Response 7: Nature Poetry

Hamlet:
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this
special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature:
for any thing so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose
end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the
mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own
image, and the very age and body of the time his form and
pressure.

(Hamlet, Act III.ii.17-24)

As I write this my cat is sitting on my lap, purring like mad, his paw on top of my hand. He's making it difficult for me to type, but I love him, and so I'll let him stay where he is. I have no way of knowing whether or not my feelings of love for Bailey are reciprocated. I'd like to think they are. Most of the time, I do think he loves me. But I have to wonder sometimes. How do I know that he isn't just seeking a warm body, or that this is his way of begging for food (he is always hungry)?

Therein lies my inherent distrust of the contemporary nature poems we read this week. One can argue that once a piece of artwork is released to the public, it belongs to the public as much as it belongs to the artist. Poems are written in a search for truth; reading them is also a search for truth. That is why one reads poetry - to find their own truth within the words. Truth, for me (and it pains me to say it, it really does, but there's no way around it), does not lie in the majority of these poems. Born a questioner, taught to dissect tissues and membranes, I find more of my own truth in phospholipid membranes and the Calvin cycle. There's a reason I named this blog after a quote from Darwin: that in all things, we ought to perceive clearly our own ignorance. We know so little. We are always searching

I wonder if we prostitute nature to serve that search. I keep bringing up the "art holds a mirror up to nature" idea because I worry that we hold the mirror up, too often, to our own nature. The hummingbirds, the deer, the sycamores - do we sacrifice them to our own end when we use them as mirrors for our own nature, for human nature? I worried about this while reading the assigned poems this week. I felt a gnawing uneasiness.

Perhaps poems like Big Fish, and In the Garden of Eden are searching for the lessons taught by nature. Perhaps they look for the wisdom in stripping away civilization. This is something I, personally, would do by reading a biology text. Perhaps that is why I am not a poet.

I don't know. I don't know anything, really, and that's why I love science, I love the very idea of it. Science admits what lies outside its realm. Science does not say, "There is no god." Science says, "I lack the ability to determine, through my methods, whether or not there is a god." Science resigns those questions to the supernatural; Things outside of nature, things that have no place in experimentation or theory. I respect science immensely for this. Science is objective - it does not condemn God, nor does it exalt God. It simply shrugs its shoulders and moves on to what it can deal with.

Experimental hypotheses are meant to be proven false.

Because I see the world this way - in what can and cannot be proven false - I have so much trouble with the way nature is represented in these poems. At times it is portrayed sexual, or sad, or in harmony with humans. These observations are so freaking subjective. I'm not saying they aren't the author's truth, I'm just saying they aren't mine and won't ever be. But I worry. We've abused nature for so long in the name of concrete progress, of mass production, of cars, of recreation, of accommodating rich appetites. Are we going to apply our own souls to the rest of the world that never, in consciousness, left the Garden of Eden (prove me wrong, prove me right)? Can we burden the purity of instinct and adenosine triphosphate with our own fraught emotional constructions? Where do we get off?