Photo Essay: Astrology Around Town, Part 3

Part Three of a Three-Part Series
Click for Part 1 and Part 2

Day 5: Jenny and I had coffee with friends in the morning, then headed out to Griffith Observatory for the afternoon. In retrospect, it was a fitting way to braid together the sensory indulgences and the intellectual intakes of the previous four days.

If you know something about astrology, you might associate an observatory with Jupiter (the great eye, the long view, the wide view) or Neptune (the boundlessness of space) or even the Sun (the shining core of our little circle of planets, our awareness, our self-understanding).

But what I saw was Saturn. Not Saturn in the traditional malefic way, the way of stripping you bare and paring you down. Saturn in the way that energy becomes matter and integrates and tells the story of deep time.

It started with the rattlesnake signs in the hillsides above the observatory: a warning of our mortality, of the instantaneous ability of forces beyond our control to swiftly and unequivocally define our time on earth. In the flash of a fang, poison mixes with blood, commutes to the brain and stops the body dead in its tracks.

Okay, so maybe that’s a little malefic. But it didn’t feel that way so much as injecting a little more somberness, a little more awareness, into our day. We didn’t turn back because of the sign, but our attention turned a bit from the hills, the Hollywood sign across the bright canyon, the little blue birds sailing in the foreground, and toward our feet on the ground, the fraying fabric there, the careful placement of each step.

After a few minutes of slow climbing, we picked our way back down the trail and were confronted again with the dead: a sculpture featuring notable contributors to the long train of wisdom flowing out behind modern astronomers (left: Galileo and Copernicus). They were reminders that, with the proper application of energy, ambition and integrity, we could stretch ourselves out past the bounds of our body’s time here on earth. We can each leave a legacy in our own achievements. We can be the giants on whose shoulders future humans stand. I was reminded of the horoscope, the 4/10 axis, the long climb from the bottom of the hill to the summit, the process of coming from one’s ancestry and going toward one’s future.

Inside the hall, the historic building welcomed us with a giant pendulum that swung slowly, always aimed at True North, while the clock below it turned with the motion of the Earth. On one side was the Hall of the Eye; on the other was the Hall of the Sky. These exhibits house more traditional — more Saturnine, if you will — information on astronomy: navigation, telescopes, phases of the Moon and other such expected features. But plunk down a side staircase and you enter the building’s newer spheres, which debuted in 2004 after the observatory’s extended closure.

At the bottom of the stairs, you turn right to enter the “wormhole stairway,” really a simple channel taking you one more flight down into the basement exhibits. Jenny and I joked that the wormhole ought to have been graced with some more interesting features if they were going to bother with a name like that: spooky music or ghostly lights, perhaps. We opted to go straight, instead. And were glad we did.

Because by going straight, we entered the Cosmic Connection, a hallway featuring a simultaneously whimsical and profound timeline that traces the development of the universe from the Big Bang until today. Below the traditional horizontal layout of the unending march of years is pinned a long, sparkling river of more than 2,000 pieces of jewelry that look like stars, moons, comets and other astronomical ingredients. The pieces were contributed by a longtime donor and associate of the observatory, who had collected them over more than four decades. It was fun to walk the hallway and try to figure out from which era different bracelets, pendants and earrings hailed. Jenny and I called to each other: “Look at this hairclip!” “I want that necklace!”

But the jewelry, cool as it was, was really just a Venusian side note to the Cosmic Connection itself. The hallway curves — maybe like space, maybe like time — so that just a few feet in, I started to feel a little disoriented, a little overwhelmed. Large-scale photo-quality illustrations of the Big Bang and other cosmic developments reminded me both of own sense of smallness and of my intimate connection with every particle of dust floating by. Randomness and order converged. I could almost hear the grand symphony of the spheres tuning up, gathering in, pausing, breathless, before the conductor’s baton sliced downward, setting the great wheel of time in motion. I thought, How could anyone look at these photos and not believe in a god, or a goddess, or a marvelous dancing troupe of deities?

Even though the Big Bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago, the Cosmic Connection made me feel like it’s right next door — like its long shimmering arms still reach around us, holding us, rippling through us, getting caught in our mortal webs, pushing us to grow upward and outward, while yet holding us to the bounds of its physical laws. Its motion is like the ripples of a pond where a rock has just been thrown: concentric undulations, moving out, and yet in, at the same time. Its long arms seem, to me, to reach back in time to gather up the detritus of our origins, then bring them forth to us in offering, asking us to repurpose the very material from which we came, so many billions of years ago, to put it to good use for the next step — outward? upward? inward? — on our long, curving journey through time.

Photo credits: jewelry, Big Bang