Two Poems
Year: 2002 Authors: Gar Bethel
Core claim
Scientific uncertainty and poetic language both point toward realities that exceed direct capture, making perception, thought, and meaning permanently incomplete.
Topics
quantum uncertainty, cosmology, language and metaphor, perception and reality
Domains
physics, quantum mechanics, poetry, literary metaphor, music
Methods
lyric meditation, scientific analogy, intertextual reference
Media
Paper text
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BRIDGES Mathematical Connections in Art, Music, and Science
Two Poems
Gar Bethel 212 Iowa Winfield, Kansas 67156
The Uncertainty Principle
Here, in the cold incomprehensible mathematics of the dark, in the vast dark of a solar system, where planets orbit a minor star
off to one side in a swirling galaxy, by the numbers out of sight in a universe, a universe of Chinese boxes,
we warm our erratic and playful thoughts by rubbing two words together, white dwarf, big bang,
beautiful simplicity.
And yet leaping genes or primordial soup are incommensurate with the majesty of the world’s first life, cells,
their thin skins learning to exchange protean information about proteins, and the two point five billion
years of layers of blue-green bacteria reigning as the only life anywhere, creating from the sun and using oxygen,
symbiotically regulating Earth into unity, changing, like ideograms, their own characters, becoming building blocks for familiar
architectures, tallgrass prairies, bobcats and pheasant, and a human child running and babbling with other
children.
That was the age when reinvention of language was easy, our brains born for metaphor and syntax, renewing and reminding
80 Gar Bethel
why childhood exists, branch, bud, leaf, green, no growth forgets its roots,
so is it any wonder out of respect and affection, we hold out an arm to protect or enfold a child for comfort
as we tell him tales or family stories, then sing him to sleep, Oh ladybugs and rattlesnakes,
Oh thistle and incredible life from volcanic steam at the bottom of the ocean, Oh Chinese celadon and kids making-up
rules for a game.
And now, compatible with the nonsense rhymes of children, unafraid of bewilderment and being’s ambiguity,
satisfied with science in flux or with music calling-up its spirits from continuity’s interstices,
we desire the song of a titmouse, we listen to a child correcting his grammar, we wander the anthill trying
to be useful.
Patience
At the quantum level within one billionth of a trillionth of a second an electron and its mate can emerge out of nothingness without
warning, come back together again, and then vanish. And any light we use to enable us to see that particle affects
its movement. The very act of observation changes the thing observed. Physical fact is inseparable from human perception affecting that fact.
Much as how we imagine the universe began, from nothing we come and return in the end
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to nothing. As Shakespeare said somewhere,
Out of airy nothing, a local habitation and a name is created until the rest is silence. Imagination and perception call us to ideas,
especially the unanswerable ones about death and love and the nature of reality, all part and particle in the language and emotions of consciousness.
Some say the only ideas worth thinking are what is unthinkable, a meaning somewhere beyond our reach. Memory gathers upon
something inexpressible that demands to be thought, but what draws us along withdraws from us, however far away we are. Some ideas
seem to ask us to give them thought, to turn toward them and think them, but words fall short of capturing their airy reality.
By the very degree we bring to bear, reality draws back to our desire for what we can’t say. Our moments are meant to be born again and again,
and memory is refined in the face of constant becoming, and withdrawal refuses the easy consolation. So just as for any extent of space, there is thought
to be a space of anti-matter exactly matter’s match, the gleam in your eye of emergence becomes the dimming of the lights to semblance, to seeming.
Still words need not contain in order to provoke or spark or elicit. Those kisses again open up the promise of something beyond their opening.
Our words, our ideas, tend by nature toward what is out of time, toward what is silent, however loud that silence is. There is
in experience a permanent incompleteness that can not be evaded.