We call it the Big Dipper, but it’s also known as the Great Wagon, the Great Bear, the Plough, the Sauce Pan, the Seven Oxen, the Butcher’s Cleaver (my favorite), or a coffin. There are hints it could even be a potty.
It’s an asterism, not a constellation, a simple, arbitrary pattern of stars that’s part of a real constellation, Ursa Major, or “The Bear.” Our Big Dipper’s handle is the bear’s tail. We imagine it on a flat plane, but its stars, with names like Debhe and Phecda, range from 58 to 123 light years away, all moving in different directions. You’d better look quick, because in 50,000 years, it will have reversed itself.
I hate to be a killjoy, but there’s really no dipper there.
We instinctively look for patterns. In clouds, we see a rabbit, or a puppy. We look for patterns in the stars, drawing imaginary lines between seven of them and see—invent, actually—a wagon, a bear, or a dipper.
Harmless, I suppose. Until we do the same with ideas. More than we admit, we pick a fact from here, a suggestion from there, a memorable phrase or two along the way, and before long, we connect them LEGO-like to each other, and Voila! This must be truth!
I am not suggesting that truth is imaginary. I think it can be known, if only partially. I am suggesting that the way we all too often connect the dots between pieces of information may show us not truth but illusions of our own creation.
This matters, because a lot of folk out there seek our money, our loyalty, or our vote, and will readily peddle their dot-connecting Big Dippers to us. They may tell us that there’s only one right pattern, and it’s theirs. So we obediently sign on, and see everything through that grid, suspicious of all others.
Mu advice: if it’s simple, easy, and reinforces our comfort zone—I knew I was right all along—it’s probably TOO simple, easy, and comfortable, and we need to let a few other voices in. We’re healthier if we understand why, when we see a dipper, honorable people see a meat cleaver.
And that’s the truth.
The Big Dipper–or so we think.
