The Nashville House

Besides the chance of clear skies, one of the reasons we went to Nashville for the total eclipse was that it was my mother's hometown. 

My great-grandfather Joseph Starr emigrated to Memphis with his brother, and they "peddled their way to Nashville," eventually bringing their wives and other brothers over.  Since 1916, when he was just 21,

my grandfather and his brothers owned and managed the Bijou Theater downtown "one of the finest theaters operated exclusively for colored patronage in the entire United States." Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters performed regularly.  It was torn down in the Fifties--an eminent domain case fought and lost: urban renewal, and it was in a "Negro" or slum part of town. 

My great-uncle, Alfred Starr, brought a lawsuit against the Nashville Housing Authority in January 1954.  He died of a heart attack at his desk in the Bijou, on October 15, 1956--exactly one week after the US District Court decided against the Bijou. He was 58. Among his pallbearers were Senators Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore Sr. The Supreme Court upheld the decision in June, 1957, and the building was levelled a few days before Christmas. 

A few blocks away, the Spruce Street Baptist Church, the first and largest all-black church in Nashville, suffered the same fate, the building fell and the congregation was forced to move.

 My grandfather came to own the largest chain of "colored" theaters in the South. My sister texted us an address from one of my mother's notebooks--her father's home:  511 N. 20th Ave. These blocks are now huge corporate gullies, a hospital complex with parking and concrete out-buildings, and #511 is long gone. Unlike Memphis, Nashville has buried most of its historic downtown, which turned out to be the blacker parts of town. 

But that night I googled it, and it showed the house at a different address: 511 Spruce St, the a name for the continuation of 20th Ave. Real estate records show it was built in 1911. 

The next day we drove back and found a lone old house, surrounded by vacant lots. There was a camper nearby, junk on the porch, and around it new brick developments: a church, low-income housing, and a magnet school. I was pessimistic this was the place, but we parked to take pictures...and my camera battery died.  I managed just two pictures, one straight on, on from the side. 

Back home, my aunt Ann Leslie sent me three old photos of the house. I took my two photos, and a few Photoshop tricks later I'd proved it to myself: this was the place.  My great-grandfather Joseph Starr's house, the first home of my grandfather, Milton Starr, and his first daughter Sara, born on August 8, 1930.  

It was magic, overlaying the past upon the present, revealing the myth of time.  The bricks that are there,  and the earth, where, 80 years before, a proud grandfather crouched with an infant girl.  They are gone, save for these few images and the meaning attached.  But 80 years later is all but simultaneous, an instant in geological or astronomical time.  But in this picture I can see they are still here.  Their vibrations, the waves they started are still moving across the lake. Ghosts are tricks of time. And DNA is even more mysterious.  You circle back, and the echo is still there.

Across the street from my great-grandfather's house is the Spruce St. Baptist Church, which carried its name here from downtown.  It was not here in my grandfather's time. That was another trick of time.  But it is the reason we couldn't find the 500-block of 20th Ave. N: by city ordinance, it was renamed in 2006 to honor the church that stood on Spruce St. downtown: "WHEREAS: The community deems it appropriate that said name be changed...." 

Cassini, Saturn & the World's Most Expensive Art Project

Cassini is the longest running, most expensive and far-flung art project in the history of the planet.  Now Cassini is about to take its final plunge, almost exactly 20 years after it took off.  Sure it's teaching us about gasses and moons and particles and all, but what it mainly brought back was art: images, close and precise, of formal bodies in space.  Something we've been glimpsing and imagining since Galileo.  Saturn's colors, shapes and rings turn out to be more formally perfect than we could imagine, and more sublimely beautiful. 

Formality and beauty are also the lessons of the Eclipse: that the macrocosmos, glimpsed at its most formal and refined, is the definition of awe,  and the definition of beauty.  The intersection of human consciousness and the working of the universe-refined is awe.  It forces our attention beyond the flat earth and the mundane to the larger scales we are operating under whether we notice or not.

I lived on the edge of SoHo for almost 20 years, and I was forever bugged and disappointed by the obsessiveness and meaningless expense of so much conceptual art presented in the galleries there.  But consider this:

Conceived in the early-80s, Cassini cost almost $4 billion.  It launched in 1997 and took 7 years to get to Saturn traveling at 42,000 mph.  2 billion miles, slingshotting around Venus, the Earth and Jupiter: 10 times the distance from Earth to the Sun. Around 80 light-minutes away: more than an hour for signals to get here, travelling at the speed of light.  Entered Saturn orbit in 2004--expected to last 4 years, it's going on 13.   All to send back a bunch of pretty pictures.  The remarkable thing is that it's been worth it.

I was back at Cornell in 2008 and by chance saw these photos at the Johnson Art Museum.

"Spectacular Saturn: Images from the Cassini-Huygens Mission," the exhibition was called.  An art museum, not a science museum.  I had never seen anything like it.  To me it was like pictures confirming a UFO, or life on other planets.  The detail and the beauty, the technological accomplishment of sending a craft a billion miles to take perfectly clear photos and beam them back hi-def.  They show Saturn to be perfect beyond our imagination:  a platonic form, an ideal form.  

The roundness of the planet.  The flatness of the rings: they are actually two-dimensional by any earthly standards.  Out there, in true space, something real can be this thin, this ethereal. Their actual thickness is about 30 feet, and the width of the rings is like the distance to the moon.  If they were the thickness of paper they would be almost 2 miles around.  The farther out you look, the more formal things become.  Edge-on, they are virtually invisible.

These images changed my view of space, the way whale-watching changed my view of the earth.  I bought the $40 book at the museum, and as soon as I got home I sent copies to my parents, my sisters, and my best friend:  I thought it was that important.  And now the book isn't even on Amazon? 

When Cassini departed in 1997, the iPhone did not exist.  Now the camera it carries is dwarfed by smartphones.  Yet behold the magnificence.  To the religious and the psychedelic communities I say: behold the mind of God.  Made more magnificent when you consider the act of human ingenuity that obtained this secret distant beauty. Yet we ignore the message of space.  And that's the definition of mundane.

Galileo was the first to see the planet was more than just round in 1620 when he invented the telescope.  Cassini, the namesake of the satellite, with better optics 20 years later, perceived them to be rings.  Could he have imagined this precise beauty?  Four hundred years on, this we have accomplished.  But can we imagine, in our world now, this commitment to science and art, and the best of mankind, untainted by greed or violence?  What has changed since the 90s when 19 countries came together to embark on this project?

History (or perhaps archeology) will see this as one of mankind's greatest achievements.  The best example of what humans can do.  Publicly funded, collectively owned.  An accomplishment of our species: for mystery, magnificence, knowledge and beauty.  What else is there?  Survival?  Sure.  Cash and greed?  Why not.

The technologies that carried Cassini to Saturn for art-as-science are the same that created ICBMs, drones and Smart bombs--rockets of death.  Here are two aspects of the world expressed.  Pessimism v. optimism; fear and killing v. exploration and beauty.  Out there, in the solar system, at the macro level, there is no one to fear or kill or menace.  Look to Cassini, before it falls, for an exploration of what we are, what we can do, what's inside of us.

Heading to Nashville for my 4th eclipse

(August 14, 2017)

Eclipses are about fortuity. I got my parents to drive me to my first one when I was 13. We happened to wander to Malignant Cove in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Sandra Blakeslee, legendary science writer, was there too and the next day I was in the Times (next to Colonel Sanders, link below):

http://www.nytimes.com/1972/07/11/archives/for-2-minutes-there-wasnt-any-sun-for-1500-visitors-at-nova-scotian.html?_r=1

Thirteen‐year‐old Jeremy Wolff persuaded his parents to take him to see this eclipse. His father, Michael Wolff, who teaches English at the University of Massachusetts, said: “Jeremy kept saying in an oedipal way it's the last eclipse in your lifetime, so what could we do?”

An astronomical alignment of precision, beauty and complexity, and you are on the spot. The sun 93 million miles away is precisely covered by the moon 230,000 miles away, casting a shadow 65 miles wide through the midline of our country. The size/distance ratio required for this is miraculous, or coincidental. Take your pick. It's a glimpse at the scale God works at.

Julie and I, during our golden pre-marriage years, travelled to two eclipses: Colombia, in February 1998; and northern France in 1999.

Stories and photos (from early days of html) here:
http://already.com/colo/colombia.html
http://already.com/eclipse2/11.htm

Eclipse Chasers are generally astronomy nerds, but it's as good an excuse to travel as any. We've know since '99, the year we were married, that the next realistic one to see was in 2017, which seemed a truly unimaginable distant future. Tomorrow I take my wife and 2 kids to Nashville, the largest city completely within the totality; both because the clear-weather odds are decent, and because it was my mother and grandfather's hometown. We've been on the coasts plenty,  but a long time since we've seen America. We'll be 50 miles west for the event, an Airbnb just over the Kentucky border. I booked early.

These are magical, sacred events, changed by our ability to predict them, but still awesome: to witness larger forces drawing on the face of our planet. Prophesy-wise, calamity-wise, this one, this line, seems particularly easy to read into. I'll give you the facts: see what you come up with. It starts in Portland, OR, and ends in Charleston, SC.

At this time of division, the path cuts through the guts of our country from the Northwest to the Southeast. Coming first through Salem, capital of privileged, "progressive," pot-legal Oregon--just 20 miles south of Portland. There could be disaster, 600,000 ironic stoned kids all decide to hop on I-5 at the same time.

The shadow leaves the continent in Charleston, historic heart the slave trade, the business of racism. Charleston has the only slave market building that is still standing, now a museum where you can see the whips and pistols and iron shackles that enforced human bondage. Superficially at least, the other end of the spectrum from Portlandia.

In the Times story, Blakeslee calls solar eclipses and the precise diameter/distance ratio that makes them possible "a fortuitous freak of nature." Maybe, but no more than any of the mysteries that allow life in this warm brief bubble of atmosphere. No, not a freak of nature: but God apparent in the universe, the magic and mystery, the natural beauty and perfection of things. Einstein said:

"There are only two ways to look at the universe: That nothing is a miracle or that everything is."