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The forest above the backs and holes of rabbits is like real life, as one artist used to say. He often talked about the tunnel at the end of the light, because we tend to forget that we always forget along with the extreme light of the tunnels. There is always the opposite, the other way around, the other way around.
The tensions of gravity in time and space and the holes of the rabbits of remembrance turn into dear tales in the head. A pivotal moment in the story of my personal life happened in 1969, when I saw Americans landing on the moon along with a pile of Russian likes, glued to an old TV in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov. Or so I remember. A month ago, I found the magazine for that unfortunate year. Yes, I was in Kharkov on July 17 (local date). No, the Americans and the Russians did not celebrate together. “I heard we landed on the moon,” I wrote. “But you wouldn’t know it on local TV, because they only broadcast old news.”
Still frightening, the memory of the wonderful memory of vodka shots made with pretty rooted boys on happy evenings was even worse. “They said I liked her as a girl,” my magazine reported, “but being American, I wouldn’t have a problem killing myself.”
It’s upside down there. It encourages flips in perspective, in revisions, in necessary corrections. I’ve often walked between being a writer and an editor, on my own and with a partner, a dog and a cat, an East Coaster and a left coaster. I hope to be wiser for this; I know my world is bigger for that.
Plus, we always miss things the first time. One of my favorite pastimes (okay, this is silly) was line dancing. These days, twice a week, I walk with a whole group of my age in a college parking lot, doing Korean knot, Cuban cha-cha, country classics. We dance with Elvis. It is now or never.
Through all of this, gravity works constantly: crushing the vertebrae, bending the spine, reshaping the center. The last time I was in the crowd, standing on tiptoe, I was horrified to realize that a wall on the shoulders of normal people had blocked my view.
Of course, we don’t “see” the curvature of space-time, at least not in the usual sense. Still, the copy editor once said that I was inserting the term “supposed” before “curved space-time”. That still amuses me. I mean, we can’t even see the air, even if a big enough blow can throw a building. Moving air (wind), like gravity, is a type of pseudo-force that depends on relative motion. A car (or boat) that is stationary in the air can cause strong winds. Apparent wind, the sailors call it.
But then we perceive everything indirectly. We hear the murmur of leaves and infer the wind at work, which is the presence of moving air. We measure the motions of galaxies and deduce the gravitational forces needed to keep the clusters together – too much gravitation, which must be explained by the spectacular stars. This is why matter is “dark”, it is now thought to tell most of the matter in the universe.
Gravity reveals itself to us through what it does to things, including me. But it’s not strength, like magnetism. It’s just a local space-time landscape. And we know that landscapes matter a lot — not just in physics. If a supposedly “flat” landscape (the playing field) keeps some people at the top, others at the bottom, you know that such invisible forces are making things worse.
Unseen actors are distorting our world every day, most of which we would like to think about: mutant viruses, weak power grids, nuclear bombs, plastic oceans. Under our feet, tectonic stresses threaten to literally pull the earth out of us, especially if you live in the Pacific Northwest, which is located above the Cascadia subduction zone, a catastrophe that will happen. Then there’s AI everywhere. Although Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk initially raised red flags, they are only now overwhelmed by the ability of some people to distort almost everything — it is now present and inevitable, like gravity.
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