When Earth and Sky Intermingle: Science and Poetry
I am shoveling snow for the third time today. The flakes landed so softly during the storm’s last spell that individual ones lying on edge are now visible because their crystalline shapes split the white light emanating from a streetlight into spectral colors. Blue, green, purple and red lights pepper the white-shrouded earth. Because I am a chemist who grows crystals in a laboratory, these mini-prisms intrigue me.
And yet science, like any endeavor, cannot tell the entire story of a snowflake’s being. Thus, because I am also a poet, my mind shuttling between science and poetry, I am interested in the light snowflakes shine onto things. Poet Paul Valéry wrote, “Like a pure sound or a melodic system of pure sounds in the midst of noises, a crystal, a flower or a sea shell stand out from the common disorder of perceptible things.” From a roiling gas or liquid, a crystal grows one atom at a time, each atom bonding to its neighbors. So, I invite you to imagine a poet’s rangy, prowling mind and exchange atom by word – a poem, a word assemblage equivalent of a DNA molecule, can happen. Thus, a homology exists between science and literature, between the dreamer of crystals and the dreamer of poems. Each bringing order to the disordered, don’t both attempt to explore a curiosity and desire amazement for their efforts?
Continue reading “When Earth and Sky Intermingle” in Modern Literature.
