Wonder spawned in: 1970s
Wondered into being by: Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
Wonderspan: 2 min reading + 5 min film
To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full
screen icon and make sure you can hear the sound.
If
all had been as it should, the T S Eliot Prize for Poetry event in
London this last weekend would have included Alice Oswald reading from
her new, long poem, Memorial - one of the ten shortlisted works. But in December she decided to
withdraw, followed in short order by another
shortlisted poet, John Kinsella. Why? Because when the Arts Council
withdrew funding for the Poetry Book Society, which organises the Prize,
a hedge fund firm called Aurum stepped in. Many other arts
organisations - the National Theatre and the Tate, for example - are turning to similar companies for help and perhaps it is good that wealthy firms are sharing some of their profits with the arts. But Alice Oswald and John
Kinsella believe that what they are trying to do through their poetry, and what hedge funds do, are pushing in different directions.
Alice Oswald explained her
decision in a Guardian article,
where she also described what she believes poetry can do to/for us: 'I think it's often assumed that the role of poetry is to
comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the
established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don't mean that
it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of
thinking. It goes lower than rhetoric, lower than conversation, lower
than logic, right down to the very faint honest voice at the bottom of
the skull.'
The setting for Memorial is the human tragedy of the Trojan War. The poem sketches the ordinary men who were killed in the war, each at the moment of his death. The text shimmers with Alice Oswald's keen feeling for the aliveness of things, and its fragility. Poetry like this gives us all something important, in that it stands up for, and appeals to, our common feeling for what can make us more humanely human. But to receive this gift is, I think, also to be disturbed, if it leads to a growing awareness of forces that overwhelm (our) lives today. To use Alice Oswald's word, a poem that is 'honest' to its own truth calls us to account for how 'honest' we are being in the way we live as individuals and as societies.
As for hedge funds, few
people properly understand them, me included, but they are
rightly notorious for representing a particularly aggressive, greedy
form of gambling on the world's financial markets. Hedge funds make a
few rich people very rich indeed. However varied their executives'
personal ethics may be, the character of the business itself is to
pursue
profit as if other people and the planet really didn't matter. For
example, Aurum's 'philosophy'
is 'to generate superior risk adjusted
returns over the long-term investment horizon', which
seems like a bleached way of saying they exist only to to make as much
money as they possibly can for as long as they possibly can. Like most
hedge fund outfits, Aurum gives a small fraction of its profits to
charity but appears to have no ethical policy for its investments.
So a poem might excite a sense of wonder and challenge us in our humanity, and we might need this when thinking about whether to endorse the sponsorship of a hedge fund, yet that means questioning not only the mind's 'established order' but that of society
as a whole. But as Alice Oswald notes in her article, 'It is increasingly difficult to
articulate any kind of unease about a
system that puts profit before ethics and makes protest a criminal act.' In other words, perhaps: it is seen to be increasingly out of step with reality to allow the tug of a poem to prevail over the demands of a certain economic system, even one leading to increasing injustice and violence.
For its part, the Poetry Book Society's website omits to mention that two poets pulled out of the Eliot Prize shortlist for reasons of ethics, but its presiding judge, the poet Gillian Clarke, has written a response to Alice Oswald. Here, she respects her fellow poet's stand but also argues pragmatically that the Prize 'cleans the money' it receives from Aurum by taking it from the rich and giving it to poetry. Her argument will appeal to those who believe the ends justify the means, but does not seem to recognise that the way we do things matters.
This week's Monday morning wonder comes from the world of science rather than that of poetry, but concerns the same fundamental question of whether a personal sense of wonder might inspire passions that would if they could change the way society works. That is, can wonder recover a feeling for what life is really about and so help to throw a question mark over some of our more damaging, deadening norms?
During the 1970s, Carl
Sagan and Ann Druyan bet that it could when they co-created the pioneering
popular science TV series, Cosmos.
At the time the whole planet
was held in ‘a perpetual hostage crisis called the Cold War’, says Ann
Druyan, and then, perhaps as now, we the peoples felt increasingly frightened
by the future. In this vein, Cosmos hoped not only to raise public awareness
of science but to excite collective imagination and humility about our place in
the universe. Ann
Druyan and Carl Sagan believed that if we could find ‘our own part in
[the] great story’ of the universe, then we might see the
grandstanding and brinkmanship of the cold war as the hubris of a species that did not yet know itself. Wonder, then, powered as it
is by awe and hope, might become a quietly redemptive force.
And Ann
Druyan and Carl Sagan shared both the same political concerns about the cold war and a strongly poetic feeling for the wonder
which runs like a seam of gold through the exploratory
project of science. For Carl Sagan this started
when he was a kid: ‘I went to the librarian and asked for a book about
stars ... And the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star
but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just
little points of light ... The scale of the universe suddenly opened up
to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There was a magnificence
to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left
me.' The sun is a star and it's just there!
Bringing
this feeling for wonder to their work, Ann and Carl brought the
cosmos to life for millions of people. Without dumbing things down, the authors peppered the script with playful metaphors, such as when Carl Sagan sums up cosmic evolution in a few words: 'If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must
first invent the universe'. The same
serious purpose still suffused the project, though: 'I believe our
future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos in which
we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.' Incredibly for a science
programme, Cosmos became the most popular series in the US from
1980 to 1990.
Meanwhile,
off air the couple were arrested multiple times for nonviolent direct
action against nuclear weapons installations including the Nevada test
site. Sagan resigned from a military research job in protest at the
Vietnam war. He was also one of the five co-authors of the first
scientific paper showing that a nuclear war would result in a ‘nuclear
winter’, in which most of the higher taxa of the Earth's ecosystem,
including humans, would be wiped out. Rather as Alice Oswald is doing
now, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan were taking their own honest
stand against the violations of their times.
So are you ready for a little cosmic wonder? Here's how Cosmos opens:
More Carl Sagan later in the year, but not as you know him.
Extras...
But if you have a little more time, you might like to hear Carl Sagan talking about the human meaning of the Earth:
...and this spooky/dreamy/eerie piece by Vangelis called Albedo
0.39 about the properties of Earth as seen from space. 'Albedo' is the
reflective property of a body’s surface in space. In other words, it’s
how much light the Earth reflects back into space forever – the chance
of being seen by aliens or gods.
And if you have a wonder you'd like to share, why not add it to
our growing collection... Click on comments below to deposit something
or other.
Source credit for 'I went to the librarian...' quote: Keay Davidson (1999), 'Carl Sagan, A Life'
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