“Life, the Universe and Everything” is a quote from Douglas Adams’s famous series, which enjoyed success in book, radio, TV and movie forms. Stories set in some distant region of the universe give us a different perspective on our own existence — which for the great majority of us will be played out entirely on a single planet of a minor yellow dwarf star situated near the edge of a fairly insignificant galaxy.
Who can remain unstirred by seeing the familiar minutiae of our lives reframed against a cosmic backdrop? This juxtaposition is what Douglas Adams exploited to such effect, especially humorous effect. The bemused suburban man in his carpet slippers is whisked across the far reaches of space into the presence of comically improbable, despotic, egomaniacal and sadistic aliens. The huge repository of intergalactic knowledge that is The Guide — in today’s terms, a sort of multimedia ultraGoogle — coexists with gross entities such as Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent, one of the Azgoths of Kria, writers of the second-worst poetry in the universe.
It’s just as well The Chimaera received nothing from Grunthos the Flatulent. But “Life, the Universe and Everything” elicited, as expected, a range of responses from assorted earthbound writers. Unsurprisingly, very few attempted to grapple with The Big Questions head on. We know what those questions concern — mind and matter, creation and evolution, life and death, belief and scepticism, among others — but can we answer them definitively? Almost certainly not. Besides, poetry doesn’t do “head on” very well. Our authors have wisely chosen approaches that work for them. They’ve found plenty of options: highlight a selected angle; pragmatically home in on something relevant to one’s own life; glance obliquely at some specific facet of science or religion; startle with juxtapositions, roughly in the manner of Adams... Or something from column A and something from column B.
I’ll stop short of mentioning everyone, but all our contributors are well worth reading.
Les Murray’s The Meaning of Existence might seem, from the title, to promise something head-on. But of course rather than do the impossible and actually tell us the meaning of existence, it tells us instead that the meaning of existence is not a matter for “my ignorant talking mind”, but is known, if at all, in the fact and act of existing... though he says it a lot more tellingly than that. So here we have language saying what language can’t do, and in the process doing something useful that language can do. The more I read it, the more I appreciate its cleverness... or do I mean “sprawl”?
The opening quote on this page is an extreme example of the pragmatic approach — and also suggests its limitations. Never mind “What’s it all about?”; just focus on being happy. An appealing idea that not many of us can stick to. But we shouldn’t equate pragmatic with unimaginative. Take Janet Kenny’s Hushabye: an underlying practical focus on life and death, but no shortage of imagination here by any means.
The spectre of death makes us crave meaning in life, which to many implies religion. While I don’t subscribe to any religion, I do find it hard to go along with the materialist view that the universe somehow bootstrapped itself into existence without the aid of any intelligence, and now here we are, products of billions of years of cosmic accidents, contemplating the intricate marvels of biochemistry and the boggling complexities of the human mind. As Schopenhauer observed, “...materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.” Surprisingly, Douglas Adams was firmly aligned with “the physical explains all”, despite the imaginative mind that created among many others the character Slartibardfast — designer of planets, dab hand at coastlines in particular, and winner of an award for his work on the fjords of Norway.
Janice D. Soderling lives in Sweden, not Norway. Which makes my segué rather contrived. But certainly her lovely poem Ossuary speaks of life and death regardless of geography.
Physics and metaphysics have converged somewhat in the last century. Physicists are moonlighting as philosophers. Some modern quantum physicists/metaphysicists suggest that the physical world is a projection of mind (reversing the traditional materialist position). Among our theme authors is physicist Peter Coghill, who does juxaposition amusingly in his poem Marvels: an exploding universe followed by “to walk the street you must inoculate for awe” and a mention of frilly undies. I like the poem, though it doesn’t satisfy my curiosity on whether he is one of those quantum
physicists.
Risa Denenberg’s Surface Tension has a bit of a tilt at modern physics and its ramifications: “The unknown /
familiar: god, demon, nostrum, vapor, quark.” And “The most/venerated quantum physicists are dumbstruck / by their own utterances.” Lucy Lepchani in Dreams looks at practical choices and how sometimes a dreamed-of other life can cast our present in a new light and crucially shape our future. A shift of perspective occurs: “
And there is a woman who some say/
has lost her way...//
for all she has achieved and accumulated /
has faded from its once-upon-a-meaning”.
David W. Landrum has chosen the number cannily for his mystical-mythological take, Eight Mythologies of Us. The number eight has had symbolic significance across numerous cultures — Babylonian, Pythagorean, Christian, and others. In China it stands for the totality of the universe. John Whitworth’s two poems speak to our theme but not in a direct way, and may serve as a reminder that “Poems are made of words, not ideas” (Mallarmé). Well, they’re usually made of both, but it won’t be a good poem if the ideas are allowed to lord it over the words. Anyway John Whitworth likes that quote, and his own poems seem made to be read and recited rather than analysed.
Inevitably, a number of these theme poems touch on the subject of God. It’s a thorny one. Faith gets in the way of reason or vice versa. Rationally, if we believe in some conception or other of “God” (whether a Creator or a Universal Mind or even a Great Setter-in-Motion of Evolutionary Humanism, etc, etc), we must decide whether our human faculties make us capable of engaging meaningfully with said entity, of grokking (another sci-fi allusion) His/Her/Its ways — or not. I lean to the “not”, because of where the opposite proposition (without overarching faith) leads us. If we say we’re capable of getting on God’s wavelength, and we apply our criteria of reward and punishment as if they were His/Hers/Its, then we soon find ourselves in contradiction. The prayed-to God is held to be all-wise and merciful, and reassuringly knowable, so long as the sick child is spared, but He is subject to abrupt reclassification as mysterious and unknowable if the outcome is otherwise. Thus Maryann Corbett in Mayday: “The Ground of Being, who let the ground give way /
in Port-au-Prince...”. Or as Peter Wyton puts it in Blink and You’ll Miss It, there’s always someone “anxious to mouth the rehearsed platitudes /
that let God off the hook.” Me, I retreat to an agnosticism that not only falls well short of Dawkins-style scoffing but indeed aspires to hear what Antonia Clark in her striking poem The Landscape from Here calls “the humming at the heart of everything”.
Don’t miss the lone prose piece, Larry Lefkowitz’s The Indexer. Yes, science fiction: an interesting projection and amusingly done. Our “Life, the Universe and Everything” feature is nothing if not a provider of varied food for thought. Feast on, then — and when you’ve exhausted the sustenance here, if you still have hunger for fundamental questions approached from various angles, perhaps a spell with the essays of R. W. Emerson?
