AT IT
By:
September 9, 2024
A (pro- or anti-) science-, mathematics-, technology-, space-, apocalypse-, dehumanization-, disenchantment-, and/or future-oriented poem published during sf’s emergent Radium Age (c. 1900–1935). Research and selection by Joshua Glenn.
I think he sits at that strange table
of Eddington’s, that is not a table
at all, but nodes and molecules
pushing against molecules
and nodes; and he writes there
in invisible handwriting the instructions
the genes follow. I imagine his
face that is more the face
of a clock, and the time told by it
is now, though Greece is referred
to and Egypt and empires
not yet begun.
And I would have
things to say to this God
at the judgement, storming at him,
as Job stormed with the eloquence
of the abused heart. But there will be
no judgement other than the verdict
of his calculations, that abstruse
geometry that proceeds eternally
in the silence beyond right and wrong.
— Seems to be his 1978 collection Frequencies. But why mention Eddington? Did he write this in the 20s/30s? Or no, I think it’s from 1978.
Recognized as one of the leading poets of modern Wales, R.S. Thomas writes about the people of his country in a style that some critics have compared to that nation’s harsh and rugged terrain. Thomas’s son Gwydion recalls his father’s sermons, in which he would “drone on” to absurd lengths about the evil of refrigerators, washing machines, televisions and other modern devices. Thomas preached that they were all part of the temptation of scrambling after gadgets rather than attending to more spiritual needs.
In this poem he laments that scientific, materialistic explanations of the world don’t seem to bring comfort, reducing life to nothing but “nodes and molecules / pushing against molecules and nodes.”
Description is invalidated by negatives and what at first appears to be an image is rendered abstract and unstable. The table is not a table, the handwriting is invisible; what we thought was a face is “more the face of a clock” and the perspective of time encompasses empires “not yet begun.”
In 1927 Arthur Eddington gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. In the following year he published The Nature of the Physical World which was the published version of the lectures.
From E.Shepherd’s book on Thomas:
The ‘Eddington’ referred to is the scientist A.S. Eddington, the first expositor of the theory of relativity in the English language and a practising Quaker, and the poem is informed by his book The Nature of the Physical World. In the Introduction to this book we read: “I have settled down to the task of writing these lectures and have drawn up my chairs to my two tables… my scientific table is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself. … There is nothing substantial about my second table. It is nearly all empty space…” […] “I think he sits at that strange table/ of Eddington’s” suggests that God presides over the interiors and intricacies of science. As the creator-God, he writes “the instructions the genes follow” rather than creates man from the dust of the ground. It is very much a late twentieth-century concept of God. But as we have already noted, if we read closely we find that, in fact, there is no image of God at all, and this is in keeping with Eddington’s rejection of the notion of substance in his own field. Thomas finds in Eddington’s concept of eliminating substance a mode of apprehending God which is free of preconceived ideas.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.