THE HARMONY OF THE SPHERE

A book of prose and poetry explores the scientific roots of spiritual experience.

Bjerken’s love of physics is apparent in the first of six essays in this densely written book, “OR, An Alternative,” which defines a “mystical experience” as “a personal involvement in a physical property of the universe.” But the natural beginning of the collection occurs in the fifth essay. Entitled “My Introduction,” it echoes the structure of the whole work by blending poetry and prose in an autobiography that is both rambling and terse. Thus, Bjerken juxtaposes “Crawled, out of swamp, and I rested” with “My father died when I was four, he committed suicide” as he describes his unruly Minnesota childhood as the son of an often absent widowed mother who introduced him to philosophy and mythology from China and India. Later, as a rowdy sailor on the verge of court martial, he had his first mystical experience before finding astrophysics, “finally…a field that could satisfy.” Readers hoping for a simple or even easily understandable explanation of link between the scientific and the spiritual or mystical may feel thwarted, however, as they attempt to keep track of Bjerken’s acronyms—including Oriented Relations (OR), spacetime (ST), and State of Relation (S of R)—while navigating such intricate concepts as, “In OR a simple falling body’s S of R begins from arrested motion and accelerates towards its Orientor at the formal ST radial rate.” For those who find the essays opaque, the poems, which Bjerken describes as having “roots in the Metaphysical poetry of the 17th Century,” may be better suited to his blend of the technical and the esoteric. Some of the most memorable ideas and images in this sometimes-inscrutable book appear in “Cross Country Skiing,” in which the changing condition of the ski trail becomes a metaphor for life, and “The Hyphen” is an intriguing meditation on the human life span through the titular punctuation between the dates carved on a tombstone.  

A thought-provoking, if occasionally incomprehensible, study of mystical reality.