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'Singularity': Poet Marie Howe’s Beautiful Tribute to Stephen Hawking and Our Belonging to the Universe

Sunday, May 27, 2018 5:49

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“‘Singularity’: Poet Marie Howe’s Beautiful Tribute to

Stephen Hawking and Our Belonging to the Universe”

“Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?”

by Maria Popova

“When Stephen Hawking (January 8, 1942–March 14, 2018) was a young man, having already outlived the prognosis he had been given with ALS, he built on earlier theories about what happens to a dying star as it collapses to form a singularity – that tiny point of zero radius, infinite density, and infinite curvature of spacetime at the heart of a black hole. But then Hawking did something radical – he took this final death-stage and flipped the arrow of time to consider what would happen if that singularity exploded outward and began expanding. He theorized that perhaps that is how the universe was born. So began his half-century intellectual adventure that shaped the course of modern physics and changed our common understanding of why everything that is is.

A crowning moment of the 2018 Universe in Verse was a tribute to Hawking’s legacy by one of the great poets of our time: Marie Howe. Because Howe is an artist extremely considered in what she releases into the world, often devoting a decade to a single poem, it was a tremendous honor to have her premiere a new poem composed for the occasion in a blink of cosmic time and inspired by her young daughter’s love of physics. Howe’s prefatory meditations are as magnificent and full of wisdom as the poem itself – please enjoy both:

“Singularity”

by Marie Howe

(after Stephen Hawking)

“Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity

we once were?

So compact nobody

needed a bed, or food or money -

Nobody hiding in the school bathroom

or home alone

pulling open the drawer

where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good

Belongs to you. Remember?

There was no Nature.

No them. No tests

to determine if the elephant grieves her calf

or if the coral reef feels pain.

Trashed oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up to what we were -

when we were ocean, and before that

to when sky was earth, and animal was energy,

and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all – nothing,

before we came to believe humans were so important,

before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?

What once was? Before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one, No was,

No verb, no noun,

only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is.

All… everything… home.”

For more highlights from The Universe in Verse, savor Janna Levin reading Maya Angelou’s cosmic clarion call to humanity inspired by Carl Sagan, Jane Hirshfield’s poem “Optimism” in a lovely papercraft stop-motion animation by Kelli Anderson, and America Ferrera reading Denise Levertov’s poem about our conflicted relationship with nature, then revisit Hawking on the meaning of the universe.“

- https://www.brainpickings.org/

○

”Do You Remember?”

“Do you remember still the falling stars
that like swift horses through the heavens raced
and suddenly leaped across the hurdles
of our wishes – do you recall?

And we did make so many!

For there were countless numbers of stars:

each time we looked above we were
astounded by the swiftness of their daring play,
while in our hearts we felt safe and secure
watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate,
knowing somehow we had survived their fall.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Do you remember?

Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2018/05/singularity-poet-marie-howes-beautiful.html

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