STRING THEORY
and The End of the Dead Universe
In as much as a poet may take an interest in contemporary issues, I venture to address a subject where the poet's voice is rarely heard. Poets should just as likely take an interest in physics without being physical scientists, as they can take an interest in eternity without being a priest. In this spirit, I wish to focus attention on how String Theory may correct modern man's perception of his relationship with all of creation.
New philosophy brings in new religion. In the 19th century, new scientific paradigms changed how the poet's work was valued in society. As man speculates on his place in creation, so he adorns his life with a coat of many colors. If we chose to define poetry as the incantation uniting human sense perception with spiritual realities, then we are concerned as poets where the possibilities for this mechanism are under public discussion.
I introduce in these pages what will be a common observation of future criticism. The Romantic Age in literature (in all its variations of the alienated individual) could last only so long as the scientific concept of the dead universe. The last two centuries took physical matter too seriously. There has always been a body of human opinion that has vigorously denied the permanent reality of matter. This intuition was sometimes expressed in the productions of creative artists and folk traditions. William Blake self-published his poems in a society that suddenly isolated the artist still insisting upon a living universe. Living outside the Romantic Tradition, Blake was the first poet of alienation in so far as he represented the earliest protest against the victory - late in the 18th century - of the mechanical universe. The subsequent Romantic Movement sought psychic unity in nature lost in a society bent on the exploitation of a mechanical, soulless environment. I include under this title the emotions of the alienated individual - of which the Western lyric has been the principle vehicle for over 200 years - and even all the variations of Romantic art that include Jazz, popular music and the individual prose/poem experiments since the 1950's. It may be of more than casual interest to poets, whom may not they have made the recognition that this era ended in the 1990's. String theory has killed the mechanical, dead universe.
By one of the oddest paradoxes in human history, String Theory can restore William Blake's credibility to the cab drivers and the hot dog salesmen of every city. What science took away in the 18th century it can give back to us in the 21st. It gave the West Romanticism - as a force of reaction - and now as suddenly takes away these same conditions of protest in a unified theory of matter - and the suggestion that matter is altered by non-material energies. The same science that changed social perceptions in the 18th century has changed its idea about itself -again. Even the once most absolute of positions - Newton's cherished mechanical universe - is discarded as a badly done schoolboy exercise.
Atoms are not, it turns out, independent, self-contained units of matter. Matter in fact may be totally dependant upon another dimension of energy. Matter is now seen as conditional - and liable to run down rabbit holes into other dimensions.
When it is suggested the smallest elements of matter disappear at one point to reappear unpredictably at another location - and possibly altered by the observer - the poet sees the interaction of non-material energies - mental energies of focus and intent. The poet will recognize at once the relevance of a String Theory universe to his own work - that all material life has an immediate and continued parallel contact at the atomic level with the energies of other dimensions of life. Of course, the poet's interpretation of String Theory is also based on a leap of imagination, but that is the poet's job. Our project is not for everyone, certainly, and the reader is invited to participate only in so far as they find identity.
String Theory is a leap of the human imagination - and shares with poetry the imagination's power to order our lives. In human life, perception is reality. Human reality is the result of a competition of ideas, and has nothing to do with some non-existent absolute. Men are what they focus on. Whether an absolute or not, when man orders his world view as if String Theory was reality - then this ordering reopens the possibility of a living - and even supra natural - universe to modern educated thought. It is already the slime on the city streets.
Scientist themselves do not make any claims about the soul's existence - nor do we look for them to. As in all discussions of the unknown, one may take the opposite view and as profitably speculate that String particles disappear into, say, the devil's belly - as to insist - with our instinct - that matter has direct relation to positive spiritual energies where the Idea of Man exists in eternity. But that is part of our character. In the GLP Project, mankind's passionate, twenty thousand year examination of the soul will never be relegated to the realm of gibberish. How does poetry compare with science? It may be useful to remember that science has been the most fickle of all human philosophies, changing every generation, while poetry, ever circling at the soul's eye, has remained the longest constant among human expressions. Science circles around created things; poetry circles around the soul, where the idea of creation is sustained in eternity.
When String Theorist suggest that there must be 9 or even 10 parallel and contemporaneous life dimensions, we recognize at once as creative artists that the universe is showing evidence of being alive rather than dead, as actively influenced by spiritual ideation, as not at all. Which possibilities now open up before us? This power of a living universe can be used as seriously or as frivolously as you wish. With the focus of the mind alone, you can heal the cancers in your body, make peace where there is war, take violence from our streets - or, at the most basic level, not be surprised when your plants respond to your human voice.
Not someday, not in other worlds, but we accept this power now. For the first time since the Renaissance, men can see themselves as manipulators of their own state of being - their environment and their experience - not through soulless mechanics and technology- but by the energies latent in the focus of their mind.
Man and poet is Magus again. Defiant individualism in the arts - romanticism, etc - is no longer relevant to our society, since the psychic environment is integrated, and sense perception is unified with the living environment. Our work must be beyond individual personality, beyond all contemporary belief, beyond all egocentric protest. And this will make all the difference in the way poetry is written in this society.
Next,
