by Sean Murphy.
When it came to physics—to name only one subject, there was no saving me, long on imagination, lacking in discipline and so much else— it’s with some humility that I recall dispirited high school teachers serving up pearls before my swinish eyes, me preoccupied with anything other than savoring the ways knowledge traverses time and space, allowing civilization to define and sustain itself. Mr. El-Yussif had emigrated from Iraq where, in a previous existence, he had been an esteemed scientist, a man of considerable respect—the kind poets and professors are accorded on other continents. But his English was awkward, and he’d been humbled by the unfathomable ways of our world (although he was also an innately modest man, as one who studies those who made sense of space must be; he didn’t even ask us to call him Dr.). Naturally, we mocked him, our ignorance as profound and practiced as his knowledge, yet he relished speaking to the starry-eyed seniors in his class about the Copernican Revolution and blasphemous brilliance of Heliocentrism, or how to properly pronounce Ptolemy and appreciate all he wrought and, of course, the great Galileo—almost burned alive for daring to suggest the devil’s in the details of everything we see. So, while his quiet wisdom was wasted on me, it was only a few years later that the sticky resonance of Psychology and recreational drugs changed my velocity, and I began thinking about the relativity of time, a more urgent sensibility taking shape like some amoeba crawling out from murky depths. Then, in 1991 I watched an entire country caricatured, some sociopolitical reprise of smirking teens mocking a gentle man who wore the weight of history like a donated suit. I saw History recycled as entire cities were bombed and displaced, men with power still condemning others to death, this time for refusing to believe the sun didn’t circle the United States. As I better grasped the cosmology of things, I found myself contemplating the quantum mechanics of second chances, and I prayed for all the professors unable to bend space and time to enlighten privileged kids, whose patriotic parents stick yellow ribbons on the bumpers of their sports cars.
(*On April 27, 4977 B.C., the universe is created, according to German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, considered a founder of modern science. Kepler is best known for his theories explaining the motion of planets.)