Poetry and science

June 27, 2014 Poetry and Science allows us to see a link between the fundamentals of quantum physics and the daring innovations of poetry from Dante onwards. Unrecognised poets rest on nothing but the books they have read and those they have not yet written. Science is more sure of itself. What do we gain from a reflection on the solidity or otherwise of dark matter? What sustains the phenomenon of life and death in an organism? If I know how the immune system works, I shall be less frightened of death, I’ll read Dante as a palliative.
 
How can we imagine a declaration of love in scientific language? By taking a short cut? In the Divine Comedy, Adam is Everyman, you or I; Beatrice is The Girl. Bit by bit Paradise becomes a faint music in the distance like the magic lantern of childhood.  
In the universe of the PDF, the neurons are in constant mutation. The absence of a body makes the body more urgent, we’d like feeling still to be there, for the snow to be real. Those who are good at numbers run their tongues over a tooth to verify they have mouths.
 
Technology/ body/ literature ergonomics are not yet perfect.
 
A power-cut will give us:  
Cloudless day turns into Summer day, which in turn becomes a film (Suddenly Last Summer, Day of Anger).
 
On my iPhone, I make my body light, the headphones, the invisible helmet, I text Pierre. On my e-reader I’m re-reading War and Peace thanks to the movement of my eyes which makes the pages go past one after the other from top to bottom. They don’t turn, they follow one another, fade, I’ve lost Prince Andrei on the previous page.
 
The increased speed of reading, the new technology, does not allow me to understand a character’s motivation any better. Existence has decided to move forward in little leaps. If progress X is added to novelty Y, I’m unconsciously expecting Z. Now that my own technical possibilities are fewer and smaller, I am connected to the world by objects which are barely visible.  
Beatrice and Gilberte, why did they disappear? A series of faces on Facebook is a perfect reflection of the tendency among schoolgirls to be anorexic. Pasolini’s adolescents in the brambles, the bare flesh in a Matisse, are elusive these days. Tsvetaieva’s snow has melted.  
When the snow disappears, what’s left is the dry poem, without a human story.  
How has progress affected my artistic and aesthetic perception, my daily habits? If trains allow me to speed from one town to the other, walking is still a more effective way to relax. Handke proved it, as do all the books of walks that tell the story of How I Crossed the Alps that you get in Relay franchises in every station. In the age of the Internet and globalisation, the hiking book becomes a fashion, a guide, a fictionalised confession in response to technological progress, increasing digitisation, the mirror-glints of surveillance cameras.
 
Poetry has always been the object of its own contemplation, has always chosen its subjects (beauty, nature, the reaching towards happiness.) Then it becomes objective, concrete, far from consolation and death, sparing the reader the tragedy of existence (Ponge’s soap, glass of water, fly). Progress has changed the thought-processes of artists and poets, whole urban and rural populations. The meeting-points of Poetry and Science, Poetry and Medicine, Poetry and Capitalism, have scarcely been subjected to scrutiny. The effects of nuclear energy on the modern text are not known. Once installed in all houses, electricity allowed us to cross a room without bumping into the walls. But daylight too. Isn’t it preferable to stay in natural light as long as possible? Who is forcing me to risk being electrocuted? Science? The wires of the computer tangled across the flex of the washing-machine? The consequences of progress for my body are not always pleasant; if a plane travels faster than a train, I still don’t have much leg-room in a charter.

Tablets, flexes, mini-headphones, have nothing to do with electricity in the period when it first appeared in every bedroom. The life of a bulb allows me to read a novel without haste. The propagation of a wave in quantum physics has no effect on my love of literature. Is it better to be an impatient writer or a fulfilled reader? The passionate reader, the real enthusiast, escapes all defining categories. He opens a book outside or in, in electric light, in broad daylight, in the Luxembourg Gardens, without any problem.
 
Life’s seasons light up faces.
 
It’s in the open air that a human being blossoms.
 
Like the reader in the public garden, the scientist will be able to re-read Genesis, to think of light in relation to something other than alternating current or pylon, let his beard grow, dive into Leonardo’s notebooks, Galileo’s rough drafts, re-read Dante at any time.