By Ryhaan Shah
The world recently lost two men whose ideas of space and time have advanced the sum of our knowledge and understanding of the known universe. One was a scientist, British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, and the other was Guyana-born poet Wilson Harris.
Coming from such opposite ends of the spectrum of knowledge and experience, you would think that a scientist and poet looking out at our universe would come up with theories and ideas that were vastly different. You would be wrong.
“The laws of science do not distinguish between the past and the future,” Hawking wrote in his seminal work, A Brief History of Time; and in his best-known collection of poems, Eternity to Season, Harris stated in the poem ‘Home’: “For time is no fixed boat or inevitable doom/but is the motion of men and matter in space …. ”
And when, in the same poem, he wrote: “… time is the harbour that men must build in each moment” there is a distinct echo in Hawking noting that “Each observer has his own measure of time”, referring to the theory of relativity, which proposes that there is no absolute time.
Where Hawking advanced the possibility of the space-time continuum being finite and without boundary, which meant it had no beginning, Harris mused, in the poem ‘Rice’: “And space is an indifferent/humour, glimpses of cloud, blueness and remoteness.”
Both men received many prizes and accolades during their lifetime, and Harris was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2010. However, neither was awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in his respective field. From Harris’s starting point of human experience and observations, he wrote prose and poetry that sought to illuminate our understanding of the universe and our place in it. But his creative output had little commercial success.
In contrast, Hawking’s landmark book, which made scientific inquiry into time and space accessible to the layman, sold millions of copies. He was 76 when he died. Because of a motor neuron disease, he moved about in a wheelchair, and spoke through a voice synthesiser, which made his speech robotic. He was an iconic figure, and had a life-long career as a professor at Cambridge University. His life story was made into the much-acclaimed movie “The Theory of Everything”.
He died just weeks after completing a book which predicts that the world will end when the energy of the stars runs out.
He once stated that science is not only the disciple of reason, but of romance and passion; a sentiment shared by Harris, though he started from the poet’s position of romance and passion, and sought answers in scientific reasoning in what was as he wrote in ‘Rice’: “An extension of longing like the heart of man/spread and searched the world ….”
Harris died at age 96. He was born in New Amsterdam, and left British Guiana for Britain in 1959, where he continued his writing and became known as an author, poet and essayist. Literary critics have commented on the breadth of his vision, which came out of his interest in physics, anthropology, mythology, alchemy and philosophy.
Yet, for all that, Harris’s work remained grounded in the Guyana he knew and remembered, as evidenced in these lines from the ‘The Golden Age’: “At the far end of the jetty between suburban Kitty and port Georgetown/where the mountains are a cloud/and the flats are sometimes drowned/stand history like a sluice of plantations/a ghost of rain over the wide waters and the sun. The Atlantic comes ….”
Hawking’s work also, for all its explanations of black holes and quarks, was always motivated by the fundamental questions: “What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning; and if so, what happened before then?”
A Brief History of Time ends with his statement: “Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why…. if we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.”
That the ultimate answers to their questions would likely be found in an understanding of things that lie beyond the finite world and outside the framework of human experience was a probability for both; and Harris, with a poet’s sensibility about the inevitability that awaited no matter the human quest, wrote in ‘Troy’: “So eternity to season/the barbaric conflict of man.So he must die first to be free.”
