The Art-Science Nexus: Can We Learn From Tales of Witches, Goddesses, and Eels?
By Barbara Morehouse | October 23, 2009
What better time than now, when the summer's heat is finally waning and crisp mornings hint that the season is changing, to savor our connections with the Earth?
I have been attending as many lectures and readings as I can of the UA's Poetry Center's very excellent fall series, "Oh, Earth Wait for Me": Conversations about Art and Ecology (http://poetrycenter.arizona.edu). The featured artists and poets ponder, each in his or her own way, our complex relations with our environment.
The series, which extends to December 4, provides diverse perspectives and artistic styles. Not surprisingly, poetry is a central component of the series, leading me to ruminate a bit on what we mean by "poetry" and how it might connect to science. The Oxford English Dictionary defines poetry as "imaginative or creative literature in general; fable, fiction..." and "the art or work of a poet...." Simple enough; but what is the work that poetry does?
For this we must turn to the definition of poeisis, which involves "the process of making; production, creation; creativity, culture." Now we are getting somewhere. Art and science are both processes of making, of creation. Both involve creativity and culture. But how might the two ways of knowing come together?
Alison Deming, director of UA's Creative Writing Program and an award-winning poet, frequently explores science and our relationship with nature, often in unanticipated ways.
The opening speaker in the Poetry Center series, Deming explored links between myth, metaphor, and science through interpretations of two matriarchal tales, Baba Yaga and Demeter, that recount the dangerous and benevolent facets of (Mother) Nature. While seemingly antiquated in the context of today's world, these tales echo contemporary society's emerging environmental dilemmas.
These tales also illustrate why, as Deming says, while science may be our "greatest ally," it is not sufficient by itself to meet the climate and environmental challenges we face today. We also need to understand at an emotional level what is happening around us and develop compassion for those suffering the impacts. Art, as poeisis, attends to the larger story, and in so doing can bear truthful witness.
Deborah Fries was one of the artists featured in the second dialogue of the Poetry Center's series. This event was organized around the most recent issue of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environment (http://www.terrain.org). I was especially struck by how one of her poems brought home how art can offer testimony and at the same time elicit compassion, even for an uncharismatic creature.
Fries’ unpublished poem, "Wyeth's Eels," is named for the late artist Andrew Wyeth. The poem begins with scientists collecting eels from the Brandywine River, which runs along Wyeth’s property, as part of a prosaic but necessary process to assess PCB levels in the river.
Once back in their lab, the scientists set each eel "on a glass palette, skinned, and chunked like hors d'oeuvres into lab bits, so far from their swimming in Chadd's Ford...sushi-cut, soon to be shipped to Harrisburg, pulverized, processed—lipids squeezed out like paint from a tube..." The poem, in a mere 22 lines, ponders a profound environmental dilemma about our relations to the world around us. It does so by weaving art, science, human necessity, and a fine-tuned compassion for the fishes that would no longer be "whipping their way past the painter's studio."
That brings me back to poeisis and the process of making, of production, creation, creativity, culture. We may think differently about what constitutes acceptable evidence, explanation, and prospects, but in the end, we are all trying to make sense of the world and our place in it. Perhaps, with poet Robert Frost, we may find answers by choosing a road less traveled.