Wednesday, November 28, 2012

10. POETRY AND SCIENCE



“No barrier stands between the material world of science and the sensibilities of the hunter and the poet.”
--E.O. Wilson                                                     
In my basement office I’ve got two large book cases within a few steps of my desk. One contains books on evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology; the other contains books of poetry—individual volumes by poets as well as anthologies of poetry.  Between those two book cases, I sometimes get echoes. For example, I’ll read a poem that reminds me of something I’ve read in a book by, say, an evolutionary biologist; or I’ll read something in a book on evolutionary psychology that reminds me of a poem.
It’s commonly assumed that the realms of understanding represented by science and literature have little or nothing to do with each other. A man who distinguished himself as an immunologist and a poet, Miroslav Holub, said this about his two professions:
I could never quite understand people asking, How can you do both things that are basically so different? They are technically different, technically at opposite poles of the application of language, but emanate from the same deep level of human urge, and the application of all available forces.

“Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science,” wrote Henry Beston in The Outermost House. Consider the following lines and phrases from poems, just on the basis of observation:
  • Robert Jeffers describing an eagle, perched on a burnt tree limb after a forest fire: "Cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders"
  • Anne Sexton calling a moose's face "mournful as an ax"
  • Richard Eberhart calling cancer cells under a microscope "a virulent, laughing gang"
  • Karl Shapiro describing a fly as having "the fine leg of a Duncan Fyfe"
  •  Dylan Thomas calling a shoreline in Wales a "heron-priested shore"
Of course poets don’t just observe and describe. They go a lot further. Here, in just two lines from his poem, “The Bloody Sire,” about how violence creates values, Robinson Jeffers captures the essence of an arms race between species over long periods of evolutionary time:

What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine
the fleet limbs of the antelope.

What follow are some connections I’ve been aware of by moving freely between scientific and literary sources.         
Several years ago I watched the British naturalist David Attenborough, on his public television show, speak convincingly of a connection between birds’ and other animals’ songs, and human music. Besides footage of birds and whales, there were scenes of Siamong gibbons attracting mates as well as announcing and defending territory; a painted, scary face of a rugby player on the New Zealand National Rugby team, in a game with territorial rituals that have their origins in a war dance; popular male rock stars displaying in front of thousands of young women; people singing national anthems, which also announce, defend, and celebrate boundaries between social groups.   
A few days after the Attenborough documentary, with all that  astonishing music and color still in my head, some lines from a sonnet by Robert Frost (who, incidentally, was quite familiar with Darwin’s writings) came to me—a poem that praises a woman’s voice, which is so beautiful that it leaves the confines of the house where it originated and goes outside, where birds are singing. The poem begins:

He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.

Over time, the woman’s voice merges with that of the birds. The poem ends with this memorable couplet: 
Never again would birds’ song be the same.
And to do that to birds is why she came.

Another passage from a Frost poem occurred to me after I attended a lecture on bonobos by the well-known primatologist, Frans de Waal, who showed pictures of the animals on a wide screen behind him. He spoke of the power that female bonobos exert over males—for example, trading sex for food. What he said reminded me of some lines from Frost’s poem “The Pauper Witch of Grafton,” about a witch who has enjoyed, over her lifetime, great power over a succession of men. But she is old now, and can no longer command as she once did. Near the end of the poem she refers to one of the men she once controlled with her charm and beauty:

Up where the trees grow short, the mosses tall,
I made him gather me wet snowberries
on slippery rocks beside a waterfall.
I made him do it for me in the dark.
And he liked everything I made him do.

A poem I read recently in an anthology called The Poets Guide to the Birds reminded me of a book by the ethologists, Amotz and Avishag Zahavi called The Handicap Principle, in which they discuss signaling among various species. The Zahavis define the handicap principle this way: “if a given signal requires the signaler to invest more in the signal than it would gain by conveying phony information, then faking is unprofitable and the signal is therefore credible.” They go on to say that “the cost—the handicap that the signaler takes on—guarantees that the signal is reliable.”  So a gazelle that is stotting (taking intermittent, high leaps as it runs) is sending a message to a wolf that it (the gazelle) can afford to waste time and energy, and therefore is probably not worth pursuing. The handicap principle is applicable not only to predator-prey encounters but also in mate selection, as when a male peacock’s beautifully extravagant tail is fanned out and shivering before a female. 
The poem, “Songbird,” by the contemporary American poet John Brehm, is in one sense an excellent dramatization of the handicap principle. A skylark fleeing from “a falcon’s quick pursuit” begins to sing, “as if to say, being/eaten by a falcon is the last thing/in the world I’m worried about.” Here are the last two stanzas of the poem:

And the raptor knows
it’s true, knows that anyone
foolish enough to sing in such
a circumstance is quite beyond
ever being caught, and that for all
his hunger he’ll be given just  
a song, tumbling through the air, 
as the body he desires disappears.

While reading the poem I wondered whether the poet was aware of the handicap principle. I have a strong hunch that he was, since his first two lines are: “Even though I have not seen it,/ I know how it could be.” In fact, what the poem dramatizes is true (and the Zahavis confirm it in their book): Falcons are more likely to pursue skylarks that don’t sing while they are fleeing than those that do sing.
I appreciate the fact that Brehm’s fine poem agrees with facts established by scientific study—whether or not he was actually aware of those facts—and I enjoy the strictly poetic detail of the skylark speaking to the falcon, saying that the falcon may “well enjoy” the song, “before I vanish into air.”   

In my early 30s I wrote a poem I called “Football, which was published in a 1972/73 edition of a journal: 

Consider the stoning of beasts:
the peppered mammoth slobbering in the pit,
the stunned boar,
the bear with crushed face advancing, m
the crippled, skirling cat;
Consider the hands
groping along the hacked shores of rivers
how many dawns ago? for this shape of stone.

          In the first part of the poem I pictured the stoning of animals by ancient hunters. I was also suggesting a connection between one kind of violence and a tamer kind that takes place in modern American football, which is sometimes referred to as warfare with terms such as “bullet pass,” “defensive strategy,” “blitz,” “the bomb,” and so on.  I remember that around the time I wrote the poem I had read Konrad Lorenz’ book, On Aggression, and was struck by his idea that sports provide a safety valve for what he called our “collective militant enthusiasm.”        
In the second part of my poem, I pictured hunters gathering stones on the shores of rivers, and here I was interested in the actual stones themselves. My lines imply that the shape of a stone used in hunting was similar to that of a football.
Many years after I published my poem, I read an article in Discover (June, 1986), with the title, “One, Two, Three Strikes You’re Dead in this Old Ball Game.” The article is about a scientific hypothesis regarding the shape of stones used by ancient hunters. It refers to some stones found by paleoanthropologists at early toolmaking sites, such as the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. These stones, the author said, are not the kind used for tools. Instead, they are shaped in such a way that suggests that they were thrown with a spin, like footballs, and that they were perhaps used for throwing at enemies or animals. The writer went on to say that modern sports that involve throwing might be a way of  channeling aggressive behavior—the same point made by Lorenz in his book.
In an interview in SKEPTIC MAGAZINE in 1996, the anthropologist Robin Fox was asked why people have such a “gut level” response to the matter of race, and he spoke of our innate xenophobia: 

. . . we have a similarity detection mechanism built into us—and even if nature doesn’t provide the cues to familiarity, like skin color, for us, we provide it for ourselves with things like costumes, haircuts,tattoos, headdresses, things through the nose, or anything that distinguishes who we are from who they are.

The us-versus-them dichotomy that Fox describes is expressed well in a poem by the contemporary American poet, Thomas Lux. The title, “The People of the Other Village,” is also the first line of the poem; here are the first eight lines:

hate the people of this village and would nail our hats
to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them
or staple our hands to our foreheads
for refusing to salute them
if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats,
mix their flour at night with broken glass.  
We do this, they do that.(3)

E. O. Wilson believes that human beings have an innate need to affiliate with other life, and calls the need biophilia. To him, “organisms are the natural stuff of metaphor and ritual,” the human brain has “kept its old capacities, its channeled quickness,” and “we stay alert and alive in the vanished forests of the world.” Poets of course have long been aware of our tendency to identify closely with nature.
The British poet John Keats, in a letter to friend in 1817, said: “. . . if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.” And Loren Eiseley, the anthropologist/nature writer/poet, expressed an even stronger kinship with other creatures when he wrote, in the 1960s: “One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.”             
Anyone familiar with fairly recent American poetry about animals will probably have noticed a type of poem that describes and celebrates a particular species’ uniqueness. Ethologists speak of animals as possessing their own, species-specific way of perceiving and adapting , referred to by ethologists as a species’   umwelt. In the words of the well-known ethologist Nikko Tinbergen, “Though all share one world, all may be said to live in different worlds, since each perceives best only that part of the environment essential to its success.”
The recognition and understanding of an animal’s peculiar world informs some first-rate contemporary American poetry. Consider “Hermit Crabs” by Margaret Renkl:
Drop them on the dock, they lean
into cracks between the boards,
their shells large
and hard. Lift them in your hand,
their rough legs stab between
your fingers to grasp at water.
 Put them on the boat deck, they pull
forward, clawing polished wood,
formica, metal for any grip,
knowing water dull green then dark
then nothing, unerring
every time as though rehearsed,
every single time without a pause,
knowing what we know, faithful:
home the easy way. Down. 


What comes through strongly in Renkl’s poem is the umwelt of the hermit crab. For instance, given its habitat, surely this animal must have an “unerring” understanding of what it feels like to drop through water; in fact, crabs must no doubt always be, as the poet says, “grasp[ing] at water.”

I believe that all poets and writers could benefit from reading some scientific writing, whether it comes from scientists themselves—many of whom are writers as well as scientists (Darwin, E.O. Wilson, Steven Jay Gould, for instance)—or science writers. It’s good not to only look inside your heart and write, as a writer once put it, but to look outside your heart, at the actual, physical world that we all inhabit and share.

Monday, October 29, 2012

PART II. POETRY, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY . . .



“Sometimes I go about pitying myself, and all the while 
I am being carried by great winds across the sky."                            

                           --Ojibway saying (tr. by Robert Bly)
         
Consider  Lao Tzu who, about 2500 years ago in China, used the image of a tree that bends, yielding to a powerful wind and thereby surviving; whereas a tree that stands rigid and resists the wind, can easily snap, and perish. Lao Tzu also spoke of going with the flow, a metaphor that’s been used so commonly over the centuries that it’s become a cliché. Essentially, what it means is that it’s always best to accept the ups and downs of life instead of resisting them. By accepting reality, Lao Tzu says, we learn to cope, and to grow and mature.


Here’s a brief poem by Stephen Crane: 

A man said to the universe, “Sir, I exist!” 
“That fact,” replied the universe, 
“does not create in me a sense of obligation.”

Perhaps if we accepted the philosophy expressed in Crane’s poem, and lived according to that philosophy, we might very well be less anxious and less disappointed when things don’t go our way. Again, the poem may be useful to consult or recite to oneself, when feeling that, for instance, “life isn’t fair,” or “nothing seems to go my way.”  

I appreciate the practical wisdom expressed so convincingly in Mary Oliver’s well-known poem, “The Journey.” The poem begins: “One day you finally knew/what you had to do, and began . . .” So, to paraphrase: You decided to leave, to seek something new in your life, even though those around you were  “shouting” at you: “Mend my life!” But you kept going. It was a “wild night” and the road you were traveling on was “full of fallen/branches and stones.” You kept on moving, and eventually, as the stars “began to burn/through the sheets of clouds,” you began to hear a “new voice,” which you realized was your own voice,

that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

“The Journey” is based on a very old and I would think universal metaphor: each of us has our own particular journey or path through life, which can be travelled only by us individually. Here is how the French novelist, Marcel Proust, expressed it: 

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves,
after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can
make for us, which no one else can spare us.

You leave your childhood home and go off to college or to a job or the military, or get married. And to do this means having to let go of a former way of life that you’ve been used to for quite some time. Oliver’s ending lines quoted above say that, finally, the only life we can actually save is our own. This revelation can cause some suffering, especially if it involves leaving others behind who depended on us, or whom we depended on. “The Journey” is for me a positive poem: it affirms our need to find our own way in the world, however rugged the journey may be. Yes, we can help others, and encourage and support them, but they have their own journey, just as we have ours. It takes equanimity to be able to hold up our heads and cope with, for example, a crisis, a disease, a death in the family, or the reality of aging. 

Recently I saw a program on TV about cheetahs, and how one day the mother of two young males suddenly abandoned them—making sure they couldn’t follow her. According to the narrator, the mother cheetah knows instinctively that the only way her offspring will survive is if she leaves them. At first, I was thinking, anthropomorphically, that the mother’s action was cruel, since it was fairly obvious that the young males weren’t mature enough to capture and kill, or defend themselves.  But then, as I watched them more and more—chasing prey animals and at first failing to catch any—the mother’s instinctive actions began to make sense to me. 

It happens to be the same for human families: children grow up and eventually must learn to fend for themselves. Or, another familiar way of putting it:  there comes a time when a child must “sink or swim.” It may seem sad and scary to parents, when their children leave home and strike out on their own, but it’s the only way the children will ever be able to make their own life. And then, of course, those children will eventually do the same thing with their own offspring (note the word’s meaning: children “spring off” of their parents into their own life.) And on and on the off-springing goes, generating more and more generations.  

Many of us are aware of Alfred (Lord) Tennyson’s famous ending line from his poem “Ulysses,” a line which was deservedly (and permanently) emblazoned on a wall in Olympic Village in London, to celebrate the 2012 Olympic Games:

          . . . to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Tennyson’s line is a powerful, inspirational statement about never giving up, about going forward until you succeed—an idea that works especially well in a sporting  context. And yet, as I mentioned in connection with the ancient Chinese sage, Lao Tzu, there is also power and courage in yielding. It’s of course generally best to go forward with boldness, and to never give up. But sometimes the wiser—and also courageous—choice is to give with reality, with what is—to acquiesce, the way a tree bends in the wind. It’s similar to the way a judo master can give with an offensive move by an opponent, so as to turn the aggressor’s power back onto the aggressor. 

According to the AA prayer/poem, it takes “serenity to accept the things we can’t change, courage to change the things we can change, and wisdom to know the difference.” Note again, the importance of acceptance—of having to let go of the past. Meditation, an Eastern practice that goes back thousands of years—and which is becoming more and more common in Western countries such as the U.S—also encourages acceptance, or letting go of the past. It too, emphasizes living in the present moment, the NOW.  

Here’s a short poem called “Prayer” by the contemporary American poet, Galway Kinnell:  

Whatever happens. Whatever
is is is what I want. 
Only that. But that.

Kinnell’s poem is an excellent example of how poetry and philosophy can exist together. It agrees completely with Epictetus, Lao Tzu, and other sages of the past, as well as recent sages and healers, such as Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle. 

But what the poet created here is also a fine poem. Have you ever in your life seen three “is’s” in a row, each of them with a different meaning? 

Now, here’s something you might want to try for yourself: Make a poem with three of the same words in it—maybe even in a row—and make sure that each word has a separate meaning. And make some kind of statement in your poem—maybe you’d like to respond to a philosophical notion that interests you.  

What sayings or poems by thinkers, philosophers, psychologists, poets and others, do you tend to remember (or keep on hand, maybe pinned to a wall in your office, or in your billfold or purse), because they have been and still are helpful to you in difficult times? 

          Can you match a particular favorite saying or poem with a particular event in your life, and say how reading it or recalling it helped you deal with something that was troubling?

         
Let me recommend a couple of books in the field of poetry therapy: THE HEALING FOUNTAIN: POETRY THERAPY FOR LIFE’S JOURNEY, edited by Geri Giebel Chavis and Lila Lizabeth Weisberger, and SAVED BY A POEM, by Kim Rosen.