Poetry And Science – And The Future

Renowned Australian poet Geoffrey Lehmann has been described by Geoff Page in the  Sydney Review of Books as “the most protean Australian poet of his generation, a user of masks, but also of those difficult tones which allow direct confession without sentimentality or self-deception.” To celebrate the publication of his most recent anthology – Poems 1957-2013, Geoffrey Lehmann spoke for The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 5 November 2014

POETRY AND SCIENCE – AND THE FUTURE 

GEOFFREY LEHMANN

Measured by telescopes, our universe began 13.8 billion years ago. Cosmologically speaking that is yesterday. If all life expectancies of all people alive today were added up, this is about 45 billion years, more than three times the age of our particular universe.

Light has been detected from objects that are now 46 billion light years away. There are at least 100 billion galaxies and each galaxy typically has thousand of millions of stars. We live in a young universe that changes rapidly and whose physical laws are barely comprehensible.

My earliest memory is of my family gathering downstairs in the dark, as explosions sounded across Sydney Harbour. I have only recently realised this must have been the Japanese submarine attack in 1942. I was not yet two.

Charles Simic was born in Yugoslavia in 1938, and his earliest memory is of bombs falling in Belgrade in 1941. Simic came to New York in 1954, but soon discovered when he began writing poetry, he was an American poet. He felt unable to play at being a European poet, with the religious, cultural and historical baggage this concept carried.

Writing in The New York Review of Books of 14 August 2014, he explained:

That each poet renders the world intelligible and in so doing determines its nature is an idea of Wallace Stevens that is widely shared by American poets… Emerson asks in his famous essay “Nature” why Americans should not also enjoy an original relation to the universe and have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition.

The core of poetry is that it is a way of making the world intelligible. This does not mean a poem has to be intelligible, anymore than a piece of music has to have a meaning. The poetry of John Ashberry, an American now in his eighties and regarded by many as the leading contemporary poet writing in English – is notoriously opaque. But that opacity or absence of intelligibility itself may be a meaning or feeling he is trying to convey. Opacity, even as genial as Ashberry’s, is a high risk strategy for a poet. Readers like intelligibility, and the lack of intelligibility of much modern poetry has turned many readers away. I am myself on the side of intelligibility.

Starting in 1954, I had a marvelous English teacher for three years. Pat Eldershaw was a five foot eight corpulent man in his late fifties, with small purple veins in his red cheeks. He had a dry sceptical manner  and a broad Australian nasal twang, as he had grown up in the bush. He introduced us to modern American and English poetry: T S Eliot, Auden and E. E. cummings. These were poets who had something to say and their subject matter was urban and contemporary, unlike the poets I’d previously encountered such as Shelley and Banjo Paterson whose subject matter and language were alien to a 1950s schoolboy. Pat also introduced us to the poetry of William Blake. He showed how a poem such as Blake’s “The Sick Rose” was not just about a rose: it was about the corrupting effect of organised religion and conventional morality on our natural spontaneity. Poetry, I felt, was “the mystery of everything” and my role in life was to become a poet.

In my second last year of school in 1955, entranced by studying Book IV of Virgil’s great pastoral poem, the Georgics, I formed the ambition of one day writing Australian pastoral poems. How a city boy, with no experience of the bush might do this was unclear.

I studied Arts and Law at Sydney University. I decided I wanted to be an Australian poet and to do that I had to remain in Australia. I may have hankered to retain a certain naïveté and provincialism and perhaps have an Australian relation to the universe. Between the ages of 15 and 30 I wrote hundreds of poems reflecting many different influences and styles. The monologue – speaking through the voice of a historical figure – I found was a liberating style, like assuming a mask as in ancient Greek drama or Japanese Noh theatre.

Poets don’t write poems. Poems write themselves. When I was about 30 my predilection for monologues took my poetry in two very different directions. I began writing through the voice of the Emperor Nero – I did not anticipate that I would be writing through his voice for another 30 years. At about the same time I also began to write the Spring Forest poems through the voice of an Australian farmer, Ross McInerney, who was then my father-in-law. I had no idea I would continue writing through Ross’s voice for another 40 years, long after he ceased to be my father-in-law and until his death in 2010.

Steven Pinker in his The Better Angels of  Our Nature states that of the forty-nine Roman emperors reigning before the division of the Empire, thirty-four were killed by guards, high officials or family members. When Nero, just 30 years old, begged his servant to stab him, he is recorded as saying: “Qualis artifex pereo” – “What an artist dies with me”. He was supreme ruler of the ancient world, but personally an anarchist, libertarian, sceptic, anti-establishment and contemptuous of senators who represented the Roman elite. And above all in his own mind he was an artist. Like many artists he was an extremophile. He went on operatic singing tours, played the hydraulic organ, was a charioteer, roamed the streets of Rome with gangs at night, was a matricide and enthusiastic bisexual and carefully composed written judgments in difficult legal cases!

I felt I had to record all of Nero’s polymorphous perverse persona. But how to do this? Poems have to emerge from something in one’s own experience.

One night my first wife and I went to dine with friends in North Sydney. The nearest parking spot to their house was across the other side of Anderson Park. Rather than follow the road around, we walked across the park, a decision we soon regretted, as we found we were among solitary figures patrolling and clicking their fingers, and from time to time entering and exiting a public toilet. It was unnerving and menacing, but we could not retrace our steps. We were told when we got to our friends’ house that a few days earlier a stranger covered with blood knocked on their door begging for help. They had telephoned for an ambulance. This experience provided the material for one of Nero’s Poems:

On the Beat

Down on the beachfront at night

savage hands drag

me into the shadows.

Each time I ask

do they bring joy or a knife?

The savage hands

make me lean against the brickwork gasping.

They could strip me, rob me, stab me,

I wouldn’t care.

But I know they feel as I do.

We know each other by signals,

fingers clicking.

On the beachfront at night

I go to meet my black god

who holds my life in his hands.

Like the hydraulic organ he loved to play, I found I could do so many different things through Nero’s voice. It is easy for celebratory poems to become stodgy. “Aqueducts”, a celebratory poem spoken through Nero’s voice, begins:

The moon. An aqueduct,

water power for our mills.

But Rome is miles from here.

In this brown field, beside

the road my urine spills.

Steam rises from dead grass.

While young men touch themselves

in lodging rooms and thieves

hide in your stripes of shadow,

and voyeurs watch behind

a screen of trembling leaves,

this utilitarian dream

on arches high above

the city never stops –

it regulates itself,

on humid days when meat

and cheese are rank in shops

a torrent cold as ferns.

Addressing his new empress, Poppaea, Nero – my Nero – begins another long celebratory poem “Gardens” in this way:

Because she coveted his garden

my mother had a man accused.

Stroll through our costly real estate

with me, Poppaea, our guilt excused

by daisies growing from cracked stonework.

Nero’s persona gives both poems a tension, an edge. I once thought about writing a poem cycle through the voice of Pliny Junior, another Roman garden lover. But there would have been no tension. Pliny was too decent a sort of chap.

I was able to make Nero’s “Gardens” a political statement. Until Nero, it seems Roman gardens hid behind walls, mainly in courtyards. His great palace “The Golden House” which he nicknamed “The Shack” may be the first open plan palace, an ancient Versailles. I have him say, as he walks through his garden with his empress:

We can pull down our walls of fear.

An unwalled city’s open space

with vineyards by our blocks of flats

will halt our spectacles of blood.

Our unemployed will raise their hens

and lettuces from city mud.

Great parks will liberate our poor.

Grasshoppers click across ploughed fields

as we advance, hands linked, and talk.

Courtyard gardens hide and enclose.

Exposed to sun and wind we walk

and look back at our Golden House,

the colonnades of a long stage,

where we are gods on public view.

Gardeners will spell in topiaried box

your name and mine, my love for you

as obvious as this bank of poppies.

Nero’s Poems is a political essay. The contradictory elements in his personality – a corrupt idealist, a libertarian and absolutist, a pacifist and man of violence, a lover of high art and vulgarity – these are a mirror of the tensions in his society. Is our society all that different?

Ross McInerney was a great raconteur and observer. He had hundreds of stories. Preserving these stories was the trigger for the Spring Forest poems, written through his voice. You will realise of course they also fulfilled the dream of my fifteen year old self, inspired by Virgil’s example, to write Australian pastoral poems. But writing through the voice of a person I knew, I had to strip my language back, and the voice that emerged was disconcerting – sparer and more laconic than anything I had written or imagined.

Here is the opening Spring Forest poem, which was written after I’d become accustomed to this voice that was neither mine nor Ross McInerney’s:

Getting Started

When we first came our house

was two weatherboard rooms

in a bare paddock.

I was just back from a war.

There were no trees

and I chose the name “Spring Forest”.

It was dark when we drove up

and lit our pressure lamps and unpacked.

Our children found potatoes sprouting

on a wire mattress of a large iron bed.

What were they doing there?

my daughter kept asking.

We burned iron bark

in the old brick fireplace,

rubbing etherised hands into warmth.

At dawn Sally and Peter were out

calling in the frost, exploring.

A long icicle hung from the tank.

That day five cars passed on the road,

and the children ran out every time.

I’ve sometimes thought it was a strange thing, in fact intrusive, to write poetry through the voice of a living person. A couple of weeks before Ross died, I drove up to visit him in Cowra District Hospital. He was very ill and it took a while for our conversation to get started. By the time his next door neighbour, a farmer, arrived Ross had become quite animated. “I want to introduce you to Geoff,” he told his visitor. Referring to his daughter, Sally, my former wife, he said: “When Sally was at university, she rang up one day and said is it all right if I bring up a friend next week end. I thought it would be another girl friend, but it was Geoff. I was really surprised. (Laughter). He and David Campbell were my favourite Australian poets.” This was an astonishing piece of information – that he had read my poetry before we met. It was suddenly clear to me why he had been so tolerant about the Spring Forest poems and their sporadic inaccuracies, which he never mentioned.

This new Ross-like voice allowed me to include direct commentary in poems. Ross was a passionate conservationist and had his Spring Forest property declared a wildlife refuge. So I wrote about the environment. In the following poem Ross’s “Spring Forest” morphs into “The Spring Forest” – a symbol and emblem of a primeval world:

The Spring Forest

Each year we get further away

from the Spring Forest,

the original text.

“Drinking straws” we say,

sipping a milkshake of imitation vanilla

through a thin plastic tube.

My children in summer

used stubble from paddocks

for sipping crushed strawberry water.

These days you don’t find tadpoles

boiled up in the washing.

Each year

there are more gaps in the text,

privet in creekbeds

chokes out she-oak,

weeds blot the lettering.

Each place spoke through its plants

and fauna, until we came.

For most of my life I have fretted about overpopulation. It’s not that we’re about to run out of resources – humans are too inventive for that. The problem is our numbers are crowding out the other species. It is a moral, not an economic, issue. “The Animals” is a recent Spring Forest poem:

The Animals

A “domesticated bearded dragon $400”

 is not my idea of an animal companion.

A calf asleep on a double bed, perhaps,

or a hare with long ears

crouched under a mahogany sideboard,

thumping the floor.

Or a koala that climbed up a four-poster bed

surprising a seventeen-year-old in her nightie.

They were here before us – the animals –

and we were once them.

Without understanding we watched the sunrise

and the coming of night,

registered the changing of seasons

and dew on leaves that brushed our flanks.

We, the animals,

knew feelings, had a memory,

exchanged sounds and visual cues,

but did not know

what came before

or ask what was to come.

A neighbour sleeps with a wombat in her bed,

and her husband sleeps on the veranda.

Kangaroos watch TV through her sitting room window.

Bottle-fed joeys get osteoporosis

if the composition of the milk isn’t right.

The females make better companions.

With shy brown eyes

they hop along beside you

as you collect mail from the gate at dusk.

We were once them,

and now are their custodians.

They know we are different

and their eyes tell us to keep our promise.

Bill came home after a fortnight away.

Pot plants had been kicked off the veranda,

there was an awful smell,

and the front door was ajar.

Inside the house

chairs were overturned,

papers and cushions trampled on floors,

and in the bathroom,

wedged against the washbasin,

her putrid flesh held together by hide,

Twinkle, a pony.

A tractor winched the body out.

When this poem was published in the New Yorker, “pot plants” was changed at the last minute to “potted plants”, to avoid confusing an American audience.

The voice in the Spring Forest poems allowed me to speculate about science – as an enthusiastic amateur, I’ve no science training.

The Golden Wall

Don’t ask Uncle Pat why the night sky is dark –

in hot weather

taking his mattress out on the grass

inside his dog-proof fence to sleep.

When Pat lifts his face up to the night –

propped on a pillow

of kapok stuffed in mattress ticking –

he’d fix you with sheep drench if you told him

that his line of sight

should intersect at every point

with a near or distant star

glimmering in the transparency of space

so the whole sky

should be ablaze from end to end

like “a golden wall”.

Pat’s golden wall was his orange tree.

Like Uncle Pat it had never borne fruit

until I dumped five tons of chicken manure

on its roots.

His line of sight

from the cane lounge where he sprawled

intersected at every point with oranges

twenty feet up in the sky,

a Utopia of fruit

which the district came to visit and eat,

oranges with no ending

like the return veranda

around the four sides of his house

where nephews and nieces ran forever

and their children after them.

Pat forgot his promise to pay for the manure

and the oranges didn’t come back.

But he didn’t miss them,

so don’t ask Pat why the night sky is dark.

Olbers’ riddle has hung around

for centuries.

You can’t explain it by absorption.

Gas and dust heat up and glow.

Nor by absences or voids.

Every square inch has its galaxies.

Ask the cells inside your head

the same riddle,

why don’t they all blaze at once

a golden wall of noise,

each neuron singing its own note

deafening your mind with light.

Political and religious visionaries

promise us this,

every cell singing in unison,

a mass of indistinguishable stars.

But something in the universe denies

the golden wall,

some structure which became Uncle Pat

calling to his nephews from his cane lounge,

“Now don’t trample them tomahawk plants!”

(meaning hollyhock plants).

Pat prefers his own company on hot nights

leaving Auntie Bridge inside

with pictures of saints on the bedroom wall.

He takes his bedding

and lies in a darkness

where each star can broadcast as a soloist.

The universe

is a composition of unique bodies

on display,

and the night sky of the mind

allows a single file of thoughts

to light up as a sentence.

The accelerating expansion of the universe suggests to some cosmologists it will end in entropy. As space stretches out, galaxies will become invisible to each other and fade. No one will be left to observe particles and radiation evenly and thinly smudged across a flat and endlessly expanding near-vacuum. This journey from a dimensionless point (the Big Bang) to universal entropy is a bleak, Thomas Hardy view.

The physicist Freeman Dyson points out however in A Many-Colored Glass (at 76): “What we see in the real universe is the opposite of a heat death. We see the universe growing more ordered and more lively as it grows older.”

A simple thought experiment suggests why entropy-as-the-end-of everything may be wrong.  We cannot imagine a moment when time began. There will always be an earlier time. It is counterintuitive that there has been only one Big Bang, just 13.8 billion years ago. Why then, and not before? If entropy is the end of everything, and there has been only one Big Bang, it should have run its course already. We should already have come and gone (an infinite time ago).

Our universe seems to repeat itself and create its own observers. They may have a variety of shapes and attributes, but intelligent life requires communities and communities will have an ethical sense like us. If this is so, our universe is not just a display of stupendous forces and lights that annihilates itself.

These universes evolve rapidly out of matter and forces so concentrated they erase all information about their predecessors. There has always been a universe (or universes) and there is no beginning or end.

In “Breakfast with a Black Snake”, which is part of the Spring Forest series, two parents on a country property discover their two-year old child “with white hair like straw” is vanishing mysteriously each morning. They follow him one day, spying on him, and watch him drag a saucer of milk into a paddock. Waiting to see what happens becomes unbearable for the mother, who snatches him up. The parents’ guess about the meaning of these events can never be verified. The white-haired boy was Peter Taylor, Mayor of Toowoomba from 2008 until 2012.

Breakfast with a Black Snake

All we have

is circumstantial evidence.

A two year old with white hair like straw,

one of three brothers,

vanishes each morning,

and one day spying parents

follow at a distance.

He crawls across a paddock,

dragging a saucer of milk,

and sits in the grass and waits –

but not for long.

A scolding mother snatches him up.

Too young to explain

or remember –

all we have

is circumstantial evidence

of a child’s

conjectured breakfasts with a black snake.

If fate is entropy

and time has no beginning,

why are we still here?

All we have

is circumstantial evidence.

The universe repeats itself.

The repeating universe, which annihilates all traces of itself before starting again, was imagined by Hindu theology and perhaps Heraclitus who saw the world as “an ever-living fire with measures of its kindling, and measures going out.” It does not have a “meaning” or “intention” in a human sense, but its self-organising principle of repeated growth and annihilation is replicated in its details. Like the fractal numbers of a Mandelbrot set, at the smaller scale of our individual lives, there is a self-similarity to the repeating universe in our birth from a single cell, our rapid growth in complexity and our death.

When I visited Ross McInerney’s farm “Spring Forest” each Christmas I was struck by the brutality of the Australian summer. It was hard to believe the devastated countryside could ever come back to life after this death by heat. But it does. I wrote about this cycle of birth and erasure of information in “Water from my Face”, through Ross’s voice:

Water from My Face

Each year spring occurs

with such vehemence

it’s clear the plants don’t remember

last summer’s dried sticks.

The young discover their bodies

as no one before ever did.

The old say “We remember”

and forget.

Nature has no memory or imagination.

The water falling from my face

into a rusted enamel dish

(washing under a kurrajong tree)

doesn’t recall its shape for long.

In one of the very last Spring Forest poems I imagine Ross in his late 80s, driving at dusk – unlicensed much to the alarm of his family – and stopping to observe the sky and experience for a moment an original relation to the universe:

Driving at Dusk

I’m driving with just my parking lights.

I switch off the motor

in the dimness under a large ironbark

and can hear a distant sound

of dogs barking,

like the monotheisms of the Middle East.

A water cannon sends a pulse of spray

to drinking fields.

There’s a pale yellow sky

fading into blue

and the first stars of a universe

free of meaning

lucid and uncreated

signed by itself.