Table Talk

THE PLANETARIUM tells its story down, trying to instill in all those tiny visages looking up that they are infinitesimal, barely registered in the grand scheme of the sky. There is always within the structures of its very being—its curving top and seats that recline, its inherent commitment to dark—the longing to be real, to be the night sky naked, stars not curated lights but the centers of celestial systems beyond any yet-invented measurement: the longing to be real, not an artificial construction wedded to a kind of vertical theater.

The planetarium dreams that it splits its top in half, peels itself open and flat against the earth. The cement would have to go soft, the rock skeleton lax, such that it could bend its interior out, turn its captive lamps up, like an open book. The planetarium imagines each point of light on its flat plane matching those suspended in the night. Though perhaps, the planetarium thinks, this would only mimic in a new way, make the planetarium less a sky and more an ocean, the symmetry between real