The rings of Saturn

The rings of Saturn have puzzled astronomers since Galileo Galilei discovered them with his telescope in 1610. Detailed study by the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft in the 1980s only increased the mystery.


There are thousands of rings made of up billions of particles of ice and rock. The particles range in size from a grain of sugar to the size of a house. The rings are believe [sic] to be pieces of comets, asteroids or shattered moons that broke up before they reached the planet. Each ring orbits at a different speed around the planet. Information from NASA's Cassini mission will help reveal how they formed, how they maintain their orbit and, above all, why they are there in the first place.


While the other three gas planets in the solar system - Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune - have rings orbiting around them, Saturn's are by far the largest and most spectacular. With a thickness of about 1 kilometer (3,200 feet) or less, they span up to 282,000 km (175,000 miles), about three quarters of the distance between the Earth and its moon.


Named alphabetically in the order they were discovered, the rings are relatively close to each other, with the exception of the Cassini Division, a gap measuring 4,700 kilometers (2,920 miles). The main rings are, working outward from the planet, known as C, B, and A. The Cassini Division is the largest gap in the rings and separates Rings B and A. In addition a number of fainter rings have been discovered more recently. The D Ring is exceedingly faint and closest to the planet. The F Ring is a narrow feature just outside the A Ring. Beyond that are two far fainter rings named G and E. The rings show a tremendous amount of structure on all scales; some of this structure is related to gravitational perturbations by Saturn's many moons, but much of it remains unexplained.


To enter Saturn's orbit, Cassini flew through the gap between the F and the G rings, farther from the planet than the Cassini Division. As a safe measure, during the crossing of the ring plane, instruments and cameras onboard the spacecraft were shut off temporarily. However, the spectacular crossing into Saturn's orbit brought incredible information, images and footage, while the instruments onboard are still collecting unique data that may answer many questions about the rings' composition.



Reference: USGS Astrogeology: Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature - Ring Nomenclature

Source: The NASA website. All emphases are mine.

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So what’s with all this astro mumbo-jumbo?


This serves as an invitation to a group reading of the novel The Rings of Saturn by the sublime German writer W. G. Sebald. The discussion is happening in Shelfari and it starts on April 4. You need to be a member of Shelfari and of the Sebald group in order to join. Registration is free. Here's the chapter-by-chapter schedule:



I – II: Week 1: April 4-10: pages 1-48

III – IV: Week 2: April 11-17: pages 49-99

V – VI: Week 3: April 18-24: pages 101-166

VII – VIII: Week 4: April 25 - May 1: pages 167-237

IX – X: Week 5: May 2-8: pages 239-296



That's two chapters a week for five weeks. The book is 296 pages long so we’re reading around 60 pages per week. The week refers to the start of discussion by chapter. That means the actual reading is done before the indicated week. You can of course read ahead of schedule. The pages are based on the English translation by Michael Hulse. Readers of the book in the original German language and in other translations can join us in the discussion but we'll be discussing in English.


We hope you can join us.

2666, double mirrors, and Borges

Having reread the first two parts of 2666, I’m reviewing my notes on it so far. I reiterate the conjecture on Borges’s direct influence on Bolaño with regard to the role of nightmares and dreams in the book. It is certain that Bolaño was influenced by Borges’s ideas on dreams, derived from Groussac and Coleridge and other poets. In the lecture of Borges on "Nightmares" (from the book Seven Nights, and also collected in Everything and Nothing), Borges mentioned that, although we might wish otherwise, in dreams what is important is not the images but the impressions produced by them: "The images are minor; they are effects." And also two ideas: first, dreams are part of waking life; and the other idea, the splendid one, the belief of the poets: that all of waking is a dream. Borges then mentioned that there is no difference between these two ideas. He gave some brilliant examples from literature and if I recall it right, an example in real life. Borges ended this lecture, first delivered in Argentina, with a speculation about the particular horror of nightmares, which is beyond the horror of the waking life, and which can be expressed by any story, a horror that has something more to it (the flavor of the nightmare).

Borges’s theological/supernatural speculation at the end of his lecture is also scary: "What if nightmares were cries from hell? What if nightmares literally took place in hell? Why not? Everything is so strange that even this is possible."

I think that these hypotheses by Borges are what Bolaño borrowed as frameworks for the dreams and nightmares permeating 2666. Nightmares as a reflection of the waking life ("reality"). Nightmares impinging on real lives.

A proof of this was the conspicuous image of the two mirrors which was both present in Liz Norton's hotel room in Mexico (in reality) and in her dream. It was clearly a nod to Borges who included this image in his story "The Aleph" and also in the above-mentioned lecture on nightmares itself where Borges said that all it takes are two mirrors to construct a labyrinth.

In Norton's room there were two mirrors instead of one. The first mirror was by the door, as it was in the other rooms. The second was on the opposite wall, next to the window overlooking the street, hung in such a way that if one stood in a certain spot, the two mirrors reflected each other.

This was how the double mirrors were described (in reality) and their vivid reappearance in Norton's nightmare made them more significant. Later on she wrote about them in a letter to the other two critics Pelletier and Espinoza ("I remember I thought about the hotel. In my room at the hotel there were two very odd mirrors that frightened me the last few days. When I felt myself dropping off, I barely had the strength to reach out and turn off the light.")

In "The Aleph" Borges suggested a metaphysical meaning for the mirrors:

Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spiderweb at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet (and none of them reflecting me), … saw in a study in Alkmaar a globe of the terraqueous world placed between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly ...

After seeing a lot of images aside from the mirrors, "The Aleph" ended the passage thus: "I wept, because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has ever truly looked upon: the inconceivable universe. Near the end of "The Part About the Crimes" the image of the two mirrors recurs. There was an indication that the labyrinth created by the two mirrors contains the evil reflected in reality. That the book was a dying man's attempt to articulate the inconceivable universe in nightmares which come alive in dreams and in waking life.

Reading literature is a dangerous occupation

I'm trying to get back on track with the 2666 Group Read that is unfolding over at Las Obras de Roberto Bolaño. I've been avidly following along for the first several weeks but has unfortunately fallen by the wayside. I don't know. I got sidetracked when I started with "The Part About Fate." The L'Etranger-like beginning of that part got to me. Coming on the heels of the dissembling Amalfitano, I just find it so sad. I may already have withdrawal symptoms. I'm pretty sure I will not be picking this book up again (cover to cover) in the future.

I've read 2666 the past year and was just consumed by it. This time around, the same species of horror (hardly more understandable) creeps into the page and it's hard to look at its writhing form.

Let me just say kudos to the theme trackers of the group read. Their thematic explorations are a big help to the floundering reader. Their tenacious readings and courage allow one to form ideas and impressions on the book and on what Roberto may be up to. I find this whole group read experience a meaningful exercise. I'm not giving up. I'll pick "Fate" up again and get back to the main blog site and the discussions. I know I will trudge through again some of the evil deeds of the twentieth and the present centuries. I know that at the same time I will be treated with the consolation of the raw power of writing. Literature is a dangerous occupation, says Roberto. So is reading it, maybe.

The last infrarrealista

While searching for "infrarrealismo" in Google, I happened upon a cool sketch of Roberto Bolaño in deviantart. I was looking for the text of his manifesto of the infrarealist poetry movement. Excerpts of the manifesto in English were quoted in many reviews of RB’s books. The only complete English translations that I found online were in two sites.





I liked the doble cara representation of Roberto as a mythological cult figure and as a serious writer. The decadent poet and the dying novelist, so to speak. I’ve adopted it as the group avatar for our Bolaño group in Shelfari.

As for the poetry movement that inspired vicerealism, I found it odd that the main page has gone extinct? Surely it was not just because the "last infrarrealista" no longer walked the jungles of this Earth?

In any case, I just relish Roberto's excerpted poem (in English translation by Erica Mena) in Words Without Borders. I'm just a bit disappointed that the whole poem was not posted online. I can't wait to read the entire sequence, and the entire "Three" collection.

Why one should not read

'It’s very bad to read books. The plain truth is that there is probably no greater obstacle to enlightenment than reading. Even those of us who have made a little progress read books like the Hekigan-shu without understanding much. When we get beyond the level of our experience we are completely at sea. Should one get the habit of putting his own subjective interpretations on the passages he does not understand, he will be handicapped considerably when he sits in zazen. He will not be satisfied with the stage he is at but will anticipate the next and wait impatiently for satori to come. The result is that for want of proper application at his present level, his way becomes obstructed. Reading can thus be a real poison. So I advise you not to attempt it….'
– Natsume Sōseki, Mon