AT THE university where I once taught creative writing, the physics department offered a course known in the common room as Astronomy for Poets. Being somewhat interested in both subjects, I got curious and phoned up the admissions secretary, who sent me a glossy brochure. It included the following bullet-points:
- discover the secrets of pulsars and black holes
- follow the evolution of the universe from the big bang
- investigate the birth and death of stars and the origins of life beyond Headingly.
For anyone unfamiliar with the geography of the north of England, Headingly is a constellation situated towards the outer edges of the city of Leeds whose points of interest include a concentrated cluster of student and staff accommodation and the collapsing star of Yorkshire Cricket Club. Mention of it was clearly meant to make the module more attractive to students from across all disciplines. More to the point, this was a course for people who couldn鈥檛 add up. It isn鈥檛 unusual, as a poet, to be associated with all kinds of scientific incompetence.
It must be a great frustration to mathematicians to be faced with the perception that all things mathematical must express themselves as a number; it鈥檚 the same for poets whose works are expected to add up to a single and precise meaning. Although I鈥檝e begun with anecdotes that suggest friction between science and the arts, what I want to suggest is that poetry and science, for all their perceived differences, might well be attempting to accomplish the same thing and through remarkably similar means.
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I was 10 or 11 when a gang of us found a tractor tyre on the moor and decided to roll it down into the village and burn it. In the poem that follows, I tell of how the tyre gained an unstoppable momentum as it careered down the road towards the village, and how we lost sight of it as it headed for destruction and carnage. When we arrived in the village, the tyre was nowhere to be seen. Because science 鈥� or what we knew of it at the time 鈥� had failed us, we were left to invent some other explanation:
Being more in tune with the feel of things than science and facts, we knew that the tyre had travelled too fast for its size and mass, and broken through some barrier of speed, outrun the act of being driven, steered,and at that moment gone beyond itself towards some other sphere, and disappeared.
鈥淚 carry a torch for that time of life when instinct and intuition still hold sway over logic and reason鈥�
I suppose what I鈥檓 trying to convey at the end of the poem is the sense of endless possibility that comes naturally to all children, just as it powers the imagination of most poets. At age 10 or 11, if a tyre mysteriously evaporates into nothing, the laws of the universe aren鈥檛 suddenly thrown into confusion 鈥� it鈥檚 perfectly acceptable. I鈥檓 not advocating a belief in fairy stories, but I am carrying a torch for that time of life when instinct and intuition still hold sway over logic, reason and law.
Science, it seems to me, is besotted with perfection. Poetry might seem to be in conflict with that position, since it goes out of its way to describe every occasion in a new and fresh and surprising way, but in fact it attempts the same thing, albeit through sensation rather than understanding. There are, presumably, an infinite number of ways of describing how a large, inanimate object such as a tyre can go missing, and presumably an infinite number of reactions. A successful poem brings about a kind of animal comprehension rather than its theoretical explanation, and comprehension comes from a common pool of experience. Some of us hope to remain open to that type of perception.
Science, like poetry, deals in likeness, similitude and equivalence. If you鈥檙e gambling with the world and its actions, science gives you better odds, because its logic is linear, whereas the logic of poetry is radial, or at its very best, entirely spherical. Just as life, as we know, imitates art, science imitates life. I don鈥檛 suggest that as a hierarchy, but to reinforce the interconnectedness of the two disciplines through the intermediary of the human presence.
In placing this kind of importance on poetry, I鈥檓 asking it to come forward and be congratulated for its achievements, but also to take responsibility for the error of its ways. Science didn鈥檛 take men to the moon. It may have worked out the trigonometry, but it was a poetic dream that propelled us into the heavens. Science didn鈥檛 drop the bomb on Hiroshima either. It was a poetic nightmare vision of hellfire discharged onto an unsuspecting city that opened the bomb-hatch over the Ota river delta on 6 August 1945, even if science guided it down to its target.
