A Swiftly Tilting Planet

on darkness and light

Happy Solstice Everyone. Summer if you are Australian, winter if you are Canadian. As it turns out, we are all spinning on an angled axis facing and unfacing the sun in what we call a day, in a wide circle around the sun we call a year, the sun also spinning, looping around the Milky Way. And the Milky Way itself orbiting its own black hole’d center. Galaxies churn too in their own light-year-sized circles. But, it is not the turning and looping that makes our seasons, it’s the tilt. Normally a sphere would, when spinning, stay pretty much straight up and down, but our sphere sits on an angle toward or away from the sun depending on where it is in its orbit and where you are on the globe. Now. Here. Tonight. In the Northern Hemisphere, the top of the globe is at its most angled away from the sun and so we are all in the middle of the darkest days and here at this cusp we are about to turn back towards the light.

And maybe you can feel it. The pull. The soundless listing of the big boat of this planet, the cold, the icy shimmering sleet at night on the boughs of trees. The psych wards filling up. Candy coloured RGB garlands slung over the trees gone runny in the wet city nightscape. The candles in the window. The skittering white flakes in the grainy night. The sun now big and and glinting off the telephone wires and through the prism and through the plant and finally, its faint rainbow on the back wall. Only for a moment someone in a puffy jacket walking the little fairytale dog with the velvety shambling gait of some old wizard returning from the forest and the sun streams though the steam from the dog-walker’s mouth and another tiny puff from the breath of the tufty black wizard-dog. His name, the dog is inky. Only for a second we see this, the sun just right but sinking, sinking fast.

But why are is our planet tilted at that 23 degree angle that makes a 365 day cycle of seasons? Why the tilt that we are feeling now at the edge of the wintery-ist night? The answer is kind of bonkers. A head on collision between the proto-earth and an ancient theoretical Mars-sized planet called Theia. Theia was, in Greek mythology, a Titan giant, mother of the sun and moon. She was a goddess of glittering. Theia the planet burst through earth spewed out a few lumps of molten magma that coalesced into our moon and knocked the earth on its side at the angle that made the seasons we are now feeling so fully. As strange and dramatic as this event seems, evidence for the scenario just keeps mounting. Not only does the moon seem to be made up of mostly earth-like material, but scientists keep finding bits of some other alien material that is also found in sheets way below the earth’s crust. Evidence of this other planet.

I made for you tonight, on this longest (or shortest) night a mood board of tilted glittering light and dark fighting it out. And at the end of the visual stream of consciousness-moodboard-fever-dream there is a really good video I found of the giant collision hypothesis.

And what would colour be, what would the feeling of being here on earth be? What would making your own materials be without the unstoppable violent crashing and then soft cycling of light and love,

yours,

—Jason

Undated.

Light. I know not a single word fine enough for Light. Its currents pour, but it is a heavy material word not applicable to holy, beamless, bodiless, inaudible floods of Light.

—John Muir from the journals of John Muir

Jeff Brown (I think)

"I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing - their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling - their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses. To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights - then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought."

- Why I adore the night, by Jeanette Winterson