Science and Poetry

Who said Science was divorced from Poetry? Whoever thinks so does not know Science. Poetry is in Science’s flesh.

Did you know that Science says that everything in us is star stuff? Everything. According to the most recent models of the universe proposed by Science, the matter that makes us has not only been inside one star, but at least two, and one of them was bigger than a hundred suns put together.

Our very thoughts were implied potentials then, unexpressed in roiling furnaces, billions of years ago.

When I bask in the light of day or stare at the night sky my eyes meet symphonies of future Mozarts, questions and yearnings that will become bodies ages after this I think me is a cloud of scattered particles.

Science tells me that when I look at the universe I am the universe looking back at itself. I am in you, or was, or will be.

Also, did you know that, according to Science, you can’t touch anything, nor be touched?

Your body is made up of tiny motes, almost insubstantial, each separated from the others by empty spaces many times the motes’ size, Science says.

Everything is held together by mysterious, immaterial forces whose true origin nobody knows. Apart from them, there’s only empty space in this almost uninterrupted void that is you.

Not the tiniest part of yourself touches the tiniest part of yourself. You’re fragmented, more alone and isolated than the loneliest castaway ever thought he was.

When you caress your lover’s cheek your skins don’t touch. You have no skins. You’re holes and holes and holes and barriers that repel contact.

You can’t really step on the ground.

Yet matter attracts, pulls in. Matter yearns to end solitude, to come together.

Were the medieval poets right, perhaps, and the purest love is the one that always yearns and is never satisfied?

Thus true Science is dynamic, always striving, never smug or stagnant. Science is constantly surprised by what it
almost
touches,
like souls and words and Poetry can never
quite
jump from one abyss of individuality to another. Almost, yes, but never quite.

Whoever doesn’t know the idea of Science, the yearning at its core,
does not know Poetry.