Following the Sun (31 page)

“Who?” someone asked from the small crowd that had gathered.

“Galileo, the impostor. As you may remember, he proposed the odd theory that the earth is moving through outer space and not fixed at the center of the universe, as it of course is. According to the Galileo lie, the planet earth is supposed to be a large, spherical shaped ball of rock flying through space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. But how could the Earth continue to move at the same speed for as long a time as Galileo and his brood of vipers claim.”

“Brood of vipers?” Billy shouted. “I beg you, sir, I am no viper.”

“Right. To carry on. If outer space were a vacuum, then there would be no problem. But space is not a vacuum, is it? Space is instead filled with ether. The earth would have to have been pushing its way through the ether for all those billions of years. Shouldn't it have slowed somewhere along the line?”

“Sir, thou shoulds't not refer to people as vipers,” said Billy with Shakespearean flare.

Somebody in the back crowd agreed.

“You got no right to call a pretty young lady a viper.”

“Now, to come to the point,” our man continued, ignoring the hecklers, “the earth is not the center of the solar system. You of the misguided generation believe that earth is orbiting the sun at a radius of around five-hundred million kilometers. Were this the case …”

“I'm no viper, I'll tell you that much,” someone shouted.

“Were this the case, the earth would be an accelerated object in circular motion around its sun. And thereby are the problems introduced.”

“Eh. Who you calling a viper?”

“Never mind vipers,” the Flat Earth speaker said. “The point is, the earth, accelerating in circular motion, would behave no differently than would a car taking a corner, if you take my point. We'd spill off into space, just like loose change or a cup of tea on the dashboard of a car taking a fast turn. We would slide around, or be thrown off completely. There would be an apparent centrifugal force on everything.”

“Wha' about gravity, mate?” someone shouted.

“Would them vipers spin off too?” asked another. “We'd be better off without no vipers such as yourself.”

“Indeed we would be,” a little man in the back of the group called out.

“Tell it to Galileo,” said another.

“Tell it to the Catholic Church, why don't you?”

The crowd was warming up.

“Conventional thinking would suggest that the water would just run down the sides of the earth if it were round, wouldn't it? If that is the case why don't the seas fall off the earth? I shall tell you why. Now, taking into account the so-called gravitational charge theory, and assuming that for some reason the atmosphere was able to align itself with the new direction of the theoretical ‘gravitational field,' we are faced with a new problem involving another branch of physics known as thermodynamics.…”

“Are you a Roman Catholic?” a little man in a derby hat asked.

This halted the speaker for a second.

“No, but why do you ask so foolish a question?”

“Church don't recognize Galileo either. You and the church. Now ladies and gentlemen if I could interrupt this man for a moment and have your attention, I should like to say a few more words about vipers. By which I mean your priests of the Roman Catholic Church.…”

“Sunday in the park,” Billy said to me. “Let's go drink a pint.”

I tried to get Billy to come with me down to the Royal Observatory the next day but she claimed she had a rehearsal, so instead, since it was raining again, I went over to the Tate like a good tourist and saw an exhibition of the works of J. M. W. Turner. Here, hanging among huge canvases of swirling lights and clouds, sunsets, and slave ships, I saw a small, quiet painting I had heard about all my adult life but had never seen, not even as a print: “The Golden Bough.”

I knew of the existence of this painting from the opening lines of James Frazer's epic collection of the same name—“Who does not know Turner's picture of the Golden Bough?”

Well I didn't, and I daresay most of Frazer's modern-day readers don't, and now I had happened upon it.

It was a surprisingly small painting, and it was not half as dramatic nor bold as Frazer's description of the scene. It depicts the moment in which Aeneas and the Sybil present the golden bough cut from a sacred grove to the gatekeeper of the Elysian fields, thereby gaining entry to the Underworld. The painting does not match at all Frazer's dark, brooding description of the doomed king who stalks the wood at Lake Nemi in the Alban hills, guarding the sacred grove where the golden bough is found. According to the myth, the king priest gains his power by overcoming the former king of the wood. Sooner or later another contender will arrive and kill the current king. The thirteen volumes of Frazer's tome go on to document the details of rituals and beliefs of cultures around the world, focusing on the myths and religious practices associated with the idea of the Hung God, the king who offers himself up for the benefit of the tribe, or, in some cases, for humankind. Completed in the early 1900s after nearly twenty-five years of work, the work attempts to discern archetypal or universal elements in the religions and magical practices of world cultures. Quite naturally, among the many rituals and rites analyzed are those associated with worship of the sun.

In typical Turneresque style, the dark scene at the sacred wood at Lake Nemi is bathed in a diffused glowing light. Of all painters of the Romantic English tradition, Turner is the one who was most associated with this question of the fall of light on a scene, in fact he was known popularly as “the painter of light.” He had an odd career for an artist, inasmuch as, unlike many painters, he was successful from the start and his popularity continued throughout his life. His first work was exhibited when he was still a teenager and he was only fifteen when one of his paintings was exhibited at the Royal Academy. By the time he was eighteen he had his own studio, and soon after he began traveling widely in Europe.

Wherever he went he studied the effects of sea and sky in every kind of weather, but instead of recording factually what he saw, Turner translated scenes into light-filled canvases that expressed his own attitudes toward the sun; there is hardly a painting—even those of snowstorms—in which the sun does not appear. As he grew older he became more eccentric and more obsessed with this question of the sun and its effects on a scene. Except for his father, with whom he lived for thirty years, he had no close friends, and he wouldn't allow anyone to watch him while he painted; he gave up attending the meetings of the academy, and he would go months without seeing any of his acquaintances. Eventually, he disappeared altogether. Only months later was he found, hiding in a house in Chelsea on the verge of death. The story goes that as he lay dying, a ray of morning sun beamed in through the half-opened shutter and illuminated his face. He opened his eyes.

“The sun is God,” he muttered. Then he died.

Turner was one of the major painters of the English Romantics, a movement that was popular throughout Europe from about 1800 to 1850. Artists in this school strove to express feelings too intense for ordinary mundane expression, thoughts that lie too deep for tears as the Romantic poet William Wordsworth phrased it. They favored scenes of wild nature, especially its untamed and mysterious aspects, as well as exotic, melancholy, or melodramatic subjects likely to evoke awe or passion or even fear. Subject matter and style varied from country to country in Europe and America, and each nation seemed to produce one outstanding painter in the field. In England it was Turner, the “painter of light”; in Germany it was Caspar David Friedrich, who had a theory of a “Father Sun,” which he believed to be the creator of all things.

In America, there developed a school of romantic landscape painters known as the Luminists, whose canvases were always infused with a glowing diffused light. They favored radiant, atmospheric sunlight, explosive storm scenes, and incandescent, twilit vistas. The term luminism was traditionally associated with the French Impressionist painters to describe the manner in which light was depicted, but in American art criticism it was applied to painters of seascapes and landscapes such as Fitz Hugh Lane and Martin Johnson Heade.

The following day I finally persuaded Billy to come with me down to Greenwich, and we boarded the little ferry and motored down the river in a misty light rain to the Royal Observatory. We stood on the meridian line that serves as the zero reference line for astronomical observations. The line in Greenwich represents the Prime Meridian of the World—longitude o°. Every place on earth is measured in terms of its distance east or west from this line. The line itself divides the eastern and western hemispheres of the earth—just as the equator divides the northern and southern hemispheres.

Billy was totally indifferent to this highly interesting fact, and I was no one to convince her of the importance of the site, inasmuch as I barely understood it myself. In fact the whole mystery of astronomy—of ellipsis and eclipses, and waxings and wanings of the circling moons, and the procession of the equinoxes, and the ecliptic, and the four seasons—baffles me, interested though I am in this great machine of the solar system. For this reason I am all the more in awe of the ancients, those of Stonehenge and Callanish and the astrologers and wizards of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt who had so thorough an understanding of the complexities of these workings and laid the foundation for the understanding of modern astronomy.

One of the stages in this progression toward human understanding of the universe was the construction of the Royal Observatory here in Greenwich. It was founded in 1675 by Charles II to improve the art of navigation, and it played an important role in determining the longitude of a given vessel at sea, which, as it turned out, required a better means of accurately measuring time. Since the late nineteenth century, the Prime Meridian at Greenwich has served as the reference line for Greenwich Mean Time. Before this, almost every town in the world kept its own local time. There were no national or international conventions that determined exactly how time should be measured, or when the day would begin or end, or what length an hour might be. The expansion of the railway and communications networks during the 1850s and 1860s created a worldwide need for an international time standard and in 1884 the Greenwich Meridian was chosen as the Prime Meridian of the World.

After dragging Billy through the tourist areas of the ROG, as it is called locally, we went over to Blackheath and took a little walk under the trees on the wet green grass. At one point we heard an ominous growling and croaking in the trees and a large black raven sailed forth and crossed low over our heads and soared out over the heath.

I saw Billy watching it. “Death,” she cackled, pointing a bony finger at me. “Beware.”

Exactly where the raven had crossed the open ground of the heath, in the misty, riding skies, a blue rift appeared and slowly shifted westward. I knew what was coming.

“Regard,” I said.

Slowly the rift brightened, the blue began to shine with a warm summery intensity, and within a minute a full blast of late spring sun fell upon us.

I raised my arms toward the light and placed my hands together in praise of the sun.

“Sometimes I actually believe you are crazier than I am,” Billy said seriously.

Twelve

A Certain Slant of Light

To be complete, any true solar pilgrimage really should include a visit to Whitby Abbey, since it was here in
A.D.
664 that a synod of bishops met and set the date for Easter, an act that unintentionally involved the Roman Catholic Church in the advancement of Galileo's heliocentric astronomy.

With this in mind, I headed northeast and spent the next several days alternately pedaling through the flat farmlands of East Anglia and taking trains whenever boredom or the wind or rain got the better of me, and since I was off course anyway I decided to ride over to the fens and marshes of the Norfolk Broads to look for birds. It was easy riding. The land was flat and watery, with ditched farm fields, and there were huge skyscapes of welling cloud banks in the west that reminded me of a Constable painting, which, I later learned, made a great deal of sense. John Constable lived not far from this district, at Flatford Mill in Suffolk.

I spent one day at Hornsea, and passed a few hours at Hornsea Mere, watching the swans and the white-fronted geese and pochards, and then the following day rode on to the high cliffs at Flamborough Head to look for seabirds. Here I found a pleasant if somewhat formal hotel near the lighthouse and wandered out to the high chalk cliffs.

A thousand feet below were sharp formations of spiky stone towers, arches, and thundering sea caves, with white clouds of thousands of kittiwakes circling and mewing around their nesting sites on the cliffs. Below, rafted on the great green sea wash, scuttling across the waters in black lines, and spearing like white arrows from great heights down into the blue green depths, were gannets and guillemots, razorbilled auks, puffins, fulmars, herring gulls, and shags. The noise of these seabirds, the wind, the lack of human presence, the sheer energy of this scene held me in thrall and it wasn't until I realized that I was starving that I could bring myself to leave.

Back at the hotel I was told that if I wished to eat, I would have to join a private party that was even then in progress in the bar. Here, in a well-appointed room with a gray rug and silver bowls set on the white-painted window ledges, was a crowd of ladies and gentlemen of a certain age, all of them well-attired in sensible tweeds and blazers, all of them drinking whiskey or sherry, smoking cigarettes or pipes, chatting happily and eating while standing up. I was ill-dressed for the occasion, tousled and browned from the sun and wind, but they seemed a friendly lot and went on talking without looking up when I entered. One older gent caught my eye and winked as I came in, as if to say “not to worry,” and I went to the bar and ordered the only dish available, a thick, bloody steak and chips, which I attempted to consume standing up.