NOLAN LIEBERT
Gravity of Hearts
"AT THE STILL POINT of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."
- T.S. Eliot, from “Burnt Norton”
gravity (grav-i-tee) from Latin: gravitas (weight) from gravis (heavy)
n.
1. Natural force by which bodies tend to attract each other
v.
1. On a blue-green cat’s eye marble hurtling around a five billion year old explosion we
meet. Our hearts spin like gyroscopes, defying forces that keep our feet on the ground despite the world trying to throw us into the depths of space as it rotates over sixteen hundred kilometers per hour. At such colossal speeds, our muscles, like taffy, stretch. Our most intimate bones twist. Our personal orbits bend into little girl braids and little boy licorice strings.
Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation: There’s a locus that everything is always falling toward, pulled toward, moths of blood and bone and dust toward the core of molten light. When bodies get close enough, they get pulled in, vectoring along invisible between them. The energy ebbs and flows, in and out, as fingers grasp haptic, hectic, desperate to latch on, hold private symbiosis, marionette and puppeteer.
We form an ellipse, a spiral, a line cascading data, words carrying weight – weight implying mass. Densities that collect and build up in the heart, dancing through private chambers, collapsing realities as links form, sinew to red sinew.
g = 9.80665 m/s2
Standing a meter apart the force between us is approximately 3.27 * 10-7. As we get closer, face to face, the distance between lips measured in centimeters, the force increases to 8.17 * 10-6. This is the burning distance, inescapable, wrapped in the warping fabric of space-time as we cross event horizons.
On the moon we are a hammer and feather, falling at the same rate. The moon pulls the
oceans slowly lapping up the surface of the cat’s eye. Gyroscope puppet strings pull the oceans in the spinning masses of our chests. We standardize the bump and slosh and eddies with an additional ring around the extremities of the gyro.
Tidal Locking: When one side of a body always faces another in synchronous rotation. One body takes just as much time to rotate around the other as it does to spin on its own axis. When the objects are similar in mass and the physical distance between them is small, both may be tidally locked to each other.
Hand in hand, hand on shoulder, hand on the small of the back. We’re all hands as we wrap each other in tug-of-war and secrets, crush each other to singularity, form a partnership, binary black holes in a lover’s dance.
Ballet Physics: Gravity is the only force acting on a dancer in the air. To calculate leaps, a dancer must account for their vertical velocity, their mass, and their horizontal speed. Done properly, alone or with a partner, a dancer can create the illusion of floating as the motion of the
head is smaller than the motion of the dancer’s center of gravity. The motion of each
jump can be defined by a parabolic function.
In the end we form a Lagrange point, a celestial lacuna, stationary in space as time expands and the universe expands, and our five billion year old explosion expands, and nothing is left between us but information.
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Nolan Liebert lives in the Black Hills of
South Dakota with his wife, children, and pets named after brutally
murdered historical figures. His house is not a covered wagon and has
indoor plumbing. Sometimes he writes. His work is published or
forthcoming from Gone Lawn, ExFic, and others. You can find him online
at http://nolanliebert.wordpress.com/
