I Carry Your Heart
This might be an anthem for those who believe we aren't but mere atoms alone in this universe, mere numbers on some universal equation explaining everything.
It’s been bloody hot here. So every day, it is only 2 hours each morning on my bike. Then I spend the rest of the day, in my airconditioned nightmare, 12 floors up, blinds drawn, with the animals, all sprawled out, surviving the day’s humidity and heat.
One good thing about it is that I’ve been reading again. I’m so glad to have all my life been a reader. It’s the fertilizer and nutrition that informs my being, my growth as a poet and “mind” full person.
I’ve returned to and been digging into e.e. cummings of late. I produced this video and narration of one of his “touching” poems - “I carry your heart”. I had to, each time I encounter it, it teaches me something. Enjoy it. For me, this poem always brings thoughts of my beautiful mother. To you, maybe someone else … let us know.
cummings for me was always “magical” and in tune with what I deem “the mystery”. His whimsy and turn of phrase, his technique (and Pound to once stated, “technique is the writer’s test of sincerity”), indeed his absolute truthfulness in the face of our cruel world, has always been his touchstone.
In this poem, cummings shares obliquely “the deepest secret nobody knows”. He doesn’t come right out and state what the secret is, like any great writer, he respects the reader. But he alludes to it, that special quality of memory.
Our ability to break out of our “aloneness” and let the world into ourselves, is a power, a magic that makes everything fill with meaning and “keeps the stars apart”, keeps life continuing. Our ability to make connections, to remember, to feel and through metaphor - the bud of the bud, sprinkle our lives with meaning is what living is all about. Imagination, memory, art …
A poem like this one, we may not completely understand but we “get it”. And that is enough for me. So much of the evil in this world is based on our belief we fully understand something, we fully control something - our cocksureness. I want more of the “gut”, in teaching, in our relationships, in our arts and sciences, in our economies, in our selves.
I hope my heart is always filled with the mysterious presence of all those I’ve met and loved. Like the scientist Alan Lightman shares in the short essay below, we are much better for the power of the “unknown” and perhaps this unknown is the power that makes being alive special. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for - said Browning.
My own fight against “scientific materialism” is a fight against the absolute truth, and arrogant world of data, calculations and brutal logic. It’s a fight for less hubris and an acknowledgement of the “so much” that we know not. It’s the mysterious, the sacred, the enigmatic, the magical that makes life liveable. It’s the force that through the green fuse, drives the flower. It’s anything gives life purpose, it is this absence of knowing - it is how everything keeps flowing. Man’s life IS a search for meaning.
More on e.e. cummings and his poetry, his meaning - forthcoming.
THE POWER OF MYSTERIES by Alan Lightman
I believe in the power of the unknown. I believe that a sense of the unknown propels us in all of our creative activities, from science to art.
When I was a child, after bedtime I would often get out of my bed in my pajamas, go to the window and stare at the stars. I had so many questions. How far away were those tiny points of light? Did space go on forever and ever, or was there some end to space, some giant edge? And if so, what lay beyond the edge?
Another of my childhood questions: Did time go on forever? I looked at pictures of my parents and grandparents and tried to imagine their parents, and so on, back through the generations, back and back through time. Looking out of my bedroom window into the vastness of space, time seemed to stretch forward and backward without end, engulfing me, engulfing my parents and great-grandparents, the entire history of earth. Does time go on forever? Or is there some beginning of time? And if so, what came before?
When I grew up, I became a professional astrophysicist. Although I never answered any of these questions, they continued to challenge me, to haunt me, to drive me in my scientific research, to cause me to live on tuna fish and no sleep for days at a time while I was obsessed with a science problem. These same questions, and questions like them, challenge and haunt the leading scientists of today.
Einstein once wrote that “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” What did Einstein mean by “the mysterious?” I don’t think he meant that science is full of unpredictable or unknowable or supernatural forces. I think that he meant a sense of awe, a sense that there are things larger than us, that we do not have all the answers at this moment. A sense that we can stand right at the boundary between known and unknown and gaze into that cavern and be exhilarated rather than frightened.
Scientists are happy, of course, when they find answers to questions. But scientists are also happy when they become stuck, when they discover interesting questions that they cannot answer. Because that is when their imaginations and creativity are set on fire. That is when the greatest progress occurs.
One of the Holy Grails in physics is to find the so-called “theory of everything,” the final theory that will encompass all the fundamental laws of nature. I,for one, hope that we never find that final theory. I hope that there are always things that we don’t know — about the physical world as well as about ourselves. I believe in the creative power of the unknown. I believe in the exhilaration of standing at the boundary between the known and the unknown. I believe in the unanswered questions of children.
Alan Lightman is an astrophysicist and novelist teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Einstein’s Dreams and A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit. Lightman and his wife, Jean, started the Harpswell Foundation to help disadvantaged students obtain education in Cambodia.
