Every now and again I try out the left side of my Brain by reading about the particle physics of string theory and quantum theory, and the reconciliation thereof….at least until I am so overwhelmed that I have to stop. String theory asserts that the universe, both matter and energy, at the quintessential rudimentary level, exists as one dimensional vibrating strings, a tonality of matter and energy; that matter and energy share a heretofore unacknowledged intimacy; that they in short behave like music. Another part of the theory (as best I can understand it) is that when observed, the behavior of the strings change, because of this hyper-inter-relativity….the observer and the observed are changed in the process of observation….there now…I have to stop before my head (and yours too)starts to ache.
This has got me thinking again about poetry. The poet and that which the poet observes in the eye of the imagination are changed…the strings of the universe sent new vibrations of creativity that renew the reality of existence entire. Prayer is that way too, a creative act: Paying attention to our world with artful eye…and things change…the strings of the universe voiced with new music.
The reason we gather as people of faith is that we believe when in enlightened community, through prayer and worship, both creative acts of observation… the world is changed, recreated, or perhaps created for the first time, this artful observation perhaps participating in the first creative act at the very beginning…. “and God saw (observed) that it was good”…the strings of the universe singing of a true and beautiful commonweal of matter and energy, animate and inanimate in which the timeless lives in artful intimacy with time; matter and energy lines of the same song…a song that moves amid the creation engendering there God’s imagination in the flesh…holy artifice of the Good….what is and what might be, one string vibrating with love, no less.
Indeed there is a lot being written these days about the increasingly intimate relationship between spirituality and science….music and mathematics…art and logic…the right brain and left…but I think the key for us is that we be about our work of paying attention (my trusty definition of prayer; poems prayer as well)… paying attention as if our lives depended on it….as if? Our work is the work of singing the universe into being…and this work asks everything of us…everything…because in truth there is nothing else.
I am working with another English professor to redesign an American Literature course as a “blended learning” course, where half of the instruction is online and half is in the classroom. The “lecture” we are currently working on is about the differing sense of what poetry is in the Enlightenment and in Romanticism. In the former, it is a nice diversion; in the latter, poetry is everything.
Poetry teaches us new ways of seeing our world, of perceiving the world, of encountering the world. What good is anything else we do if we don’t have that?