The first birth follows the nativity story that has mineralized into cultural bedrock: centrifugal charm, talent, ambition, luck, and discovery combine to send a mere mortal into the sky, where she is nothing more or less than light to us. The second way is lesser known, which is its point. The second birth is also the seven hundredth, the six billionth: in individual memories and in the collective imagination, a star’s energy, once released, is endlessly refracted—orienting us to the archetypal landscape within and forming a kind of cohesive gloaming without. Celestial bodies hang in the sky for billions of years after their death; in theory light travels forever. The same is true of their fleshly namesakes, whom we recognize as uncanny not for their freakishness but their profound and utter familiarity. What I am saying is that it is my solemn belief that I entered the world with the idea of Marilyn Monroe built into my dreaming mind, like a coiled box spring of memory beneath the mattress of consciousness.
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