Ira Mathur
So you’re in Port-of-Spain on the night of January 21, 2019, lying on a blanket, prone, eyes peeled at the sky for rare celestial theatrics of a lunar eclipse as the blue moon, the super moon, and the blood moon coincide for the first time in over a hundred years (1866).
As your eyes adjust to the dark you play Pink Floyd's ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and sink into the vastness of this universe: a hundred billion stars contained in ten billion galaxies. Over a billion trillion stars in a universe where astronomers can train their telescopes in every direction 13.6 billion light years away.
Numbers so staggering they can't be grasped.
You watch the shadow eat up the large round super moon until it is a sliver of light in the inky sky, glowing rust, and with the growing dark notice stars when before there were none.
You remember reading that astrophysicists say if you are standing on the surface of the moon when this event was happening, and you were staring back at the Earth, what you would see is this beautiful reddish-orange tinted ring. You imagine what it would be to stand on that super moon with a powerful enough telescope to see the minutiae of life on Earth.
You would see planet Earth, a cobalt blue globe, of rock, oceans, and crust, occupied by 7.2 billion earthlings. You’d see, as you zoom in, that they have used their considerable intellect to create wondrous science, technology, art, languages, and architecture. You would marvel at the way humans fly in machines, over a 100,000 planes moving daily like meteors through the sky, zigzagging through its five continents.
You would see that half of the earth's population—over 3.4 billion people struggle to meet basic needs on less than US$10 a day; that the poorest 40 per cent of the earth’s population account for five per cent of global income.
You would deduce from looking at the surfeit of guns, the arms trade nuclear power and conflict between over 20 nations that humans are capable of destroying planet Earth. You see that human desires, for power, for territory, for control, for fame, for knowledge are double-edged swords. You will see races, religions, nations pitted against one another, simply to win. You will puzzle over the super egos thinking, don’t humans realise how brief their lives are?
You comprehend, standing on the moon looking at your miniature island nations, grasping as if all at once what is needed in us all: more art, more transformative Peter Minshall-type mas, more clever calypso, folklore, more reading books, music, science, more quiet time.
You think our children will find themselves if they are intimate with the labours and talent of the people who brought us this far, through slavery and indentureship: People we are ignoring and forgetting, such as Dr Eric Williams, VS Naipaul, Angela Cropper, Keith Smith, Frank Rampersad, William Demas, Pat Bishop, to name a few.
You think somehow that we will battle past the layoffs, hotels pulling out of Tobago, the crime, the missing woman who was brutalised and lies dead by a hillside with no justice.
You search for hope.
You train your telescope at a middle-aged man walking around the park who has lived with a tumour in his brain from the age of 20, who lives as if each day is his last, plunging into business, study, music, prayer, duty, Carnival, and travel with Herculean energy because he knows each moment is borrowed.
You see the two children snatched towards war and extremism and reunited with their mother by a member of this same self Pink Floyd now urging you to ‘shine on you crazy diamond’.
Back on Earth, as more stars come out, you think you’ve been deluged with wonder and your thoughtful son says, “You’re looking at the past. Some of those stars no longer exist. By the time we see them billions of light years have passed.”
You think of the people you loved, who’ve died, the people you miss who’ve burnt themselves into you with their books or deeds. You feel relief, then hope. Nothing disappears. It's all here on a molecular level; they are all here, somewhere.
Then you sit down and wonder hard how you will do your bit to embody light and you open your heart, you get up and engage with the Earth because in the end, that’s all there is, the heart and the unending light of unending stars.