DIALOGO

Are you Ptolemaic or Copernican? Don’t worry – I’m not asking about your sexual preferences. Nor yet about your taste in wine – that other area of primary importance in life. No – nor about your likes and dislikes in literature, which is, of course, the most important thing of all.  “Have you read the latest Copernicus? I couldn’t see the ending coming!”  “ No, no, I’d rather go to bed with a nice Ptolemy.”  Never fear. You’ve not been missing anything. They weren’t even runners-up for the Booker prize. Partly because they’ve both been dead for a while. Nor have they lent their names to designer star-signs, with the usual paraphernalia of birthstones, colours and associated scents for aromatherapy. “I’m mostly Ptolemy, but part of me’s on the cusp to Copernicus – that’s why I go a bit funny at parties sometimes, and tend to drink too much.”

In a sense, though, they are star-signs. And they do relate to personalities, describing rather than determining them. And if they had been novelists, Ptolemy would have had the more interesting characters and Copernicus the better-constructed plots.

I’d better come clean and drop the intellectual pretence. Copernicus and Ptolemy represented, as Galileo put it in his Dialogo, the two great world-systems. One of them, Ptolemy, looked up at the sky and described what he saw, very accurately, without particularly trying to make sense of it. If a star or a planet moved regularly one way across the celestial hemisphere and then suddenly turned round and started moving back in the opposite direction, or did a little shimmy, or a dozy-do, (as we say in country-dancing) then that’s what Ptolemy wrote down in his calculations.

It made them a bit complicated, admittedly, and every time something new happened, he (or his successors, because the Ptolemaic system as such lasted for at least a millennium and a half) had to add a rider, such as “not on Thursdays when there’s an R in the month, except for February and sometimes April.”  But the point was that he (or someone else) had already done the calculations, so all you had to do was look them up, not work them out yourself, so the complexity didn’t really matter, and every time you found something was wrong, you wrote off to the people who were editing the star-tables and in the next edition they got it right, with another “patch” – that’s what they call it in computer-programming and trouser-mending: a patch – because it’s easier than starting again from the beginning. Just like life, really, where you don’t even get the chance to start again from the beginning.

Copernicus, on the other hand, who may have been German and may have been Polish and may, in fact, have been both – it all depends on where you’re standing when you look at him – Copernicus really did start from scratch, and took, as his premise, something which made all the calculations very easy and straightforward, with no exceptions and no anomalies – at least, at that time, none that were big enough to be noticed by the instruments available to him. If he used any instruments. He may simply have taken the Ptolemaic observations, which were accurate enough as far as they went, and looked for a simpler, more rational, more mathematically elegant way to arrive at the same results, reflecting, perhaps, as he did so, that his mathematics actually produced all the apparent exceptions and anomalies and reverse motions that Ptolemy had to accommodate with cycles and epicycles and patches.

So: what I’m asking you is how you explain reality. What reality? Well, try this bit of it.

Dog-walkers move through the areas where they walk their dogs like heavenly bodies through the cosmos.  And so, of course, do the dogs. Some of them are like satellites in a tight orbit around the mother-planet, always showing it the same eager face and long pink tongue. Others, like comets, describe great ellipses, disappearing seemingly forever into the outer darkness, returning only every seventy-six years or so, to intersect with the more stately progress of the star to which they “belong” in order to get a biscuit and have their lead put on again before they cross the road and go home. Others have more elaborate patterns still, composed out of habit, bursts of energy, and sudden, unexpected wafts of scent that vary with season, temperature and relative humidity. Perturbations in orbit – that’s what they’re called. That’s how you know things are there that you can’t actually see at the time – like Neptune or Pluto, or the cat under the hedge on the far side of the field.

Then there are the dog-walkers themselves, and their interactions with one another: mutual attraction, mutual repulsion, mutual indifference, relative speeds, directions, vectors – what a complicated and fascinating pattern it all makes on any morning or evening of the week in the village where I live. Though of course, what you see all depends on where you stand to look at it.

Even though we all tend to walk our dogs in the same area, everybody has their own special walk, traversing a well-defined path in a specific order from which they are unlikely to diverge, unless to keep company with another walker. But mostly you just greet each other from a distance with an upraised hand. This is a period outside of time. The mind, as Eliot puts it, is conscious, but conscious of nothing. It is a kind of waking sleep, a blissful nirvana – though I don’t think Buddha had a dog.

One of the people I regularly used to wave to – though it isn’t so much a wave as a stately salutation, a bit like a gladiator saluting a Roman Emperor – was Mr Rudge. The Rudges’ house is just where the fields begin, and sometimes I would see one or the other of them working in the garden or hanging out washing and I would exchange a word or two as I went by, starting or finishing my dog-walk.

When I first arrived in the village a couple of years ago, the Rudges had an agèd black Labrador called Fred. He and Mr Rudge, who was in his eighties, matched their speeds very well. I watched with sadness as Fred got slower and slower, extending their brisk half-hour to an agonising hour and a half. But if Mr Rudge tried to spare him what looked like torment, Fred’s fierce and obstinate pride unleashed a volley of barking that could be heard halfway across the village, and demanded a walk - or earplugs.

Then one morning, as I reached the top of the hill more out of breath than I expected to be, and reflected that I ought to take more exercise, I looked across and saw a large black Labrador cavorting and tail-chasing in front of the dark woods that effectively form the southern boundary to the area of sloping fields and copses where we walk our dogs.  I looked long and hard. There was no master or mistress in sight, though it was a normal path for Mr Rudge and others. I always avoided it – the woods seemed unfriendly to me, and I didn’t know what lay beyond them.

If the dog hadn’t seemed so youthful and full of life and energy, I would have said it was Fred – though perhaps it depended on where I was standing to look at him. All of a sudden, he stopped dancing for joy and lifted his head in my direction. He remained motionless for a full half-minute, looking at me, as I thought. Then he turned and slipped away into the dark wood behind him.

As I came down the hill and went past the Rudges’ house, I saw Mrs Rudge at the kitchen window and caught her eye. She nodded in acknowledgement. It was an unusually warm autumn, so the window was open – but the Rudges were of the old school, and always had the windows open anyway.

“Is Mr Rudge all right?” I asked.

“Never better,” she said, which was her standard answer. I was suddenly aware of the sound of someone digging in the back garden, behind the high hedge. I knew that Mr Rudge took a fierce and obstinate pride in still doing his own gardening.

“I just thought I saw Fred out on his own,” I said.

“Oh no,” said Mrs Rudge, “couldn’t have been Fred.”  And she leant forward, almost out of the window, to say the next words more quietly. “Poor old Fred passed away in the night.”  Her hand was resting on the window-stay, to support her as she leant across, and as she leant back, she lifted the window-stay and closed the window, and turned her back on me, as if there was something she didn’t want me to see.

They got another dog, of course, a springer spaniel, liver and white. The speed ratio was about one to six, and I’m not sure even Copernicus could have produced an elegant equation to describe the orbit, but they coincided at crucial points. As Sir Thomas Beecham often said to the orchestras he conducted: All the audience can really demand is that we start and finish together.

I saw them morning and evening, the dog more often than his master, as his path crossed and re-crossed my own.

Then, one warm spring morning, as I went by the house, I heard a whining and scratching coming from inside. There was nobody to be seen, and the windows were all shut, despite the mildness of the weather. There was a car parked outside, rather dangerously, I thought, given the narrowness of the road, but the printed notice in its rear window explained: DOCTOR ON CALL it said.

When I walked my dogs in the evening, the house was quiet and the car had gone, but the windows were still closed, and the curtains in some of the rooms seemed to have been drawn earlier than normal. I saw all the usual people at the usual points on my walk – except for Mr Rudge and his springer spaniel. I can’t say that their absence had any particular effect on my trajectory.

My house is on the other side of the valley from the place where everybody walks their dogs, and from my front door I have a view that takes in the wood at the southern edge. I got out my keys, I remember, and then paused, and turned to look over at the deep, dark woods. Though the weather was warm, it was still early spring, the clocks not yet put forward and therefore the light fading. I thought I saw a familiar figure walking up the slope by the edge of the wood. When he got to the top of the hill, he seemed to turn and look in my direction and – I suppose it all depends where you stand when you’re looking – I had the impression, insofar as I could see clearly at that distance and in that light, that he was raising his hand, as a kind of greeting, and that it was directed at me. I doubted if he could actually see me so far away, but I raised my hand too, and he appeared to respond by nodding and then turning his gaze away.

I followed his glance and saw a dog come silently out of the wood. It stood there for a moment, its tail slowly oscillating, then it moved towards him and he bent down and took its head in his hands. I watched them while they stood there, until something happened to my eyes and I had to rub them clear. When I looked back, the pair were gone, and there was only the dark line of the wood, growing darker by the second.

In discussions about the systems of Ptolemy and Copernicus, the point is often made by those with a sneaking sympathy for Ptolemy that “it does look as if the Sun goes round the Earth!”  To which Copernicans reply with the self-satisfied smugness of those who know that reason and common-sense are not always the same thing: “How would it look if the opposite were the case?”

The truth is: it all depends where you stand when you’re looking.

Finished 12.43, 29.x.2001