Celestial Bodies

The strange cosmology of the sonnets

There's this jazz musician, David Sudnow, who wrote a book about trying to find where the music comes from. He finds it in the hands, in the body, in the places where hands and body and voice want to go. "When I play 'Moon River'," he says, "I have before me the presence of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's. The sounds make me remember her and she makes me remember the sounds." She's not there as a visual memory, he notes. "Rather, the sounds are being caressed," he says, "and that is the way her presence is encountered…. It is caressing, and impishness, and huddling under the rain that my hands reach for through the sounds."

Is this what Shakespeare is doing in the Sonnets? Caressing, huddling under the rain, reaching for these conjunctions through language sounds? And where is the beloved in this reaching? Where is Sudnow’s Audrey? Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day? asks Sonnet 34—a question that felt to me like the music of that sonnet, the feeling tone to return to in reprise. But didst thou promise? Or in my reaching for the sounds, in the caress of them, did I make it all up?

Reprise; reprisal.

Sudnow suggests that these movements of the hand in making music aren't about anything—they aren't mere commentary. A caress isn't about anything. It is the thing itself. And in music, in singing, in saying, we're moving, moving our bodies, moving feelingly, in and out of phase. And then, arrestingly, Sudnow writes this: "I used to think I would gladly be a dolphin if I could retain but one human expression: 'Wow'. But that 'wow' is only another bodily experience. It does not comment on the experience. It is part of the way of having it."

So I think that, with Shakespeare, we’re the dolphin here. And language isn't the saying, it's the sea. All the ways of saying "wow": fins and flippers, smooth skin and sleek head, moving through this medium and moving it. The sea sprays, swirls, eddies. But what's being caressed? Is it you, is it me? Is it the sea? Such a beauteous day!

So here comes another sonnet, Sonnet 97, reaching in toward me from its long-period orbit, blundering into the caress of a riff I've been carrying in my fingers these last couple of weeks.

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness every where!
And yet this time removed was summer's time,
The teeming autumn big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widowed wombs after their lords' decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me
But hope of orphans, and unfathered fruit,
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.

The sonnet suggests a cosmology: start with the assumption that you are a world—a wandering world, wandering through other atmospheres, passing through the vapor globes of others, unsettling one another's seas. Where does your energy come from; whence the light, the heat? Do you derive some portion of it from another, some vagrant thou who also wanders, planetary, throwing off influences and energies, irradiating everything it comes into a tangle with? Perhaps they're following their own foreordained course, but from your vantage, they dance in epicycles, they loom and withdraw. And you only catch glimpses, glimpses and swoons, as they come into conjunction and opposition, wax and wane, rearranging your clouds and unsettling your seas. In winter, their word can be a surfeit of sunshine playing over every part of you, while withdrawal draws the sap from the trees and sets a frost on the flowers even in summertime.

Lodged up here in the Sonnets' haunted observatory, I think of the conjunctions of Venus. To look down on the planets in their courses like Copernicus taught us to do, we would see Venus following a nearly-circular orbit, the most circular of the planets, with a period of 224.7 days. Seen from earth, however, it spirographs in a pattern called a "precessing pentagram," looming closer and then widening away in a pattern that repeats shiftingly every 2900 days or so. To map the travels of Venus from an Archimedean distance directly above our north pole, then, we see this pentragrammetry inscribing a pattern of loops and leavings that's been called the rose of Venus. It's beautiful:

via Wikimedia

This is not the music of the spheres in the abstract, Copernican sense, in the purity of their proportions. This is the music of bodies coming and going, tugging at one another, opening and closing to one another. As David Sudnow puts it, "the universal harmony of our "pure tones" is a harmony of the body's purity and not of some idealized nature…. It is no accident that the sequential arrangement of the tones of the major scale on the piano and the capacity of an opposable thumb go quite elegantly together.... Notice that the distances between places of the major scales, our most common sequential routings, are slightly uneven, the somewhat shorter stretches presenting themselves at just those places that most nicely fit the rotational tasks of the hand."

Venus also has phases—currently a waning crescent, to set around the 22nd of March. Can you feel it on the wane?

Via JPL’s Solar System Simulator (go play with it!)