Unextraordinary Light (for Euclid)

I was honoured to be asked to contribute a poem to the artwork by Lisa Pettibone called Fingertip Galaxy. This spiral, inspired by the M51 galaxy, is made from the fingerprints of working scientists and is being launched into space on the Euclid galaxy-mapping spacecraft in 2023. As it maps the galaxy, Euclid will also seek to better our understanding of dark matter. Some lines from my poem have been etched onto the piece.

A poem is its own explanation, its own argument, but if I were pressed to explain my approach I’d say that I was fascinated by the human need to make marks, to communicate through traces and signs and to leave those marks somewhere — everywhere — even in space.

The fingerprint galaxy is a clear representation of this — both humble and bold. Light is also a form of information, a means of information, and its interplay with darkness and dark matter and those things about the cosmos we still don’t understand challenges the human talent and desire for language, communication, marks.

Unextraordinary Light

When I think of the lure, the fly, the hook of Scorpius, the siren of space, I hear Beckett: “It was not enough to drag her into the world, now she must play the piano!”

We must get our fingerprints onto the ivory, paddle and daub the musical stave,

get our notes, our marks into space. For the hell of it. For the ache of it. Maybe for survival.

Eleven minutes per billionaire, a green spree in the vomit comet,

an encomium from an actor with a half-life of half a newspaper column.

The Big Bang didn’t bang and it wasn’t big, but it was clever,

and it’s inside you now, red-shifting your hopes, blue-shifting your fears.

You are the centre of the non-centric non-centre, flying away from yourself,

the Big Bang helter-skelters through the grooves of your fingertips, the mountain ranges on the palm of your hand.

We thought we had it covered but there’s something amiss,

something that doesn’t want to play ball, that doesn’t know what ball is, that hasn’t read the rules.

A home run to a next-door galaxy, a singularity of scorecard maths gone wrong,

a thought so dark it leaves thought reinventing language. Fort-da. Thought-da. Thought-not-there. No da-sein.

We light out to observe the darkness visible.

Milton had it down: Pandemonium. Encomium – that word again – Pandencomium.

The eternal return, Newton prodding the side of his eyeball with a needle, suspecting that sight was contingent, was nothing to rely on, and yet we do.

Our eyes are constantly falling like the Moon but at such a speed we orbit the visible and at the pit of all the light that bathes us we lust for true darkness. Lustre.

But to see our opposable thumbprints on this craft you will need ordinary, common-or-garden, standard, plain, vanilla, workaday, down-to-earth, light to know these unique marks at all. And there is no such thing as unextraordinary light, ordinary matter.

For more information about the Euclid project, see Euclid overview.

The Dead Nation (London Film Festival 2017)

The Dead Nation (Romania, dir. Radu Jude) is an extraordinary documentary that maps out Romania's sure and steady slide into nationalism, anti-Semitism, fascism, and the Holocaust. The form and structure make it so extraordinary. It is basically 83 minutes of still photographs (from a photographic studio in a small rural Romanian town, taken between 1938 and 1946) set against readings from the contemporary diary of a local Jewish doctor, interspersed with news broadcasts and state propaganda.

Radu Jude introduced the film at the ICA, saying (to much laughter): 'If maybe you think after the first 15 minutes that the film is bad, perhaps you'd better leave because it doesn't get any better.'

The severity of the form is daring. To use moving pictures to display only still pictures is subversive but the interplay between image and words is immensely creative, maybe even dialectical in the way it makes the audience fuse different perceptions, different events, to try and understand or at least confront the barbarity that is described but never seen.

While 'innocent' photographs of family gatherings, rites de passage, holiday snaps, and youths posing in their newfound militias and organisations pass by we hear the words of Doctor Emil Dorian. His diary recounts the surefooted spread and growth of authoritarian laws; sentimental and aggressive chauvinism; fascist organisations; anti-Semitic fantasies; pogroms; massacres; newspaper stories about Nazi experiments with Zyklon-B; the burning and enucleation of Jewish women and children: the horror and despair are relentless, if purely (thank God) verbal and not visual.

And they expose just how much was known, how much was common knowledge, by the population of Romania and the wider world. 

In between these calm forensic passages from Doctor Dorian we hear the all-too-familiar broadcasts from right-wing outlets braying about the virtues of nation, folk, heartland, identity, purity, the parasitic Other, the need for strength and optimism! All the toxic effluent that is currently swamping public discourse in the UK and is gathering in poisonous pools across Europe and beyond.

The Dead Nation feels painfully relevant and is unflinching in its steady, sober warning of how a nation, how a political space, can swiftly deteriorate into barbarism while the majority population stand by, look on, continue, mark their special occasions, sleepwalk into Hell. 

There is a moment of relief and triumph when Romania finally switches allegiance to the Allied forces. But the moment is brief. The film ends with Stalin. Thinking back to the dysfunctional parents of Ana, Mon Amour it feels like a wonder that anyone survived these traumatic years intact. 

Up next: The Party.