Mysterium Cosmographicum

John Banville has long been a favorite writer.  For me his principal strength has always been the writing itself.  His prose is just about always lovely.  There is so much pleasure in reading his words.  With Banville I can relax in the confidence that my senses will be well cared for.  In that regard ‘Kepler’, a short historical novel based on the life of the Renaissance astronomer, astrologist and writer Johannes Kepler, is no exception.  I like to read Banville with a highlighter in hand; I just can’t resist marking some striking passages.  I’m not sure these excerpts will read so well out of context, but nevertheless:

‘A bubble of gloom rose and broke in the mud of his fuddled wits.’

‘Italian oranges throbbed in a pewter bowl on the table between them.  Kepler had not seen oranges before.  Blazoned, big with ripeness, they were uncanny in their tense inexorable thereness.’

‘Her labour lasted for two days.  The rain of February fell, clouding the world without, so that there was only this house throbbing around its core of pain.’

‘The game, which they had not realized was a game, had ended; suddenly life was taking them seriously.  He remembered the first real beating he had got as a child, his mother a gigantic stranger red with rage, her fists, the startling vividness of pain, the world abruptly shifting into a new version of reality.  Yes, and this was worse, he was an adult now, and the game was up.’

‘Regina tentatively came to him, and, her face buried in his cloak, whispered something which he did not catch, which she would not repeat, which was to be forever, forever, a small gold link missing from his life.’

‘His world was patched together from the wreckage of an infinitely finer, immemorial dwelling place; the pieces were precious and lovely, enough to break his heart, but they did not fit.’

‘Curious, how easy it is for us little creatures to confuse the opening of our eyes with the coming into being of a new creation: like children conceiving the world remade each morning when they wake.’

‘Even random phenomena may make a pattern which, out of the tension of its mere existing, will generate effects and influences.’

Kepler's illustration of geometric harmony.

It’s a relatively short book, and is not by any means a full-scale biography.  It is historical fiction in the best sense:  truly creative writing based on real people and events.  The narrative is a little confused, particularly in the last quarter of the book, but Banville manages to share real insight into the mind of the Renaissance man.  He illustrates the almost manic search for patterns, for truth, for meaning.  That some of those supposed patterns are severely limited by the concepts and prejudices of the day is inevitable.  At the time, who could say what was real truth and what was an irrelevant pattern forced onto the data from the outside.  Who today can know that about today’s best thinkers?  A few hundred years from now they’ll be considerable snickering about some of those early 21^st century limitations and prejudices.  We just can’t see them as such today.

Much earlier in my life I spent years working in the field of music theory, particularly Schenkerian analysis.  The search for patterns and structure is prominent in that field, and the dangers are similar.  Many patterns are there which don’t much matter.  Some are coincidental, some merely incidental.  But others are basic to a core understanding of the music itself, and are unconsciously perceived and appreciated by trained listeners.  And those patterns provide the structure on which pure beauty, grace, and emotion can safely be draped.  The art is not just the structure, but without the structure the art will collapse.

Or maybe, as Banville has Kepler say:

‘Since God, in his highest goodness, was not able to rest from his labours, he played with the characteristics of things, and copied himself in the world.  Thus it is one of my thoughts, whether all of nature & all heavenly elegance is not symbolized in geometry . . . And so, instinctively or thinkingly, the created imitates the Creator, the earth in making crystals, planets in arranging their leaves & blossoms, man in his creative activity.  All this doing is like a child’s play, without plan, without purpose, out of an inner impulse, out of simple joy.  And the contemplating spirit finds & recognizes itself again in that which it creates.  Yes, yes, Roslin:  all is play.’