Month: November 2013

November 18, 2013

Dancing Stardust

This poem continues my earlier perambulation around the inter-relatedness of Science and Poetry

 

Dancing Stardust

 

It was then that the star dimmed,

 

A light, swallowed by eternity,

 

Smothered into terrifying silence

 

Somewhere on the dark side of tomorrow.

 

 

And the light, the light is everything,

 

We who know nothing will light our candles

 

Build our thought traps to try and re-capture,

 

The rapture; the mortal essence of you

 

Before the last closing of the circle.

 

 

Sometimes grieving can be beautiful

 

That day on the beach when the clouds parted,

 

The night when Orion winked at you.

 

 

 

Beginnings and endings may mean something,

 

And our thoughts and words, the love we shared

 

Endless, eternal, precious, who knows?

 

 

We are ocean, we are dancing stardust;

 

We carry the weight of the world on our shoulders,

 

That is all.

 

 

 

 

November 18, 2013

Truth is beauty

‘You have a certain set of questions you are trying to solve and you have to imagine what the story could be..you have this experience of failing, day after day and it’s an intensely bad feeling because you know what success looks like and you can’t fool yourself when you are not there..once every two or three years something works.’

This is not a poet or an artist speaking but the theoretical physicist, Arkani-Hamed in a fascinating discussion recorded by the Observer magazine. His reflections on the concept of beauty touch on the Keatsian, ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’ Beauty is a sense of inevitability. It is exploring something that already exists and is waiting to discovered. MkEwan reminded him of the famous remark by Jim Watson when Rosalind Franklin came to look at his and Cricks model of the DNA molecule. ‘To beautiful not to be true’

This reminded me of the intimation that some poets have experienced of a poem already existing in some form and being discovered by the writer. It accentuates the role of intuition and touches on the concept of a universal consciousness that could, perhaps, be accessed by all.