GERLACH’S POSTCARD
Coloured blot illlustration in An Essay on a New Theory of Colours
and on Composition in General, Mary Gartside (London: J. Barfield, 1808)
Walther Gerlach’s postcard changed history
Is that how it felt when he reached for the postage stamp:
Victorious?
Or maybe it was all a day’s work
Like picking up dish soap at the convenience store
Alongside jars of ajvar and that seltzer water that your lover likes
Was changing our view of the world on his checklist?
On his wishlist?
A wishlist: olive oil lemon cake, banana bread, cornbread
That’s not a list of my wishes, just a list
of wishes that I’d like to push onto someone
Could you wish for these things for my convenience?
For the integrity of how I view the world?
A reality where we share a piece of cake is one I can understand
Physics focuses on beauty, someone tells me
So I try to listen to poets talk
They say sentences are a way of keeping time
And that my body is a map of memories
But I know it is also a reservoir for more atoms than I can count
It’s nature vs. nurture, it’s atoms vs. memory
Do you know what was on Gerlach’s postcard?
Just a dark spot on a screen
Except that it is really two, one vertical line and another, touching at the each end
Like something that is breaking open, becoming a peep hole into elsewhere
Like a gaping maw opening with hunger for another reality
It invites you to jump in
To be swallowed by the upcoming age of the atom
To be shaken, to be inconvenienced
Is “reality we can describe but not understand” on your wishlist?
A postcard can only say so much
Caution and
Lust
For knowledge
For certainty
For a good day’s work
When I try to write a poem about absence, or at least one haunted by it
I tell myself that I can’t ever really know what absence means
Because absence is just another word for a space left empty
And empty space does not actually exist
Empty space is actually quite crowded
With acts of creation and annihilation
A Biblical drama, just microscopic
Teeny-tiny miracles happening at all times alongside the world’s smallest tragedies
When physicists feel bold, or poetic, they say that
If you could get a good look at the universe’s emptiest places
You would see them foaming
Sometimes people say that the atom is mostly empty
But it is actually quite full. Not with matter or radiation, but clouds of possibility
That is a technical term, I promise
Technically, your atoms are more filled with possibility than they are empty
Technically, empty is more of a feeling than a rigorous fact of science
Putting pen to paper fails to capture it
So why does it sit so easily within the heart?
As a science writer, I am a full-time middleman. My job is to take the story of our world as told through the abstract, impersonal language of mathematicians and scientists and translate it into language that comfortably rolls off just about anyone’s tongue. Words that feel natural in the mouths of physicists become sharp and bitter when someone else tries to say them. I, too, once had that mouth and that mouth only. Now I am the person who intervenes to shave off those words’ edges, soak them in syrup, sugar them until candied, and dice them into pieces that are easier to swallow. Had I not chosen to become a writer, I would have never had to engage in this peculiar cookery. Had I become a practicing scientist, I would have been able to construct my own physical reality, one abstract piece at a time, jagged edges neatly locking into each other on some mathematical plane more pure than the muck of everyday human life.
When I set out to write poems this year, I begrudgingly found that I could not fully escape the cold call of that realm. I was trained to visit it regularly once, during my science education, and now I could not just leave it be. Scientific and impersonal words kept creeping onto pages that I had meant to reserve for verbs and nouns dripping with feelings. There were postulates in my sugar, theorems stuck in syrup. Call it a hazard of my profession, but I just kept landing in the middle again and again. What pleasure of knowing and meaning lies in between mathematical clarity and human volatility? A world of words that can’t decide exactly where they want to belong started to take shape, offering me a bridge.
Is that how it felt when he reached for the postage stamp:
Victorious?
Or maybe it was all a day’s work
Like picking up dish soap at the convenience store
Alongside jars of ajvar and that seltzer water that your lover likes
Was changing our view of the world on his checklist?
On his wishlist?
A wishlist: olive oil lemon cake, banana bread, cornbread
That’s not a list of my wishes, just a list
of wishes that I’d like to push onto someone
Could you wish for these things for my convenience?
For the integrity of how I view the world?
A reality where we share a piece of cake is one I can understand
Physics focuses on beauty, someone tells me
So I try to listen to poets talk
They say sentences are a way of keeping time
And that my body is a map of memories
But I know it is also a reservoir for more atoms than I can count
It’s nature vs. nurture, it’s atoms vs. memory
Do you know what was on Gerlach’s postcard?
Just a dark spot on a screen
Except that it is really two, one vertical line and another, touching at the each end
Like something that is breaking open, becoming a peep hole into elsewhere
Like a gaping maw opening with hunger for another reality
It invites you to jump in
To be swallowed by the upcoming age of the atom
To be shaken, to be inconvenienced
Is “reality we can describe but not understand” on your wishlist?
A postcard can only say so much
Caution and
Lust
For knowledge
For certainty
For a good day’s work
EMPTY
Abstract composition, Johan Thorn Prikker,
1892. Rijksmuseum
1892. Rijksmuseum
When I try to write a poem about absence, or at least one haunted by it
I tell myself that I can’t ever really know what absence means
Because absence is just another word for a space left empty
And empty space does not actually exist
Empty space is actually quite crowded
With acts of creation and annihilation
A Biblical drama, just microscopic
Teeny-tiny miracles happening at all times alongside the world’s smallest tragedies
When physicists feel bold, or poetic, they say that
If you could get a good look at the universe’s emptiest places
You would see them foaming
Sometimes people say that the atom is mostly empty
But it is actually quite full. Not with matter or radiation, but clouds of possibility
That is a technical term, I promise
Technically, your atoms are more filled with possibility than they are empty
Technically, empty is more of a feeling than a rigorous fact of science
Putting pen to paper fails to capture it
So why does it sit so easily within the heart?
✍🏽
As a science writer, I am a full-time middleman. My job is to take the story of our world as told through the abstract, impersonal language of mathematicians and scientists and translate it into language that comfortably rolls off just about anyone’s tongue. Words that feel natural in the mouths of physicists become sharp and bitter when someone else tries to say them. I, too, once had that mouth and that mouth only. Now I am the person who intervenes to shave off those words’ edges, soak them in syrup, sugar them until candied, and dice them into pieces that are easier to swallow. Had I not chosen to become a writer, I would have never had to engage in this peculiar cookery. Had I become a practicing scientist, I would have been able to construct my own physical reality, one abstract piece at a time, jagged edges neatly locking into each other on some mathematical plane more pure than the muck of everyday human life.
When I set out to write poems this year, I begrudgingly found that I could not fully escape the cold call of that realm. I was trained to visit it regularly once, during my science education, and now I could not just leave it be. Scientific and impersonal words kept creeping onto pages that I had meant to reserve for verbs and nouns dripping with feelings. There were postulates in my sugar, theorems stuck in syrup. Call it a hazard of my profession, but I just kept landing in the middle again and again. What pleasure of knowing and meaning lies in between mathematical clarity and human volatility? A world of words that can’t decide exactly where they want to belong started to take shape, offering me a bridge.