From Poetry to Physics: A Linguistic Continuum

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A young bibliophile friend recently pointed me to The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini.  It is a “high fantasy" series usually classified as “young adult fiction.”  And, given that Paolini wrote the first draft of the first book while still a teenager, the moniker fits. But it is wrong to write the series off as “Tolkien-lite.”  The well-written tale travels nicely over a couple of thousand pages following dragons, dragon riders, humans, elves, dwarves, magicians and Urgals [orc-like bad guys who turn out to be good guys] on a complex telling of good versus evil.  

I found Paolini’s treatment of language particularly insightful.  Not the language in which the work is written, but rather his recognition of the power of language as a plot element.  In the world Paolini creates there is an “ancient language” of great power.  You cannot lie using the ancient language, the most powerful spells are spoken in the ancient language, and knowing the true name of an entity in the ancient language gives you unique power over that entity. The idea is engaging and got me thinking about the ways in which language has played a variety of roles in my life.

I really cannot think of any period in my life when words did not play a central role. Reading them on a page, speaking them on a stage or in front of a class, writing them, singing them, seeking just the right one, seething over their misuse by a variety of charlatans, staggered by their beneficial power in other works - words have been the warp and weft that weave my relationship with the world. And the tapestry they weave changes, as my needs and desires likewise shift.  But despite those changes language, and my use of it, seems to always find its place on a continuum that runs between the poles of poetry and physics. Let me explain.

Poetry expresses experience in the language of beauty. Physics describes the universe in the language of mathematics. Everything else falls somewhere in between, with various disciplines and professions engaging in a call and response cacophony that seeks to position their adherents firmly on the preferred path to truth, wisdom and enlightenment. As chaotic as that sounds it is not necessarily a bad thing. We have advanced from images sketched behind the smokey hearth of caves to startling projections of the edges of the universe via the often confusing application of assertion, investigation, revision and new assertion. Language is the hammer, forge and anvil with which we construct our conception of the world, and the worlds beyond our own.

But my focus at the moment is not so much universal as it is personal. Eventually each of us makes our way in the world in part by personally choosing the language which seems most appropriate to our life’s work and our personal search for meaning. It would be nice if we, like the inhabitants of Paolini’s novels, had an ancient language that could guarantee that our musings would be free of falsehoods or deceit. If that seems a bit much to ask, I would settle for a language that would simply handle the complexities of life’s shifting sands with equanimity.

There, too, the request meets unexpected challenges. My formal education; BA in Theater, MA in Mass Communication, and PhD in Radio, TV and Film, while bearing different names, were all articulated using varying shades of the same rainbow; and I engaged the various concepts addressed in those disciplines in the language of beauty, in poetry. I went so far as answering an African History exam question regarding the religious beliefs of the Mbuti with a series of 20 or so rhymed couplets. Fortunately, my professor was equally enamored with the poetic end of the continuum.

When I eventually moved to the other side of the desk, I was, for a number of decades, able to maintain my fealty to the language of beauty - exploring with my students the idea of communication as an art form. I taught photography, radio and TV production, media criticism and special seminars on M*A*S*H and Northern Exposure - always with an eye and ear toward Ray Charles’s insistent question: “What does it sound like, Baby?” What does it sound like? What does it look like? How beautiful is it?

But nothing lasts forever.  When I first arrived here at NC State in 1981, our department was, primarily, a small cadre of idealists committed to sharing the delightfulful world of human communication with students who were embedded in an institution totally dominated by disciplines that would eventually become known as STEM. Our Head once informed me that I would do well to realize that my job was not to do research, but to create curiosity in the classroom, to get to know and teach my students.  But as I said, nothing lasts forever.  Perhaps we did our job too well.  It wasn’t too many years before our little “service” department had more than a thousand majors, far more than any STEM department, and the numeric equal to some entire STEM colleges. Neat, huh?

That depends upon how you define neat.  With our swelling enrollments, came the swelling of our heads, and in the ensuing decades we garnered a Masters Program and a Ph.D program. And in the world of the 21st Century University those are significant achievements indeed.  But that is not the lens I’m using today. Today I am thinking about how we use language and how that usage shapes us. As my professional world followed its path to success within the academy, the dominant language used on the highways and byways of that world began to shift. Where initially our faculty had been actively discouraged from doing research, we soon began to look like our colleagues on the STEM side of campus where publication was a prerequisite to survival. And publication demands a particular, formalized kind of language - one that slides away from poetry towards physics.  Additionally, to argue for a graduate program, on our campus, we had to overcome the skepticism of our STEM colleagues who felt we weren’t “really” a discipline. To prove our legitimacy we needed even more research, more publication, and in addition grants, attempting to address increasing pressure to become a “profit center.” Common academic challenges, and ones we met, and are meeting, successfully. So what is my problem?

Well, I never really left the poetry end of the continuum and those corporate successes have mandated both professional and pedagogical language shifts, all skewed to the physics end of the language continuum. Don’t get me wrong, I am fascinated by physics.  I subscribe to New Scientist, Science News and Science Daily, fascinating stuff.  And I will often re-read a sentence or paragraph - just blown away by the insight contained therein. But I cannot remember a single instance in the past 20 or 30 years when I have read a sentence in those, or other STEM-related  sources and said “That is just a beautifully written sentence. I wish I had written it!" Whereas it is a rare Billy Collins poem in which a line or stanza fails to elicit a “Damn. That is just gorgeous. How does he do that?” Dylan Thomas has the same impact, as do some 19th century “popular press” novelists.

That’s not to say that I have spent the last 30 years repressing my poetic voice. Not at all. I still write poetry and songs, I sculpt, I draw. I even manage to sneak some of the poetic voice into my classes, which, in response to those corporate pressures already mentioned, have ballooned to seats in the hundreds. But I realize that over the years, the poetic voice became the avocational voice as the dominant professional and pedagogical voices of my world were asked to slide further toward physics.

Today, as I explore this interesting new world of phased retirement, I sense those voices beginning to realign. My future no longer lies in meeting the expectations of the academy. Realistically, I “owe” the university a few dozen more weeks in the classroom over the course of a year and a half. More importantly, those interactions will be, as they were 38 years ago, primarily with my students.

In my mind, the linguistic implications are refreshing. I need not concern myself with the secondary audiences of "the discipline" or the institution. I can return to the exciting challenge of inciting curiosity, free from the sometimes subtle, but still niggling, presumptions of disciple and institution.

But here is the problem: having spent so much time sliding toward the physics end of the linguistic continuum, I find my use of the poetic has grown somewhat rusty, a touch hoarse if you will. Theoretically speaking, it is as if a concretion of STEMistic verbiage has stealthily wrapped itself around the thesaurus of my mind inhibiting poetic articulation.  Jeez! See what I mean?!  

But I am assuming I will recover. I have been consciously seeking an appropriate metaphor to assist in that recovery, an image from the poetic end of the continuum that I can call up when I feel myself sliding inappropriately toward the language of physics. Initially I was drawn to the 17-year cicadas. I mean these noisy critters bury themselves underground for 17 years and then emerge to climb up into the trees and overwhelm the night with their raucous serenade. There is a lot to like about that image. But if you zoom in a bit or search for an image of a 17-year cicada, well, call me “humanist,” but those are really ugly critters. I mean sci-fi horror flick ugly, and the second tenet of Distilled Harmony is “Enable Beauty.” So I really can’t go there.

However, Freckles, by Gene Stratton-Porter, a book published in 1904, that my mother gave to me 50 or 60 years ago, contains a lovely description of a Luna moth leaving its cocoon. To paraphrase - a mysterious form emerges, barely discernible appendages move slowly in the sunlight, gradually taking on the shape and the pale green hue that will define wings that can span your hand. Soon the orchid-colored ribs that arch above each wing come into view, as do the slightly disconcerting, centrally positioned eye-spots. The wings raise and lower, testing the breeze of the gathering evening, and then, without warning, the seeming fragile creature ascends aslant a moonbeam, vanishing into the night on the understanding of good-bye.

Yes, that is better.

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