Impurities (Part 3)

So is pure water water pure? Or does water carry the memory of its past lives? I have spent time thinking of how this can be, and my conclusion is that the memory of water, if such exists, must be heavily diluted by time and chance, for time and chance happen to every molecule.

Yet there are those, especially homoeopaths and dowsers, who contend that water remembers. And I should say, I believe that clay and other aluminosilicates can indeed remember, for all that memory needs is present in their most crystalline formations.

Today I had a conversation about that. Crystals and false-crystals, how they replicate memory at a distance. In the lunulae all of decayed bronze and gold, we see the moon; in the carbonaceous glitter of diamond, we see the stars. O, all the golden and silver apples!

Metal is the bane. Metals conduct, and in the sudden earthing of electrons, they wipe memories clean. Who knows what the clay knew, before heat-haze and electron-storm glazed it into the fired husk of itself? Yet the impurities that remain make it beautiful again, just as we humans are.

A Thousand Ships, A Thousand Stars

I remember I was still a small boy when I found myself a copy of Marlowe's Faustus in the corner of my literary aunt's house. It was a tattered old Penguin book, with a simple brown cover. The worms had been at it.

And then I found these lines:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

(Skipped some soppy stuff here)

O thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter...

For a small boy brought up on classical myths and astronomy, the imagery was astounding. I could not imagine what kind of beauty the woman possessed, but I could imagine it was something I could not quite imagine, an intensity equivalent to that of a supernova, a nebula, a galaxy of stars.

As the years went by, I met many women, even some Greek ones. I found myself wondering whether these were faces that could launch a thousand ships or not. Of course, I was not the first in this endeavour; I wonder who it was who first considered the implications of the verse and deduced that if a Helen could launch a thousand ships, a millihelen was sufficient to launch one.

But then I did high school math, physics and chemistry. It became clear to me that Marlowe was describing an energy-related phenomenon; Helen's beauty was related to the impulse sufficient to launch a thousand ships, the energy transfer rate sufficient to consume the towers of Troy, the luminous intensity of a thousand stars and a brightness greater than that of Jupiter.

And in my final pre-university year, it finally clicked. Wow, I said to myself, she must have been one HOT chick! :D

Ring Around The Sun

Today, the Tailor came running into the office. "Look! Up in the sky!" And he ran out again. Suddenly, infused with the spirit of the Beatles (as seen in A Hard Day's Night), I felt moved to get up and run out as well. Several others followed.

Behold, there was a ring of rainbow light, a halo around the sun. Of course the Tailor, as a physicist, knew what caused it. But although we knew why it appeared that way, we were all engulfed in the wonder, the splendour, the glorious beauty of it all. Yes, the upper air was filled with tiny ice crystals. Yes, refraction does occur and its effects are seen as a circular locus visually centred around the sun (which approximates a uniform source at that distance). But physics aside, this was pure poetry.

I've seen haloes around the moon before, but seldom in broad daylight and hardly ever at noonday. This was a particular, spectacular moment of meteorological grace.

A Room In The Heart

In every heart there is a room, and it sometimes has more than one nature. To Chesterton, in his epic poem Lepanto, it is

The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.

Chesterton, of course, speaks of the Pope in his chapel, at the centre of the storm that rages as the forces of the Caliphate collide head on with Don John of Austria's Christian navy at the Battle of Lepanto. But on a different level, he speaks of the place in our inmost being from which we look out and see that the world is beautiful and fragile. From this place, we see that the people we love, the things we delight in, the activities which are life to us, are all easily reft from us – and we learn to pray that we are protected from the fearful pain of their loss.

To Billy Joel, this place is also a sanctuary – but of a different kind. It is a refuge from that pain, not a window upon it; it is a place of healing in between the hurts. Perhaps he and Mr Chesterton were more alike than we can ever know. Here is Mr Joel's take on that room:

In every heart there is a room
A sanctuary safe and strong
To heal the wounds from lovers past
Until a new one comes along

I spoke to you in cautious tones
You answered me with no pretence
And still I feel I said too much
My silence is my self-defence

And every time I've held a rose
It seems I only felt the thorns
And so it goes, and so it goes
And so will you soon, I suppose

But if my silence made you leave
Then that would be my worst mistake
So I will share this room with you
And you can have this heart to break

And this is why my eyes are closed
It's just as well for all I've seen
And so it goes, and so it goes
And you're the only one who knows

So I would choose to be with you
That's if the choice were mine to make
But you can make decisions too
And you can have this heart to break

And so it goes, and so it goes
And you're the only one who knows.

For me, that place conceals both the painfully beautiful and the beautifully painful. I remember old roses of all kinds, their smiles, the planes of their faces, their curves of mind and body; I remember sexuality and spirituality and somatic intensity. For these some of all the kinds of beauty that have been given to mortal men doomed to die; and God has made all things beautiful in His time.

Why did He give us all this beauty, these things that we have died for, or felt like dying for, or felt that we have died from? It is clear that there are two gifts of doom (in the Anglo-Saxon sense, I suppose) – the two Trees in the Garden were of moral knowledge and eternal life. But in Ecclesiastes it is written that firstly, God has made everything beautiful in its time; and secondly, God has set eternity in the hearts of men. The two things to be contrasted are not beauty and eternity, but time and eternity. All beauty has been given to us to enjoy in its time, regardless of variety – but the enduring foundation of our secret room is eternity.

And so, now older and a little wiser, when I see the brightness – the beautiful intellect and power and grace and strength (and so many other wonderful things!) in each of my students – I think of eternity. I think of how each aspect, each attribute might decorate the vault of infinity, and I thank God that He has made us all beautiful.

Decayed

He went on a long walk. He looked back on each decayed, every ten dead barrels of the wine of years. The air was sharp with oxygen and the oxides of nitrogen; the air was blurred by the residual moisture of the storm just past. Quicksilver raindrops pooled and fell from the waiting trees. Fine rain seeped into his eyes, passing the barriers of his lashes. He could not tell them from the tears he might have known.

His shoes had sprung a leak somewhere. His back ached although he felt strangely soft. For a quick, lightningflash moment, he hoped the teenager loitering near the lift would attack him, or that the lovers in the void deck were terrorists. He held violence in his hands, and wished that the memory of his powers was sufficient excuse. And then he remembered being a teenager, and a lover, and damp in the falling rain after she had gone away.

That was always it, the moment in which the sphere of his infinite universe had collapsed into a ring of dizzy sky, into a tiny bubble of impenetrable cloud. It was like one of those movies when you saw the bullet slow down and stop a thousand years before it hit you – and you spent eternity knowing you were dead. Years later he would listen to Once in a Red Moon by Secret Garden and he would remember it that way.

For some music has that power to crush the chest, to reduce the breath to shallow gasps of pain which does not hurt. All that comes, in the grip of the low notes in a minor key, is the thin and salty trace of liquid at the rim of the eye. He would always remember her that way. And many years afterward, when they were different people, he would wonder why he could not forget. After all, he did not think about her that way anymore. Not at all.

She was slim and dark with large eyes. She wore her hair shaggy, short but neat; it was always around her neck and having to be tossed out of the way. Her face was sharp, mischievous; her fingers were long and strong, on a netball player's hands. And she was far too sharp to be graceful, though beautiful with it. She reminded him of a knife, a kite, a frozen moment of frost. He had never been able to see her properly.

And there they were, across a dinner table. She was as sharp as ever, but now they were much older. She had taken time to cloak herself in reassuring charm and all the other trappings which make a woman feel less intimidating. And she was still beautiful, with children of her own. She was even more beautiful than he remembered, in fact.

That was when he knew his breath was his own. He knew at last that he was right, that she was as close as a mortal could be to 'beautiful' and still be human, that she was certainly not for him. But he had been right for a long while. They had been friends for a long time, most of that while. And the rain washed everything away and made all things new.