On Stars

​Star. The word itself is very short, one syllable of four common letters. This makes it rife with anagramatical flexibility. It can become “rats” or “tars” or “tsar” or “arts,” but, frustratingly, not “sart” or “tasr” or “astr”. Nonetheless, there is so much density packed into those two pairs of letters that it’s like, well, insert-black-hole-joke here.
 
As with a few of the other blogs on this here site, like the one on the letter X or the color red, I’m choosing to write about what a star is and what it means because it is a symbol so ubiquitous to be almost without meaning anymore, making it worth taking a few minutes to contemplate. In other words, twinkle twinkle, cute little star. How I do wonder what you truly are...
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You might be thinking that this is just some lame deconstruct-the-homonym game. It’s not. The truth is there is a lot of connection between the different things named with the word “star”: a word just as sharp, bright, and elegant as the many things it signifies.

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These are all pictures of stars. Wait...what?
​Gina Rodriguez photo credit: Dominick D

​First, let’s acknowledge that there are billions upon billions (obligatory Carl Sagan reference) of burning balls of gas out there in the universe, and one of them, our Sun, is lucky enough to have this beautiful blue marble whirling around it. In I Heart Huckabees, Dustin Hoffman's character says, "There's not an atom in our bodies that has not been forged in the furnace of the sun." Not only is that assertion difficult to dispute, but it certainly rings us all together with one great big metaphysical lasso.

Wikipedia says a star is “a luminous sphere of plasma held together by its own gravity.” I could figure out what that means, but instead I’d rather focus on what we see when we’re in the middle of an Illinois hayfield at night: perfect pinhole points of light, as Sagan might say, poking through the black cloak of oblivion. Stars have long been considered symbols of the divine, sparkling above our heads from distances too big to understand, massive objects far beyond our lifetimes. Fulfilling the dream of travelling among them would be the among the greatest of human accomplishments. (Whoops…there’s my Sagan again.)

But the word “star” can just as easily conjure up a different image in our head, depending on the context. You all know it: the five-line symbol that can be made without lifting the pen from the paper. Every time my grade school teachers made that thing, the ball-point pen snapping across the top of my homework, I was amazed. I wanted to learn how to do it. It looked so cool, and that’s perhaps why it sat at the top of every well-done multiplication worksheet. This is my attempt at it in MS Paint:

Part of the allure of the star shape is how dynamic it is: your eyes bounce from corner to corner, it stretches out. Even the negative space has angles that slide and kink. But somehow the idea of a star still transcends these visual schemas...

​Sometimes we would even get a sticker on our worksheets—a gold star—which was even better, for it combined that intriguing symbol with the best, most expensive, most beautiful color. Hard to beat a gold star. Turns out they motivate seven-year-olds and career generals alike. They also rate hotels, restaurants, movies, Amazon products, and Netflix shows and adorn the flags of nations, logos of sports teams and businesses, iconography of religions, and shapes of glitter. Or if you want to see stars in your eyes, go get into a fight and take one right in the kisser. (Please don’t.)

The same symbol reaches across domains, professions, uses, and cultures.
​Stephen Colbert photo credit to Cliff.

As if that weren’t enough, the star symbol shows up in a variety of other places. The symbol itself, whether in five-point version or with more vertices, has been a sacred symbol for ages, and books have been written on this topic alone. Most notably, the six-pointed Star of David is a symbol of Judiasm. The mystical 5-pointed star is referred to as a pentagram or a pentacle, and many people associate it with Satanism and dark magic. Ooooh. Although it is widely employed in scores of other religions, this nefarious stigma has nonetheless made it an emblem of heavy metal and horror movies.

But this white male millennial also chooses to see stars in an iconic in a not-so-sinister video game franchise, for it is a star that grants Mario temporary invincibility with which he can kick goombas and pirhana plants without shrinking all with a big smile under his ridiculous mustache. The comment is not subtle: just as many spiritualists have used the star symbol as a ward against malicious spirits, so it has become the primary ward in the most iconic western video game franchise to date.

​We also have stars in human form, celebrities, people with public personas and the keys to the city. We call these people “stars” who experience “stardom”, or better yet, “superstars” basking in “superstardom”, living the life that 99.9% of us only dream about: fast cars, beautiful men and women, crazy parties, giant houses, exotic locations, trashing hotel rooms, never showing our faces in public.
 
But why do they call celebrities “stars”? Perhaps because they are as far away from us as stars are, beyond the reach of our hands or social standing. They are beautiful, stunning in appearance and action, leaving us in awe at their power and presence. And when each actor makes it big enough, what do they get? A star on the lauded “Walk of Fame” in Hollywood. Funny how those stars are flat on the ground.

​Right now in your head compare this single walk of fame star to a bright burning ball of gas in the sky larger than you could ever comprehend.  What’s the similarity there, other than the word? Other than those four letters which could easily be “arts” or “rats” or “tars”.
 
Because, in the end, a star is both a symbol of—and agent of—the purest ideal of potential. Potential for what one can accomplish. Potential for what one can stretch to. Potential for awe. Potential for beauty and goodness. And, as in the case of our Sun, potential to create worlds. The potential to create all our human lives. And plenty of other lives as well.

Go forth, bright shining stars. May the universe be your playground.