Science, we
are regularly assured, is based on rationalism, repeatable experiment, hard
fact, and mathematical certainties – rising loftily above mythical beliefs,
cultural biases and individual vagaries. Poetry, on the other hand, is supposedly
about our inner worlds – unrepeatable experience, individual emotions, and the unpredictable
imagination. Science seems so crisp and defined, whereas no one I know has come
up with a decent definition of poetry; it’s something you just learn to
recognise when it strikes the ear, rather like the “unparaphrasable
meaningfulness of music” (the phrase is critic George Steiner’s from The Poetry of Thought).
Almost all
discussions I’ve seen start with this alleged dichotomy, these silos of human
thought, or the “two cultures”, as CP Snow famously termed the division. And
almost all the discussions I’ve seen – mostly launched by poets, to be sure –
go on to assert that this is just not the case. The argument might go like
this: not only is “science” a social construct like any other human
thought-system, it is, like poetry, founded in fundamental ways on metaphor.
They are both languages of understanding. And if one goes beyond the
simplicities of Newton’s objective laws of motion, into the subatomic realms of
quarks, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and Schrödinger’s Cat, a realm in
which the presence of the observer is inseparable from the experiment, one is
back in the dizzy whirl of the individual and the immeasurable. So why should poetry and science not be
speaking to each other, cross-fertilising? – and perhaps they always have done,
actually. Here’s the poet Alison Hawthorne Deming on the subject:
[T]he view from either side of the
disciplinary divide seems to be that poetry and science are fundamentally
opposed, if not hostile to one another. Scientists are seekers of fact;
poets revellers in sensation. Scientists seek a clear, verifiable and
elegant theory; contemporary poets, as critic Helen Vendler recently put it,
create objects that are less and less like well wrought urns, and more and more
like the misty collisions and diffusions that take place in a cloud
chamber. The popular view demonizes us both, perhaps because we serve
neither the god of profit-making nor the god of usefulness. Scientists
are the cold-hearted dissectors of all that is beautiful; poets the lunatic
heirs to pagan forces. We are made to embody the mythic split in western
civilization between the head and the heart. But none of this divided
thinking rings true to my experience as a poet.
Ruth Padel
is another American poet who has written on the topic; indeed, as
the granddaughter of one of Charles Darwin’s granddaughters, she has published
a whole poetic life of her famous evolutionary predecessor. In this, she is
echoing Charles’s own father, Erasmus Darwin, who wrote a lengthy treatise on
the science of his time in resounding heroic couplets. The early nineteenth-century Romantic poets
were fascinated by the scientific discoveries of their own day; and many
scientists and naturalist-travellers, including those to Southern Africa, felt
it was de rigueur to enliven their
accounts with snatches of quoted verse and Classical allusion. The divide, it
would seem, has become stricter, along with more intense specialisation in the
academy. Yet, as the anthology A Quark
for Mister Mark (edited by Maurice Riordan and Jon Turney, 2000) shows,
poets have continuously written about science and its theories, which sometimes
can seem as outlandish as any dreamscape, and to use science as metaphor in
wild ways. There is, as South African poet and literary mentor, the late Lionel
Abrahams, titled his last volume, a “chaos theory of the heart”.
Abrahams is
just one of any number of South African poets who have found in scientific
discovery rich imagery for topics not strictly scientific. Cosmological,
botanical, zoological, medical, geological, chemical terminologies, aesthetics
and ideas work their way into poems in obvious and subtle ways. Just as John
Donne, back in the seventeenth century, got poetically excited by the new cosmological
theories of Galileo and Kepler, so do modern poets in the age of moon walks, the Hubble telescope, the discovery of black holes and dark matter, which
are as mysteriously untouchable as any poetic implication.
No doubt
many scientists appreciate poetry – and some even write it. Pre-eminent among
such South Africans is Douglas Livingstone, a professional microbiologist whose
last volume of poems, A Littoral Zone
(1996), is structured around the various measuring stations he established to
monitor pollution levels along the South Coast. As one might expect, the
imagery of cells, molecules and chemical reactions feature strongly. Don Maclennan always reminded us as students
that poetry as poetry comes not from
raw emotions, or the ether, or scientific knowledge, but out of other poetry.
Livingstone wittily demonstrates this in one of his poems by ‘Giovanni Jacopo’,
a sort of comic alter ego he invented. In “Giovanni Jacopo Meditates (on the Passionate Bacteriologist to his
Love)”, he rips off a famous seventeenth-century poem by Andrew Marvell –
which was so gloopy and romantic it had almost immediately been satirised by
Walter Ralegh. In Livingstone’s self-mocking version, the speaker invites his
lover up to his laboratory, promising not Edenic gardens and unrealistic
happiness, but
Bacilli with
a sunset Hue
Will form a
little Chain for you,
& Cocci
on a Culture-plate
Will make
your heart gyrate
You’ll see
fresh Eggs infected by
The virus
from a bloodshot Eye.
For your
Delight, my Lover Doll,
I’ll
flourish Spleens in Alcohol.
In more
serious vein, Livingstone uses the microscopic to reflect the essentially
destructive side of human nature. In “A Natural History of the Negatio Bacillus”,
he mimics the terminology of a medical handbook – definition, epidemiology,
aetiology, diagnosis, prophylaxis – to map a kind of mythic evolution of the
human-as-disease, obliquely critiquing pride, aggression, and intellectual
separation from a sense of wholeness with the earth. We are, Livingstone
repeatedly recalls, ineluctably part of the material world – especially at the
molecular level, where interchanges between our ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are
happening continuously. Not least after death: in “Cells at Station 11”, the
poet-speaker, taking his ocean-water samples, wonders if cells from a “blackened
corpse” tumbling beyond the surf line have found their way into his test-tube.
At that level, we have always been, in common, infiltrated by
Billion-year
invaders
– the silent
mitochondria –
[which]
propel our mobile tower, shared cells
sparking,
colonised by vandals:
a fifth
column of DNA ...
We might “claim
autonomy”, but the independent “self” is something of an illusion; Livingstone
returns to that phrase “shared cells” to assert, basically, that to kill your
brother is to hurt yourself. For all the science (he draws explicitly on Lynn Margulis
and James Lovelock), it is almost religious.
In the same
way, Livingstone, caring deeply about the health of the planet and distressed
at humanity’s accelerating capacity to poison it, sees that the earth is us: it
is like a “bright blue cell”, uniquely hanging in space, and our relationship
with it boils down, bluntly, to a choice: “symbiosis or death”.
Many other
poets work with scientific material, language and disciplines. Scientists
themselves can be subjects. Charles Darwin,
whose evolutionary theories are foundational to all the natural sciences, inevitably
appears. Basil du Toit, in his poem “Darwinism” (in Older Women, 1996), wonders how he is to survive in Darwinism’s
tough world of unrelenting competitiveness and “searing wispy airs” – “you who
are so inhospitable to love”. Loveless and irreligious Darwinism might be but,
as du Toit notes in “Eye & Ocean”, it has also helped alert us to nature’s
complex bounties:
the
Darwin-rich deeps
supporting
genus after genus
ocean hierarchies:
whales,
jellyfish, plankton
rejuvenating
the blue organ.
Gus
Ferguson, in my view our finest comic poet, explores the evolutionary migration of
once-upon-a-time land mammals ‘back’ to the sea to become whales, in his
lightly ironic but affecting poem, “Poetry at the Whale Well”. (As it happens,
a transitional, 42 million year-old “hoofed whale” skeleton has just been
unearthed in Peru.)
Another,
related popular discipline, then, is palaeontology. South Africa is so rich in
fossil remains, from the most ancient ammonites through the dinosaurs of the
Karoo to the early hominid skeletons of Gauteng’s ‘Cradle of Humankind’, that
many poets have had a go at fossils. Ruth Miller, for example, riffs off Broom’s
discoveries in “Sterkfontein”, though her concern is less on the science than
on the remains’ implication that we all, as it were, descend into the cave of
death; we will all be blown to “the kingdom of shared graves”. In a quirky
essay, “The Hippo and the Moth”, Miller shows her familiarity with several
sciences, including zoology, relativity and the physics of light, although, as
she says, “the moth must remain a symbol at all costs”: that is the heart of
poetry.
Brian Warner,
a bit like a Livingstone-Ferguson cross, produced a volume of witty rhyming
poems (Dinosaur’s End, 1996) satirising
scientific discoveries, especially of the ancient dinosaurs and the fossil
remains of early hominids. Among the lighter squibs is his clerihew on the
discoverer of ‘Taung Man’:
Raymond
Arthur Dart
Gave
anthropologists a start
When out of
nowhere he sprung
And stuck
out his Taung.
Don
Maclennan, who shared with me an amateur interest in science, wrote repeatedly
of his particular fascination with Stone Age tools, the flakes and cores we
could find lying all over the Eastern Cape, even in Grahamstown’s gardens – “handaxes that obtrude/ to challenge who we
are/ after a million years of progress” (from Reading the Signs, 2005). Also in Grahamstown, Chris Mann is
particularly assiduous in exploring zoological and galactic subjects, and
marrying them with a sacralising reverence for life and its ecological
interdependencies.
All the
above is only to scratch the surface of a potentially vast subject – a book for
someone to write. Certainly, as Riordan and Turney say in their introduction to
A Quark for Mister Mark, poets,
whatever they are up to, are not ‘doing science’, their references to science “often
oblique, glancing, wry, or sardonic, or it is so much a part of a way of seeing
that the reader, and even the writer, may not be conscious of its presence.” That’s crucial: science has come to dominate
and structure so much modern thinking that a poem may be surreptitiously ‘scientific’
even where no technical terms are used. Douglas Livingstone once asserted that “science
is man’s search for truth, that art is man’s interpretation of it”. However, in
a 1985 interview with Michael Chapman (in Green
in Black-and-White Times), he blurred the distinction. He noted that the
science philosopher Kuhn saw science as creative, that a scientific philosophy’s
“new way of looking at things can alter our perception of reality – a kind of
poet’s way”. The final lesson for him, whether through science or poetry, was “how
to feel variously, how to admit ambiguity, how to understand the equal
attraction of opposing truths, or to know when to mistrust ‘truth’ altogether.”
A mantra for
our own times.
*****
Are science and poetry incompatible? What have South African poets made of scientific developments?
ReplyDeleteFascinating, Dan. I'm not sure that I agree with the characterisation of Thomas Kuhn, who saw scientists, during periods of "normal science", as mere articulators of the paradigm within which they work. Only during periods of crisis, which are few and far between, do scientists become truly creative. Karl Popper, a philosopher of science whom Kuhn opposed, would be a better choice of an advocate of the scientist as creative.
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