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Since 2006, I have been working on a project to convert each Nobel
physics lecture delivered in the twentieth century—some 150 addresses,
all but one of them by men!—into a “shadowgraph,” a poetic X-ray or
exposé of hidden themes, latent or repressed symbols, unconscious
images, etc.
The name of the project is taken from the citation for the first Prize,
awarded to Wilhelm Röntgen of Germany in 1901 for his (accidental)
discovery of X-rays: “Now, when a foreign body impermeable to X-rays,
e.g. a bullet or a needle, has entered these tissues its location
can be determined by illuminating the appropriate part of the body
with X-rays and taking a shadowgraph of it on a photographic plate,
whereupon the impenetrable body is immediately detected.”
As I explained at a public reading (Cape Breton University, November
2007), “the unsubverted prose of the lectures constitutes, for me,
an ‘impenetrable body:’ a solid wall of confidence in the capacity
of modern western science to penetrate to the inner sanctum of nature
and, in the inexorable process, deliver infinite progress and prosperity
to humanity. But there is a terrible dark side to this enlightenment—a
hidden or inner shadow that I think can be shown, its plots exposed,
on the ‘poetic graphs’” resulting from a radical rereading.
The main technique deployed is a variant of the dada-inspired “cut-up”
method pioneered most prominently by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs
in the 1950s. I call the approach, which I first developed about fifteen
years ago, “downlining:” copying the text onto a series of ten-word
by ten-word grids, then reading the words downwards, exploring,
reflecting and elaborating on the (often shocking; frequently hilarious;
occasionally grotesque) images produced or suggested. The basic idea,
as I noted in my presentation, is that when you “cut-up” or scramble
a text, any text, you “transform it, release its bound poetic
energy: you split—for peaceful, if creatively explosive, purposes—apparently
dead, and deceptively solid, ‘atoms’ of meaning, symbol and sound.”
In 1997, the British poetry magazine Envoi published some
of my early experiments in “downlining.” The editor asked for a short
explanatory note, in which I wrote: “The following poems…aim to generate
‘meaningful coincidences’, or incidents, between different
parts of a text (or between texts). The premise is that language can
be taken out of its ‘natural’ or habitual, awoken state and put into
a dreamlike state (something like the shift from the classical to
the quantum physical world); and that that state can be monitored,
and engaged with.”
On average, each shadowgraph takes around twelve hours to write: three
or four to read the lecture and transcribe it onto the grids; eight
or nine to uncover, work with, reflect on, amplify, select and edit
the results. The easiest part of the process is pocketing the wonderful
free gifts sometimes offered by the re-juxtaposed words; the hardest
part is forcing yourself to accept, to both witness and trust, the
dream-logic involved, to neither force the issue nor impose a pre-emptive
or reductive interpretation (as can sometimes happen in science itself).
I was particularly pleased, and peculiarly affected, by shadowgraph
69, a “poetic plate” illuminating the interior of Donald Glaser’s
1960 lecture “Elementary Particles and Bubble Chambers.” Glaser, inventor
of the bubble chamber method of tracking particles released in atomic
collisions, was only thrity-four when he received the Prize, and his
lecture is full of youthful, infectious enthusiasm. Yet he also talks
about peering into “ovens with windows” with no inkling, seemingly,
of the broader, darker connotation of the phrase as image: the glimpse
the words give into other chambers, where other experiments were conducted,
particles destroyed.
In the early nineteenth century the English poet Charles Lamb wrote:
“The true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject.”
To judge by the Nobel lectures, scientists very often are possessed
by theirs; they cannot always see the shadow they cast. It takes a
kind of dream to do that; and in our scientific-technological—our
sometimes sleepwalking—age, poetry can be just that, a kind
of cultural dreaming.
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