The Universe In The Creak Of A Bedspring

Science doesn’t think. Said Heidegger. Science is rigorously empirical. It observes. It measures. It quantifies. It obscures Being with abstract numerical properties. Science is reductive, thought is rampant. Technology is fundamentally blind. Creativity sees the invisible beyond the visible. Science exalts objectivity. Poetry evinces Erfahrung, the feeling of coming into existence.

Science eschews the alchemy of metaphor for the accuracy of the caliper.

The mind (to paraphrase William James) sees in the universe an alluring enigma whose key is hidden in the form of a word or a name.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Science sees the mind as a kind of computer, an organ, an electrochemical Wurlitzer. A symbol-manipulation device, a network of neurons, or a probabilistic inference engine.

According to Heidegger (and, not unironically, the AI overview on Google) “technology significantly affects the mind by shaping our perception of the world, causing us to view everything as raw material for manipulation and control, essentially ‘enframing’ our understanding and limiting our ability to experience the world authentically; he argues that modern technology, with its focus on calculation and efficiency, can restrict our thinking to a purely instrumental way of viewing the world, potentially reducing our capacity for deeper contemplation and connection with nature and other beings.”

I’m sympathetic to these thoughts. I find them cogent and alert. I also find them romantically naïve.

Technology has helped make existence endurable. Not just endurable, fun. It’s exhilarating to feel the thrust and roar of the turbojets aboard a passenger jet lift from the ground and watch below as the city and its exasperating complications shrink into inconsequential miniatures. Take that initial downward dive on a roller coaster. Listen to Susan Tedeschi play an electric guitar.

Technology has given us refrigerators, vaccines, electric lights and heating, halls for symphonies, stadiums for sports, telescopes, microscopes, spectroscopes and colonoscopies, calculus and codeine, welding, windmills and well-being, vineyards and violins, antennas and aqueducts and antibiotics, careful experimentation and observation, Robert Boyle’s indomitable matter of fact.

Technology has also destroyed what I most love. What I devoted to my life to. Writing. Literature. Poetry. Computer technology has had a powerfully corrosive effect on literary and critical thinking. It has also been a critical component of warheads and ballistic missiles.

Not to mention the 2,000 lb. bombs being dropped daily on the citizens of Gaza. Men, women, and children. Babies.

Or the fire bombs dropped on Dresden in February, 1945.

Or the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Or the daily release of 32,000 gallons of radioactive water into the Pacific from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan for the next thirty years.

Science doesn’t think. It blunders. It destroys. It brutalizes nature. It distances us from ourselves. It produces sidewalk zombies forever scrolling for little squirts of dopamine. It enables war and ecological disasters. Lethal viruses escape from its labs. Children die in lithium mines.

So I get it. I lean toward Heidegger. Everything but the Nazi affiliation.  

It’s a curious exercise to mix poetry and science. Lucretius did a fine job of it in De Rerum Natura. This testifies to the ultimate failure of categories to support a coherent argument. Because poetry and science – mathematics especially – have far more in common than they do irresolvable differences. Things blur. Life is lived in blends of plum and soft Tara gray.

Equations are poetry. There are equations that evince a marvelous aesthetic. And there are equations that reveal unexpected relationships between things, which is precisely what poetry does. Poetry is an arena of equation making.

For example, the Standard Model Lagrangian. It’s not much to look at. At first glance, it looks like an indecipherable mess. But it’s beautiful. Beautiful in its complexities and mathematical éclat. It describes the fundamental interactions of elementary particles within the Standard Model of particle physics, and does so with clarity and sparkle and a keenly displayed perceptibility of highly elusive abstractions. How is this different from a poem? The equation is customarily written as a sum of terms representing the kinetic energy of the particles, their interactions with the gauge bosons (a bosonic elementary particle that acts as the force carrier for elementary fermions) and the Higgs field interactions, which is responsible for converting energy to horses, frogs, and motorcycles. It’s a poem. It does what poetry does. It creates. It enchants. It accelerates particle beams smashes congruent chains and sprinkles the world with God particles.

I’m not trying to make converts here. I do tend to get evangelistic on matters of poetry and the verbal arts, but a lot of the time I’m trying hard to make sense of the many incongruities and contradictions that inhabit my brain. The wrongly assumed antagonism between science and art being one of them.

If there were an equation for that, it would look like this, what I call the Pierre Reverdy equation: “The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison, but only of the bringing together of two more or less distant realities. The more the relations of the two realities brought together are distant and fitting, the stronger the image – the more emotive power and poetic reality it will have.”

The ocean in a drop of water.

The universe in the creak of a bedspring.