The Fredösphere

A solar system is the smallest of small towns.  Imagine a planet may have a mind and a soul generated by its magnetic field.  Unless it has the energy and patience to call across the light years separating star systems, it may choose its friends only from among a small collection of planets:  rocky, Earth-like worlds, who usually die young as their cores cool and the electromagnetic activity within themselves ceases; or gas giants, who are as a rule pompous and self-absorbed; or the Sun itself, whose great magnetic field shouts above all other voices in the language of the stars, glorious but unintelligible to mere planets.

In such a situation the Earth, in our imagination, finds itself tormented by grief and regret, realizing too late its companion, the dead Moon, loved him with a gentle, unselfish love.  Now the Earth spends the eons reading the record of the Moon's thoughts, caught and preserved in metallic lava flows which orient themselves to the Moon's magnetic field and then harden into an "epitaph of stone."

So the Earth loves in return, and mourns, and watches the dead body of his lover as she slowly drifts away in an ever expanding orbit.  If we humans listen, we can overhear Earth's love song accompanied by the repeated notes of signaling satellites as they rise, pass over, and disappear into the horizon.

Labels: Choral, Composition