This year the Winter Solstice is at 9:28 AM (Mountain Standard time) on Thursday, December 21.
This time of year on far northern prairie the day opens a eye only for a short time. It is the Winter Solstice. The people wake a bit, then begin again their familiar dream cycle, meant to be a spell to make a shell against the emaciated polar bears of death that prowl in the dark, seeking bright blood.
There are no molecules in the sun, but only elements, their particles, and plasma. Intense heat prevents the formation of links among the elements that would assemble to create patterns of beginning life. When the plasmas are spewed out towards earth, we recognize them and call them Aurora Borealis, the sky’s rose-and-green birth garments, dancing in the solar wind, snapping incantations of gauze.
Once we thought the sun was the only source of life, but now we know that within the deep fuming of the planet, both wet and almost dry, the stubbornly craving atoms play hookup with each other and form strange alliances.
The sun is a bell, ringing out the changes of tilting planet, withdrawing seas. Swaying mouth, pinioned top, clanging bronze resonant with alarm. Or maybe celebration.
The sun is a drum, rhythmic and pounding, calling feet to strike the ground, alternating, whirling, lifting bell-encircled ankles high and driving down knees.
The sun is a gong struck to call the eaters to their places at a frosted table where steam is rising in fantasies of hunger and repletion. When we eat, we are eating the sun through its living intermediaries, first plants, then animals/ first grass, then buffalo.
One year there was a season for swans and we ate one for Thanksgiving. It was not black. It did not die when it fell from on high, but ran scurrying, slapping the grass with its flat feet. There is a place around here where the ground squirrels have mutated but these are not albino, a common lack of pigment, but rather are densely black as sable. People fuss over white buffalo but I don’t know of any buffalo black as panthers.
One year there was a season for swans and we ate one for Thanksgiving. It was not black. It did not die when it fell from on high, but ran scurrying, slapping the grass with its flat feet. There is a place around here where the ground squirrels have mutated but these are not albino, a common lack of pigment, but rather are densely black as sable. People fuss over white buffalo but I don’t know of any buffalo black as panthers.
The sun is a cerebrum, a cerebellum of connections, linking in the limbic, because this is a fusion bomb, not an atomic bomb which tears apart connections in a madness of destruction. When all the possible links of hydrogen into helium have formed float balloons, because they were thrown out in paroxysms of long tongues seeking cool black velvet throats, then the molecules, with mechanical folding and poking, create themselves and think of life, whether or not they can define it.
The sun is a felted partly-black swan, “a 30cm tall prehistoric swan - made in felted reindeer wool in the 5th/4thC BC by a Scythian craftsman/woman, perhaps as an ornament, & preserved in permafrost in a tomb in the Altai Mts” — (Dr. Sue Osthuizen tells us so on Twitter.) The black swans that fly and swim and dive are down under, so how would the felters know about such a bird on the Mongolian plateau? Because the sun is chiaroscuro working in black and white reversals, after-images on the dark retina of white eyes. But do black swans migrate the way the trumpeters do?
The black sun is a figure of mysticism because if two things are paradoxically juxtaposed in impossibility, the brain and eye must rise up and struggle to resolve that which is a key to what is only felt and never resolved. I once knew a man with one grandfather who died a ragged skeleton in Auschwitz and the other who was finally hung in his gleaming storm trooper uniform, the rough rope stretching him tall in orgasmic death.
The sun comes up, whether or not you can see it, and it always comes up on the same side because it’s not really coming up at all, it’s only that the ground under your feet is approaching the center, carrying you to your fate, your dreams of beginning again. No use to protest — better to sing.
Inside, all creatures are blood red, including the people.
The Sun is a huge, glowing sphere of hot gas. Most of this gas is hydrogen (about 70%) and helium (about 28%). Carbon, nitrogen and oxygen make up 1.5% and the other 0.5% is made up of small amounts of many other elements such as neon, iron, silicon, magnesium and sulfur.
The temperature of the sun in this layer is about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius). Hydrogen atoms are compressed and fuse together, creating helium. This process is called nuclear fusion. As the gases heat up, atoms break apart into charged particles, turning the gas into plasma.
Plasma is a state of matter in which an ionised gaseous substance becomes highly electrically conductive to the point that long-range electric and magnetic fields dominate the behavior of the matter. It is one of the four fundamental states of matter
Plasma is the often forgotten component of blood. White blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets are essential to body function, but plasma also plays a crucial, and mostly unrecognized, job. It carries these blood components throughout the body as the fluid in which they travel.
The cosmos must be fluid because process is the definition of life, taking in and throwing out, traveling always on the same path but always beginning again.
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