Outer space, inner space, space as aspiration of governments, space as metaphor for psychiatrists, space the intangible that we are always trying to fold into our arms.

Perhaps there remains for us

some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take

into our vision...

     Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space

gnaws at our faces...

     Fling the emptiness out of your arms

into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds

will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

In just these few fragments from his first Duino Elegy, Rilke gives us three exciting ways of imagining space.  We wrap our vision around the tree and bring it into our interior space, which we fill with all the beautiful places we have been.  How large is the world inside our skulls!  It is filled with the Infinite.

The wind of night recalls for us the black of space between the stars.  The chill evokes the chill of vacuum.  The isolation we feel echoes the isolation of one solar system from the next.  Our nearest neighbors, unimaginably distant as the house down the road on a winter night.

Our breath charges the air in which the birds fly.  When I first read this, I thought "perhaps the birds will FILL the expanded air,"because I want to see space as something that needs filling.  But Rilke is willing to hover in uncertainty, leaving the space as an opening to be experienced by the birds.  And of course, the birds have inner emotional lives as lucid as Rilke's own, alert to the subtleties of the air, which stirs their passions.

What a complexity of space Rilke inhabits!

I've been thinking about space in a more cosmological sense lately.  It's now common knowledge that space and time are relative, but really, what does that mean?  We sometimes are asked to imagine bowling balls dropped onto the bed sheet.  The surface warps, that's space being warped by the forces of gravity.  But our image involves a two dimensional surface being warped within a three-dimensional space, so how do we apply that charmingly domestic metaphor to the real three-dimensional world?  I've never figured that out, all I know is that the bed sheet has some bowling balls lodged in it and that seems awfully uncomfortable.

Space has acquired nuances these past one hundred years.  More recently, the theoretical physicists have decided that in addition to the usual three dimensions, there are 7 or so incredibly tiny curled up dimensions, attached to every particle of the Universe.  Oh yes, particles, that reminds me.  I can't recall the book, I fear, but I remember reading the rather poetical musings of one physicist.  I don't know about you, but I really enjoy those moments when scientists wax poetic.  The results are often both absurd and sublime.  This particular physicist was describing the possibly fundamental particles that carry the force charges that ignite our universe.  And he spoke of particles that create space.

See, there's something very strange about space itself.  Not just the metaphor, but the actual fundamental stage of existence.  It's expanding.  That's old news, but now we learn that it expands at different rates at different times.  First it was expanding rather sedately, just after the Big Bang.  Then it accelerated, then slowed down again, and now it is (perhaps) accelerating again.  That is mysterious enough, but not itself the part that puzzles me.  I've read that the space BETWEEN galaxies is expanding, but not space WITHIN galaxies.  We, for example, are not expanding.  The amount of space between our solar system and its neighbors is likewise stable.  But the distance to the Andromeda galaxy is growing, not as a function of Andromeda's own motion but as an expansion of the very emptiness between us.  There is a fundamental field, or possibly particles that create the field, and that field is changing.  This is even more radical than Einstein's warped bed sheets.  The physicist whose name I can't recall posited a particle whose purpose is to create the field of space, and imagined that early after the Big Bang, these particles were uncoordinated, one with another, so that the Universe was made up of shards of space.

I imagine that somehow they coalesced into the apparently uniform field in which we all make our way, but this business of expansion between galaxies suggests that the picture is still incomplete.

Space is a mystery, whether out at the limits of observation or closer to home.  Space is malleable and variable in more than just the physical world.  Let's give Rilke the last word, that unmatched master of mapping interior spaces.

What birds plunge through is not the intimate space

in which you see all forms intensified.

(Out in the Open, you would be denied

your self, would disappear into that vastness.)

Space reaches from us and construes the world:

to know a tree, in its true element,

throw inner space around it, from that pure

abundance in you.  Surround it with restraint.

It has no limits.  Not till it is held

in your renouncing is it truly there.

(Translation by Stephen Mitchell)