`A Random Light Meandering'

I knew a computer science professor who now works, I think, for Google. He was an interesting fellow who defied many CS stereotypes. He read books outside his field, for instance, and spoke in complete sentences. Ten or twelve years ago as I was walking across the engineering quadrangle toward the parking lot, I noticed him kneeling on the sidewalk outside the mechanical engineering building. He seemed to be looking at something in the grass. As I approached, I saw he was studying a fire-ant mound. He said two words: “Brownian motion.” 

The phenomenon is named for a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown, who, in 1827, was the first to describe the random fluctuations of pollen particles suspended in a fluid. Strictly speaking, swarming ants are displaying Brownian motion only in a metaphorical sense, but the prof’s observation has stuck with me and I remember it whenever I see a swarm of ants or bees. I remembered it also when reading Howard Nemerov’s “The Crossing” (Gnomes and Occasions, 1973):

 

“September, and the butterflies are drifting

Across the sky again, the monarchs in

Their myriads, delicate lenses for the light

To fall through and be mandarin-transformed.

 

“I guess they are flying southward, or anyhow

That seems to be the average of their drift,

Though what you mostly see is a random light

Meandering, a Brownian movement to the wind,

 

“Which is one of Nature's ways of getting it done,

Whatever it may be, the rise of hills

And settling of seas, the fall of leaf

Across the shoulder of the northern world,

 

“The snowflakes one by one that silt the field . . .

All that's preparing now behind the scene,

As the ecliptic and equator cross,

Through which the light butterflies are flying.”

 

In his 1965 prose work, Journal of the Fictive Life, Nemerov writes: “Like many poets, I read a good deal of science, and like most of the poets who do, I do not read it for the sake of science but rather for the sake of metaphor.” Nemerov took an intelligent amateur’s interest in science and mathematics. Consider his “Figures of Thought” (1978):

 

“To lay the logarithmic spiral on

Sea shell and leaf alike, and see it fit,

To watch the same idea work itself out

In the fighter pilot’s steepening, tightening turn

Onto his target, setting up the kill,

And in the flight of certain wall-eyed bugs

Who cannot see to fly straight into  death

But have to cast their sidelong glance at it

And come but cranking to the candle’s flame–

 

“How secret that is, and how privileged

One feels to find the same necessity

Ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise

Without kinship—that is the beautiful

In nature as in art, not obvious,

Not inaccessible, but just between.

 

“It may diminish some our dry delight

To wonder if everything we are and do

Lies subject to some little law like that;

Hidden in nature, but not deeply so.”