Science-informed readings

Explain thro’ a brief analysis why the reading of any poem of your choice, by yourself or someone else, is enriched by bringing a science-informed interpretive strategy to bear. The poem may or may not be working consciously with scientific allusions; if you think it will help, refer to one poem that is and one that isn’t.

Armantrout:

Dress Up

To be “dressed”
is to emit
“virtual particles.”
 
 
*
 
The spirit of “renormalization” is that
 
an electron
all by itself
 
can have infinite
mass and charge,
 
but, when it’s “dressed” …
 
 
*
 
A toddler stares at us
till we look up.
 
“Flirtatious,” we call it.
 
She waits
until we get the joke
 
about being here,
being there.

I want to use my poem “Dress Up” to illustrate some issues I raised in my answers to questions 1 and 2. The first two stanzas of this poem are paraphrases (condensed and rearranged) of Steven Gubser’s The Little Book of String Theory. Gubser’s writing interests me both because of the peculiarity of the metaphors embedded in it and because of the deep strangeness of the phenomenon it describes. A “dressed” electron is one that has emitted “virtual” particles. As most of us know by now, virtual particles spring into and out of existence spontaneously (and in pairs no less). This has always made me wonder what “existence” means. Anyway, virtual particles are — in some sense — not fully real and yet it is only when an electron emits such particles that it has a realistic (as opposed to impossibly infinite) charge and mass. “Renormalization” — a fecund word in itself — is the mathematical process of canceling out infinities by putting in the values for the virtual particles. The word “renormalization” suggests suspect tinkering. But it’s the word “dressed” that’s really interesting. One could say that the electron can’t “realize” itself until it has clothed itself in some fantasy get-up. Note that I don’t say that — but one could.

The third section, obviously, comes from another place entirely. It depicts a toddler I saw in a bank lobby. She was playing a kind of peek-a-boo with me, staring at me until I looked up then giggling and looking away. I had the sense that she found the whole presence/absence, self/other dynamic essentially comical. Now I’m not saying that the girl is an electron or that the electron is a girl. That’s a standard rhetorical move I refuse. It would be silly. I am equally interested in the real child and in Gubser’s book. I want to link them in tandem, to “entangle” them, as it were, to see what sort of resonance they might establish. There’s a parallel of some kind here, I feel, but not an equation. At least that’s how I experience it. I hope others will too. [for more poems by Armantrout, see the “Poetry Supplement”]

Adair:

Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711):

True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,
What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest,
Something, whose Truth convinc’d at Sight we find,
That gives us back the Image of our Mind …

And Williams, Spring and All (1923):

                            I find that there is work to be done in the creation of new forms,
new names for experience
      and that “beauty” is related not to “loveliness” but to a state in which
reality plays a part

I used to think these were opposite credos: Pope saying that there are no new ideas (tho’ the lines get trickier the closer one scrutinizes them, as many have said: is nature dressed to advantage still nature? etc; and he was writing in the relatively new form of heroic couplets), WCW saying the times demand new ideas — as would Stein three years later in “Composition as Explanation”: “The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.” But more and more I came to experience recognition as a key aspect of reading poetry, and it tended to be recognition of things I hadn’t realized needed recognizing. So Pope’s line shifted toward something like: “What you didn’t even realize you’d tried and failed to put into words, or what you’d never thought was even up for that, and are glad now to see expressed — and in some way, however briefly, empowered by that; the world becomes a little less opaque.” (Still a way to go with the elegance here) —

I think that’s precisely what I felt with Rae’s poem “Dress Up.” When I first read it, I was reminded of something the science fiction writer (among many other things) Samuel R. Delany said back in the 60s: that one of the things SF can do is literalize metaphor. Now it never occurred to me that the poem is saying “the girl is an electron or that the electron is a girl.” But there seems to be indeed “a parallel of some sort there, but not an equation.” It brings an everyday experience into fresh focus to place it in the vicinity of something we know or believe is literally true and strange. I’ve never so sharply understood the fascination of Freud and his followers with the fort-da game before. In a comparable way, I’ve never so vividly imagined population increase as when I read the obituary section in Kenny Goldsmith’s Day: person after person “survived by” four or five children, multiple grandchildren … from just one day in just one city — 

One of the preoccupations I acquired on first moving to London in the late 70s was with vast, unthinkable numbers of things — and of people. This would relate to science in a very broad sense, bringing in technology, architecture, medicine, sanitation measures, bureaucratic organization, mass food production, etc. Population and factory farming are now, arguably, symbiotically linked. What does that do to our sense of morality, of the value of a single life, of, indeed, the politics of Food Inc?

Adair: I’m wondering if it might be useful to take a poem whose scientific sources we feel we more or less know & look for some aesthetic dimension of it we haven’t hitherto queried & that might help shed light on its knitting-into / challenging of the presently complex cultural field. For instance: The following poem, from a forthcoming collection sable smoke, took off from something I learned (but had no way based in my own areas of expertise of confirming) from Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004): that while pretty much everything we know, including the destiny of our own deaths, confirms an irreversibly forward arrow of time, no one has so far devised a mathematics that would demonstrate some physical cosmic necessity for this; weirdly, all time-related equations, from Newton thro’ Einstein & beyond, work equally well if time is going forward or back. The poem’s governing conceit is that in that case, we can go back in time; of course, we’d experience it as going forward, but instead of learning things day by day we’d be forgetting them … we’d be growing younger rather than older, & moving beyond birth to disappearance.

as if there were
a last glance wipes
hairs & umbrellas streets
 
scrubbed of bustlers
in daguerre exposures
why we cannot
 
travel back (in
time)’s mathematically
undemonstrable either
 
way a wedge
up over the top or
back down the
 
slope to an equivocal
“blast of silence”
declaring annihilating
 
unity
of signification
components hold beyond
 
otherwise most troublesome
jitters of matter
moment to moment
 
remanifesting rather than
wavely persisting if tick
failed to physically
 
tock it back whosever the
math (even boltzmann’s)
as persuasive heading back
 
in time as forward 9
 — five — four — 
one — 0 — beyond
 
albeit non-paradoxically
in terms of a
syllabary’s virtual bounds
 
* * *
 
sir arthur eddy
also thrown to
the muddy
 
oceans en route
subtracting
tea taken from
 
causation
bent quakers
whiskt connections
 
from one to t’
either side of
atlantic unable to
 
abrupt forbid
1,000 bi-colored penguins
a) blue-green b) grey-blue
 
c) grey-grey crowding
d) yellow-yellow
again & their
 
red-blue nail name
cliff tags against their
premature disappearance
 
* * * *
 
from early (to return)
exposures of needed
duration to
 
develop erasing mobilities
housefronts
assimilated to the
 
plate relay planck
unit’s reassumption
of integrality by
 
disabling wave
interference to safety
glass made of in
 
the shatter event
recalcitrance to
recombinations what’s
 
present if “time” isn’t
outside of inorganics’ &
organics’  happenstances
 
passers-by trailing
temporal vapor
trails tall as they
 
“see the ground wave-heaves”
“smoke without fire”
durations of bastings dug
 
* * * * *
 
steam-sooted gantries
round’d scuffed suitcases
pleated knuckle-sheens-tautened
 
pegs smudging memories
of antecedents frog
turning into a quail
 
evidently a wildly held
general belief shit
fan charts poundage
 
loss it’ll feel
like we’re going
back to chicago
 
but as beasts
w/ two backs go
tying a diesel
 
back of the train
aways & then
we’ll reverse into
 
penn station
parentheses wriggling
to be seen
 
while we’re still
treading temporal water
around transparencies
 
* * * * * *
 
space a flat unrippling
the most probable
if apparently otherwise
 
cross-checking against
a metronome virtue
of pan vocabulary
 
hogwash! sez cecilia payne-
gaposchkin 1919 glory
years behind her in
 
front the team studies in
high luminosity star-
clouds in a manor manor
 
to skalding the harvard
hydrogen hydra constituent
“in the reversing layers of stars”
 
evolution keyed alarm
to small-group reach
having in a return
 
to be unduly
unglued as a result
of a plank as projected
 
moor of cow cord lane
evacuations smithfields
distemper mat w/drawings
 
from acidic smokescarps
grave emergings
of the still
 
still but less long dead
reverse echoings of
spaded lid-thunks heavy
 
still to happen has but
perhaps not or
won’t have quite
 
the posited return
if soil clatter
canceled perish
 
* * * * * * *
 
she’s found un-
sleepless no sleepless
for 3 nights the
 
test of proof
of “a result of one
of the highest
 
achievements of
human thought” not
sleepy no
 
on past that which
nothing that hasn’t
will happen but
 
with foreboding
she won’t sleep
mutually
 
* * * * * * * * *
 
head-on
time’s arrows
from both directions’d
 
short out (liveforever)
more likely adjacent not
sharing a track a braid
 
perhaps of broken fronts
the “fearsum symmetree”
o’ rabbie burns compounding
 
reappearances’ claim on
more numerous erasures
see going back many fewer
 
hot shots a’ready
other easier to learn
quantum fluctuations
 
essay as a verb preceding
sounding in retrospect
without anticipation
 
recollections dimming
of the deaths of others
passed under an
 
umbrella coughing
decamped children
growing younger on these
 
same streets memories
of decreasingly
conceivable achievements

Obviously I was fascinated by the physics concepts involved here, & desirous of acknowledging the intellectual tours de force they represented & the excitement they generate(d); equally obviously, I bent this toward imaginative registering of certain political realities: the active persistence of debts apparently owed to the dead (if time is going backwards, the dead will be up & about again in no time, & anxious to collect) & the apparent reversal of progress in multiple sites in the global prospect. In each case, I think that what I wrote in response to Rae’s poem is pertinent: that there’s not so much a metaphorical crossover going on as the bringing of a familiar “experience into fresh focus [by placing] it in the vicinity of something we know or believe is literally true and strange.” It’s entirely possible that this is missing the whole point of taking on recent physics as proposed by Amy (in “Disciplinary Pertinence”): “that novel sciences must have novel languages beyond mathematics that can be used to describe them.” I’d be interested to know what anyone else thinks of this.

Looking again at the poem, however, I get curious about the form. The prospective shape of a poem on the page is one of the first things to clarify in my mind, & I tend to trust it & run with it. Here what’s apparent is the short-lined tercets, the 1.5 spacing, & the division by asterisks into sections. I wonder why that seemed (& still does) the way to go. I associate the form with Williams, but not quite the way it’s used here, where the compression seems wanted to focus (to hold?) startling transformations & also ruminative stretches: “The Desert Music” in the lineation of “This is just to say”? Something or my sense of something in the contemporary [technosphere] presumably demands this here. It may or may not be compelling to others.

John Cayley: Thanks to all for the contributions so far. I’ve been thinking and writing slowly. I’m afraid that what I’m sending now is yet more in terms of ‘general remarks’ and is only about half of the prose I’d like to contribute. After this, I’d like to go back and read or reread the other contributions so far, but then go on to give some indication of the actual procedures that I’m beginning to use to make work these days, in the belief that this does bear on the questions we are addressing. I’m also planning to contribute a few actual pieces made according to the procedures I will introduce.

(I’m a little bit worried that the formatting of the paragraphs that I’m pasting in now will not survive the googlegroups cloudform. Ah well. Here goes.)

Given that the impetus and tenor of poetry is aesthetic, it is difficult to imagine that its incorporating linguistic material of any variety in any manner could be deemed to be inappropriate. Science isn’t just around us in the form of science-made-technology, it is in us and in our language. If poetry partakes of science-as-language (only) in some ‘metaphoric’ sense, well then, science-as-technology is (only) in the world in an equally ‘metaphoric’ sense. An effective or, for that matter, an ineffective, malformed machine or process both is and is not whatever its ‘science’ may be. There is no question but that science — as content or as anything — may partake of technology or poetry however we please.

Perhaps some consideration of science and poetry as cultural practices will allow greater articulation of whatever, despite my opening remarks, remains problematic for makers and readers in both communities. For the scientific community, language is a medium, one of many. Pure science is, perhaps, the symbolic formulation of what can be known about the world. As such, it is language; it is poetry. However, in practice, this formulation is only ever made in constant, reiterative experiential dialogue with all the other media which are present to us as the material world. The language of science is constantly tested against materialities that we tend to agree are external and beyond us: given.

Both communities are in the same world and relate to it as such. On this basis, Walter Benjamin might have said that the language of science — as a whole — is, necessarily, a translation of the language of poetry and vice versa. Poets, equally, attempt a symbolic formulation of what can be known about the world and, especially whenever they are ‘experimental,’ they test and retest their formulations. But language is the medium of poetry. The poet must engage, specifically, with the ‘singular (im)materiality’ of language. In so far as language is supported by media which are present to us as the material world, any relationship between language and media is arbitrary. Any media will serve, and any signifying relations will do, so long as they are some part of shared symbolic cultural practice. Crucially, the media capable of supporting language include those we associate with the mind, with operations of our subjectivities that are, typically, deemed to be private or internal. It seems to me that this is the point at which the communities of practice might diverge. I can continue to write on the basis that my practice is supported by ‘thoughts’ ‘within me.’ These ‘thoughts’ support my writing, materially, despite any lack of substantive relation with other ‘external’ media, at least until they are written down or spoken out. And even once written or spoken, any relationship between my subjective practice and the material form of its inscription (as writing or utterance) remains arbitrary. By contrast, the scientific practitioner is required to treat any unsubstantiated thought as, at best, ‘mere’ hypothesis.

Thus there is a vast subset of aesthetic linguistic practice that is unlikely ever to be accepted as scientific while, on the contrary, all of scientific linguistic practice can be encompassed by the poetic, and deturned for aesthetic effect, without implying any incoherence of poetic practice.

Scientific writing is procedural and constrained in terms of its relation to media, as indicated above. It focuses on its constrained practice of signification at the expense of the other primary dimension of the aesthetic: affect. Scientific discourse pretends both a necessary significant relationship with the world and also that this relationship is neutral, non-affective. Clearly, beyond the sensitivities that are typical of most scientific discourses, this pretended relationship implies a powerful system of affect — both in itself and as it functions as cultural and social practice. The anxiety that provoked the present discussion is, I would argue, a product of the affect generated by the discourses of science, rather than any anxiety over scientific or poetic practices of signification.

It happens that I am reading Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual while being asked to think and write about poetry and science. Massumi’s introduction concludes with three good pages advocating the use of scientific and mathematical models in cultural critical philosophy. He first provides a more subtly argued, generative version of my own argument thus far — while the studiously ‘poached’ scientific model or concept “suffers an exemplary kind of creative violence” — and then, as a fine analyst of affect, he locates the more powerfully generative effect of taking science to the humanities in a productive displacement of affect, precisely — as I would say, although Massumi doesn’t give his own characterization — the authority of pretended affectlessness in scientific practice. “When you poach a scientific concept, it carries with it scientific affects …. This is the kind of shameless poaching from science that I advocate and endeavor to practice: one that betrays the system of science while respecting its affects, in a way designed to force a change in the humanities.”

For Massumi, as for many poetic practitioners, the point has been ‘to force a change’ in their own and their colleagues’ practices. For poetry and poetics, the Objectivists were exemplary in this. No surprise that we have been asked to be provoked by some discussion of Zukofsky. I agree that we must further discuss and defend our right as poetic practitioners to generate change in this manner — by bringing scientific models and concepts into poems — but in further remarks that I still want to go on to make I would rather turn to the adoption of procedures — actual practices of writing — which may appear to model scientific procedures and so represent another variety of scientific transgression into poetry and vice versa.

Durand: Gilbert, the excerpt of “sable smoke” and your discussion reminded me of recent reading of Call Me Ishmael, where Olson posits that Melville’s turn toward a preoccupation with time (via Christianity) as opposed to space (via, um, exploration, exploitation, manifest destiny?) led to a disjunct between his being and writing at the end of his life. Olson doesn’t discuss Melville’s language so much within this turn, but I was interested by the idea of how language would accommodate what Olson evidently sees as a rift between time and space as preoccupations/driving forces. I also thought about some longer epic poems, like Notley’s Descent of Alette or Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, where “action” occurs again and again, a kind of temporal loop, with little or no spatial movement. Instead, the poem is placed within a constrained space (in form as well), to me correspondent with the growing (or so I hope) perception of resources/space/land/earth as limited, obligatorily recyclable. Infinity does not seem such a timely concept “at the moment,” so to speak.

I was also interested in your second section, in which you link extinction to this sort of backward movement of time — “memory” of penguin species being lost. For me, much of my interest in science is via ecology, and perhaps one way of explaining that is ecology’s friendliness to investigating connections and systems in a tactile realm (paved to by empirical naturalists). Perhaps I’m interested in the correspondence of the naturalist to the poet, as a precursor to scientist, (although LOTS of problems, maybe insurmountable ones, with naturalist exploitative, kill-what-you-observe, processes).

Adair: Hi Marcella —

Many thanks for your thotful response to the poem — it hadn’t actually occurred to me that the various constraints in it cld be taken more positively as a strategic ecological refusal of “infinity” (altho’ you’re right about the penguins) —

About Olson: I just reread the “Christ” chapter in his book, & my first response, as it had been the first time, was to just how enthralling the writing is. The stern exactness of critical insight, the human sympathy in an inexorably lawful universe. So endless thanks for sending me back to that. It strikes me that he is proposing the simpler, future-directed time of the post-1855 Melville as operating a kind of decoherence of the space-related time he defines as follows: “Time was not a line drawn straight ahead toward future, a logic of good and evil. Time returned on itself. It had density, as space had, and events were objects accumulated within it, around which men [sic] could move as they moved in space.”

This may link up with your pointing, in Notley & Rich, to time as events-loop “with little or no spatial movement.” This can be found in multiple writers & musicians (to name only those) since, say, Stein; to stave off death is one obvious motive, or to enjoy a timeless (non-reminding) paradise before the end of one’s own time (in xian composers such as Messiaen); but it may also relate to what you indicate, an unease with the imperialisms underlying movement in space — “The sense of life and death that Melville forfeited is one the experience of space gives. The vision of it is Moby-Dick, and its savage myth.” If he’s right that time has to have “density,” then durable problems lurk here — projected into cyberspace by conceptual & flarf writers —

Armantrout: This is just a general comment. I’m starting to wish more people would post poems here. What are you waiting for? If it’s for fools to rush in, a couple already have. (I can say that since I went first.)

Adair: OK, as fool number two, I second that (remember it doesn’t have to be a new poem) — 

Quantum dot wave function (image courtesy of the NSF).

Catanzano: Most of my poems that are relevant to this discussion require a PDF format, and it seems Google groups doesn’t support this — am I wrong? I guess I could send something to you, Gilbert? The poems I would share are from a project, “Borealis: Time Signatures,” an electron of “Quantum Poetics: The Word and Its Earthwork,” which attempts a conversation between poetic logic, scientific inquiry, and self gravity to examine poetry and theoretical physics. The project explores the influences on my poetry in relation to distinct versions of spacetime proposed by string theory, quantum mechanics, and relativity. The borealis — a legend of twenty-three writers who extend my imagination, ciphered with words and the image of a tesseract, a fourth-dimensional analogue of a cube — is worked through a series of “time signatures” that respond to the theories of time posited, including Newtonian time (linearity), Planck time (quantum mechanics), sidereal time (time measured by a distant star), time dilation (relativity), timelines (algorithmic, hyperdimensional), and morphogenetic time. The project culminates in a deciphered borealis spine [for the poem, see “Metaphor or More?”].

Adair: Here’s what to do: on the homepage, go to “Files” in the right-hand menu. Click “+ Upload File,” then “Browse.” Select the name of the file you want and click “Open.” It’ll then start to upload. When it finishes, you can add another or click “done uploading files,” at which point it’s there. As with any pdf attachment, the recipient then has to download it. I’m sure we can find a way to make it properly public to the Jacket2 readership when the time comes.

Catanzano: Hi Gilbert and all,

In response to Rae asking us to post poems, I’m sending a few from my borealis project. As I mentioned, my borealis — a legend of twenty-three writers who extend my imagination, ciphered with words and the image of a tesseract — is worked through a series of “time signatures” that respond to the theories of time posited.

Reading Rae’s and Gilbert’s poems in the context of discussing poetry and science prompted me to rethink the relationship between poetry and poetics. I recently created a fake book on GoodReads about flarf & conceptual poetics in the spirit of Alfred Jarry. One idea is that as people write reviews they will create the book and therefore become a part of the Nowhere Cooperative, the group of “authors” responsible for the book, inspired by Jarry’s Pa Ubu, King of Poland, which is said to be “Nowhere.” A few days ago Eddie Watkins wrote a “review” of the fake book and talked about being a penguin poet: “I do not have anything to say about Flarf and Conceptual Poetics because I am a penguin poet …. But what am I now but a cool penguin poet in a box with the appearance of meaning? And why am I at the equator? So away I fly on the plain-spoken wings of penguin poesy to Antarctica. Upon arrival I am informed that while I have wings I can not fly with them, however plain-spoken. Nevertheless, I am here in Antarctica where life has no meaning and I am freezing in this plain-spoken meaninglessness, and neither Flarf nor Conceptualism can do anything for me now. It is very plain here and I no longer feel like speaking. Poetry is elsewhere; only penguins remain.”

The next morning after reading this penguin commentary on how “poetry is elsewhere,” I read Gilbert’s response to Marcella about his poem’s penguin time-memory. The coincidence got me thinking: some assumptions in our conversation might be that poetry illustrates its poetics or that the poem can say that which can’t be articulated by poetics. This might be why I am also wishing we were posting poems: we know they can drive the discussion to its subspace. However: in Gilbert’s poem it seems the Newtonian linearity of time is expressed, sometimes ecologically though causation — the penguins face extinction even if time moves forward or backward. In the review of my fake book, the penguin poet is also part of an ecology, albeit one detached from Newtonian physics by existing in the Nowhere environment of the imagination, and by nowhere I also mean elsewhere or everywhere, just not somewhere, maybe like quanta. In Rae’s poem being here and being there is similar to being elsewhere and everywhere but not somewhere; one must dress up, make the costume, play like the toddler using the imagination to pretend to be something, somewhere else. The poem dresses us up. I wonder: what happens when we undress? Is this the poetics? Penguins, of course, are simultaneously “dressed up” in their tuxedo-like skins and naked all at once! In this sense I too want to be a penguin poet.

Reilly: Just thought I’d throw out these lines from part two of “Hearing” by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge as an example of qualities that can arise from introducing a scientific mental landscape into a poem apparently about other things. I also think it has some interesting parallels with both Rae’s and Gilbert’s poems.

A bird falls out of the air, through the anti-weave, into the anti-net, delineating anti-immanence.

Twenty-four crows upstate, each fall is a gestural syllable.

Cover them with a blue cloth of creatures ready to be born, contact like starlight that will arrive, for sure.

Let mothers catch them, raccoon, Labrador bitch, girl, interspecies conservative mothers, arms out like foliage, no locomotion of their own.

Her matter is pacing in the present, as I come along or go away.

It’s experienced as vague, general understanding, but not accessible.

That’s how a girl away is undivided, like virtuous deeds accomplished quietly.

She is the other of myself hearing, simultaneous.

A flashing sequin in the unapplied form of universal, co-presence before space, internal line of time into hearing not arriving from meanings of words, like starlight.

She spans real time over this sense of being touched, like a beautiful dress.

I see the movement here as from what could be construed as the antiscientific (line 1: “delineating anti-immanence”) to the purely linguistic (line 2: crows fall out of animal-hood to become figures of visualized language) to the scientific (line 3: creatures ready to be born are like the light of stars that will arrive eventually through the continuum of space/time). So far, pretty familiar stuff, including the use of science to construct a slightly unusual simile. Much more interesting to me is that after these (perhaps false?) starts, the poem becomes a meditation on the nature of human “co-presence,” in which the struggles of communication are presented within the language of physics, specifically as an intersection of energy (light and sound) with matter (we humans). On one hand this is a sophisticated exploration of concepts of “self” and “other.” On the other it’s a hilarious riff on parent/child hearing and not-hearing. That it works on both levels is what is so pleasurable. Another thing I like is the way humans are presented in this poem as just one among other species. Human mothers in fact are even conflated with plants (the part of the living world without “locomotion”)! Other works by Berssenbrugge such as “Endocrinology” and “Pollen” are equally interesting in this regard, but are infiltrated primarily by medical science and terminology. In fact, one route into the scientific for writers seems to be the experience of serious illness. You see this in Will Alexander’s work as well.

Armantrout (to Amy): One thing I like about your poem is that it brings back and lets us see/feel the strangeness and displacement inherent in the scientific language and concepts you’re using. Scientific writing itself, by convention, represses personal experience. One use of poetry is to bring the “objective” and the “subjective” back together until they’re indistinguishable.

Harvey:

Harvey: The idea of ‘emergence’ has been kept in mind but not specifically stated in the following piece. Hopefully, some aspects of ‘emergence’ will be noticed in the form as well as the subject matter of the poem.

Here is E. O. Wilson: “To add one last concept from computer science, social insect workers are cellular automata, defined as agents programmed to function interactively as a higher level system.” From “The Superorganism.”

Elaine Scarry has written in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World: “To have a material form is to have a self-substantiating form; to lack a material form is to lack the autonomous power of self-substantiation.”

The ‘actual’ car in Apollinaire’s “The Little Car” poem, or that part of the text, is material enough in its shape that it can ‘vocalize’ other material, and not merely advertise itself, to the outside of itself. In the poem, the three people inside the car say what’s on their minds, although they are said to be silent, through the very structure of the car and themselves, which are one. It is difficult to differentiate the car from those inside it.

Going back a bit: with the adding of the vertical dimension to the already horizontal (preceding) text it becomes possible to make an image by moving the letters around on the flat surface of the paper: here, a two dimensional image representing a three dimensional object — the car. The car’s image design, however, is abstract in form.

Herbert Read in “Form in Modern Poetry” gives the following two definitions:

“Organic form”: When a work of art has its own inherent laws, originating with its very invention and fusing in one vital unity both structure and content, then the resulting form may be described as “organic.”

“Abstract form”: When an organic form is stabilised and repeated as a pattern, and the intention of the artist is no longer related to inherent dynamism of an inventive act, but seeks to adapt content to predetermined structure then the resulting form may be described as “abstract.”

When the car part in the poem is read keeping an eye on both the shape of the car and what the words that make up the car are saying, which are different to just saying that it is a car, the form appears to become more ‘organic.’ It seems that an extra dimension has been added. Here John Cayley’s point on bringing in the dimension of time is important. The enacting of this part of the poem provides another dimension, not as clear cut as time, that brings the car momentarily to the reader, while reading it, out of the ‘abstract’ and into the ‘organic.’ (This of course might be true of all reading but something else is going on here as well.) The moment in time brings both the car and what it is saying together. Or both those in the car and what they are thinking.

The car seems to hover between ‘abstract’ and ‘organic’ form, and this indeterminacy and potentiality seems to imply greater self-regulation to the matter of this part of the text. Also, as will hopefully become clear, it does the same for the rest of the text, as well.

Guillaume Apollinaire, “The Little Car” in the original French and English translation.

The car is laid against the background of what has preceded it in the poem. Here, the language of war has tied everything to fluctuating metaphors of unstoppable momentum and potential, nothing is stable. The material described does not own its own time and space in which to act, everything comes together and moves forward. While in the car there are three separate people, you can see them sitting there, even though they merge with the car itself, the car is a single entity, or so it seems.

Scarry again: “Each of the two armies periodically becomes a single embodied combatant, with the real human body’s elemental duality of inflicting injury and of receiving it. The ordinary five- to six-foot vertical expanse of the adult person now becomes a colossus with, for example, one foot in Italy, another in northern Africa.”

And, Apollinaire, from near the beginning of the poem: “We said goodbye to a whole epoch / Furious giants were looming over Europe / Eagles were leaving their eyries expecting the sun …” and a little later, “As I went I carried within me all the armies that were fighting.”

The metaphors of war reflect on those inside the car heightened senses but also a greater fragility because temporarily separated from the whole, which is accentuated by the text’s greater materiality or ‘organic’ form in this section. And also, as said all along, it is difficult to differentiate the car from those inside it: at the same time as the car is a part of the mechanization of the culture that is going to war, and transports them to the war, the changing of the car’s tires and the bringing in the idea of blacksmiths make it more of a personal extension of the human — the acts would be performed using hand tools.

There is this doubleness to the poem: the car reflects back onto the rest of the text the actual fact of being human in these circumstances. And the transition from the straight text to the car starts with a curved line, not yet fully part of the car and no longer fully part of the preceding text, and the same happens in reverse after the car. The car momentarily comes out of and then goes back into the militancy of the rest of the text: “We understood my comrade and I / That the little car had brought us into a new / Era,” from near the end of the poem.

Turning the page around 90 degrees and the car looks like the torso of a pregnant woman.

PS I can send in a photocopy of the full poem.

Adair:

The attractor was stable, low-dimensional, and nonperiodic. It could never intersect itself, because if it did, returning to a point already visited, from then on the motion would repeat itself in a periodic loop. That never happened — that was the beauty of the attractor. Those loops and spirals were infinitely deep, never quite joining, never intersecting. Yet they stayed inside a finite space, confined by a box. How could that be? How could infinitely many paths lie in a finite space?

 —  James Gleick, Chaos (1987)

For a while I had on my desk an article pointed out to me by Laura Elrick called “The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity.” Just glancing at the first page, not even really reading it, made me overexcited in the same way that a poem by Emily Dickinson can. I keep meaning to read this article, but am almost afraid of its potency.

 —  Evelyn Reilly, 1st posting here [see “Metaphor or More?”]

The text to which James called attention in his own 1st posting here, Eric Mottram’s investigation of concrete poetry in Towards Design in Poetry (1977; recently reprinted by Veer, operating out of Birkbeck College, University of London), has among its thematics “a simultaneity of elements — visually inclined, produced in sound or some other behaviour — which are usually taken separately in poetry, or at least with a single emphasis in exegesis.” & it’s surely correct that simultaneity of apprehension has been a widespread aim in concrete poetry, & that this has often taken the form of fusing signifier & signified, often by expelling elements of linguistic reference, to produce, in Paula Claire’s words from her (still-punning) 1975 title Codesigns cited by Eric, “response to marks as sign-sounds” as a means to intimate an intimate connectivity of humans & universe (Paula would perform, e.g., the veins in leaves); the result being that concrete poetry becomes “an extra-linear writing ‘between poetry and painting.’” Nonetheless the simultaneity proposition is interesting not least because one of the big influences on modernist aesthetics given in Mottram’s text, general relativity, with its hypothesis of objects moving at different velocities in a spacetime fabric which variously adjusts these objects in conformity with the limit-speed of light, absolutely rules out absolute simultaneity. Of course, this only becomes meaningful at unimaginable velocities. Also bear in mind that this is almost all I can say about general relativity, within the confines of a highly restricted coherence (ha!) of vocabulary, derived from various pitiably beloved popularizers of science; that already when I venture into Scientific American or New Scientist, which in fact I often do, I’m operating at the limits of stretched imagination; & that I was fascinated to learn, from Allen’s “friendly polemic” [see “Basics of Defenition”] that “Nature, the ‘International Weekly Journal of Science,’ as they subtitle it in the UK, was printed on Bible paper when [he] first started reading it, it was that authoritative.” From the Nature of the 80s I remember relentlessly white-&-black matte-pulp pages of near-uniform type, tiny articles each written by many people whose 1st names were identified simply by initials, & association with the predominant greys & whites of early-60s BBC science fiction on a Cromwellian box —

Asserting the freedom of letters/words to move out of linearity renders the reference complexly 3-D. The concrete or abstract/organic image in Apollinaire’s “The Little Car,” so thoroughly discussed by James above, hovers fractally between 2- & 3-D; other of the calligrams, such as the still-life parody “Heart Crown and Mirror” or the wonderful “It’s Raining,” where words are typographically bent into clearly cartoonish images of what is being said, seem rather to collapse the 3- into the 2-D, effecting a weird redundancy. But as S. I. Lockerbie (gendered by initials) sez in his intro to Anne Hyde Greet’s 1980 translation of Calligrammes, “Tautology is impossible between a linguistic statement and the instant impression conveyed by a shape,” because a temporal slice for interpretation is inserted within the surface of the page that may further return to complicate (delay) the shape’s “instant impression” —

At this point I’m tempted to turn to Peter’s remark in his discussion of Zukofsky’s poem 12 [see “Zukofsky”], that “the crisis of the equation of materialism and realism” was made acute by the new physics, for “as long as quantum mechanics failed to provide pictures of an invisible material world, it failed to constitute a new reality.” A prefiguring & corrective of that in typography? some kind of epistemic set of transferences? Probably not, or nothing so easy —

All by way of offering a reading of James’s “Strange Attractor.” The figure is perhaps strikingly anthropomorphic, a faintly wincing native (Inuit?) holding his or her belly; on her or his left (our right) cheek, what looks like a scar; ditto, mutatis mutandis, if you turn it upside down. These visual “scars” in fact prevent any reading of the words as a continuous tracing of what, among the array of gorgeously colored figures that would briefly enthrall so many of us during the chaos theory heyday, would be called a Lorenz Attractor, initially developed to model heat convection. Nor however do they allow a pair of intertwined but self-contained spirals, disappearing each into its vortex’s vanishing point, no, there are two breaks, two barriers to resumptions that relaunch over troubles. Starting, necessarily arbitrarily, from one of these, manually revolving book or sheet, one verbal string might read:

leaving a double spiral never reaching its end three non-linear equations constructing maze the walls rearrange every time they change the three coordinates three dimensions a continuous path never overlapping falling through and rising up they move never taking/again/same path again leaving a double spiral never reaching its end three non-linear equations constructing maze the walls rearrange every time they change the three coordinates three dimensions a continuous path never overlapping

never taking same path because of the physical complications of the task of continuously focusing

Indeed, the heady citation might be taken from some edited text on chaos theory, tho’ a rather cursory google search didn’t turn it up. The idea of the infinitely bursting nut no longer does it for me, but what else might? “Where the spirals appear to join, the surfaces must divide, [Edward Lorenz] realized.” Gleick offers the following as a relatable-to model of the fractal: “Without friction a simple linear equation expresses the amount of energy you need to accelerate a hockey puck. With friction the relationship gets complicated, because the amount of energy changes depending on how fast the puck is already moving. Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules”; there results a “twisted changeability.” So we might think of the poem’s actual words as operating a kind of coiling friction in our apprehending the apparent simple duplication/spectacle of a Lorenz figure. Or to put it another way, an intuitively dubious Nietzscheanism, the ability of willing negation to turn negation to affirmation — here we get a look at it in those scars or slivers that repeatedly interrupt continuity as they do disappearance, crafting infinity on a 2-D surface even as they detach the poem from purely visual spectacle.

Darragh: Hi, all —

On a day off, jumping in here.

The “don’t write of what you don’t know” critique works to reinforce the worst aspects of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures commentary. This discussion prompted me to reread it today, and I’d forgotten that Snow paints the scientific community as a culture where differences in class have been erased by education, producing a productive, future-oriented moral enterprise concerned with global poverty. Literary types, on the other hand, are amoral, self-absorbed whiners who helped pave the way for the Holocaust. When we literary types take on science, we help break open that dualism so that the capitalism in scientific endeavors can hang out in all its “we-don’t-need-regulation-’cause-we-have-your-best-interests-at-heart — love-those-boundless-profits” glory. Do you think BP will change its name to CP?!! We are citizen poets when we refuse to be in awe of/challenge the idea of a “pure science” providing the authority for what is good.

Adair: Hi Tina —

Intriguingly, this is the first time that someone has so overtly brot up the science/capitalism connections — certain positions or attitudes are beginning to take shape: the informed putting of science to metaphorical use for the exploration of everyday life (Rae); an excitement with the vocab (Evelyn), the sense of an “aesthetic effect” distinct to science which scientists are in various ways constrained to disavow (John Cayley, and related, Marcella) — certainly science popularizers are allowed to show enthusiasm, & major scientists are generally supposed to be passionate … the placing of poetry at the service of the exploration of scientific developments (Amy) … now critical (yourself) —

The one witty thing I’m aware of Henry Kissinger ever having said is that “No one will ever win the battle of the sexes — there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.” It’s not directly analogous, but there are many fascinating, beautiful, precisioned, & cool things about science, even when it’s in the service of the enemy — perhaps more urgently, much we believe accurate that we know about the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe comes from people with scientific training — ditto for large-scale climate change, the circulation of the blood, & so on — those who deny climate change we tend to regard as either scientific illiterates or paid scoundrels; they in their turn have no problem rejecting an overwhelming weight of scientific authority, any more than do creationists —

The various prestiges of various authorities are a key thematic here —

Reilly: Hello all,

One of the interesting results of following this online dialog for me has been the realization that I bring science into my poetry less directly, or maybe it’s just less “head-on,” than others. I’m not so concerned with accuracy or even with addressing, or enacting, or referring to scientific ideas per se, but am very interested in constructing a language environment that blends the “presence” of science with the ethical and emotional implications of living among its “findings” and “impacts.” While I admire poetry that aims to achieve what Joan calls the enactment of “the dynamic principles that a scientific model has been developed to understand,” I’m more engaged, at least at the moment, in exploring the poethics of a world that, as technological animals, we both create and inhabit (and one of our chief technologies being language).

Recently I’ve been working on a long poem called “The Dreamlife of Materials” and I’ve posted a few sections to the site. This work integrates a faux architectural language I found in a book called Siteless: 1001 Building Forms, by the French architect François Blanciak, into a series of imaginary reports and letters written by an engineer who’s been assigned to a jobsite in some kind of futuristic dystopian landscape. As I worked on this I was surprised to find that the creation of a pseudotechnical poetic language opened a space for a tone of “contained hysteria” which I probably couldn’t have managed otherwise. It was this mixture of the technical with the hyperemotional that interested me, because I think the contemporary moment is marked by a very shaky faith in our ability to solve problems through technological prowess and enormous, almost inexpressible, grief over our environmental circumstances.

from The Dreamlife of Materials

Time stamp: 029 ZMT 77104
Report from build site: 423
 
 
It is windy terrible and the time frame comfort slot
so doted over
keeps hurtling
 
today: 12 chapped columns, 3 quartered globes, 244 knuckled sheets
 
and the scalped dome project “lays wavers”
 
 
Astonishingly, the corner tear is back-lit in dream light
and this night after night
 
 
Still we keep pouring digital spit into this blog storage device
having unboxed the urbox permanently       
 
 
yours, sincerely
 
 
Time stamp: 029 ZMT 7710118
Report from build site: 37B
 
 
Ms. T,
 
It was a shock that you would send
this ignition system
 
instead of the slogan-infestation compress
we had so explicitly requested
 
 
What exactly was your intent?
 
 
Nonetheless we animated the chamber
and discovered the delicate filigree
of the disaster end
 
— a very affordable solution!
 
 
Now we can display the entire series:
 
barbarism star, barbarism square, barbarism float debris
 
 
Time stamp: 0526 ZMT 770807
Report from build site: 93 (also known as Glove Stab)
 
 
The signal is so sticky with procedure drek
we grow desperate
for dislocation lubricant
 
Yet today we completed
2 maelstrom corners
and 6 perfusion upsinks
 
after which it took hours to adjust
the nose cone of rampant grief                                       
 
 
We have now pried countless tender chordate features 
from the slab encasement                
 
105 translation blockages
79 embedded snares
 
 
I am so lonely I have been talking to my software
for nearly three years
 
 
kneeling
 
yrs
 
 
Time stamp: 011 ZMT 947334
Report from build site: 10449
 
 
More ugly workdays marked
by ceaseless moral deficiency showers
of which however
our terror has lessened
 
Many just let the face fall
into the skinflap of personal life
 
 
This is when I decided to erect the pity stations
so that each could enact their sorrow intact
 
44 liquid squares
3000 circumvention rods
2 mush buildings
 
 
Time stamp: 9112 ZMT 870428
Report from build site:  3 (one of the originals)
 
 
The address tower finally overlooks
the management stations
 
and a panel laid against the openings
of the edge condition
 
marks the site for touristic pilgrimage
 
 
So many kinds of pulverized material:
I fill the vials out of some sense
of future retrieval                                               
 
Just don’t breath and the dust
won’t get over you    
 
 
Time stamp: 967 ZMT 79109
Report from build site: Bicephalous Cantilever
 
 
Finally improvements!
 
Brighter dimmers have replaced the blighted meters
and our blinded windows are backed by decorative grills
 
Even the situation drive restarted
which had been exhausting us for weeks
 
 
Today the sun is ambulatory! the planet ambulatory! 
 
 
The surplus bark in spite of snow
peels in permeable tentacles of façade plu!
 
 
Excuse my effervescence!
 
 
Time stamp: 07 ZMT 996026
Report from build site: 39TXX
 
 
G,
 
Why now happiness its radial features
hand in hand with total inversion splash ruin?
 
(why what repeats itself repeats
(why what repeats repeats the self-replicatory system
 
plus random mutation messaging:
 
ATT ATC GTA CTT                             
TAA TAG CAT GAA
 
and the oracle says “offending command: syntax error”   
 
So we went ahead and inserted the sequence
being in dire need of bugs and fleurs                    
 
 
Time stamp: 066 ZMT 0006 (a moment of celestial concurrence)
Report from build site: 893
 
 
Chérie,
 
It is undeniable that our little mitosis act
on this lattice
was over-hatched
 
but we keep erecting frames no matter how
the times expose our litter failings
 
 
No scale, order or end to this series
 
 
which I’ve come to think of as just so much panel gush
held in place by the flimsiest identity replacement gear
 
 
— one in a heap of trembling outcomes
 
 
filed under say “universal envelop mistake blanket”

Adair: Hi Evelyn —

This seems to me tone-perfect satire of a multifaceted colonizing effort: its internal paranoias (“What exactly was your intent?”), its ominous preparations for “slogan infestation,” among them the rush of exclamation marks leading to the plea “Excuse my effervescence!” (reminiscent of the advertising strategy in which actors mime in overabundance the enthusiasm we are required/permitted to express for the commodity being pushed), the hint of institutionalizing machines for environmental harm (“barbarism star,” etc) —

I wonder how you wld see these pieces as relating (or not) to stances on science fiction staked out by Joanna Russ in her 1973 essay “Toward an Aesthetics of Science Fiction,” where she insists that barring one or two necessarily acceptable violations such as faster-than-light space travel, the premises of an SF text shld not contravene “what is known to be [scientifically] known”; and the greater latitude extended by her colleague Samuel R. Delany shortly after, when he proposed that SF cld find its launching-pad in “real, speculative, or pseudo-science” — the last of these not, of course, any more than in Russ, ruling out an intersecting basis in a take on social shiftings —

We seem to know pretty much what the “hurtling” of “the time frame comfort slot” must imply — we may not be able to guess what “knuckled sheets” are but defer to the routine assuredness of the reference — “What exactly was your intent?” is LOL-funny because the ramifications of the preceding choice are so absolutely opaque —

I think in the first Die Hard movie (1988) I began to see technical operations (usually in heist contexts) conducted in a paratactic blur of fast-forwards, as poets had launched into long before, making contact with a larger world of processes/machinic intimacies which we cld rarely explain ourselves but knew/assumed had an explanation — & if an explanation, perhaps a purpose — the issue of trust resumed its career as narrative & readerly thematics [“NO TRUST” sez Melville 1857, & the Tea Party echoes today, except that Melville meant it] — the issue of trust engages the issue of discipline, but at the same time an issue of somehow-slanted landscape — 

Allen Fisher: Dear all,

I was looking at Thomas Pynchon’s article “Is It OK to Be a Luddite?” which appeared in the New York Times October 28, 1984.

I think it could be of interest to the discussion. He begins with C. P. Snow’s 2 cultures and goes on to give a history of the Luddites. But he also notes the inseparable praxis of literature and technology (and thus science and poetry).

best wishes,

Allen

Reilly: Allen, Gilbert et al.,

I got great pleasure out of the Pynchon essay and it gave me some ideas as well as to how to respond to Gilbert’s questions about “The Dreamlife of Materials” and the whole issue of “sci-fi.” (And I’d also like to take the occasion to thank Gilbert for being the maestro of this e-dialog.) As for Pynchon’s identification of science fiction as a site for a contemporary Luddite sensibility (or at least, contemporary as he saw it in 1984), I agree that the genre often serves as an outlet for paranoia and fear of the next chapter of our technologically-driven future. Of course all human history has been “technologically-driven,” but the rate of change does keep accelerating. I’m not in any way against such change, but certainly think we live equally among the results of technology as destroyer (weapons technology, environmental degradation) as those of technology as emancipator (public health, digital communications). I’ve never been a reader of science fiction, so can’t really comment on the state of the art, but do find it very satisfying as a TV genre. In fact, I gave a talk at the CUNY/Belladonna conference last fall called “Vulcan Feminist Poetics: Scientific Appropriation and the Mask of Spock” that posed questions about poets, including myself, who don “the mask of Spock” (or, alternatively, the “drag of lab”) in its various guises as both aesthetic and social strategy. This talk focused on questions such as: In what ways is such a strategy an embrace of the world, a tool of investigation, even an exploration of gendered life? In what ways is it a flight or reprieve from gender, a way of masking out issues of class, race, sexual orientation? But one of the other questions I put forth, and perhaps this is what accounts for the nature of the poetic landscape of “Dreamlife of Materials,” was: Is the Vulcanist’s quest to go where no one has gone before (the goal of the masters of the universe and the premise of Star Trek)? Or is it a search for home (the goal of exiles and the premise of Battlestar Galactica, in which a small group of survivors of nuclear holocaust are just trying to make it from one devastated home to the next)? In a sidebar email to James Harvey, I mentioned that it may be my years spent in research labs — I was a technician in the lab of Martin Chalfie at Columbia, who eventually went on to win the Nobel Prize in 2008 — that has moved my interest from the strictly scientific to what Gilbert called, regarding Delany’s fiction, “the social shiftings.” Not because of any disillusionment with the scientific, which I got to experience at its best and most idealistic, but maybe “having done that,” I felt liberated, when it came to poetry, from issues of accuracy etc., and was looking for very different things, like the ability to be playful and extreme and let language take the lead. But that’s not the whole of it. I think that the freedom of poetry (which I don’t want to overstate, we are of course all inhabiting the same only semi-autonomous zone of language) does provide an arena (as does the pseudoscience of sci fi) to explore, with no (or fewer) holds barred, many aspects of our current situation. And maybe that’s been part of the two streams of this online dialog: those whose work embodies the exuberance of recent scientific thinking and those whose work is colored by the social shiftings of a world marked by apparent impending catastrophe. Two aspects of the same thing?

Adair: Evelyn — 

This is very interesting, that an inside experience of a top-flight research lab liberates you from the complex anxieties re the scientifically accurate that may haunt those of us without that experience — can anyone else speak to this?

I’m also very glad that Pynchon has been brot into this forum, & his article from a key date, I think, 1984. When in the late 70s I first became aware of Allen’s work & its ability to present the complexities & thicknesses of what was becoming apparent as an increasingly technologized culture, I was working on what became a PhD dissertation on post-1945 American epic fiction, featuring Pynchon & Delany among others. In Gravity’s Rainbow, his most recent novel then published, Pynchon was working with an internalization of Henry Adams’s hailing of entropy as perhaps “the great generalization that would bring all history under a law” (GR enacts this down to the level of the sentence) & also the ideas of radical neo-Freudians Norman O. Brown & Wilhelm Reich; thus he has one of his spokesmen in the novel refer to the worldwide “persistence … of structures favoring death. Death converted into more death …. This is the sign of Death the impersonator.” It extends into a reading of science/technology so “Luddite” that it includes a tirade on refrigerators for arresting the organic process of decay. I take it we all know that a McDonalds hamburger, left on a kitchen table for 2 weeks, will suffer no such organic process …. But I remember also the disquiet many of us felt with Ginsberg’s “Plutonian Ode” (1980) & its major vexation that before us was a “new element … unborn in nature … named for Death’s planet through the sea beyond Uranus” —

OK, this is coming out of a familiar tradition in American lit. By 1984, Pynchon had been for some time at work on his next biggie, Mason & Dixon, eventually published in 1997, where he’s trying to get away from the paranoid obsession with thanatological closed systems via, as Joe Tabbi argues in Cognitive Fictions (2002), the notion of autopoesis, “an explosive transformation ‘across some Threshold of self-Intricacy’ unpredictable from the mechanical principles of the … original assembly.” ‘Self-organization’ — ‘order out of chaos’ — buzz-terms in the National University of Singapore, where I spent much of the 90s, & where Ilya Prigogine was a welcome invited lecturer. ‘Emergence,’ one of the terms that James has valuably raised — something that may cut across the organic, the technological, & the poetic — any more on that? (Tabbi: “the self-creating process out of unknown cognitive elements” — including those of the mind itself) —

Back to 1984, around the incipience of the hot new SF genre of cyberpunk — so hot that Fredric Jameson intemperately thot it might be the literary genre of the postmodern era. 1986 saw the Mirrorshades anthology where editor Bruce Sterling drew attention to a new kind of technology — electronic, often miniaturized — where “on” buttons didn’t metallically snap on but crept into light with soft whispers, that were stroked rather than stabbed, that dwelt in an ambience of early-morning bluegreys. I’m suggesting that that was around the point when it became hard to be alienated from science & technology in the way that the Ginsberg of “Plutonian Ode” & the Pynchon of GR had been; tho’ we could contrast Ginsberg’s deadly seriousness here with what makes the writing of “Is It OK to Be a Luddite” characteristically delightful: the relaying of esoteric (here mostly historical) learning thro’ a battery of pop-culture filters (“Sorry, Rev, got some knitting.” “What, again?”). Was it also about then that the word “cool” was reincarnated from its 50s jazz ambience & 60s cultural savviness to imply something to do with smart & elegant technology? — tho’ its applications radiated after that (applications rather than meaning) —

Speaking for myself, without a scientific education beyond the age of 14, I found the Pynchon of GR to go in very deep, to be operating still as an unconscious tug. Useful to me then is Allen’s urging [in “Basics of Definition”] to pluralize & differentially frame the sciences (as well, obviously, as to integrate them in other kinds of temporary syntheses, which I suppose is one name for poems). Physics is very cool not least, perhaps, for poets, because whether at macro- or micro-levels it abounds with creative intellects & giant ideas we can admire, which ideas can provide wonderfully subtle metaphors without themselves being enmired. The dirt on Schrödinger, please —

Adair: PS I just read “The Trade in Bathos,” an article by Keston Sutherland in Jacket 15, December 2001, but written when the 2000 US presidential election was still undecided, which includes the following:

The position from which we can observe, describe, criticize, hate, ignore, or admire globalization is a position of literal ecstatic compromise. We stand outside of what we see; we are excluded fundamentally from the knowledge which, however, we are free to believe that we possess; we are totally compromised in that exclusion, not only by our literal inability to influence or properly to comprehend the sovereignty of liberal economics, but for a more profound reason. This reason is to do with what we mean by (and what we can do with) the word “ideas.”

The argument is complex, taking off from the disquiet felt by Pope and Locke at the freedom (license?) people had come to feel in choosing to believe wrong or fanciful things, in the context of the “first great wave of financial speculation following the establishment of the Bank of England, the National Debt and the introduction of paper currency in the 1690s”; Keston now sees variants on bathos as near-universal among practitioners of innovative poetry, himself included; not long after that he began to promote & practice what he called “vague” poetry, an interesting idea to me at least. But. Almost from the moment I moved to NYC in 1999, it was apparent to me that the 60s maxim “If it feels good, do it” had been widely replaced by “If it feels good, think it — & by all means proclaim it.” This seems different from the deliberate playing with wrong or fanciful ideas by poets, not least because so many people so passionately reject views that among relevant scientists are all but the consensus (notably re climate change and neo-Darwinian evolution). A mass bid — Luddite in the worst sense — to withdraw from the contemporary world is uncomfortable to see up close; the political, environmental, & educational effects are direct; the kooky pronouncements from many Tea Party candidates for the midterm elections are perhaps symptomatic of something hard even to begin to analyze.

In the meantime, this is Tabbi’s comment in Cognitive Fictions with respect to truth-value in Mason & Dixon:

That Dixon recognizes his map as “an overhead view of a World that never was” does not, in itself, contradict its truth value or scientific integrity. His map is true in the way that a circle, line, or triangle is “true,” even though none of these actually exists in the world: what Dixon has encountered … is the efficacy of approaching the empirical world of “truth-like detail” with the aid of a cognitive theory. Above all, the integrity of the composition, its self-consistency rather than consistency with the outside world, makes the map truth-like.

Hmm. Gotta brood on this one, as on the whole idea of “models.”