{"id":87212,"date":"2015-07-01T14:35:00","date_gmt":"2015-07-01T18:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=87212"},"modified":"2015-07-01T14:35:00","modified_gmt":"2015-07-01T18:35:00","slug":"the-machinery-of-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/07\/01\/the-machinery-of-the-universe\/","title":{"rendered":"The Machinery of the Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poe\u2019s vision of the cosmos and the art it inspired.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"physicaloptics\"<\/a>

Alfred Jensen, Physical Optics<\/i>, 1975, oil on canvas, 7’2″ x 12’9″. Image via Pace Gallery<\/p><\/div>\n

Since adolescence, Edgar Allan Poe had been picking fights with science. His second collection of poetry, published when he was all of twenty, opened with a mischievous sonnet needling what he called that \u201ctrue daughter of Old Time<\/a>\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet\u2019s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

By the time Poe wrote Eureka: A Prose Poem<\/a><\/em>, the last major work he published before his premature death in 1849, his attitude toward certain men of science had softened. He eagerly absorbed\u2014and sometimes rejected\u2014theoretical works by the brilliant astronomer Sir John Herschel, the popular scientist J. P. Nichol, and the towering, eccentric naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, to whom Eureka <\/em>was dedicated. He was still capable, on the other hand, of caustic put-downs such as the one he attributes early in the book to a scientist from the distant future. It\u2019s in that figure\u2019s prophetic voice that Poe chews out most of his contemporaries for \u201ctheir pompous and infatuate proscription of all other <\/em>roads to Truth than the two narrow and crooked paths\u2014the one of creeping and the other of crawling\u2014to which, in their infinite perversity, they have dared to confine the Soul\u2014the Soul which loves nothing so well as to soar in those regions of illimitable intuition which are utterly incognizant of path<\/em>.\u201d <\/p>\n

Eureka <\/em>is a strange, eruptive, delirious book: a cosmological treatise on the origin, expansion, and collapse of the material universe that takes the form at various points of a prose poem, a polemic, a scientific report, and a malicious joke. That the \u201cmachinery of the universe\u201d could be, as Poe memorably put it, guessed<\/em>\u2014disclosed \u201cthrough mere dint of intuition\u201d\u2014was as dubious a suggestion for readers in 1848 as it would be for most physicists today. But it\u2019s also grounds for Poe\u2019s inclusion in a deep, submerged strain of American visionary writing that also includes Emerson\u2019s \u201cIntellect\u201d (1841) and Charles Sanders Peirce\u2019s \u201cA Neglected Argument for the Reality of God\u201d (1908): essays set, like Poe\u2019s, in open opposition to what Peirce called the attempts of most philosophers to \u201cbar off one or another roadway to inquiry.\u201d In the distinctly American picture these writers developed, thought was both a route to nature\u2014\u201cour thinking,\u201d Emerson wrote, \u201cis a pious reception\u201d\u2014and a natural phenomenon itself. To track its free and erratic movements was to watch the universe at work.<\/p>\n

\"GROUP_inst_MAY_2015_v03\"<\/a>

\u201cEureka,\u201d installation view. Image via Pace Gallery<\/p><\/div>\n

Wandering through \u201cEureka<\/a>,\u201d a group show at Pace centered on Poe\u2019s book, you wonder what this unruly Southern Romantic would have made of the lineage in which the exhibit\u2019s curators have placed him: call it the \u201cartist as stargazer.\u201d A massive, gracefully rotating wicker construction by Tim Hawkinson, modeled after a four-dimensional Klein bottle; a handful of drawings and sculptures by Alexander Calder, who once wrote that \u201cthe underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe\u201d; a vast, roughshod Alfred Jensen canvas zigzagged by a network of arrows, equations, and curves; an elegant, monochromatic Ben Nicholson relief painting; a faded first edition of Edwin A. Abbott\u2019s Flatland<\/em>: the show is a delightful cabinet of curiosities that riffs playfully, if a little abstrusely, on Eureka<\/em>\u2019s atmosphere and tone.<\/p>\n

What fascinates most of these artists about astronomy are the specific sets of visual, spatial, and geometric models it opens up to them. \u201cThe idea,\u201d Calder wrote in 1951, \u201cof detached bodies floating in space, of different sizes and densities, perhaps of different colors and temperatures, and surrounded and interlarded with wisps of gaseous condition, and some at rest, while others move in peculiar manners, seems to me the ideal source of form.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the universe, for Poe, was more than a formal template. It was an object of serious, if speculative, research\u2014a subject about which he had definite, firm ideas. In Eureka<\/em>, Poe claimed to have intuited, among other discoveries, that the universe is finite, that it came about by the \u201cradiation\u201d of atoms out from a single \u201cprimordial Particle,\u201d that what Newton called gravity is nothing but the attraction of every atom to the other atoms with which it once shared an identity, that countervailing forces of repulsion keep matter as we know it \u201cin that state of diffusion demanded for the fulfillment of its purposes,\u201d and that, eventually, the universe will collapse back into its original, unitary state.<\/p>\n

\"eureka-illustration__small\"<\/a>

A diagram from Eureka<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

Poe\u2019s verdicts, as Marilynne Robinson and many others have pointed out, sometimes eerily predicted developments in twentieth-century astrophysics. For Poe, however, all the imaginings contained in Eureka<\/em>\u2014the prescient as well as the flighty or far-fetched\u2014had the weight of indisputable truths. Only two of the artists included in Pace\u2019s show so dramatically conflate the work of artistic imagination with the business of scientific inquiry: Sun Ra, the multifariously gifted Alabama-born bandleader who developed an unprecedented form of free jazz after having set himself up as an ambassador from Saturn, and James Turrell, who draws on images from his Quaker upbringing to create immersive, site-specific sensory chambers in which patterns of light warp, shimmer, and bend. Both of these figures seriously considered the possibility that a poem, an artwork, or a song could make assertive, confident claims about the structure of the natural world. And each resembles Poe, you could argue, in more particular ways: Sun Ra inherited his sense of the creative life as a constant, half-ironic performance, Turrell his interest in extreme physical states and higher, more acute levels of consciousness.<\/p>\n

If Poe resented science to the extent that its \u201cdull realities\u201d fettered his poetic impulse, it\u2019s no less true that he eventually came to consider scientific discovery as the most rarified, exalted sort of work poetry could do: the \u201ctreasure in the jewelled skies\u201d to which the speaker in that early sonnet hoped to soar. Poetic thinking, in Poe\u2019s way of speaking, involves both observing and emulating <\/em>the movements of the natural world. (\u201cThe source of all motion is thought,\u201d insists one of the two cryptic speakers in \u201cThe Power of Words<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n

In its own way, so did fictional thinking. Writing in Eureka <\/em>about the universe\u2019s \u201ccomplete mutuality of adaptation\u201d\u2014the notion that any given element in what he called a \u201cDivine construction\u201d could be taken either for an element of the original design or an adaptive consequence of that design\u2014Poe proposed that<\/p>\n

\n

the pleasure which we derive from any display of human ingenuity is the ratio of the approach <\/em>to this species of reciprocity. In the construction of plot<\/em> for example, in fictitious literature, we should aim at so arranging the incidents that we shall not be able to determine, of any one of them, whether it depends from any one other or upholds it. In this sense, of course, perfection <\/em>of plot is really, or practically, unattainable\u2014but only because it is a finite intelligence that constructs. The plots of God are perfect. The universe is a plot of God.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"efficaciousgrace\"<\/a>

Jonathan Edwards\u2019s Efficacious Grace<\/i> manuscript, via Yale\u2019s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.<\/p><\/div>\n

Here Poe sounds like no one more than Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century theologian who copied out the manuscript for his treatise Efficacious Grace <\/em>in a circular notebook whose pages resembled planetary orbits, and who wrote\u2014in Concerning the End for Which God Created the World<\/em>\u2014that \u201cwhat God aimed at in the creation of the world, as the end which he had ultimately in view, was that communication of himself<\/em> which he intended through all eternity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike Edwards, Poe was no theologian; nor was he a physicist, nor a scientific historian, nor\u2014as Pace\u2019s exhibition occasionally suggests\u2014a fountainhead to generations of visual artists inspired by the shapes and curvatures of cosmic forms. What he became in Eureka <\/em>is more singular: a fiction writer possessed by the thought that the known and unknown universe could be pounded, by sheer force of inspiration, into the shape of a book.<\/p>\n

\u201cEureka<\/a>\u201d is at Pace through August 28.<\/em><\/p>\n

Max Nelson’s\u00a0writings\u00a0on film and literature\u00a0have appeared in <\/em>The Threepenny Review,\u00a0<\/em>n+1, <\/em>Film Comment, and <\/em>The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.\u00a0He lives in New York.<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poe\u2019s vision of the cosmos and the art it inspired. Since adolescence, Edgar Allan Poe had been picking fights with science. His second collection of poetry, published when he was all of twenty, opened with a mischievous sonnet needling what he called that \u201ctrue daughter of Old Time\u201d: Why preyest thou thus upon the poet\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":851,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[4499,18598,35,18600,1759,16787,1353,8453,8622,18599,1323,7355,10945],"class_list":["post-87212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-alexander-calder","tag-alexander-von-humboldt","tag-art","tag-charles-sanders-peirce","tag-edgar-allan-poe","tag-eureka","tag-james-turrell","tag-jonathan-edwards","tag-marilynne-robinson","tag-pace-gallery","tag-ralph-waldo-emerson","tag-science","tag-sun-ra"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nEdgar Allan Poe\u2019s \u201cEureka\u201d and the Machinery of the Universe<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"July 1, 2015 \u2013 Poe\u2019s vision of the cosmos and the art it inspired.Since adolescence, Edgar Allan Poe had been picking fights with science. 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