t h e   l a w   o f   f a l l i n g   b o d i e s

b y   t h e o d o r e    b e s t


: i      : ii      : iii       : iv

the author writes:

This poem uses the acceptance of a new scientific discovery into a particular culture as a template for how I perceive myself being introduced into a universe I cannot yet understand and so vainly struggle to define in my own terms. The discovery I have used is that of the painful assimilation of Galileo's new time based Law of Falling Bodies into a world consciousness accustomed only to such a law which treated distance fallen as relative to space, and not to time. This subject I found explored in an essay by the feminist philosopher Michele Le Doeuff: Galileo or the Supreme Affinity of Time and Movement.

The essay tells of the negative valuation of time as Aristotle and Plato portrayed it. This was a time of non-intelligibility, one whose 'becoming' entailed a destructive nature and whose derived status was fundamentally a subjective mode: the past being memory; the present, direct experience; the future, expectation. Aristotle questioned whether time existed at all: one part of it, he thought, has been and is no more, while the other will be and is not yet. His conclusion was that what is composed of non-being seems incapable of substance. In sum, time was regarded in Galileo's day as a mark of imperfection and ambiguity. Le Doeuff explains why the world consciousness relied so much on space, and not on time, as a contrasting principle of order and factor of intelligibility. She concludes that this was because (Euclidean) geometry just exists, and so is independent of any subjective mode. Furthermore, the mathematization of geometry makes possible a univocal model of space.

So when Galileo introduced his new, time based law, based on the affinity of time with space, he had to rely on a tradition of entirely non-scientific speculation – existing representations of time varied from the ascending and descending profile of human life (from new-born to dotard), historical-religious time, a subjective time of varying speeds, to circular, astral time, also sacred in virtue of the religious calendar. There were no scientific models of time for him to manipulate as tools during his endeavours.

To turn to my own, I have, for some time, been quite unconsciously making notes which I am only just realising have a common thread: that of an affinity I feel I share with my environment. I am constantly looking for ways in which I can justify my experiences and interpretations of the world. Central to these methods is the proposal that if my judgements of the world depend on some time based interpretation of experience in that all reactions exist in virtue of their relation to all those in the past and future, then it should be possible to break with tradition and experience my environment outside the context of these mortal limitations, they as geometric in their efficacy as Euclid's were in measuring the world. And what language would I be able to define such experience with? Surely something beyond that ambiguous mishmash of concepts with which I am equipped now?

Galileo broke with tradition and sought out a law based on what appeared to be almost an occult language. Le Doeuff shows how the affinities shared between the analogous series of the planets the organs and the metals, and those of Goethe's Elective Affinities in which chemical laws are transposed onto human sentiments, lend Galileo's proposition, and therefore mine, an almost alchemical palette (see section IV of the poem). I have entertained the idea that I too might borrow from the occult language of affinity. Thus my inception and my own discoveries and explorations are really nothing but elements of a universe which accepts me or allows me to integrate as an external element only under the premise that it possesses all the means to produce me itself, and not just me, but my revelations, my explorations my affects and effects. Once time is banished from my equation, in much the same way it was accepted into Galileo's, I can perceive a universe knitted together by an absence of beginnings and ends, and whose qualities insist that to talk of one element is in fact to talk of all elements, they being connected in virtue of their infinitude, or, rather, their timelessness.

'it is in obscurity and confusion that thought progresses'

This epigraph goes some way to explaining why I often feel as though it is only after metaphor, analysis, imagery, all these, have gradually accumulated about my ambiguous form (as though I myself were a new theory, like Galileo's), that I can find sound abstraction through a slow assimilation into a universe I initially reject on the premise that I do not have the necessary formulae to explain it. I simply lack the language, and in much the same way as Galileo abandoned the 1st law of Falling Bodies (he did not possess the necessary formula of exponential acceleration required to test it) I am inclined to abandon all the assumptions I have conjured up to explain that which I perceive.

So really I am looking for a common language with which I can describe the world and myself in the same terms. But I do not want to convert the universe into some human currency, nor do I want to deny my status as a sentient being. This problem mirrors that of the philosophical conflict between the mental and the physical. Is this because they could in fact be the same argument? I have a hunch that art, in my case poetry, is the only way we can get close to the problem; the answer is something that simply seems to become us when we look at it. I'm not sure yet what this means. Perhaps even great sunderings of cultural realities like that made by Galileo are alluding to the same fragile disposition: the habit of placing ourselves inside the system we are trying to explain. Perhaps this is not a disposition. Perhaps it is necessary.