Adler Planetarium On a Weekend
Jenny McDougal
Copernicus sits outside, at the eastern-most tip of this jut, Lake Michigan churning around us, wind gathering hair, and very nearly, your glasses, into the water. He looks distinguished here, raised on a dais, this old astronomer, the center of a scientific revolution with his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium that told us the Earth wasn’t the center of this universe, that we are one of many, that the revolutions of the celestial sphere are determined by our sun.
A similar statue sits in Warsaw, a fact I carry with me.
Inside, we watch a movie in the omnitheater, a Sagan yarn that gets me to cry, the narrator’s voice like the velvet covering the old theater seats, worn and patchwork and beloved. After, the exhibits call. There are fourteen glass cases alongside the walls, tiny, incandescent lights burning to illuminate the brass sundials, the astrolabes, their curious and delicate etchings catching the light like small kites. We peer, you and I, at each tiny dial, the meridian and equatorial rings blinking gold in the light. There are some from Persia, the curl of Arabic cut deeply into the gold, into the silver. My favorite boasts the oldest instrument in the Adler Collection, its burnished face shows a stereographic projection of the celestial sphere, northern portion. Each ring is worn, the thumb of some astronomer having touched the same spot centuries ago. You tell me that each astrolabe is signed, and this one from 525, the year of Hegira in Baghdad. I can barely make out most of the numbers, the small pictures, before we’re pulled along.
In a much darker room, the planetaria are shown, intricate mechanical models showing the movement of the planets around the sun, the moons around our planets. Everything here is rubbed soft: the blocked wood telling us to Lift Here to see the Answer!, the glass telescope lenses grimy with dirt. Are all planetariums dying?
You pull me through the exhibit on gravity, on light pollution, on the history of the telescope, past the Largest Photo of the Milky Way to the open atrium where Jupiter is hung from the ceiling, dusty peach and placid, where the sun is a halved orange stuck in a metal skeleton, where the outer planets are lost among the stacked chairs beyond the Area Closed sign. Here, I stare up at Jupiter’s bottom, none of its sixty-four moons delineated in its rings, and wish for a ship with guts, with warp, with something to get me there below this Jovian, to maybe touch what’s missing, to bear witness to the planet. I can barely contain these cosmic bursts inside me.
Running my fingers along the exhibits no longer satisfy my craving for space.
None of these approximations will suit: blue light to indicate space, folded glass baubles lit from within to mean stars and moons and gravity, as if these things are not different, as if I never wanted each of them deliriously, separately. After the movie, the narrator’s voice still sawing through me like a viola, we take our pictures in a photo booth, just so I can hold onto this place, tuck it inside something to remember those dials, how history and distance collided in front of us, that somewhere, sometime ago, we could have stood, marveling at how lovely and strange this universe is.
JENNY MCDOUGAL lives and writes in St Paul, Minnesota where she teaches English at St. Catherine University and is Co-Editor and Founder of Versus Literary Journal. She is a semi-finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Nimrod, Paper Darts, Red Bird, sleet magazine, and elsewhere. She loves roller-skating, discussing feminist narratives in literature, and most things that are neat.
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Homage to the Strange Spirits
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