Read the next post by Natalie Mesnard
I remember a friend who was taking a fiction workshop with Jamaica Kincaid telling me that, once, during a conference, Kincaid gave her a seed catalogue and said, paraphrasing from memory, “This is the only thing in the world you need to inspire you to write.” I thought about that. I was a sapling of a writer, just growing into my own sensibility, which naturally veered toward the natural world.
I believe that all writers bring with them sets of images that they return to, that populate their imaginations, that are brick and mortar for their voices. These sets of images are the results of writers’ sensibilities, which are the results of interests and backgrounds, which can range from a skeptical eye toward nonoblique description or a hawk-like eye that Lucie Brock-Broido described best: “An attention / so attentive / it is close to worshipping.”
I grew up in a tiny community in the crinkly hills of southern West Virginia. So the world of science—in this case, the natural world, the world of plants and animals, mountains and rivulets, so many trees—made its way into everything I wrote. Rot, decay, the world sloughing and replenishing itself, knots on trees, carapaces, ant lions, passion flowers (nonendemic), grafted apple trees, towering yuccas and pampas (pompous) grass, phlox (flocks), bleeding hearts, Rose of Sharon (who’s Sharon?), and the list goes on. So even when I was awarded an Artist Development Fellowship from the Harvard Office for the Arts to go to New York City to trace Lorca’s footsteps, I found out I would never be a “city” poet like those I had admired. I wanted to be. But instead of writing about the people there, about the pockets of silence in alleys textured by the voices of so many other humans I should have met, I was focused on the weed in the sidewalk. How could it grow, trampled as it was? My sensibility—my having grown up surrounded by more deer and poplars than people, my grandfather a science teacher, my uncle an amateur botanist—would allow nothing else.
I did not meet Crane’s sailors by the Brooklyn Bridge. The husks of bugs were mosaicked into patio screens. The catalpa trees in my little Brooklyn backyard clicked like castanets. I lived on the same street that Marianne Moore lived on. I could imagine her, huddled in her apartment, diving into the world of encyclopedias, relying on black-and-white photos of nonendemic flora and fauna to come up with her masterpieces such as “An Octopus.” Her sensibility, shaped by an interest in scientific language, would not allow her, I think, not to use the scientific words for things. It would be imprecise, which would be bad manners—two things she famously hated.
Maybe her genius locus (I imagine it would be a cat, crossing through neighbors’ gates to smell their gardens, to record the precise scents) led me to read more writers who use scientific language. I fell into Barry Lopez and Emily Wilson. I fell even deeper into Loren Eiseley and The Anatomy of Melancholy. Emily Wilson can describe the stem of a flower as if it were the plinth on which the history of mankind rests and just as quickly telescope to overarching ideas of intellectual history and nuanced references to emotion that are pathetic fallacies to her garden. She becomes the damn lilies themselves. And Loren Eiseley, himself a scientist and naturalist, floors me every time with his essay “The Star Thrower.” Forrest Gander, Brian Teare, and Richard Kenney are other poets whose scientific eyes continually challenge me to look closer. John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud made more palpable to me, by using the powers of fiction, the horror of living with brain tumors.
Michael Faraday, quoted by Zvirzdin, discusses beautifully the need to invite a reader on a journey to understand scientific ideas:
For not only are [times in scientific writing when we leave strict lines of reasoning to speculate or use tools of fiction] useful in rendering the vague idea more clear for the time, giving it something like a definite shape . . . but they lead on by deduction and correction, to the discovery of new phaenomena, and so cause an increase and advance of real physical truth.
My writing process is one of looking and questioning. I try to begin with a simple image that I can see in the world around me (or in the world of imagination, a place I’ve been to) and then ask myself whether it makes sense. For example, here, in Palencia, Spain, where I live now, laurel trees line the walk by my house. Because they’re shaped like perfect half-globes, their shadows are the same form as the actual trees but larger. Two of them on either side of the street, casting shadows, form one entire circle of umber. That makes sense to me. The human having planted the trees fairly far apart, the trees seeking their complement in each other, even if they can touch only with their shadows. Naturally, the idea of bay leaves being used as both astringent and seasoning comes into play, and then I research to find Castile soap is made from the same extracts. And I see pictures of the vats used to make the soap. And then we’re back to the human world, the act of making, writing images about each of these discoveries, the result of research—the pastime of the scientist—based on an image—the tool of a writer. These tiny discoveries are the result of seeing phenomena in the world and using the imagination to metaphorize them into something to continue the chain of deduction and induction.
Jaime Zvirzdin’s article is illuminating for a variety of reasons. Most of her eloquent points I agree with. It is indeed necessary, I think, in challenging writing, to invite the reader on a journey, which is why Maxwell’s demon is a welcome antagonist in science classrooms. In my own writing, even when I am not writing a direct address, I try to begin with a simple image (such as, “There is foil in the air” in “Vinculum”). The same can be said of established poetry, science diction or no. I can’t imagine “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” without its beginning: “Let us go then, you and I . . . .”
I would, perhaps, be less keen to accept the “patient etherized upon a table” if I weren’t being directly addressed in a dramatic monologue. If someone is speaking to me caringly, I don’t care whether they’re an anesthesiologist talking about poisons needed to put me to sleep or an astrologist telling me my spirit animal is a camel and I would be a good politician. [Apparently, this is true, and it took someone consulting astrological maps (science) and showing me the coordinates of my birthplace (science) to make me believe, at least for a moment, that latitude (science), longitude (science), and taking my first breath in the afternoon of fall dictate so much about me that I have not yet experienced (fodder for poetry).]
In essence, going back to the demon, to understand a knotty principle, it is vital that some metaphor—some figure, some illustration—be in place to allow us to leave our bodies. Because once we can leave our own bodies, limited as they are, by imagining another’s body or another figure in relation to a concept, we can use a different sort of reasoning. I still can’t see a photon, but I can see a ray of light. I still don’t quite understand antimatter or paradox as ideas, but I can certainly see a cat in a box. Etcetera.
“Metaphors call upon the power of fiction,” the author writes. And to use metaphors in scientific writing seems to me the most effectual way to transfer complex ideas and make discovery enjoyable. It’s easy to forget that metaphors related to flora and fauna (science) exist in our everyday speech. For instance, one of my favorites: collective nouns. Two of my favorites are “a murmuration of starlings” and “a murder of crows,” but then again, I was known as the “bird poet” in grad school. Within that common lyric “A of B” structure lies a vestige of common human perception toward two species of birds. A flock of starlings, harmless and lovely as they are, may be seen as a collective murmur. A black gathering of strident crows—carrion eaters, more malevolent-seeming (enhanced by their intelligence, I think)—lends itself more to ideas of murder.
I think collective nouns, metaphors used to name natural creatures, tell us something about human—and cultural—sensibility. For example, in Spain, I was delighted to find that a clove of garlic is known as a “tooth” and that the showerhead is “the artichoke of the shower.” We make sense of the world by comparing objects to other objects. In the same way we need Maxwell’s demon, we need quotidian objects with certain attributes to describe other objects. I’m surprised, in a way, that we don’t say “a thatchwork of ivy.”
Using scientific language in our writing—and for my own purposes, I’ll limit “writing” to mostly poems—is an act of protest like any other form of literary writing. In this case, I think it is an act of ethical protest as much as anything else. And by “scientific language,” I am not referring only to jargon specific to scientific disciplines. Also the common names of things: “stargazer lily” instead of “flower.”
To exemplify, consider West Virginia. A great portion of the state was without potable water for a long period of time. Unfortunately, aside from poverty porn, my home state gets very little press when in states of emergency. A company, located beside the Elk River, which is a tributary of the Kanawha River, which runs through the most populated valley in the state, leaked 7,500 gallons of crude 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol into the ground by the river. Now, this explanation of this tragedy is alienating in that it uses the chemical name. It may have more pathos—and reach a larger audience—if I say that the chemical is a coal-cleaning agent and that the company that leaked the chemical is called Freedom Industries, West Virginia having a coal-driven economy and the freedom to drink water or to shower having been stripped from families in a poor state. Maybe it would be more tangible if I say I never saw a national news source mention the knife fights over bottled water at Wal-Mart (a bit of firsthand narrative, tool of the writer) and that the water that ran through pipes could not be boiled to be cleaned, burned when touched, and smelled like licorice (this last part a simile, appealing to the senses, a tool of the writer). However, “7,500 gallons” is necessary to comprehend the immensity of the event. So we must do a little hand-holding for readers when using scientific terms, even when some of the scientific precision (in this case, mathematical) is required for our intended meaning.
Finally, I’d like to mention the danger of not using specific, technical, and scientific language in creative writing. The Romantic scientists were not afraid to tell us how science works, even if they tried to make us interested. But such writing today may be seen as stuffy or “baroque,” a term I often eschew. In our fast-paced culture, glutted on technology and instant gratification, the need to quickly digest information (or poems) often translates into writing that uses very simple language. But if we do not name things as precisely as we can, keeping in mind to help the reader along, we will lose entire lexical sets. And in doing so, only the scientists will know how to explain scientific phenomena. It will be a deforestation and mountaintop removal of literature and thought itself. I’m reminded of Seamus Heaney’s place-name poems (e.g., “Anahorish”) and the Anglicization of Irish names that eliminated the history of the places contained within those names.
Science is, among many other things, its own sort of religion. So of course there are demons, and of course there are murders. So of course there is a certain nomenclature scientists use among themselves to describe the hosts of creatures that live around us. But not everyone has studied Latin or the binomial system, and those untrained in the sciences will not likely understand a living thing through descriptions of every capillary, fovea, and mechanism required to maintain homeostasis. But we all know that the world is beautiful and terrifying: we understand the need to survive. So we, as lovers of science, must use the tools of fiction and poetry to disciple and educate those around us. And naturally, if we don’t know the words for the flowers that seem to lean up to us as we run our errands, teleologically it may seem, we can always consult a seed catalogue to do some research.
Comments from other contributors to the Poetics of Science online discussion:
L. Shapley Bassen:
What a fine essay . . . my favorite sentences: “In our fast-paced culture, glutted on technology and instant gratification, the need to quickly digest information (or poems) often translates into writing that uses very simple language. But if we do not name things as precisely as we can, keeping in mind to help the reader along, we will lose entire lexical sets.” Now I’m looking forward to your poems in the KR science issue! Hope you like my tribute/bouquet above . . .