It’s a strange business, the things that stick with us from childhood. Not the big events, necessarily. Birthdays and holidays tend to blur into a single image. Instead, it’s often the small, peculiar moments that lodge themselves in the mind like a piece of shrapnel. A particular quality of light on a dusty floor. A sentence overheard and misunderstood. Or, in this case, a vision of a brown, spindle-like vortex turning slowly in the blackness of space.
An image like that asks for nothing and explains nothing. Yet, it demanded to be looked at. It emanated a force, magnetic and threatening. While not necessarily hostile, it seemed utterly indifferent to me. One could, of course, take this memory to a specialist. They might speak of hypnagogic states—the fertile, hallucinatory ground between waking and sleeping—where the mind throws up all sorts of flotsam.
It’s a neat and tidy explanation. It puts the strange, cosmic memory into a small, labelled box. It’s like explaining the chemical composition of paint to someone who has just seen a masterpiece. The explanation is correct, but it doesn't capture the feeling.
Interestingly, over two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato told a story about a soldier named Er who died, saw the machinery of the universe, and came back to tell the tale. At the heart of everything, Er saw a colossal spindle, turning on the lap of the goddess Necessity. It was a vision of a universe that was ordered, beautiful, and inescapable. The spindle spun, yielding the threads of every life.
For millennia, people have been staring into the same silent darkness and seeing similar shapes. We see faces in the clouds, hear voices in the wind, and dream of structures in the void. Perhaps they are faint signals from a deeper part of ourselves, the part that understands, without being told, that we are caught in something vast and intricate.
A child in the modern age and a philosopher in ancient Athens, both are merely trying to make sense of the immense turning of the world.
I’m writing a book on… eh, let’s call it social innovation. This blog expands on it, and related ideas.
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