Stemistry lab

Galileo's sister

Galileo had a twin sister. She was never born into this world. Their mother glimpsed her presence only in vivid dreams and strange passing thoughts that she attributed to the state of pregnancy itself.

Galileo grew up to love mathematics. The rightness and beauty spoke to him like high poetry. He wanted to follow the trails of law and order that came to him but ‘real life’ intervened. His father died and he had siblings to support, later, a free spirited girlfriend and their three children made their claims on his time and energy and money. Also, the academics didn’t like him much. There was just something about him that they couldn’t quite put their fingers on.

He pressed on regardless of public opinion and uncovered some difficult and uncomfortable truths; people were outraged. Who did he think he was? He wasn’t thinking of himself at all. There was so much else to think about.

His sister had foreseen all this as they teetered on the brink of conception. She changed her mind. She wanted to dance for longer and decided not to manifest in that time or place. ‘Come with me’ she whispered in the formless void before light. ‘Our mother will have other children, she’ll love them all the more for having lost us’ She knew that all work and effort was for love, the creation and making and spreading and increasing of it. They couldn’t be separated. Their bond was too strong for that. Love. We all get entangled with love. Divine spider webs joining us up, do we yield to be eaten ignominiously like little flies? No, we fight and end up in sticky messes. Eaten anyway. It looks ugly from outside, but the maker has a tapestry in mind.

Galileo was seduced by the discipline of form. Knots and threads and colours. He wanted to be a knot or a stitch. He wanted his love to be visible, even through a mirror, dimly.

Much, much later, people like Galileo and his sister, people like you and me, would uncover strange interesting theories to do with DNA, Vanishing Twin Syndrome, Chimeras. These things have always occurred in human experience. Poets, visionaries and lab technicians, bus drivers and little girls with skipping ropes have glimpsed the cosmic dance of divine intelligence which creates and mutates them. They have a purpose and we do not yet know what it is.

Sometimes they (we) fall off the linear edge of time and space and flounder in the swamps of schizophrenia with its infestations of thought demons. Sometimes we freefall into mystery itself and are never seen again by those of us who are left behind. Sometimes we are just waiting to be revealed in new forms.

Music and mathematics are very similar; they have disciplines in common and can be used over and over again without ever wearing out. They are accessible to most of us in one form or another. Galileo loved the music of the spheres. He reached for the stars and was imprisoned for heresy, but no one could imprison his thoughts or his love. The church judged him but God did not. Does He judge any of us? If Galileo had access to the vocabulary of our age he would love the idea of pluripotence, a perfect description for the power of love. He may have been seduced into manifesting again into a lab near you, with his sister and countless others who are capable of anything.