Earth is a Round Bridge

On the poem beneath The Climate According to Life

I sometimes wonder about the wisdom of trying to maintain a poetry practice while at the same time writing about climate science. It’s a big stretch between poetry and science and reaching toward both runs the risk of grasping neither at all, for each demands a lifetime’s worth of attention.

But there’s also the faint but glimmering possibility that, by touching both poles, even if poorly, I might tap a current running between, or perceive how the two poles mirror each other, are two versions of the same human longing—to not only understand but to know this place we find ourselves.

That at least is where Rainer Maria Rilke seems to point with his astounding poem, “Just as the Winged Energy of Delight.” Rilke wrote the poem in his native German tongue, and there have been numerous translations, but I prefer that of American poet Robert Bly. Bly seems to capture the grandeur of Rilke’s vision while not weighing it down with the prettiness that comes with trying to reproduce the rhyming sequences of the original.

In the poem Rilke raises the motif of a bridge. He begins:

     Just as the winged energy of delight
     carried you over many chasms early on,
     now raise the daringly imagined arch
     holding up the astounding bridges.

Who does not feel the summons in those lines? And note that Rilke doesn’t simply point to a bridge, but to the arch that lifts it. Going beyond the simple image, he points to a deeper principle, an inner architecture “holding up the astounding bridges.” And note also that this arch must be “daringly imagined.”

He later says:

      To work with things is not hubris
      when building the association beyond words
      denser and denser the pattern becomes

I love that last line. Isn’t that how it is with everything? Few arrive satori-like at sudden enlightenment. Instead we accumulate knowledge and ability bit by bit. And we aren’t just stacking bits, but weaving an image whose visage we don’t clearly see until we’ve woven enough pattern for it to gradually appear before us.

This is certainly the case with the development of a poet, but I’ve observed the same in the progressions of science. Science seems less a series of lightning-flash discoveries than a steady laying on of bricks, each discovery or articulation laid on bricks laid by others. Occasionally a brick comes flying that takes out an entire edifice, but the enumerative process begins again, and a new understanding is built.

This ambition is “not hubris” he says, as long as you reach beyond words, or mere talking. Is the same true when reaching beyond numbers, or mere counting? He concludes:

     Take your well discipline strengths
     and stretch them between two
     opposing poles. Because inside human beings
     is where God learns.

There it is, the two opposing poles, and the affirmation to stretch between them from Rilke himself. Do it, he says, suggesting the most amazing result—that God, or the creative force of the universe, or the Great Mystery, or whatever you wish to call it, will surge through the current created by your own reaching, and through you, learn

I don’t want to be grandiose enough to suggest that God learns through this Substack page. And I don’t think what we call God learns through humans only. I believe the creative mystery learns as well through rivers and willows, sage grass and badgers, asteroids in their orbits and ants in the labors. Certainly, when I allow this indwelling of God in things, they enlarge before me, shimmer with more than facts and data. They come into a presence beyond the realm of language, or mathematics for that matter.

The point here is the opposing poles, that they are both necessary. I’m referring here to the poles of science and poetry, with the suggestion that they’re not separate but connected in a continuum and in no place divided. We can see this more clearly when we consider the subject that pulls at them both—the Earth, or phenomenal reality, or things as they are. “No ideas but in things,” said American Poet William Carlos Williams, an anthem equally at home in science as in poetry. For it is things—what we can see, touch, smell, taste and hear—that chiefly concerns both poet and scientist. Each aims, in their own way, with their own methods, to get at the truth of the thing.

This preoccupation is a binding force, not a separating one, so does it make sense for the two to live so firmly apart, sealed off from each other by buildings and departments, culture and language? One is considered the practical discipline, the other a form of art, but I’m becoming convinced they are two sides of the same coin and therefore need each other. Especially today, poetry seems to need science just as science seems to need poetry.

Williams, who helped propel the move from rhyming formalism to free verse, spoke of the need in poetry for “glimmering details.” Well, for the poet willing to look, science is an inexhaustible source of such details. They’re not necessarily the details immediately seen, heard and felt, but those hidden within and between things, the details within the details, of microbes and atoms, weather and hydrology, photosynthesis and energy flows. What does it mean that our guts are run by organisms that date back to the origins of life? What is the poem of a tree expiring unseen water vapor into future rain? Poetry, walled off from these storehouses of knowledge, has only been robbed by the demarcation, and I sense that science holds an infinitude of poems yet to be discovered.

Science is robbed as well by this artificial partition. Like racehorses fitted with blinders to focus the gaze only on what’s ahead, shielded from distraction, science races to “the future” with necessarily limited vision. But existence is not a race to be won or a task to be solved. It’s something with a much wider aperture, which necessarily includes mystery, meaning, and immediate apprehension.

So much of science today is reductive. That is, it reduces things to their smallest parts, subjectable to mathematical manipulation, and then attempts to rebuild the wholes it has dissembled, with ever more elaborate equations. Meanwhile life (and climate,) which is not reductive, but dynamic, moves on, going places and doing things reductive science simply can’t see through mathematical models.

This is essentially how science arrived at the CO2-only interpretation of climate. And though useful for computer modelling and mathematical prediction, it has deprived us of deeper understanding, an all-at-once sense of the full, interconnected majesty of this living orchestration we call climate. The result is a blind-but-confident stumbling into the very patterns that got us here.

Can poetry, with its ability to see whole meanings in small details, to discern relationships and allow things to speak for themselves, be of help here? Only if poetry breaks out of the constraints imposed upon it and take as legitimate territory the realm of scientific investigation. And only if science gives up its claim to ultimate knowing, recognizing both the limits of the reductionistic approach, and the greater understanding available to it beyond the confines of purely rational interpretation.

Just as there is a science of climate there is also a poetics of climate. There are climate facts and there are climate meanings. There are physical constraints and living dynamics, and between them may well lie a comprehension that exceeds the sum of its parts. Rilke speaks of “raising” the arch. But the arch is also dug at. It stretches below as well as above and is all around us. And what it lifts is a bridge, not separate islands. It lifts connection, not separation.

At bottom we are gifted the bridge of all bridges: the Earth. The Earth is a round bridge we all equally travel, continually crossing to each other, to ourselves, to deeper understanding. Trees bridge ground and atmosphere. Rivers bridge glacier and ocean. Every living creatures bridges energy flows. And humans? We bridge understandings, knowledge. But for the current to flow, the channel must be open, the poles sought.

Here’s Rilke’s poem in full.

     Just as the Winged Energy of Delight

     Just as the winged Energy of delight
     carried you over many chasms early on,
     Now raise the daringly imagined arch
     holding up the astounding bridges.

     Miracle doesn't lie only in the amazing
     living through and defeat of danger;
     miracles become miracles in the clear
     achievement that is earned.

     To work with things is not hubris
     when building the association beyond words;
     denser and denser the pattern becomes--
     being carried along is not enough.

     Take you well disciplined strengths
     and stretch them between two
     opposing poles. Because inside human beings
     is where God learns.