The thing I’ve
learnt in the last two years is that I really like finding patterns. Brian Boyd, in his 2009 On the Origins of Stories: Evolution,
Cognition, and Fiction, speaks of the arts as a form of cognitive ‘play’
that enhance human capacity for pattern recognition, inextricably linking our
modes of creativity once thought divided by what Snow called ‘the two
cultures.’
These multiple
creative modes, all aspects of our evolutionary coding to seek patterns, are
exemplified for me, in the deftly crafted words of Primo Levi, searching to
explain both beautifully, and scientifically, the path of a carbon atom:
“It is again
among us, in a glass of milk. It is inserted in a very complex, long chain, yet
such that almost all of its links are acceptable to the human body. It is
swallowed; and since every living structure harbors a savage distrust toward
every contribution of any material of living origin, the chain is meticulously
broken apart and the fragments, one by one, are accepted or rejected. One, the
one that concerns us, crosses the intestinal threshold and enters the bloodstream:
it migrates, knocks at the door of a nerve cell, enters, and supplants the
carbon which was part of it. The cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain,
the brain of the me who is writing;
and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of
my writing, in a gigantic miniscule game which nobody has yet described. It is
that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and
nos. makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes
that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy,
guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.”[i]
Levi’s
collection of short stories, each named after a element, chronicle, using
metaphor, analogy, the elements of story, his experiences in Fascist Italy, his
career in chemistry, his participation in anti-Fascist activities, his arrest,
and his internment at Auschwitz. It is both memoir and science text,
intrinsically of a time and place – the story of a Jew in a fascist regime –
but entirely universal. Named the Royal Institute of Great Britain’s best
science book ever in 2006, The Periodic Table hauntingly, beautifully enhances
our human capacity for pattern recognition – “pinions… awareness to the solidity
of the world…”[ii]
Earlier this
week, writer Helen McDonald pinioned my awareness to the solidity of the world,
recognising patterns that have been emergent in 2015, looping back through time
and place to the world Levi described. Relying on a metaphor that’s critical
when explaining the science of complexity; murmuration – the act of schooling
and flocking in fish and birds, where each animal only pays attention to its
neighbours, but at the same time yields complex group dynamics, McDonald first
describes the flock:
“a long,
wavering chevron of beating wings is inked across the darkening sky… an
astonishing barrage of noise and beauty.”[iii]
She then
explains the science: “the changing shape of starling flocks comes from each
bird copying the motions of the six or seven others around it with extreme
rapidity.” She explores the “celestial strangeness” of the phenomenon, the
sense of “signs and wonders,” the mixed fear and joy expressed by watchers.
McDonald explores the animal neuroscience “no starling wants to be on the edge
of the flock, or among the first to land… fear is one factor that shapes
flocks…” Watching, “disoriented,” she peers “through a spotting scope…the
confusion resolves into individual birds…[a] simple switch between geometry and
family.”
This
realisation, this pattern recognition, brings to life a metaphor of
heart-breaking beauty, a comparison that again inextricably links our human
modes of creativity and inventiveness. McDonald connects (‘Only Connect’) “the
thought of crowds moving slowly northeast as the cranes moved southwest.”
“ Watching the
flock has brought home for me how easy it is to react to the idea of masses of
refugees with the same visceral apprehension with which we greet a cloud of
moving starlings or tumbling geese, to view it as a single entity, strange and
uncontrollable and chaotic. But the crowds coming over the border are people
just like us – perhaps too much like us. We do not want to imagine what it
would be like to have our familiar places reduced to ruin. In the face of fear,
we are all starlings, a group, a flock made of a million souls seeking safety.
I love the flock not just for its biological exuberance, but for the way it
prompted me to pick similarity out of strangeness, for the way its chaos was
transformed, on reflection, to individuals and small family groups wanting the
simplest things: freedom from fear, food, a place to safely sleep.”
I cannot imagine
a better pattern for science and the arts to help we humans see in this, the
first week of Advent.
[ii] Tim
Radford, quoted in James Randerson, ‘Levi’s memoir beats Darwin to win science
book title,’ The Guardian, 21 October
2006.
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