rage of wonder
In less than a year I will be 40 years old and this morning I sat in my doctor's office waiting for my physical (I appear in perfectly good health despite my best efforts) reading a fascinating article by Freeman Dyson, When Science & Poetry Were Friends (The New York Review of Books, August 13, 2009, page 15-18). Starting around the time of Blake and Coleridge and ending with Lord Byron and Keats (about 60 years) Britain appeared to be full of gentlemen-scientists, amateurs who did things like discover the planet Uranus, anthropological work in Tahiti, create what is now the art we call botany as well as the principles of modern-day astronomy. It was called the Age of Wonder and because everyone was an amateur (they did this because they loved it, not because someone paid them to do it) no one really cared when one discipline bled over into another. Coleridge helped his friend Humphry Davy in his experiments with nitrous oxide, Lord Byron helped come up with the first English-Armenian dictionary, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, one possibly influence being the debate between vitalists, who claimed all living things had a Life Force that made them different from dead matter and the materialists, who claimed there was no such energy.
The point I took away from Dyson's article is that there were a lot of interesting things happening between 1770 and 1830 and wasn't it nice that poetry and science were bedmates. The article ends with some talk of whether we live in a new Age of Wonder, what with all our new discoveries in technology and whatever and a lament of sorts that today's poets are nothing like Byron and Company (though what exactly our generation of poets aren't doing that the poets of 1777 were isn't very clear). For me, though, such comparisons feel disinguinious. After all, this whole concept of an Age of Wonder, Age of Reason, Age of Romanticism, Age of Labeling Everything Ages, is a very, very modern idea. We are, if anything, creatures of compulsive compartmentalization. To even get back to the mind-set of an Age of Wonder would require us to cast off Freud, Psychology and everything in our culture that says everything in our culture needs a label. I doubt anyone, even William Wordsworth, would be up to that challenge. And since such an act falls into the realm of science-fiction worrying that science and poetry are no longer cut from the same cloth seems a bit … pointless.
There's another reason looking back isn't always as glorious as we make it seem. I mean, I love the guy, but Lord Byron made sure the whole world knew he was a Lord, upper-class, a celebrity beyond our reach and not like you or me, the unwashed gutter-trash. It's true that part of what made the Age of Wonder wonderful was the unexpected discoveries done by rich white men who had a lot of free time on their hands.1 But it wasn't that they were sitting around angisting that some previous age had it better together than they did. Because we do. This insecurity is everywhere; what has modern literature turned into but an endless whine that life isn't fair? What modern author doesn't address the universal theme that Life Sucks? Sure, some of it is brilliant, lots of it gets awards and fills our thinking and criticism and that's what helps shape modern American culture. But, even more than poets doing science experiments with their friends in their free time, what marks 1779 compared to 2009 is that we are hyper-aware of ourselves to a point that cannot afford to have amateurs wasting their time over nothing; everything needs to have a goal and a price and everyone needs to be an expert and get paid and if you're not getting paid for it then it is a hobby and isn't it nice that you are keeping busy?
I say this because my doctor asked me “what's your job?” meaning “what's your career?” And I can't say poet because that would indicate someone is paying me to write poetry, or teach poetry, which is certainly not the case since I am unemployed. And I can't say jazz musician because I don't show anyone the music I make and who has ever heard of a musician who doesn't make recordings, doesn't perform for others, doesn't even tell a soul he makes music? I suppose I could say I am a novelist, because I am working on a story of the Armenian genocide but even that is dodgy since novelist has come to mean someone who makes a living writing, which I don't do. I usually tell people I am a nurse aide, which at 39 years of age leads people to ask, “oh, you are going to be a RN?” which of course I'm not cut out to do.
Employment has always been tricky.
In fact, I reflected over the weekend, if it weren't for the generosity of other people I wouldn't be here writing endless blogs and sonnets and translations from Chinese and stories of Armenian women who fought back against the Ottomans and essays on gender-politics and all that glorious music on my duduk and tenor saxophone. If it weren't for the love of others who, ironically, will never hear or read or see 90% of what I do, I would be broken, homeless, one more terrible warning in an Age of Terrible Warnings. One more amateur in an Age of Professionals.
Useless; I read of the Age of Wonder,
of Lord Byron — philosopher, poet
scientist. We have no philosopher-
poets. Science is suspect. Our prophet
is our profit and even that leaves me
unemployable. And if it were not
for all my friends and loved ones I would be
homeless, drunken wretch of a boy, distraught,
“my words did this to me.” No, Zack, gin did.
Illness not poetry. My dear Byron,
you are so far away. We love to rage
how life sucks. And it does. This Rage of Id
and our grand Ego. This Age of Tension.
This Age of Age of Age of Age of Age.
- Let's be clear here, the Age of Wonder was the realm of white boys, even when women contributed to the discoveries they were not given equal billing. William Herschel, who with his sister Caroline, discovered the planet Uranus, was made the King's personal astronomer and given a living wage of £200 whereas Caroline, who was instrumental in the same discoveries, was given only £50. [back]