SEEING STARS

For author Emma Forrest, a love affair with the night sky has lasted longer and been felt more profoundly than any other relationship

Emma Forrest’s love affair with the night sky

Iwas 16 and had made it into a secret Beastie Boys album launch concert, dressed in a giant tartan cagoule that conspired against my form, my hair a triangle of frizz as parched as my heart. I hadn’t yet had the nose job that liberated me from looking in the mirror every 45 minutes. The triangle of moles I’d been teased relentlessly about at school sat beneath my left eye like squatters. In short, I did not feel very desirable. And then, he appeared before me, long, elegant bassist fingers almost but not quite touching my face, as he softly said, ‘Pleiades.’ Adam Yauch, aka MCA, the prematurely grey member of the Beastie Boys, the quiet, thoughtful George Harrison of the band, who had found Buddhism, started the Free Tibet concerts and nudged the band to atone for their early sexism, had noticed me. ‘What?’ I asked. ‘Pleiades. The constellation. The freckles under your left eye are in the shape of Pleiades. It’s so beautiful.’ I stammered a thank you and he was gone. Maybe that brief spotlight, from a man who’d been gentle, encouraging, romantic (in his way) but non-lascivious, planted my love for the stars and moon. But it bloomed wildly when I turned 40: five novels in, one young daughter and soon to be divorced. Hiking with my headphones on, I’ve noticed that stars must be the second most referenced imagery in popular music, after the heart. The heavens were, of course, David Bowie’s muse, walking alongside him from young Starman until the album released the day before he died: Blackstar. In later life, Bowie was asked if he’d like to go on a spaceship. ‘I wouldn’t dream of getting on one,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid to go to the bottom of the garden.’ The moon and stars were his Superman costume.

I understand this completely and wonder if I ended up living in Los Angeles so long because it is a city of stars on stars: the arc of the constellations reflect the endless lights of Mulholland, reaching up to them as if they were lovers torn apart. It is utterly hypnotic, a dreaming board.

I started seriously monitoring the moon when my marriage was in free fall. I’d had two wedding dresses, a blue-grey veil and an orange-almond cake. It was only looking back on my wedding photos that I saw I’d also had a full moon that night. I’d worked so hard and long to save my marriage that it blew my mind that you can’t fight or thwart

the moon. It won’t be persuaded. You are powerless. How much courage it gave me. I always fantasised about living in a hotel, so that each day, when I came back to a room made tidy, I’d have a fresh chance to get things right. The cycle of the moon is an endless ‘begin again’. The ultimate reset peace offering.

After the divorce, having relocated to London, I was on a bus passing through Crouch End, when I saw a print of a woman kissing a man made out of stars in a shop window. Everything fell into place. In a capitalist society approaching endgame, it’s come to feel like only stars and orgasms offer free pleasure. I saw that print and had the strong sense memory that my greatest love affairs have involved being places where the stars and moon were most visible: a secret Auckland beach, a remote Irish clifftop.

My first epic love was a Maori – he came from people who’d navigated from Hawaii to New Zealand by the stars. It’s referenced in We Know The Way from my daughter’s favourite film, Moana. People have been watching the stars, living by them, loving by them for thousands of years, which puts our personal sorrows into perspective.

As for astrology (the divination of human affairs by studying the movement of celestial objects), well, sure it’s a pseudoscience, but it also predates religion. In my opinion, anything that has been believed by that many people for that long holds a power. You don’t need to believe it’s real. But you can accept there’s power in so many people believing. It is, in that sense, like conventional religion, to which I have also been drawn as an adult. I am particularly aware when it is ‘Dark Moon’ (the days before a new moon, when you can’t see the moon at all but have to believe it’s there). Judaism and Islam – religions that do not depict God in drawings – require you to believe in a God you cannot see. This might correlate with both religions having subsets dedicated to astrology and astronomy (which is a true science).

In my 20s, in love in New Zealand, there was that sense from the sky of being cradled. I’m shocked, in retrospect, how clearly that was not the case from the lover, and wonder if I confused him with the sky. It stepped in where he’d abdicated. The respite from his emotional absence was the nights he’d make love to me on the beach, our neurotic constellations melding.

In my 30s, new lover: Ireland, again those epic stars, the euphoric amplification of our nascent feelings so we were wildly in love before we’d spent any length of domestic time together.

My life is all domestic now. I fall asleep every Sunday night listening to my favourite astrology show, Ghost Of A Podcast, hosted by

Jessica Lanyadoo, beaming possible pathways from her garden office in Oakland, California, to my new life in north London. ‘I love that question,’ she always tells callers, ‘I cannot tell you how much I love that question.’ In a world that feels black and white, good and evil, it is comforting to delve into astrology, a world in which everything is constantly open to interpretation. Stars, both to look at and consider, are free entertainment when everything else costs.

I live on a hill, in a little top-floor flat I bought because it felt old and decrepit and suffused with the magic of its endless view. The further my romantic life has receded (something beautiful and strange too far away to touch), the more I’ve been drawn to the stars. With their Greek names, they are my Greek chorus, helping me process the story of my life as it continues to unfold. I think I’d miss men more if I didn’t have the sensual pleasure of the

‘The further my romantic life has receded, the more I’ve been drawn to the stars,’ says Emma

‘PEOPLE HAVE BEEN WATCHING THE STARS FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS’

moon gazing at me, the stars running themselves over my body as I moon-bathe in my underwear on my roof terrace. Instead of a farmer’s tan, I feel constellations drifting into my hair like snow.

This might mean I’m a witch. I fit the archetypal description. There is no man and I don’t need one. I’m about at the end of my child-bearing years and I have never felt this powerful. But without the moon, I wonder if I’d have enough light to see how much I have. I’m a single mum who used to be 16 and now I’m 42. I weigh so much less than I did in my 20s. I wasn’t fat, I was just full, so full. Now I’m a waning moon. But, if you believe in such things, waning moons are good for bringing spells to fruition.

‘Why are you so old?’ my daughter asks one day, not meaning to be rude.

I stroke her ears, considering. ‘I think because… I’m still alive.’

The moon is waxing gibbous as I write this, sliced like a wedding cake, that orange-almond taste in the skies.

Adam Yauch died very young. In his memory, there’s Adam Yauch Park in Brooklyn. And a middle-aged woman in north London, Pleiades beneath her left eye, saying to herself, ‘Look up. Look up.’