Personal Gravity, Personal Quantum Mechanics

PBS's NOVA, on The Fabric of the Cosmos, brought to us by physicist Brian Greene, is interesting. A viewer can't help musing about time and space, gravity, energy, electromagnetic forces, down into the quantum level.

A large object, in this case the sun, rests in the middle of the fabric of space, as if on a trampoline, the surface of the trampoline bent so that a round object approaching the sun would fall inward on the down slope into the where the sun is. That bend of gravity effects time as well.

And so, one might be tempted to think that each person has, if you will, a gravity force around them. Other people and beings around them are effected, as if that person projected a force that held something of us, of our minds, in some kind of orbit.

Then would it follow perhaps that some individual beings have a larger or more compelling effect upon the rest of us, say a JFK or an Abraham Lincoln? As if such people had an ability to intuitively recognize the potential, such that we end up wanting to read about them, study them, appreciate their own words, follow the lines of their histories... And perhaps maybe some of us are more prone to the influence of particular suns and planets, as it were, than other people might feel, and feel ever the pull of influence upon our own lives of such a person even though they may have died long before we were born.

It would be as if that person who has such an influence shaping the fabric of our world had grasped something about what it is to be human, as if he or she had a better grasp on what the reality of and behind every day life was about.

Anyway, this is why sometimes it is difficult for, say, a writer to start the day being contaminated with verbal interactions from outside, as such tends to throw him off from getting to the thoughts within. Politics, like creating literature, too is a matter of staying on subject, not being pulled away from the point by a meandering conversation. There is, of course, a time for interaction, but the thinker must say his piece or feel frustration.




The work week is only four shifts, but I feel pretty wiped by the end of them. Bartending is a hard job on the psyche. It is a hard contest of deprivation, of being out of synch with society's hours, and probably with one's own expectations from having graduated from college. Exercise helps, for freeing the mind from the shackles of the routine.

The weekend becomes for me a matter of clearing the head, of avoiding excessive external chatter. If I'm lucky, I get that one day to be a writer again, to emerge from the confusion of jarring barrages of information to remember a bit of what I've been thinking about. To get there it took a day of rest, then a day of beginning to do the basics, laundry, grocery shopping. The writing day was also by necessity a day of exercise, yoga, a hike in the woods, a bike ride. Part release, part rediscovery, part just letting go, part dusting off an old book, getting reacquainted with things interesting.

The meek inherit the Earth, it is said. Maybe that thought refers to the quiet that allows one to get back to a sense of her own innate gravitational force. Yes, it doesn't seem too much of a coincidence that a serious person who's got it all together is referred to as having gravitas.


And doing so, I am reminded, on a Saturday night, what a sweet intimate thing it is to sit with those thoughts and dreams going on inside. The difficulties of life fade away, the frustrations make sense as sign posts, and histories read point to the future somehow.

Who knows what writing is, what it's ultimate overarching purpose is. We see, of course, many many examples of it, a great proliferation even, so much so that the volume can hardly be filtered anymore. The Ancients wrote, rather wisely; there are famous moments where fiction and novels served a great purpose, becoming great vehicles for that purpose; there are great moments in political communication that call that high purpose. There are histories, that too must be well written, with a vision that is fair and appropriate and humane. And now, in this world experiencing another form of Big Bang, where everything people have ever done, it seems, is available for view, or purchase, on the internet, we must continue to enjoy whatever writing is, what it reaches for... Along with science. Along with art.

It is precious to hold on to those moments when we are allowed, somehow, by peace and practice and inspiration, and spirit, to give rise to the pen, to fingers across a keyboard.