I’ve been getting a lot of tiktoks of amateur astronomers filming through their telescopes. The usual subject is Saturn, its rings, and its moons. I love and fear outer space, and this is scratching the love portion a lot more. The shadow of Saturn on its rings. The brightness with which you can see its moons through a telescope. The clarity of the image.
I’m having an anxious week. It’s a few days before payday, there are layoffs looming in my job and I have no idea who’s going to make it, friends are facing similar stresses, I’m going to my mum’s place for the weekend, I have an MOT on the horizon, I’m still paying off money I borrowed in May, I’m feeling generally not very good about myself artistically and personally. Friendships are shifting and changing. I just went for a walk. The walk helps, as it always does, and tends to unstick complicated or difficult thoughts from the cobwebs up at the back of my brain. Maybe I could have been for more walks recently. Old habits and fears always come back in September time. Perhaps the fact that I feel so terrible today is a good sign that I can tackle it all head on, early, and avoid a misery winter. I’ve already promised myself I’m going to cut down on cigarettes. I’d already quit: I quit in the summer of 2023, pretty easily, using nicotine patches. But honestly, I don’t really see the upside of outright quitting. Probably stupid.
Dione, one of Saturn’s icy moons, is visible in the last astronomytok video I watched. It’s bone white, looks a bit like a football. As the telescope zooms in, you begin to see the incredible number of pockmarks on the surface. I’m compelled to think about the discovery, history and science of Dione, where I find out that it was discovered in 1684. Oh, to be a guy with a telescope in the 1600s.
This time last year, I talked about the best year ever and the worst year ever. I had been at a counter protest to a fascist march in George Square. This year has been unmitigatedly better across a number of personal factors, and yet, I again was in the city centre again, counter protesting fascists. The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth. (@pontifex on twitter). My writing, when looking at the real world, feels too angry and bitter to be worth all that much right now - I suspect part of this is that when you’re really pissed off, and you’re writing, the red mist is clouding a lot of the good parts. Nonetheless, I’m angry that we’re still pushing at the same talking points - not just online in posts, but even antifascist counter protests. I’m just not convinced that there’s a single argument being made on the left that isn’t down to managerial, university educated and snobby rhetoric from the centre left. Do the far right care that they have small dick energy? Do the neo nazis care that their figureheads rhetorically contradict themselves? Do we win the argument by calling the far right unemployed, stupid, ugly?
Dione’s craters initially look like a generic, boring feature of a moon of a planet that though beautiful is a little boring itself. Maybe that’s controversial, but aside from the rings and the moons I don’t find much to excite me in an outer orbit gas giant. Give me a peculiar floating island of rock in there or something, please. You sometimes get bored of looking at the same pictures of our moon. She’s up there with a fixed gaze and never takes her eye off us. As such, you get a really long look at her eyes. There’s a man (or men) up there. It’s made of cheese. You must create these myths to maintain the ever eroding mystery of our only moon, and what a shame.
It’s exhausting, isn't it. Holding the same conversation over and over again. “Did you see what Trump did.” Weighing your answer for how long you want the conversation about Trump to run. Deciding at what point to go get another drink, or go to the bathroom, to avoid the old, “Are we really gonna make it?” chat. As the far right continues to tighten its grip on the flow of information to adults of all ages from all sources, you have to gauge the politics of each person you meet so as not to conflagrate things between strangers. You’re not just in competition with every single person you meet, you’re gauging their level of threat to you. The trans people in your life are genuinely scared, and the people with all the reach in the world are showing historical JK Rowling tweets to show how much of a hypocrite she is. Post-truth this, post-truth that. How about you post some bricks through some windows.
When you look long enough at Dione, you might see the craters in a new light. This outpost, this colony of Saturn, outside of the orbit of the rings, but close enough to identify as Saturn’s moon through a regular telescope on planet Earth, has been hammered by debris from space since the very beginning. If we ever wanted to colonise Mars we would need to figure that out, because it’s similarly getting hammered. The submarine implosion but for Elon Musk on Mars with a tiny rock would be a funny one to post about, I really can’t lie. I’d quite like to die on Mars. Like, if I had a terminal illness and they needed to send someone up there for science I used to really think I’d do it. Something about the way coffee tastes and a hand on my back feels is finally, at 32, starting to keep my feet gripping onto the Earth. Dione is just getting battered by all the stuff that’s out there and the situation is probably being made worse by being in Saturn’s orbit. Extra shit getting sent round from the dark side. That sort of thing. Dione’s beautiful up there, though, isn’t it? It’s hardly groundbreaking to suggest that there’s a majesty to looking up into the sky through a few pieces of glass and seeing a moon from a planet that’s unfathomably far. Sometimes when you do it you feel ancient urges, and you feel that of course these objects are sending you a message. The thing they teach you in Information Studies about messages is that they should feel timely and relevant. Dione’s been up there since at least 1684 and we could probably prove it’s been there a lot longer, and it hasn’t been split apart or broken yet, even in the orbit of a much bigger, much more boring force.