On Retrograde Motions

I discovered yesterday that Mercury's been in retrograde since the 7th until the 29th, which can help explain some of my current frustrations with not being able to write or otherwise express myself clearly. Riding my bike around after finding this out, I was somewhat relieved to know it was "only the planets" moving backwards again, but considered that actually, retrograde motion isn't real, it is only a centuries old misperception that we still express because of how it looks to us, which was itself a kind of crisis to the scientific methods, in that in our anthropocentric cosmologies the planets had to be moving backwards, and no simple and elegant system could fully articulate that, when really it was only a disparity of orbits and velocity, where the planets on wider orbits would get behind our perception of where they should be in the sky, thus appearing to move backwards.

On the other hand, I believe that as big gravitationally active objects, the planets must have some physical effect on us, the way the moon influences tides and periods. At the beginning of the war on Iraq, Mars was the closest its been to Earth in thousands of years, and I don't think that's a coincidence, so that even though the planets don't move backwards they do seem to fall behind, thus causing a seeming opposition in our actual lives, particularly Mercury, which is fairly close to us, going retrograde three times a year, often with disastrous effects to communication and travel, those fields the Egyptians relegated to Hermes' influence.

Of course it seems it would be impossible to scientifically prove if the effects of retrograde motion are real or imagined (not that that might make much difference to those who claim to feel the effects), as any experiment would require a control solar system similar enough to ours but without retrograde motion, which clearly we don't just have a spare solar system lying around, or otherwise for a survey historical records of all communication happening during periods of Mercury retrograde, which data computers might be able to crunch one day, except that "not working" or "going wrong" seem to be more in our perceptions of the intended effects of our communications then int the communications themselves, once again a matter of misperception. And so like God, retrograde motion may currently have to be relegated to the realm of the unprovable, and thus a matter of individual taste and faith to believe in. If anything though, real or not, knowing Mercury's in retrograde right now at least took some of the burden off of blaming myself solely for things not working right, which makes it possible to frame the attitudes necessary to do them different, because retrogrades reminds me to remember that we often, like Earth, get ahead of the reality of our perceptions.