from “From Nothing”
Georges Lamaitre (1894-1966) was a Belgian mathematician, theoretical physicist, and Jesuit priest whose insights during the 1930s and 1940s provided solutions to physical problems stemming from Einstein’s general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics that Einstein himself did not foresee. Though a lesser-known figure in cosmology, he was the first to develop a theory of an expanding universe through the explosion of a “primeval atom,” what has become known popularly as “the big bang.”
One note, another, in the parlor’s angled light,
your fingers flaring to the keys, the waiting clavier,
its felt hammers striking strings, resonant frequency
borne from score to bridge to sounding board,
coupling every gradient of energy into air.
So your moments fill with the shapeliness of song
here in the safe flat beside the Town Hall, its façade
a medieval choreography of burghers, saints,
secular cathedral, while the Reich’s page turners
goose-step through your streets. You saw, advancing,
this second coming, the library atLouvainagain
a torched sanctum, melted webs of steel, charred cocoon.
You’d have made your way to the coast,Pas de Calais,
and across the channel, father, mother in tow,
would have beaten to the pass the panzers atDunkirk
that turned you back and locked you in retreat.
In Princeton Einstein has written his letter, his fear
of atoms concerted to bombs by German hands,
the President in seclusion committing the secret funds.
Now this bright November sun of Berchtesgarden,
the neutral king portioning his pact with Hitler.
Is there a providence at the heart of quantum chance,
the risk of the Pianist whose score evolves the keys?
Point and purpose hazarded on scales across scales.
*
Now in earshot of you—the scale that shatters scales:
50 freight cars x 50 per car x 1.5 trains per day
x 1066 days = 4,000,000 Jews “resettled to the East”
exclusive of the death squads, and each one eclipsed
behind the death gate’s limit, its prevailing West,
and Himmler petitioning the Minister of Transport
“I must have more trains,” among them cattle cars
out ofBrussels, out ofAntwerpvia Breendonck
andMalines—your seminary within hailing distance
of the moated barracks where Öbersturnfuhrer Asche
assembled them for Auschwitz, Berkinau,Bergen-Belsen–
Asche to ash along the side line track throughLouvain.
That fall afternoon, your father collapses on a tram
and the one who sits beside him wears a yellow star.
We have the duty of conscience to strive for resistance
declares His Holiness Van Roey, and you, good son
charged to attend your mother, leaven act with prayer
like an untestable theorem, listening into the vacuum.
But to see the singularity in a sphere composed of dust,
to see beyond the given limit to the horizon where light
plunges permanently into the void—your “dust solution”
by which space and time contract to nil—how to reconcile
the math when the metaphor waxes real, gravity and graves,
cinder clouds, a calculus of stars red shifting on the rails?
*
Sunflower plumage, the pulsing body alive with song:
the Pope’s canary, perched ex cathedra on his shoulder,
sings nothing of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Gretchen, his favorite, freed from her cage, keeps vigil
there, while Pius, rail-thin, pallid as a plaster saint,
eats alone according to his habit, the staunch observance
of his solitude, that lifted gaze for which he is revered.
Scholar, classicist, holy man, bureaucrat, former nuncio
to the Reich, invoker of conclaves and concordats—
should he speak the word that utters condemnation
to the bestial, the antichrist? –and him the Vicar of Christ
caught in the inertia of his prudence, his well-meant
action at a distance that would preserve his own tribe,
or risk the fury, martyrdom, His Church a shambles?
The laws which bind civilized people together
have been violated, he broadcasts on Christmas,
his rhetoric a dark wood veiling Buchenwald,
his telegrams to Hitler, his silence at the roundups
nearVaticanwalls—culpability caught by hindsight,
the encyclical denouncing hate shelved for diplomacy.
In the photograph you look up at him, your pontiff,
as he welcomes you, open, obedient, to his throne.
And had he donned the yellow star? History’s “What if.”
O golden haired Margaret, O ashen haired Shulamith.
*
And so, let the mind commit a thought experiment,
split the physicist from priest like a single photon
shot through a screen, charting the divergent paths:
–“Consider a civilization where music is unknown,
only acoustics and frequencies, the notes like an air
un-breathable for the animal in its element.
Is this not where our method leads us, into matter
as matter, force as force, the amplitudes a blank smoke
unnecessary—number as number and nothing more?”
–“Infinity is such an artistic creation, all symmetry
and elegance, but your method smacks of metaphysics,
lifeless life, and the bible is not a textbook of science.
If relativity theory had been necessary to salvation
it would have been revealed toSt. Paulor Moses.
Still, the deeper we penetrate the universal mystery
The more we will find one law and one goodness.”
–“Newton’s Principia, Abbe Mendel and his peas,
from quantum to quanta—all purposeless process.”
–“Time’s arrow at t=0 has a barb at each end
that makes the infinite universe a buried corpse.
Our world is now a world where something happens,
with the world’s matter present from the beginning,
with the world’s story to be written step by step.”
–“In venom, crematoria, the animal’s voided blood.”
