I named this ridge on which I live Luna Ridge, because it seems the moon is never too far away, but the most scintillating moments here have actually been those experienced in the absence of her cool light, when darkness draws its own luminescence from galaxies abroad.  These are moments when I look up into the constellations and immerse my mind in swirls of the Milky Way.

Somehow, staring into this swell of stars electrifies my mind, almost as if the stars intersect with the synaptic networks of my brain cells and communicate fluid fire.  It is true: I am reinvigorated, even enlightened, by these pinpricks of electric light.

At these moments, I am as close to levitation as I will ever be, a helmetless escapee from gravity, reaching outside the confines of my skull.  Is it possible that revival is somehow seated in the stars?

Who really knows?  I am betting, though, that in her time, Marjorie Hope Nicolson knew something about the revival in the stars.  A forgotten American scholar who claimed to be “no feminist” in a time when women wrangled for academic respect, Nicholson pursued a gender free scholarship unimaginable today as she investigated the roles of nature and science in the formation of the literary imagination.  Due to her discipline, she gained an enviable prescience for the science of our day.

Similarly, when I am on Luna Ridge looking into the stars, I don’t waste my time imagining I am a woman.  Forgetful of that fact, I reach from the variegated shadows of night, to snatch revival from dark’s quick-centered time, a revival felt in a moment of timeless ecstasy.  In Nicolson’s words, I am reaching into the aesthetics of the infinite, though I have the benefit of breaking in on a different side of science, one which Nicolson did not know well—the science that remakes entropy, chaos, and decadence into “emergent complexity,” a place where there is an oxymoronic dance of chaos and order, a new order, if you will allow it to be said.

As we ponder the measurement of immeasurable and emergent complexities, even here on Luna Ridge, we can gain confidence—a new order is emerging from the disordered post-Romantic Twentieth Century.

This evening, I will end with Nicolson’s own words as expressed in her critical study published first by Cornell University in 1959, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite, where she argues for a position beyond Wordsworth’s “terror” and fear for Nature’s decay: “From mountains, the mind and soul of man rises again, through Space, to Eternity and Infinity, with awe and reverence for the power of God, to the serene and tranquil peace that passes all understanding.”

I am a respecter of this lady scholar.  She had prescience for what we are only beginning to uncover, a science of emergent complexity where what is beheld resonates between what is predictable and what is not.