The Solstice

Photo by John Nail on Pexels.com

Today has been the Summer Solstice in Britain and this time will have been the Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a little confusing how the solstices appear to move around. This is mainly because of leap years and the fact that the year is not exactly 365 days long in reality. I think there’s another explanation too, but I have difficulty remembering what it is. It’s also the case that Earth’s axis is precessing, which moves the position in the year of the solstices, and also the eccentricity of our orbit and the position of the points where we’re closest to and furthest from the Sun gradually change, although this may not be directly linked to the equinoctes and solstices.

One of the peculiarities of living in these isles compared to North America is that we’re a lot further north than either people living in North America or we think we are. This is of course because our climate is currently strongly influenced by the Gulf Stream. A dramatic way of illustrating how close to the North Pole we really are is to consider our position relative to the Alaskan Panhandle, which extends from 54°43′ to around 62° North. The southern figure is also the latitude of Hartlepool, and the whole of Scotland is north of that latitude, as is about half of Ulster. The northernmost point of Scotland, Out Stack (and not Muckle Flugga as many claim) is about 60°51′ North, meaning that most of the Panhandle is actually south of the Shetlands. As for the Aleutians, they extend as far south as 51° North, which is even south of most of Kent.

Anyway, one of the consequences of this is that even in England we get a six week period around the Summer Solstice where it doesn’t get properly dark. Today, the Sun will set at 10:42 pm on Muckle Flugga and sunrise tomorrow there will be 3:29 am. Compare that to Le Marais de Samarès in Jersey, which is more or less the southernmost point of any part of the Atlantic which might be considered to be entangled officially with our government, where the sunset will be at 9:17 pm and tomorrow’s sunrise at 5:03 am. The midpoint between those two, or rather the closest point on land to it, is the Northumberland village of Boulmer, where sunrise tomorrow will be 4:24 am and sunset tonight will be 9:52 pm. I feel a bit twitchy about the idea that Boulmer, which is only thirty-seven kilometres from Scotland, is in a sense the midpoint of this political entity. This gives us a maximum apparent length of summer solstice night for these three places, north to south, of four hours and forty-seven minutes, six hours and thirty-two minutes and seven hours forty-six minutes, or so says my brain calculator. However, this isn’t the whole story because the Sun will not just cut out when it sets, and this means, for example, that the stars, or strictly speaking any other stars than the Sun, will not become visible for quite some time sunset and will also disappear considerably before sunrise. And even here in the English Midlands it doesn’t get completely dark.

This might sound wonderful to someone living closer to the Equator, and I admit that I’d like to see the midnight Sun one day, but in fact I find it a complete pain, as do many other people. It makes it difficult for people to sleep and the long days also seem to stir people up and agitate them into “midsummer madness”. Last night I went to bed before sunset, which is always disconcerting. Patients I’ve had with mental health issues, particularly those who are bipolar, often find themselves entering a manic phase at this time of year. It’s sometimes felt like a race against time when a client has started to report problems or behave in a manner which is cause for concern several days before the solstice and knowing that there’s nothing anyone can do to prevent the main precipitating factor from getting worse for a week or more, and double that time coming out of the other side, by which time the person may have done something to themselves which may have a long-term impact on their well-being. It isn’t just bipolar either, because poor sleep is involved in other mental health issues. It’s now thought that the correlation of poor sleep with mental health problems is not causative, but I find myself K-skeptical of that because sleep deprivation clearly does have an adverse influence on it. The worrying and rumination which occur for many when they’re lying awake is not going to get better if it’s too light for them to sleep well, and paranoia and schizophrenia do seem to be triggered by it. This feels sometimes like a train bearing down on one at full speed because obviously we live on a massive great rock with a huge amount of momentum and it isn’t feasible or even desirable just to flip it into an upright position with respect to its orbit, which would in any case probably trigger a mass extinction and cause the ice caps to melt. We can’t live without seasons either.

There’s also the spiritual aspect. Judaism, Christianity and others do have a midwinter festival and this makes sense psychologically because it counteracts the misery of the cold and dark, and also the fact that many sources of food have shut down for the winter so we have to rely on all that is safely gathered in, but a midsummer festival isn’t as celebrated in the Abrahamic tradition today, although of course it is a big thing for Neo-Pagans. Like Xmas, Midsummer is for some reason considered to be several days after the solstice. I don’t know why this is, although if one regards today as the beginning of summer, which it is astronomically (i.e. declared to be so by the astronomical community), summer ought to be over by the start of July. Clearly it isn’t, although it does seem to be rather short here.

The summer solstice is one of those astronomical events which is almost the opposite of an astronomical event, along with the Full “Moon”. It makes it harder to observe the night sky, and in the latter case harder to see details on Cynthia herself as well as fainter objects in the sky at the same time. This issue makes the observation of the Jewish Sabbath more complicated far from the Equator. According to Halakha, which does not speak for all Jewish traditions, the Sabbath ends when three stars are visible in the night sky on Saturday evening. Within the polar circles this may not happen for weeks at a time, and even in England there can be a problem, not least because it tends to be cloudy as well. The alternative is to look at a white and a blue string until it’s no longer possible to distinguish their colours. This too can be a tall order in these parts of the world at certain times of year. As with some other cultures, this links to a timekeeping system where hours vary in length according to the length of daylight and night because of the interval between sunset and when this is no longer possible. In physiological terms it means the point from which the blue wavelength cone cell no longer functions, and in my mind it raises the questions of visual impairment, complete colour blindness and the extent to which the blue string is dyed. In a way, this is not my problem but in another way it is because I want to observe the Sabbath “properly”, even though I’m not Jewish, because mindfulness on the rituals is spiritually significant. In the Church of England, there are a number of sacraments, including the Eucharist and Baptism, and as an ex-deputy church warden it has been my rôle to prepare for both. Pouring water into a font and wine into a chalice are similar experiences, to be done mindfully, almost as a form of meditation, taking care not to spill any and although it’s vital to avoid idolatry, these liquids become charged with spiritual cathexis. The same applies to beginning and ending the Sabbath, and although I also feel that I’m engaging in cultural appropriation here, am I doing so to a greater extent than when I practice Yoga? If it makes it easier for me to behave compassionately towards others by practicing this, I don’t understand why I shouldn’t do it. It’s all rather complicated.

Islam, a proselytising universalist faith to which I ironically feel much less drawn, also has issues when practiced far from the Equator, mainly because of Ramadan. Because in terms of the solar calendar Ramadan cycles through the year, the requirement neither to eat nor drink during daylight hours is difficult to fulfil near the poles because of twenty-four hour daylight for some of the year, although there are rulings regarding this, and also ad hoc practices. Some people, for example, decide to use the time of sunset and sunrise in Mecca to time their fast. A similar problem exists with the qibla for Muslims in low Earth orbit, because this constantly shifts. I was once curious about the antipodes of Mecca and found that it was, as expected, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean but nonetheless close to Mururoa, since at that location the qibla is in all directions, bringing to mind the possibly apocryphal story about the Sikh guru who fell asleep in a mosque with his feet pointing at the qibla, and on being awakened and made aware of this fact saying “point my feet in a direction where Shabad is not”. I’m afraid my memory of this is rather sketchy and I apologise for that, and for my terminology.

I don’t want to problematise the solstice though. I’m aware that as I’ve been writing I’ve mainly used this post to complain about the negative side of this day. It’s also a day of high energy, with exuberant plant growth, animals foraging over a longer period of time and feeding their young and so forth. It’s also a breeding season for many species, which makes me wonder if it was in the distant prehistoric past. Would this also have been the time of year that non-avian dinosaurs were displaying, performing courtship rituals and tending their young, for example? Is there a way of knowing? Or were there fewer reasons to do so because the seasons were different and the climate was warm throughout the year? Does it depend on that or is the signal simply the longer days, used to coördinate breeding behaviour?

I have occasionally decided to stay up all night near the solstice, notably in ’86 although that year I actually did it on 26th June. Until very recently, I had never seen a sunrise and in my attempt to do so then I also failed because after a while I realised I was looking at a street lamp from a great distance. There is a problem with deciding when sunrise and sunset really happen if you don’t live in a relatively flat and featureless environment, because the Sun will only appear over the skyline and not the horizon, which is an abstract concept in most places I’ve been. However, there are a few places in Great Britain where one can genuinely see the horizon at sea level, without it being interrupted by land, and where this is in the West, a rarer circumstance than the East, it’s possible to witness the “green flash” and the “green ray”. These are optical phenomena taking place at sunrise or sunset, but the chances of being around to see the sunrise are lower. For a second or two as the Sun becomes invisible or visible behind Earth’s limb, and the air is clear, refraction separates the colours of sunlight and Rayleigh scattering – the cause for the sky being blue – is removed from what’s visible to the eye. Because the shorter wavelengths of light are bent differently than longer ones, the visible portion of the Sun is then green-looking. Sometimes this takes the form of a ray projecting from the horizon. It’s also enhanced by shimmering air, which I think probably makes it more likely at sunset when the air is warmer, and also quite rare in Britain. Hence one likely place for it to be seen is in West Cornwall, which is warmer and faces the Celtic Sea rather than the Irish.

To finish, I want to mention in passing an idea used in the excellent ‘Handbook For Space Pioneers‘ concerning what would happen on a planet orbiting one of the companions of α Centauri. Although there are close binaries around which habitable planets might have stable orbits, one would expect most of them to have a second companion at a distance from the first, i.e. the closest, and therefore there would be a period during which there were two suns in the daylight sky and another when the other sun lit the night sky. This would effectively provide conditions close to daylight around the clock when the planet was on the same side of the star as its companion, and since the stars are also orbiting each other this constant daylight condition would shift around the calendar, sometimes occurring in winter, sometimes in summer. In the book, this is almost as important to the ecosystem as the seasons, with some plants only growing when the night sky is also lit and animals emerging from eggs during this period alone, along with more complex animals using the period to feed their offspring to maturity more quickly. This raises the question of what would happen on a planet with two close binary companions within its orbit, such as the Trojan used for a series of stories including one by Asimov called ‘Sucker Bait’. A Trojan body is one orbiting in an equilateral triangle with two others, the most notable examples in this Solar System being the Greek and Trojan “camps” of asteroids sixty degrees behind and ahead of Jupiter in the same orbit. Two similar Trojan stars would provide 240° of daylight to a planet of this kind, meaning that if it had a twenty-four hour day it would average only eight hours of night. If the stars were of different luminosities and/or spectral types, the colour of sunlight would also vary throughout the day, and if there were a significant axial tilt, things would be even more complicated.

But we live on Earth, and sadly will probably never leave, so at least we won’t have to consider how to observe the Sabbath or Ramadan on other planets.

Happy Solstice!

Yesterday’s Non-Post

Sarada and I have decided to return to our practice of turning off and going offline every Friday to Saturday, and it won’t have escaped your attention that this is very similar to the Jewish Sabbath. This is no coincidence. I’ve doubtless mentioned it on here before, but it’s at the instigation of an organisation with Jewish roots, which actually rather surprises me because it’s actually an outreach programme (that might be the wrong word). Judaism is emphatically not a proselytising faith and many religious or observant Jews would consider it inappropriate for Gentiles to comply with the 613 mitzvot. Nonetheless I’ve previously recognised the spiritual value of sabbatarianism as a Christian, and it makes sense for me to do this, although I do it rather sheepishly.

I didn’t do it “properly”. We did open it with a prayer and ceremony, followed by a meal, and also closed it with prayer followed by a meal, but it wasn’t sunset to sunset. Sunset today is at 9:25 pm BST, which is five minutes before I go to bed due to the possibility of being disturbed at night by my father for whom I care, making it very difficult. It’s notable that at least two Abrahamic faiths have ceremonies which are easier to observe in the region of their origin than much closer to the poles (and for Muslims there’s an additional problem at Mururoa Atoll, which is not, however, my concern). Britain is the northernmost country which is not officially considered Arctic and although we don’t have the midnight Sun here, we do have a six week period around the summer solstice when it doesn’t get completely dark, so currently we have no proper night and in Lerwick sunset can be as late as 10:34 pm, followed by sunrise at 3:39 am. However, it has been suggested that an analogy can be drawn between someone wandering in the desert who has lost track of time and observing the Sabbath within the polar circles, that they should simply count six days and observe one as the Sabbath, and it’s also been said that one should observe it according to the time of one’s usual abode. This would mean that the Sabbath is observed over a different interval depending on where you come from and is also unhelpful for people born near the poles. It’s also said that anyone who is confused as to which day of the week it is should avoid the thirty-nine melachot on every day, which strikes me as impractical. Maybe the answer is to follow Jerusalem time but I haven’t heard this suggested.

It made me uneasy that I didn’t do it “properly”, and I’ll have a dive into that whole thing later. We also can’t say the prayer associated with opening the Sabbath without it feeling culturally appropriative, because we are not the chosen people set apart from all the peoples and we have no tradition of Exodus from Egypt, so there’s that.

On the whole, it was a positive experience. My observation of the Christian Sabbath has long been stricter than average, and probably far stricter than the average liberal Christian, although more recently I’ve wavered a lot. There are various issues with me observing this Sabbath as strictly as I feel drawn to. For example, I simply cannot sleep without something like the radio or a media player on, so I had to do that. It’s difficult enough in the first place to sleep near the summer solstice, and that would’ve made it completely impractical. I don’t know where that leaves me. I also just did turn lights on and off, cooked and so forth, so I did kindle fires. A substantial issue for me here is that I’m a carer, so I can’t see how I could simply not care for my father in this situation and that’s likely to continue for as long as he’s around, and the same presumably applies to parents of younger children. I seem to recall that there’s discussion of this in the Talmud, and it amounts to the work of “women”, which is likely to include caring and parenting, being exempt. This raises all sorts of questions about the nature of work. Is work generally considered to be activity undertaken for the advantage of the worker, for example to receive financial or other material recompense? It seems to me that if that’s so, there’s an argument for that sort of work not being undertaken at all, at any time.

Douglas Adams talks about “the long dark teatime of the soul” as the fundamental problem with Sundays, and was writing at a time when Sunday observance was rather more strictly enforced legally than it is now, though not enormously so in most of these isles, with the exception of Na h-Eileanan an Iar. Adams was an atheist, and to some extent, though perhaps through persuasion, something of a proselytising atheist in the later years of his life, so maybe for him Sundays would indeed seem empty, although I can also relate to that. My experience of yesterday was that it was very much like that of the old Sundays before they liberalised the trading laws, which suggests my life revolves too much around shopping although I don’t actually go that often and ironically I did go yesterday to pick up reading material to plug the gap. This emphasises the importance of preparation. I also wrote a lot, which is one of the melachot, so basically I definitely didn’t do it properly, and I did it better the last few times I did it than I did yesterday.

I think it’s probably harder for someone to do this in isolation, but also easier. I expect one of the benefits is face to face socialising, substantially with the family but also the wider community. This I didn’t get. Due to a combination of caring and the lockdown, I don’t really see many people socially outside the home and, negative though it often is, much of my socialising is via social media. Sarada and our son went off to see my mother, thereby kindling a fire in the car. I did speak to my mother on the ‘phone although I didn’t initiate the call, and I also answered a work ‘phone call but the issue there is that patients have needs, and again we come up against the issue of how one is meant to provide necessary services for people. Isolation would also make it easier because one would not then at least feel the pressure to do things for others, and it would be more like a weekly retreat. However, I always ring my mother on Saturday so that would have to change were I to observe that.

Probably the hardest thing of all was the absence of music. When I first left home for university, in an attempt to be minimalist I took a radio and no other means of listening to music. After six weeks I was crawling the walls for that and other reasons, and it’s so hard to cope without music generally. There was some music yesterday, furnished by our son’s excellent guitar playing, and I even sang along to it, but not enough. But no radio of any kind was very difficult, perhaps the hardest part of the day.

There is also an issue with how I’ve been attempting to approach reading recently. A few years ago I decided to give away all the books which were out of copyright and could be easily found in electronic form, and my main purchases of reading material since then have been in ebook form. All of these became unavailable to me, and this was also rather hard to handle. It meant, for example, that I couldn’t even read the Talmud, although the Tanakh was available to me. It seems a bit absurd not to have the central sacred texts available on a holy day because you have to break a mitzvah to read them. However, looking online in advance for copies of the complete Babylonian Talmud in print form and you’re talking hundreds to thousands of pounds. It’s like buying the Encyclopædia Britannica. So that’s not happening.

At this point you may be thinking, why am I interested in attempting to observe the whole thing properly when I’m not even Jewish and when only Orthodox Jews would go that far? The answer is that it doesn’t feel like enough when I don’t. I think I have inherited traits which incline me towards obsessive-compulsive behaviour, and I need to go further into that to explain why this claim is not offensive. In terms of personality disorders, using the classic cluster-based approach I score more highly on the obsessive-compulsive side than any of the others, and a psychiatric assessment led to the conclusion by said psychiatrist that I was in fact obsessive-compulsive. This is not a claim I wish to bandy about as a kind of attention-seeking “identity” issue, and in fact I would wish to defuse the whole idea that it’s problematic in my case. I have a few genes at the end of one of my chromosomes which would predispose me to this, and these genes are also commonly found in persons of Jewish descent. However, they’re not “Jewish genes”. They just happen to be there in my thoroughly Gentile genome, just as they happen to be there in a lot of Jewish people. I think that the observance of the mitzvot is a means of sanctifying, in a positive way, what others might see as obsessive-compulsive. In fact, when behaviour more classically diagnosable as obsessive-compulsive does turn up in Orthodox Jews, it makes it easier for them to follow some mitzvot but harder for them to follow others, because they may be too focussed on something like trying to ensure there are no insects in their food and neglect some of the rest. Right now I’m tending to think that obsessive-compulsive behaviour may sometimes be the result of not having a spiritual outlet for that aspect of one’s obsession, so it’s inappropriate to consider Orthodox Judaism as pathological in that respect, mainly because it’s deeply offensive to do so, and in fact this can be turned around to say that a spiritual gap in people’s lives might lead them to become obsessive-compulsive. That said, this seems just as offensive to non-religious people, so what can you do?

The Noachic Covenant (and no, the Flood didn’t literally happen and so on but bear with me okay?) is seen as governing the whole human race, and has only seven mitzvot. Some of those I find questionable, such as the sexual immorality mitzvah which I think must surely be inevitably sexist and homophobic. However, I also have the impression that there aren’t enough of them. It feels like one is not doing something properly if one is governed by only seven principles. Six hundred and thirteen seems like a more sensible number, which would give life some kind of structure and recommend what to do in most given circumstances.

But many people would say I shouldn’t be doing this at all, because I’m not Jewish and am practicing cultural appropriation, and because Gentiles are specifically excluded from following this kind of thing. The problem here is that I’m kind of left in the wilderness if I don’t. I am quite thoroughly theist and in the Abrahamic tradition, but I don’t now believe that Jesus was God in human form. If you take that away from the Christian Bible you’re left with the Tanakh, and a long story about the relationship between God and humanity, mainly the Jews. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my spiritual tradition now it’s been “beheaded” in this way. Sympathetic though I am to Islam to a certain extent, which does apply the whole human race, liberal Islam is either something I haven’t heard about or which is in a very small minority, and I can’t go along with a largely sexist and homophobic religion. That’s a no-brainer. It is of course also true that there’s a lot of sexism and homophobia in the Jewish religious tradition, but in that case there’s also a lot more on the liberal side. In the absence of knowing what to do, I do this, with a certain sense of unease about cultural appropriation, but it seems to me that it’s efficacious to spiritual development in a similar way to something like Yoga, and that it works well for the human race generally to do this kind of weekly detox. It also benefits others to be more spiritually developed. So I do it.