Romantic Science

In which our poet enters the world of science…

‘Some readers may object that poetry and science can have nothing to do with each other. They represent, it will be said, two entirely different, if complementary, ways of looking at the world. Science, it will be maintained, is based on fact and reason, poetry on emotion and imagination…. But perhaps it is already time to reconsider the relationship between poetic expression and objective fact. For one thing, the idea that science itself is a purely intellectual process must also be seen as simplistic. More than one scientist has paid tribute to the role played by imagination and intuition in the formation of a hypothesis. This may even take the form of an actual visual image, perceived with something of the clarity of a dream. It may be that the poet and the scientist have much in common in both creating and describing the world in which they exist.’ Poems of Science, John Heath-Stubbs, Phillips Salman, Penguin, 1984

‘Given the boundless human implications of science, it seems strange that poets have not used it more.’ John Carey, Editor, Faber Book of Science, 2005

‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.’ Einstein

“What is science for at all if it has no time for culture?” Nietzsche

‘Science is poetic, ought to be poetic, has much to learn from poets and should press good poetic imagery and metaphor into its inspirational service.’ Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, Penguin, 1998

‘The poet has something of the scientist about him, many now think, and the scientist something of the poet. The starting point for both of their activities is the imagination.’ Poems of Science, John Heath-Stubbs, Phillips Salman, Penguin, 1984

‘I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark.’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

‘Simply installing sequencing machines in an art gallery doesn't make genome art, although it may be a good way to inspire some. The conversation between art and science seems to work best as mutual inspiration, rather than mutual instruction. Scientific accuracy is appropriate for illustration of a current concept, but an artist referring to, rather than illustrating, scientific concepts can evoke connections outside science and suggest that within science, interpretive frameworks can shift.’ Nature Editorial, 2005

‘But if the explanatory mode is science writing’s breath of life - its armoury,  palette and climate - the problem for science-writers is how to explain. How can science be made intelligible to non-scientists? The least hopeful is that it cannot. Giving an inkling of what modern science means to readers who cannot manage higher mathematics is, Richard Feynman has proposed, like explaining music to the deaf…This would be a desolating conclusion if Feynman were not himself among the most brillant of explainers… he freely imports a kind of animism into his experimental accounts.’ John Carey, Editor, Faber Book of Science, 2005

‘When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.’ WH Auden, poet

‘If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will sleep then no more than at present: he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but… carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist or Mineralogist will be as proper subjects of the Poet’s art as any on which it can be employed.’ Wordsworth, Preface, Second Edition, Lyrical Ballads, 1800

In which our poet gamely enters the 21st Century world of science…

I come blundering with my soul -

whether they will let it exist or not;

flapping clumsily - like a drunk dove

startled by sun, unaccustomed sounds;

knowing now these bony nubs are vestiges

of wings; we are fossil-birds, fossil-angels -

ignoring burning questions of consciousness,

mind/body duality, the long problem of God;

Argument from Design, posh Expert Observer -

so many years since the crucible, Periodic table,

Noble gases, crucified frogs - organs of sexy

flowers, spitting Potassium; my hand pressed

full into Mercury for resistance never felt since,

like pushing through dream mirror if you dared.

Since surgical truths, exam hurdles,

loss of science’s skeletal language;

her precise vocabulary become alien,

distorted by distance, my fuzzy brain

cultured by different approach…

But I just get stuck in anyway,

inappropriately dressed in dreams,

outrageous red passion - peacock

turning up iridescent at a pigeon party,

unfashionably late – togas, crinolines,

breeches, almost acceptable before

everything was so strict, dress code

white coat, horse blinkers; advanced

qualifications mandatory for entry -

magic now become a dirty, silly word,

a gorgeous concept of spirit disowned,

despite their ancient, groaning cargoes

of human response; fertile idea, notion,

metaphor - linked imagining through history;

story-telling, mystery and true advancement -

knowledge in all bright spheres;

Science’s sprinkling of visions.

And in the basket of my hands, like wine

and flowers – chocolates, gold and fruit -

the offering I want to bring, present;

the answer I have dragged from life,

of love - power, point of everything;

flying my idealistic, tribal banners - 

of smiling education, knowledge and art;

organic, not mechanistic structure. I am

intruder - Crosser of Thresholds;

so long a stranger in their midst -

heart on my sleeve embroidered

like an open rose, raggedy wild-

child of emotion, thrilling to the notion

of complexity connected to simplicity –

brilliance of Comparative Genomics

binding me to fish and bird, flower –

bristling with ideas like green tendrils -

exploratory, undisciplined, but naturally

questing, searching - looking for nooks -

mental footholds, hooks for wide sharing; 

when expected behaviour is prim, clinical,

exact - language is foreign, most esoteric.

But I am the poet - of all men, I am free; 

sniffing art like an eager drug squad dog,

rapturous - wildly bumping into numbers,

tangling myself in invisible letter strings,

sliding the Double Helix, life’s helter-skelter;

climbing the magic rungs of bonded sugars –

netting myself in the Genome’s ever-twinkling

strings of lights – drinking in the simple, living

distillation of mankind, as source of all people;

each shifting like a flock of animals and angels,

anchored to a single life, one authored spirit,

whose lack of existence we just can’t believe.

I splash chemicals like perfume on my skin,

to smell their properties - elements, powers;

feel broken composition in my open pores,

understand mechanisms, magic language -

how they are called to dancing matter -

old molecules summoned by the Word;

word and poem of being -

original voice of existence.

How life’s ancient, wily snakecharmer

pipes new eyes from blind darkness –

potential, intention of sight,

that was cultured from stars.

Climbing with my exhilarated ice-pick

brain – sometimes stumbling, sliding -

but finding again the silver, branching path -

Hansel and Gretel bread for dummies I’d left

behind; understanding illuminated words - 

at other times understanding only as a dog

finds enough meaning behind human words;

a rose understands sunlight, photosynthesis -

wandering in my alien skirts

through this new knowledge,

the Human Genome still shining,

damp as opened leaves with light

and spirit, stamped with the maker’s art;

shimmering with possibilities, potential.

And look, scientists are kicking off

their shoes; they are jolly, dancing!

shrieking metaphors - shouting aloud

their home-made poetry to the world,

because the bigger world is deaf as yet –

flat stone hearing thunder, unarticulated;

not the enormity of what it is saying.

Deaf to the wonder they see and feel,

and temperate words droned 

from a secluded island world

they know is not enough;

not grand, messy, wild -

glorious enough for imparting this;

beauty, result, art of this chemistry.

But hark, the hosts are welcoming me!

as long lost stranger, a friendly alien –

weird, freaky cousin from the artistic Sticks,

visiting new territory with different customs.

We are speaking - my ears, tongue, mouth

are all theirs - we are flushed, bright-eyed,

drunk on a similar wonder,

art and science concoction;

all dancing together -

we are holding hands.

"Let us advance together, men of letters and men of science, further and further into the ever-expanding regions of the unknown." Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963

‘Science, like Art, is fun, a playing with truths.’ WH Auden

‘…the progress of mankind in arts and sciences, which continues slowly to extend, and to increase, seems to evince the youth of human society…’ Note to the Temple of Nature, Erasmus Darwin, 1731-1802

"We've called the human genome the blueprint, the Holy Grail, all sorts of things. It's a parts list. If I gave you the parts list for the Boeing 777 and it has 100,000 parts, I don't think you could screw it together, and you certainly wouldn't understand why it flew." Eric Lander, Millennium Evening, The White House, US, 1999

‘The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver.’ Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins, Penguin, 1998

That beautiful perturbation of the soul

is not confined to artists, experiencers;

but comes to high practioners of science -

seeing to the heart of things, beauty there.

‘By firm immutable immortal laws/ Impress’d on Nature by the GREAT FIRST CAUSE,/ Say, MUSE! how rose from elemental strife/ Organic forms, and kindled into life…’ Erasmus Darwin, 1731-1802, The Temple of Nature

‘This ‘shuddering before the beautiful’, this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that which the human mind responds to at its deepest and most profound.’ Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Astrophysicist, 1975

‘Come out and talk to me/ For then I know/ into what you are shaping./ Thinking is no more,/ I read your thoughts for a symbol: a movement towards an act.’ Poet to Physicist in his Laboratory, David Ignatow

‘Is it, when paper roses make us sneeze,/ A mental or a physical event?/ The word can freeze us to such categories,/ Yet verse can warm the mirrors of the word/ And through their loose distortions represent,/ The scene, the heart, the life, as they occurred//…- In a dream’s blueness or a sunset’s bronze/ Poets seek the images of love and wonder,/ But absolutes of music, gold or swans/ Are only froth unless they go to swell/ That harmony of science pealing under/ The poem’s waters like a sunken bell.’ Robert Conquest, Humanities

The Genome is a Poem

The Genome is a poem -

sung from the lips of God;

original whisper in the dark

beginning, the written Word

that bred blue Earth

among sister stars -

brother planets,

spinster Moon.

 

Stirred in water molecules,

that gorgeous chemistry -

some thickening of light;

organic fibres - clinging

to a simple idea, somehow,

of existence - evolving life.

Poetry and Science among the Stars

Are we not both searching among the stars;

wandering for laws, meaning - revelation -

profound perspective; a voice among blackness

telling truths, of unalterable rules of true beauty

none can challenge, upset, supercede ever -

immutable, fundamental theory; word as art.

‘The traditional opposition that we tend to make between biology and culture is as misguided as the traditional opposition between body and mind…Culture is the form that biology takes.’ John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 1995

‘As Science has grown, so inevitably, has the ignorance of those who do not know about it. Within the mind of anyone educated exclusively in artistic and literary disciplines, the area of darkness has spread enormously during the late twentieth century, blotting out most modern knowlledge. A new species of educated, but benighted being has come ito existemce…Teachers at British universities will know that most arts students happily forget what little science they learnt in their schooldays. Even if you are prepared for this, however, the extent of their ignorance can come as a shock...the annual hordes competing for places on arts courses in British universities, and the trickle of science applicants, testify to the anabdonment of science among the young.’ John Carey, Editor, Faber Book of Science, 2005

‘When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.’ WH Auden, poet

‘…animism is a persistent ally in the popular science-writer’s struggle to engage the reader’s understanding. To a scientist, this might seem ridiculous. Lewis Carroll rubbished the whole idea in The Dynamics of a Particle.’ John Carey, Editor, Faber Book of Science, 2005

‘It was a lovely Autumn evening, and the glorious effects of chromatic aberration were beginning to show themselves in the atmosphere as the earth revolved away from the great western luminary, when two lines might have been observed wending their weary way across a plane superficies.’ Lewis Carroll, The Dynamics of a Particle, 1865

‘Greater specialization means the culture gap between art and science has perhaps never been so extreme. It is hard to find today a true artist-scientist like Leonardo da Vinci, as noted for his science and engineering skills as his Mona Lisa and Last Supper. There is just too much to know. But recently there has been an increasing awareness on the part of some artists of the heritage of scientists and vice versa.’ Nature online, 2006

‘…it is possible to enjoy the Mozart concerto without being able to play the clarinet…couldn’t we learn to think of science in the same way? It is certainly important that some people, indeed some of our brightest and best, should learn to do science as a practical subject. But shouldn’t we also teach science as something to read and rejoice in, like learning to listen to music rather than slaving over five-finger exercises in order to play it?’  Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, 1998

‘…John Dee,/ astrologer and mage to the court of Elizabeth, himself/ the wide-eyed vestige of an older world where poesie/ and scientific method were a single creature romping/ under planets, seraphs, meteor showers, ghosts. He/ conjured ghosts.’ Albert Goldbarth, Vestigial 2, The Adventures of John Dee

‘Exclusion from the mode of thought which is habitually said to be the characteristic achievement of the modern age is bound to be experienced as a wound to our intellectual self-esteem.’ Lionel Trilling, Literary Critic, US

‘It is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science…’ Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, Penguin, 1998

‘Perhaps, as more scientists…make science available to general readers, it will permeate the culture and Wordsworth’s prophecy will come true. As things are, however, modern poets avoid science, and, it seems, because they feel inferior to it, not…superior.’ John Carey, Editor, Faber Book of Science, 2005

Never again will the amateur scientist be able to keep up -

Never again will the amateur scientist be able to keep up -

contribute meaningfully; inform, debate new work directly.

Nor the man on his sofa understand the workings on a screen;

these days are past - poignantly, with the smell of applewood,

beeswax - mahogany sheen of collecting boxes, butterfly nets -

hand-coloured illustrations, etchings; when so much to discover

was discoverable, receptive to understanding, contribution;

notions graspable - originality in the field was achieveable,

meaningfully blissful. Now the skill is in engagement, contention;

without academic means - finding ways, methods to allow enough

comprehension, intelligent debate about implications, directions,

capabilites, possibilities - what better way than art then, with her

octopus arms embracing so many concepts, angles; interweaving,

illuminating, and never forgetting the person, human being adrift;

making meaning digestible, comprehensible enough for popular

access to work that will affect, impact upon us all - enrich, help,

impoverish, endanger, celebrate. Growing ignorance is no option -

we are thus diminished, disempowered, enslaved to new darkness,

loss of freedom; barred to beauty and enlightened understanding –

so must struggle on through marshy ground; uncertain, stumbling,

looking for the kind of lights untutored eyes and brain can use –

art is that which speaks to human mind and heart, emotion, wit

and intellect; without the need for limiting precision, total

explanation - yet in being less exact, illuminates meaning;

not as some fey vagueness, weak approximation - some Will

o’ the Wisp leading on the foolish into dangerous conclusion,

but vital means of communication, comprehension on levels

yet unamed and numbered, not yet understood; perhaps still

mysterious, but just as needed now as in days of other ignorance -

succour and illumination, challenge, impetus; a fuller perspective.

‘Art/ Is complete when it is human. It is human/ Once the looped pigment, the pin-heads of light/ Securing space under their deft restrictions/ Convince, as the index of a possible passion,/ As the adequate guage, both of the passion/ And its object. The artist lies/ For the improvement of truth. Believe him.’ A Meditation on John Constable, Charles Tomlinson

‘But nothing rises. Neither spectres, nor oil, nor love./ And the old professor must think you mad, Alex, as you rehearse/ poems in the laboratory like vows, and curse those clever scientists/ who dissect away the wings and haggard heart from the dove.’ Letter to Alex Comfort, Dannie Abse

Why is it less the poet’s task

Why is it less the poet’s task

to wander new genomic fields,

picking up shining treasures,

turned in the palm, thinking;

than speaking only of love and sunsets -

painterly articulation of the evening rose;

the Genome showing us bound - green-wired,

red, also - by Evolutionary art, to its red heart.

‘Generally speaking, science has had a bad effect on poets, inciting them to bombast (of the ‘O thou terrestrial ball’ variety) or to drivelling regrets that science has banished ‘faery lore’. Science’s dominant position in contemporary culture might surely have been expected to breed some modern scientific poets. Yet most poets remain science-blind.’ John Carey, Editor, Faber Book of Science, 2005

‘We have an appetite for wonder, a poetic appetite, which real science ought to be feeding but which is being hijacked often by monetary gain, by purveors of supersitition, the paranormal and astrology.’ Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, Penguin, 1998

‘To follow Galileo as he explains his observations step by step is to share an experience of scientific enlightenment that fiction and poetry, for all their powers, cannot give, since they can never be so authentically engaged with actuality and discovery…fiction could not compete with the impact of this, since the force of Darwin’s account depends precisely on its not being fiction but fact.’ John Carey, Editor, Faber Book of Science, 2005

‘Mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved…’ Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, Penguin, 1998

Magical Fact

What is more magical, stunning, full of wonder,

than fact; where all the best fiction in the world

could not compete with a peacock’s tail, lemming’s

instinct, zebra or tiger coat, hare disguised as snow;

with Evolution’s fantastic story, her legend of stars

and light, the voice over the water; the Word come,

shivering under the waves, organic filaments bound

by will invented out of nothing or sourced to a deity,

depending on belief; and the mighty chapters written

from first authored cell through fish, dinosaurs, birds,

mammals, burgeoning of green life; who would believe

if you wrote your hand has kinship with the green leaf -

flowering plants - a poisonous inflatable fish, mouse –

not one publisher would touch it, far too strange to be

true - that is the nature of Nature’s truth - her bundle

of facts is colourful, embroidered, anything but plain;

seeming impossible to build the eye from mud and water,

yet so accomplished by principles of boundless creativity,

adaptation as art, not a ruthless barbarism of animals.

Our music, art, literature - our science and medicine,

are miracles appearing out of the miraculous, that no-one

dared guess could be written - incredibly - in three letters.

‘The peculiar thrill and spiritual charge of science.’ Faber Book of Science, 2005

‘One might have hoped that by the end of this most scientifically successful of all centuries science would have been incorporated into our culture and our aesthetic sense risen to meet its poetry.’ Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, Penguin, 1998

‘There is no reason at all why scientists should not do philosophy and do it well. From Galileo and Darwin to Einstein and Heisenberg, many of them have done just that.’ Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry, Routeledge, 2003

‘Science is the art of the soluble.’ Sir Peter Medawar, Immunologist

‘Beyond technology, and in harness with it, is science. People conflate the two… Science is about understanding how the universe works and all the creatures within it… at its purest is nothing more nor less than ‘natural philosophy’, as it was originally known, and need produce no technologies itself.” Ian Wilmut, The Second Creation, Headline, 2001

‘Wordsworth, who read mathematics at Cambrdige, gives us the great dream of the Arab who is saving the stone of mathematics and the shell of poetry from a threatened cataclysm. For Wordsworth, the stone and the shell – science and poetry,  reason and feeling – were ultimately one.’ Poems of Science, Penguin, 1984

Give me anything and I will give you art!

Give me anything and I will give you art!

That frilling amoeba’s transparent pump

is obviously dancing in transparent skin,

elixir water’s artistic consommé soup -

from clear sea will come blood -

the reddest thing in the Universe;

for reasons still mysterious -

now implicated in messages

of love and hearts;

nature of the rose.

Give me a bug and I will present you - the butterfly!

whose wings have welded beauty, chemistry, flight;

hinged on the remnant of original humble creature -

become metaphor of living hope; embroidery on air.

One new leaf unclenching green - damp with birth

on a bright blue day, is art enough for any lifetime;

augmented by the dreamy, teasing lily, who has seduced

the hazy, lazy summer eye of sky, by perfuming the air -

dripping sugar into earth, embarrassing the arthritic crook

of struggling fern, unfurling by the black ditch - steaming,

primaeval, brewing new life for a future world,

when this is all undone - such hopes in Nature.

Not one inch, one millimeter - water droplet,

blade of grass, wood; not one town of people,

one hair on their heads; one virus, one feather

dropped - beetle, peapod, biscuit crumb, tear,

that is not crammed with daily art, everyday genius

expressed by life, her aesthetic mechanisms, freely.

Even from black earth, chilled months by the soul

of winter, I will bring you the flower, food, insect.

Even in the overhead emptiness, I will show you stars,

strung in figurative and expressive art; dreams, wishes.

‘The methodological argument that underlay this view ran much like this: Only what science studies is real, Science cannot study consciousness, So: Consciousness is not real’. And, although the conclusion has officially been abandoned, both these premises are still widely accepted.’ Putting Our Selves Together Again, Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry, Routeledge, 2003

‘What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life’. It is information, words, instructions. If you want a metaphor, don’t think of fires and sparks and breath. Think, instead, of a billion discrete, digital characters carved in tablets of crystal. If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology… the information technology of the genes is digital.’ Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Longman Scientific and Technical , 1986

Why reduction, unenrichment, marble carving,

when understanding is organic, interconnected;

genes are not crystal, discreet, but alive with light,

living principles fulfilled with flesh, eyes, hands -

every creature that walks or grows upon the Earth.

Who could look upon a rose, a child, and conclude

that such profound holiness of Creation is just information -

pure digital instruction, chance conglomeration of chemicals;

so much of the greater meaning of being alive is escaped.

An impoverished definition, so inaccurate in monovision.

‘All science is inevitably drenched in our human presumptions, deisgns and conceptions… it was already evident to Francis Bacon at the start of the seventeenth century, who saw that perfect, pure objective science was impossible, not only because we are forrced to use language, or some kind of numerical notation, which does not ‘naturally’ belong to the objects we name or number, but also because we seek patterns, shapes and symmetries in nature which correspond to our own preconceptions, not to anything that is ‘really’ there. From this viewpoint, to say that iron ‘breathes’ is no more absurd that to say that it is called ‘iron’, or that its chemical symbol is Fe. In each case, we add something human to its remote, alien, unknowable nature – a nature that has nothing to do wth human thought, and is therefore altered the instant we think about it.‘ John Carey, Editor, Faber Book of Science, 2005

Celtic Catherine Wheels of Spiralled Galaxies

From Celtic Catherine Wheels of spiralled galaxies -

still expanding in the yawning black mouth of night;

hot star bellies, spurned planet hearts, ruminating Moon -

blank white clock, too old for time, hanging on the wall

of space - showing her ruined stone numerals - ticking

light/dark; wobbling orbits anchored on time’s twisting

rope; black matter brooding, soot-eyed heart of a dead star -

to light’s white wings, blurred into invisible air; to dancing

otter juggling fish, breathing wave, purple weed; golden eagle,

insignia of blue sky shield - his dinosaur feet, arrow in his eye.

To the curling tongue of a butterfly, sugar it sucks - scales

under wing colour; green alchemy of grass blades choiring,

moving as fur - smell of their blood from cut wounds; rattling

atoms of a red flower, energy between, script and power - all,

all are bound in nature; dreaming schemes, enormous plans -

beauty and purpose fused; nothing and everything, allowing

knowledge like pass-the-parcel, sweets salted in every layer,

explosive gifts within - everywhere, everywhere, wonder –

species of love, new flowers blooming from such common root;

imagination pollinating - sums on the weight of an angel’s wing,

Gabriel’s immunity from gravity, composition of halo light;

look of a dream in a sleeping eye, kingfisher-humming-bird

coloured, nightmare crows; discovering the formula for love

in the unseen characters of the Word, at heart of everything -

illuminated script, information of poetry; written description