"That black, maddening firmament; that vast cosmic ocean, endlessly deep in every direction, both Heaven and Pandemonium at once; mystical Zodiac, speckled flesh of Tiamat; all that is chaos, infinite and eternal. And yet, it's somehow the bringing to order of this chaos which perhaps has always disturbed me most. The constellations, in their way, almost bring into sharper focus the immensity and insanity of it all - monsters and giants brought to life in all their gigantic monstrosity; Orion and Hercules striding across the sky, limbs reaching for lightyears, only to be dwarfed by the likes of Draco, Pegasus, or Ursa Major. Then bigger still - Cetus, Eridanus, Ophiuchus, and Hydra, spanning nearly the whole of a hemisphere, sunk below the equator in that weird underworld of obscure southern formations. You try to take them in - the neck cranes, the eyes roll, and the mind boggles until this debilitating sense of inverted vertigo overcomes you..."
― Mark X., Citations: A brief Anthology
typically they are a group of stars forming a recognizable pattern that is traditionally named after its apparent form or identified with a mythological figure. but the art behind it: the way they make and break, the spaces between them, the way they are sighted, looked for, searched for. their presence telling the universe moves and breaks and rotates and accelerates and grows and collides all at once fraction of a second where we are just doing a simple thing, such as picking up a pen from the floor - a new galaxy must be formed. we evolve in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly, partially. we are relative. we are mature in one realm, childish in another. the past, present, and future tangle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. we are made up of layers, cells, constellations. we are made of stars and if that doesn't scare you or makes your bones tremble because you are a star that broke down a billion years ago - I don't believe you. I don't believe you.
"He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within." ― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty horses
Tell constellations that I live for them. That the secret lies there. That the conundrum lies there.
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