Icarus skywriting # 7

terminal star...

Being told you are going to die comes as a bit of a shock. I know this because today I was told exactly that. I smiled, what else can any of us do, especially since the news was predicted by a Brighton gypsy who asked for nothing but gave it as a gift. And I wonder, is it a gift we desire? Is a premonition, a prediction of death, really a desirable gift. I ponder this because I also wonder if I should write a bucket list of things to do, or should I be doing them anyway? But didn't I say, yes I am going to die, predicted age 92, oh! It makes me feel like I should be preparing for it; strengthening my (slowly becoming) arthritic fingers, strengthening my breathy lungs, my signs of calcium deficiency, my aching heart (ever the dramatist). But of course my body is not a prison for my ailments but simply the coop that holds my clucking thoughts and dreams and ideas until they can be developed further (which may be no further than chicken and miso soup) '...does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance.'  I feel my spirits expand and I was thinking, terminal star is a phrase used to describe a star which has died but we can still see its light; because it takes light years for light to travel and by the time it reaches us the source is already dead. I haven't died yet, and I am still transmitting, but surely memories are like terminal stars and so as Karine Polwart sings these lines (below) the metaphor extends beyond the physics into the metaphysics of being and memory:

You're a beautiful trace
Of time and space
You're a thing that once shone
And you still shine bright
In the darkest night
Though you're already gone...

All the stories in stones
And in beakers and bones
All the salt in the sea
Are eclipsed by the might
Of your fading light
You're dying so beautifully
So beautifully...