Orbital by Samantha Harvey is a short book about which the only complaint is perhaps that it should be even shorter, so that the lapidary sheen on this multifaceted jewel might be yet more polished for even greater effulgence; a confit for which even slower cooking might have reduced the constituents into a yet deeper and more refined reflection of their parts.
As a piece of fully immersive metaphysics, Orbital probes away at our perspective on ourselves and our planet, on our simultaneous insignificance and grandeur, and on the need for a true sense of awe rather than the gimcrack variety applied in a ludicrous diminished form to the flashy and superficial attention grabbing detritus of modern existence.
So why would a short piece about six people orbiting the earth in a space module open with a reproduction of Velasquez's 'Las Meninas'?
In short, because it is a 17th century painting (more on the baroque sensibility later) profoundly concerned with perspective, in which what you see depends on where you stand and your instinctive sense of what matters. This is such a brilliant mirroring of the effect of seeing our own planet from space, from constantly shifting vantage points in which everything can be viewed in new and different ways and our attention moves from subject to subject. Indeed is the focus of either the painting or the orbital view actually on humans and their artefacts at all, or on other flora and fauna?
Perspective can lead to dislocation and Orbital on a deeply immersive level is also about how it might feel to be unmoored from both planet and normal functioning of the body, having to learn afresh how to exist in an environment in which we float free having lost the weighty importance and attachment granted by gravity. Removed from our planet we would drift at the mercy of the space winds.
Viewed from space in a state of shifting perspective and immanent dislocation, the planet inspires new found grandeur and awe. Here the state of awe is one that has a deep psychological sense of bubbling emotion from being newly aware of the vastness of our surroundings. This can make us feel diminished which can impart a new sense of (yes) perspective on our individual selves but also connection to others and to the far reaches in which we exist. This is transcendent. Psychologically a true sense of awe can support well-being and altruism because we recognise our value but also our smallness and our shared experience with others.
Page 28 of Orbital - now one of my favourite pages in any novel - captures beautifully the sense of a world viewed anew from space:
"Yet it's clearly not that kingly earth of old, a God-given clod too stout and stately to be able to move about the ballroom of space; no. Its beauty echoes - its beauty is its echoing, its ringing singing lightness. It's not peripheral and it's not the centre; it's not everything and it's not nothing, but it seems much more than something."
The wonderful phrase 'the waltzing universe' is reminiscent of the ancient concept of the music of the spheres developed by the astronomer Kepler to describe the effect of the movements and the relationships of celestial bodies which he considered capable of being perceived by the soul, if not by the ear. A harmony which can be imperceptible but reflects the profundity of the universe.
A modern metaphysics of awe arising from a shift in perspective seeing our planet and ourselves from the outside may also be a mirroring of the development of metaphysics in the baroque period which, from the work of Kepler and others, reflected a new found understanding of the cosmos. The so called metaphysical poetry of the period is replete with astronomical imagery coupled with a delight in paradox.
Orbital is the modern equivalent given an agnostic twist.
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