Gravity and Levity
When I met Frank on the train, I was reading a book entitled Gravity and Levity. This binary continues to preoccupy me and to inform my thinking about how I’m doing here on the planet. On the levity end, giggling with delight, I’ve always been drawn to the fleeting and the insubstantial. Fireflies, mist, human life. I lean into it and it fakes me out, fades away. I look out my window at the pond and watch the ripples advancing towards me but never arriving, the shadows of the leaves flickering in the sunlight, so deeply real but at the same time entirely immaterial. I believe Plato gave this some thought while hanging out at the academy eating stuffed grape leaves. He saw a shadow on the wall of a cave and noticed that he couldn’t hold it in his hand. You can’t scoop up the reflection of the trees on the glassy surface of the pond, stick a thumbtack in it and put it up on a bulletin board. Like the name of God, a reflection will not be owned, imprisoned or nailed down. Everything is always in motion, always just out of reach. The structures and the furnishings that we are so invested in are mere collections of moving parts at the molecular level.
Spaciousness and movement are the essential fizzy characteristics of this universe, our home, as much as we imagine ourselves having blue eyes and short legs, sitting on chairs, unloading dishwashers. Still if you’re on the look out for it, there’s some really good news. For example, there’s no need to bother about claustrophobia. Like a raisin cake rising in the oven, the universe is always expanding and the space between the raisins is always stretching out like your old sweaters. Space is infinite. There is no end to the space between points. There’s room for everything, for everyone. In Jewish mysticism, this is called ein sof, no end. Claustrophobia is a failure to grasp this ungraspable reality. No door is closed.
When I was a girl, I was subject to claustrophobia’s opposite, a sort of agoraphobia where I experienced panic in large indoor spaces like museums. I wanted to be held and kept safe, not left to roll around like a complete unknown. Agoraphobia is just another misunderstanding about space. Space is always infinite but it’s not out to get you. Presence helps me hold on to that impossible idea for a minute here and there. Looking at the world inside and outside of myself, I have a glimmer of the fact that the chairs and the dishes, the shoes and the bookshelves are insubstantial at their innermost level. Their gravity and apparent solidity is one aspect of them just as the defended nature of someone I know is only her facade, her veneer. Beneath that layer of polyurethane, the vast circus of the person’s feeling life and experience pulsates in and out. Sometimes I catch a fleeting glimpse of the indeterminacy between the world inside of myself and the world outside of myself and I wonder…where is the line in the sand, really?
It’s been a blessing to learn that vulnerability is a good thing, that all we can do is be mindful of our humanity as we witness the burning of towns, the disappearance of loved ones. This is not immediately obvious. Frank tells me that if anything I am becoming more impatient and more burdened with worry as I age. Life partners are good for that. Just when you think you’re making some “progress,” they knock you down a peg so that you are forced to confront your denseness. I mean that quite literally. In the everday, I am dense, made of flesh and blood, gravid with baggage, clueless in the face of the larger unfolding of spirit. I worry about the weather as if there’s something I can do about it. I start to foam at the mouth if I have to wait for service in a restaurant. I have been known to be judgmental and to allow words to fly out of my mouth that stain the air with grievance. I want to levitate, but often I’m just too weighed down by the air quality index and the coming Republican side show. I would like to be better at honoring the gravity, the thingness of life, while making more room for the levity, the laughter rising and dissipating in the smoke-filled air.
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Many Voices, will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In August, Many Voices will welcome Montreal-based editor and Substack writer, Alice Goldbloom on the subject of her father’s Catholicism. Read Alice’s work at A Considerable Age.
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Susie you capture the ineffable with such grace and lyricism - spectacular piece. Enjoyed the levity and gravity of it!
Oh my Goodness! This piece so deserves a huge audience, perhaps a Buddhist-leaning audience.
I liked the part about reflection. I'm drawn to taking phone photos of reflections on water, snow, sidewalks, grass.....But this made me consider my thought reflections, the ones I usually mistake for being solid. Then I looked back a few pages in my journal--nope, thoughts not solid either. As you say, "Everything in motion." I also really like how you spice up with humor some heavy philosophical statements: "space is infinite, but not out to get you....and how you describe the depth of us humans as "a circus of a person." Thanks, once again, for a great read.