'Scrawls With a Lavish Hand Its Signature'

“Where the wind listeth, there the sailboats list, / Water is touched with a light case of hives / Or wandering gooseflesh.”

Carl George is the sort of scientist whose company I most enjoy. He is a generalist, what used to be called a naturalist. Now an emeritus professor of biology at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., Carl started as an ichthyologist but left that specialty when he developed an allergy to formaldehyde and other chemicals used to preserve fish specimens. His new specialty became everything, especially birds. The first time I saw a pileated woodpecker was with Carl. The same day we saw a scarlet tanager.

 

Carl is no mushy-headed nature mystic. His science is rigorous but he’s driven by wonder. A walk in the woods with him was better than a lecture. When I was working as a newspaper reporter he was an ideal source for many of my stories. One question could lead to half a day’s walk. Thirty years ago we were on the north shore of the Mohawk River in Scotia, N.Y., watching an osprey slam into the water, disappear and emerge with a fish in its talons. Carl asked if I had noticed what was happening on the surface of the river. Away from shore it gently riffled – not waves but rows of subtle disturbance. Carl explained the phenomenon as Langmuir circulation, named for Irving Langmuir (1881-1957), a chemist who, while working for General Electric in Schenectady in 1932, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his discoveries and investigations in surface chemistry.”

 

While reading Anthony Hecht’s poem “Riddles” in The Transparent Man (1990), I realized the opening lines quoted at the top could refer to Langmuir circulation, which  Hecht may never have heard of. Subsequent lines in the five-stanza poem seem to confirm it: “Scrawls with a lavish hand its signature / of ripples gathered into folds and pleats . . .” and “The surface wrinkles in spirit-shapes that sprint / Like small rapids or frightened schools of fish . . .” I’m not talking about influence. The allusions in Hecht’s richly learned poems are drawn from literature and history, not science. But Hecht, like George, was an intent observer, and it’s irrelevant if he understood the physics of water.

 

In his 1999 book-length interview with Philip Hoy, Hecht reflects on the mystery of writing poetry:

 

“One of the great satisfactions of writing poetry consists in the absolute and indispensable conviction, while one is writing, that one is working at one’s very best. To think otherwise is deeply discouraging, and virtually intolerable. But to feel one is working at one’s best is to call into question the fact that one felt this way about each and every poem one had written in the past, not all of them still regarded with pride or satisfaction, and some of them, alas, now disappointing if not humiliating. This does not bear much dwelling upon.”

 

 Hecht died twenty years ago today, on October 20, 2004 at age eighty-one.