Ben David Trigg

I remember the moment I realised that the universe must be spherical.

Upon exiting the British Museum, as I did on this bright day in February, amid the crush of disinterested tourists, one is funnelled, bustled, hustled, squeezed down the toothpaste tube of Great Russell Street, bracing yourself for the ram of the London taxi when your feet are pushed inexorably into the road as you attempt to negotiate whether or not it is safe to cross.

Having made it safely through the Red Sea and across the Jordan of Coptic Street, I paused at a small lull of the crowd by a lamp post, waiting for Wilforth, an unmentionable rascal, who for his sins had got caught in the crowd some way back.

I was paused outside one of those shop fronts selling London-on-a-fridge-magnet for 40 times their manufacturing value, to luckless Chinese tourists – magnets made in China, we might add. And thus does the global economy turn around. Outside this shop were a bizarre array of additional curiosities and well-placed distractions and it was here, dear reader, that I had my epiphany, for expostulating its spherical non-entities into the air, its ephemeral projections encasing and borne along by and vanishing into thin air, there was a bubble machine. And I, having just been dragged around the British Museum and witnessed the great discoveries of Enlightenment thinkers, was in a Mood Scientific, and prone to the great discoveries of Knowledge Itself, touched by the Muses Themselves. I observed a bubble as it drifted before my face, appreciating its perfect sphericality, and surmised, realised, that this bubble must be spherical because the universe is spherical.

My discovery rests on perfectly solid observable data, reader. Consider the earth. Spherical. The moon – thus so. The sun, the stars – giant gas balls that because they are balls, are therefore spherical. The hapless bubble, innocent of any other pretension to be anything other than it ought to be, emerges with a breath and adopts the only shape it knows to within the environment in which it finds itself: a sphere.

But, you will say to me, as that scoundrel Wilforth did when we were sat at the Old Duck holding our glasses and holding forth on our discoveries, you will say that the bubble is round because the canal that gave it birth, the plastic yellow ring that is dipped into the solution and then held to the mouth with expert precision by every two- and three-year-old – is round. Furthermore you will observe to me that conjurers and entertainers will, by means of a square dipping device, be seen to perform tricks to create square bubbles in the air. Conmen, I say, conmen and charlatans, for if you observe the onward trajectory of said bubbles, you will note their obstinate re-formation back to their natural and unquestionably spherical state. Big or small, few or many, these innocent mirrors show our wondering faces in convex array, in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, embodying the shape of the universe in a moment, before vanishing in a puff of sparkle, becoming one with the universe, of which it was so spherically a part, once more.

‘Clouds aren’t spherical,’ Wilford said, inexplicably; scratching behind his ear.

‘The water droplets that form them are.’

‘Particles cannot be shown to have any kind of shape.’

‘But they tend to comprise molecules that will tend towards circularity in shape. Cells likewise tend to be – ’

‘Ovular,’ Wilforth interjected.

‘ – of the family of shapes defined by circular characteristics.’

‘Same can’t be said of your face,’ said Wilforth, the bounder. The ineluctable scallywag. Let the record reflect.

‘The vaulted dome of the sky, the orbit of the spheres, the rings of Jupiter, the arc of the Milky Way; from micron to supernova, everything tends towards circularity – because the universe is spherical. You believe in the Big Bang?’

‘You think it was a bubble that burst a bit too enthusiastically?’

‘Everything expanding outwards in equal proportion in a beautiful universe-sized orb.’

‘You really have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘You’re just too much of a linear lover. Womb to tomb.’

Wilforth contemplated my forehead and threw a piece of jerky into his mouth, then downed the last third of his pint. ‘Can’t forestall the inevitable.’

‘But you are just a part of the great circle of life. The earth turns and . . . I might become a monk,’ I concluded.

‘Pardon?’ Wilforth belched.

‘Living in perfect rhythmic harmony with creation – you know those monks who have kitchen gardens and say their prayers at the rising of the sun and the rising of the moon.’

‘I think you’re talking about druids.’

‘And all of humanity, which is most of humanity up until, well, us, who lived by the seasons, the turning of the year, not so worried about what year it was as what time of year it was, finding their place in the great circle, the great sphere.’

‘The great bubble.’

‘Like most things, I think it’s safe to blame the Enlightenment.’

‘What for?’ Scratching behind his ear again.

‘For you being a linear lover. For believing in the myth of progress, and growth.’

‘That’s Adam Smith.’

‘And Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton.’

‘Arguably that worldview is based on the Bible.’

‘A hyper-rationalist reading of the Bible.’

Wilforth continued trying to locate the source of an itch under the lank locks of greasy hair that flopped behind his ears; he coughed, gruffed and panted his way through his beef jerky and a second pint. His heel tapped the floor incessantly. In the great mythos of Wilforth that shall one day be composed, myth tending to have its substance in the accounts of the great scoundrels as much as the legendary heroes from before time, it will be said of him that he was as much like a dog chasing a stick or gnawing a bone as anything, and as a dog, dogged, determined to chase down an idea to the very end, unyielding, and in his pursuit, nevertheless, wrong. Much as a dog might believe it could eat the bone whole, or catch the squirrel.

You see Wilforth believed in that myth of ‘progress’ that is so alien to the circularity of the cosmos. He believes society has been always progressing, yet there are many parts of it that are slipping backwards, not forwards. Take the number of incarcerated individuals, for example: the highest per capita in America, the nation that is the most forward-thinking advancement of Enlightenment rationalism, embodying in its Declarations and Amendments and Inalienable This-That-and-The-Others, the myth of progress. He believes in continual economic growth, but that economic model has to exist within an ecological one, and no matter how big the size of your vision for an economy, the planet can only sustain so much tree-hacking and loss of biodiversity, wild habitat, and so on – never mind whether you think global warming is a real problem. Not for nothing do I give credence to that economic model which strives to take these things into account and, happily, is known as Doughnut Economics, for it is pictured as a ring of basic human need within a greater ring of human flourishing, and is thereby circular, much like our spherical universe.

The myth of progress has caused the efforts of the workforce to move from what could be produced in step with the rhythm of creation in agrarian societies, to the production of, well, products (many of them unnecessary) that are supposed to progress or enhance our lives and exponentially grow the bottom line of the company that produces them – producing a ballooning sphere – or bubble, ironically – in Western economies, that has at times been known to burst, when the natural human pace or the planetary resources required have been unable to keep pace with our insatiable greed for more. The South Sea Bubble. The Wall Street Crash.

Wilforth, if he opens his eyes, finds himself on a line that will never end, disappearing ad infinitum into the distance – with no final destination; for those who want more find, when they acquire more, that they still want more; much like the screens they have devised in order to track their accumulation of more, which offer infinite scroll, and calendars that stretch infinitely into the future, and never-ending feeds to flick through.

The circularist, on the other hand – i.e., me, or rather the aspirational me, the one who is right, dear reader – closes a book and feels a sense of satisfaction at having finished it. Or writes in a diary that runs out at the turn of the year – a tangible reminder of our finitude, contra the pursuit of continual, never-ending progress, that has lost all sense of how to mark another orbit of the sun, except by the arbitrary celebration of a birthday, prompting the acquisition of yet more unnecessary frivolities and trinkets.

All these were good thoughts that I had, of course, a couple of hours after parting ways with Wilforth, for his comments about the Bible had me a bit befuddled for a short while, and we somehow got sidetracked talking about the cricket that was playing on a TV above the bar. Biblical theology, like all good worldviews, has a teleology – a destination point; but it is fixed, not endless. But don’t Christians believe in eternal life? They do, and some may find it hard to conceive of, if they imagine it to be represented by an infinitely long line of progressive time into the future. But in that Biblical theology seems to have a fixed-point teleology – a summing up, a judgment, the second coming of Christ – eternal life would appear to then be a time beyond the time of the ‘end’ point, at which point perhaps that eternal life will rise gracefully back into its pattern of circularity and rhythm established by its Creator from the outset; an eternal state not represented by a continuous straight line extending ad infinitum into the future, but something circular – perhaps a spiral, ascending – harmonising creation and freeing it from its linear bondage to decay and entropy, as summer and winter, springtime and harvest continually regenerate new life. And the last thing to die will be death itself.

‘Yes,’ I texted Wilforth later, on having had all these reflections. ‘I think I’ll become a monk.’

I exhaled slowly, satisfied with my decision.

‘…ey,’ he texted back.