Moon photographed in 2012 with a 6-inch Newtonian reflector telescope I built
When I once brought my eye to the eyepiece of a telescope
and witnessed the moon, it was not science but wonder that held me transfixed.
And this, too, would not be correct, for what I saw was not suspended in
hallucination, nor a vacant staring; I was instead enlivened by sensation.
Noticing things, specific and concrete, both expanded my wonder and began a
list of observations which descend to science and its purposes. But the
open-eyed shock of near disbelief – the witness of one’s own miraculous vision
– remained for all my life a welcome, if infrequent, occurrence. Art excites
it, yet art seems a secondary illustration taken of vision’s prime effect. It
is like memory rather than the first instance of seeing.
Oddly, Copley has some of that optical effect in his airless
colonial portraits, and Vermeer practically sits us down in a camera obscura. It is more due to
optical accuracy that the state of wonder is engendered in us like this, and it
is ironic for the hard observational work – the science – needed for such a
simple accomplishment on the viewer’s behalf.
So the state of seeing passes through stages – the first
being prized for its sensational magic, and succeeding observations resorting
to noticings, then measurements, finally a dry correspondence like this, or
some account book registration.
Who will reawaken in us this first light of an object’s
existence in our consciousness? Who can re-create the poetry of the brand new
experience? Or have we forever passed beyond the ability to be thrilled by a
movie of an arriving train? Must we now have a story to include it in?
Yet, the train arriving still thrills us in person. No story
is necessary. The visceral is enough, yet the more we record it, the less we
have of it. When I again have brought my eye to the lense of the telescope, and
see there the moon in its finery of gray and satin whites, its bombarded
continents and gray dust oceans; when I thereon do gaze languid in my summer
comfort, breathing air that is nowhere present on the moon; when I partake of
wonder at the stony sphere out there and of myself below drawn up by
fascination; then am I at the tip-toe of my life, alive with the wonder of the
all in all.
