Dark star crashes1
pouring its light
into ashes
Reason tatters
the forces tear loose
from the axis
Searchlight casting
for faults in the
clouds of delusion
Shall we go,
you and I2
while we can
Through
the transitive nightfall
of diamonds
Mirror shatters
in formless reflections
of matter
Glass hand dissolving
to ice-petal flowers
revolving
Lady in velvet
recedes
in the nights of good-bye
Shall we go,
you and I
while we can?
Through
the transitive nightfall
of diamonds
spinning a set the stars through which the tattered tales of axis roll
about the waxen wind of never set to motion in the unbecoming
round about the reason hardly matters nor the wise through which
the stars were set in spin
Words by Robert Hunter
Music by Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh,
Ron McKernan, Bob Weir and Mickey Hart
An oxymoron: the brightest of objects, seen as the absence of brightness.
The phrase seems to have come to the English language by way of the astronomers who spoke Middle High German, who in turn borrowed it from Latin, translating the phrase stella obscura, used by Roman astronomers to describe a faint star. This was translated into the German of the Minnesingers and of the medieval German astronomers as dunkler Stern. The astronomers, according to an article by Arthur Groos, used it in a comparable manner to that of the Romans, while the Minnesingers adopted it as a literary metaphor.
He cites a song by Kurenberg, a mid-twelfth-century poet:
Der tunkel Sterne, der birget sich.
Als tuo Du, Frouwe schoene, so Du sehest mich.
So la du diniu Ougen gen an einen andern Man.
Son weiz doch luetzel iemen, wiez under uns zwein ist getan.
[The “dark star” hides itself.
Do likewise, beautiful lady, when you see me:
Let your eyes glance at another man,
And no one will know how things are between us.]
For many years, the phrase as used by the Minnesingers was taken to mean “Venus,” the “star” obscured by cloudy vapors and representing Love in the age of chivalry. Groos’s article contradicts this interpretation, arguing for a much more complex metaphor. His article (“Kurenberg’s ‘Dark Star,’ in Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, vol. 54 [1979], pp. 469–78) is worth reading.
John Michel, a British natural philosopher, first theorized the concept of a black hole in 1784, and dark star was the term by which the concept was referred to at the time. Incredibly, Michel reasoned that there were dark stars that had a “critical circumference” beyond which light did not escape. (Another John Michel is a contemporary English author who brought the subject of sacred geometry and earth mysteries forward. In 1972, during the Europe ’72 tour, some of the Grateful Dead’s entourage, including Garcia and Lesh, who were interested in the subject even then, long before the Dead’s pyramid adventures in Egypt, met with Michel).
Astronomers today still use the phrase dark star to refer to the phenomenon of a faint star and in reference to dwarf stars. I’ll cite one article: “Dark star throws light on missing mass,” New Scientist, vol. 116 (November 19, 1987), p. 33. The subject tracings for the article indicate it is about dark matter (astronomy) and dwarf stars. In essence (and in one sense of dwarf), stars go through dwarf stages as they die. Our sun, for example, “will become a white dwarf, then a black dwarf—a cold corpse in space.”
On the atomic level, the nucleus of an atom is surrounded with a cloud of electrons. At high stellar temperatures, atoms are ionized and the electrons run around free of the nuclei. As a star is crushed to higher densities in its evolution, the electrons form a degenerate electron gas.
In 1935, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar applied the physics of a degenerate electron gas to the model of a star. He found that the pressure exerted by the electrons could resist the force of gravity only for stars of less than 1.4 solar masses and that such stars would have a particular density. Such stars are known as white dwarfs. He also found the crucial point at which the star has the highest density and smallest radius possible. Any more mass at all added to this point and the star collapses. This point is known as the Chandrasekhar limit.
So, a white dwarf is a star at the end point of its thermonuclear history, where no heavy elements are fused and no energy is produced—the end of the line of energy production. Slowly, the stored integral heat of a white dwarf then radiates into space (pouring its light into ashes, as it were). Eventually, it becomes a black dwarf, cold, without energy, and nonproductive.
Any number of books and songs have used the phrase, and it is now impossible to tell who influenced whom, and is it important, anyway? I find it interesting to see how often the phrase has been used, so I offer the following, doubtless far from complete, list of books, films, and songs using dark star in their titles:
BOOKS:
Fiction and drama:
Caldecott, Moyra. Child of the Dark Star. 1984.
Chambers, Robert William. The Dark Star. 1929.
Cost, March. The Dark Star. 1940.
Dowding, Hugh Caswell Tremenheere. The Dark Star. 1951.
Furst, Alan. Dark Star. 1991.
Gater, Dilys. The Dark Star. 1981.
Hill, Pamela. A Dark Star Passing. 1990.
Hilliard, Nerina. Dark Star. 1968. (A Harlequin romance)
Kahn, Florence Ring. Dark Star, a Drama in One Act. 1950.
Knight, Brigid. Dark Star. 1965.
Lloyd, Hugh. The Mystery at the Dark Star Ranch. 1934.
Maybury, Anne. Dark Star. 1977.
Moon, Lorna. Dark Star. 1929.
Muller, Marcia. Dark Star. 1989.
Silverberg, Robert. “To the Dark Star.” Short story, anthologized in The Cube Root of Uncertainty. 1970.
Biographies (this seems to be a popular subtitle for biographies):
Amburn, Ellis. Dark Star: The Roy Orbison Story. 1990.
Bates, Robin. The Dinosaurs and the Dark Star. 1986.
Fountain, Leatrice. Dark Star. 1985 (A biography of the actor John Gilbert.).
Greenfield, Robert. Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia. 1996.
Jones, Dylan. Jim Morrison, Dark Star. 1992.
Nonfiction:
Dugger, Ronnie. Dark Star: Hiroshima Reconsidered in the Life of Claude Eatherly. 1967.
MacLeod, Fiona. The Dominion of Dreams: Under the Dark Star. 1910.
Wolfe, Robert. Dark Star. 1984.
FILMS:
Dark Star. 1974. (A sci-fi feature film).
Holt, Nancy. Art in the Public Eye: The Making of Dark Star Park. 1988.
RECORDINGS:
Oldfield, Mike. “Dark Star.” Track on Tubular Bells 2. 1992.
Stills, Stephen. “Dark Star.” Track on CSN.
Note relationship to the title “Stella Blue.” Stella is Latin for “star,” so, a blue star.
A line in J. R. R. Tolkien’s poem “Cat” refers to:
The pard dark-starred, fleet upon feet . . .
(Pard is short for “leopard,” so the dark stars being referred to are the leopard’s spots.)
Dark Star was also the 1953 Kentucky Derby winner.
David Womack, in his The Aesthetics of the Dead, points up a parallel to T. S. Eliot’s opening lines for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table.
“Prufrock” is also echoed in “Stella Blue.”
Recordings: Generally, the version from Live/Dead (November 10, 1969) is the acknowledged standard. However, a studio version (noted above) was released as a single, backed with “Born Cross-eyed” in April 1968.
First documented performance: December 13, 1967, at the Shrine Exhibition Hall in Los Angeles.
The verse at the end of the lyric was included on the studio recording of “Dark Star,” released on the compilation What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been, recited by Hunter himself. It was not sung in performance.
Hunter states in a note in A Box of Rain that “Dark Star” was the first song lyric he wrote with the band, though they had earlier arranged “Alligator,” “Saint Stephen,” and “China Cat Sunflower.”
“Dark Star” was included by Jim Henke, chief curator for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, on the list of the 500 most influential songs in rock and roll.
In Garcia, Charles Reich questions Garcia about “Dark Star”:
Reich: Well, then, if we wanted to talk about “Dark Star,” uh, could you say anything about where it comes from? Garcia: You gotta remember that you and I are talking about two different “Dark Stars.” You’re talking about the “Dark Star” which you have heard formalized on a record, and I’m talking about the “Dark Star” which I have heard in each performance as a completely improvised piece over a long period of time. So I have a long continuum of “Dark Stars” which range in character from each other to real different extremes. “Dark Star” has meant, while I’m playing it, almost as many things as I can sit here and imagine, so all I can do is talk about “Dark Star” as a playing experience. Reich: Well, yeah, talk about it a little.
Garcia: I can’t. It talks about itself.
Tom Constanten said:
“Dark Star” is going on all the time. It’s going on right now. You don’t begin it so much as enter it. You don’t end it so much as leave it.