On Consilience, Beauty, and Escapism
“O brave new world, That has such people in’t!”
–Miranda, The Tempest (5.1.183-4)
“It was love … love that never attempted to clutch its object; but like the love which
mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world
and become part of the human gain…”
–Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (56)
“Though there are, there really are things in the world, you must believe me”
–Jorie Graham, “Steering Wheel”
*
In 1637, Descartes made a promise to himself and to his reader to start at the atoms of
truth. Doubting everything, assuming nothing, his Discourse on Method marks a journey of
deductive reasoning, whose most famous output is the simple fact of his own existence. With, “je
pense, donc je suis,” Descartes equates thinking with being. It’s a logically sound and necessary
deduction, but neglects that which makes us inherently believe in our own existence. Thought
alone is not what defines the experience of being, but consciousness stems rather from our
senses. Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey writes of the experience of being in his essay “The
Thick Moment,” noting that in any given moment, “What matters is that I feel myself alive now,
living in the present moment. What matters is at this moment I’m aware of sounds arriving at my
ears, sight at my eyes, sensations at my skin. They’re defining what it’s like to be me”
(Brockman 200).
Even as I sit here in bed writing this essay, plunged into the depths of my mind’s capacity
for reflection, I do not truly exist in the abstract world. I can describe the state of my being as a
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product of the raw pain in my left ankle as it rubs against my sheet, the soft hum of silence
buzzing in my ear, and a myriad of other sensations that encase the place where I know my body
begins. The danger of “I think, therefore I am” is that it leaves us vulnerable to the belief that the
thinking itself defines the being. We can hardly live inside our minds anymore than we can
separate our thoughts from the outside input that informs our experience. In “The Waking,”
Roethke offers, most simply, “We think by feeling. What is there to know?”
For much of this year, I tried to escape the physical world. I committed myself to thought
alone, believing that this represented some sort of devotion to the metaphysical realm over the
physical one. I didn’t sleep and I hardly ate, refusing to acknowledge the needs and binds of my
physical being. I felt the air pulse with urgency around me: no time, no time, no time. Every
moment not spent thinking or doing was a moment wasted. It couldn’t last, of course. I found
myself ebbing into slumber as I worked, at any hour of the day or night, hating myself for
succumbing to that primitive necessity. I was shell-like, adrift. I startled myself awake one day
after staring blindly at the wall in the WERCS. I felt terrified, horribly lost. I was not sure if I
had fallen asleep or, if I had, which part of my dream was real, which part of reality a dream. I
clung to the table, needing to feel its cold smoothness against my skin, clutching desperately to
the physical world I had been so willing to lose.
Weeks later, I stood before Monet’s haystacks at the Art Institute talking about art and
Impressionism with my friend Jake. The word impressionism comes from impression, the merest
imprint of a sensation. I watched him experience these impressions for the first time, impressions
already etched in my mind’s eye, impressions that had seeped through the feel of the sun on the
artist’s skin and pressed through the paint.
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The look on Jake’s face wasn’t marked by the instantaneous knitting of his brows or
paralleled movements of his eyes and hands. Those are the gestures of his body working with his
mind through an analytical exercise. Monet was something he was experiencing. His eyes were
wide, his hands were calm, each clutching the elbow of the opposite arm as if to feel more
acutely the anchor of his own body. Monet’s paintings are in direct conversation with the
physical world. Standing before one, you feel the warm fingerprints of the rising sun on your
skin. The next, and you shiver with the raw winter air, the memory of snow clinging still to the
frozen bits of straw. We need the physical world to understand this art. We need our outside
reality to inform our interior one, and vice versa.
I consider the weight of the atmosphere pressing in on me, dark energy in each cubic
centimeter of empty space radiating outwards, endlessly. Here where art lives, here where the
clean physicality of the rooms and the people in them binds me too to the real world, I remember
Rilke. “Here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”
*
We all have our islands, our Caverns: rooms we build for ourselves to escape the world
and its chaos, or to recall something once loved but later forgotten, or to dwell in the suspended
beauty of the present moment. I myself have many: houses upon houses filled with such rooms.
Open a door and disappear into the abstractions of proof, settle in snuggly between lines of
derivations. This is the world of definitions and interweaving structures: rings extending fields
enclosing groups partitioned by subgroups. Walk down the hall, and you’ll discover where
poetry has been all this while. Here, everything is different from proof, but the same. Images and
disjointed thoughts create labyrinths that were once composed of axioms and logic. Just around
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the corner is my own personal art gallery; farther down the way you’ll find the equations of the
universe, framed and hung upon the wall.
Sometimes, it seems as though the world is composed of such rooms, grand simulations
of reality. Some resemble those I inhabit: the fabricated world of the theater, for example, even
the art world as a whole. Art asks us to immerse ourselves in it, to give ourselves over to the
world created by the artist. However, many of our world creations are built not for beauty or
memory but for the facilitation of societal processes. I’m talking about technologies, institutions
that create a false world that is imposed upon our own in order to perform a service to sustain
modern life. The very concept of ceteris paribus, on which the simulations of marketplaces and
scientific experiments depend, is the replacement of the world with a version of fewer variables.
Classical economics requires us by definition to consider the world as if certain forces were held
constant, a clear misrepresentation of the eternally shifting forces acting upon each point in
space. The very concept of money, too, is a falsehood. It has no inherent value except that which
we assign to it, creating a world in which paper bills represent differing price points so as to
facilitate trade between individuals. Even language, as a tool, is a mapping of real things to
representations. It is convenient, but it is false. The use of the word “tree” does not necessitate
that one ever existed, nor does it offer us the experience of encountering a tree.
The technologies through which we have come to communicate replace proximity with
wires and airwaves. I used to love talking on the phone. Certainly, the telephone as a piece of
technology affords some level of intimacy otherwise impossible between people who are not
physically close to one another. I liked thinking of myself, cocooned in my blankets at home,
existing as a voice in another room in another house. Technology allows us to spread ideas
without moving anything at all.
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And then, I tried having those most important conversations on the phone. I pressed my
ear to the phone as close as I possibly could, talking to Jake about the difference between science
and art, about how there isn’t one at all. I wanted to see his face, to know when he was nodding
in agreement or looking down in thought. I called my grandfather on his birthday and he could
not hear me through the static of the sound waves. I needed to be able to speak directly into his
ear, to lean my head on his drooping shoulder and feel its solidity, to know he was still there. My
friend John called me after the worst week of the worst month of his worst year, and the phone
receiver felt horribly cold and mute in my palm. I was terrified that he couldn’t see me listening,
wouldn’t feel the only help I could possibly give him: the touch of my hand against his, the
steadiness and honesty of my gaze.
These technologies create distance between our experience of reality and reality itself.
They are tools that are dependent upon our belief in them as real things, equivalent means of
interaction. We call economics “the dismal science” because we believe in its objectivity, when
by definition it gives a view of the world biased in favor of the variables it deems important
enough to consider. We text when we could call, and call when we could engage in a face-toface conversation. We even speak in suggestions of the objects to which we are referring.
Technology replaces our world with a new overlying structure and asserts its own reality and
practicality.
The escape I usually associate with art is of a distinctly different quality than these
technological structures and processes. This escape is one that enhances rather than replaces my
experience of the world. Playing or listening to Chopin’s Nocturne No. 2 in E Flat Major, Op. 9,
I feel physically pulled with the articulations and legatos, each of my senses heightened with the
forceful strokes of the keys. And with that final great crescendo, the way my body and the space
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around me seems to grow until the world settles back into itself in calm resolution. The piece
itself does nothing to change the world, except that it pulls forth the feeling of its experience.
When we encounter art, we are forced by its very structure to leave it eventually. We
cannot live in the Cavern, but enter the experience of that false reality only temporarily.
Symphonies must end; paintings and sculptures lack the full dimensionality of a room we can
exist in; curtains close. In the Cavern, “the world re-forms itself. Outside, there is no saying.
Against the real, perhaps must plead no contest. But from the demonstration room, no one walks
out the way he came” (Powers 410). The Cavern, as an art form, does not try to replace the real
world. As an art, it is by design the manipulation of a medium, an exercise in depiction, which is
necessarily distinct from true existence. The Cavern invites us in, but necessitates too that we
walk out. Its role is not to entrap us, to fool us into thinking that it is reality, but rather to create a
momentary reality from which we leave changed. As Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” pleads,
“you must change your life,” it offers the role, the salvation of art itself. You come to a piece of
art, and you must change as a result of experiencing it. Art does not replace our world – as
Auden tells us, “poetry makes nothing happen” – but it helps us to live in the real world
differently.
However, art, like technology, can also be used to create distance. On the same visit to
the Art Institute in which I felt with Jake the heat of Monet’s haystack days, we went to a
photography exhibit in the Modern Wing. The photographs that lined the wall, though, were not
of people or places or regular things, but were of sculptures. These sculptures were certainly an
exercise in balance and planning. They were made from everyday objects: tires stacked on top of
soda cans suspended on hammer heads. The sculptures themselves were interesting, but it
seemed strange to me then, that they should be in the Art Institute in a photograph rather than
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being displayed along the wall themselves. The photographs were not exhibits of any particular
style, or lighting, or composition, but were merely straight-on, uniform shots of these structural
oddities. I felt, as an audience, stripped of the thing to which I should be looking for an artistic
experience. The photographs seemed only to work to remove us from the objects of our gaze, the
objects created by the artist, the art.
Similarly, there are “technologies” that function as we would have art function, helping
us to discover and live in the world rather than separating us from it. Richard Powers’s Cavern in
Plowing the Dark is a startling art medium: sculpture that breathes. In Switzerland, the Large
Hadron Collider stretches in great circles beneath 200 meters of earth. Particle beams traverse
this cavern’s dark corridors, colliding in sprays of subatomic fireworks to recreate conditions
yearning back to the universe’s origins. This piece of technology, made from metal and wires
and computer chips collecting the most precise data, is a glorious creation. Rather than replace
any part of our world, it reveals to us the history and building blocks of our universe to which we
would otherwise be blind.
This knowledge isn’t perhaps as immediately useful to us as discourses on beauty or
human interaction, but it is equally capable of informing our experience in the world. I would
argue with Bernard from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. In a fit of anger, he erupts with, “If
knowledge isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it
contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing ‘When Father Painted the Parlour’? Leave me
out. I can expand my universe without you” (Stoppard 61). Certainly, Bernard, if knowledge
isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much, but self-knowledge can take many forms. In order to
learn about the human experience we must also know the universe from which we sprang. In
order to learn our place on earth we me must understand the scale at which we exist, we must
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understand the very large cosmos which surrounds us and the very small particles of which we
are composed.
Studying the universe is about reveling in its glory and discovering our place in a much
larger system whose organization parallels organization on the human and smaller scales. If we
can’t consider the human and philosophical implications of relativity or uncertainty or universal
expansion, we simply aren’t thinking about it in the right language. Shift your frame of
reference, and its necessity, its beauty becomes clear. Science offers us, “In an ocean of ashes,
islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing” (Stoppard 76). These patterns exist
on every scale. When we learn of the infinite or the infinitesimal, we need only either to peer in
more closely or to back up a little further and see ourselves in the great cosmic rhythm.
Additionally, science allows us to perceive beyond our senses. Through its technologies,
we can know and experience the world to a greater degree than our mere human functions would
allow. The extent of human perception is only one shade of reality. We are blind to the
microscopic, to the effects of light waves and sound waves outside of a small sliver of the wave
spectrum. A human vision of the universe is thus an incomplete one. Science allows us to
experience the universe beyond ourselves, revealing greater layers of organization and structural
complexity. As noted by E.O. Wilson in Consilience, his treatise on the necessary unification of
the sciences and the humanities, “With the aid of appropriate instruments we can now view the
world with butterfly eyes” (Wilson 50).
I experienced this almost literally just a few days ago, through the startling clarity of
Louis Schwartzberg’s footage of pollination on TED. Schwartzberg has captured this natural
process at an unimaginable level of proximity and resolution. I held my breath, watching
hummingbirds’ little throats and the hairs on a monarch butterfly’s antennae. I saw insect
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slurping up nectar more clearly than I can see the faces of my classmates walking down the
hallway. The microscopic became, in a short few minutes of film, more real and vivid than what
I can perceive on the human level. Schwartzberg opens the world in its colors, slowing down and
speeding up natural processes with his camera zoomed all the way in, allowing us to see what
would otherwise be perpetually out of focus.
*
Here is what I am certain of: the debacle between math and art is the wrong distinction to
make. They are both works of beauty in so far as they enhance our experience of the world, and
they are both dangerous in so far as they try to replace our experience of the world. What we
cannot afford to lose is the world, that great cathedral to all origins of thought and feeling.
Purpose and awareness create that vast distinction between works of beauty and tools. In
Stoppard’s Arcadia, there is such care in the order and ambition of Thomasina’s mathematics.
“God’s truth Septimus,” she postulates, “if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must
be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is
written in numbers? … Then why do your equations only describe the shapes of manufacture?”
(Stoppard 37). That Thomasina seeks an equation for a bluebell, instead of one for
manufacturing cabinets, makes all the difference. She does not reduce the world by naming it in
equations. Rather, she seeks to honor the beauty she sees about her by defining the origins of that
beauty, the awe of its order. Her math imparts on her a heightened view of reality, which allows
her thus to see the fractalline structures that would awe both mathematicians and historians
hundreds of years after her death.
There is a necessary discourse between the world of abstraction – of numbers, thoughts,
feelings – and the world of bluebells. The awareness of each enhances the experience of the
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other. I wouldn’t know to feel compressed in Van Gogh’s bedroom unless I had experienced the
way that walls ought to stand straight. Reading The Tempest taught me about forgiveness and
release. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems will forever color the way I see the world: as a product
of paradox and negative spaces. These works of art are beautiful in themselves, but are made
more beautiful in the way that they reflect and refract real light.
The eternal dialogue between science, art, and experience is pulled through the lines of
Jorie Graham’s “Steering Wheel,” a poem that was a revelation to me when I first read it. I read
hungrily the lines rife with scientific language and ideas. In the poem, Graham describes a
moment in which she is backing out of her driveway, and stops short, seeing in her rearview
mirror the autumn leaves flying up in the draft. She wants to stop, to hold onto this moment of
beauty, but it is a moment that is fleeting, dependent on the movement that prevents her from
appreciating it.
The poem uses the language of physics to describe the physical phenomena as well as her
thoughts and emotions. She considers at once, “the weight of light, and angle of vision, dust,
gravity, solitude.” She gives her feelings a synonymy with the laws that govern the beauty before
her, dealing in one stroke with the problems of subjectivity and objectivity, permanence and
impermanence that plague the physical, intellectual and emotional realms. Her self-knowledge is
tied inextricably to her appreciation of both physical and intellectual beauty. She depicts the notquiteness of the moment, its belonging wholly to neither the interior nor the exterior, saying,
“You couldn’t say that it was matter. I couldn’t say that it was sadness.” Here, the expansion and
distances of the universe come from both within and without. Graham honors the symbiosis of
art, science, and physical reality. Her use of physics terminology in poetic metaphors allows the
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abstract world of ideas and art to enhance the experience of the physical world, while the
physical world in turn sparks her interior discourse.
The poem ends with a plea, the triumph of beauty and the reality of things. “There are,
there really are, things in the world, you must believe me,” Graham pleads. She implores us not
to forget the wonder of real, solid things. Though this world can at times seem so fleeting, so
fragile, so uncertain, it exists with a fierce and necessary glory.
Even in Charles Simic’s experience of philosophy in the dark, which is blind to the
outside world and therefore could be a totally interior experience, he describes the synonymy of
the interior and exterior, of all fields of study and experience. “And it all comes together: poetry,
philosophy, history. I see – in the sense of being able to feel the weight of another’s solitude. So
many of them. Seated with a book. Day breaking. Thought becoming image. Image becoming
thought” (314). What Simic sees and what he thinks are, in a sense, topologically equivalent.
When he allows his outside world and his inside world to speak to one another, his connection to
both is heightened.
His experience of others’ solitudes is the key to this development, for other people exist
as houses to other, endless interior lives separated from us by physical distance. What I lost by
living only in my head was not only the physical sensations that are crucial to the experience of
beauty, but also the human connection that is crucial to everything. I barely spoke to my family,
and felt often isolated from my friends. I didn’t make time for others – not dinner with my
family, lunch with my friends, nor any open hours seeing a familiar face – and so I went without
the emotional, intellectual, and physical nourishment of human intimacy. Part of the reason why
we need the real world is that we desperately need other people.
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Last summer, my friend Jack and I navigated the blazing streets of Paris together, making
our way one day to the sun ripened pathways of Musée Rodin, an outdoor sculpture garden. As
the pale skin of my arms radiated with the heat of the sun we stood before the gleam of Le
Penseur and other stooped, bronze figures. We were sitting in the 99-degree Parisian summer
sun, all my senses prickling towards the surface of my skin, and talking about art and physics.
We sat before these figures suspended in their eternal pauses, Rodin’s famous sculpture forever
squinting into stormy thought. He seemed to guess at our very gestures, thinking those same
stormy thoughts. In that moment, with my physical body feeling the full force of that glorious
sun, with my mind steeped in great reflection, I felt foremost an unparalleled intimacy with Jack.
Everything that was then defining my existence – physical, intellectual, emotional – was engaged
in the experience of being with him. And he in turn enhanced these sensations, illuminating in
my mind and heart new visions of art and science were worked and reworked between us.
Any existence between the abstract world of art and science and the real, physical world
necessitates then a commitment to connection and illumination over distance and escape. Earlier
this year, I was terrified of wasting the little time I have, worried that the math I love was too
rigorous, too abstract, too removed from the world. Though the equations of math and physics
define the functions of the universe, poetry and literature felt more real to me, more sound.
Reading Copenhagen, however, I was reminded finally of the reason why I love math and
physics – not for its austerity, but for its beauty, the way it flows with near humanness. Logic is
not separate from humanity, but rather, as Frayn reminds us, measurement is “a human act,
carried out from a specific point of view in time and space, from the one particular viewpoint of
a possible observer…the universe exists only as a series of approximations. Only within the
limits determined by our relationship with it. Only through the understanding lodged inside the
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human head” (72). Copenhagen carried a frightening truth within it, the existence of the atomic
bomb. Still, it carried the reminder also of the humanness, and thus the self-knowledge, at the
center of any emotional or intellectual pursuit. I need not be afraid of objectivity, for it doesn’t
exist, not free from the colors and sparks of the human touch. No matter what I choose to pursue,
I need only not to get completely lost in it.
*
The relationship between the sciences and the humanities preoccupies me, coloring all
my perception. For a long time, I was not even sure why I cared so much about their unity except
that I loved them both, profoundly. I was shocked into the sliver of an answer one day, driving
my brother home from school. I was trying to tell him about string theory, eager to forge a
relationship with the boy who has so long been a stranger to me.
On the phone the previous evening with my sister, I had voiced my concern at the
distance between Jacob and me. “I don’t know what to talk to him about,” I stressed, imploring
her for answers. Thinking of his muscular neck and perpetually sweaty athletic wear, I was sure
that I knew nothing about him, had no bridge to offer across that chasmic distance between us.
“Talk to him about something you care about,” she had suggested, and that was precisely what I
was trying to do now, trying to share a bit of myself with the 15-year-old boy beside me.
And he listened, or at least he pretended to, offering in return only the question that I
hated answering, “So why do we want to pursue this? Why does it matter if the universe is made
up of vibrating strings?” My brother is no Bernard, but he hit at the heart of the dubious regard
both scientists and scholars of humanities alike hold for the other field. It is this doubt in the
urgency and usefulness of the other study that creates such a yawning distance between the
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fields. Theoretical physics seems too surreal and too inhuman to poets, whose practice in turn
lacks the rigor and objectivity that mathematics yearns for.
And yet, somehow, from a place within me I did not even fully recognize, I answered
instinctively, “Because it’s beautiful.” And it troubled me, in the moments following, why that
answer seemed sufficient at the time. I was not even sure what that word meant, beautiful,
though I know I used it far too often and too reverently for one who could not precisely define it.
Still, as the sun peeked at the edges of the dashboard as I shifted into fifth gear, it seemed
that beauty was the place of the great cosmic get together of both science and art. It was beauty
that reflected the order and elegance of objectivity, beauty that made the humanity of poetry drift
into the light. The love of the world, the drive to discover it, was a drive to revel in its great
beauty. This was the common presence in the rigorous patterns of its physical laws as well as in
the weight and pull of sensory and emotional experience.
Weeks later, I walked into the cathedral-like building of Sterling Memorial Library at
Yale University. I approached, on the library’s far inner wall, a mural of a woman carrying in her
two palms a book and a ball of light, respectively. Here was lux et veritas personified, light and
truth. Traveling into the deeper vaults of the building, I tried to think of what this motto really
meant, light and truth. I sat in a corner where the lamplight threw faint shadows across the floor,
and opened my reader. I was supposed to be doing a poetry entry on Louise Glück’s “Celestial
Music,” but I turned to B.H. Fairchild’s “Beauty” instead, drawn in by the boldness and grace of
the title. The poem was stunning, triumphant even after its long lines of silences and absences
and muteness. It ended with a victory of communication and of beauty, as Fairchild tells his
wife of, “the way the metal roof of the machine shop, I tell her, would break into flame late on an
autumn day, with such beauty.” In this final moment, the beauty of Florence bursts into the
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beauty of Fairchild’s childhood, and everything is alit with his ability to share this beauty with
his wife after so many years of silence.
Lux et veritas, I think, light and truth: the way the truths of art and science illuminate
each other, grow alive in the real sunlight as I step outside and take in the blazing stone of the
courtyard. World, this world. This is what beauty is, the ultimate triumph, the light and the truth,
the breaking of silence into flame.
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