Urania's Mirror

I do not remember exactly when Urania’s Mirror came into my life. I do not remember the first day I felt the pulse of those faraway stars. I do not remember the first time I felt the push of their ever-increasing winds, the pull of their distant, immutable gravities. I do not remember when my life began to walk the constellated paths already set before me by the cards,  unseen under the turgid earth or beyond my sight in the night sky, or at what point I lost sight of my life altogether.

I first came to possess Urania’s Mirror at some point during the spring. I had been redundant for the better part of a year and had suffered in that time a slew of minor personal misfortunes which, after the events of several years before, left me in a rather low state of mind. I was due at my local surgery in Mile End a little after 11am. I have experienced odd shooting pains in my chest and a shortness of breath out of keeping with my mild asthma. After an exhausting trip on the District line in which I was besieged by a raft of small children, apparently without owners, I arrived almost half an hour earlier than intended and decided to wander around the area until my appointment was due.

I was perusing the dusty shelves of a small antique shop when I spotted a small metal tin partly hidden under a book entitled Medley’s History of the Second Punic War. The box was slightly corroded from sebaceous acids, and stained and fissured by a little under two centuries of wear. It reminded me of my grandfather’s cigar case, Winterlight’s Slim Pantellas, which smelt of sharp tin and old apples and wet leather. A triptych of the Dionysian pantheon - Silenus, a retinue of Maenads, and the wine god himself - staggered in a roguish procession along its outer edge. A drawing of Urania herself, cradling the celestial globe and resting on a cloud or nebula, was pictured below. I had read about Urania’s Mirror in the Greenwich Royal Observatory archives; the asking price of seventy pounds seemed eminently reasonable, given the condition of the cards and their relative rarity.

Urania’s Mirror is, in short, a hand-painted painted boxed set of thirty two cards depicting the principal constellations, derived partly from the works of Herschel and Hevelius and partly from romantic mythology, and first published by Samuel Leigh of the Strand, London, in 1825. The authorship of the original lithographic set was mysteriously attributed to “A Lady” - Peter Hingely, librarian of the Royal Astronomical Society, and, incidentally, a former colleague of mine, has established, some believe conclusively, that the true author was the Reverend Richard Rouse Bloxam of Rugby. I have my own theories as to their authorship which I will not expound upon now.

I bought the cards, attended my appointment at the surgery, and was vaguely diagnosed with a chest infection brought on by poor health and stress, and took the underground home without incident. I placed the cards on my mantelpiece, and forgot about them.

It was only when April dawned, shot through with cold days and endless nights, that I began to find uncanny meaning in the cards. My electricity was cut off for the first time on April 4th, and I began to burn certain volumes for warmth until my DSS cheque cleared and I could afford to feed the meter again. My chest worsened. I burnt some of my own books, supplemented with recycling, but left Cali’s on the shelves in our bedroom. Little thoughts, forced into silence and drifting in slow orbits round the rim of my mind, began to fall inward. I began to think: I am the loneliest person I know.

I began to feel inexplicably drawn to the cards. I researched them diligently. I felt some invisible tether anchoring them to me – the mythology of Perseus and his kind seemed to chime uncannily with my own life. Occasionally I opened them, which seemed curiously like an act of trespass, and stared at the constellations, their principle stars punctured so as to let light shine through them. Rings of cadmium, cobalt and vermilion were etched round the rim of certain bright stars, giving them the same colours as they had in the night sky above.

Over the following month the cards began to call to me, and I began to research them; they have occupied me ever since. I have enclosed select extracts from my log book below.



Cassiopeia

July 

The first line of the Cassiopeia entry in Alexander Jamieson’s The Celestial Atlas reads thus: “The wife of Cepheus and queen of Æthiopia once boasted that she was more beautiful than all the Nereids”. I began my research in the Royal Observatory’s manuscript library, a building I’d worked in for over a decade, long ago. I first met Cali there.

The constellation of Cassiopeia is generally depicted as a slanted W or M. It is most prominent in winter skies, passing through the zenith in early January. It is not classified as an asterism, being as it is of no prominent shape or design, yet that skewed W, seen side on bordering the roof of Auriga in mid January, is as at least as distinctive as the Sickle of Leo. I have worked out, using a very rough azimuth equation I am not entirely happy with, that its principal stars equate to a set of co-ordinates on a side street that lies just outside of Westham underground station. This system is vastly more accurate than my former method of searching haphazardly for literary or astronomical clues in related texts, and I am sure I have divined the correct method for revealing the meaning of the constellations, though the methodology is still imperfect. My current path, however, is clear. My task for today is to seek beauty in Rugby Road.

Cassiopeia led me down Westham high street for some distance. A slurry of grey clouds filled the sky to the west. A couple of thick-browed Polish men smoked a packet of Benson & Hedges on a street corner. They stared at me as I walked past. I pressed on.

The co-ordinates of Cassiopeia led me into a small West-Indian newsagent. I smiled brightly at the owner, a large black man with powerful forearms and a spade-shaped beard, and navigated my way round trays of rutabagas and artichokes to get to the location of the co-ordinates. Tinny reggae hissed from unseen speakers.

I stopped in front of a shelf of tinned goods. I dropped to my knees, keeping the GPS on my phone steady. I picked up a tin of Alphonso mangoes. They had a beautiful lady on the front of the tin, smiling gently while holding an almost unbearably ripe mango, which blushed pink and orange in her hand. I turned the tin over and read about it. It was from AMALSAD REGION, GUJARAT and contained 882 GRAMS of PUREED MANGO in FRUIT JUICE with SULPHIDES and PRESERVATIVES. I stared at it for perhaps half an hour, turning it over and over in my hands, until the proprietor asked me what the fuck are you doing man, either piss off out of my shop or buy something. After a moment’s hesitation I decided to piss off. I got the DLR to Upney and sat on a bench on my own next to the canal and ate a tiny, heartbreaking BLT with a single fugitive rasher of bacon in hiding under the lettuce until I got cold and caught an empty District line train for home.



Andromeda

October 

I have taken, of late, to going through my neighbours recycling bin. There are reasons for such behaviour. Firstly, anything they dispose of in their recycling bin is, by definition, unwanted. Secondly, recycling is not exclusive to physical recombination; intellectual reappraisal of unwanted or expired documents is what we might refer to as mental recycling – it is a form of salvage, nothing sinister. If that salvage is, for example, for astrophilogical use or, indeed, for burning for warmth, then it has served its purpose. I have been shivering constantly and have started, at times, to lose sensation in my arms and legs. I spent the third weekend of July, the month of Cygnus, interred in my local hospital after collapsing in a branch of Sainsbury’s. They said I had mild pneumonia, and was given a course of antibiotics. They have not helped.

Andromeda guides me this month. She was the princess who, through the dynastic distribution of divine punishment, was chained to rock to be consumed by the sea monster Cetus in retribution for the vainglorious proclamations of her mother, Cassiopeia.

Calli once said that if we ever had a child, we’d call her Andromeda. I always liked Merope, which was also the name of Calli’s grandmother from Mykonos, a tiny, nut-brown woman, wrinkled as a Hunza apricot, who spoke no English and had the same milky blue eyes as her namesake in the far Pleiades.

The logical assumption to draw from Andromeda relates to, I cannot deny it, some form of rescue, some consolation of love. I searched endlessly through my card index for clues to some other meaning, but I was eventually forced to admit the nature of Andromeda can only relate to love and loss. I am ashamed to admit that I flew into a fury at this and took to tearing apart the quince tree in my back garden, ostensibly for fuel, with a hatchet. When that became blunt, I switched to a kitchen knife, but the blade - thin, untempered steel unsuitable for sawing – snapped, and I lashed at the tree we’d planted together helplessly with my bare hands, and all the while a great roaring pain sang through my lungs and heart. I sank to my knees and buried my head in a gap in the roots and rested my temples on the damp topsoil. I decided to face my nemesis that night.

I checked the co-ordinates for Andromeda using a refined azimuthal calculus I have developed over the last week. I cannot help but think that last month’s guide, Cepheus, might have served me better as an instructive masculine figure if I’d corrected for proper motion and ended up in Aldgate library – a place I once worked in as a young man - instead of a disused warehouse in Clapham, where I sat in the dark under a colony of comparatively rare Serotine bats and got shat on for a few hours. They flitted endlessly in and out of the building’s shell through the broken roof-spars until I left, dispirited. Urania’s Mirror is not to be blamed in this instance. I am.

My calculations predicted that I would face down Andromeda wherever she was chained at Turnpike Lane, some hour and a half’s ride on an overland train. I arrived there in due course, but realized with a sinking feeling that my calculations were out by several degrees. I readjusted my formulae under the grease fires and impassive eyes of the Armenian cook in Dzadour’s Tennessee Fried Chicken and got the Piccadilly line out to Oakwood.

Oakwood Park is named after an area of Enfield Chase that was partly felled and reallocated between the King and the freeholders of nearby parishes in the sixteenth century. Only a strand of oaks remained, which were later enclosed in the grounds of Samuel Sugden, a homeopathic chemist who bought the land in 1870. There is still a strange igloo-shaped building in the centre of the park where an ice-well stood – ice being a luxury item in 1870, and Mr Sugden being a man of no small means – and there I stopped to search for Andromeda.

I scanned the skies for quarter of an hour, forty feet deep in darkness. Beyond that height, the sodium glow of London washed the sky a dull apricot, picking out the thick shaggy heads of oaks and the thin fingers of poplars. I found Andromeda interred in a starless patch of the London sky, high above a dead sessile oak, a pale coreless smudge of a trillion stars in an almost empty sky. I gazed at my enemy. I looked at her, and she at me. We locked eyes until my hands were numb with cold and the street lights had been switched off and I felt all the loss and rage and stupidity of my increasing years and my redundancy and my dwindling funds and my atrophying body and the encroaching bailiffs and the insubstantial simulacra of a life I had woven around me like a chrysalis and above all the wheeling stars that took my Calli. I shouted and swore at the distant, indifferent galaxy until my lungs erupted in a chain of coughs and whines and I fell to my knees on the hard earth. I walked home round the Staines and Colbrook reservoirs until I climbed into a frozen bed at 4.42am.


Lyra

December 
I am lying on the camp bed I have made up for myself in my otherwise empty living room at 43 Caistor Park Road with my breath clouding the air in short, arrhythmic bursts. It is 7.17pm. I sleep often now. I have not eaten, at last count, in eight days. Half-empty mugs, with various bacteria and mildews flourishing at different stages of decomposition, consume each caffeine remnant. I believe that I will expire at some point over the weekend, assuming that it is Thursday twelfth, although that date is somewhat suspect. I no longer know what I think, or how I think it. All I know is that Urania’s Mirror is at its heart, and I at its. I am on my way out. Urania’s Mirror has gone before me in the last fire in my waste-paper bin.

Everything is very peaceful now. I wonder how many other people there are out there, quietly exiting the world, unnoticed in semis and bungalows and council flats silent but for the marine roar of television static, forgotten by the rush outside until the unread post composts on the doormat and electricity severance men discover the bodies curled up on chintz sofas across the face of England. Possibly hundreds.

I will watch the gradations of light and dark and morning and night rise and fade through my net curtains and listen to the sounds of the city and the song of birds in Plaistow Park until, one day, I won’t. That will be Urania’s Mirror’s parting gift to me, and it will be the greatest one of all.

Goodnight.