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With the Universe in Mind
An Acquaintance with the Night and An Index of Possibilities

Cliff Fell

 

The invitation to this essay came with instructions, not unlike the directions to a party somewhere: ‘I live at the edge of the universe, like everybody else.’ So the poet says and indeed, he describes a place we all know well. Yet, there’s something that is still hard to pin down: which edge is that, exactly?

*

Early August. Even though the days are getting longer, I’m gone before sunrise and rarely return until after nightfall. Most of the week, the hills and trees around my home loom vaguely in the light of the heavenly bodies, or vanish altogether when it’s so inky-black I have to feel my way down the unlit path from the garage. We all know how the night can leave us stumbling in the dark; and yet there’s always this paradox: that it can – at times – reveal so much more of the universe, or its distant detail, than we ever see in the wondrous light of the sun.

As on a night last week, when the sky was fired up with stars and the Milky Way glittered overhead, a white stripe so luminous you could see why the Mayans thought it the road the soul take on its journey to the land of the dead. My wife came out looking for me, and as the frost settled around us we stood watching the stars pulse, naming the constellations we knew.

What I had really been looking or hoping for, though, was a meteor shower, or simply one stray Perseid flying far from its radiant, its source in the constellation of Perseus. To be there, to bear witness, perhaps sole witness, to the fiery trail of a meteor burning out as it angles into our atmosphere, has long been seen as a supernatural sign and even now, reminds us of the dynamics of our universe. And so the culture grants us this: to wish upon the star and think ourselves lucky.

* *

Claudius Ptolemaeus, the astronomer known to us as Ptolemy, was born in AD 90 and lived in Alexandria, where he mapped both the heavens and the earth, recording his findings in two works, the Almagest and Geographia, which were still current when Copernicus wrote his epoch-making treatise, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. In fact, the Almagest was the only classical astronomical treatise that survived into medieval times, through an Arabic translation. It demonstrates Ptolemy’s wide knowledge of both Greek and Babylonian astronomical observations and contains the work he is best known for, his geocentric model of the universe. This describes the earth as the fixed centre of the universe, orbited by the sun and moon, while the motion of the planets is seen as a set of ‘nested spheres’ revolving around the earth, an idea based on the theory of epicycles devised by the 2nd century AD astronomer, Apollonius of Perga. The Almagest also identifies forty-eight constellations, assigning to them the mythological and zodiacal names by which they are still known in much of the western world. Among them is the constellation of Perseus, named for the mythical hero who slew the Medusa, and who was (according to some sources) fathered upon Danäe by Zeus, in the form of a golden shower, suggesting an ancient interpretation of the annual Perseid event, that heavenly sign I was hoping to glimpse the other night, even though I knew that Perseus would not rise until just before dawn, and was unlikely to burst into any starry trails before then.

* * *

A few weeks ago the postie delivered an unexpected parcel. It was a book from my ex-wife that arrived with neither word nor message of good or ill, though I daresay the book’s title is open to interpretation. And certainly she would have remembered that An Index of Possibilities was a bible to me in the 1970s, when it was published. Above all, it infused me with wonder about our place in the universe, in the past, present and future – all of which it covers in considerable depth.

It’s a big book, an A4-sized compendium of knowledge and information about the earth and the cosmos, subtitled ‘Energy and Power.’ New Age before the term re-entered the cultural imagination – indeed the book almost certainly brought the term back into currency – it was first conceived as a British version of The Whole Earth Catalogue and put together by a band of Notting Hill hippies (acid-heads, no doubt), back in the days when the IBM Selectric compositor, the first machine to use interchangeable golf-ball print-heads, was the very latest gizmo in typesetting technology. It wasn’t long, though, before the book had morphed into its final form and become a comprehensive attempt to reconcile and synthesise I960s mysticism and speculation with science-based fact and hypothesis.

A glance at the chapter titles of An Index of Possibilities reveals its scope and ambition: Universe, Earth, World, Body, Mind and God. Subsections include articles on Radio Astronomy, Anti-Matter, Black Holes, Continental Drift, Energy Wars, the Carbon Cycle, Earth Mysteries and Shamanism, to name but a few. The pages that absorbed me most, though, were in a chapter titled Fundamentals, which examined Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. It was to these that I turned time and again, trying to pin down what cannot, perhaps, ever be fully understood, just as a quantum particle can never be definitively observed. Thirty-five years on, recent advances in knowledge are, of course, glaringly absent: String Theory, Dark Matter, Chaos and Fractal Theory. More to the point, you cannot help wondering whether those hippies didn’t quickly move on from the IBM Selectric to computer programming, for the thing that is really missing from these pages, with their great desire to cross-reference, is the hyperlink.

Nonetheless, the catalogue contains a wealth of information. For a nineteen year-old dropout with artistic aspirations, An Index of Possibilities offered a wide-ranging education in Physics and the Natural Sciences and fed me with an understanding of the role science and natural systems play as a foundation of all artistic practice.

But while it was the astrophysics and quantum mechanics that most fascinated me, when I opened the book again after twenty-five years, it wasn’t to the Fundamentals pages I turned, but to an interview with Kurt Vonnegut, lifted from Playboy in 1969. In it, Vonnegut talks about his visit as an official guest at the first Apollo moonshot, which he describes – no doubt with Hugh Heffner in mind – as ‘a tremendous space fuck,’ adding, ‘and there’s some kind of conspiracy to suppress that fact.’ That’s hilarious, of course, all the more so with the hindsight of forty years, but what I was really seeking in the interview was the exact phrasing of a Vonnegut statement I have often quoted in arguments and attributed to this source. I remember it as a few typically ironic Vonnegutian words about extra-terrestrial intelligence and the cultural phenomenon of what we might call ‘UFO-logy.’ They went something like this: ‘Perhaps the ultimate cosmic joke is that the Earth’s the only place in the universe where intelligent life exists.’ It is a sentiment that appeals to me still, as it did then, because it runs against all our current notions of cosmology, but is still clearly a possibility. And more, it seems to tell us something about living at the edge of the universe, if only in this: Vonnegut’s idea sets up a resonance that Manhire picks up with his line’s benign acceptance and embrace – he goes on to say, ‘Sometimes I think congratulations are in order’ – of life at the lonely margins, which, as Bornholdt, O’Brien and Williams point out in their introduction to The Oxford Anthology of New Zealand Poetry, we must read, on one level, as a metaphor for New Zealand’s far-flung location in the world.

I realise that Vonnegut’s idea runs against all probability. NASA’s current Kepler mission expects to report back within three years on the location of an earth-like planet, and within twenty years spectroscopic analysis of that planet’s gas emissions might prove the existence of other life-forms – evidence of oxygen and methane would be the key signals. But still, there is something about the ‘cosmic joke’ notion of the universe that satisfies me, with its hint of the existential terror that Sartre defined as ‘the nothingness that haunts being.’ So, you may imagine my discomfort when I searched through the interview and then the entire Index a few nights ago and couldn’t find that passage anywhere. My attribution was false. Nothingness haunted my expectation of proof. I will have to be more circumspect in future about the evidence I use to rile up the ET believers I know.

* * * *

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as keen as anyone to learn of life elsewhere in the universe. The discovery would be momentous. It is just that I am a little sceptical and feel we might be better off trying to improve things for ourselves. In the meantime, I speculate about crop-circles, scan the night skies for extraordinary signs and take considerable delight in the knowledge that extra-terrestrials have a long literary history. Lucian of Samosata’s True History is considered the first known fantasy ‘novel’. Written in the 2nd century AD, it recounts the story of Lucian’s journey into space, borne aloft on a huge waterspout, where, in the midst of many adventures, he meets the vulture-horse people, and the people of the sun and the moon. Lucian and Ptolemy were contemporaries, but whether Ptolemy read Lucian’s work is unknown.

In contrast, there is no doubt that Copernicus, the Polish astronomer, knew Ptolemy’s Almagest in detail. The work of a lifetime, Copernicus’ treatise, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, published in 1543, refuted the geocentric Ptolemaic system, which had long dominated astronomy in both the Christian and Islamic worlds, and offered as an alternative what we have come to know as the heliocentric model of the universe, in which the sun replaced the earth as the fixed mark at the centre of things. The philosophical implications of this new thinking ignited a controversy that was perilous to its supporters. The philosopher Giordano Bruno was burnt as a heretic in Rome, in 1600, while thirty-four years later the Inquisition put Galileo under house arrest.

But, in time, the debate would overturn the geography of the soul. Although it was not until 1822 that the Catholic Church conceded to Copernicus, it was soon driven to re-imagine the medieval map of the afterlife, best exemplified in Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which Hell and Purgatory are located within the compass of the world and the nine celestial spheres of Paradise – described as ‘planetary realms’ – orbit the earth in accordance with Ptolemaic cosmology. In the intervening years, various ideas were deployed in support of the Ptolemaic model. The longest lasting was the attempt to reconcile the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems devised by the astronomer Tycho Braye, in the late 16th century. It was quickly adopted by Rome, as it preserved Biblical notions of the earth as the fixed centre of the universe. In this model, the sun and moon were said to rotate around the earth, while the planets orbited the sun, surrounded, in turn, by the sphere of fixed stars.

Galileo’s observations with a telescope, which he first undertook in 1609 – four hundred years ago – swiftly undermined Rome’s attempts to refute the Copernican system. His observations of the phases of Venus, published in his presciently titled tract, Siderius Nuncius (The Starry Messenger) demonstrated the crescent and gibbous phases of Venus, effectively proving that Venus orbited the sun. The discovery, in 1610, of Jupiter’s moons was even more threatening to the geocentric position, as it demonstrated that there were planetary satellites orbiting planets other than the earth. This would lead, in time, to Galileo’s appearance before the Inquisition and his forced renunciation of Copernicus – and to the legend of his muttering, ‘And yet, it moves,’ as he signed his recantation.

* * * * *

In Robert Frost’s poem, ‘Acquainted with the Night,’ the poet delivers three of the most extraordinary and deceptively simple lines in 20th century poetry:

And further still at an unearthly height

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

The poem finds Frost’s protagonist wandering a city at night, leading us, inevitably, to read that ‘luminary clock’ at its ‘unearthly height’ as one of the heavenly bodies, probably the moon. But it’s the moral possibility, the unexpected juxtaposition of wrong and right as neither are ‘proclaimed’ for the moment and yet, for the epoch, too, that offers us an insight far beyond its play on the realm of earthly clocks. It invites us to question whether rectitude can ever be absolute. Applied to the heliocentric controversy, which ushered in the ‘Scientific Revolution’, and far-reaching advances in knowledge, the poem asks us to examine any notion to which we might apply certitude. It is intriguing that Frost published those lines, in his collection West-running Brook,in 1928. It may be a coincidence – though I suspect not – that only a year earlier, Heisenberg had produced his treatise on the Uncertainty Principle.

Galileo’s achievements laid the foundations of our knowledge that the earth orbits the sun and spins in diurnal motion. They demonstrated the geocentric model was fundamentally flawed and physically ‘wrong’. Indeed, there are times, particularly at sunrise and sunset – if I might employ those everyday terms inherited from the geocentric view – when we can, in this knowledge, now experience a sense of the earth’s motion and the heliocentrism of our solar system. And yet, when we gaze out at a starry night, it is easy to understand why the ancients thought of the earth as the centre of the universe and upheld the Ptolemaic system for so long. It’s what commonsense, that unsung virtue, for so long the strongest of geocentric arguments, still clamours to tell us.

Commonsense, which in its manifestation as theories of consciousness and perception, has now attained academic credibility. Such theories ask us to re-examine how we conceive our physical and philosophical relationship with the universe, literally in terms of the primacy of the mind – the seat of all understanding. They demand that we trust the perception that, regardless of our cosmic insignificance, and despite any implication of inflated egotism – either individual or collective – the mind is, philosophically, the singular point around which the universe revolves.

In the opening scenes of Jean Cocteau’s film, Orpheus, released in 1950, we are briefly, but deeply, engaged by this idea. We meet the principal characters in the Café des Poètes, where Orpheus sits out a brawl with a character enigmatically styled ‘The Poet’ (played, incidentally, by Roger Blim, who would shortly take the role of Pozzo in the first performance of En Attendant Godot). ‘The Poet’ asks Orpheus what it feels like to be ‘the centre of the universe.’ Note: not ‘at the centre,’ but ‘the centre.’ Hindsight now suggests that Cocteau’s question intuitively predicts the narrative arc consciousness theory has assumed since then.

To measure ideas of individual perception and the mind against notions of objective physical reality is to engage in dualism, and a discourse that runs from Plato’s cave, through Descartes’ epistemology to the notion currently propounded by the physicist, or quantum activist as he considers himself, Amit Goswami: that no reality can exist independent of an observer’s consciousness. It is a conundrum that was expressed long ago in the Zen koan that asks whether the tree in the forest really falls if no one is there to hear it. This reminds us that we are central to our perceptions, and that our lives occur at the very centre of everything – the universe. And indeed, as creatures of mobility, it follows, therefore, that the centre of the universe moves with us as we move. That, funnily enough, is Relativity, albeit on a microcosmic scale.

* * * * * *

And if commonsense insists that the mind is the centre of a multi-centred universe, and that the philosophy underpinning this ‘percepto-centrism’, to coin a phrase, is born of an unassailable logic, is it not all the more beguiling to learn the theoretical physicists have arrived at the same place, albeit by a different route?

It is not hard to imagine that Marcus Chown once subscribed to An Index of Possibilities. As a layperson’s guide to Theoretical Physics, he is a worthy successor to those hippies. His recent book Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You argues that physicists have finally, four hundred years later, come to agree with the words of Giordano Bruno, the Italian philosopher who was, you will recall, burned at the stake in Rome for his support of the Copernican system. Bruno stated his heresy thus: ‘In the universe, no centre or circumference exists, but the centre is everywhere.’

In his article on the Big Bang, and explanation of why everything in the universe is always expanding from any given place, Chown elaborates a point largely neglected in the collective imagination, despite its enormous significance. It is simply that, in Chown’s words, the ‘Big Bang is a bit of a misnomer… (it) did not happen at an existing point and there was no pre-existing void… Everything – space, time, energy and matter – came into being in the Big Bang and began expanding everywhere at once.’ The conclusion is inescapable: we exist, physically and philosophically, singularly and collectively, at the centre of the universe: all of us, and everything, at one with the vast, multi-faceted singularity.

* * * * * * *

Mid-September: the dawn breaks before I leave. I’m thinking again about Bill Manhire’s lines. Like Robert Frost’s, they’re deceptively simple, and remarkable – the more so for their echo of Vonnegut in The Sirens of Titan, in which the Tralfamadorians bring a gift from one edge of the universe to another. Manhire’s subtle couplet is perfectly pitched, but its rightness is equally wrong. No doubt the poetry – its edginess! – would be lost, but it should, without doubt, also read: ‘I live at the centre of the universe, like everybody else.’

References and Reading

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