Circularity by Geoff Carter The Pen in Hand Blog

Attribution: Photo by Galina Nelyubova on Unsplash

By Geoff Carter

A couple weeks ago, some old college buddies and I got together to go to our annual Brewers’ game outing. We keep in touch mostly because we exchange emails that inevitably spiral into discussions about politics, sports, and other sundry subjects, but we’ve known each other for decades. We’re a pretty close circle of friends.

This year, one of the guys suggested that each of us contribute ten of our all-time favorite songs that he would compile into a single playlist to play at our tailgate party. The trick would be to try and guess who picked which song. Fun, but a lot more difficult than it might seem at first glance.

How do you boil down a lifetime of listening pleasure into ten songs? How to pick only ten from the gamut of everything from Miles Davis to The Band to Chicago to Bruce Springsteen to Elvis Costello to X to Frank Sinatra to The Grateful Dead?

Most of my favorites were from those college days. I’ve discovered some twenty-first century artists like Noga Erez and Billie Eilish that I like, but my heart and soul always go back to the seventies and eighties. And it was very hard not to look back in this case. Not just for me, but for all of us. Most of my top ten choices were from my college days.

When I was listening to “I Will Follow” by U2 while choosing my top ten, I remembered how excited and amazed I was when first heard it. I was in my early twenties and new possibilities seemed endless at that time, but now most of those doors have been gone through—or have closed. Listening to the same song nearly fifty years later, I find myself looking backward instead of looking forward. Same song, different direction. Forward to back. I was—am—moving in a circle, completing another revolution. Hope took me forward, and memory takes me back.

Of course, almost everything, not just memory, moves in circles—or cycles: the seasons, the planets, animal migrations, the phases of the moon, the tides, and, as it turns out, time. Just about everything repeats and returns. Just about everything cycles through. Circles don’t have beginnings or ends. They intersect, overlap, or run rings around us, but they never cease.

Our lives span the circle of our time (so aptly described by Shakespeare in “The Seven Ages of Man”) and generations after us will follow in the tracks through the same circle, experiencing birth, childhood, love, parenthood, old age, and death as our ancestors have. As my circle is drawing closer to closing its arc, I find myself wondering about history and why that also seems (despite all the warnings against it) to repeat itself.

As I get older, I find myself thinking about those who came before us, who already ran this arc of the life cycle. When I was young, I deluded myself (in my unthinking arrogance) into thinking everything we experienced was brand-new, discovered by our generation—a pathetic fallacy if there ever was one. Our generation, or the former, or the next, didn’t discover sex or angst or love or injustice or pain—although we thought we did. No, we were hiking down well-worn paths traveled by all who came before us.

I saw the glimmering circle of the full moon the other night, and I wondered what it might look like once we started building bases on it, as NASA seems to be planning to do. Will we be looking up at a series of lunar strip malls? Moonlight McDonalds? Our moon has been there forever, running through its own cycles, never ending and never changing. Now it seems it will have to bear the additional cycle of man’s intrusion into the natural word—not a very happy cycle.

From the devastated forests of Europe to the pillaging of the Americas to the destruction of our natural world to the eradication of our rainforests and the wanton destruction of our planet, greed is a recurring cycle—a downward spiral not unlike a flushing toilet, that only increases in intensity while decreasing in wisdom—a cycle of greed and destruction.

Political power and warfare run along the same recurring patterns. Countless empires have risen and fallen over the eons of human existence. War has raged as long as human beings have existed. Greed and oppression have existed for as long as one person sought to dominate another. And so those bloody circles keep turning. And we never seem to learn.

Of course, we have also seen cycles of enlightenment, reason, discovery, scientific achievement, and profound humanitarianism. The American Revolution firmly established inalienable rights for all men. We first went to the moon in 1969. We conquered polio, smallpox, and other horrible diseases, at least until another recurring cycle—that of ignorance and fear—supplanted it.

So, these circles intersect, spanning the personal, the public, the past, and the political. Everything spins; everything revolves, but everything is connected.

In their concept of the microcosm, the Elizabethans might have had the right idea. They believed “…that the human body was the microcosm or “little world” that mirrored the structure of the wider universe, or macrocosm” (Cambridge University Press). To them, the human body, the state, and even the stage were reflections of the universe and nature. So, the veins in a leaf were like the veins in the hand like the tributaries, canals, and rivers—all were reflections of the cosmos, circles within circles if you will. Music aspired to imitate the music of the spheres, the seven turning orbs of the cosmos that created music so beautiful it was beyond comprehension. We were, according to Elizabethan thought, a reflection, a scaled model, as it were, of the cosmos, moving in concert or in sync with ellipses of heavenly bodies. Circles within circles.

The circle is eternal. No beginning, no end, just a continuation. Pi, the mathematical constant that defines the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, cannot be defined. It is infinite. Our understanding of the eternal is usually defined as a circle or a recurring cycle. Over two billion people believe in reincarnation, the rebirth of the soul into a new lifespan. Western religions posit that the immortal soul ascends to heaven to exist in eternal bliss. May the circle be unbroken

Is there a logic behind the patterns and cycles of our lives, or do we exist in an arbitrary universe where the only logic is that imposed by the human mind? We discern cycles, patterns, and relationships, but the only circle we know exists is that of our own existence, and the track of that sphere leads us to our ultimate destination. It also allows us to see where we’ve been and who we’ve become.

Parts of our experience seem eternal and universal, elements of the human condition, but other elements, other memories, are singularly personal. When I listen to my U2 or my Talking Heads, I travel back along the track of who I was and compare it to who I am—circles that are the same but different. It is the intersections of these concentric circles, of all these circles which intersect in my life, that define me, and which also define us.