Wednesday, July 25, 2007
And I think of the bodies of the Filipino comfort women and the bodies of those who fight to have their experiences acknowledged and recognized. How genocide is about taking away the bodies, taking away the evidence of violence, taking away the price paid for the riches of colonization. How the body remembers and if you take away the body, then there is no evidence of crime, and if there is no evidence, then there is no memory, and if there is no memory then there was no crime. But the body remembers, the body of the earth, the body of the blood, the body of the genetics, the body of social thought and social structure, and so there is no erasure, no sure erasure, only the bending of perspective, the revision of history.
There is more on this meditation...follow her poetic reflections. After reading her post, somehow I wandered over to another story about Einstein and so I post it below.
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What I didn't know about Einstein:
When he arrived at his famous field equations that mathematically revealed that the universe is expanding, Einstein was alarmed. In the Newtonian world, the universe is static - same today as yesterday. Einstein lost his nerve and altered his equations. The Russian scientist Alexander Friedman came up with the same conclusion about an expanding universe and Einstein dismissed him. It was Edwin Hubble that finally convinced scientists that the universe is expanding. Later, John Archibald Wheeler would conclude: in nature, there is no law except the law that there is no law. From hereon, scientists would enter a new era of enchantment. Scientific understanding will be valued as that power capable of evoking in humans a deep intimacy with (scientific) reality.
Thus, Brian Swimme, theoretical mathematician, persuades us that the Cosmic Story rather than being governed by fixed underlying laws, is actually an unfolding drama: the infinite elegance which gathers us into its life and existence.
