It's Carl Sagan Day!

“Make me wonder, make me understand. Spark the light of doubt and a newborn mind. Bring the vast unthinkable down to earth,”

              These are lyrics from a song by my favorite band, Nightwish. It’s called Sagan, after the famous astronomer Carl Sagan. I was going to make that blog post about designing forms today, but seeing as it’s Carl Sagan Day apparently, I thought it would be more fitting to talk about last week’s project. The project was to turn a song into a poster based on feelings. Not the title, not the lyrics, but the feeling of the song and how it makes me feel. I regularly belt this song in the car and prance around the house while it plays, either in my head or on my phone. I regularly do this with a number of Nightwish songs.

              I was, at first, overwhelmed by the possibilities. There are so many songs that would have been excellent for this project. Eventually, I settled on Sagan. Settled is the wrong word. I just kept thinking about that one periodically throughout the day like I had already made up my mind on it, and that was how I decided.

              Then came the part where I had to decipher my feelings and put them into words. “Big feelings” wasn’t going to cut it, even though that’s how I would describe it most other times. Obviously, it makes me feel happy, but it goes beyond that. It makes me feel powerful, free, at peace, joy, in awe, like what’s out of reach really isn’t.

              The song, on the surface, is about space exploration. Which, yes, please, let’s talk about space. Do you want to know the life cycle of a star? I did a speech on that once for a different class. Do you want to talk about black holes? I could tell you about those too. (Look at me, I watch three episodes of How the Universe Works and I think I’m an expert) But this song came to mean something else to me. There is a line that goes, “always wary of a captive thought…” and one day I really let myself ponder those words and suddenly the song related deeply to my deconstruction of religion. I grew up being told to “take every thought captive” because thoughts are dangerous. Thinking leads to doubt. Doubt is bad. It’s not. Anyway, I won’t give you the give you the Full Monty on that journey because a) no one has time for that, and b) that’s not what this post is about. I just wanted to share a little bit on why free is one of the feelings this song evokes.

               Then I had to represent all of that visually. With Photoshop and about six-million layers.

              It does seem to fit thematically, at least where the space imagery is concerned. That wasn’t cause I was cheating and going “hey, the song is about space so let’s have space pictures,” it just happens that space pictures give me a lot of the same feelings, and honestly I don’t know who can look at stars and nebulas and the moon and not be left absolutely speechless and in wonder at the sheer existence of everything.

              The birds flying off represent that freedom I was talking about.

              Also featured on this poster is a relatively new addition to my BJD collection (wow, I didn’t even realize I’ve had him a year already. Time flies.) I wanted to use him for this project because I hadn’t gotten a chance to put the spotlight on him anywhere else but on Instagram. Also, I just like taking pictures of my dolls. Sue me. His name is Beorn (yes, after the Hobbit character. What did you expect? Nienor is named after a character from the Children of Hurin. We stan Tolkien on this blog) and his faceup and wig are done by me. Normally he wears clothes, but I didn’t think his yellow sweater would have the vibe I was going for.

              Anyway, he represents both the wonder and power from the song, partly because he has such a gentle face (and I think that wonder is strong but gentle), and also because of the glowing nebula dust coming off him like he’s some cosmic god of creation. We’ve solved the mystery of the origin of the universe, folks. Beorn did it.

              So yes, the visual representation of how the song Sagan makes me feel is Cosmic God Beorn releasing parrots into space.

              I didn’t say it would make sense.

 

“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.” J. R. R. Tolkien