I was honoured to be asked to contribute a poem to the artwork by Lisa Pettibone called Fingertip Galaxy. This spiral, inspired by the M51 galaxy, is made from the fingerprints of working scientists and is being launched into space on the Euclid galaxy-mapping spacecraft in 2023. As it maps the galaxy, Euclid will also seek to better our understanding of dark matter. Some lines from my poem have been etched onto the piece.
A poem is its own explanation, its own argument, but if I were pressed to explain my approach I’d say that I was fascinated by the human need to make marks, to communicate through traces and signs and to leave those marks somewhere — everywhere — even in space.
The fingerprint galaxy is a clear representation of this — both humble and bold. Light is also a form of information, a means of information, and its interplay with darkness and dark matter and those things about the cosmos we still don’t understand challenges the human talent and desire for language, communication, marks.
Unextraordinary Light
When I think of the lure, the fly, the hook of Scorpius, the siren of space, I hear Beckett: “It was not enough to drag her into the world, now she must play the piano!”
We must get our fingerprints onto the ivory, paddle and daub the musical stave,
get our notes, our marks into space. For the hell of it. For the ache of it. Maybe for survival.
Eleven minutes per billionaire, a green spree in the vomit comet,
an encomium from an actor with a half-life of half a newspaper column.
The Big Bang didn’t bang and it wasn’t big, but it was clever,
and it’s inside you now, red-shifting your hopes, blue-shifting your fears.
You are the centre of the non-centric non-centre, flying away from yourself,
the Big Bang helter-skelters through the grooves of your fingertips, the mountain ranges on the palm of your hand.
We thought we had it covered but there’s something amiss,
something that doesn’t want to play ball, that doesn’t know what ball is, that hasn’t read the rules.
A home run to a next-door galaxy, a singularity of scorecard maths gone wrong,
a thought so dark it leaves thought reinventing language. Fort-da. Thought-da. Thought-not-there. No da-sein.
We light out to observe the darkness visible.
Milton had it down: Pandemonium. Encomium – that word again – Pandencomium.
The eternal return, Newton prodding the side of his eyeball with a needle, suspecting that sight was contingent, was nothing to rely on, and yet we do.
Our eyes are constantly falling like the Moon but at such a speed we orbit the visible and at the pit of all the light that bathes us we lust for true darkness. Lustre.
But to see our opposable thumbprints on this craft you will need ordinary, common-or-garden, standard, plain, vanilla, workaday, down-to-earth, light to know these unique marks at all. And there is no such thing as unextraordinary light, ordinary matter.
For more information about the Euclid project, see Euclid overview.