*A revised version of this essay is posted HERE. This one will be removed.
Works discussed: Poem, "The Abacus and the Rose", Jacob Bronowski
NOTE: I do not have permission to post this poem on the web. Students can obtain the poem from me by email.
Say what you mean! Or maybe not.
The narrator of this poem presents a series of comparisons or oppositions: root and roof, star and larches, snow and honeycomb, thing and wing, abacus and rose. The construction of the poem invites us to examine each pair as a possible example of the feud of eye and intellect. In each case, which of the pair goes with eye and which with intellect? The concrete terms eye and intellect appear to stand for something more general, intangible, or abstract. Can you describe what they stand for? In those terms, what, precisely, is this feud? In what ways does the building of a house illuminate this opposition? Would the design of a lab experiment work as well?
Based on the experience of building a house, the narrator rejects the feud, believing that the members of each pair are unified by a force that is abacus and rose combined. How might the experience of building a house lead the narrator to this view? The force is also referred to as a pleasure and a thrust. At the end of the poem, the narrator calls this force the spring. What might this force be, and why does it fill the narrator's mind with a paradoxical icy sweetness? The word spring may bring to your mind a season when nature produces a profusion of greenery and flowers. But a spring is also a coil of metal that provides the force to drive a mechanism, such as a clock. A taut metal spring, as it unwinds, gives life to the mechanism it drives. The season of spring is certainly living, and lies taut within the bulbs and seeds that will eventually burst forth. Can both meanings apply? Are there other possible meanings (a spring is also a source, as of water)? Can you give this force a name? Why doesn't the narrator name it?
Do you ever wonder why poets don't just say what they mean?
In science, we try to make our statements and models as clear and unambiguous as possible. In the end, we know that there will be some ambiguity in even the simplest statements, but one desirable (if ultimately unreachable) goal of scientific communication is clarity and singleness of meaning. Poets often seem bent on just the opposite goal, intentionally using words and grammatical constructions that support more than one interpretation (but not just any interpretation), and using concrete words like abacus and rose to stand for more general ideas. Bronowski once said that science aims to resolve ambiguity, while art aims to put unresolved ambiguity on display. Would "saying what they mean" permit poets to pursue this goal?
I believe, and the narrator of this poem seems to agree, that the artist's and scientist's views of the world complement, rather than oppose, each other. Furthermore, I am quite comfortable with the narrator’s notion that the creative force that drives science and the one that drives the arts are one and the same. To me, the formulation of experiments, models, and theories in science are creative acts in the same sense as are the insights that produce poems, paintings, or symphonies.
If you have never worked in a lab, you might think that day-to-day experimentation sounds pretty dull, especially in comparison to the great lurches of creative thought that characterize the works of Newton, Einstein, and Darwin. But if you are a writer, a social worker, or an electrician, you know that many ordinary work days bring you unexpected, unbidden creativity, in which a puzzle or difficult problem simply dissolves in the solvent of a sudden insight, and you experience a sudden burst of joy. If you work with your hands, it might be nothing more than realizing that a specific tool, or just a junk part left from another job, might gracefully execute the tricky or awkward task before you. If you stop just then, and reflect on how you picked that tool, you might realize that all sorts of tools and approaches flashed non-verbally through your mind, and suddenly, there was the solution. I believe that the greatest insights of the greatest scientists are built on such flashes, and that day-to-day work in any creative area, pottery to particle physics, gives us vivid hints about what goes on in the greatest minds.
How do we define the force that is central to this poem? My own take on it—what is yours?—is that it is creativity broadly defined, even more broadly than human creativity, encompassing the physical forces that drive the formation of crystals, rocks, winter storms, and volcanic eruptions; the forces of variation and selection that drive the evolution of new forms of life; the chemical forces of metabolism that drive development of an organism from a seed or zygote, as well as the formation of a rose or a brain from simple cells; and the intellectual forces that give us breathtaking paintings, riveting music, fascinating poetry, dramatic scientific experiments, and powerful scientific theories.
To encompass, in one force, expressed by one word, everything from abacus to rose requires us to think big. Creativity is a truly big word.
