Meeting the Universe Halfway - A Poem for Comment

Below is a poem, Cascade Experiment, by Alice Fulton. I first encountered it in 'Meeting the Universe Halfway' by Karen Barad. 

When I see you either at the next session or the one after I will speak about it a little bit, but for now please use this as an opportunity to leave a comment and to begin engaging with the posts on the blog. You are also welcome to respond to others' comments. Let us know anything about the poem that you like - what does it make you feel? - which lines resonate? - does it relate to any of the things we discussed in our first seminar? - how could it relate to thinking science AND society?

Cascade Experiment   

Because faith creates its verification

and reaching you will be no harder than believing

in a planet’s caul of plasma,

or interacting with a comet

in its perihelion passage, no harder

than considering what sparking of the vacuum, cosmological

impromptu flung me here, a paraphrase, perhaps,

for some denser, more difficult being,

a subsidiary instance, easier to grasp

than the span I foreshadow, of which I am a variable,

my stance is passional towards the universe and you.

 

Because faith in fact can help create those facts,

the way electrons exist only when they’re measured,

or shy people stand alone at parties,

attract no one, then go home and feel more shy,

I begin by supposing our attrition’s no quicker

than a star’s, that like electrons

vanishing on one side

of a wall and appearing on the other

without leaving any holes or being

somewhere in between, the soul’s decoupling

is an oscillation so inward nothing outward

as the eye can see it.

The childhood catechisms all had heaven,

an excitation of mist.

Grown, I thought a vacancy awaited me.

Now I find myself discarding and enlarging

both these views, an infidel of amplitude.

 

Because truths we don’t suspect have a hard time

making themselves felt, as when thirteen species

of whiptail lizards composed entirely of females

stay undiscovered due to bias

against such things existing,

we have to meet the universe halfway.

Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward what

looks to us like nothing: faith is a cascade.

The sky’s high solid is anything

but, the sun going under hasn’t

budged, and if death divests the self

it’s the sole event in nature

that’s exactly what it seems.

 

Because believing a thing’s true

can bring about that truth,

and you might be the shy one, lizard or electron,

known only through advances

presuming your existence, let my glance be passional

toward the universe and you.