{"id":47279,"date":"2023-01-27T17:16:20","date_gmt":"2023-01-27T16:16:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/paricenter.com\/?page_id=47279"},"modified":"2024-04-27T18:50:34","modified_gmt":"2024-04-27T16:50:34","slug":"making-literature-science-and-love","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/paricenter.com\/library-new\/science-and-the-arts\/making-literature-science-and-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Literature, Science – and Love?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I. Strange Bedfellows<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n

[T]he first criterion of success in any human activity, the necessary preliminary, whether to scientific discovery or artistic vision, is intensity of attention, or, less pompously, love.
H. Auden1<\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a provocative claim. Indeed, one might wonder why Auden, writing in The Criterion<\/em> in 1933, didn\u2019t confine himself to that seemingly more appropriate phrase, \u2018intensity of attention,\u2019 or even \u2018fixity of purpose\u2019 as he characterizes it later in the piece, for which artist or scientist wouldn\u2019t concede the role of focus and determination in any breakthrough endeavour?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But love? \u2018The first<\/em> [my emphasis] criterion of success\u2019 in \u2018scientific discovery or artistic vision\u2019? Auden does not elaborate. He\u2019s unabashed. The word \u2018love\u2019 dangles like a showy upstart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d like to explore at least something of that which Auden has left unsaid. How might love catalyse processes of creation, and specifically literary creation, my own area of interest, as well as scientific discovery? Could love really be the<\/em> vital dynamic behind worlds as apparently disparate as art and science? Is love, along with those more familiar qualities of focus and determination, crucial to far-seeing vision?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1969, the iconic English novelist John Fowles described an image that \u2018rose in his mind\u2019 when he was \u2018still in bed half asleep2<\/sup>.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It corresponded to no actual incident in my life (or in art) that I can recall\u2026 These mythopoeic \u2018stills\u2019 (they seem almost always static) float into my mind very often. I ignore them, since that is the best way of finding whether they really are the door into a new world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I ignored this image; but it recurred. I began deliberately to recall it and to try to analyse and hypothesize why it held some sort of imminent power. It was obviously mysterious. It was vaguely romantic. It also seemed, perhaps because of the latter quality, not to belong to today. The woman obstinately refused to stare out of the window of an airport lounge; it had to be this ancient quay\u2014as I happen to live near one, so near that I can see it from the bottom of my garden, it soon became a specific ancient quay. The woman had no face, no particular degree of sexuality. But she was Victorian; and since I always saw her in the same static long shot, with her back turned, she represented a reproach on the Victorian age. An outcast. I didn\u2019t know her crime, but I wished to protect her. That is, I began to fall in love with her3<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The woman was Sarah, the eponymous heroine of Fowles\u2019 most acclaimed novel, The French Lieutenant\u2019s Woman<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reading the above, an apparent declaration of love for a fictional character, one would assume Fowles is merely employing a stock turn-of-phrase to make a point. He was, we understand, struck by a visual image. It was an inspirational moment, even a gift of a moment, but a moment that, in reality, had little to do with love. How could it? Perhaps we intuit that, even here in an essay about the making of a novel, the novelist cannot resist the dramas of storytelling, and we gladly forgive the fault, if fault it is. Later, he confesses, \u2018I loathe the day a manuscript is sent to the publisher, because on that day the people one has loved die\u20264<\/sup>\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Fowles is not playing fast and loose with words. \u2018Characters (and even situations),\u2019 he explains, \u2018are like children or lovers, they need constant caressing, concern, listening to, watching, admiring. All these occupations become tiring for the active partner\u2014the writer\u2014and only something akin to love can provide the energy5<\/sup>.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At some level then, the character of Sarah is \u2018alive\u2019 as Fowles writes her, and, living being that she is, she makes demands:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was stuck this morning to find a good answer from Sarah at the climax of a scene. Characters sometimes reject all the possibilities one offers. They say in effect: I would never say or do a thing like that<\/em>. But they don\u2019t say what they would say; and one has to proceed negatively, by a very tedious coaxing kind of trial and error. After an hour over this one wretched sentence, I realized that she had in fact been telling me what to do: silence from her was better than any line she might have said6<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So \u2018love\u2019 for Fowles is not merely dedication to a project. It is devotion<\/em> to a character or an imaginative situation that has arrived seemingly unbidden, an invaluable offering of the creative process. And in this devotion, as in all forms of devotion, there is an element of personal sacrifice, an almost literal giving-over of one\u2019s self to the \u2018life\u2019 of that creation. In the above account, it is indeed difficult to say where Fowles ends and Sarah begins. \u2018All natural or born writers,\u2019 Fowles writes, \u2018are possessed, and in the old magical sense, by their own imaginations\u20267<\/sup>\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The comparison of authorship to the state of possession is not, for Fowles, a casual one, nor is it without precedent. \u2018Madame Bovary, c\u2019est moi,\u2019 Flaubert once famously and cryptically declared.  Charlotte Bront\u00eb was more forthcoming. In the preface to the second edition (1850) of her late sister Emily\u2019s novel, Wuthering Heights<\/em>, she offers a glimpse into the creation of the elemental, degenerate and now legendary character Heathcliff. Her remarks are a lightly veiled attempt to defend Emily Bront\u00eb and the novel against its numerous critics who objected to the characterisation of Heathcliff on moral grounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master\u2014something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection; and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent to \u2018harrow the valleys, or be bound with a band in the furrow\u2019\u2026 Be the work grim or glorious, dread or divine, you have little choice left but quiescent adoption. As for you\u2014the nominal artist\u2014your share in it has been to work passively under dictates you neither delivered nor could question\u2014that would not be uttered at your prayer, nor suppressed nor changed at your caprice. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame8<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Charlotte cannot say to the indignant reviewers of Wuthering Heights<\/em> is that, for all his diabolical rage and evil-doing, Heathcliff is a compelling character, compelling not because he is monstrous, but because he is contradictory and complex. Grotesque in his demands, he is utterly human, blighted by loneliness and a gnarled longing for intimacy. Such subtlety of characterisation, I would argue, can only have been achieved through a constancy of attention\u2014or, in Fowles\u2019 words through \u2018something akin to love.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Re-reading Bront\u00eb\u2019s words (\u2018As for you\u2014the nominal artist\u2014your share in it has been to work passively under dictates you neither delivered nor could question…\u2019), I am reminded of Fowles the novelist as he is instructed by Sarah the character in what she will and will not say. I am reminded, too, of the contemporary novelist, D.M. Thomas\u2019s comment about his character Lisa Erdman, the heroine of his groundbreaking 1981 novel, The White Hotel<\/em>: \u2018I kept discovering new things about Lisa Erdman. Much that was in her letters [in the novel] to [the character of] Freud took me by surprise10<\/sup>.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who then is in control, author or character? \u2018A writer doesn\u2019t choose his subject matter,\u2019 argues D.M. Thomas, \u2018he submits to it.\u2019 How, after all, could a vicar\u2019s daughter leading a sheltered life in remote nineteenth-century Haworth \u2018choose\u2019 or decide upon the character of Heathcliff? The question is commonplace in literary-critical circles. In those same circles, of course, the notion of \u2018literary possession\u2019 is occult, in the sense that it is literally occluded from active critical discussion. In my experience, the only critic who explores this uncanny but vital dynamic of literary creation in general is the great Russian thinker, Mikhail Bakhtin11<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps the truth of Heathcliff\u2019s conception lies in the conclusion to Charlotte Bront\u00eb\u2019s preface. Here, in a passage that reads too passionately to be merely figurative, Charlotte evokes Emily\u2019s keenly felt sense of the \u2018spirit of the place\u2019\u2014the place in this case being the wild moorland that, even today, surrounds the Yorkshire village of Haworth, a landscape to which Emily, of all the Bront\u00eb children, was most devoted. \u2018As far as the scenery and locality are concerned, it could scarcely have been so sympathetic: [she] did not describe as one whose eye and taste alone found pleasure in the prospect; her native hills were far more than a spectacle; they were what she lived in, and by\u2026\u2019 And in Emily\u2019s \u2018hewing\u2019 of the character of Heathcliff, the spirit of the place is made flesh: \u2018With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock; in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it\u202612<\/sup>\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, could<\/em> the character of Heathcliff in some way be the manifestation of the spirit of that moorland? Could<\/em> Emily Bront\u00eb, in her love for her native moorland, have been the devotee and medium through which the land \u2018spoke\u2019 or \u2018thought\u2019 itself13<\/sup>?  Could she have, in some sense, become <\/em>the spirit of that landscape as she wrote?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a daring and poignant exploration of the life of the poet Walt Whitman, the writer Lewis Hyde makes a convincing connection between artistic creation, the state of possession\u2014or \u2018enthusiasm\u2019 as he terms it\u2014and love:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be \u2018enthusiastic,\u2019 originally meant to be possessed by a god or inspired by a divine afflatus. The bacchants and maenads were enthusiasts, as were the prophets in the Old Testament, the apostles of the New, or, more recently, Shakers and Pentecostal Christians. Enthusiasts, having received a spirit into the body, have never been hesitant to speak of a \u2018sweet burning in the heart\u2019 or a \u2018ravished soul14<\/sup>.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Hyde, certain gifted writers or artists are also enthusiasts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one can speak for Emily Bront\u00eb, or testify to her precise experience as she wrote her novel, but certainly Wuthering Heights<\/em> is aflame with that \u2018sweet burning in the heart.\u2019 \u2018I am<\/em> Heathcliff,\u2019 declares its heroine, Catherine Earnshaw,\u2019 \u2014\u2018he\u2019s always, always in my mind\u2014not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself\u2014but as my own being15<\/sup>.\u2019 As a writer, I cannot help but wonder if Cathy speaks not only for herself but also for her maker; if Emily Bront\u00eb was also and irrefutably Heathcliff; if she was an enthusiast of that ancient variety, possessed and impassioned by the genius loci<\/em>, or animating spirit of the moorland she loved. Are the realities of creation more complex than we can usually articulate? In the words of the African-American novelist Toni Morrison, \u2018Imagining is not merely looking, or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other.  It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming16<\/sup>.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

II. Science and the Unbidden<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

It is possible that, in culture at large, we are not very surprised that artists seem privy to such mystery.  Indeed, post-Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth, perhaps we even expect a certain other-worldliness of our first-rate talent. It allows us to enjoy, if briefly and superficially, a very literal je-ne-sais-quoi<\/em>.  However, if we return again to W.H. Auden\u2019s risky claim, scientists, we generally agree, operate very differently. Toni Morrison\u2019s \u2018becoming,\u2019 Charlotte Bronte\u2019s \u2018possession.\u2019 Lewis Hyde\u2019s \u2018enthusiasm,\u2019 and John Fowles\u2019 \u2018love\u2019 simply don\u2019t come into it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or do they?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2001, I listened to an interview with Cambridge scientist John Sulston on BBC Radio 4\u2019s Desert Island Discs<\/em>. Sulston was, of course, one of the leading figures in the recent turn-of-the-century race to map the human genome. Throughout the interview, his dedication to the project was clear. So too was what emerged as an early passion for science and a keen childhood curiosity about how the physical world worked. Yet it was a particular choice of words at one point, a particular emphasis, that struck me, in his description of a boyhood moment: \u2018I remember trying and trying to figure out how a transformer worked, how it changed electricity; converted it from here to here…\u2019  Standing in my Sunday-morning kitchen beside my radio and fruit bowl, I was fascinated as something unexpected and strange unfolded in Sulston\u2019s account: \u2018I looked and looked,\u2019 he explained, \u2018till I became<\/em> the transformer, till I could feel<\/em> the electricity, the voltage, the magnetism.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018[T]ill I became<\/em> the transformer\u2026\u2019 He had chosen his words carefully. The moment was both long-ago and alive again as he described it. Somehow, under the rapt intensity of his boyhood gaze, in that flash of sudden knowledge, he and the transformer had apparently become one, even as Fowles and Sarah had become one, or D.M. Thomas and Lisa, or Emily Bronte and Heathcliff. At the age of 59, Sulston sounded like a boy who\u2019d fallen in love again for the first time17<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property<\/em>, [reissued in 2007 with the alternative subtitle, Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World<\/em>] Lewis Hyde reminds us that eros<\/em> is, first of all, the principle \u2018of attraction, union [and] involvement which binds together\u2019 and that it exists in opposition to logos<\/em>, or \u2018reason and logic in general, the principle of differentiation in particular18<\/sup>\u2019. In 21st<\/sup>-century Western culture, we tend of course to be more at ease under the directives of logos<\/em>, and who would be without it? Which genuine artist or scientist could spare this faculty which allows us to reason, to make distinctions, and to see the beautiful particular in the general? We are less comfortable, however, with the force of eros<\/em>, that live current not only of human love, but, as Hyde argues, of wholeness too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it then in the keenly desired union with something other<\/em> than ourselves (the \u2018mythopoeic still\u2019 of Sarah, the Yorkshire moorland, the electrical transformer) that we experience that rare sense of unbidden wholeness? Is it only through this \u2018erotic\u2019 coupling of the passionate self and an other that we stumble upon the gift of holistic awareness?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Milton wrote that the Muse \u2018dictated\u2019 to him the whole \u2018unpremeditated song\u2019 he would later entitle Paradise Lost<\/em>. Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously woke from sleep with what he described as \u2018a distant recollection\u2019 of the whole of the poem \u2018Kubla Kahn.\u2019 Nor is this experience of \u2018wholeness\u2019 and certainty exclusive to artists. The mathematician Henri Poincar\u00e9 recalled one such momentous experience:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go to some place or another. At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it<\/em> [my emphasis], that the transformations I had used to define Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had the time, as, upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty19<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And he wasn\u2019t wrong.  In 1914, Poincar\u00e9 made the breakthrough discovery of Fuchian functions in mathematics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coincidentally, Friedrich Kekul\u00e9\u2019s fundamental theory of organ molecular structure also, famously, arrived on a London bus, the last night bus out of Islington:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I fell into a reverie, and lo, the atoms were gamboling before my eyes! Whenever, hitherto, these diminutive beings had appeared to me, they had always been in motion; but up to that time I had never been able to discern the nature of their motion. Now, however, I saw how, frequently, two smaller atoms united to form a pair; how a larger one embraced the two smaller ones; how still larger ones kept hold of three or even four of the smaller, whilst the whole kept whirling in a giddy dance. I saw how the larger ones formed a chain, dragging the smaller ones after  them but only at the ends of the chain\u2026 The cry of the conductor: \u2018Clapham Road,\u2019 awakened me from my dreaming\u202620<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kekul\u00e9 awoke from his dream of this \u2018giddy dance\u2019 with the explanation of how carbon atoms link together to form chains, an explanation that would inspire his 1858 Theory of Molecular Structure<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet he was also aware that he\u2019d failed to account for the whole of organic chemistry. For the next seven years he would labour over the puzzle of \u2018aromatic compounds,\u2019 trying to produce the structural formula that would account for their distinctive character. Then, one evening in Ghent, he dozed by a fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026I resided in elegant bachelor quarters in the main thoroughfare. My study, however, faced a narrow side-alley and no daylight penetrated it. For the chemist who spends his day in the laboratory this mattered little. I was sitting writing at my textbook but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation: long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together, all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night working out the consequences of the hypothesis21<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kekul\u00e9\u2019s insight that carbon atoms form rings as well as chains was published in 1866. As John Carey notes, nature is based on the carbon chain and the carbon ring, and \u2018life itself relies on the capacity of carbon atoms to form molecular chains and rings as they did in Kekul\u00e9\u2019s dreams22<\/sup>.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1921, the states of sleep and waking were also crucial for the German American pharmacologist Otto Loewi. It would lead to his discovery that the transmission of nerve impulses to organs is chemical, not electrical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The night before Easter Sunday\u2026I awoke, turned on the light, and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at 6 o\u2019clock in the morning that during the night I had written down something most important, but I was unable to decipher the scrawl. The next night, at 3 o\u2019clock, the idea returned. It was the design of an experiment to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical transmission [of the nervous impulse from nerves to their respective organs] that I had uttered 17 years ago was correct. I got up immediately, went to the laboratory, and performed a simple experiment on a frog heart according to the nocturnal design23<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1936, Loewi was awarded a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the chemical transmitter acetylcholine, a discovery that would have an impact \u2018on everything from our knowledge of brain function to the treatment of neurological disease24<\/sup>.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018There are no logical paths to such natural laws,\u2019 Einstein would say of his own discovery of Special Relativity, \u2018only intuition can reach them.\u2019 The \u2018happiest thought\u2019 of his life, he recollected, was a mental vision of a person falling off a roof in which came also the whole and sudden understanding that someone in this position was at rest and<\/em> in motion at the same time25<\/sup>. There is now a small sign at a window in Einstein\u2019s apartment through which one can look; the sign explains that through this very window, special relativity was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Likewise, string theorist Michio Kaku remarks, \u2018I find myself spending most of my time staring out the window. I see blocks of equations dancing in my head, and I spend hours trying to fit them together26<\/sup>.\u2019 A window is a dream-space, as was Loewi\u2019s bed and Kekul\u00e9\u2019s hearth.  For the scientist too, dreams and mental visions are the spaces through which that force of sudden wholeness, love or eros, <\/em>can enter, bringing with it living forms\u2014Kaku\u2019s dancing equations, Loewi\u2019s fervent jottings, Kekul\u00e9\u2019s gamboling atoms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the notion of eros <\/em>and \u2018living forms\u2019 has no place of course in the Scientific Method. How can it? Its time-honoured standard procedures and criteria demand consistency, predictability and reproducibility. The brief testimonies of Sulston, Poincar\u00e9, Kekul\u00e9, Loewi and Einstein can only exist outside it as curiosities or anecdotal anomalies in a scientific tradition that first distinguished itself from centuries of superstition by spurning all claims to knowledge that were not directly attributable to recorded observation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Scientific Method is not the problem. Its success rate, across scientific disciplines, speaks powerfully for itself. But perhaps we need alternative questions and tools with which we can approach and, most importantly, engage with the physical world. For Wolfgang Pauli, one of the most respected physicists of the last century, the burning issue was \u2018the lack of soul in the modern conception of the [physical] world.\u2019 For \u2018soul,\u2019 we might also read \u2018animating spirit.\u2019  As physicist F. David Peat relates in his article, \u2018Wolfgang Pauli: Resurrection of Spirit in the World,\u2019 Pauli despaired, in both his personal and professional life, that \u2018he continued to live in a world where there was a clear split between spirit and matter.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Peat explains, Pauli was visited in his dreams on several occasions by a Persian stranger, a figure whom he believed \u2018was tempting him to enter the world of the senses.\u2019 If so, it would be fitting guidance, for is it not through a deep engagement with the sensual that reality comes most fully and vividly to life, as in John Sulston\u2019s early experience of looking and looking at that transformer in all its transformer-ness? Significantly, in a letter to Carl Jung, who was counselling Pauli at the time, Pauli came to the painful conclusion \u2018that the missing element was Eros27<\/sup>.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lewis Hyde would not be surprised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what does it mean to enter the world of the senses? The apprenticeship of the scientist and the poet is, in some ways, much the same; both disciplines demand that its initiates train themselves to be keen-eyed observers of the physical world. But potentially, it is in this most obvious and, in a sense, everyday of places that we experience what the writer James Joyce called \u2018epiphany\u2019; where we can grasp, as he put it, \u2018the what-ness of the thing.\u2019 Yet is it also at this junction between revelation and imaginative understanding that the poet and scientist must finally part ways?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Niels Bohr, father of quantum theory, didn\u2019t seem to think so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018We must be clear that, when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry,\u2019 he told Heisenberg one day as they trekked through the German woods.  \u2018The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.\u2019 Then, Heisenberg asked, \u2018how can we ever hope to understand atoms?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018I think we may yet be able to do so,\u2019 Bohr replied. \u2018But in the process we may have to learn what the word \u201cunderstanding\u201d really means28<\/sup>.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is<\/em> the essence of poetic understanding, and what might it reveal to the scientist and the layperson about the physical world?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u2018atom\u2019 of poetic reality is the metaphor. A metaphor of course is a \u2018conjugation\u2019 of two seemingly disparate images from which a fresh and undreamed-of \u2018third\u2019 is born. It is naturally \u2018conjugal\u2019; so, it\u2019s a marriage of sorts or a coupling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ask yourself. What could a fallen apple possibly have to do with a slant of sunshine?  Recall Dylan Thomas\u2019 effortless image of \u2018the windfall light.\u2019 It seems at once surprising and inevitable. Yes, we say. Of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Metaphor allows us to break with habitual or received ways of seeing and knowing the world. What could a potato have to do with the moon? Yet the two become one as Thomas pulls back the curtain of the night to point to \u2018the halfmoon\u2019s vegetable eye.\u2019 In this new coupling, both potato and moon become, simultaneously, more vivid and <\/em>more strange to us. They become, in other words, fuller, more striking versions of themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even in these very simple examples, one rides the life-force of language, and the drive toward connection is essentially erotic. Words unhitch themselves from fixed meaning; they go forth and multiply. Language (our categories, our classifications) slips and shifts, and with it, so too does perception. In the process, the world itself becomes seemingly mutable and abundant; something that exceeds our ability to define it; something bigger than we are.  Something, in other words, that is alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can feel the dizzying and lovely flux of the so-called ordinary world in the American poet Mark Doty\u2019s poem, \u2018Difference.\u2019 Here, in a poem about the common jellyfish, he suggests that, in fact, all<\/em> seeing is always \u2018seeing like\u2019 or \u2018seeing as\u2019; that all perception is always innately and helplessly metaphorical, because the physical world can never, at its most essential, be fixed; because it is always stubbornly myriad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Difference<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

The jellyfish
float in the bay shallows
like schools of clouds,
a dozen identical\u2014is it right
to call them creatures,
these elaborate sacks
of nothing? All they seem
is shape, and shifting,
and though a whole troop
of undulant cousins
go about their business
within a single wave\u2019s span,
every one does something unlike:
this one a balloon
open on both ends
but swollen to its full expanse,
this one a breathing heart,
this a pulsing flower.
This one a rolled condom,
or a plastic purse swallowing itself,
that one a Tiffany shade,
this a troubled parasol.
This submarine opera\u2019s
all subterfuge and disguise,
its plot a fabulous tangle
of hiding and recognition:
nothing but trope,
nothing but something
forming itself into figures
then refiguring,
sheer ectoplasm
recognisable only as the stuff
of metaphor. What can words do
but link what we know
to what we don\u2019t,
and so form a shape?
Which shrinks or swells,
configures or collapses, blooms
even as it is described
into some unlikely
marine chiffon:
a gown for Isadora?
Nothing but style.
What binds
one shape to another
also sets them apart
\u2014but what\u2019s lovelier
than the shapeshifting
transparence of like<\/em> and as<\/em>:
clear, undulant words?
We look at alien grace,
unfettered
by any fixed form,
and we say: balloon, flower,
heart, condom, opera,
lampshade, parasol, ballet.
Hear how the mouth,
so full
of longing for the world,
changes its shape?29<\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The \u2018its shape\u2019 of the final line is ambiguous. Does \u2018its\u2019 refer to the mouth changing shape in its longing to utter the world? Does the mouth become as mutable as the jellyfish it describes? For, paradoxically, isn\u2019t that mouth (and by extension, the poet) also <\/em>part of the living flux of the created world it captures? Can anything ever stand outside it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or does \u2018its\u2019 refer to \u2018the world\u2019? Is Doty suggesting that the physical world itself changes shape through the force of the poet\u2019s longing; through the force of his desire to hold it, fleetingly, with language? Does desire somehow catalyse a Heraclitian \u2018everything flows\u2019 transformation? Does it lay bare, or even engender, a flux that is perhaps the fundament of the physical world?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I suspect all of the above is possible. I also suspect that Niels Bohr, were he here, might be inclined to agree; that he, like Doty, understood the rich potential of images (those born of sharp observation) to capture reality at its widest and most unpredictable; that he, too, understood that words are, in fact, only marvellous images, and that tried-and-true facts, at some point, always become provisional. In Doty\u2019s poem, the living \u2018what-ness\u2019 of the jellyfish is revealed in a slipstream of images that are both recognisable and fresh; everyday (\u2018balloon,\u2019 \u2018flower,\u2019 \u2018heart,\u2019 \u2018condom\u2019) and urgent; unassuming and incantatory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stanza by stanza, the poem rises to a final revelation of desire and longing, and it is this force of love, I would argue, that has allowed the poet to bring back from the inchoate sea of jellyfish facts and observations the life<\/em> of his subject, and, with it, by implication, a sense of the full life of the wider physical world of which the jellyfish are but one detail. The metamorphosis of the final lines, in which both the poet\u2019s mouth and the world at large simultaneously begin to shape-shift, takes place not on the page itself, but finally in the mind of the reader. We too enter the slipstream, and become one with the poet, his mouth, the jellyfish, the purse, the lampshade and the condom. In this \u2018all\u2019s one\u2019 reality made accessible to us by the poet, the world is met and held, alive<\/em> in our own mind\u2019s eye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps, for these reasons, the scientist, too, needs literature and art, not just as an outlet from the demands of logos<\/em>, but as a bridge, a point of contact, to a wider experience of the real. Perhaps every scientist should also learn, firsthand, something of the craft of the poet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

III.  On The Wave Theory of Angels<\/em> <\/em><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

To be honest, I\u2019d never given much thought to angels. If anything, outside of certain artistic traditions, I found the subject faintly embarrassing, the stuff these days of cheesy Christmas calendars and television phone-ins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wim Wenders\u2019 1987 film, Wings of Desire<\/em>, had long been an exception. Here, two male angels dressed in sober black overcoats, walk (and occasionally hover over) the streets of a war-scarred Berlin, until one of them falls helplessly in love with a circus girl and longs to be human. He yearns to leave footprints in the snow, to crunch on an apple, to see red, to make love; to be more, in short, than a divine abstraction. As he stumbles into mortality, the film flickers from black-and-white into Technicolor, and we see our world through his fresh eyes. The cityscape of Berlin unfolds, and we remember all over again how distinctive the ordinary world is, even in the dirt of a broken post-war city; even in the spit and sawdust of a bankrupt circus. Indeed, the dirt, spit and sawdust are also somehow illogically beautiful30<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Wenders\u2019 film, the angel\u2019s physical transformation is born of his longing. His desire catapults him into mortality. Yet the mythic (or psychical) connection between desire and transformation is age-old. In Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses<\/em>, as the poet Ted Hughes once remarked, mortals and gods spontaneously combust, mutate or levitate under the terrible pressure of their own desires31<\/sup>. Hughes was right. As readers, we can only watch in wonder, amusement and sympathy as their assorted longings bear down on them with an emotional g-force the physical world itself cannot resist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Wave Theory of Angels<\/em> began, long before it began, when I stumbled upon and fell in love with a very brief account of an apocryphal medieval saint. Christina the Astonishing died while still a young woman, and, in a startling reversal of all expectations, sat up on the bier during her own funeral mass. When she soared to the rafters of the church, the congregation, understandably, fled. Only her sister stayed and tried to talk her down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Church had long ago wiped her from its calendar of feast days, but that only recommended her to me all the more. She was transgressive. I loved the fantastic, Ovidian quality of Christina\u2019s flight from death. I loved the image of that sudden and defiant surge of life. What desire, I asked myself, could have fuelled so powerful a change? What longing could have catalysed such a return to life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to create a story and a space in which a modern reader might suspend disbelief just long enough to wonder\u2014in both senses of that word: i.e., to marvel and to ask questions. I wanted to evoke a fleeting sense that, even in the 21st<\/sup> century, reality still resists our efforts to pin it down. Ours is the Information Age, and at times there has seemed little that rational enterprise cannot know or accomplish. Indeed, were it not for the horror of our most rationally executed disasters (the Final Solution, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Cambodia, Sept.11th), the twentieth and twenty-first centuries might even have been mistaken for the flowering of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment Project. But imbalance is invariably a dangerous thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In highly rational times, we necessarily sacrifice those experiences of the \u2018irrational\u2019 that renew us: that\u2019s to say, our ability as a culture to wonder, to marvel, to receive mystery, and to make leaps of faith or intuition. A small price, many would argue. Yet the upshot is, that without it, we, arguably, make ourselves vulnerable to the dark flip-side of the irrational: that\u2019s to say, to superstition, to religious hatred and to brute fundamentalism\u2014radical Islam\u2019s fervour, Bush\u2019s war-on-terror \u2018Crusade,\u2019 and Blair\u2019s zealously moral high ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Wave Theory of Angels<\/em> unfolds in the years 1284 and 2001. Both the medieval and the modern-day storylines explore this dark potential of the irrational that now, tragically, seems as much a hallmark of the 21st<\/sup> century as it was of the 13th. In fact the novel was already, almost independently of me, running toward these questions, when, all too terribly out of the blue, Flight 11 and Flight 175 hit the World Trade Center.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In August 2000, immersed in my research into13th<\/sup>-century life, culture and thought, I came across a phrase that struck me as interesting if tangential at best: \u2018Fear of the Angel.\u2019  My source referred very briefly to a controversy that had nearly brought down the University of Paris in the early part of the 13th<\/sup> century. The work of the Islamic (or so-called \u2018Arabist\u2019) philosopher Avicenna had suddenly been banned. I knew nothing of his work, but I chased up a title, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital<\/em>32, <\/sup>quickly added it to a list of some twenty seemingly more pertinent titles, and forgot about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That night, I did what I sometimes do; on the brink of sleep I, rather madly and not a little desperately, asked my dreaming mind for help with my still very tentative novel. If I\u2019m honest, it\u2019s not quite as mad as it sounds. Sometimes, I seem able to direct myself toward useful information or insights in dreams that will conveniently wake me with the sharp nudge of their own relevance. At this point in the process, I was certainly feeling stuck. I had a few vital elements for the novel, but I had little idea of how to make the story \u2018go\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That night, however, the experience was both decisive and, for me profound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m at Yaffles, though the house is very different. Jill tells me she is getting rid of lots of books; she has stacked them in the corridor. Do I want any?
The upstairs corridor is very long and narrow, unlike the actual corridor I remember well. It\u2019s really more of a passageway. I say I will look at the books, really only to be polite. I lift one from the stacks. As I do, its cover starts to glow. I look more closely. It\u2019s covered in wings. As I look, they move and fill with light. I realise it\u2019s an angel on the front. I look at the title: Avicenna\u2019s Visionary Recital<\/em>.  It\u2019s pure pleasure to see it, to hold it. \u2018It\u2019s so funny,\u2019 I say to Jill, \u2018because I ordered this through inter-library loan only today.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the books arrived, it was the first I turned to. Perhaps the dream\u2019s alteration of the wide corridor of the family home I had once known into something I could identify only as a \u2018passageway\u2019 was significant; for it was to emerge as perhaps the<\/em> vital passageway through what had been a very tight spot in my writing process. The controversy known as \u2018Fear of the Angel\u2019 offered me the way forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once upon a time, the Christian West had taken its cues from Islamic scholars.  Avicenna was an 11th<\/sup>-century physician, philosopher, and a respected authority on Aristotelian logic, metaphysics, psychology and the natural sciences. Yet, in the 13th <\/sup>century, the question of Avicenna\u2019s \u2018tenth angel\u2019 would bring uproar to the University of Paris.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Suddenly, nine archangels were deemed sufficient; a tally of nine meant there was one angel to oversee each of the heavenly spheres. Avicenna, however, counted ten, and his tenth angel was not celestially remote. On the contrary, this angel occupied the sphere between the heavens and our earth, and, more surprising still, he was open to union with each mortal. Human longing was the catalyst. The plain of the imagination was the meeting place33<\/sup>. The beloved detail of the ordinary physical world was the shared language. Communication and revelation took the form of images, not speech. Through this loving union, the physical detail of Creation was renewed. Through this imaginative collaboration, Creation also evolved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the tenth angel was trouble. Not only was he awash in all that desire, not only did the concomitant notion of an evolving universe threaten the status quo, but the tenth angel also meant that we ordinary humans could participate directly<\/em> in the divine cosmos; that the Church\u2019s intercession was not strictly necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I realised that Christina\u2019s father\u2014the \u2018imaginator,\u2019 or sculptor, Giles of Beauvais\u2014was who he was, above all because he stood for the potential of the imagination. As my novel took life again, I knew I had to locate him at the University of Paris in his youth; that he\u2019d been a student who had argued passionately for the importance of the tenth angel. For Giles, the stakes would have been high, for in those days, metaphysics was also<\/em> physics; angels were also the very atoms of the universe, and physics was a reading of the mind of God. Giles, then a student philosopher arguing against the ban on the \u2018Arabist\u2019 philosopher, could only have been branded a heretic and cast out. Indeed, he would have been lucky to escape Paris with his life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, Avicenna\u2019s tenth angel is perhaps nothing more (and nothing less) than an embodiment of the principle of Eros, that force of connection and wholeness in the world.  Angel or principle, we seem to be talking about a live force in the world, odd as that, admittedly, does sound. Yet with Fowles\u2019 loving creation of the \u2018living\u2019 character of Sarah, or Bront\u00eb\u2019s creation of the strangely wilful Heathcliff, in Doty\u2019s rapt rendering of the shifting jellyfish, and in Sulston\u2019s own transformation through the transformer, perhaps we do <\/em>actually see the world evolve, detail by surprising detail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I recorded two such moments in my journal, moments in which \u2018reality\u2019 seemed transfigured. Each was brief, no more than a few minutes, yet each was also quietly extraordinary. The first came in April 2000, a few months before my discovery of the tenth-angel controversy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wake and see above my head, a small flying thing, hovering very bright in the darkness. It is hard to name at first because it is so much in motion. Like a butterfly, only the size of a small bird. It glows red and blue, as if made of neon or a naked flame. I try to focus. I can make out an electric blue body and wings, with edges of red\u2026 A quick vision but much more than a dream. I have the sense that I am actually watching a living thing that I might easily have reached out and touched had I dared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second came some six months later:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A night vision again. I am awake, eyes open to the night; am watching a huge pair of wings, sometimes black and sometimes blue, flapping high overhead, some 10 feet up, near the top of my big Edwardian wardrobe at the far end of my room. I can only stare, mesmerised and a little frightened, until they disappear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back, it seems only natural that I should have been \u2018visited\u2019 by wings, or at least by the image or vision of \u2018winged-ness\u2019; the force of \u2018uplift,\u2019 both liberating and dark, would be vital to The Wave Theory<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet involved as I was in the tenth-angel \u2018Arabist\u2019 controversy, I couldn\u2019t rest in the medieval world alone. I was writing for a modern readership, and while the 13th<\/sup>-century setting and characters provided a very natural launch for questions about imagination and belief, I was loathe to leave my story there. I was concerned it would be too easy to dismiss images of mystery as the by-products of medieval ignorance and spectacle. I needed to transplant these images and questions to the here and now. What sort of modern-day world could provide the vital backdrop? Where could the story of Christina and Giles find a home in the year 2001? Anything that smacked of New Age mysticism was out. I needed a world that would seem reasonable and credible to the reader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had just finished reading Danah Zohar\u2019s The Quantum Self <\/em>(1991).<\/em> Over the next five years, I would come to love quantum theory\u2019s reluctant notions of indeterminacy, uncertainty, complementarity, non-locality and entanglement. I would immerse myself in the philosophers of the new physics. I would book myself on courses, and chase after an understanding of String Theory and M-Theory. I would fly to Chicago to visit Fermilab, the renowned physics laboratory\u2014and the workplace, I would soon realise, of my 21st<\/sup>-century character, Giles Carver. Like his medieval counterpart, Dr Giles Carver would also wrestle with the mysteries of the invisible world, even as the mystery of his sleeping daughter would frustrate his abilities to explain it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once again, here at the quantum frontier, was the world in flux; here, too, the boundaries between dimensions seemed to give way; here, too, there was the ghost of a suggestion that we might co-create the world; that ours, like Avicenna\u2019s, might be a participatory universe. For this reason, the Observer Effect of quantum theory was hard to resist. Here, human consciousness is posited as the<\/em> force that collapses quantum wave function into the fixed and real; in other words, the force that sieves physical reality from the flux of sub-atomic possibilities. The idea excited me, verifiable, accurate or not. The debate was enough\u2014great novels have been based on far less. If human consciousness could act on the physical world, by implication, so could the imagination, including the reader\u2019s own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From page 72, the reader is him- or herself invoked, as a witness to the novel\u2019s events, and more specifically, as the catalytic Observer of the Observer Effect. Of course, the reader is always involved in the creation of any novel, but with The Wave Theory<\/em>, I wanted the power of the imagination to feel real, active, firsthand, and not merely a literary given. I wanted to create an experience of the novel as something alive and unfolding. I wanted to involve the reader directly in its page-by-page evolution; to make it somehow co-creative. I wanted the reader to want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was only at this point\u2014desiring more for the sake of my novel than I could perhaps deliver\u2014that I returned to page one, knowing what the first lines must now be:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

The world yearns. This is its sure gravity: the attraction of bodies.
Earth for molten star. Moon for earth. A hand for the orb of a
breast. This is its movement too: the motion of desire, of a longing
toward.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Or, as even Auden might have it, the motion of love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

1 Auden, W.H.\/Mendelson, Edward (ed). (1988) The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writing, 1927-1939<\/em>. London: Faber, p. 319.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2 Fowles, John\/ Bradbury, Malcolm (ed). (1977) \u2018Notes on an Unfinished Novel,\u2019 The Novel<\/em> Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction. <\/em>London: Fontana, p. 147.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3 ibid, pp. 147-48<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4 ibid, p. 160<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5 ibid, p. 148<\/p>\n\n\n\n

6  \u2018Notes on an Unfinished Novel\u2019, pp. 158-59<\/p>\n\n\n\n

7  ibid, p. 148<\/p>\n\n\n\n

8 Bront\u00eb, Charlotte (ed)\/ Bront\u00eb, Emily. (1965) \u2018Editor\u2019s Preface to the New [1850] Edition of Wuthering Heights,\u2019<\/em> Wuthering Heights<\/em>. London: Penguin, pp. 40-41.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

9 Thomas, D.M. (1989) Memories & Hallucinations.<\/em> London: Abacus, p. 47.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

10  Nicol, Bran. (2004) D.M. Thomas.<\/em> Liverpool: Northcote House Publishers, p. 8.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

11 See, for example, Bakhtin\u2019s discussion of the \u2018autonomous hero.\u2019 See also Morson, Gary Saul. (1994) Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. <\/em>New Haven, CT:<\/em> Yale U.P.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

12 Charlotte Bront\u00eb, \u2018Editor\u2019s Preface,\u2019 p. 38 and p. 41.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

13 I am reminded here of C\u00e9zanne: \u2018The Landscape becomes reflective, human and thinks itself though me. I make it an object, let it project itself and endure within my painting…. I become the subjective consciousness of the landscape, and my painting becomes its objective consciousness.; (See \u2018David Bohm, Paul C\u00e9zanne and Creativity,\u2019 F. David Peat, Pari Center website)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

14 Hyde, Lewis. (1999) The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property.<\/em> London: Vintage, p. 167.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

15 Emily Bront\u00eb, Chapter 9, Wuthering Heights<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

16 source now unknown; citation noted in my journal<\/p>\n\n\n\n

17 Sulston\u2019s experience is an interesting echo of one of Einstein\u2019s boyhood moments of inspiration. According to Michio Kaku, Einstein recalled that he read \u2018with breathless attention\u2019 Aaron Bernstein\u2019s Popular Books on Natural Science<\/em> in which the author asked children to visualise riding alongside an electrical signal inside a telegraph wire. (Michio Kaku, \u2018The Power of Staring\u2019, New Scientist<\/em>, 16 April 2005), p. 48. Here, too, there is a suggestion that Einstein was willing, imaginatively, to take on new form as he tried to understand the nature of the electrical signal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

18 Hyde, Lewis. (1999) The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property.<\/em> London: Vintage<\/p>\n\n\n\n

19 From \u2018The Foundations of Science\u2019 by Henri Poincar\u00e9, first published in Paris in 1908.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

20 Kekul\u00e9, F.A.\/Carey, John (ed). (1995) \u2018Chains and Rings: Kekul\u00e9\u2019s Dreams,\u2019 The Faber Book of Science<\/em> London: Faber, p. 137.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

21 ibid, p. 138.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

22 ibid, p. 138.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

23 Lightman, \u2018Alan, \u2018Moments of Truth\u2019, New Scientist<\/em> (19 November 2005), p. 36.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

24 ibid, p. 36.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

25 source now unknown; citation noted in my journal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

26 Michio Kaku, New Scientist<\/em>, op. cit., p.48.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

27 See F. David Peat, \u2018Wolfgang Pauli: Resurrection of Spirit in the World.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

28 Johnson, George. (1996) Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order<\/em>. London: Vintage, p. 146.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

29 Doty, Mark. (1995) My Alexandria. <\/em>London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 44-46.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

30 Wim Wenders is by no means alone in his vision of beautiful dross.  Take J.M.W. Turner, for example, and his remarkable paintings of the radiant haze of pollution over the Thames in the 1830s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

31 Hughes, Ted (trans.) (1997) \u2018Introduction,\u2019 Tales from Ovid<\/em>. London: Faber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

32 Corbin, Henry. (1960) Avicenna and the Visionary Recital<\/em>. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

33 I\u2019m reminded here of William Blake\u2019s view \u2018in which the visionary sees the whole visible universe transfigured, because he has; put on Imagination uncorrupt.\u2019 In this state of lucidity, symbol and reality, Nature and Imagination, are seen to be one\u2026 \u2018I knew that this world is a world of imagination and vision.\u2019  See Evelyn Underhill on Blake in Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual <\/em>Consciousness <\/em>(Oneworld, 1999).<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thoughts of artist and sculptor Antony Gormley also seem relevant. He comments on the influence of the French phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty, on his art: \u2018Imagination, he believed, can have privileged access to the hidden dimensions of Being\u2014to what, in his later writings, he calls \u2018the invisible.\u2019. This, he said, can be imagined but not  seen; it is not non-existent but pre-exists the visible. Every \u2018visible\u2019 dimension of being\u2026 is correlatively connected to an invisible or imaginary dimension; he sought to establish the real and the imaginary as two separate but corresponding realms: separate on the level of ordinary being but corresponding on the level of fundamental Being.  Such correspondence even applied to the human body\u2014’It is not the utilizable, functional, prosaic body which explains man: on the contrary, the body is precisely human to the extent that it discovers its symbolic and poetic charge.\u2019  Antony Gormley<\/em> (Phaidon, 1995).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Difference\u2019 from My Alexandria<\/em> \u00a91995 by Mark Doty. Used by permission of the poet and the University of Illinois Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Author bio<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Alison MacLeod<\/strong>\u2019s new novel, Tenderness<\/em>, was a\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0\u2018Best Book of 2021,\u2019 a \u2018Book of the Year\u2019 for\u00a0The Spectator<\/em>, a \u2018Best New Book\u2019 for PEOPLE Magazine and\u00a0The Sunday Times<\/em>\u2018 \u2018Historical Fiction Book of the Month.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MacLeod\u2019s last novel, <\/em>Unexploded<\/em>, was long-listed for the Man-Booker Prize for Fiction and The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and named one of the Observer<\/em>\u2018s \u2018Books of the Year.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her most recent story collection All the Beloved Ghosts<\/em> was shortlisted for Canada\u2019s national Governor General\u2019s Award for Fiction and named one of the Guardian<\/em>\u2018s \u2018Best Books of 2017.\u2019  It was shortlisted for The 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize for best single-author short story collection in the UK and Ireland.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I. Strange Bedfellows [T]he first criterion of success in any human activity, the necessary preliminary, whether to scientific discovery or artistic vision, is intensity of attention, or, less pompously, love.H. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6464,"featured_media":6914,"parent":47215,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_tec_requires_first_save":true,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"_tribe_blocks_recurrence_rules":"","_tribe_blocks_recurrence_description":"","_tribe_blocks_recurrence_exclusions":"","footnotes":""},"papers":[141],"class_list":["post-47279","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","papers-science-arts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paricenter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/47279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paricenter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paricenter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paricenter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6464"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paricenter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/paricenter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/47279\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paricenter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/47215"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paricenter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paricenter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"papers","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paricenter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/papers?post=47279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}