Being a university student was liberating: choosing when and what to attend and how to respond without the dictates of subject teachers or examinations encouraged self-expression. But herein lay a problem: first-year university was also about the search for self-identity which, together with the newly-found confidence in letting others know my opinion, produced many words.
“I saw this movie the other day,” I would begin,” and it was just truly amazing.” What followed was my elaborate recounting of an overhead shot of a boy in his canoe, which then moved out, the boy now a dot on the wide river, then whizzed back past the moon, the solar system, the Milky Way, stars and galaxies galore, colours and shapes aplenty and halted in deep space. Back through the universe we kaleidoscopically zoomed, its planets, rings and stars streaming past our eyes and came down to focus upon a mosquito feeding on the boy’s forearm. Entering his skin, we journeyed through the layers of epidermis, the vessels, cells and walls within the structure of our body, abundant in colour, shape and movement, before the scene stopped; on the screen appeared: “As without, so within”. The lights came on.
That I remember it well is important. Our eyes, being naturally tuned towards movement as the evidence of life, rarely see through the surface of sight into what lies beyond and within.
Let’s go on a game drive. If you are fortunate to have done so, you would know that what’s needed are keen eyes, eyes that detect movement. Anything that moves, be it insect, bird, reptile or mammal, prompts a reaction. Of course, there is a hierarchy of things important to see, but if it aint moving, it aint worth looking at. It’s not rock, soil or trees we want to see but what affirms life, and that means it moves – the bigger the creature, whale, elephant or eagle, the more it counts.
Considering that, as I write and you read, we are moving and spinning at 107,000 km/hr around the sun, having a blind spot about movement is quite understandable. Without acceleration we sense what’s surrounds us as stable and fixed. But a change in movement is a form of acceleration and attracts attention. A child at a rock pool will search its waters for anything that moves, hoping for an octopus, a fish or crab. If nothing moves, the pool is boring and she will move to another. Rarely does a child or an adult focus on the creatures clinging to the rocks, growing beneath the surface or floating on the water.
It is the exceptional person who sees movement in what seems unmoving. Such exceptional beings observed that the earth moves around the sun – Galileo famously had to deny this because it confounded common sense and contradicted religious doctrine; Copernicus also met with strong opposition. By the time we reached the atomic age, the likelihood of losing your life for your scientific understanding of life had receded, but it was simply inconceivable that a solid object like a pen, rock or plant was a structure of atoms, within which were even smaller particles constantly moving; smaller yet is the matter falling through you and me in this moment. Telling someone that an orange is only seen as orange because it reflects wavelights of that colour while absorbing the other colours which constitute white light is unlikely to be met with, “I thought as much.” Finally, it is the movement of small matter which has produced the most earth-shattering and life-threatening condition under which we live: the splitting of the invisible atom and the consequences thereof.
The proverb, what the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, holds truth in some human relationships. What does not move, does not interest the eye, sums up the superficiality of our sight in the earth we live upon. When recanting his theory it is said that Galileo muttered under his breath, “But yet it moves.” Would that we could see the movement of matter around us more readily, life in the inert and growth in the inanimate.
