[Music]
Greetings to all you white knights of entitled opinions from your host Robert Harrison.
I don't know if it's the opulent bloom of a California spring after an unusually wet winter
on the west coast or if it's the fact that I'm teaching a course on symbolism this semester.
But I have color on my mind these days. The mystery of color in general and of one color in
particular white which isn't a color at all technically speaking. I've long been intrigued by whiteness,
its associations, its symbolism, its power to blot out and even fill you with dread.
This past week I put some thoughts and texts together about the color white for the symbolism
seminar and felt that I needed to develop these thoughts further and that's why I've dragged our
producer Vitodia into KZSU on a Sunday so I could share them with you or at least those of you
who might be interested to reflect with me on this most reflective of colors that we call white.
So just so you know we're going to blanch ourselves out in the next half hour to an hour.
I can't promise a purification or a glimpse of the end of the tunnel.
Just some thoughts from out of our mood on a workshop.
(upbeat music)
- Let's begin with what we know about the physics of color.
Color is visible light of a specific wavelength.
The color depends on the wavelength.
The chromatic spectrum is perceived
or as perceived by human eyes
range from 700 nanometers at the red end
to 400 nanometers at the violet end.
That's a very narrow range
and we have no idea what the world looks like
if the doors of perception were open wide
so that we could see far beyond or outside
that 300 nanometer range.
And I for one do not crave such an expansion of perception.
The chromatic wonders of this world
are intense and overwhelming enough as it is.
Be that as it may.
What we're seeing when we see colors is in fact
photons that reflect off the surface of objects.
In that sense, colors do not belong to objects at all
but are what objects fail to absorb.
We say that the apple is red but red is not in the apple.
Scientifically speaking, we do not see any of the light
that is in the apple.
On the contrary, we see only the wavelengths of light
that bounce off the apple.
The reason it appears red to us is because the apple,
whatever that object is in itself,
has absorbed all the light whose wavelengths
do not correspond to the color red
when perceived by the human eye.
One could say, therefore, that color is unconsumed,
unassimilated, unosmosed light.
So let me define it in my own terms.
Color is an excess of remainder.
Color is quite literally an outcast.
Some of you may have heard me use the word
chlorophilia on this show.
It's a term that I coined to refer to our natural love of
and even need for plant life and the green that comes with it.
All living things with the exception of those
in hot vents on the ocean floor depend
in one way or another on the chlorophyll molecule.
This molecule, which has a magnesium atom in a porphyrin ring,
is what enables plants to turn sunlight into sugar,
a process otherwise known as photosynthesis.
Chlorophyll absorbs energy from the blue
and red parts of the solar spectrum,
but not from the green middle.
And if the molecule were more efficient,
in other words, if plants were efficient enough
to devour all of the solar spectrum,
their leaves would be a non-reflective black instead of green
and we would probably be mavrophiles
instead of chlorophylls.
I find this deeply weird that the red of an apple
or the green of plants is in fact an absorbed light.
And when we talk about the color,
white things get even more involved,
an object appears white when it reflects all the wavelengths
of the color spectrum.
By the same token, an object appears black
when it absorbs the maul.
That's why people tend to say that white is the presence
of all colors and black their absence.
And in reality, whatever reality might be
outside of our perception of it,
neither black nor white is a color properly speaking.
Again, I find it deeply weird that sounds are not sensations,
but waves that produce the sensation of sound in the inner
and outer ears.
It makes me wonder what it is that I'm really hearing
in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves,
which is the sound of the land that is blowing
in the same bare place for the listener.
If colors do not inherit in things
but are unassimilated wavelengths of light
that hit the thing, then why these unsubdueed
elations when the forest's bloom, if I may borrow
from poet Wallace Stevens?
Do the colors of my moods have only an internal reality?
Is there in fact an internal reality disconnected
from material objects?
I don't wanna believe that, or maybe I do wanna believe.
I think that, one way or another, the question arises
about the deeper symbolic correspondence
between the subjectivity of perception
and the external objects that touch me.
And I mean, touch me directly and immediately and powerfully
and that even in gender moods in me.
How can an outcast of light and gender in me a mood?
What are these gusty emotions on wet roads on autumn nights
to call on Stevens once again?
Why this certain slant of light on winter afternoons
that oppressors like the weight of cathedral tunes?
My recent perplexities regarding the color white
are connected to a short essay
that the Irish poet W. B. Yates wrote about symbolism.
I was rereading it for classes last week,
and I was struck by a couple of verses that Yates quotes
at the beginning of the essay.
Yates makes a hyperbolic claim for these verses
and he may well be right, at least for those of us
who have six-tier more winters on our head like I do.
Referring to their author Robert Burns,
the Scottish poet Robert Burns,
the author of these lines, Yates writes,
There are no lines with more melancholy beauty than these by Burns,
"The white moon is setting behind the white wave
"and time is setting with me, oh."
Yates claims that these lines are quintessentially symbolical
and that if you take away the whiteness of the moon
and the whiteness of the wave whose relations
to the setting of time are too subtle for the intellect,
you also take away their beauty.
He calls the verses symbolical because the way they bring
together moon, wave, whiteness, and setting time,
and also that last melancholy cry, evoking emotion,
which cannot be evoked by any other arrangement
of colors and sounds and forms, and I agree with him.
But now my perplexity becomes even more extreme
when I realize, as I did only yesterday,
that Yates actually misquotes Robert Burns lines,
Burns wrote, "The wand moon is setting beyond the white wave,
"and time is setting with me, oh."
So does Yates's claim about the unmatched melancholy beauty
and magic symbolism of the line still hold
when we consider the original?
Again, it's the difference between the white moon
is setting behind the white wave and time is setting with me, oh,
and the wand moon is setting beyond the white wave
and time is setting with me, oh.
I don't have an answer to that question,
and if time permits, I will read you the Burns poem
a little later, but there is no question
that something very specific is evoked
by a white moon setting behind a white wave,
as opposed to a wand moon setting beyond a white wave.
Why?
Traditional color symbolism regarding the color white
can't help us very much here.
If you look it up on the internet,
you'll find a bunch of statements like the following.
I quote, "White is associated with light,
"goodness, innocence, purity, and virginity.
"It is considered to be the color of perfection.
"White means safety, purity, and cleanseiness,
"as opposed to black, white usually has positive connotations."
White is inherently a positive color.
It's associated with purity, virginity, innocence,
light, goodness, heaven, safety, brilliance, illumination,
understanding cleanseiness, faith, beginnings, spirituality,
possibility, humility, sincerity, protection, softness,
and again, perfection.
It goes on, and these are different entries.
It's not just the same entry I'm reading from.
The color white is color at its most complete and pure,
the color of perfection, the psychological meaning
of white is purity, innocence, wholeness, and completion.
In color psychology, white is the color of new beginnings
of wiping the slate clean, so to speak.
It is the blank canvas waiting to be written upon.
While white isn't stimulating to the senses,
it opens the way for the creation of anything the mind can conceive.
White contains an equal balance of all the colors of the spectrum.
Its basic feature is equality,
implying fairness and impartiality, neutrality,
and independence.
It is interesting to note that babies come into the world
with a perfect balance of white,
ready to imprint their lives with all the colors of the spectrum
from all their life experiences.
Oh boy, that last part, I was not able to grasp what to see,
or he mean that babies come into the world
with a perfect balance of white.
Leaving that aside, let me say that I don't want to dismiss all this
as sentimental pap.
White sometimes does indeed symbolize purity or perfection or salvation.
Dante's Patadizo is drenched in white light, no doubt about it.
The souls there appear as pejaline yankafronte,
a pearl on a white forehead.
And the celestial rose and Dante's imperion is white.
But when it comes to white, there is a lot more to it
than is dreamt of in our philosophies.
For some reason, I can't explain the first thing that comes to my mind
when I think of the color of white are two women.
Both of them dead who could not be more unlike one another
in aspect, demeanor, and life biographies.
One of them is Marilyn Monroe.
And it's not because she often dressed in white,
but because in almost every photo of her,
there's a strange luminosity about her that tends towards a vanishing point
of radiant whiteness.
Does anyone know what Lanugo is?
Lanugo.
It's a very soft, unpigmented, downy hair that is sometimes found on newborn babies.
Usually disappears shortly after birth.
And I don't know if this is true, but I was told that very, very exceptionally
certain individuals never lose their Lanugo hair,
and that Marilyn Monroe was one of them.
Maybe that's why in photos of her, even when she's in dark rooms surrounded
by a lot of people, the light has a way of gathering about her.
If I could, I would show you photos of what I'm talking about,
but this is radio and you'll have to imagine that for yourselves.
The other woman who immediately comes to my mind when I think of white is Emily Dickinson.
Dickinson knew something about that color.
I say that not because she is reputed to have worn only white during the last decades of her life.
We have really no way of knowing whether that was indeed the case.
We know that when Thomas Higgins and met her in 1870, she was dressed in white.
And we know that her one surviving dress, now in the Emily Dickinson Museum is white.
Plus we know that when she died, she was dressed in white and buried in a white casket.
We also have this statement by Maybell Loomis Todd, the secret lover of Emily's brother.
She dresses wholly in white and her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful.
But we have to take that with a certain degree of suspicion,
because Maybell Todd never actually saw Emily Dickinson,
despite spending a lot of time in the Dickinson House.
Emily would only communicate with her from behind the closed door of her room.
So when I say Emily knew a thing or two about the color white,
I'm thinking above all about her poems and the inner passions that they bring to expression.
So intensely.
And I'll give you only one example.
It's her poem, "Dare You See a Soul", which reads as follows.
"Dare You See a Soul at the White Heat", then crouch within the door.
Red is the fire's common tint, but when the vivid ore has sated flames, conditions,
it's quivering substance plays without a color, but the light of unenointed plays.
Least village boasts its blacksmith whose anvils even din stands symbol for the finer forge
that soundless tugs within, refining these impatient oars with hammer and with blaze,
until the designated light repudiate the forge."
That opening question, "Dare You See a Soul at the White Heat", suggests that there's some risk involved in doing so.
In seeing passions burn so intensely that they're like an iron that turns white in the fire, red fire.
There's an association of red and white throughout a lot of poems, artworks.
There's a symbolic correspondence in the deep sense of the term correspondence between red and white.
And I may have a word to say about that a little bit later on, but returning of this poem,
if we do dare to look at a soul and white heat, we should not come too close, but we should crouch within the door.
In other words, we could get seared by this iron that heats up and becomes hotter than the fire itself.
When that iron comes out hotter than the fire that heated it, it is white.
So she writes, "Without a color but the light of unenointed blaze, unenointed blaze is peculiar."
Does that mean that we're talking about the blaze of hellfire?
And so far as it's unenointed?
It could well be, in any case, it is not an innocent white heat.
Every village, she says, has a blacksmith, the least village has a blacksmith, and his activity, it's forging activity.
Acts as a metaphor for the spiritual internal process of refining one's souls and passions.
Again, she's from the poem whose anvil's even ring stands symbol for the finger forge that soundless tugs within.
So this spiritual refining process takes place soundlessly but not painlessly, if only because it requires hammer and ablaze.
A long, arduous, and ardent process that continues until the passions themselves, like the iron that becomes hotter than the fire that heats it, over power of what refines and gave rise to them, presumably in lived experience.
I have a feeling that what this poem is talking about is the process of making poems, of Emily Dickinson's process of refining the lived experience, pain, hardship, and suffering.
And is it any wonder that she would speak to people like Mabel Todd from behind her door where all this was going on?
Maybe Mabel Todd is one who really should not have crouched within the door to look at this process from a safe distance.
But the question remains is what is this white heat?
Well, it could well be the emotional intensity of Dickinson's poetry itself, which comes about through a forging, smelting, refining process that places the poets' emotion into the blast furnaces of the soul where all their impurities are removed.
And what we're left with is a white-hot poem like this one, uncontaminated by ornamental language or poetic flourishes, no rhetorical colors, but only pure white expression born of intense, barely tolerable, transfigured pain.
That's what the white heat is in my view, pain transfigured.
And that's what makes it dangerous to gaze on and why we're told to crouch at the door.
In other words, there is nothing innocent or blissful about this process of transfiguration.
Now, there's a suggestion here that's present in other poems of hers as well that only through this searing process of passion refinement through hammer and fire as it were, can the soul become pure enough to repudiate the forge as she puts it.
That is, leave it behind and rise up to a higher level, perhaps even a redeemed afterlife in heaven.
Leaving behind the forge would mean leaving behind all the earthly sources of what feeds the poem and the fire in the poem.
But one way or another, there are certainly more to Dickinson's white heat than purity, virginity, innocence, light, goodness, heaven, safety and so forth.
It is nourished by and burns with a degree of hardship, pain and much else besides.
Stay tuned, more to follow.
[Music]
As she walks in the room, sent it to dawn, isn't it in once more?
As I take all myself and bitterness, I feel realising love for lots of white horses.
They would take me away and I tenderness with you.
You will send the dawn to me when I follow you through the glory of life, I will scatter all the flow, dismount the way and dead and so.
In my thoughts I have been, for the widows I have been fed, another life and so forth.
White horses, they would take me away and I tenderness with you.
You will send the dawn to me when I follow you through the glory of life.
[Music]
I would like to say a word about another poet from a very different country, Austria and a different
cultural context and time period.
I am referring to Gere or Trackel, Austrian poet and don't tell Gere or Trackel that white represents innocence and goodness because few poets have stared more directly into the dark night of western nihilism, the Gere or Trackel and who, when he did stare into those depths, saw what amounted to a white horror and dread.
Trackel died from a drug overdose as an enlisted soldier during the First World War at age 27, leaving behind some of the most wondrous expressionist poems of the early 20th century.
Here's one called sleep.
Not your dark poisons again, white sleep.
Dark poisons there, I think, refers to drugs.
Trackel was a pharmacist and he self-medicated with various drugs throughout his 20s and factite of a cocaine overdose in the First World War.
So not your dark poisons again, white sleep.
This fantastically strange garden of trees and deepening twilight fills up with serpents, nightmoths, spiders, bats, approaching stranger.
Your abandoned shadow in the red of evening is a dark pirate ship of the salty oceans of confusion.
White birds from the outskirts of the night flutter out over the shuttering cities of steel.
Here it's the white of nightmare, this white sleep where you have the phantomatic apparitions that haunt our dreams, especially the ones that disturb us the most.
Another poem of his, called descent and defeat, has the same sort of valence when it comes to this color white.
Over the white fish pond, the wild birds have flown away, and icy wind drifts from our stars at evening.
Over our graves, the broken forehead of the night is bending under the oak's we fear in a silverskiff.
The white walls of the city are always giving off sound.
Under arching thorns, oh my brother, blind minute hands, we are climbing toward midnight.
A few verses from another poem, is called the heart.
The wild heart grew white in the forest, so that's the third time we see the word wild and white conjoined together.
The wild heart grew white in the forest, and to grow white evokes to me a kind of petrification of the turning into the white marble, having seen the Gorgon's head, where Medusa would turn those who dare gaze on her to some kind of statues of salt or of marble.
And maybe that's why Dickinson warns us about looking at the white heat that there is some risk of this kind of petrification.
Certainly, Truccle did see the Medusa's head in the year, almost year that he spent fighting on the fronts in the First World War, where the heart is wild and it grows white in the forest.
Dark anxiety of death as when the gold died in the gray cloud, smoking with blood to which a man listens in wild despair.
All your days of nobility buried in that red evening.
Again, here we have the red white connection.
Out of the dark entrance hall, the golden shape of the young girl steps surrounded by the pale moon, the prince's court of autumn.
Black fur trees broken in the night storm, the steep fortress, oh, heart glittering above in the snowy cold.
In Truccle, there is no opposition of black and white on the contrary.
His poems venture right into that very strange region of what I would call the nocturnal white, or the white nocturn.
The white nocturn shows the true face of darkness in his fantomatic abominations.
It's like Kurtz's bald head shining white in the unredeemed darkness of the inner station on the Congo River in Conrad's heart of darkness.
Conrad says that Kurtz's head was an ivory white.
The same color is the ivory that Kurtz and his fellow white men dig up from the ground in the interior of the African continent.
It's as if Kurtz were digging into the shadow realm of death itself.
The death that would claim him shortly after Marlow takes him away from that infernal inner station.
I suppose this is a place to say a brief word about the racial associations of the color white, which has such a long tragic and ongoing history.
It would need a whole other show to deal with this topic properly.
Here I'll only suggest that white supremacy in its acts and ideologies belongs precisely in this region of the white nocturn, such as refined, in Truccle's expressionistic poetry.
The white robes and hoods of the Ku Klux Klan at night are not symbolic of innocence, purity, or goodness, but of a malignant, san
There is nothing quite as unsettling as the symbols of white supremacy, where darkness itself takes on a white hue of horror and nightmare.
We could call it the blanching of the shadow realm itself.
And this, believe it or not, brings me finally to Melville and his visionary authority when it comes to the disquieting even hideous aspects of the color white.
No discussion of the associations and symbolism of the color white can dispense with a reference to chapter 42 of Moby Dick entitled The Whiteness of the Whale.
Melville is really very eloquent when it comes to the white nocturn. He describes in the chapter I'm going to go through the experience of sailing in the Antarctic seas and what happens when a ship is completely surrounded at night time by a
all these white glaciers and mountains and a sea that's reflecting all white.
And he says, "Let a sailor be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness, as if from encircling headlands, shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him.
Then he feels a silent superstitious dread.
The shrouded phantom of a whitened water is horrible to him as a real ghost. In vain the lead assures him he is still off-sounding heart and helm they both go down.
He never rests until blue water is under him again."
So in this chapter 42 the whiteness of the whale, each mile the narrator begins by saying what the white whale was to Ahab has been hinted what at times he was to me as yet remains unsaid.
And he goes on to say aside from those most obvious considerations touching Moby Dick which could not be occasionally awakened in any man's soul, some alarm, there was another thought or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him
which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest.
And yet so mystical and well-nighingeffable was it that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form.
It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.
But how can I hope to explain myself here?
And yet in some dim random way explain myself I must else all these chapters might be not.
And what follows is an extraordinary catalog of the various divergent symbolic valences of the color white.
And he really goes through a series of examples that recall color symbolism quotes that I cited earlier in this show.
And he says though in many natural objects whiteness refining Lee enhances beauty and though various nations have in some way recognized a royal eminence in this hue,
though besides all this whiteness has been even more significant of gladness though in other mortals sympathies and symbolizing this same hue is made at the emblem of many touching noble things though among the red man, the giving of the white belt and so forth though to the noble you
wise the mid winter sacrifice of a sacred white dog was by far the holiest festival though directly from the Latin word for white all Christian priests have derived the name of one part of their sacred vestiture though in the vision of Saint John and finally two pages later all in the same sentence we get the yet.
Yet for all these accumulated associations with whatever is sweet and honorable and sublime there yet lurks an elusive something in the inner most idea of this hue which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which are frightened blood.
Then he goes on to discuss various other examples it seems like there's something so mysterious and indefinable about what he's trying to.
Get at in this color white that he cannot get there directly has to go through one example after another he speaks about the albatross he speaks about the white seed of the prairies.
Ask why albinos have such a load some quality to most even to their own kith and kin as he says it it's that whiteness which invests him a thing expressed by the name he bears.
That even if an albino is as well made as other men and has no deformity yet this mere aspect of all pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion and asks again why should this be so.
But before he goes about answering it he speaks about other white things like the white squall of the southern seas the white hoods of the gantmurdor.
Well the white hoods would be the our equivalent would be the cook up clan with their white hoods and sheets.
And he says that there is some common hereditary experience of all mankind that bears witness to the supernatural ism of this hue.
The supernatural ism of the color white and he associates it with the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most depals the gazer.
Namely that marble paler lingering there and here is where white and red have some kind of substantive connection where red is the color of the animating blood of vitality and white is the color of the cadaver which has lost its blood and it's become pallet and pale and.
Lifeless.
But even that association with the power of death doesn't get to the bottom of what perturbs us about the color.
And here I'm going to skip over a number of other examples that ishmael brings into play.
The white side marshal the white fryer the white none the white tower of London the white mountains the white sea that exerts such a spectral cast over the fancy.
I'm going to skip over all that and go directly to each male's final speculations and revelations in chapter 42.
I quote, "Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love the invisible spheres were formed and frightened."
Now before I continue let me mention that if we go back to the science of color and sound that we talked about at the beginning.
I believe the invisible spheres here might have something to do with what reality consists in independently of our subjective perception of it.
Namely what the apple might be if you take away from it the illusion that it is red or what the plant might be if you remove the green veil from it.
There is a visible world that we perceive through human app perception and then there is this invisible sphere which the color white intimates and reminds us of.
And that gets us closer to the conclusion of chapter 42 where we get the following reflections from Eastman.
But we have not yet solved the incantation of this whiteness and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul and more strange and far more portentious.
Why, as we have seen it is at once the most meaningful symbol of spiritual things, nay the very veil of the Christian deity and yet should be as it is the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.
Is it that by its in-definiteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensity of the universe and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation.
When beholding the white deaths of the Milky Way or is it that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color and at the same time the concrete of all colors.
Is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness full of meaning in a wide landscape of snows a colorless all color of atheism from which we shrink.
And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers that all other earthly hues every stately or lovely emblazoning the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods yes and the gilded velvets of butterflies and the butterfly cheeks of young girls.
All these are but subtle deceits not actually inherent in substances but only laid on from without so that all dayified nature absolutely paints like the harlot whose allurements cover nothing but the journal house within.
And when we proceed further and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces everyone of her hues the great principle of light forever remains white or colorless in itself.
And if operating without medium upon matter which touch all objects even tulips and roses with its own blank tinge.
pondering all this the pulsed universe lies before us a leper.
And like willful travelers in lap land who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him.
And of all these things the albino whale was the symbol.
Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
I think Ishmael is onto something essential when he connects the color white here to something in nature.
Something about the universe itself.
I spoke earlier about this weirdness of a phenomenal world that appears to us in a burst of form sounds and colors but that these appearances do not correspond to the quantum or material nature.
Each male suggests something along these lines and is idea of nature's mystical cosmetics as he calls it.
It's a cosmetics at veils or covers over the journal house within.
Science tells us that underlying the alluring colorful seductive tapestries of the world are sound waves of certain length of light waves of certain milligmichrones that the world in itself if you want to use that Kantian distinction between the phenomenal and the numinal that world in itself is altogether colorless and tasteless and in some ultimate metaphysical sense white in its essence.
That whiteness relates to the nullity of a universe that offers us this overwhelmingly beautiful and bewitching spectacle whose story ends in annihilation and what trackal calls the icy winds drifting from our stars at evening.
Yet despite this cold absurdity of the cosmos we still can't resist being drawn into it being enchanted by it even when we remove the veils and stare at the blankness of it all.
As we've done most of us these last few days who got so fascinated by the first photographic images of a black hole.
There's such great wonderman in us that we forget that what we're looking at is the horror of horrors in these images, a remorseless monster at the center of galaxies devouring all light, all energy, all matter that comes within its voracious gravitational vortex.
By the way despite their names black holes are among the most luminous phenomena in the universe, the most intense whiteness imaginable gathers at their event horizons as the light of doom stars, panics and surges in its last terrible flares before disappearing into the sinkhole forever.
It was far less dramatic and momentous than the black hole photos that were made public a few days ago.
Yet this same past week I was struck even more by a different image and different article that I read in the science section of the New York Times, April 9th is the exact date of that article.
It was a short piece with a small black and white image about astronomers who have recently discovered a chunk of a former planet orbiting the remains of its now defunct star which has become a smoldering cinder known as a white dwarf.
What is a white dwarf? It's when a star depletes its thermonuclear fuel and cannot generate enough heat to avoid gravitational collapse.
It's the detritus left behind when a star as large as our sun or slightly larger runs out of energy and shrinks into a dense ember the size of our earth.
The universe is littered with these white dwarfs and yes white is the right color for them.
If we could look with other eyes and the ones we have we would see such tombstones everywhere in the night sky.
For every galaxy out there there are countless by countless stellar graveyors.
The reason I was even more struck by this report of a fragment of a former planet orbiting a white dwarf is because we know that neither our sun or our planet will ever descend into the jaws of a black hole.
But we'll suffer a fate similar to this white dwarf and its planetesimal.
Our sun will go through its death throes in about five or six billion years.
And let me mention that in the process of dying stars first puff up into so-called red giants.
Here's that connection between red and white again.
They're called red giants because before collapsing into white dwarfs stars flare up and burn violently for a short while.
And as they do that they envelop and destroy their inner planets.
What the astronomers discovered was a fragment of a planet that had partially survived this cremation.
And if you look at the accompanying image in the hard copy of the New York Times article it is in fact drenched in white.
And what we get in that image is a glimpse of the cosmic future of our planet earth.
Because when our sun goes through the process of becoming a red giant before collapsing into a white dwarf, it will incinerate everything inside the orbit of Mars and maybe even the earth.
Or maybe the earth is just near or far enough away that it too will be reduced to a planetesimal.
One way or another as the New York Times article puts it, I quote, "There is no chance of life on this planet surviving the event."
And it's in fact a toss-up whether the physical object now known as earth will persevere or be dragged to its doom in the sun.
Whether it perseveres or not, the color of those endays is white.
Now five or six billion years from now may not mean all that much to us. It's hard to relate to time scale so infinitely beyond a human lifetime.
Yet in concept, metafismically,
this universal fate of all things is the dread and horror that Ishmael has in mind when he says,
"Of all this the albino whale was the symbol."
So it's not to end this show in the desolation of cosmic death that awaits all the universe's stars and all of its planets and that awaits even the universe itself.
Let me bring our human mortality back to this earth of ours where our individual passing away means something.
If not to the universe, then at least to those who we may love or those who may love us.
And here I'd like to return to that Robert Burns poem that WB8 quoted a couple of lines from and that I cited earlier in the show.
The Burns poem is also about death yet in this case, it's a human death that finds us proper symbol as a death that matters locally, if not universal.
It's about a man out in the cold at night asking his loved one to open the door to him, but by the time she does so, it's too late.
The poem is called "Open the Door to Me Oh" from the year 1793, three years before Burns died at the age of 37.
"Oh, open the door some pity to show. Oh, open the door to me. Oh."
"Though thou hast been false, I'll ever prove true. Oh, open the door to me. Oh."
"Cold is the blast upon my pale cheek, but colder thou love for me. Oh."
"The frost that freezes the life at my heart is not to my pains from thee. Oh."
"The one moon is setting beyond the white wave, and time is setting with me. Oh."
"Fals friends, false love, farewell. For more I'll never trouble them. Nor thee. Oh."
"She has opened the door, she has opened it wide, she sees the pale corpse on the plain. Oh."
"My true love, she cried, and sank down by his side, never to rise again. Oh."
This is Robert Harrison for entitled "Openions. Thanks for listening."
[Music]
you