By
Daniel Tobin
Four
Way Books
New
York, NY
ISBN:
978-1-935536-69-7
39
Pages
Review
by Dennis Daly
Melding
together physics, mysticism, and mathematics, Daniel Tobin, in his epic paean
to Jesuit priest and scientist Georges Lemaitre entitled From Nothing, creates
and choreographs a twentieth century re-conjured world of cosmological wonder
and Dantean horror. He conveys his tale to us in extraordinary lines of
narrative poetry. Tobin’s writing
explodes onto the page with white-hot intensity, its numinous words and birthing
suns expanding and cooling first into elegance and then into a compassionate
understanding of our human condition.
Tobin’s
subject, Lemaitre, just for his acquaintances and geographic address, deserves substantial
intrinsic interest. A friend of Albert
Einstein, Lemaitre visited with him often after Einstein had fled Germany for
the temporary sanctuary of Belgium.
No
stranger to savagery, Lemaitre fought in the trenches during the First World
War and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Lemaitre remained in Belgium up until
and through the 1940s and the Jewish holocaust. He witnessed the horrors
first-hand and was himself questioned by the Nazis because of his friendships
with multiple Jewish scientists.
In
his work Lemaitre anticipated and solved many of the problems inherent in Einstein’s
physics. He disagreed with Einstein on issues of quantum mechanics and his
insights were later proved correct. He also developed the theory of cosmology
that became known as the “Big Bang.”
Though
writing mostly in the third person, Tobin occasionally speaks in the voices of
preeminent scientists of the time such as Lemaitre himself, astronomer Edwin
Hubble, Robert Oppenheimer, and George Gamow. The technique works wonderfully
by infusing emotion, humor, and, generally, other points of view into the text.
A
consideration of Lemaitre’s deeply felt faith and his scientific persona opens
this collection of distinct, yet intrinsically connected, poems. In this piece
entitled (Fountain) Tobin expounds on the attraction between matter and
anti-matter before ending his argument with Lemaitre’s own words,
…
your physics and your faith,
the
divergent roads with their singular horizon
where
the radius of space converges into zero,
where
what was, is, will be waxes without boundary
into
seed and sand grain, a Cepheid luster of eyes—
news
of the minor signature keyed from everywhere,
the
primal radiation, omnipresent, the prodigal
wave
arriving from its Now that has no yesterday,
the
proof of your calculus, the tour of the expanse:
“The
evolution of the universe might be compared
to
a display of fireworks that has just ended,
some
few red wisps, ashes, and smoke. So we stand
on
a well-cooled cinder to see the fading of suns,
to
glimpse a vanished brilliance, the origin of worlds.”
At
the Battle of Yser Lemaitre details a chemical gas attack and pivots from
realty into a work of art. The poem, (De Rerum), is spoken, amidst the
spattering of machine guns, in Lemaitre’s voice. Here’s the heart of the piece,
Why
is it, O my Precious Christ, we do this to each other,
crouching
in transverse, trench, the barbed, deadlocked lines,
who
might have joined like harvesters among hedge and fold?
A
hiss, and from enemy dug-outs the strange cloud curls
in
waves, grayish, yellow to green, darkest at the bottom.
And
I know we are in a biblical plague, the men fumbling
for
bits of flannel, cotton pads, the gassed in spasm, clawing
at
their throats, their eyes, vomiting, crawling off to die—
the
way the forsaken do in Bruegel’s The
Triumph of Death,
its
black plumes of smoke and burning cities, its scythes
and
armies, skeletal, their coffin lid shields, the slit throats,
wagonloads
of skulls, that dog nibbling a dead child’s face.
At
his most provocative Tobin summons up Pope Pius XII, the mystic and Vicar of
Christ, loathed by Adolf Hitler, obsessed with apparitions in Fatima, and
utterly alone in his bureaucracy. He had ordered his churches to save
individual Jews by hiding them and issuing phony baptismal records. He
broadcasted veiled condemnations of the Nazis. He seemed to mean well, but
yet…. The poet, speaking of the audience Lemaitre had with the Pope, concludes
the piece this way,
…
his silence at the roundups
near
Vatican walls: culpability caught by hindsight,
the
encyclical denouncing hate shelved for diplomacy.
In
the photograph you look up at him, your pontiff,
as
he welcomes you. Obedient, open, to his throne.
And
had he donned the yellow star? History’s “What if.”
Using
the famous double-slit thought experiment as a metaphor in his poem (Aperture),
Tobin plots out the possibilities and paths of science, as well as Lemaitre’s
mystical hope for religious salvation. In the experiment that charts “wave
theory,” particle photons, when shot through a slit screen, seem to know where
to go; they have a kind of consciousness. Does probability theory indubitably lead
to an invisible world? The poet explains,
--“
Infinity is such an artistic creation, all symmetry
And
elegance, but your method smacks of metaphysics,
Lifeless
life, and the Bible is not a textbook of science.
If
relativity theory had been necessary to salvation
it
would have been revealed to St. Paul or Moses.
Still,
the deeper we penetrate the universal mystery
The
more we will find one law and one goodness.”
Lemaitre
envisions cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) in Tobin’s poem entitled
Canto. His predictions were validated shortly before he died by Arno Penzias and James Wilson. The poet begins his piece by
quoting St Augustine,
Is it motion itself that makes the
day? Or is it the time
taken in the motion? Or is it both? The saint
asked,
searchingly—
Deus creator omnium: the measure
of
mind made by the Maker of minds, and time
come
to existence only observable as time, phase
transition
to the radio spectrum, pre-recombinant,
the
primordial light unchanged from the initial
sea
of light, a television hiss homing everywhere,
mysterious,
incessant…
Tobin
has dared mightily with this multi-faceted book of cosmological wonders and soaring divination. The degree of his rarefied
achievement startles beyond mere artistic credence. Bravo.
