Saturday, September 09, 2023

( via / via )

Should be the end of the "Sirius used to be red" myth, but of course it won't be.

"A Pastiche For Eve

Unmanageable as history: these
Followers of Tammuz to the land
That offered no return, where dust
Grew thick on every bolt and door.
And so the world
Chilled, and the women wept, tore at their hair.

Yet, in the skies, a goddess governed Sirius, the Dog,
Who shines alike on mothers, lesbians, and whores.

What are we governed by? Dido and Carrie
Chapman Catt arrange themselves as statues near
The playground and the Tivoli.
While warming up the beans,
Miss Sanders broods on the Rhamnusian, the whole earth worshipping
Her godhead.
Later, vegetables in Athens.

Chaste in the dungeon, swooning with voluptuousness,
The Lady of the Castle weds pure Christ, the feudal groom.

Their bowels almost drove Swift mad.
'Sad stem,
Sweet evil, stretching out a lion's jaws,' wrote Marbode.

Now we cling together in our caves.
That not impossible she
That rots and wrinkles in the sun, the shadow
Of all men, man's counterpart, sweet rois
Of vertew and of gentilness.
.
.
The brothel and the crib endure.

Past reason hunted.
How we die! Their pain, their blood, are ours."

--Weldon Kees (via PoetrySoup)

Not just the Dogons. Obviously the most eminent use of Sirius in literature is The Sirian Experiments, & a close second with the hilarious Wasp. In poetry, we can mention Merwin's book, though i have to say none of these is really about the star... Also (thanks for the Auden!).

"Sirius is too young to remember." --Basil Bunting (maybe the only poet who knew his astronomy--since Omar)

"...dynamical simulations suggest that stable orbits exist around both stars at circumstellar distances up to more than half the binary system's closest separation of 8.1 AU." This one thinks out to 7 AU is okay. My Sirius rundown from 2016 (plus bonus wombat) According to my old notes, B was a late-B star of 2.95 mass (or more) in a circular orbit at 8 AU; my calculation yielded a maximum orbit around A of 2.3 AU & 1.9 AU around B. But obviously these planets would have been disrupted e.g. by the formation of a planetary nebula--not to mention the changing of the stellar orbits.

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