DRY THE RAIN #06: "Entropy & the Shrike" by Mads Bajarias

DRY THE RAIN is an essay series on Contemporary Philippine Poetry, where I devote an hour of thinking and writing about some selections from the anthology UNDER THE STORM (self-published 2011, edited by de la Cruz and Toledo). This is the sixth of the series. I hope to add to this as often as possible.




QUANTUM PHYSICS AS THE NEW SUBLIME: PART 1 OF 3

My understanding of the sublime in poetry is that it is a tool for decentralisation, specifically for decentralising the ego of the persona and the reader and the poet via musings on normally natural - things that occur/exist in nature as nature other than yourself or things you yourself have made - events and processes and things that are beyond our normal worldly mortal ken, to remind us that we are all merely mobile mounds of dust in potentia, that often things exist because they just do, not because you made them exist, through poetry or polystyrene or any other creative endeavor and medium.

Only the sublime in poetry is actually mainly used as a tool for merely musing on events and processes and things that are beyond our normal worldly mortal ken as occasions of/for beauty and profundity - beauty and profundity that you made manifest through poetry - which is, in all fairness, true, but this limited line of thinking has placed the ego of the persona, the reader, and the poet squarely in the middle of the work - Ako ang daigdig / We are the world, also an ecologically-irresponsible line of thinking - conflicting with the far more interesting far more open decentralising aspect of the sublime, by effect merely reducing the sublime as tools to turn poetry into exercises on/of heightened heady solipsism.

In recent years, the sublime in poetry has turned to Quantum Physics as its new source of beautiful and profound imagery, this curious aesthetic cropping up in the last thirty years but only really picking up in the last ten or so, of which Mads Bajarias's "Entropy & the Shrike" is one of the latest. This aesthetic is not without precedent as practiced directly by people like Borges (mentioned in Bajarias's poem) and the Oulipo who seemingly drive it, and peripherally by people like Burroughs who are seemingly driven by it. The connection is not difficult to make, also containing its own elegant paradox/irony: quantum physics and the sublime in poetry both drive and are driven by the processing of the poetic possibilities of uncertainty, for limning infinity, all in aid of and by effect making the human ego tiny and insignificant, i.e., musings on the mountains and the sea are replaced by considerations of the Mandelbrot Set; or rather, both are permutations of logic and reason driving the imagination "to sniff out order from randomness"; or rather, both are manifestations of the secular justifying the sacred.

More than a mere update of the sublime, though, the implications of quantum physics on poetry and poetic thinking and thinking about poetry are both deep and wide, even if we only remain on the surface level: much like poetry, quantum physics is a set of ideas that strive to make real the unreal, fueled by the insistent realisation that the unreal in fact drives the real; or rather, in my understanding of quantum physics, there is no concept of "chance," events happen because other events make them happen, only these events may either be too large or too tiny for or too far away from our perceptions they effectively do not exist in reality, thus the illusion of chance - the implicit "order in randomness," the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing a storm in New York. The implication of these ideas is that things are - if not everything is - connected on a very fundamental causal falling-dominos level, thus the oracular possibilities of "the Fabric Softeners lane at the corner supermarket" and its causal falling-domino connection to being overcome by the pre-/post-human sublimity of "... the thought of the Milky Way hurling us, / inexorably, into the path of Proxima Centauri", an event that itself is the product of a process that began with an event of atoms colliding in a cascading curve crescendoing into the event of the birth of the universe and all its particulates that make up everything in it, i.e., corner supermarkets and Fabric Softeners and you and I and poetry. Quantum physics has not only potentially reclaimed the sublime as decentralising tool, but has potentially decentralised the ego so far away from the center of everything by insisting that actually, everything is the center of something, i.e., it's not just about you, it's about everything.

This holds up pretty well, up until you consider the Uncertainty Principle as a foundational critical literary theory.

CONTINUED HERE.