GREGORIO MORALES’ QUANTUM SONG:
A POETIC VOYAGE INTO THE ENFOLDED ORDER© Copyright Allan Riger-Brown 2005
Whatever else art may or may not be, it is inherently a process of discovery, an exploration. The true artist – whether as creator of original works or interpreter of existing ones – always opens up new horizons; always, to a greater or lesser extent, breaks new ground. This is so, not because innovation or originality are absolute values in themselves, but rather because everything in the universe – including artists themselves – is in a state of flux; everything, as Gregorio Morales reminds us in one of his poems, “flows in an eternal voyage”
[1]; so that, in order to be genuine and relevant, art must be at the forefront of human experience; it must – in addition to entertaining us and charming us – tell us something about what is happening at the leading edge of feeling, thought, consciousness.
So then, what kind of “explorer” is Gregorio Morales? What is his characteristic outlook as an artist, indeed as a human being? Part of the answer, I believe, would be to say: Gregorio is an enthusiast, a marveller, someone with the ability to find beauty everywhere; someone who takes delight in the diversity and complexity of life and who, being a passionate believer in the power of creative freedom, views art as a process through which we not only explore the world but actually generate it, realise it as a singular moment, a “unique, unrepeatable vibration of being”
[2].
When I first met Gregorio in the late 1980s, in London, I was in fact struck by two features of his personality: the first of these was his passion for literature and for his craft as a writer. Gregorio had so arranged his life – giving up, in passing, quite a few material and moral comforts (everything which, as he put it, was “superfluous”) – as to devote himself entirely to writing. Hand in hand with this overriding passion for his craft, was – is – Gregorio’s second marked characteristic: his openness to the world, his boundless interest in people and life in general, his craving for first-hand knowledge and experience.
Not surprisingly, over the years Gregorio has not only produced a considerable body of work, but has also explored a variety of literary genres and approaches, including allegory
[3], short stories, journalism, poetry, essays, literary criticism, etc. When I first met him, Gregorio had just completed his third novel,
La cuarta locura (1989), considered by many critics and readers to be one of his best works in addition to being a seminal moment in the development of that nucleus of themes and concerns which was later to mature into “quantum aesthetics”. Since then, Gregorio has produced four other novels:
El amor ausente (1990),
El pecado del adivino (1992),
Ella. Él (1999) and
Individuación (2003) as well as a collection of horror stories (
El devorador de sombras, 2001) and numerous critical and theoretical studies
[4].
Readers of
Quantum Song will no doubt find, as readers and critics of the original
Canto cuántico did in the Spanish-speaking world, that Gregorio’s poems are reminiscent of the classical oriental tradition and, in particular, Chinese poetry. Indeed, although
Quantum Song may evoke – or has points in common with – other texts, ranging from the Vedic hymns and the Bible to works by Lucretius, Goethe, Hafiz, Browning, Kobayshi Issa, Machado, Eliot, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Robinson Jeffers, D.H. Lawrence or Wallace Stevens (to mention just a few “associations” that spring to mind), clearly its most obvious source or “precedent” is Chinese philosophical poetry, as epitomised by Lao Tse, Ch'u Yuan or Li Po. Yet, even at a purely formal level, it takes only a few seconds to realise that Gregorio Morales is, so to speak, a Lao Tse with a difference. For woven into Gregorio’s poetic discourse, whose minimalism and essentiality do in fact remind us of the classical Taoist or Confucian tradition, is the language of contemporary science. Gregorio is a Lao Tse who speaks of particles, neutrinos, quarks, electrons, antimatter, black holes, superstrings, digital images, etc. – and the reader is immediately struck by this resolute poeticisation of modern scientific terms, which alone is enough to set Gregorio apart both from that classical tradition and from its many latter-day imitators.
Yet
Quantum Song is not merely a bold attempt at formal renewal. Gregorio Morales has not just introduced some modern terms into his poems, placing electrons and black holes alongside the more traditional metaphors of philosophical or mystical poetry (light and darkness, labyrinths, oceans, abysses).
Quantum Song embodies a modern sensitivity, a contemporary outlook on the world. One essential ingredient of this
Weltanschauung, as becomes immediately apparent to the reader, is the poet’s sense of wonder, his marvelling at deep layers of existence which philosophers and poets have of course intuited, and wondered at, since time immemorial, but which only modern scientific developments, notably quantum theory, have begun to unveil to our gaze by describing some of the highly complex mechanisms and elusive entities that make up, or rather, can be “extricated” from, Nature’s “enfolded order”. And, needless to say, these scientific advances provide, aesthetically speaking, much more than just a new terminology or a rational basis for the intuitions of old. Like other scientific developments in their own time, quantum physics has also opened up new domains for philosophical and artistic exploration. Partaking in this exploratory thrust,
Quantum Song, in addition to renewing poetic language, moves well beyond the aesthetic and philosophical framework – i.e. intuitive mysticism – of classical Chinese poets.
“To meditate is to voyage,” says Gregorio in a short poem entitled, precisely, Voyaging, and each of his poems is evidence that he has travelled far and long. If
Quantum Song is, as I have suggested, a marvelling at deep levels of “reality”, this is not the naïve marvelling of the newcomer to quantum physics who gapes at the “wonders of science”.
Quantum Song rests on a keen understanding of modern scientific developments, a sustained process of reflection on their aesthetic and ethical implications which encompasses not only the latest theoretical and experimental contributions to quantum mechanics, but also recent findings in other areas of knowledge such as genetics, astrophysics and information technology.
Though primarily a scientific theory based on a set of equations which describe the probabilistic behaviour of subatomic particles, quantum mechanics is rich in philosophical implications, as the fathers of quantum physics were quick to realise. Two of the theory’s basic principles, namely the “principle of uncertainty” (the position and momentum of a particle cannot both be calculated simultaneously) and the principle of complementarity (elementary entities such as photons and electrons are both wave-like and particle-like, depending on the type of observation performed) highlight the role of the observer as the “creator” of the world and problematise the very concepts of “reality” and “identity”. Clearly, assuming that what is at stake is not just a measurement problem, but rather, a more fundamental inability to isolate the “subjective” element in perception, these principles are highly relevant to the theory of knowledge as well as to aesthetics, i.e. the analysis of the process of artistic creation.
The fathers of quantum mechanics were actually driven by aesthetic preoccupations. During a seminar held in Moscow in 1955, when asked to summarise his philosophy of physics, Paul Dirac wrote on the blackboard in capital letters: “Physical laws should have mathematical beauty.” He is also often quoted as saying: “God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.” Such statements, often heard from quantum theoreticians
[5], express more than the scientist’s typical delight in mathematical elegance or a neo-Platonic belief (again, not uncommon among scientists) in the inherent beauty of the cosmic “order”. Dirac, for example, not only considered “beauty” a criterion of “truth”, but also viewed aesthetic experience as a form of direct intuition of nature, a cognitive process in its own right
[6]. Another eminent quantum physicist, Richard Feynmann, went as far as to suggest that, possibly, the fundamental laws of nature need not be stated mathematically but might be better expressed in other ways, including art. For his part, N. Wiener, in a paper on “harmonic analysis”, which formed an important element of his contribution to quantum theory, referred to his fascination with “the possibility that the laws of physics are like musical notation, things that are real and important provided that we do not take them too seriously and push the time scale beyond a certain level”
[7]. The key distinction here, implied in Wiener’s remarks, is between musical notation and music as an aesthetic experience, which, though also ultimately partial and “subjective”, moves on a different plane from scientific analysis and provides us with a kind of knowledge (or insight into reality) which mathematical formulae, including the equations of quantum mechanics, cannot – as such, as mere descriptions of quantifiable relations between objects – enable us to attain.
If works of art move us, arguably this is so because they tell us something which is in some sense “true” about the world or about ourselves; and this consideration, if valid, is enough to substantiate the belief in a correspondence between aesthetic experience and some form of “objectiveness”, between “beauty” and “truth”, i.e. the belief in the cognitive value of art as a specific mode of apprehension parallel to, or complementary with, science. But art, as we recalled earlier, is by its very nature an exploratory, creative process which we associate with individuality, originality, subjectiveness. We find therefore, in art, a dialectical tension between “the objective” and “the subjective”, between the affirmation of individuality, of what is unique, and the socialisation of experience, between the discovery or portrayal of “truths”, including archetypes or essential forms inherent (or hidden) in reality, and the fact that the artist is, in a very real sense, a creator of the world. Perhaps like no other human activity art exemplifies this aspect of the dialectics of existence, the unfolding of the totality through individuality, the realisation of the “objective world” through subjectivity. For while – rightly or wrongly – the individual scientist can be regarded “merely” as the person who happens to discover some “truth”, who adds to our existing store of knowledge or to our technological possibilities but is not ultimately, in his or her capacity as a scientist, “irreplaceable”, the artist is more readily recognised as someone who enriches life by realising his or her own unique, “subjective” individuality – a specific, possibly unrepeatable, synthesis of historical (as well as social, genetic, psychological, etc.) factors. Not only do artists endow life with ethical and aesthetic significance, thus dealing with “realities” that are not “objectively”, immediately or univocally quantifiable, but they do so by expressing each his or her own idiosyncrasy, by pursuing his/her own individual quest for freedom and self-realisation. This underlying tension between subjectiveness and objectiveness, individuality and totality, this fascination with the multiplicity of individual experiential and existential pathways which hinges on the interplay of (individual) freedom and determination, are central to the philosophical concerns generated by quantum mechanics and contemporary science in general.
Since it was originally formulated some eighty years ago, quantum mechanics has found many technological applications and ramified fruitfully into different areas of knowledge. As is only natural, however, it has also given rise to a considerable amount of dubious theorising and “philosophical hocus-pocus”, ranging from mind-blowing arguments for the actual existence of an infinite number of continually bifurcating “parallel universes” to spurious analogies with holistic or religious belief systems, to blatantly ideological attempts to use quantum mechanics to extol the merits of the so-called free market economy. Some of the fathers of quantum physics themselves were not altogether innocent – in their youthful enthusiasm – of philosophical dilettantism combined with a certain histrionic pose
[8]. Even today, probably very few physics teachers and popularisers of modern scientific developments resist the temptation to impress their “audience” with such statements as (Abracadabra!) “The particle is in two places at once” or “The particle knows beforehand which slit is open.” This kind of biased wording of actual experimental results is often seasoned with a mixture of vaporous “philosophical” remarks which – be they innocent embellishments or some form of ideology in disguise – do not stand up to rigorous analytical scrutiny. However, because of the mathematical difficulties involved in understanding quantum mechanics and because of its many complex links with other branches of science, it is often difficult, particularly for the layman, to distinguish between serious theorising, half-baked philosophical speculation by scientists who cast themselves – rather naively – in the role of philosophers, and plain mumbo-jumbo.
One particularly persistent and widespread misconception associated with quantum mechanics is the belief that it “proves” radical idealism, i.e. the view that the world is merely a mental construct, a collection of “sense data” that has no “objective existence” apart from perception
[9]. As a matter of fact, the case for radical idealism was made as forcefully as it can (and arguably ever will) be made by the Irish philosopher Bishop Berkeley a few centuries ago, and it stands or – as I believe – falls on other, more general considerations about the nature of perception, language, individuality, etc. As anyone familiar with Berkeley’s philosophy (or that of Kant, Hume, Schopenhauer, etc.) knows, there is simply no need to descend to the subatomic level to find instances of how the “world” is filtered or “constructed” by the “observer”. A book, a tree or a planet are just as much – or as little – “mental constructs” as an electron, and there is nothing in quantum theory or, more generally, in the subatomic level of “reality”, that substantially strengthens the radical idealist’s or radical phenomenologist’s arguments
[10]. But, although many people are still unaware of it, quantum theory has certainly dealt the death blow – at the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum – to the kind of primitive materialism (associated with nineteenth- and twentieth-century positivism and modelled on classical mechanics) which sees the world in terms of clearly localised, rigidly quantifiable interactions between tiny little spheres of hard stuff, and regards mind as a “chance by-product” of material forces. Together with other scientific developments in physics, biology, cosmology, etc., quantum theory refutes this simplistic, reductionist conception by highlighting the sheer complexity of what we call “matter”; the absence, in many cases, of any clear-cut diving line between the “subjective” and the “objective”; the infinite possibilities of being and becoming which are, inter alia, a function of creative mind; the existence of relations (symmetries, synchronies, etc.) that cannot be explained by local interactions, etc. Modern science, and quantum mechanics in particular, are outlining a picture of “reality” which, though not identical with, or reducible to, mental phenomena (as in radical idealism), is not an unproblematic “given”, an “external” object independent of the process of perception. More generally, there is a growing recognition – not only among theoreticians but also among scientists engaged in eminently practical work – of the limitations of a traditional cognitive approach based on certain deceptively self-evident dichotomies, including “objective” versus “subjective”, “matter” versus “mind” and “part” versus “whole”. As in the case of other abstractions (including fundamental scientific concepts such as energy, mass, momentum, inertia, etc.), such dualistic distinctions are today increasingly understood to be, ultimately, expedient symbols, necessary simplifications or, as Gregorio puts it in one of his poems, “imaginary coordinates”
[11] rather than descriptions of an immediately knowable, bedrock level of reality. Far from substantiating either radical idealism or crass materialism, modern scientific developments are calling into question our entire classical scientific and philosophical baggage, including the largely false dichotomy between “idealism” and “materialism”.
As we have recalled above, quantum mechanics is the basis of much modern technology, from computers to electronic microscopes, and has been successfully incorporated into different branches of knowledge, including atomic physics, electrical engineering, psychology, biology, etc. However, literary criticism and, more generally, aesthetic discourse, constitute something of an exception in this respect. In spite of its early association with aesthetics and its obvious epistemological implications, quantum mechanics does not appear to have influenced critical theory as rapidly or – at least until now – as profoundly as other theories (for instance, psychoanalysis or structuralism) have done. At any rate, references to quantum mechanics were fairly rare in most mainstream twentieth-century criticism and for many years no clearly identifiable “quantum school of criticism” emerged in academia to rival e.g. the psychoanalytic, Marxist, structuralist or deconstructivist schools. Until fairly recently, if quantum mechanics influenced critical discourse, it did so, in the main, only indirectly, e.g. via Jungian psychology, or as one element among others in a more general theoretical approach, as in the case of British and American “New Criticism”
[12]. Similarly, for most of the twentieth century quantum mechanics does not seem to have exercised a comparable influence, either on collective consciousness or on individual artists, to that of other, more “popular”, scientific theories, such as Darwinism or relativity, though no doubt quantum physics, at least in some “hearsay version”, has long formed part of the intellectual make-up of thousands of artists around the planet
[13].
Focusing, first, on the potential of quantum mechanics as a critical tool, we cannot do more here than hint at some of the reasons that may have led to the considerable time lag between the initial formulation of the theory and its systematic application in the field of aesthetics. Quite apart from the fact that the conceptual difficulties involved in understanding quantum mechanics may have delayed its “adoption” by many critics, the explanation for the preference given to other theories no doubt lies in general historical factors. In the light of developments such as three or four industrial revolutions, the crisis of established religions, the advent of fascism, two global wars and the division of the world into opposing blocs, etc., it is not difficult to understand why preference would be given to, e.g., sociological theories or to approaches, such as psychoanalysis, that could more readily be used to fill the ideological void left by the disintegration of the old values. All of these approaches, including structuralism and deconstructivism in the 60s, 70s and 80s, had to run their course and exhaust their possibilities before criticism could turn to explore the new horizons opened up by quantum mechanics. More importantly perhaps, being a physical theory – basically a set of equations – quantum mechanics did not provide critics either with a methodology or a set of concepts that could be readily transposed from the physics laboratory to the field of aesthetics. Unlike psychoanalysis, Marxism or structural linguistics, for example, quantum mechanics did not contain a collection of myths, concepts and political categories (Oedipus, the unconscious, neurosis, the class struggle, ideology, the signifier, the signified, etc.) which could be easily applied to critical analysis. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that, as a critical tool, quantum theory suffered from a scarcity of metaphorical and discursive possibilities in comparison with other approaches. Rather, we should say that this potential could only be realised over a considerable period of time as quantum theory developed and was gradually incorporated into new, expanding fields of knowledge, thus creating new synergies and revealing its full epistemological and aesthetic significance. And indeed, although “quantum aesthetics” may well be in the process of mapping out its own specific methodology and terminology, it is perhaps best seen as a general theoretical framework for bringing together a wide variety of insights and concerns, including those expressed by previous critical schools as well as new findings and points of view. In other words, quantum aesthetics is not so much a specific methodology modelled on mathematical equations as it is a broad approach, a general awareness of the aesthetic implications of scientific developments with, at its core, quantum mechanics acting as a catalyst for integration and cross-fertilisation between different critical approaches
[14].
Similar considerations can be made when we approach quantum aesthetics as an art movement. Contrary to other (historical) movements such as, e.g. naturalism, surrealism or cubism, which provided the artist with concrete “recipes” or “dos-and do-nots” for creative work (e.g. portray a “slice of life”, draw on the irrational, simplify forms geometrically, etc.), quantum aesthetics lacks specificity in this respect. There are, of course, some general principles that can be derived from quantum theory or conform more or less closely with its basic principles – for example, the rejection of mimetic realism and of univocality, the adoption of a complex, multidimensional or multifocal viewpoint, open-endedness, the deliberate use of ambiguity, etc. – but clearly these precepts are no more than very broad “guidelines” for the practising artist, nor does an artist have to adhere to “quantum aesthetics” (nor to any other movement, for that matter) to adopt these principles and to display them as distinctive characteristics of his or her work. Indeed, as distinctive features of existing works of art, these same qualities (complexity, multidimensionality, etc.) characterise artists as disparate as Hyeronimus Bosch, James Joyce or Jorge Luis Borges, all of whom are or could be considered in some respect “quantum artists”.
Be this as it may, “quantum aesthetics” did not emerge as a clearly identifiable critical and aesthetic movement until the 1980s and 90s, coinciding with new experimental and theoretical developments in quantum mechanics as well as in other fields of knowledge, notably astrophysics and genetics. A milestone in this process – which is also associated with other developments such as the advent of the information society – was the publication, in 1991, of the American critic Leonard Shlain’s
Art and Physics, in which the author explored the relationship between these two seemingly disparate disciplines, highlighting their complementarity as forms of insight into “the nature of reality”. In his illuminating book, Shlain establishes an analogy between the “revolutionary artist” and the “visionary physicist” and shows, for example, how certain artists expressed and even anticipated 20th-century scientific developments, including Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Another major step in the development of the new aesthetics was Gregorio Morales’ own critical work
El cadáver de Balzac (Balzac’s Corpse, published in Spain in 1998), which is indeed widely considered one of the founding documents of “quantum aesthetics” as an articulate, coherent and “militant” art movement. The genesis of
El Cadáver de Balzac should in fact be viewed in the context of the emergence of a group of Spanish poets and novelists (Fernando de Villena, Enrique Morón, Francisco Plata, Miguel Ángel Diéguez, Heinz Delam, Juan Antonio Díaz de Rada, etc.) who sought to revive the literary scene in Spain, in opposition to the limited and (often) stagnant “artistic trends” (notably “realism” and “magic realism”) promoted and supported by the political and cultural establishment. The initial group of authors, who formed the “Salón de Independientes” in 1994, was soon joined by artists and scientists of other nationalities – notably the painters Linda Lowe (USA) and Antonio Arellanes (USA); the musician Lawrence Axelrod (USA); Agustín Ruiz de Almodóvar (Spain); painter Mikael Fagerlund (Sweden); author Sorin Preda (Romania); photographer François Camus (France); physicist Luc Schokkelé (Belgium); linguist Jennifer Wilson (USA); and Leonard Shlain himself. This led, on 27 February 1999, to the founding of the Quantum Aesthetics Group, which published a Manifesto, widely disseminated on the Internet
[15]. In addition to rejecting shallow realism and upholding artistic freedom and multiculturalism, the Manifesto puts forward a number of principles, including “the certainty that human beings are the creators of their own reality”; “the synthesis of opposites into an integrating totality”; “the belief that matter and consciousness are two varieties of a common magma and that they can influence each other reciprocally”; “emphasis on the fact that the task of every human being is individuation, i.e. the emergence of his/her own singularity”; and “awareness that all forms of [genuine] art must be inherently holographic, as is the universe, where the smallest part contains the whole”.
To return to
Quantum Song, it should perhaps be stressed that the actual scientific details of the physical theories underlying Gregorio’s poems are – I believe – relatively unimportant. In order to appreciate
Quantum Song as poetry, we need not, for instance, attach a precise meaning (assuming it were possible) to “parallel universes”; it does not matter whether or not we regard a particular experiment as conclusive evidence that information (or anything else) can “travel” faster than light; nor does the reader ultimately have to believe – to mention just one more example – that quantum theory proves or disproves anything about the possibility of human freedom. What counts, aesthetically speaking, is the poet’s response, his wonderment at the creative power and complexity of the universe; the thrill that accompanies the artistic intuition of the depths of existence, the “implicate” or “enfolded order”. What counts – and we are moving here into a higher level of aesthetic exploration: the ethical level – is the sense of awe which comes from the realisation that life, the emergence of increasingly complex organic forms, and (hence) of humanness and consciousness, are inbuilt in the smallest particles of matter
[16]. This is no doubt one source of that “honda palpitación del alma”, that deep pulsing of the soul – to use Machado’s definition of the essence of poetry – which runs through
Quantum Song.
Take, for example, one of my favourite poems in the collection,
Light, where Gregorio, suddenly struck by the well-known fact that everything is “made of” particles (as only poets are struck by familiar facts), addresses the particles as “you” and, after listing a number of objects which we recognise as belonging to fairly traditional poetic imagery (“the ochres and golds of an autumn afternoon, the pure blue of a morning sky, the iridescent sea…”), unexpectedly concludes the list with “this face of mine, / dark, / bewildered, / that questions you in the mirror”. How vibrant, how full of poetic awe are these four short lines which not only highlight the multifarious, creative potential of particles, the wondrous organising forces behind existence, the essential unity of being, but also suddenly make us see the universe looking at itself, “like mirrors reflected in mirrors”
[17], through the bewildered eyes of a human being!
Nor should the (more apparent than real) formal simplicity
[18] of the above-quoted lines prevent us from realising the complexity of their philosophical implications. To be sure, in
Quantum Song Gregorio is frequently staring into a Nietzschean abyss that “stares back at him”, and – as befits an author who has cultivated the horror genre – he sometimes strikes dark, disquieting notes in his poems. We need only mention, by way of illustration, the stars that in
Creation and Destruction “fall apart, / burst asunder, /
murder their planets / and then, turned
cannibal, /
swallow up satellites and galaxies”
[19] or the way in which Gregorio breathes new vigour into Machado’s well-known “wake metaphor” by comparing our bodies with paths “
devoured / by oceans / of particles, /
consumed and closed / like a wake in the sea”
[20]. Yet, in Gregorio’s conception of things, humankind is not essentially or irreconcilably opposed to the universe. There is no fundamental discontinuity between matter and consciousness. Man has not been parachuted – as it were – into “the inert” from some Garden of Eden. The face that stares into the abyss has sprung from it. The poet is “made of particles”; as an instance of creative consciousness, he is not solely the antithesis, but also the highest expression of the natural world, and he recognises his origin from, and affinity with, all existence:
…when I was interstellar pollen
voyaging across the cosmos,
when I was darkness,
when I was a beam of light spanning the universe,
when I copied scrolls
in the sleepy shadeof an Egyptian temple,
when I bubbled in the lava
of thunderous Cotopaxi,
when I strolled about the green hills of Rome,
when I was a dog, a cricket,
an eagle,
when I buzzed happily
in seventeenth-century tragicomic Madrid,
when I navigated
the steep canyons
of New England,
when I was quartz and iron
and gold and silver,
when I fired my rifle at the horizon
from a dank trench
in Spain.
I was.
I am.
I shall be.
[21]We have earlier characterised Gregorio Morales as a marveller and an enthusiastic practitioner of his medium. But we can now see that this was only a rough approximation. If Gregorio marvels at reality, if he enthusiastically sets about transfiguring it artistically, it is not from the standpoint of a facile
mentira vital or “vital lie”, as Pío Baroja called the more or less one-sided, more or less blinkered outlook, set of “principles” or “existential project” which so many people, including writers, adopt as their basic standpoint, and which is so often built on the quicksand of wishful thinking or shallow utilitarianism. Gregorio is no naïve optimist, no believer in an unproblematic divine providence, no guru preaching deedlessness – and in this respect, in his rejection of a unilateral or ready-made “solution” to the problem of existence, in his view of life as complex and contradictory and – basically – a big question mark, Gregorio is happily at variance with many poets and would-be-poets, particularly contemporary ones, whose contemplation of the natural world, in the “oriental manner”, is so often tinged with facile lyricism or complacent resignation. As opposed to all the various strains of vaporous holism or sentimentalism that are commonly passed off as poetry, we find in Gregorio Morales the scientifically grounded
desgarramiento (or “ripping of the soul”) of a Lucretius or a Leopardi; we recognise in his poems a new strand of that golden thread which, since the times of Lao Tse, has run through cultural history: moral and intellectual courage. And we may add, in passing, that if any positive or “preceptive” meaning ought to be attached to the term “realism” beyond “genuine concern with the realities of human existence”, it is perhaps the ability to cope with “reality” in all its complexity and contradictoriness, to portray, in poetic discourse, the clash and coexistence of many different elements and forces – it is this ability which the artist should cultivate and by which the artist’s achievements should be judged.
A case in point, in
Quantum Song, is the central theme of the unity of being: This is developed with a “reductive” approach in the poem
Essence, in which with quasi-comical, yet truly Schopenhauerian desperation, all manner of objects and events, from the Taj Mahal to the sea to a horse, are seen as, or reduced to, “mere” collections of “quarks and electrons”. Yet the same theme is developed in a highly lyrical tone in the above-quoted poem
Waves, where “fragments from all the ages and centuries”, through which he lived, flood the poet’s mind, or in the poem
Kingdom of Man: “I am here / and in all galaxies. / I am one / and I am many. / I am man / and I am woman. / I am an adult / and am the children being born. / I am alive / and am the stone of the mountains.”
Gregorio’s complex vision is also apparent in the “political” dimension of his poems. If Gregorio Morales rails against “seeking outside what can be found within” or against “aeroplanes defiling the skies”
[22] it is not because he is unaware of the advantages of television (pace Umberto Eco) or of modern transport. Solipsists and apprentice hermits will not find in Gregorio’s poems confirmation of the need to reject “modernity” and to retreat into an inner, exclusive world, except, that is, as a precondition for embracing the “outer” world; nor will apologists of the prevailing system find confirmation of the “absurdity” of a universe “governed by chance”, of its “subjectivity”, and hence of the virtues of the Stock Exchange regarded as the supreme instance of “order out of chaos”. For Gregorio, the recovery of the “inner self”, the process of “individuation”, are necessary first steps to intervene in the real world and to change it. What’s more, they cannot be effected in isolation. The interdependent, complementary nature of the relationship between the individual and society is perhaps most strikingly expressed by Gregorio in the poem
Singularity, which we quote here in full:
Love-governed particles,
you do not wander aimlessly
but join together in complexity,
thus giving origin to humankind
through whom you seek
the essence,
the unique, unrepeatable vibration
of being,
and so you lead them forth
through all life’s twists and turns –
you question them
wound them
humble them,
kindling their gregariousness
into a fire
whence rises
what you love most –
singularity!
And this is, in essence, what
Quantum Song represents: not a solipsistic “trip” into “inner realms”, nor the depiction of a “beautiful soul”, nor a pathological cry, nor again a thinly-disguised list of politically correct grievances – but rather, an “intervention”: a courageous stance against the shallow materialism and positivism of our age; against the sort of “realism” that stops at the surface of things; for a renewed sense of wonder at existence and the power of creative consciousness.
[1] See the poem
Eternal Voyagers. All poems quoted in this study belong to the collection
Canto cuántico (Quantum Song), Granada 2003. An English translation of the poems (a few samples of which can be read on the web site
http://www.terra.es/personal2/gmv00000/quantum_song.htm) is currently in preparation.
[2] See the poem
Singularity.
[3] See the allegorical novel
Y Hesperia fue hecha, Madrid 1982.
[4] Notably
El cadáver de Balzac, Alicante 1998.
[5] Cf. Albert Einstein’s famous dictum, “The only physical theories that we are willing to accept are the beautiful ones.”
[6] Similarly, David Bohm once stated that “Physics is a form of insight and as such it’s a form of art.” Quoted by Leonard Shlain in Art and Physics (1993).
[7] N. Wiener,
Spatio-Temporal Continuity, Quantum Theory and Music (1964).
[8] For an interesting insight into how quantum physicists found themselves in the role of philosophers, see
San Francisco Chronicle: Interview with Jack Sarfatti, August 17, 1997.
[9] For the sake of clarity, it is perhaps worth stressing that this view is fundamentally different from other (much more tenable) propositions such as that, for something to exist, it must be in principle perceivable (as opposed to actually being perceived) by someone or something; or that self-consciousness appears to be inbuilt, at least as an actual possibility if not as a necessary quality, into the universe; or again that the nature and structure of the universe are such as to warrant the belief that “mind” logically, though not necessarily chronologically, precedes “matter” or is indissolubly intertwined with “matter”.
[10] Quite apart from the fact that perception is always perception from a certain point of view, and therefore inherently partial, i.e. subjective, 1) As Hume showed, the very concept of an “object” and of interaction (causation) is problematic since by “cause” and “effect” we mean the succession of certain phenomena according to certain patterns; and the question of the actual nature of the relationships between different parts of reality, apart from these observed patterns, is problematic; 2) As Kant showed, science describes phenomena in space and time, so that the question of what, if anything, lies “beyond” these spatially and temporally defined “objects”, and beyond space and time themselves, is also problematic; 3) As Einstein showed, the position and speed of an object as well as the time of an event can only be determined relative to an observer; 4) Nobody, to date, really knows what space and time actually are; and 5) The concept of “mass” (the amount of “stuff” or “matter” in an object), which lies at the very heart of our concept of an objective “reality”, can only be defined by reference to the effects of “mass” on “motion”. In other words, the quality of “mass” is not defined, but merely exemplified by an international kilogram prototype.
[11] See the poem
Seurat.
[12] A case in point is English poet, scholar and New Critic William Empson, whose influential book,
Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), can be seen as an attempt to translate the ideas of the “new” physicists into literary theory. As a critical school, however, New Criticism was more concerned with stressing the subjective element in “reading a text” (as a means of decontextualising it) than it was with establishing a systematic correspondence between quantum physics and critical theory.
[13] Cf. D.H. Lawrence’s poem
Relativity. “I like relativity and quantum theories /”, writes Lawrence, “because I don’t understand them / and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan / that can’t settle / refusing to sit still and be measured…”
[14] Clearly, quantum aesthetics is to some extent implicit in, and can readily integrate, the concerns of such movements in literary theory as “postmodernism” and “deconstructivism” (with their emphasis on, e.g., the experience of reading, the relations between the reader as “subject” and the movement of language in texts, etc.). But, as theorist Leonard Shlain points out, quantum aesthetics also appears to “overlap” with other critical and aesthetic approaches, including “classical” ones. Think, for example, of Oscar Wilde’s vindication of artistic freedom, Schopenhauer’s theory of art as “intuition”, or even some of the tenets of surrealism… Quite naturally, those Spanish artists – including Gregorio Morales’ – who played a major role in the development of quantum aesthetics have sought to find a forerunner of their movement in García Lorca. See Gregorio Morales’ essay
La estética cuántica mirando a García Lorca (http://www.terra.es/personal2/gmv00000/garcia%20lorca.htm), originally delivered as a speech in Granada in 1998 during the presentation of
El cadáver de Balzac.
[15] http://www.kronos.org/bitacora/03-marzo-99/1409Martes23-3-99EdicionTarde.txt. For an appreciation of the social implications of quantum aesthetics and how the theory has been applied in various fields of knowledge, see also the collection of studies The
World of Quantum Culture, Manuel J. Caro and John W. Murphy (Edits.), Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002.
[16] Cf. quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s “Exclusion Principle”, which states that no more than one particle of a specific kind and spin is permitted in a single quantum state. This principle appears to play a key role in nature since it “ensures” the stability and size of atomic and molecular structures, thus enabling matter to be stable and hence life-permitting.
[17] See the poem
Reflection.
[18] Time constraints prevent us here from attempting a more detailed analysis of the formal properties of
Quantum Song, to the extent that they can be (dualistically) isolated from “content”. Yet it seems appropriate to raise at least one key question, leaving it for further investigation: To what extent do Gregorio Morales’ poems conform to the tenets of quantum aesthetics? More specifically, to what extent are concepts such as “ambiguity”, “resonance”, “open-endedness” or – to borrow a term from psychoanalysis – “overdetermination”, applicable to
Quantum Song from a formal point of view? To what extent does, e.g., the syntax of
Quantum Song reflect the principles expounded by Garcia Lorca and upheld by Gregorio? What is the balance, in his poems, between “controlling reason” (or philosophical argument) and “poetic intuition”?
[19] My emphasis.
[20] See the poem
Relay. My emphasis.
[21] From the poem
Waves.
[22] See the poem
Speed.
