“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the spirit.” John 3:8
On the wall in my backyard office, directly across from My Chair, hangs a framed memento in a potential state. It’s one of those cheap cardboard and plexiglass rectangular frames with border clamps on the four sides holding it all together. The picture is a circular advertising image of a 1960s-era Joe Morello behind a set of classic white marine pearl Ludwigs. It’s circular because it fit over the front bass drum head of the set displayed up on a shelf in Art’s Music Shop in Montgomery that became my first set of drums when I was thirteen.
Those blue oyster pearls moulder in my attic now. Even in this age of throwing my life’s excess weight overboard, I’ve never quite been able to part with them. One of these days maybe—which is just another way of saying “leave it to my survivors.” We lost Joe in 2011, a year before Brubeck. Morello's late thirtyish, visually-impaired self still smiles behind that set of Ludwigs. He was a cool cat and delightful character, and one of the cleanest, handiest drummers you’ll ever hear.
As the years have passed, I’ve watched the slow motion process of the contents of that cheap frame migrating steadily downward. As demonstrated on prior occasions, eventually the bottom border will lose its grip and fall, and, without remedial action, everything in the frame will follow, and I’ll have to gather it all up and reassemble it.
There’s a reason you have to “reach” up—but don’t have to do anything to “fall” down. “Up” takes effort; “down” just happens. What is the culprit here—weight, or force?
They’re the same thing, said Newton, and coined the word “gravity” (from the Latin word for weight or heaviness, through Old French for seriousness or thoughtfulness). But are things that fall being pushed, or pulled, down? These are the thoughts one might have gazing across a small, cluttered office at a cumbersome wall-hanging exhibiting just such a glacial process. Clearly the weight is a wee bit stronger than the binding power of the frame. Buy a more expensive frame, you might suggest. Yes, I could, knowing full well it costs money to overcome gravity. But, however you cut it, futile in the end.
Gravity is a force, said Newton, though a force you can’t see or feel or understand in its essence, only in its effects. Newton’s stroke of genius (or one of them) was seeing that force, operating everywhere in our earthly experience, as the same force governing the movement of celestial bodies—e.g., the moon revolving around the Earth as the same phenomenon as a released ball falling to the ground. That force is innate to the mass of objects. Einstein brought in the curvature of 4-D spacetime created by the mass of objects, a gravitational field, which helps us envision how a non-observable force could exert itself across space. Gravity is pervasive in the universe and all-powerful, yet relatively weak. It takes little effort to pick up a fallen tennis ball and raise it away from the Earth’s center of gravity—even if you can count on it always falling back to the ground once you let it go.
You can’t sense or feel gravity as a thing: it seems too equivalent to the is-ness of reality to warrant another name. And, unlike its fundamental force-mates (electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces), it doesn’t function appreciably at the sub-atomic level, and hasn’t yet been satisfactorily accommodated by quantum field theory—not that these forces need to be integrated, but because they are: we live in a flabbergastingly-functioning whole. Maybe this assumed, but non-intuitive kinship of forces is the reason we don’t really think of metaphors for electromagnetism and weak and strong nuclear forces, but gravity seems to be a metaphor for everything.
We call gravity a force, which makes it an “it,” a subject, when maybe there is no “it.” Human beings tend to think in terms of things not being, but being caused. “Rain” should be a complete sentence, subject and verb in one, but we need an agent and say “It’s raining.” Same with the “cause” of the universe itself; we balk at the idea of something that has no cause but just is, and visualize an agent. In the case of gravity, the only thing that “is” is mass, and the potential “weight” that comes with it.
The mass of my Joe Morello wall-art, which gives it weight on this earth, either pushes it downward toward the mass of the earth, or yields to the mass of the earth pulling it—probably two ways of saying the same thing. But you don’t need either of those ideas to look at its sagging self and just know that, barring intervention, the time will come when the bottom will fall out. It is the competition, as I said, of two slightly unequal forces. Like two spaceships traveling side by side in infinite space, one moving a millimeter a year slower than the other. They will be close together for a long long time, then the one will slowly edge ahead of the other, and eventually will pass it, recede into the distance, and ultimately disappear. But my point is, you can grasp the phenomenon fully without translating it into a human brain-friendly mechanism. Maybe gravity is too intuitive to understand.
Gravity, entropy, all varieties of decay in a time-ruled universe—everything moves toward its end, which is its source. All biological processes, certainly—but all ideas, places, time itself, everything—the return of all circumstances to their essence, their ground state. Everything is pushing toward, or being pulled toward, something, ultimately some final singularity. The end and beginning are one. And it is the tension between the two that creates our reality.
Take five.