Sirius - an essay on Poetry, Family & Religion.

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Sirius- An Essay on Poetry, Family and Religion

   The last time I saw my father it was a night in deep midwinter. I drove him home; the streets were ringing with frost. By the time we got to the bottom of his hill the moon had disappeared behind a cloud and the stars stood out. We walked up the last few yards to his gate; he stopped. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘Sirius’. 

Sirius, the white star, the Dog Star, always his favourite. Suddenly he leaned back from the waist, like a young man, so that his sight travelled straight upwards to this point of pure light; I could almost see the unwavering straight line that connected them. He was young again, lithe under the stars. Then the moon stepped out and the stars vanished, and he went in through the gate of his last habitation, the lonely house where he lived after my mother had died.

That was our last earthly conversation; I never saw him again. I went away the next morning and while I was still out of the country I got the news, ten days later, that he had died in his sleep. So that was that, then. All the unfinished conversations would stay unfinished; he was the greatest friend I ever had, the interlocutor of my life.

That was ten years ago and I have had plenty of time to reflect. And gradually these reflections have sorted themselves into two subject categories: his love of the Universe, and his uncompromising resistance to any intrusions on his special field, especially from his children, to the extent that he took care, though I never knew how conscious and deliberate this was, to send us to schools where the only sciences taught were softer than the Mathematics and Physics that he had given his life to – the almost ladylike teachings of Botany and a fairly truncated form of Biology. Skeletal stuff, producing in my case, intense diagrams of leaves and the world of the Infinitesimal - the microscopic life you could find in a drop of pond water – amoeba, paramecia and once, magnificently, the mythic form of a Hydra, as I stared down into the infinity of the small.

Hydra, anyone can tell you, can potentially live forever. Some people become obsessed with it, for this reason, like my current doctor who can spend almost the entire consultation discussing its immortality. He’s an example of someone seeking the Universe in what is Infinitesimal. Others head for quantum physics; others revert to Zeno and his law that explains how the Hare can never catch the Tortoise. But my father’s vision was the contrary of this, the other side of the coin: he delighted in Space; he loved being part of it, living on an axial planet rotating through the emptier wastes of the cosmos, travelling, always travelling endlessly on. Vastness, he called it. ‘Vastness.’ Some say the first thing to go from your memory is the voice of the dead, but I can always hear him saying that.

*

One thing that can be said about my father – he was consistent. He was consistently doctrinaire, unyielding in argument, profoundly convinced that he was always right.  To be fair he’d started young, facing up to some pretty solid opposition from his own father. He was in his late childhood when he developed an interest in Pure Mathematics, a system, as he saw it, of pure logic, untroubled by any need to apply itself to the problems of the practical world. It was this, ironically, that stiffened his resistance to being forced into the Army career his father wanted for him, and it served its purpose. But as he grew up it was in Physics and Applied Mathematics that his maturing imagination began to lodge itself and by the time he arrived at university, although he never lost his love of Pure Maths, his inspiration had swung away towards the Applied Sciences, and their capacity, in the best outcomes, to change the face of history and alter the course of civilisation permanently for the good, which in his youthful optimism he sincerely believed they would.

It might have been this love of the applied sciences that led him in the unlikely direction of unquestioning religious belief, a system, as he saw it that combined a logic, in its Theology, as abstract and beautiful as unsullied mathematical thinking, with the practical applications of religious truths to our behaviour, questions, in other words, about Ethics and how we live together in the world.  The rules of life had to come from your understanding of the nature of Being in Space and Time as well as from considering the social practices of the human world, humanity being scarred with ignorance and spite, no matter how it dressed itself up in grander ideas about itself. 

How he had arrived at this position and how, having got there, he maintained a relationship between, as many people would see them, quite oppositional forms of thought – Science and Religion –brings us to the Pivot of this essay, the point of balance where you can shift, if the engineering has been right, quite hefty masses turning them on their own weight, with something like lightness and ease. Undue theorising can take this down, but I’m not capable of that. I would never have got to the point of understanding I’ve got to, whatever that is, without my childhood – I’d never have got there from essays or from books. I got there – we all got there, my siblings and I – as a result of the daily fray of argument that governed our lives and made them excitingly full of conflict and the thirst for thought. My mother, meanwhile, spent her time reading books and smiling out of a benign silence, like a sunny island in a raging sea. (I had to make an effort here not to put her inside a parenthesis, like this one. But in a way that was how she chose to live, in parenthesis.)

It was the possession of these ideas, ‘and plus’, as we used to say, to his furious scorn, a trait in his personality that made him incapable of irony about himself, that within Christian theology as he read it he felt that he was the One to interpret and apply Christian truths to our daily lives. An unbrooked Authority, a kind of Cardinal of the kitchen table which was where we ate most of our meals except for special occasions when the dining-room was cleared of his books and papers and we sat down to various annual festivities, ranging from the more or less pagan celebrations of birthdays to the great Festal Events of Christmas, Easter and the Feast of Christ the King. 

I might have said ‘Liturgical’ events, except that you can’t, in a certain line of thinking, have a Liturgy without a Priest. But even here there was a moment, one winter day, when something of the idea of having liturgical status, and having it accorded to him by us, trembled on the edge of his speech. I saw it forming, I saw him longing for it to be possible, to be accepted as a Priestly if not even an Infallible presence. It was the winter when he had introduced a dressmaker’s ruler to the dinner table, long enough to reach down amongst his unruly children and rap them on the knuckles of whatever offending forefinger slipped off its purchase on the centre of the handle of knife or fork. It wasn’t a happy winter for him, one way or another, which might have been what pushed him towards the edge of infinity in such a daily event as dinner. As we argued with him and protested and outright refused the Rule of law, as we called it, he invoked the highest of divine authorities: ‘I am God’s Representative in this family,’ he said. 

But I saw what trembled on the edge of his thought – he had been about to say, about to try it on, because we’d all been to Church that morning and heard the Sermon on Man as the Image of God, which opened up enormous democratic possibilities in an argumentative family like ours, which clearly he hadn’t quite thought out, ‘I am God’s Image in this family.’  That’s what he was on the very edge of saying, but at the last second he faltered and petered out. That was what I saw; it was my duty as the eldest to see all these things and report on them and basically sort our opposition out. 

Because none of this cowed us; quite the opposite; it made us loquacious and annoying; it made us long for the first clash of the cymbals that announced the day’s debates, it made us fond of Victorian poetry, which seems to be predicated on the idea of combat – ‘Say not the Struggle Naught Availeth,’ for instance, or ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,’ or lines like ‘And all day long the noise of battle rolled…’  

As the non-scientists in the family (something, as I’ve already noted, that came about by his managing to send us to religious schools where little in the way of science or maths was taught) we had to resort to poetry, although even there he lay in wait, lurking to catch us out: ‘So why can’t modern poets write like Tennyson,’ he would sweetly enquire, leaving his opponent  (it was always a debate) grinding her teeth, the unspoken assumptions (that they couldn’t, that they would even want to) being far too cumbersome to answer with pertinence and speed. Pertinence, Impertinence and Speed – they were our chosen tactics. Like the Parthians we were always prepared to stand up in the saddle and issue a parting shot before dashing breathlessly out the door into the silence of the dark garden under its frost of stars.

And it was there, too, that he changed, coming out quietly to show us what he knew about the cosmos, the Universe, as it wheeled by above us, all personal contentiousness ebbed away under the nightly panoply of planet and star. He showed us the constellations; he told us about the great astronomers of Arabia and Iran. He asked each of us to choose a favourite star, Aldebaran or Canopus, Rigel or Sirius. From this we learned the magic of naming, and of names, and everywhere we looked we looked for rhyme. Rhyme held us together, earth with stars, pebbles with constellations, sand on the night beaches we went to in summer when it was too hot to sleep and the sand of stars in the sky.  And later, variously in life, we found them in poetry ourselves, the sense of rhyming and the fling of cosmic thought, in ancient works like the Aeneid or the Persian Rubaiyat, or in Blake’s transforming of what the material sciences show us into a luminous vision of what stands almost beyond the reach of consciousness:

The atoms of Democritus

And Newton’s particles of light

Are sands upon the Red Sea shore

Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

Because of my father we saw ourselves and all mankind made up of sentient beings in an active and sentient universe, and these ideas which circulated around us were derived equally from Religion and Science. Where Religion was for practitioners like my father focussed on the worlds that lie beyond the world, ‘the many mansions’ in ‘my Father’s house’, these too were increasingly the subject of scientific enquiry. The ideas borne out by some of the major understandings of Quantum Mechanics - that down at the sub-atomic level particle behaviour seems to show that the Universe is thinking and capable of choice - seem to converge seamlessly on the strongest understandings of Theology that the World and all within and beyond it are produced and brought into renewable daily existence by the thought of God.  

So there we were, practising but sceptical Catholics all. Sceptical, because though my father found his answers in Religion as well as in the Science that increasingly resembled it as Quantum theory progressed and became more widely dispersed, he had little patience with church or clergy, reserving his rational admiration for God, loosely envisaged as a kind of Super-Physicist. 

We all went to Mass, where his audible snorts of derision at some of the things that were said from the pulpit, kept us all lively. The priests of the parish were rather scared of him, one or two making visible efforts not to address their entire sermons to his ears and for his approval (rarely accorded) alone. He might have made a good, but Irascible, Pope, (‘He’d have had to say we were his nieces and nephews,’ one of my brothers said), useful in this Office at the beginning of the Scientific Age, marrying the two forms of thought as he did, instead of seeing them as oppositional. 

But maybe not; maybe he would have been too much of a vigilante patrolling the borders of discussion, working out who was and who was not entitled to use particular scientific terms.  His obsession about this might have come from his being a young child who from his earliest years was mocked in his opinions and consistently shouted down.  My father beat a retreat from this by heading into science where his own father could simply not follow him. But it left him with a need to defend the language of science against non-scientific use in case it lost its precise beauty of meaning. Take ‘calibre’, for instance, a word you were only allowed to use for the bore of a gun (‘or an old bore of a father,’ my other brother said). 

We were kind to him about this, never really taking him on, because we could see the anxious child he had been, trying to preserve ‘his’ language from his father’s onslaughts. And when it came down to it he had given us so much more in the way of language and meaning than he ever tried to obstruct. Sometimes, thanks to his influence, I can see a perfect match between religion’s view of God as the active Thinker-Creator of all actuality and the recognition in quantum theory of a universal field of energy that gives being to us all, the Energiser, without which nothing would be. 

Best of all he gave us confidence in the human mind’s capacity for vision, the great arc of thought for which a man standing on a dark night beneath a field of stars in the last weeks of his life is a perfect image. 

As for the lifetime of disputes, well, that is hard to replace – the one we could be having right now, for instance, about the term Heft, given that these days it seems to be essential to the discussion of particle behaviour. I don’t know that I’ve quite got my mind clear about what it means as a scientific term, and I will find out, but for the moment I’m keen to hang onto my own idea of it, gleaned from a half-understood comment I picked up from somewhere – that ‘Heft’ used in this context means the energy that keeps things apart, that prevents all matter from simply conglomerating into a shapeless mass. I’m pretty sure that’s wrong, but I like the idea of an energy that keeps things apart.  So before I find out what it means in the exclusive territories of the particle scientist I want to enjoy what I think it is. And I like its open poetic aspect - which I imagine my father would now not allow, even, say, to Emily Dickinson:

  There’s a certain Slant of light,

  Winter Afternoons –

  That oppresses, like the Heft 

  Of Cathedral Tunes -

Good luck with that one, Emily, we would have said, round the kitchen table. And then, saving our best shot for last, we would have told him the next verse:

  Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

  We can find no scar,

  But internal difference,

  Where the Meanings, are –

He would have loved that, the Meanings, the place where the Meanings are. Because that was where he was all his life, both anchored and made free. That’s what he gave us, our Inheritance, the confidence that they existed and that they were available to every single mind and in every moment of existent thought. A poetic vision and a scientific one at the same time, One and the Same, like the Higgs Field, which Quantum theory has found for us all, the universal Field of energy that gives mass to the fundamental, sub-atomic particles of all actuality.

And thinking about it, and thinking about my father as part of it, I like to think of it as a Field of Stars, and amongst them, brightest of all, the Dog Star, Sirius.