Galileo Galilei showing the Doge of Venice how to use the telescope by Giuseppe Bertini (1858)
This is usually our second musical Haggard tribute piece in rehearsals and concerts. You can find it as the fifth on the original Eppur si muove album by Haggard. The whispered verses at the beginning, right after the step by step addition of each instrument led by the first violin, reflect about the divine revelation that human beings are offered through the path of reason. Galileo was not an atheist – he saw that the universe was ordered through partly undisclosed natural laws and called out the inconsistencies in knowledge, as any scientist should. Whether these discoveries are allowed to us by a Supreme Observer that frees us from limiting convictions or whether they are available to the human observer to the extent of its capacity to perceive and to reason – is a matter of choice of standpoint and individual perspective. The recited verse in the beginning of this piece quotes Galileo — thought to have been saying: “I did not feel obliged to believe that the same God, who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect, has intended us to forgo their use”. Our faculties are viewed here as instruments of release from our mental or spiritual enslavement.
Astronomy is one of the oldest of the natural sciences, yet the Copernican Scientific Revolution in Europe took place only in 1543, because of many centuries of political interest in the control of the masses, which deemed scientific pursuit risky and thus often brutally banned. Neolithic and bronze age artefacts demonstrate signs of human knowledge of mathematics and astronomy for more than 35 thousand years Before Christ. For the Ancient Greeks, astronomy was a branch of mathematics and it was applied science. Mathematics allowed people to predict the movements of celestial bodies and to orient themselves on sea and land with sophisticated calculus. They actually had to dive into trigonometry with pen, paper and their eyes on the stars. That’s why we’ll hear these verses: “So all the stars will guide us on our way; the sextant as the leader has duration for all days. Look at the amazing skies, in long and profound discoveries!”
Observers tend to have a strong and a clear mind. Just as the navigator has to constantly check his sextant to re-adjust its components in order to notice measurement errors, so does the human observer need to look after the purification of the lenses through which he sees and reflects about the world. We are called by this song to self-observe and to consider how the observer interferes with the objects and phenomena under observation.
The song depicts Galileo’s daily way of life, the way he gets absorbed by his work and the impressive impact of his research in astronomy: “in endless nights he entirely observes the skies; his publications will change the world: Galileo Galilei”. Apart from his actual practice of studying the ordered movement of celestial bodies through his telescope, if we read these verses as metaphors, we might be reminded of those dark moments arriving sooner or later in our lives, sometimes lingering too long, when we are upset or somehow afflicted. Then contemplating the skies allows us to see our problems from a cosmic perspective. How small and insignificant they seem then, when we realise we are just a speck of dust agitating itself over passing petty interests.
There is also a set of conceptual metaphors in looking up — up is associated with growth, according to American linguist and philosopher George Lakoff. Many people address their prayers upwards, feeling small and in need of protection from something much bigger than all of us, that encompasses the whole world, and has the power of creation and of destruction, and whom some choose to value as benevolent and others choose to fear — but either way It is beyond our grasp and reveals Itself to the keen observers that look to understand or to discover and seldom to those who look only to confirm their own mistakes for the absolute truth.
The fears that commonly arise when reason reveals that we’ve been wrong are an indicator of human beings’ desire for stability in an unstable world. But scientists and philosophers have always proposed a different type of anchor to calm our existential vertigo – learning about the tides of this world and the forces that produce them, so that we can surf our ways through the waves of instability, instead of resting too long in the apparent comfort of myths held as absolute truths. It takes more work to train oneself for the predictable, the unseen and the unforeseen than to put one’s faith in the empty promises of those who claim to know the will of God.