Song of Two Worlds
Alan Lightman
MORE PRAISE FOR
Song of Two Worlds
“The book begins with an un-named protagonist finding himself suddenly moved to re-examine his life, both to confront past tragedies and failings and also to look for meaning. We overhear his thoughts as he uses his scientific skill to interrogate the mechanisms of the cosmos and the workings of his own body. When he reaches the limits of scientific ‘questions with answers’ he turns to ‘questions without answers’ which must be explored by faith, art or philosophy. Alongside rehearsals of insights by great thinkers and teachers we also get glimpses of the narrator’s relationship with an old and loyal servant. This weaving of the lofty with the human and mundane is one of the more effective aspects of the book.”
—MICHAEL BARTHOLOMEW-BIGGS
London Mathematical Society
“Only Alan Lightman could have written this verse narrative that brings together his explorations in the worlds of science, art and philosophy and makes of them this strange and mysterious but seamless and beguiling whole.”
—ANITA DESAI
“Lightman’s Song of Two Worlds is of consistent high quality and poetic energy. To begin with, the perspective is intelligently conceived, surprising, and productive. The provenance of the speaker who obviously is routed in the Islamic culture, his scientific competence, his familiarity with history-combined with his personal view, his regular life, his introspective mood, all this creates a captivating and innovative narrative verse.”
—HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER
ALSO BY ALAN LIGHTMAN
Screening Room
The Accidental Universe
Mrg
Ghost
A Sense of the Mysterious
The Discoveries
Reunion
The Diagnosis
Great Ideas in Physics
Dance for Two
Einstein’s Dreams
Time for the Stars
Ancient Light
Origins
with Roberta Brawer
Good Benito
Song of Two Worlds
Copyright © 2009, 2017 by Alan Lightman
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
Illustrations by Derek Domnic D’souza
Book design and layout by Selena Trager
ISBN: 978-1-59709-032-2
eISBN: 978-1-59709-584-6
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Dwight Stuart Youth Foundation, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Amazon Literary Partnership, and the Sherwood Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.
Second Edition
Published by Red Hen Press
www.redhen.org
Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.
This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again,
and fillest it ever with fresh life.
—Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali
Contents
Preface
PART I: Questions with Answers
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
PART II: Questions without Answers
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
Song of Two Worlds
Preface
I would like to tell the story of the remarkable genesis of this new Red Hen edition of Song of Two Worlds. The first edition, illustrated using a few photographs, was published in 2009 by AK Peters of Boston. In late September 2014, I received an unexpected letter from Ajai Narendran, who introduced himself as a teacher at a school in Bangalore, India, the Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology. Mr. Narendran was using my book in his classroom and told me that one of his students, Derek Domnic D’souza, was so inspired by the book that he began doing penand-ink illusrations of the chapters. Mr. Narendran described his student as “a gifted boy with amazing skills at drawing/sketching … a self-taught artist.” Attached to the teacher’s letter were a few of his student’s drawings. I was so taken with the beauty, imagination, and whimsy of these drawings that I contacted my literary agent, Deborah Schneider, to see if we might explore the possibility of a new edition of the book illustrated by Mr. D’souza. Happily, Red Hen Press in Pasadena, California, was as struck by Mr. D’souza’s drawings as I was, and the result is this book. I believe that the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, whose Gitanjali was part of the inspiration for my own book, would have been pleased with this collaboration.
—ALAN LIGHTMAN, October 2016
PART I
Questions with Answers
1
Awake—
What are these quick shots of warmth,
Fractals of forests
That wind through my limbs?
Fragrance of olive and salt taste of skin,
Razz-tazz and clackety sound?
Figures and shapes slowly wheel past my view,
Villas and deserts, distorted faces,
Children, my children—
Distant, the pink moons of my feet.
What rules do they follow?
I think movement, they wondrously move,
Moons flutter and shake.
I probe the hills and the ruts of my face—
Now I grow large, now
I grow small, as the waves
Of sensation break over my shore.
There, a gnarled tree I remember,
A stone vessel, the curve of a hill.
What is the hour?
Some silence still sleeps
In my small sleeping room—
Is it end or begin
ning?
2
Have I awakened?
For decades, it seems, I have slept in a cave,
Hung like a dried fly
Sucked of all insides and faith.
Am I awake
After so many foldings unfoldings,
The loose flaps and threads?
Something is stirring, some newness,
A flail, buzz, and heave.
Welcome, this sharp morning blast—
Pleasure floods through me
While tears sting my eyes,
Veins fill with promised life.
Breathing, I breathe and I feel,
My skin bristles.
3
Footsteps—
It’s Abbas, dear Abbas.
I know that old shuffle,
Grey stubble, haired mole,
Yellowing teeth.
Clatter of pots in the kitchen.
He’s making some tea.
“Are you awake?” he roars.
Smells of hot peppers and onions
With cinnamon, hazelnut cake,
Baklava, sugared cream.
I rise from my bed, middle-aged,
Balding, the white scar on my arm,
Shrunken chest,
Losing more weight every year—
In thirteen, by my estimate, I’ll weigh zero.
My spindly legs stiff as I stand,
Light from the night hallway,
Red glint of my eyes.
Am I still sleeping?
I dreamed of Zafir,
Weighing the sand on the beach.
4
Abbas is muttering.
Standing, I look for my paper and pen,
Books scattered about. Inhale—
I breathe in my ancestral home,
Turquoise rough stucco and terra cotta–tiled floors,
Earth colors, arches and airy rooms,
All crumbling now. There, the tinny piano
My mother once played. Here, the brass compass.
Abbas serves breakfast,
Eats at his small bench,
Belching and smiling.
Through an arched window,
I gaze at the wide rutted steps
To the terrace and down to the sea.
Garden of aloe and sharpened spine puyas,
The dune evening primrose, the prickly white poppies,
The red bougainvilleas that wind up the walls—
Shadowy shapes in the dim light of dawn.
There, bitter orange trees,
Now smelling vanilla and powdery.
Olive groves, gift of my father,
Like everything here.
Parentless now. I was a parent myself,
Father and husband.
5
Then faintly, the call of the muezzin,
The nasalized song.
Abbas drops to the floor, praying.
I watch him and wait,
Help him regain his feet,
Give him his cane.
I am blasphemy.
“Shukr,” he says, rubbing his bony knees.
Glances at me, sighs,
Hobbles from the room.
6
I take up my pen, dry for some years.
What should I write?
What should I think?
Escape from this slow daily drip—
Keeping accounts, trips to the tailor,
My sweeping cracked plaster, the buckling
Unbuckling of sandals,
The sippings of tea,
Life without life—
Nothing and nothing,
Drivel from dry seabeds,
While time slides to an end.
But something has turned, opened,
Some wrinkling of air, brain cell that shuddered,
Perhaps Uncle Zafir called from the grave—
And the tree is no longer a tree,
Hand is no longer a hand,
And I will not sleep to the end.
Look, morning light falls on my desk—
I take up my pen.
7
In the distance, I see a great tower,
A built thing, a place.
Child, I’m a child, song of discovering—
I’ll move and explore.
There, a long hallway,
A dome, silent stars
Splitting the blackness from light—
I knock on the door of the universe.
Here, this small villa, this table, this pen.
I ask the universe: What? and Why?
Now wakened, I must remake the world,
One grain at a time.
8
A great door opens a crack,
Sends a shaft through the darkness,
Which brightens one tile in the hall,
And I want to see more, and forever.
In the dim hallway, dark galaxies
Spin in the space of my mind—
Secrets of matter
Now wait in the dark for the opening door—
And the secret of time waits in the dark
For the opening door—
And the puzzle of death waits in the dark
For the opening …
What power pries open the door?
Is it divine spirit or deity?
Standing, I wait for something to believe.
9
Past the half-open door lies the sea—
Fishing boats bucking on anchors,
Gulls wading for clams, wind on my skin,
Something that gleams on the shore,
Sliver of glass. Stooping, I grasp it,
It catches the light,
Casts off a palm’s width of colors,
Red green violet, pattern of rainbows.
A second shard does just the same, and another,
Another, always one pattern.
And this I believe.
10
Many hours I spent with my uncle Zafir
In his chemical shop
Smelling of sulfur and salts,
Burnt oil and dry ice.
Canisters hissed with blue opaline clouds—
Curved glass and scales.
“One thing is certain, life flies,”
He said, quoting Khayyam.
“And here is another:
This manganese, density 7.2,
Silver in tint, atomic mass 54.9.
Truth—it is truth.”
And he placed the cool bar in my hand.
11
As I hold this glass shard in my hand.
I have entered the cosmos of questions with answers.
This is the world of the sharp spheres of hail,
Orbits of planets, vibrations of atoms,
The fission of cells, pulse of a neuron,
The plucked string of a harp,
Wavelength of blue light.
Here, atoms are pierced
By equations, the sunlight exposed by a prism,
The cells observed passing their secrets
Of organ and bone. Nothing escapes
Being weighed and titrated, resolved
Into numbers, displayed in a graph.
Is this the place where I might make something whole?
Find a solidity?
Slow down my dark fall into nothingness?
Subdue the voice that says No?
Should the lab be my temple?
The microscope my prayer mat,
The stopwatch my candle?
My sacraments test tubes and beakers,
Pipettes, calorimeters,
Specimens, diodes,
Transistors, glass flasks?
Should my guides now be Darwin, al-Haytham,
Lavoisier, Einstein, and Newton?
12
I knock on the door of the universe, asking:
What makes the light of the stars?
What makes the heat of my flesh?
What makes the tear shape of rain?
Questioned, the world walks on little feet.
Ask and take wing while my body
Stays bound far below—
Body, poor stone
That will wear down
To dust,
Like this ruined villa perched on the sea.
So much I’ve lost,
I have nothing
Except a fierce hunger
To fathom this world.
Naked, I knock on the door,
Wearing only my questions.
13
Morning breaks in the east,
And my house fills with light.
I discover my various things:
Tables and chairs, closets of clothes,
Drawers full of coins, shelves of books.
Still my house seems abandoned and bare.
Somewhere, the market is seething.
Men rush down the alleys
And rush to their deaths.
Horns clamor and wail. City jerks
Screaming, my mind becomes deaf.
I walk to the temple that glows—
Here, I own nothing,
Except this unease inside.
And the thought of the ages lifts
This poor stone and says:
“Here lies the path to eternity.”
14
It is time to discover the oceans—
I fling myself into the deepening,
Roll and slap, swallow what fits in my maw,
Launch my small skiff on the thrashing green sea,
Follow the bell buoys of my mind.
A dot in the roiling,
Convulsed by the waves,
I ask and find stillness in knowing:
This is the stuff of the water,
And this is the shape of the sky.
This is the measure of masses,
And this is the logic of air.
Adrift in this strange jittered world,
I am held by these meters and grams,
By Zafir’s atom densities,
Wind on my sail,
Action reaction,
The compass submitting to magnetic force.
These are the bits of some pattern,
I think, and I hold and am held,
