Through the Cloud Chamber: One poet's trajectory

an essay on one aspect of his poetics by Dr. Tim Metcalf 

 

The inter-related concepts of relativity, chaos, post-modernism, Zen, and the bizarre possibilities of the quantum universe have penetrated the popular imagination via successful translations into everyday English. We are told the many dimensions of space exist only at the subatomic scale; that time is a one-way street; parallel universes are there to be slipped into; naked singularities could swallow us at any moment. The question that I pose in the medium of poetry is where human beings fit into this mentalistic landscape; indeed, can they? How can we live with a probabilistic life, bounded by chaos? Is all this not contrary to our very conception of ourselves? 

Life may be envisaged as that place in the mind from which chaos is excluded; where continuity and sense are commonplace and obvious, and where the unexpected happens to others. Life is a field of possibilities, created by cross-communication: the individual is more or less shaped by this field. Death is that point at which communication ceases: that hazy horizon that surrounds and limits us in all directions. 

For me, the concept of a field of possibilities has been transformative. If probability replaces destiny, life is psychologically difficult for us; we are very resistant to letting ourselves go into the infinity of possibility, for we fear the loss of selfhood. Coming to terms with this view of the universe can be disorienting: 

an alternative life 

Every moment I am offered an alternative life.

Mostly my task is to stay on course

for that final buoy, out in the endless sea,

that has no known co-ordinates.

The waves are chaos, shimmering on a spinning globe.

Dependent for my independence,

my life raft’s ballasted by documents,

but has no stern, no prow, no tiller;

the only compass in my head.

Bobbing in a huge salt-water basin,

I can’t see which way the needle’s pointing,

only cross-currents, counter-clockwise,

oscillations, gods, stellar and tidal motion:

one infinite, changeable ocean. 

 

Voltaire’s Candide’s life represents chaos. Candide himself is followed in the innocent act of living, waking to chaos each day, from dreams that tried and mostly failed to make sense of the day before. Voltaire remarks that ‘He was unhappy only when he thought: and that was true of the majority of mankind.’ The comic genius of Candide lies in our identification with his experience of life. The more times we ourselves have confronted fearful chaos, when we come up against the boundaries of order, the more we enjoy his adventures. This is the essential humanity of humour and its apparently paradoxical expression of pain. 

Poetry shares with humour the ability to contain paradox, ambiguity, and downright contrariness within a coherent structure. These two forms may employ each other’s techniques for effect. Complexity may be both acknowledged and controlled, even defied, in a poem. Ultimately, however, acknowledgement is confronting; and control ends our experiment in eternity. 

my little howl 

my little howl is rolling like a golf ball

in an oil refinery.

It’s afraid of getting stuck

inside pitch-black complexity.

 

Sometimes I hear it drop

or decide at a ‘Y’.

I know one day it might pop out

and hit me in the eye.           

 

There is not much difference between chaos, as loss of order, and the infinite. Both are frightening concepts to humankind, something it could easily be dissolved into. The following poem uses the Fibonacci sequence, a strict, real world mathematical structure that generates infinite numbers, to determine the number of syllables per line, and creates first a giddying expansion then a fearful contraction that is the sudden comprehension of the enormity of the universe many of us experience. The two sections of the poem are also numbered according to the Fibonacci sequence, implying that the poem itself is another beginning with infinite potential, and asserting the tendency of things towards expansion then dissolution.

(NB this poem is centred but I cannot format it here as it is printed originally) 

1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,…

 

1

 

From

The

Flowers'

Petals spring

Open before us

Nature's spiralling equations

Intricate rhythms forming from simple sequences

From the single seed to the sunflower's face to the waving field of

splendid yellow

    The golden centre of the picture that rapidly expanded from the big

bang through all time until the mind of the mathematician

Fibonacci whom they called the Blockhead who found a way that

nature might have made its breathtaking rush to the Infinite that

pervades our lives that at every step confronts us and falsifies our

equanimity

That is the ever-receding-before-our-science repository of fear and

    of beauty…

 

1

 

...containing the threat of innumerable possible points of departure

from every event.

The other way we could consider this is to say that randomness

terrifies us that our true desire is to dismantle it into predictable

portions to analyse the flickering dark surrounding our fires' light

Using Quantum Mechanics to calculate our tunnelling unscathed

through black uncertainties those moments into which the tiger

might leap

And Chaos Theory to steady our pulse that with the forests' fractal

branching trembles

Like the hands of ancients who accepted without sums

                                Our simple human need to grasp

                This unruly world

And reduce

It all

To

One.

 

 

Poetry’s response to chaos is empathic. The empathic voice is a communicant between compassion as the acceptance of chaos, and progress as the defiance of chaos. Through the scope of the poem we may view many worlds at once. This broadens and strengthens our field of human consciousness, and it does so via interconnectivity. Interconnectivity is not merely central to poetry: it is poetry. Like us poetry yearns to transcend, but knows its limits. It has been given permission to conceive of, and discuss the human implications of the quantum world, and that which can survive, contain or surpass it. Here I ask the old question of love in fourteen lines that contain irregularity by invoking a traditional sonnet: 

love is a quantum affair

strange attractor

i didn’t understand, myself

as a charm quark

probably spinning a dream

awake the energy welling up

i wanted to, in principle

i was uncertain

once you made the observation my lips are soft

(though i don’t always shave)

one kiss and the world shifts

but at the same time (different place)

and/or the same place (different time)

or neither

it doesn’t antimatter.

 

 

Poetry, then, sustains our human field, pushes out into chaos, subsumes more and more of the universe to our understanding. It also works in the opposite way, by assigning words to that which is beyond words, reducing our field by signification: creating a cage for us from words, so that we are like divers in a vast ocean infested with the sharks of meaninglessness. Hence the poet is both significant as the definer of the field of possibility, and insignificant, as a passing mind bubbling up on the surface of history. The poet is an individual, but immersed in the mass. The poet works for science and history, and for detachment and the nothingness of self. 

George Eliot observed in Middlemarch that ‘The human mind has at no period accepted a moral chaos’. The poets are contrary from an explanatory, therefore dichotomous, point of view. Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men mentions Socrates’ belief that poets were anything but wise, mere representatives of the arts and sciences symbolic of a degenerating society losing its virtue. In the quantum world-view, however, what is in fact natural is allowed – people have inner views that differ – yet both exist together, indeed need each other. Polarities are embraced, even absorbed in a broader aspect. Somehow we must retain our bearings in a world where they have been brought into question, and again we reflexively withdraw into the human.

 

A Brief History of Love

 

God or no god

there is always the future.

The Earth will turn cold,

Geology will stop.

The ocean will level the land.

 

The sun will flare and boil

off the seas: its implosion

will burn up the earth.

Each atom will vanish

like light from a torch

held up to the night.

 

The future’s fixed, not worth

a thought. We’ve only time

to be in love. Let science

slap its head and fumble

with its facts! All the planets,

every star, will burn away.

 

It’s taken time, it’s true

to learn this answer to

the future’s mystery;

but today the sun is kind,

and love still entertains

its disregard for history.

 

 

From the fearsome vision of timeless, open space, our minds retreat into the ‘safety’ of our homeostatic animal body. To have entropy we must have linear time, the ‘one-way arrow’, and this leads directly to death, something we all attempt to deny. Similarly, home is where chaos in spatial relations is minimised. By and large things stay where we put them – only now and then does there seem to be a glitch in space-time. If our home burns down, we save our photo albums above all other materiel possessions, for they are the physical proof of our history and our connection to society.

 The answer to entropy is to deny linear time. Humans have evolved many ways to achieve this, at least temporarily, in their minds. Many individuals in modern Australia believe a complex derivative mix of the ancient thought systems of a multicultural nation. Australia is fortunate also in retaining significant fragments of the world’s oldest extant culture. The Dreamtime of the Aboriginal people is actually timeless: it is a complete explanation of reality that requires no interpretation, and indeed creates no concept of debate. Aboriginal peoples around the world to this day have difficulty with the Western ‘time equals money’ metaphor and the numerical subdivision of the day. Practically this runs them into endless conflict with the dominant economic culture.

In our foolishness we all believe our own theory of the universe to be the correct one, and the most developed. We use history to establish a time-line, and do not see the timelessness that unites us. Poetry, however, has kept a record of this basic and profound understanding that defies the notion of historical development.  

In a time of convergent global culture and awareness of each other it may be a poet’s chosen task to use language, an ancient tool of enormous power, to participate in the preservation or construction of human culture. ‘From the extreme inequality of conditions and fortunes, from the diversity of passions and talents, from useless arts, pernicious arts and foolish sciences would arise a mass of prejudices, equally contrary to reason, happiness and virtue’ says Rousseau, but the temptation to engage in anti-imperialist culture wars can be transcended to unify us in our diversity. 

Poetry is interconnectivity – seeking new similes and metaphors, new juxtapositions. It is vitally important that this form of serious play be allowed to operate independently. Dampening poetry (and the other creative arts) eventually leads to a stultified, inflexible body politic that is incapable of adaptation and therefore doomed. Poetry in this sense is political, and there are divides between forms of poetry based ultimately upon one’s notion of existence. Poetry becomes a political project despite itself, and much has been written on making the arts socially constructive. 

Good, in the chaotic quantum world, is therefore an organising force. It is divorced of its moral dimension. It functions to improve cohesion of the field of humanity.

If it is the poet’s understanding that everything is a metaphor for everything else, then it is his most important task to control those metaphors, and limit the chaotic world to a few carefully chosen words.

 

The solution to us

 

My mathematical love

has two eyes and two feet

 

her body waves at me

its beautiful equations

 

subatomic physics spins

my head round, but not hers

 

always in the same place

black space cold at my back

 

I orbit around her

steady eye, I am earthed

 

our lovely universe

the solution to us.

 

 

As I sit here writing, a large Anopheles wasp is trying to escape the window. It can see the light but cannot escape the window’s wooden frame, for that would be, for a moment, to take the plunge into darkness in the terrified hope of resurfacing into a previous, broader, reality. Perhaps for the poet, that darkness is represented by a silence of the pen, and to write or contribute to the debate is increasing the entropy. Many would say we should be silent, but that would not be human. 

‘“What, then, should one do?”

“One should be silent.”
”I offered myself the flattering prospect,” said Candide, “of debating with you a little concerning causes and effects, the best of possible worlds, the origin of evil, the nature of the soul, the pre-established harmony, and similar matters.”’

 

References

Cranston M (trans.)(1984) Jean Jacques Rousseau: A Discourse on Inequality  Penguin Classics p69, p134

Eliot G (1871-2) Middlemarch  Penguin p136

Voltaire (1859) Candide  Wordsworth Classics 1993 pp114; 102

 

Acknowledgments

Thanks to those who first published the following poems of mine:

 

An Alternative Life: Five Bells  Spring 2005

1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,…: Redoubt 16, 1993, p64

A Brief History of Love: from Corvus Ginninderra Press 2001 p61

The Solution to Us: Poetry Monash 73: 2006

Love is a quantum affair: Retort Magazine  2006 (on-line)