Gospel & Universe 🔬 Science & Mystery
Primum Mobile
Cherubs & Nitrogen - Walt Whitman - Who Knows? - Our Primum Mobile
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Cherubs & Nitrogen
Sitting at a café on Piazza dei Signori, I hear the church bells ring out through the night-time streets of Vicenza, reminding us of eternity and the world up above clanging through the self-same air. Above the wayward clouds sits Paradiso, the adult cherubs perching on the golden margins and silver linings, playing harps.
Beyond the atmosphere thick with nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, helium, and 1% H2O, the bells sound of Upper Space and the Music of the Spheres. The Divine Violinist plucks the icy harp-strings of Saturn, its gold and violet rings, which are lines that have been swept so long that we forget they’re circles of the Divine Geometer.
Circles, always perfect circles, like the circular planets circling in the Greater Circle of the Primum Mobile, moved by the great triple circle of God. Or, as Dante puts it, The light and love of a circle surround it, / as like the others; of this space / only He who encloses it understands (Paradiso. 27. 12-14).
Unable to understand, Dante jumped beyond the stars, beyond time and space, and entered the realm of the Deity who created both — from this double world to that realm of triune unity, with the Spirit of God Himself mirrored in perfect circles by the Son and Holy Ghost:
In the deep clear essence of that lofty light, three circles / appeared to me — of three colors, / but of the same dimension; / the first was reflected by the second, / like a rainbow by a rainbow, and the third / seemed like fire breathed by the others. (Paradiso. 33. 115-121)
All of this poetry lies somewhere beyond Pluto (who was recently de-ranked, lost even to himself), far, far beyond our oblate spheroid and the ellipses of the planets of our solar system, somewhere in outer space, cold and black, with quasars and odd debris.
Do prophets, like poets, just make stuff up, like the animals that went in two by two, like all those circles and capital letters, like the magic goose and holy page? Or is there something divine, higher, beyond, behind their hopeful cosmologies?
Is there something beyond spectrographs, deeper than dark matter; something out there — and right here, right in front of my skeptical eyes and ears, my blood, flesh, and bone, as I sit here, surrounded by the chaos of clinking glasses in this Vicenza coffee shop of random experience?
Is there something behind the absurdity of human life that makes a singular me worth being? Is there a correlate to this astronomical miracle of being, somewhere out there, vast as outer space?
Dante knew he could never know it all, not logically anyway. To him, it was more a divine comedy than a summa cosmologica. The best he could do was build up his metaphors and then let them collapse: the eternal beauty of a Florentine girl at a water fountain, and he, Cupid-struck, watching as she walked away into the streets of Florence, her feet lifting off the ground, light-footed up the conical Mountain, into the clouds, past the startled angels, ascending at last to the Mother of God, deep at the centre of the Blessed Rose.
Even that, he admitted, can’t get to the essence of this universe, the ether hanging in the night air of a world that holds within it a girl’s perfect beauty and a mother’s perfect love, rare, in this imploding chaos of wars and plague, as a virgin birth.
The beauty of it all — the Madonnas with their golden air and the blue Giotto heavens — make me rethink what I like to call the facts.
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Walt Whitman
I feel like Walt Whitman, looking out into the mystical moist night air, after viewing the proofs of the learned astronomer, after the figures were ranged in columns before him, the charts and the diagrams.
The space, big as that big old US of A that he imagined back in 1865
and his more than optimistic union of microcosmic self and sky
— Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son —
has been multiplied and yet it’s also been reduced
since the construction of Hubble’s telescope
and the discovery of galaxies in 1923;
since Darwin and the deciphering
of cuneiform, collapsing stories
we once thought revealed
or at least original
now derivative
from Sumer
and the
lost
bards
of Akkad
which for decades
was seen as a reduction
as part of a recent fall from Grace
but I would argue that this is not the case;
rather, it’s another take on Herbert’s “Easter Wings.”*
If what we wanted was the truth (whether we could handle it or not),
we got it, and now above us lie three hundred billion galaxies, because we are now
closer than ever to an exact, albeit expanding, calculation of infinity: 300 billion galaxies and counting…
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Who Knows?
Above us stretches a sky glistening with stars, ten million million million leagues deep, but this time the depth is literal.
It’s also a metaphor of what might be, a probability of other life amid the chaos and order of stars.
Who knows, perhaps even proof of spirit sextillions of miles away,
there may exist the same notion of spirit we have here, thinking, feeling,
but for a longer or more predictable time
living for a thousand years
with senses woven into unity with a million worlds
yet the same notion of spirit that we have
here in our precarious world
in which we may not live another day
or another moment (a stroke of bad luck
a seizure while seizing the day)
or we may live another forty years
qui sait?
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Our Primum Mobile
There may be 300 billion universes’ worth of things that we don’t know
yet what we do know is that we’re here
thinking, feeling
right here, right now
pulsing with the bio-electrical charges of a trillion synapses
in a universe in which we don't have to make things up
because it's already big enough.
The present is our primum mobile.
It moves us out, each moment, into the world
and at the same time into our selves
pivots us from the microcosm of self
to the macrocosm of our understandings
a million million million journeys
these neurons take us on
like a rocket ship.
O voi che siete in piccioletta barca... * *
A statistician pondering the improbability of his own existence
steps into the chapel or out into the night sky
and yet holds onto his tablet
doesn't let it drop and fall to his knees
but falls to his knees clenching the calculations
that made his devotion possible.
He sees on the glass screen of his tablet
(what was once cuneiform in clay is now digits that create letters,
as if to prove some theory about the outward and the inner forms of silicon)
and feels the beauty of it all
but without the need to believe in things he can’t fathom
without the need to deny the building blocks of the body
the miracle of existence
the miraculous here
this miracle of feeling
intertwined with the miracle of thinking
which whispers to us that the miracle may also be there
beyond us, outside this café, beyond the streets of Vicenza
in some other universe
the same church bell tolling optimistically in the night sky.
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* “Easter Wings” is a poem by George Herbert, published in 1633. Here is the first stanza:
Lord, who created man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poor:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
** O voi che siete in piccioletta barca... O, you who are in your little boat... (Dante, Paradiso 2.1)
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