[235] Stars

The Pleiades. Altair. The evening star. Shooting stars have a certain interest. They'd be even finer if it weren't for their tail.

- Sei Shonagon

The Pleiades. A star cluster in the constellation of Taurus, designated as "Object M45" in 1171 by the French astronomer Charles Messier. When my family moved from Austria to Malawi in 1981, I was devastated. I loved Vienna, I loved the woods, I loved my friends, I loved winter, and I was leaving them all behind. Africa was the vast unkown, no reference points to help orient me, nothing familiar except my parents. But one night, shortly after we arrived, my father and I looked up at the sky over Lilongwe, where the silver track of the Milky Way hung like fog, sparkling like the train of a wedding dress, and I saw the Pleiades. Along with Orion, they were they only star formation I could identify by sight. They looked small but somehow important amid all that brilliance, undimmed by light pollution or smog. I fixated on the Pleiades as a sailor might, something recognizable and reassuring, a guide.

The Seven Sisters, daughters of the titan Atlas: Maia, Electra, Taygete, Alcyone, Celaeno, Sterope, Merope. Ladies-in-waiting to Artemis, the night huntress, goddess of forests and hills, of fecundity and birth and moonlight. Maia, the oldest, mother of Hermes, whom Robert Pinksy calls "quick one, little thief, escort of the dying, / and comfort of the sick." Merope, the youngest, who was loved by Orion, but whose heart belonged to Sisyphus, who defied Zeus and deceived the god of death. Tennyson describes the sisters glittering "like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid."

One of the things that always fascinated me about the Pleiades is that I could see them most clearly in the periphery of my vision; they seemed to disappear when I looked at them straight on. My father told me that this was because they had died long ago, but their light was just reaching earth. I always accepted this as fact, but upon reflection, it strikes me as one of those fanciful things that parents tell their children. M45 is approximately 440 light years away, and as there have been documented sightings of the cluster going back thousands of years, it seems unlikely that they no longer exist. But there's something appealingly melancholy about the idea that when we look up at the night sky, the corners of our eyes are touched by ghost light.


In Hindu astrology the Pleiades are called Krittika, the Cutter, lunar mansion, one of the 27 divisions of the sky described in the Vedic texts. Their lord is the god of fire, their symbol is a blade. Gary Snyder wrote a poem called 'Anuradhapura, City of the Pleiades,' but it turns out to really be about his girlfriend and the title is prettier than the poem itself. According to Chinese astrology, the cluster forms the head of an enormous white tiger made of stars. In Japan they are Subaru, hence the design of the logo on vehicles of that make.

These days I see the Pleiades most clearly in the northern Shenandoah Valley, at Villa del Re. I crane my neck and search for them in the sparkling dark and find a trace of the old consolation in the thought that the same cluster of ghost light above me shines also on Vienna, and Lilongwe, and on every place I have ever loved.