer is dead.

He passed quietly amidst the rising din of the ground zero mosque debate, as oil wicked its way further into the mangrove swamps of the Gulf Coast, as Pakistan drowned and Afghanistan hardened, and as the Perseid meteor belt moved away from Earth’s atmosphere, having given us its yearly display. This is sad news, indeed. The world has lost another true educator, one who was filled with simple awe at the cosmos and sought to share his wonderment.

Some days feel hopeless, like for every teacher we lose, ten red-faced pundits spring up like hydra in their stead. Any more it feels like there are less and less people asking questions and more and more people simply trying to assert their version of the answers. It is evident everywhere. In theology, in politics, in the ongoing culture wars that have set journalism against commentary, literature against celebrity gossip, high art against everything else, theories against hunches, and language against itself.

I like to think that Jack Horkheimer and others like him (Bill Nye, Annie Dillard, Mr. Rogers, Mary Oliver, Jim Henson, Neil deGrasse Tyson, et al), work to show us another way. Where the spittle flies among the deciders, who trade in linguistic baubles on the battlefields of the rhetoricians, the science educators and the poets and the imagineers forgo the lockjawed face-offs and instead look up to the stars or to the soil at their feet, tap us on our shoulders, point and say “wow, check that out.”

We would do well to not only listen more often, but set aside our opinions and our determinations and take it all in for a little perspective.

Jack Horkheimer is dead, and passed quickly through the scope of our epoch, flashing brightly, wearing too much eyeliner, filling his televised lectures with groan inducing puns and humor and warmth and pathos and pointing us always skyward, where everything seems to be spinning on majestically whether or not we take the time to shut up and recognize it.

Aerial

Rolla Olak

Sun Kil Moon

Sun Ra

John Coltrane

Pink Floyd

The Orb

The B-52′s

Sonic Youth

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