Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 7

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Day 7 - Grooving With Gravity

Today I hiked up the West Fork River again, to the swim hole at a bend beneath the cliff with the high-up cave into which the ancient Mogollon people built what our maps show as “three mile ruin.” There the water is swift and deep enough to exercise by paddling in place. Of this river’s swim holes, this one has a special “fun” edge to it because a rock fall could be fatal.

After cooling down, I walked the main path upstream to the next river crossing, found a place to nestle in among some rocks at the edge of the current, and ate a simple lunch. Then the flowing water started to enchant.

There was something about the visual and auditory patter of intricate patterns that led to a “favorable conjunction of experience and surrounding objects,” in the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher of the Enlightenment. My conjunction was a doorway into gravity.

How alive the water seemed. The gravity that tugged on it was the same gravity that causes stars to contract and then to ignite, the same gravity that compresses the Earth into a compact sphere, the same gravity that binds the Galilean moons to Jupiter, and me to our spinning planet. Gravity. Does anyone really know what it is?

Gravity is the raw attraction of matter for other matter. It is one of the four fundamental forces of physics. In Einstein’s terms, it is the space-time warp caused by material stuff, which in turn causes neighboring stuff to seek surfaces of less energy in each other’s space-time warps. It is difficult to imagine four-dimensional space-time warps. Better to meditate on a moving stream. The wet fluid flows—is pulled, really—in the direction of less potential energy.

Gravity makes water flow downhill, drawing streams and rivers into larger channels and ultimately to the sea, from which water then evaporates, travels through the atmosphere as wind-blown vapor, condenses into clouds, and falls back on land. The water cycle is fundamental for the structure of the biosphere. It increases the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere, creates clouds and determines much of climate, and slakes the thirst of the entirety of land life. All this is tied to the elemental fact that water flows downward.

The river’s surface was intricate, with fantastic undulations. It sported a plunge near my feet, which swirled around a rock into a foot-wide pool from which the water then whipped outwards with a foamy surface. When I looked upstream from that rock and observed the stream’s surface closely it rippled like beach sand, from the propagation backwards of displaced momentum from the stream impinging upon that rock itself. This backwards pressure coupled to the forward velocity of the water gave rise to a rippled lacework of stationary waves. Then, where the water bent around the rock and flowed through strands of living grass anchored in the sediments along the shore, each strand interfered with the flow, influencing the water’s surface film structure for several inches all around. As the water coursed along, the rocks in its path split the spread into zones of fantastic shapes and delicate terraces of flow.

Gravity was not the only player in this creation. Welcome Vulcan, god of deep Earth’s heat. Vulcan is plate tectonics, which lifts up the land. Without Vulcan, worldwide flowing waters would wear down the continents to an even, horizontal surface. A stream lives within a conjunction of gravity and plate tectonics.

Yet another member in the inventive mix of forces was electromagnetism, which worked between the molecules of water. At typical Earth temperatures, the electromagnetic force lightly glues water molecules together. It binds them via atomic hydrogen bonding between the positively charged oxygen of one molecule and the negatively charged hydrogens of another, with just enough strength to make the water liquid. It’s a goldilocks effect. The hydrogen bonds are not so tight that the turns the fluid into a stiff solid; they are not so loose that the water all vaporizes (but some does, that’s the water cycle).

I went into a reverie as I peering at these patterns on water, and thinking, even feeling, the creative forces at play. Their conjunctions were not abstract. My body felt the land lifting, the water tugging, the molecules of water bonding and unbonding. My seeing was indeed something visceral. My mental activity during the reverie was like heartbeat, a drumbeat: gravity . . . gravity . . . gravity . . . plate tectonics . . . electromagnetism. What knowledge I had about these forces and processes floated in and out of the total experience, as my unconscious store of understanding fed into the favorable, ever-deepening conscious experience.

Finally, I pondered the master equation for fluid flow, the so-called Navier-Stokes equation. If we could know the particular placements of the rocks, and all the forces, then using Navier-Stokes a fluid dynamicist could in principle calculate every pattern in the water I could see, precisely mimicking the patterns in the mathematics of a computer simulation. The patterns are deterministic in that they are the results of the interaction of gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the positions of the rocks. When the same logic is applied to the nerve networks of my brain in interaction with the sensory information coming from the world, I am led to think of myself as a mental neuro-robot. But this was not a time to go there . . .

It started to rain. The reverie broke. As I gathered my pack to start the return hike, I felt that what just occurred was not a mere no-mind meditation upon the water; my aim had not been nothingness. Rather, I had actively engaged an informed imagination with the sensory experience and thereby vastly enhanced the reality of the senses.

The patterns of water had become much more than visual and auditory patterns of eyes and ears. The patterns had been given a new, enhanced sensory existence by my ability to weave into the experience my knowledge of the interactions of forces right there before me, forces that ranged from four-dimensional space-time and Earth’s inexorably slow and powerful plate tectonics to the bonds across atoms.

As I walked, I affirmed that I would practice more of this form of creativity. No external object had been produced, no painting, no writing. The creativity took place in shaping the moment itself, in a conjunction of knowledge, imagination, and senses.

Later that day, back home, I called a friend in Silver City, partly just to check in with another person. To be sure of the day I asked, “It’s Friday, right?” No, it was Saturday. Somewhere during the week I had lost a day.

Reference

I cannot locate the exact translation for my quote from Rousseau’s “Fifth Walk,” which was from a physical book. But now, seeking the source for this citation, I located a free online translation (from 1796). Rousseau valued states of mind in which “the present is extended without our noticing its duration.” One ingredient for such states he reached during his meditations around the shores of a Swiss lake was “a concurrence of surrounding objects.”

© 2024 Tyler Volk