Kepler

It began on a night some months ago now. A simple question. “Do I know Kepler?” And since that night, I have felt that thought come upon me many times. While I tilled the soil in the garden as Winter loosed its fingers. Walking through an exhibit at the University, startled by the notion that it is spinning which makes the Earth a geoid as much as it is gravity that holds it together in a sphere. I did not know Kepler. That thought found its way into my head to occupy the space left empty by the departure of another.

Have you ever had the sensation that you are living a memory? That sometimes when you see things, you’ve seen them before? Not Dejavu exactly, but a memory of something that has yet to happen. I have those, at times. I’ve met people before I’ve met them. I’ve brushed my teeth in a perfectly ordinary way and felt the exact same feelings in two instants; first a memory, and then a reality. It is difficult to remember the future. Most of the time it is an act as unconscious as breathing. At others it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what is going to occur, because the future blends together in many potential states, just like the past does.

But this night, the night I had that question planted in my brain, I knew a certainty in the future that demanded to be seen through. It haunted me for weeks. It kept popping up in my head like that one item on a shopping list you can’t seem to find even as your cart fills up to its brim. Don’t forget to…

And so I did.

xxxxxxx is a local sidewalk that gets quite busy on Friday nights. It plays host to several restaurants, Cafés, a club or two, and a Design College. On the corner is this carpet shop or art museum, I never quite know which, which displays these gigantic rugs in the window covered in crazy designs. Half of them look like they were once white and after having too much colour spilled on them they’ve been repurposed and sold as modernist exhibits. Others are geometric and squiggly. I love looking at these carpets as I walk by.

That night, I had one purpose wrapped up in others. A band I know played music in the College parking lot on market days fairly regularly, so I thought I’d drop in and show my support. At the time, however, they were running late, so I went off to see to my other business. I mused on the corner as I looked up at the carpets. I hurried along, past thin alleys that cut through the boardwalk and up into a little pizza place. I considered the menu very carefully. One pizza was a given, because I knew what I wanted. I did not really know what to put on the other. I think I settled for something with meat and mushrooms, maybe peppers, and two cooldrinks. I sat and read while I waited. I’m having trouble recalling the book. Something from Verne perhaps, or Fynn. It had that old, tough taste that can be hard to chew through when you are distracted. I don’t think I managed to read very far into it before the pizzas were ready.

When I had them, I returned to my car and put mine and the Crème Soda on the passenger’s seat. Then I took the other and the Sprite and walked them around the corner, past the carpets, past a leaky pavement and some orange construction tape, past three cafes and up to a bus bench. There was a man sitting there, wrapped in layer after dirty layer of clothes, picking through a plastic cart filled with junk. Possessions to him, I suppose. Not junk. Cardboard and trinkets of arcane potency, for survival in the city.

The moment exploded before me. Every permutation I had seen pass through my mind. Every response he made, every gesture and hour we could spend, sitting and talking, feigning some sort of equality or familiarity in our shared humanity. The possibility of me actually caring, and not just ticking one more thing off the to-do list in my head. They hit me all at once and they were so very heavy. So humbling.

“For you,” I said awkwardly, holding out the meal. That – just that – took up all the energy and will I cared to invest in the moment. It was all that was necessary. The other possibilities crumbled away. I did not want to talk to this man. That echoing sentiment of ‘Pass it on’ would happen with or without further prompting. His reply of ‘Thank you master” irked me, common though it is in The City. I am no man’s master. I do not engage in voluntary acts of charity out of some sense of responsibility or superiority. The idea of Pity derails my code more than I care to admit.

So I walked off, and left the potential of that moment at its core and brutal economy. Necessity, nothing more. A future remembered, experienced, committed to the past. Yet the night was young.

I recovered my own pizza, and not feeling particularly hungry after a few mouthfuls, shared it with some of the groupies who had set up at the café across the street from the College until the band was ready to play. I listened to them talk, mostly. I do not generally engage in conversation unless I am questioned directly.

Time passed, and the band eventually had their turn to play. Old songs. Familiar songs I had heard them play many times. They were new, and so they didn’t have much variance from those few good songs. What to call it… Indie Rock, I suppose, though this Indie concept still escapes me since it refers to Independent music rather than a specific kind of music. Still, it had all those light inflections of something not quite refined or mind-blowing, but still beautiful. A Shade of Memphis, perhaps, stuck between prompting personal appeal and an urge to be on a bigger stage.

As the same tunes went on, one of the groupies I had been sitting with said she was going to get cigarettes, and asked if I wanted to walk with her. I said ‘yes’. I didn’t, of course, mainly because at the time I wanted to be anywhere and anyone other than myself, but there are many parts of the code that deal with honour, and when a lady asks to be escorted along the street at night, honour is certainly called into question. So we went along the street past many cafés and restaurants, past the blue-dyed mess of carpets, up to a corner store so the girl could get her cigarettes. She asked me questions along the way, and I answered. The usual ones. Where is that accent from? How long have I been in The City? Have you ever gone back to The Old Country? [incredulous surprise] And you still have the accent? We bump into two of her friends, and after being introduced they ask the same thing. This scares me, all the time. It is the big bogey behind the bedsheets of the human experience. The shadows become a million things when you put a light behind them, but take away the sheet, and it’s the same pair of hands dancing in the glare. So many faces, but one solid mind operating in all of them, so that to a point you can predict what they are going to say, what their reactions will be, all their thoughts and opinions which exist simply because they are fashionable and easy to think. Gods, that scares me.

When she’s done getting her cigarettes, she asks me to go with her to a nearby bar/club/thing called The Office, and thinking of the return journey to The College, I agree. We are absorbed into the amorphous cloud of 20-somethings. Noise is blasting from the speakers almost too loud to hear people speak. Someone puts a hand on my shoulder and I let them turn me around.

“Hey there,” she says.

“Hello,” I say, inclining my head by the slightest degree, not really looking at her. I turn back and walk off, following the one I came here with. We stand a bit back from the bar, where there’s enough space for the people around us to thrash their arms and call it ‘dancing’. She peers up at me, oddly apologetic. Not long after, we leave. Just outside, we bump into one of the bartenders, who she knows, and who I know from school. We reminisce for a while. He comments on the hair. Everyone comments on my hair, as though it is a unique animal I am carrying around with me as a social icebreaker, but not nearly so affective as a chinchilla or a bushbaby. He has to get back to his shift. We mercifully begin the trip back to the College.

And then past the carpets, past the orange tape, just outside a café, a man walks up to us, leaving one of the cafés. He walks strangely, drunk or tipsy, or perhaps simply inspired, and he says to me, “You!”

“Me,” I agree. “How do you do?” I say.

“Very good this evening, sir,” he says to me. “You remind me of someone. What was his name?”

“xxxxx?” I suggested, out of habit.

“No, not xxx,” he says. “Do you know Kepler?”

And here, in this morass of an evening, I find something else to grab my attention and fill the newly emptied space in my mind. Do I know Kepler?

“I have never met him,” I reply. “But I know of him. He’s up there with Newton.”

“Yes, that’s right!” he laughs. Then he turns to the girl. “Listen to me now. This is a very good xxx you have here. You must not let xxx go. xxx is a good, good xxx. I can see it! You will be very happy together.”

“Okay,” she says.

‘Do I know Kepler?’ he said.

“Promise me now you will stay with xxx. He is good, do you know this? Promise me.”

“I know. I promise,” she says.

Do I know Kepler? I wonder.

He laughs again. “Thank you, my friends. Goodbye.”

“Good evening,” I say. We walk away.

“Well that was odd,” she says.

“Yes,” I agree. We arrive at The College, and she tells a few of the groupies about the strange encounter. I stare at someone out of the corner of my eye, wondering if I know them. I don’t. No more than I know Kepler.

My duty done, I quietly slip away, and drive home.

Do I know Kepler?

It is now months later. ‘Good’ I may be on the lips of drunken prophets, but I have not seen that girl since. Instead, I kept on looking out for Kepler, wherever I may find him. I am meeting Kepler for the first time, today.

Johannes Kepler was born in the sixteenth century in Germany, an astrologer who dreamed of the idea that planets may yet be alive. He saw Earth as a colossal whale, whose breathing drives the tides and the winds, and who swims through the heavens as a gigantic organism in its own right. Kepler was a dreamer. He lived at a time when astrology and astronomy were virtually inseparable, and mingled in their mid-section with theology. One of the early supporters of Copernicus, who challenged the idea that Earth was the only ‘central’ planet in the universe (where in actual fact we now know that all planets can only be seen as moving in relation to another cosmological entity) and upgraded the telescope developed by his contemporary, Galileo. As a man, Kepler was cursed with frailty and myopia – he could not actually see with any particular clarity the stars he had committed his life to studying. The result of this was that he could focus on the mathematics and geometry of his craft by interpreting the research of others. His work with telescopes and optics actually led to the realization that images are inverted and flipped by the retinas. For his efforts he became Imperial Mathematician and served under many rulers, giving sage and trusted council in the courts.

In addition to his many scientific works, Kepler had one perspective piece that followed him throughout his life. It is a short novel called Somnium, and recounts the voyage of a man to the moon, the society he finds there, and how his relative perspective of the Earth and the sun change due to his position. Originally put down by his heliocentric lecturers, Kepler held on to the manuscript to publish at a later date, refined it, and in its initial printing found it put in as biographical evidence against his mother during a witch trial. He ceased his cosmology for a time to defend her case in court, and was successful, though the stress of the proceeding killed her shortly after. The full Somnium with its complete notes was only published post-humously with the aid of two sons (another dying before its completion) and at last, the story was immortalized as the very first in the science-fiction genre.

On Kepler’s grave was writ:

I measured the skies, now I measure the shadows,

Skybound was my mind, Earthbound my body now rests.

So now, I have met Kepler. I like him quite a bit. He lived at a time when magic and science were oddly clasped, and died when science was at last gaining an upper hand. It is difficult to say anything of his character but that he was a hard worker devoted to his craft, that he was a dreamer and as such, a visionary. I would be honored to share any association with him.

And now what new thoughts may fill my mind, I wonder?

Once closes one’s eyes, and the universe rushes in to plug the gap.