a study in Gravity

The title of this show, A Study in Gravity, was taken in inspiration from a Radiohead lyric,

“He used to do [plastic] surgery, for girls in the eighties, but gravity always wins.”

What Thom Yorke penned as ‘gravity’, King Solomon in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes calls ‘hevel’, which is here translated to ‘meaningless’.

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”

In other translations of the Bible, hevel has been translated as ‘vanity’ or ‘futility’ but the most literal translation of the word is ‘vapor’ or ‘smoke’: something which is beautiful to the eye, and which may perhaps appear solid, but when grasped at, will slip through your fingers. These translations of the ‘hevel’ point to what the author of Ecclesiastes is trying to express about the fleeting nature of this life under the sun. This life and its ways are not ones we can hold onto tightly. The physical beauty of clouds of vapor, or of tendrils of smoke, is partially in their transience. Try to box them in and they dissipate.

In the end, the ‘answer’ in Ecclesiastes is to accept our lives for what they are: hevel. Under this sun, gravity will always win. But instead of gripping or grasping or trying to prop it up, we are to step back and to acknowledge and enjoy all that we have been given in this life. In all its fleeting beauty.

The themes in this show are each drawn from the above ideas.

Opening evening captured by Jon Manzke.

The below weavings serve as the thesis statement of this show. The quote “Be comforted, small one, in your smallness.” is from C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra, the second book of the space trilogy series. This quote is pulled from a moment when one of the god figures of that universe is speaking to the main character, a human, essentially affirming his finitude.

He is only human.