On poetry & science

[kaberett]

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no-one ever knew before. But in the case of poetry, it's the exact opposite.

-- Paul Dirac

So I came across this quotation earlier, and I am actually really viscerally upset by it. Because trying to tell people things such that they can be understood by everyone is really, really not something we do. Science not communicated is science not done, yes, but - universal understanding? No. I don't even think it's a reasonable or realistic aspiration.

-- and poetry -- oh, it is in my breath, it is grace, it is ease, in a way that science is for me, too, but: there is poetry in science, but there is also a lot of book-keeping -- but it's the poetry of the other, of the external; whereas poetry of the word (rather than of the deed; thank you, Frank Turner) holds me close and smooths my hair and says I see you, and you are not alone. Poetry told me about abuse: that it wasn't okay and that I'd survived it. Poetry told me about depression; about my depression. Poetry provides a place for me to stand; provides me structure to investigate myself; tells me that I can survive and I can be strong and I can find beauty and wonder in the world. It tells me things I didn't know before, about myself, and if we are to denigrate that then we despise teaching, and if we despise teaching then, I feel, we have lost our way.

Poetry is a perfect way for me to say particular things to a particular audience, but it is not the only perfect way, even for a given listener. This does not devalue it. There is craft and beauty and skill in poetry, as in music, as in science; and as in science, just because you cannot see the value or interest of a line of inquiry does not mean it does not exist.

And in that craft and beauty there is, yes, communication of things that no-one ever knew before: about the certain slant of light on winter afternoons, or the harsh call of the wild geese (over and over); about how words fit together like rivers or grains of sand with history running through them, and about the strange and terrible wonder of grief.

I am a poet, and I am a scientist, and you cannot know me unless you can hold me complete in your heart: two things on their own, and both at once.

Comments

[flippac]

[pasted from IRC per request]

Poetry is there to highlight what we've obscured with the idea that we understand it

[kaberett]

Related thoughts: good science is beautiful, and so is good poetry; poetry is a way of saying "you know that thing where...?"; the leaps of intuition that guide me through my science lead me surefooted through building poems, too.

[jjhunter]

Yessssssssss. (I too am scientist and poet both.)

Poetry and science — especially neuroscience — are two sides of the same coin: getting at what it really fundamentally means to be human in our particular context of time + space. Both are asymptotic arts of increasing but not absolute precision, and get their rooted strength in how they grapple with that so directly.

[milkymoon]

You know, this is really a marvellous way of describing it - 'asymptotic arts'.

[jjhunter]

Thank you!

[silveradept]

That's a bad idea from that quote. I always thought poetry expresses the same things as sciences, but poetry compresses where science explains in detail and many pages.

[flippac]

I quite like the reading where for poetry you invert the initial "one" to "no one", myself. In fact, given that's valid I think the other reading becomes - almost poetically - self-defeating!

[inoru_no_hoshi]

The thing about both science and poetry that that dude is missing is that not everyone is going to understand every bit of both, no matter how you put it. Some people don't grok science well. Some people don't grok poetry well. Some don't grok either well. And some, like you, live and breathe both at once because they are you, in a way.

So it's not a universal either/or, it's a universal what-speaks-to-you, and that is forever subjective and it's exclusionary to say otherwise.

(Me? I try to grok both, but I don't know how well I do. I just love the beauty of a well-phrased poem as much as I do the magnificence of the stars or the beautiful terror of a volcano. And that's okay, too.)

[kaberett]

YES THESE THINGS.

[milkymoon]

I don't think that quotation is true either; I think poetry, too, can illuminate things for people - it can expose lots of important emotional truths and things that you wouldn't have known otherwise.