Surface Tension

Why his brother monks called him Purewater Peter, was because there was so little tension around him. He was - well - wispish. Nebulous. His hobby was astronomy. He was star-struck and didn’t have much time for the petty worries of ordinary, day-to-day life, which relentlessly pursue and irritate the rest of us.

Peter was brilliant and yet, at the same time, exceptionally simple and totally lacking in self-consciousness. To many of his fellow monks he seemed to be, as they put it, outside himself. Not that he wasn’t at one with his body and wasn’t well-grounded. He was. Before joining the holy order he had been a world-class sportsman. He had played rugby for his university and then his country. And he had excelled. Because of his natural good looks and his self-effacing manner he became a hero - a role-model for young men and an object of abject adoration for young women. He had excelled academically, gaining a first in Mathematics at Cambridge University. He had boxed too. He was hard and courageous. He had become a judo black-belt. He knew his body and he knew what he could do with it. Extraordinary. He once told me that he valued courage and selfless love above everything in the world. He always said that he saw these special qualities in himself as gifts - as talents that he was duty-bound to exploit to their fullest capacity, which he did and with such a natural ease that it left you breathless. It really was as if he could do no wrong. At least, not in the really important things. Of course, like all of us, he screwed up a little here and there, but he always came through shining and clean. And I don’t know of anyone to this day, who bears him a grudge or actually has a bad word to say about him.

Peter did not join the order because life was too tough or disappointing for him. He had succeeded at everything he had attempted, but he had nonetheless given up the world to devote himself to God. Not that many successful men and women haven’t over the centuries given up the worldly clamour and taken holy orders. They have. To many people it can look like an attractive way of life. And so it was for Peter.

But it wasn’t God, as such, who had called to Peter. It was the stars. It was this obsession though that eventually became the source of his pain. For the first time in his life he suffered. Not because he had lost his faith or was wavering. No, it was because prayer, contemplation and worship in the end just didn’t do it for him, but the stars did. The sight and the silent, magnificent splendour of the heavens on a clear moonless light did do it for him - in spades. Peter always found himself transported on a wave of awe and wonder. The power of it all touched him with the joy of love. He found, he told me years later, how contemplating the heavens lit a fire in him, which seemed to spread out from his own heart in deep, rolling waves, encompassing everything, right out into the furthest reaches of space and into the heart of every sentient being in the universe. This was real mystical stuff, but it worked well for Peter.

He also admitted to me that what had really changed his life were the half dozen or so LSD trips he had taken at college. Peter described to me in great detail the manner in which the veils had been lifted and what he had seen. He did appreciate the power and the limitations of the drug and the celestial visions, which it produced. It was during one of these trips that Peter had first seen the stars and had fallen in love.

The problem, he realized after being in the order for twenty years, was that he wanted to devote his life to exploring the stars, to reach deeper into what they could tell him about himself, the world, the meaning and purpose of existence. So he didn’t want science for the sake of science. He wanted science as a vehicle that could carry him to his love and - maybe - to the truth.

Peter did not have a telescope. That would have been unacceptable to the order. But he did have books and pictures - beautiful pictures. It wasn’t just the scale and the beauty of the heavens that struck so deep into him. It was also the ways that the stars worked. The Red Giants, The Pulsars, the Quasars and the Super-Novae. What really inspired Peter above everything was the incredible fine-tuning of the forces in the universe, which allowed for our emergence and existence, or which were required to produce us - beings that are aware of ourselves and of the universe in itself. As Peter pointed out, we are nothing if not the universe looking at itself, becoming aware of itself. He often quoted from the medieval mystic and alchemist Paracelsus. His favourite was ‘Solve at Coagulum’, which Peter transliterated as ‘He separates in order to unite’. It was all so clear to Peter. I kind of got it.

For five years Peter studied astronomy and astro-physics through a special arrangement set up for him by his old University and the Abbot. His college was an ancient and a powerful one and could speak with a loud voice when it wanted to express loyalty to one of its own favourite sons. Peter had, as usual, all the help he needed. He had only to ask.

Twenty years of commitment at Peter’s level, though, was something to be reckoned with. As far as he could, he had given his all. He had done his utmost to conform with the philosophies and faith of the order. Again he had done well, but it had never completely subsumed him. He found over the years that it could only take him so far and his real inspiration could only be found in the science of the stars.

He sat his final exams in the monastery’s vast, oak-paneled refectory. The day he qualified was the day that he quit the order and stepped out into the world again.

Peter went straight into astro-physics and steamed ahead. He devoted himself to the study of the physical processes going on in stars. He spent hours sharing his scientific knowledge and insights with me. He loved to talk and, fortunately for him, I could never get enough of this kind of stuff. He explained to me that for a star to remain stable and burn evenly, long enough for life to evolve, an astonishing, mind-blowing balancing act is performed between gravity and the nuclear forces. Because all atomic nuclei carry a positive charge, they must be pushed together hard enough in the core of stars to overcome the electrical repulsion force, and just close enough to allow the nuclear forces to dominate, and for fusion to take place. So, Peter painstakingly pointed out, if gravity were weaker stars would not be compressed and fusion would not occur. If gravity were stronger stars would be smaller and would run through their life cycles more quickly - too quickly for intelligent life to emerge. He was fascinated too by the Red Giants. These are stars, which have exhausted hydrogen and are burning helium. Now, Peter told me, to produce carbon requires, a very specific set of resonances, or energy levels. Without the matching resonances of nuclei in Red Giants, the universe would have had nothing more to play with than helium and hydrogen, and not a lot would have happened! Peter found this fine-tuning awesome.

Another scientific discovery, which completely blew his post-acid mind, was that sometimes when a massive star exhausts its fuel and collapses, it can form a dense stellar core - as smooth as a ball bearing, smaller than a city but more massive than the Sun. It's called a Neutron Star and is nothing more nor less than a giant atomic nucleus. Now the amazing thing about all this was that when one of these Neutron Stars explodes it generates all the energy needed to synthesize a whole variety of the elements heavier than iron. This event is beautifully named a Super Nova. Material from the inner part of the surrounding star plummets down into the core at speeds approaching 15% of the speed of light. And when this material hits the core it compresses. But neutron stuff is very difficult to compress and it quickly bounces back, reversing the shock wave, sending it speeding back out through the star. Now, the shock wave is followed by a flood of neutrinos. The matter in this shock wave is so dense that it absorbs neutrinos. The energy from the neutrinos gives the shock wave just the boost it needs to blow the outer layers of the star apart. In a moment, tons of gold, silver, mercury, lead, tin, copper are created in the fiery collision zone. And this is how all these elements come into being. Wow.

Peter found all this deeply moving and inspiring. Sometimes it made him laugh, but it always assured him - if he needed assuring - that we live in, what he liked to call, a Designer Universe. He held that there had to have been some pretty subtle tampering with the laws of physics, some very precise tunings of the dials to produce stars, let alone us and our incredibly complex bodies and minds. He loved to think of us as the children of the stars, remembering that our atoms were forged in the most extreme and extraordinary conditions imaginable. If you really pinned him down he would say that he was certain that a higher intelligence was responsible for our presence in this universe. That’s really about as far he could take it. What form that intelligence took, where it resides, where indeed it came from were not issues that concerned him. He was not into conjecture. He sought only what he could know and experience himself. He was his own laboratory and love-nest.

One thing Peter had never experienced - ever - was carnal love. He had never been in love with anyone. He’d had, as you can imagine, all the opportunities in the world to fulfil any man’s wildest dreams. But he’d kept his need and his seed to himself. When I asked him about this on one of my visits to the monastery, he just laughed. Not forced or anything. Hardly more than a chuckle. But it reassured me immediately that he did not regret in the slightest missing out on the experience of physical and emotional love. Don’t think for a minute that he was inhuman or unloving. On the contrary, he was filled with love. I have never known a more loving, sensitive man. For example, after his second LSD trip he became a vegan - that is, a total vegetarian. Fruit and veg was his thing and he never deviated once, as far as I know. He saw some things in a butcher’s window that completely and literally turned his head.

His groundbreaking work in Astronomy won him acclaim within the community of professional stargazers. His contribution was significant, but he was always more the lover than the hard-nosed technician. Also he was not ambitious to climb the ladder and win accolades and a higher salary. The work for Peter was reward enough in itself.

Then one bright spring morning he disappeared. Completely. Without a trace, without leaving any clues as to what had happened or where he had been. In the eight years he was AWOL, no body was found. No sightings of him were ever made. Zilch.

When Peter finally reappeared he was seventy-five years old. He had money and he was in excellent health. He had nothing to offer me or anyone else, though, as an explanation for his mysterious absence, except about a dozen black and white photographs. Peter gave them to me when we met again before he even shook my hand. He looked immediately relieved to hand them over. The photographs were printed to about A4 size and were loosely wrapped around with brown paper, taped at the join.

We met in the lobby of my apartment block and took the elevator to the fourth floor. On the way up we did not look at the photographs. Peter joked about the expensive, glitzy-looking building in which I lived. Well, I’ll admit I could see the funny side of it all and he liked that.

We talked for a while about my work, then he casually invited me to look at his photographs. While I tore open the package, Peter took a seat by the window where he could watch me and the slowly rolling River Thames.

The pictures were all of scenes of the most extraordinary beauty but, at the same time, scenes from everyday life. The most ordinary and the most mundane things like a couple shopping, a student crossing the road, a furniture workshop, a dentist at work. There were always people in the shots. And often there were animals. They were intensely powerful. The nearest thing to this work, that I could think of, were the paintings of Norman Rockwell. Rockwell immortalized some very mundane things. Rockwell had an exceptional talent to be sure, but what he could not do was what Peter had achieved. There was a resemblance, but Peter’s work, while capturing the pure and simple beauty of the moment, managed to transform his subjects into something ethereal and majestic - even....................godlike.

Peter’s photographs lifted his unprepossessing subjects out of time and cast them glowing like beacons of wonder into eternity. To say that his pictures were timeless would be an understatement. They were located outside time and when I pondered them, they took me out there with them. They lifted me right out of myself. I felt transported. I felt wonderful. They were deeply powerful and satisfying.

Peter did not stay long. I managed to keep him with me for a couple of hours. When he left I asked him for a phone number, an address. He just smiled his knowing smile, squeezed my hands with the warmest affection and then determinedly closed my own front door on me. I haven’t seen or heard from him since that day.

He left me his photographs. I still have them. I think that’s the way it will stay. On the reverse of the final photograph there was a short poem, a haiku, written in Peter’s own immaculate hand and it went like this:

The owner of the field

Goes to see

How the scarecrow is

And comes back...............

That’s all. His last observation on the mystery of his own existence. It was crystal-clear to me what he meant. I hope that you can understand it too and that now you can see why I have kept those extraordinary pictures to myself..........Casting pearls before swine, springs nimbly to mind.........................

Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon was born in Cambridge in 1943. He was educated at St. Faith's, Cambridge and Oundle School. Nigel began writing while still a student and subsequently published poems and short stories in the UK, the USA and in France. He toured the UK performing at poetry and poetry & jazz readings with the New Departures Group. Nigel's interest in film took him to the London School of Film Technique in 1969. From film school he joined the industry as a trainee editor working on TV commercials, then moved to the BBC as an editor, cutting dramas and documentaries. Nigel formed his first production company, Green Back Films in 1976 with the partners of the record sleeve design company, Hipgnosis. They worked on music promotions for Donovan, Pink Floyd, 10cc, Squeeze, Rainbow, Joe Cocker, Big Country, Wings and Paul Young, producing ground-breaking and award-winning commercials and videos He later joined the creative team at the Central Office of Information, writing and directing for the international TV documentary series This Week in Britain and Living Tomorrow. Nigel is recognised for his ability to make difficult and technical subjects accessible through his exciting and thought-provoking films. His most outstanding work includes an acclaimed series of films for the UK's Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, SAVING THE CHILDREN, a television documentary on women who work for children's' charities. He also directed The Bobby Charlton Story, Reflections, Satguru, Rainbow - Live Between The Eyes and the series Whatever You Want for the UK's Channel Four. GORDON FILMS UK was formed in 1995 to produce the award-winning television documentary THE COLOURS OF INFINITY, presented by Sir Arthur C. Clarke with music by David Gilmour on the discovery of the Mandelbrot Set and the development of Fractal Geometry. COLOURS has thus far been broadcast in over twenty territories world-wide, including in the UK - on Channel Four. Following from THE COLOURS OF INFINITY Nigel has produced and directed IS GOD A NUMBER? This television documentary looks at the mystery of consciousness and some remarkable discoveries that have recently been made in mathematics. He has also produced and directed a biographical broadcast documentary on the life of the mathematician, Benoît Mandelbrot. Nigel has just completed directing a feature film, REMEMBER A DAY, for Madcap Productions. Nigel's first book, INTRODUCING FRACTAL GEOMETRY was published by ICON BOOKS in November 2000.

Email: Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon

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