These Stars Are All The Same: A Survey of Constellations

By David Keffer

As astrophysicists have long known, stars are alive. Stars are born and they work, converting matter into energy. When their work is done, they die. Like their celestial constituents, constellations also live. Constellations love, they weep, they battle the seemingly infinite expanse of cosmic ennui in which they are enveloped. In this light-hearted novel, Boötes, who chases the great bear, Ursa Major, decides he has had enough. He abandons his sidereal post and with his Earthly traveling companion explores the heavenly realm, paying visits to many of the other constellations, listening to their laments while constructing for himself a path toward a new, more fulfilling destiny.

Boötes has been chasing the great bear, Ursa Major, around the pole for time out of mind and, truth be told, he long ago lost his enthusiasm for the task. His hunting hounds in Canes Venatici are existential drug addicts, who cannot be relied upon to provide additional encouragement to maintain the futile and ultimately demeaning pursuit. So Boötes calls the chase off, starting a sequence of events that throws all of the constellations in the heavens out of kilter. Aries the ram abandons his post in the House of Mars to serve as Boötes' steed as he roams the celestial panorama in search of a more fulfilling destiny.

Boötes is accompanied by his childhood friend, who has traveled from Earth to the heavens upon noticing that Boötes can no longer be seen in the night sky. Their relationship is deep and tested by time but not without the occasional, adversarial episodes. They are separated in the great oceans of deep space while attempting to elude the voracious pursuit of Draco, the dragon. Both Boötes and his Earthly companion pay visits to the constellations as they look for each other with ostensibly the intention of making sure that the other is safe.

These Stars Are All The Same was written from April to May, 1993, in the spring of the author's first year in graduate school at the University of Minnesota. It is a relatively early work and, while the same threads of an endless pursuit for meaning and purpose can be found woven through the narrative, one also hears a different, younger voice than that found in the later novels, a voice that has not abandoned a light-hearted wit.

These Stars Are All The Same contains all known fragments of A Catalogue of Lovers, which is the maternal counter-part to A Manual of Sons contained in the novel, The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme, published approximately eighteen years earlier in 1975.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Keffer
• Release date: Feb 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301385836

David Keffer

David J. Keffer was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He pursued a technical education earning a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. After a year as a post-doctoral scholar at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., he began his career as an engineering professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he remains today. He has published about 100 technical papers in archival journals. He was awarded a Fulbright Grant to learn and to teach about sustainability in Seoul, Korea.Outside of engineering, David Keffer studied world literature and creative writing. He has published analytical articles on the works of Primo Levi and Kobo Abé. He created various reading aids to several classical Chinese novels. Over the past two decades, David Keffer has been active writing novels, poetry and stories. Several novels and illustrated stories are available from the Poison Pie Publishing House at http://www.poisonpie.com.Beginning in 2012, David Keffer began teaching a course on the subject of non-idiomatic improvisational music, of which he is a devoted listener and a topic which has led aided him on an investigation of a literature of non-idiomatic improvisation.David Keffer lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with his wife, Lynn, and two children. As a family, they enjoy hiking through the local mountains and are always on the look-out for poison pie and other ambivalent mushrooms that dot the landscape.

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These Stars Are All The Same

A Survey of Constellations

by David J. Keffer

written April-May, 1993

Minneapolis, MN

modestly tinkered with in 2012

Knoxville, TN

Copyright 2013 David J. Keffer

Smashwords Edition

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These Stars Are All The Same

Table of Contents

Boötes

Canes Venatici, the Hunting Dogs

Ursa Major, the Great Bear

Lyra, the Lyre

Aries, the Ram

Capricornus, the Sea Goat

Draco, The Dragon

Delphinus, the Dolphin

Hercules, the Laborer

Hydra, the Water Snake

Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer

Gemini, the Twins

Serpens, the Serpent

Cetus, the Whale

Orion, the Giant Hunter

Lepus, the Hare

Sagittarius, the Archer

Corvus, the Crow

Virgo, the Virgin

Andromeda, the Chained Lady

Scorpio, the Scorpion

Perseus, the Champion

Eridanus, the River

Cassiopeia, the Lady in the Chair

Cygnus, the Swan

Cancer, the Crab

And still they're all the same to me

These stars all look the same

—Stina Nordenstam

"Alone at Night"

from the album Memories of a Color

1992.

Boötes

'Boötes!' was what I was shouting, having found myself in the arctic heavens, amongst the constellations with no clear picture of how to proceed. 'Boötes!' I hollered again. In response, I heard his hunting dogs, Asterion and Chara, barking in the distance. I thought I heard the great bear snarling back at them but that could have been purely the product of my imagination.

'And a fine product it is!' replied Boötes, jumping out from behind a nearby boulder. It is not well known that Boötes was a telepath. He had been persecuted mercilessly in primary school because of this aberration, deemed invasive and uncouth by teachers and peers alike, and thus he had always attempted there-after to keep it secret and to use it as infrequently as possible. The only reason I knew about it was because I went to grade-school with Boötes, a constellation.

Back then Boötes had been an entirely different person, possessed of a certain earthiness of which he was now bereft; he was a happier person then, despite the taunts and jeers of his classmates. He had had his heart set on becoming a farmer, as a kid. It wasn't until much later on that Boötes settled for bear-hunting and he was never fully able to reconcile himself to it.

On that afternoon of my first day in the heavens, Boötes wasn't looking well; his full beard had become unruly, circles sagged beneath the eyes whose pupils were dull and lifeless. The club he ordinarily swung with vigor was instead serving as a walking staff as he hobbled over. It had been more than a few years since I had last spoken to Boötes but I had seen him every night, starry-eyed and glowing, nothing like this animated cadaver approaching me.

'You let your dogs loose!' I knew Boötes, the great bear hunter, always followed his dogs on the hunt.

'I know,' he sighed, settling on the stump of a tree trunk and folding his arms across his lap. 'I have lost my fervor for the hunt.' He made the admission with gravity and grace.

I wasn’t altogether surprised by what I was hearing, knowing the Boötes of old, knowing how much he had cherished the chores of tending the earth. Besides, I could imagine that the endless hunting of bears, in fact of any variety of creatures at all might wear on one’s nerves as the eons passed.

'It's only too true,' Boötes admitted, reading my thoughts. 'I never wanted to be a hunter. In fact, I never wanted to be a constellation. It's all my mother's fault. She couldn't leave well enough alone.'

I opened my heart to my suffering friend. It had been my role for so long; it was as natural now as shining up here in space. Even back in school, Boötes had hid behind my broad back from the ridicule of our peers who called him, 'Boots' much to his shame. In a moment of weakness, when Boötes could take no more of the childish torment, his brother had robbed him of all his goods and evicted him from the family home.

Betrayed by even his own blood, Boötes had decided to drop out of school and I followed him. We wandered about down on earth, pleasure-seeking, hardship-enduring, traveling from village to village and lurking between the villages as well. As often as not, the excitement we discovered was to be found between the villages. We slept beneath the stars in whatever field or forest we grew weary. Our favorite refuges, though, were swamps. Countless miles we poled in our pirogue past breathing cypress knees, beneath dangling Spanish moss, over stagnant glades reeking of methane, and through clouds of mosquitoes. Those were the sorts of days into which our youth extended itself. The damp rot of marshes prolonged our inevitable fall into maturity. Those were the kind of days when you could find solace in a swamp, in any place really, so long as it was devoid of inhabitants. Of course, we weren't in strict seclusion considering we were there together, but then again, as they say, you always have to make exceptions for your friends and compromises for your family.

If it was destined for Boötes to become a constellation then he should have been placed in the heavens then, I think, when he still was capable of amazement and wonder when encountering the world. For Jupiter to place him up here only after his heart had grown embittered and his vision jaded, when he longer could relish the myriad of glories which swept beneath his gaze from this celestial vantage point, was no less than a dirty trick and one for which Boötes suffered immensely and continuously, that is until last night.

I can't say that I don't blame his mother either. Callisto thought herself so clever. She thought to lure him back home once his brother had abandoned her. And right she was. Clothed only in a scanty bathrobe, leaning onto the window sill, she wept into the wind. It worked; Boötes, paragon of filial piety, foolishly sped to her beckoning. He spent those years being ground into salt by his sniveling, whimpering mother, though he never betrayed by word or sign any hint of unhappiness. When I would visit him I would find him out in the fields or in the pastures, tending to their farm. The sun had changed the color of his face. I pleaded with him to resume his idyllic voyages with me. I swear his face would pale then, the years of labor tanning his flesh would drain from his cheeks, he'd tilt his hat back, and relive, in a breath, our youthful excursions through the swamps. With a single exhalation, the color would return and he would once again be Boötes, loyal son and farmer. Indeed, Boötes' first love was farming and his mother's poor treatment did not deprive him of the joy he found in working the fields.

I wasn't there for the plow episode. I'm glad I wasn't too; I heard it was nasty and some regrettable things were said. I do miss, however, the fact that I never got to say goodbye. That's what I'm here for now.

'How'd you get up here?' Boötes asked, 'What infernal miracle did you perform? What contraption did you create? Who did you have to sleep with to get placed in the heavens as a constellation?' (These reasons were the usual grounds for being grant immortality among the stars.)

'Oh, come on,' I replied, 'It can't be all that bad.' I seated myself on the ground near the stump. Boötes pulled a pouch from his belt and withdrew a pinch of tobacco which he stuffed in his pipe. From a distance, we listened to the yelping and crooning of his dogs immersed in the frenzy of the hunt.

'It's that bad,' Boötes admitted, 'Do you know what I have been doing up here in space ever single night without fail, regardless of whether you folk down on earth can see through the haze of clouds or not?'

Of course I knew; Boötes occupied a prominent position in the heavens. How could I have had eyes and not known? How could I have drunkenly stumbled home from this bar or that bar night after night and not accidentally looked up and come face to face with my old friend, stuck in the stars, chasing that damn great bear, driving it around the north pole with his club, ceaselessly? I had often wondered why Boötes never advanced for the killing stroke.

'Can't kill the stupid bear. That's the one thing Jupiter said to me was, 'Boötes, don't you kill that stupid bear.' So there I was on display with a great bear for the entire world to watch pointlessly revolving. Our pathetic routine, the bear and mine, was like a galactic carousel, never gaining or losing ground, the dogs never cornering it, the bear never turning and confronting us, just spinning around the pole to the insidious merry-go-round music of time. I told Jupiter it was demeaning and I would prefer to abstain. He told me it was an astrological parable explaining the futility of existence to the creatures on earth. He told me it was like I was telling them, 'See, even in heaven, you get the run-around, even where the gods dwell, you waste a lot of time, and don't get recognized for your efforts.' I told Jupiter I wanted to convey no such message. I told him that was a depressing parable and why couldn't I rather tell the one about all the demons getting funneled into a herd of pigs and then all of them running into a lake to drown? Jupiter claimed ignorance of that parable and wouldn't budge.'

'I could only put up with it so long. I could only continue the mockery of myself and the betrayal of my principles for so long. I won't do it anymore. Now I'm hiding.'

This was the Boötes with whom I was educated. Now as then, he held the unerring belief that he could escape his troubles by hiding. Then the swamps had been our sanctuary, later the fields, now the corners of heaven. Hide! I hoped this was an indication that he had not been permanently scathed by the eons of bear-driving.

Boötes paused and lit his pipe. 'I mean I had no idea at the time that something as simple as a plow was going to get me into all this trouble. When I first showed my mother the plow, she was so impressed she insisted on running up Mount Olympus and announcing to Jupiter my accomplishment. I just shrugged. It was only a plow. Just a piece of metal you hooked up to a couple oxen and dragged through the dirt. No fancy deal. Other mortals had created devices and not gotten placed in the stars for it. Take the shovel for example. Somebody had to make the shovel and there's no shovel constellation. Take the scythe, the hammer, the deck of cards. You don't find any of those in the heavens. How was I supposed to know?' Boötes glared at me.

'Well, you can read minds, I mean, maybe you could have figured it out,' I conjectured much to Boötes' dismay.

He straightened his back as he sat on the stump and shouted, 'A plow! Jupiter came down to the farm and asked to see the plow. I showed it to him. How could I not, he was king of the gods? He wanted to see it and I showed it to him, the first plow ever, made by me. Callisto really thought it was something else, she told Jupiter, right there in front of me that I had always suffered at the hands of my classmates in school and then at the thieving hands of my brother and now, I should be placed in the stars for inventing the plow. I thought the whole idea preposterous and was embarrassed that my mother had even brought it up. Jupiter, however, had entirely different plans in mind. He took me aside and said, 'Boötes, you remember when Prometheus took the fire and gave it to man? You remember how I had him chained to a mountain and loosed a pair of buzzards to tear out his liver everyday and then heal it over night? I was not happy about that, the loosing of fire. If I had wanted man to have fire I would have given it to him myself. I wouldn't burned the whole goddamn world down if I had wanted man to have fire. What that whole incident amounted to was a lot of pain and suffering and one less distinction to be drawn between mortals and gods. We gods had only a few things left which man could not claim: cold fusion, faster than light travel, immortality, and the plow, come to mind at the top of the list. And now, I have to go home, back to my palace, back to my screaming, hysterical wife and cross plow off the list. Rather than shame you for all eternity and upset your mother who has been a good neighbor to me all these years, I'm going to put you in the stars, as a bear hunter, a vocation in which you have no natural ability and will therefore be doubly unlikely to make any further 'inventions'. You should consider yourself lucky there are no buzzards in space.''

I had never heard this version of the story and was shocked as you can well imagine.

'I was shocked too!' Boötes exclaimed. 'Over a plow. Right then and there I got zapped. Next morning I woke up with this bear growling over me and I started chasing it with a club I found nearby. I didn't realize until later that I was a constellation, that I was doomed.'

'But you weren't there last night. It caused quite a ruckus down on earth.'

'Like I said, I could only put up with it for so long. I'm through.' Boötes gazed contemplatively toward the pole. 'Is that why you came up here? To see if I was alright?'

'Sure, man. We didn't make blood pacts in those mosquito ridden wastes for nothing.'

Boötes grinned at me. 'How'd you get up here?'

'Well, since there was no chance of a god getting me placed up here, I had to sneak up, risking no less than life and