The art of writing a poem is, at its heart, the art of paying attention. And the reading of a poem should make the reader feel like she has attended to something. Alan Lightman’s stunning book, Probable Impossibilities is a literary performance of sustained attention, focused on some of the most difficult mysteries of the universe. Lightman turns his attention to the quantum field, to the flow of time, and then turns his attention to attention itself.
Life is what we pay attention to, and attention is, at its core, the rhythmic firing of neurons. Thought is rhythm. “Evidently what we perceive as ‘paying attention’ to something originates, at the cellular level, in the synchronized firing of a group of neurons, whose rhythmic electrical activity rises above the background chatter of the vast neuronal crowds.” The neuroscientist Robert Desimone calls this the “synchronized chanting” of the brain.
Just as six metronomes will come into synch with one another through the vibrations transmitted through the board on which they stand, so the mind seems capable of coming into synch with the symphony of nature, bringing what is outside into accord with what is within. The brain doesn’t just chant, it sings the music of the spheres.
Imagination is, after all, a form of attention, and Lightman revels in pushing his imagination to its limits. “Standing at that boundary is an exhilarating experience,” he writes. He explains: “Einstein once wrote, ‘The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art true science.’” One of Lightman’s “probable impossibilities” is imagination.
The poetic act is to stand at the boundary of the comprehensible and incomprehensible and to write from the island of the comprehensible toward the ocean of incomprehensibility. True poetic composition is a spiritual experience. But you don’t need to contemplate the universe to achieve these spiritual heights. The ordinary observation is enough. What stuns about Lightman’s prose in Probable Impossibilities is its ability to simultaneously marvel about the mysteries of forward moving time, and then to settle into the ordinary beauty of walking along a beach in Maine. The poetic can take us to the stars; but more often it can be found in a simple cup of tea.
And perhaps that’s the miracle of the universe, the miracle of the poetic. The heart and mind can travel through infinite space, but the real miracle might be closer to home, in the smaller spaces: a glass of orange juice on your breakfast table, an ant walking across a leaf, sunshine on the skin, a smile.
Lightman “confesses” that he doesn’t believe in miracles. He doesn’t believe in “another kind of reality that exists outside the physical universe but that can enter our time and space at will.” And yet, he believes in a quantum reality where “ghostlike photons pop out of the vacuum into being, enjoy their lives for perhaps a billionth of a billionth of a second, and then disappear again.”
How can one stand before the impossibility of the quantum field where photons can be formed ex nihilo and not admit that there are forces that cannot be explained by science alone?
Lightman writes about the scientist Owen Gingrich, a man who believes “‘that our physical universe is somehow wrapped within a broader and deeper spiritual universe, in which miracles can occur.’” I’m not so sure about that. But I couldn’t help feeling like there was some kind of mysterious connection between the rhythms of the photons, the rhythms of the quantum field, and the rhythms of consciousness itself. If the sum of these rhythms isn’t something like spirit, I don’t know what is.
But even without admitting spiritual mystery, Lightman gravitates toward the mystery of life’s specialness: “Of all the zillions of atoms and molecules in the universe, we have the privilege of being composed of those very, very few atoms that have joined together to make living matter. We exist in the one-billionth of one-billionth. We are that one grain of sand in the desert.”
This uniqueness is not trivial. Lightman writes about the philosopher Spinoza who believed that the substance of the universe was God and God was the universe. Everything in this manner was connected though God, with God as a common denominator.
To think of the atoms that make up life forms as distinct from anything else seems like an error. Perhaps consciousness, like rocks, and sun, and gravity, is a natural consequence of the unfolding. We are not distinct, but connected by whatever spirit moves the sun and other stars.
The greatest of all “probable impossibilities” is consciousness itself. The miracle of attention woven into the warp of universal change.
And in that way, our changing is inevitable and guided perhaps not ourselves, but by the forces all around us, acting in beautiful synchronicity. Our poetry may also be so guided. When I am writing well, it feels that way; it doesn’t feel like I wrote this or that sentence, but that I came into rhythm with the wider world around me and found the words to describe it perfectly. It wasn’t change at all. It was there all along, waiting for me to come into synch with it. True poetry only needs our fullest attention.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.