In Memoriam: Ashley’s Astral Praxis
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
— William Butler YeatsIn Lumine Tuo Videbimis Lumen
“In Thy Light Shall We See Light”
— Columbia University motto, after a translation of Psalm 36:9
The first time I met Ashley Simone, I hated her.
It wasn’t my finest time, I’ll admit — it was my first semester at Columbia and I was in the process of being ghosted by a partner without realizing it, so I was in a particularly grouchy mood for most of that semester.
Ashley had been the sub one day in the ancient mythology undergrad class that I was taking for grad credit at Barnard, and there was something about her intense energy combined with her booming upper register voice that grated on my ever-loving last nerves. We were going over the Aeneid and I remembered clenching my teeth as she dramatically read aloud one of Dido’s speeches and wondering is this…the best that Columbia classics had to offer?
As a classical studies masters student, I viewed the classics PhDs on the pedestal of importance that the professors placed them on, and I was so caught up in all the interdepartmental hierarchies (which seemed so much more important to east coasters than west coasters) that it took me a while to actually connect with the PhD students themselves rather than how everyone else on campus perceived them.
All that to say — it took me another year before I actually had a conversation with Ashley. After she’d been my substitute teacher, I’d looked her up on the classics website and made up my mind about her: of course she was some sort of Cicero scholar with a flashy subject like astral poetics, of course she was a part of some married couple in the department that looked like the leads in an early ’10s CW TV show, of course she had the Columbia Latin motto in the header/bio of all of her social media. I wrote her off as someone I probably didn’t want to know that well.
But a year later at a roundtable on aesthetics, Ashley sat next to me in a recently vacated seat, and I remember trying to think of an excuse for why she shouldn’t sit there before giving up because everyone was trying to return to their seats anyway to start the next session. I was in a grouchy mood that day as well, but because of the roundtable — despite being there all day and raising my hand after nearly every talk, there seemed to be a very clear hierarchy of which professors were going to be called on first, and they all had “more of a comment than a question, really, but it might loop back into a question at the end — “
It got so ridiculous that I just started being as dramatic as possible to draw some sort of attention to the disparity, and after doing that for two more talks, Ashley turned to me with her big wide blue eyes, deeply concerned. “But wait, you didn’t get to ask your question!”
The bitterness of the day already had my wry response ready: “Oh, they’ll never call on a lowly masters student, please there are more important profs!”
I’d said it while cracking a smile, but Ashley had grabbed my arm with a high and booming “No!” that caused me to jump back as she then started aggressively looking towards the front of the room and insisting that I was going to get my next question answered come hell or high water.
I was completely taken aback and had to quickly assure her that I’d already talked to the last panel organizer and made a deal with him to call on me, and I was just being overly dramatic for the time being. But I sat there and felt my perceptions around Ashley start to shift. By the end of the dinner following the roundtable, I’d decided that I actually quite liked Ashley Simone.
I didn’t think I would write another grieving piece for Corona Borealis quite so soon. And, this is the first death I’ve experience of a classicist that I’ve been close to. Nothing feels quite…certain, or settled about it. I’ve been glad to talk with other friends feeling similarly over the past week.
Ashley Simone was a light — someone so vibrant and full of energy and committed to seeing something through to the end. There was always some sort of glow pulsing out from her expressive eyes as they’d dart around the room, trying to hold the group together by her gaze. Both wanting to bring a lot of collective energy to the Columbia community, while also staying passionately unique and independent (the classic Aquarius conundrum), Ashley went out of her way for people, especially students from underserved backgrounds in the field.
After that roundtable, I’d started to hear more from undergrads and post-baccs who were trying to continue studying in the field about how influential and helpful Ashley had been in helping them get through the application processes. When she found out that I was applying for PhDs back in 2019, she insisted on getting coffee with me to break down all the different institutions, their professors, their students, her contacts, and how she thought each might be helpful for me. She offered to look over all of my writing samples and statements of purpose. She was constantly trying to be a resource for me, even when I was too blasé to admit that I needed help.
She was a disco ball of energy, she aggressively loved her sons, she seemed to genuinely enjoy the absurdity of life, she was wildly idealistic about our institution, she was ridiculous, she was intense, she could be a lot, and she is still, to this day, the only white woman in NYC that I have ever given a free pass to for touching my hair without asking.
Why? Well…because, I mean, it’s Ashley.
I was talking to a friend from the department this week over zoom and we reminisced about the time we’d both seen Ashley give a colloquium talk in the department. I enjoyed the fact that no matter what critique a professor would throw her way around her analysis of Cicero, she always gave them a heartfelt thank you for drawing her attention to said critique. It made my Southern half very happy.
But it was also one of my all-time favorite colloquium talks, it was one of the first times I remember being excited about the possibilities of philology, in Ashley’s analysis of consonants and vowels and how it related to the broader cosmos. It was that talk in part that inspired the first ever Corona Borealis piece that I wrote: “Stuck In The Middle With M(n)u: An argument for Greek Consonance in these Existentially Vowelled Times”
That talk was the first time that I got why Ashley had the Columbia motto across all of her social media — there seemed to be something deeper that she was reaching for in her astral understanding, and I think it was something that I wanted to understand too. Going to Columbia, I never not thought of it as a cold institutional Ivy League hellbent on extracting every last resource out of its students by every mean feasible, but in knowing Ashley, I actually wanted to be wrong and for it to be something different.
I remember one night when I was babysitting for her, and I’d already put her sons to sleep, and so I got a chance to just curl up with her books and try to think through all the ways I’d heard her talk about the cosmos. I loved how she thought about light, and stars, and constellations. And part of me maybe sees that it wasn’t just theory for her, that there was some sort of astral praxis being formed, in her constellations of ideas and theories that she was constantly drawing and redrawing into different signals around the fixed stars of her vast network. It was almost enough to get a chthonic mythologist to start thinking about the heavenly gods for once.
Part of what’s been eating away at me this past week is worrying about all the things I never really said to her. Things I could have said while there was time. We both had our lives fall apart at similar times in 2020, causing a lot of uncertainty for both of us. But while I’m…well, me, Ashley was someone that I was more concerned with this past year precisely because of what I study: belief systems — I watched the belief systems of my colleagues start cracking left and right.
The last time I spoke to Ashley was over Facebook back in May. I’d seen there was a Latin teaching post at Columbia and I sent it to her, in case she was thinking about moving back to the city. She thanked me for it and let me know that she’d been thinking of me recently.
And the thing is…part of my brain had made a sort of plan (nothing concrete, just in that vague brainstorm way), because I knew it’d probably take a year or two for me to finish whatever projects were popping up for me this past year, so in vague 2023/4 I’d always imagined by that point me and Ashley might finally have all of our shit worked out, we’d both have some distance from Columbia at that point, and maybe we could team up and do something fun around astral poetics together? It wasn’t anything I really thought through, I just always knew that eventually I was going to come around to doing a lot of work on ancient astrology, and Ashley was the only person I’ve ever had in mind for it because of how much her work has inspired me.
I deeply regret not finishing her dissertation before she passed, because there are so many things in it that I want to talk with her about.
But I would also erase all of the inspiring research she’s ever written from my memory if I could just to hear her say “Hey lady!” again.
Saturday was Emma’s birthday. Many of us were out in Harlem celebrating her, but also remembering you, Ash. There was a point post-tequila shots where I managed to forget, and then a song came on and I was dancing, and then Cat was dancing, and we looked over and Elizabeth was dancing too. It felt good for a few seconds before I almost started crying, because it was so obvious that you were missing. We stopped dancing to talk about it and remember you, because God, you were always down to dance, and you would’ve if you’d been there on Saturday with us.
I will dearly miss you, Ashley. I don’t know if Columbia ever saw your light, but I do know that my world will be much darker without it.
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art —
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No — yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever — or else swoon to death.
— John Keats“…for about cosmic matters, one can never be too sure.”
— the final line in “Cicero Among the Stars: Natural Philosophy and Astral Culture at Rome” by Ashley Simone
