Wednesday, January 03, 2018

TREE RIESENER - THE HUBBLE CANTOS (an impressionistic review)



How to harness the grandeur of the cosmos, how to translate it into human terms without stripping it of its magnificence?  How completely can an enigma be explained before it becomes mundane?  And what of our own mundaneness, the ordinary passage of numbered days?  How do we reconcile the unspooling of our relatively short lives with the limitless wonders and terrors of outer space?

Or this - 

What if our lives here on earth are equally shrouded in this cosmic mystery and wonder?  What if these mortal minutes and hours are just as full of unknown joys as the night sky? What if we all just temporary mirrors of an infinite universe?

Or this -

What if, finally, the one truly amazing fact is that all of this exists together?  All of the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown - the vacuums, the voids, the overcrowded cities, both humor & sorrow, both laughter & fear - the mundane, the obscene, the surreal and the fantastic, all of it constantly occurring, lives constantly ending and beginning, stars forever forming and dying, the intangible always outnumbering the tangible, but all of it out there.  Not all of it necessary and not all of it inevitable, but still out there, defining us or being defined by us, and what then?  How to capture these elemental, constantly overlooked truths?

And here, then, within these pages, within these luminous lines, maybe an answer.




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