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Saturday, July 5, 2025

Dark side of the moon

by

Iraq Mathur
2352 days ago
20190126

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.


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