Penultimate Orbital Reading
+ notes on the week
Good Sunday!
Below is the penultimate post on Orbital. I really love the slow pace that we used for this book, which could be read in a weekend. Each week felt like a small attention practice, prayer, and portal. I am going to offer another slow read and will share soon.
This week and next are filled with support and pushing my students towards the end of the semester and final projects. It seems like it would be easier because I am not preparing and delivering lectures, grading traditional assignments, and such. But it feels harder! The time is moving slowly, and I am worried about their work and ability to get ambitious ideas to the finish line. I will be ready for a little break soon.
A crow (or maybe a raven) perched on a tree in my yard and made the most haunting song for 30 minutes one morning. I am trying desperately to draw crows to my yard and hope this was not an accidental visit but the start of something. I left some hamburger out, and a Blue Jay ate it. I cross my fingers that word spreads to the other corvids soon.
I watched Scream this weekend. My horror exploration is ongoing. I am not naturally drawn to horror, but it has proved a great way to connect with students and my own kids - my appreciation is growing. Scream was fun and packed with self-referential humor poking fun at the genre’s tropes, which I appreciated. I especially liked the cameo by Wes Craven as the janitor.
An acquaintance from a working group I am involved in contacted me to chat about ideas in our overlapping interests. I have to be honest, when I looked at her website and wor,k I was completely intimidated. She has a long career that logically built on itself and a robust identity as an independent artist. I worried that my life experiences and work look like a splatter painting. It is all ok, but a reminder of what it is like to be creating a career at 50, after years of dabbling while supporting someone else from whom you will divorce.
In pottery, I have been making tiny houses, which is calming and therapeutic as I build a home and wrap up a semester of teaching about domestic spaces to students. The calm vibe in the studio every Friday night is magic, and I hope to continue on the next session. I get a lemonade from the nearby coffee shop and sit and sculpt weird little things for 3 hours. It’s the best.
Ok, enough yammering….
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Orbital
This week’s reading, “Orbit 14,” felt like a gentle lead into the wrap-up of the book and the mission. The opening sentence, balanced opposites separated by a comma:
With untold peace and silence, the typhoon hits land.
overtakes the reader. I am not sure about you, but as soon as I read it I visualized it. The brute strength from far off in eerie silence read cinematic to me, like footage of the atom bomb with no sound. And the following list of the contents of the “soupy thing-thronged water” was recognizable to someone who grew up with hurricanes and the 24-hour weather channel. The dogs and people and building shards and ephemera floating away were familiar and ordinary.
The storm feels like Earth’s emoting over Chie’s mother (and all the grief in the world). Because of that, it feels like a relief that the event has finally arrived, and hope is embedded in the cleansing effect of disaster.
“Orbit 14, descending” invites readers into the dream of the astronauts. It is telling how many times we have peeked at them sleeping or quietly vulnerable throughout the book. Their dreams are revealing and surreal; it’s a puzzle figuring out what they might mean.
Nell’s dream of swimming in the ocean with a candle, looking for the Challenger survivors, was particularly powerful for me. Those dreams where you are working in impossible circumstances are not uncommon!
And Chie, oof. Her holding on to her mother as a child was heartbreaking. When my daughter was young, I remember being fixated on the idea (dream) of us being the same age. I wondered what it would be like to have her as a friend when I was 7 (and she was 7). With her birth, and the immediate aftermath in which I viscerally felt (and saw) our souls separate, I felt time transform into something flexible with folds, collapses, and scrambles increasingly possible. Chie’s dream reminded me of that.
Pietro’s nondreaming has left him knowing that the Earth is perpetually falling away and that:
We matter greatly and not at all.
That line, only seven words, captures the cruel and beautiful reality of being human. Nothing really matters; we are unimportant on the grand scale. But to a few, if we are lucky, we are reciprocally the most important.
Share what hit for you this week.
And if you record your dreams, or can remember them, consider them as a jumping-off point for writing this week.
Next week: We wrap up the book! Read Orbit 15.
A BIG, Weird gifting guide is headed your way! I am putting the finishing touches on it - so be on the lookout.
And next Wednesday, for subscribers, a thought about sloppy craft and some ideas to get the holiday season rolling.
Xo,
Amy
Many of the same phrases and sections stood out for me, and I also felt so deeply her descriptions of natural disaster, having lived through severe wildfires but not hurricanes, and my mother's beloved town experiencing a severe flood recently.
Harvey's craft here is executed so well. The book leading us here to the typhoon landing and to these dreams and the one dreamless sleep. It felt like a culmination. And to begin with the juxtaposition that you noted for orbital 14, ascending and then end orbital 14, descending with another: death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.
I love your weird little houses <3
Also, this week I stood in the woods for ten minutes and watched the strangest thing (strange because it was behaviour I'd not noticed before). A crow sat at the very tip of a pine tree while another kept dive bombing it. Then a third, then a fourth came, and they created this intricate weaving dance as they took turns flying at the crow in the tree and then swooping around to come again. The three active ones rested for a few minutes on the same branch of a maple, chattering amongst themselves, then started up again. The first crow stood her ground and never left while I was there. I'd love to know what was going on.