Photosynthesis
by Laurence O’Dwyer
Tjåktja Pass, Photo by Laurence O’Dwyer
Introduction: The poems in Photosynthesis are from a manuscript that evolved from journeys through Norway, Sweden and Finland; sometimes on snowshoes in winter, sometimes running the ridges of mountains under the midnight sun. When my second winter crossing of Sweden’s Kungsleden or the King’s Trail did not go to plan, I aborted the trail and headed — disconsolate — for the refuge of the Kunstnerhuset (or the artist’s house) in the Lofoten archipelago where I met Danish Grethe and Norwegian Grethe who appear in some of these poems.
On arrival, I was struck by the fact that I’d never seen the town of Svolvær in the dark before. I’d only ever known it in the constant light of summer. Over time, the idea of creating a diptych of light and dark, summer and winter, came to obsess me — so much so that I started to study the physics of light. One book in particular influenced my thinking: De natuurkunde van 't vrije veld (translated with imagination as The Nature of Light in the Open Air) by Marcel Minnaert.
If Minnaert once wrote that “physicists have hardly ever investigated the sound of running water”, I might add that poets have hardly ever studied the physics of light. Rayleigh scattering, caustic networks of sunlight on the underside of bridges, the triangular shadow of all mountains irrespective of their shape, the creation and annihilation of glints on water that split into daughter glints before coalescing and disappearing again. Why had I never paid attention to these things before? I came away from Minnaert’s book with a desire to go outside, to study light for myself, to see what I’d always seen but to see it new. His descriptions, replete with diagrams and equations, were so precise and beautiful, so full of wonder, that they seemed better than poems to me.
Minnaert’s world has largely been untouched by writers. I have not redressed the balance here — I simply want to say that fusing poetry with this kind of science seems to me to have endless possibilities. If Lord Rayleigh came close to answering the question “why is the sky blue?” he must have had a child-like curiosity to consider the question with such intensity over so many years. Closer to our own times, the mathematician Stephen Smale annoyed bureaucrats in the National Science Foundation when he said that he did his best topology on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. For six months of an NSF grant he spent his mornings “on that wide, beautiful, sandy beach sometimes swimming, or, depending on the height of the waves, body surfing”. He also took a pen and paper. Afternoons, he went to the Instituto de Matematica, Pura e Aplicada to discuss differential equations with his friends. Eventually he discovered how to turn a sphere inside out in three dimensional space, winning a Fields Medal along the way.
The only problem with reading all this science is that I wanted to say so many clever things about light and dark, about the sun (that too-near star) and the aurora borealis, that I forgot about my other favourite book, Platero y Yo by Juan Ramon Jimenez who describes — in the simplest, most evocative way — the life of the Andalucian village of Moguer in little prose poems with titles like Dawn, Night, Eclipse or The Man Comes to Sell Slides. Juan Ramon was a failed painter but you can still feel his boundless love of colour in his descriptions of sunrise and sunset, autumn days in the fields or the moon glinting on the estuary of the rio Tinto. His discussions with his best friend, the donkey Platero (the Marcus Aurelius of the fields), always seem to offer a corrective as I try to hover between the poles of Minnaert and Moguer.
For the eponymous poem, Photosynthesis, I should say that the idea it contains comes from Simone Weil’s, Gravity and Grace. Weil also held science in high regard. Her brother André, who was one of the finest mathematicians of the 20th century, had a strong influence on her thinking. Interestingly, she often cautioned against the imagination which she characterised as a liar, something that fills up the void with trivial, inconsequential things. Better to contemplate the world as it is — in all its unknowable complexity. No doubt she would agree with Zbigniew Herbert who said that the piano at the top of the Alps always played concerts that sounded false to his ears. Herbert loved a flat horizon, a straight line, earth’s gravity, but he also wanted to know “the nature of the diamond…the Lascaux painter’s joy…the rise and fall of an oak…the rise and fall of Rome”.
Weil set off in the opposite direction of the surrealists and travelled so far in space and time that she often ended up in front of them. Consider the simple thought that I’ve borrowed from Gravity and Grace — that the sorrow of being born into this world stems from the fact that seeing and eating are not the same thing. Now turn it on its head. Imagine the opposite — that humans can photosynthesise like green plants or trees. What would our world be like if we could derive food simply by receiving rays from the sun?
For a start our economy would dissolve overnight. Almost everything that we spend our lives worrying about — a job, food, money, a salary — would become obsolete. Paradise might not ensue; probably there would be an initial increase in chaos but it is interesting to consider what we might do with our newly evolved autonomy.
Weil noted that capitalism has brought about the emancipation of humanity with respect to nature but that humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature. Question: can this emancipation, won by society, be transferred to the individual? This problem, that a mathematician might call non-trivial, was left open.
On a simpler level, I want to underline that something that we are taught in primary or elementary school — namely photosynthesis — is soon abandoned for more practical adult pursuits, just as we abandon too soon the question: why is the sky blue? Those who persist in thinking about these things are called many names. When my father asked me what I was working on, I told him about Platero, how he eats a watermelon with its red ice glittering in the late sun while his best friend, Juan Ramon, reads Omar Khayyam lying in the grass.
Two dossers, he said.
A very Irish word. It comes from ‘lying on your back’ — dos, back — and doss house, a refuge for poor wanderers, vagabonds. I left science long ago but somehow I still think that I’m working in that field, that compostela, even when I’m doing nothing more than hiking the King’s Trail or going on a little pilgrimage, walking on the banks of the rio Tinto from the village of Palos de la Frontera to the village of Moguer.
Contents
The Wind at Alesjaure
The Lake at Hetta
The Blue Shift
Zwicky
Little Skier / Eternal Life
A true and perfect description of the Novaya Zemlya Effect
Kunstnerhuset
Løvetann
I must use everything I’ve learned
Jan Gunnar Retires from the Sea
Avicenna’s Floating Man
Svolværgeita in Summer
Quisling
Rengård
Photosynthesis
Laurence O’Dwyer has published three collections of poetry, Tractography (Templar, 2018), The Lighthouse Journal (Templar, 2020), and Catalan Butterflies (Templar, 2022). His distinctions include the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Project Award, the AUB International Poetry Award and a Hennessy New Irish Writing Award. He has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Rensing Center, the Bogliasco Foundation and the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Trust. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from Trinity College Dublin.
Other O’Dwyer Mudlarks: Poems from Haiti, Flash No. 66 (2012); Poems from Lapland, Poster No. 140 (2016); Poems from Litløy Fyr, Poster No. 158 (2018); from The Lighthouse Journal, Flash No. 131 (2019); Civil War Butterflies, Poster No. 187 (2022); and Nappstraumtunnel, Mudlark Chap No. 75 (2023).
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