So today I got to do a fantastic thing.
I went to the Mirror Lab and had a tour of the lens facility
underneath the football stadium.
And I've been wanting to do this since 2018, when
I went to visit the European Southern Observatory in Chile
and some telescopes there.
And Susan Briante told me about the Mirror Lab.
And so, anyway, today we went there together,
and with Sara Sams, Tuscon poet.
It was so interesting and wonderful.
But I'm going to read you two poems that come from my trip
to the observatories in the other desert.
In the desert near Antofagasta, Chile,
tailings ponds are those green neon rectangles,
tight adjacent pools of toxins sloughed from Middle Earth.
Their geometric neatness like a pantone strip, electric lime,
unlucky lark, primavera, artichoke.
[LAUGHS]
You may have seen them from above in photographs.
The effusions of the Atacama mines, lithium plus pus.
From the searest, barrenest stretch of all the Earth
we light our hand-held stars.
And yeah, in a kind of clever counterpoint,
the closest other industry vaults into the sky.
The VLT, very large telescope, and coming soon,
extremely large.
These astrophysicists, they put their tongues
into their cheeks, a little smug that their work is just as hard
to do as mineralogists, but optimistic.
All curiosity and awe.
Above, above, above the cynics of the minds.
Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light is a movie
that will send your brainy heart into the basement of your chest.
Widows, mothers sifting that same desert
for fragments of bones from Pinochet's camps.
Is this calcified scrap a human scrap?
They work coincidentally alongside archeologists
whose job is in situ, prehistoric human artifacts.
And the movies from the 2010's, the observatories
are also going up right their neighborhood of scoping out
the past.
A half century or 10 millennia, or all the way.
Big Bang.
Guzman seems to hope that we deserve the sky.
Definitions of addiction: Doing something
even when it's bad for you.
A disease, not a moral question.
Anyway, still a matter of choice.
And it takes enormous will to reverse course,
like choosing to divorce or join the Paris Accords
or not shoot up, not scroll.
Someone figured out how to use, then scale
to millions, all this lithium for batteries,
mostly though trace amounts for mental health.
Batteries, metal articles wrought
by hammering is what a battery first was.
Resource used to mean to rise again, recover, by the way.
The astronomers must know about the desert ponds etched
into crusty veils below their own search for wherever's next.
All those metal necks craned up.
Or maybe, like their tools, the astronomers look only up.
Imagination resigning itself to the common task,
give us something new deep in the mantle,
deep in the Milky Way.
When I visited the very large, I took its picture with my phone.
[LAUGHS]