In Which the Magpie Considers the Possibilities of Outer Space

Spacepeople perch in trees . . . prisoners in the desert read the stars . . . escalators lead the way to the Big Bang

Magpie, definition, Cambridge Dictionary: 1) a bird with black and white feathers and a long tail, 2) someone who likes to collect many different objects, or use many different styles

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Recently, at a very, very large march in Washington, DC, the Magpie looked up and spotted this figure in a tree.

In fact, the Magpie spotted several figures, on the ground and in the trees, dressed exactly the same way: puffy white jacket, white pants, and that blue patch on the arm that, if one looked more closely, was this:

Several of the figures dressed all in white were carrying this emblem on banners as well. The Magpie had a hunch that these folks must be from outer space, and they had come to Earth to join the march, which was rowdy and happy, and cheer us on.

This turned out to be the case, sort of. The white and blue emblem is the International Flag of Planet Earth, created by Oskar Pernefeldt to “remind the people of Earth that we share this planet, no matter of national boundaries. That we should take care of each other and the planet we live on.” Mr. Pernefeldt, a Swedish artist, has imagined that the emblem would be worn on the spacesuits of astronauts. It isn’t entirely clear how serious Mr. Pernefeldt is about this proposition, but in times of great crisis, people often look skyward, seeking another perspective.

This was what prisoners under Chile’s Pinochet regime, held in the Chacabuco concentration camp in the Atacama Desert in the early 1970s, did. According to the 2010 documentary Nostalgia de la Luz, by Patricio Guzmán, an astronomer among the prisoners taught his fellow inmates how to look at the stars and track the constellations with a simple device they made out of the very few materials they had at hand. The prisoners, training their eyes on the stars overhead at night, found a kind of freedom in being able to read the vastness; before too long, the military banned the lessons and confiscated the devices. Clearly, it wasn’t enough for the regime to confine these men physically. Their imaginations had to be suppressed as well. In my imagination, the prisoners continued to look up at night. They knew what they knew.

We look up, and perhaps we seek some relief at the thought of all that space up there, how weird it must be in space, the billions of years of the universe’s lifespan, and so on. Extreme temporality can feel like refuge. Maybe I was seeking this at the Hayden Planetarium in New York the other day. I followed the sign that read escalators to the Big Bang, got lost, flailed through several gift shops, and finally found the Big Bang Theater (a name that might have been thought through a bit, it seems to me) from which a loud rumbling was issuing as a line formed for the next show. At the Hayden Planetarium, the Big Bang happens every four minutes, and, again . . . well, you can tell that joke yourself.

The man in the line behind me was complaining that the price to see The Dark Universe, the show he’d really wanted to see, was too high. The woman with him said, “It smells weird in here.” A precocious child, looking at the several stories of the planetarium’s glass wall, commented, “It is probably more spectacular at night.” Unlike the prisoners in the Atacama Desert, these customers were already disappointed in the origin of the universe. Nevertheless, a few minutes later we all trooped in and positioned ourselves around a very big, faintly glowing declivity in a large, round chamber dimly tinted with blue light. The museum guard announced, “This is not The Dark Universe,” and half the people left.

Those of us who remained to see the beginning of time listened to Liam Neeson explaining that the universe before the Big Bang was “smaller than an atom” and then it blew up and “light slipped free . . . the universe became transparent.” It was all quite pretty. The declivity whirled with lights and speckles as it expanded exponentially in “the afterglow of the Big Bang.” (One might wonder at this point if the Hayden Planetarium has a keener sense of humor than is suggested by the earnest models of ammonia and methane molecules strung on cables from floor to ceiling in the main room.) Time passed. Space got way bigger, and dark energy played a major role, although scientists still don’t know exactly how. After our four minutes in heaven were up, we exited onto the Cosmic Pathway, a ramp that unfurled thirteen billion years of galactic and earthly development. Educational plaques explained the highlights. Gases billowed. The seas formed. Life began. And here we are.

Which is where, exactly? “Look what you’ve done,” sings The Weeknd sweetly, and viciously, in “Starboy,” “I’m a motherfuckin’ Starboy.” In this fall’s dimly lit video for that song, The Weeknd appears to be playing the role of a psychotically entitled star who tortures and kills people, brags about making more money in a week than other people make in a year, and rampages through a penthouse wielding an enormous pink neon cross that he uses to smash shit up, apparently just for the joy of destruction. He has tables of ebony. His baby, he sings, uses slivers of ivory to clean her face. (Odd, but we get the point.) “House so empty need a centerpiece,” he lilts, “I take any lane . . . I kill any pain.” Starboy isn’t subject to any of the gravity that keeps we lesser mortals tethered to Earth. “No competition / I don’t really listen.” No rules, no limits, in an endless, well-appointed gloom, an empty house he wrecks with his glowing cross and then leaves in his cartoonishly super-fancy car, with his panther. It’s so stupid, and so scary.

As I flitted past billions of years of history at the planetarium, my own gloom unrelieved, I wondered if I should have gone to see The Dark Universe, too. Maybe that would have explained some things. Light slips free, the spacepeople roost in trees, but what about the rest of us? We’re not motherfuckin’ Starboys. We can’t fly up into the trees, or momentarily land in them; we can’t drive away from the destruction in our supercars, accompanied by panthers. Like me looking up from the march at the otherworldly, beautifully styled guy in the tree, we’ll be on foot, walking on this earth, in this time and no other.