An evaluation of Aldous Huxley's Literature and Science (1963) is presented here in the context of the ‘two-cultures’ debate with emphasis on Huxley's distinction between literature and science on the basis of their function, psychology, and language. Huxley's challenge to writers in a scientific age to work out appropriate private responses to important public aspects of modern science is considered next. A review of critical contributions since Huxley in the area of literature and science follows, including work on epistemology, education academic and professional specialization and the public understanding of science. Full bibliographical references and other details are provided in notes.
Recent creative work in the field is examined critically, including fiction, science narratives, new-journalistic encounters with technology, science fiction both realistic and speculative, and poetry and essay exploring new view of nature and their social corollaries. Brief remarks on trends and possibilities conclude this survey which, to the author's regret, had to remain of a parochial, English-speaking nature.
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References
1.
SnowC. P., The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge University Press, London (1959). An expanded edition was published as The Two Cultures: and A Second Look, Cambridge University Press, London (1964).
2.
HuxleyA., Literature and Science, Harper &Row, New York (1963). Opening quotation from p. 70.
3.
HuxleyT. H.gave his talk‘Science and Culture’ at the opening of Sir Jostah Mason's Science College in Birmingham. It is included in hisScience and Culture and Other Essays (1881). Arnold's response, ‘Literature and Science,’ may be found in his Discourses in America (1896).
4.
LeavisF. R., Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow, Chatto and Windus, London (1962).
5.
HuxleyA., Literature and Science, pp. 3–9. Harper &Row, New York (1963).
6.
HuxleyA., Literature and Science, pp. 13–38. Harper &Row, New York (1963).
7.
HuxleyA., Literature and Science, p. 42. Harper &Row, New York (1963). The quotation from Wordsworth is from the Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800).
8.
HuxleyA., Literature and Science, p. 107. Harper &Row, New York (1963).
9.
HuxleyA., Literature and Science, p. 63. Harper &Row, New York (1963).
10.
HuxleyA., Literature and Science, p. 76. Harper &Row, New York (1963).
11.
HuxleyA., Literature and Science, p. 79. Harper &Row, New York (1963).
12.
HuxleyA., Literature and Science, pp. 99, 106, 100, 79. Harper &Row, New York (1963).
13.
HuxleyA., Literature and Science, pp. 92–93, Harper &Row, New York (1963).
14.
HuxleyA., Literature and Science, pp. 117–118, 78. Harper &Row, New York (1963).
15.
BronowskiJ., Science and Human Values, J. Messner, New York (1956). This book, and the 1953 M.I.T. lectures from which it was drawn, inspired much of the two- cultures discussion in later years. A revised edition [Harper & Row, New York (1965)] contains Bronowski's ‘The Abacus and the Rose: A New Dialogue on Two World Systems,’ a dramatization of the Snow-Leavis debate, which Bronowski resolves largely through the education of his literary figure, Dr Amos Harping.
16.
BronowskiJ., The Identity of Man, p. 50. Natural History Press, Garden City (1971). First published 1965, without Bronowski's supplement. The Logic of the Mind.
17.
According to Bronowski, science has a second language, the ‘provisional’ language in which it is expressed, in which it differs from literature, which has no ‘provisional’ language, being expressed in its ‘thinking’ language. The Identity of Man, pp. 68–69.
18.
MedawarP. B., The Art of the Soluble, Methuen, London (1967).
19.
LuriaS. E. and LuriaZ., The Soluble and the Insoluble or Are Two Cultures Better Than One?, Daedalus104, No. 1, 273–277 (Winter 1975). The economist Kenneth Bould- ing similarly defines science, half-facetiously, as ‘the process of substituting unimportant questions which can be answered for important ones which cannot.’ [The Image, p. 164. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor (1961).]
20.
SnowC. P., The Case of Leavis and the Serious Case. In Snow'sPublic Affairs, Scribner's, NewYork (1971). Originally published in Times Literary Supplement69, 737–740(9 July, 1970). Snow's piece was provoked by Leavis's Literarism versus Scientism-the Misconception and the Menace, Times Literary Supplement 69, 441–444 (23 April, 1970).
21.
On this point Snow credits John Ziman, Public Knowledge, Cambridge University Press, London (1968). See especially pp. 8–9.
22.
This insight Snow credits to Harold L. Burstyn, Tradition and Understanding, School and Society pp. 419–424(November1969).
23.
For curricular experiments in this direction, see references 27 and 40.
24.
SkinnerB. F., Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Knopf, New York (1971).
25.
Skinner, paradoxically, majored in English as an undergraduate and lived for a while as an aspiring novelist in Greenwich Village before beginning graduate work in psychology.
26.
A corrective view from the field of psychology is that of Jerome Bruner, who in his On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand [Atheneum, New York (1969); originally published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1962)] urges his fellow psychologists not to neglect the intuitive side of their subjects or of their own researching and practice. Bruner sees the breeding of psychological hypotheses as a process that combines the ‘complementary’ but ‘deeply different grammars’ of literature and science. (See especially Bruner's introduction and the chapter titled Art as a Mode of Knowing.) A closely related work is R. E. Ornstein's The Psychology of Consciousness [W. H. Freeman, San Francisco (1972)], which discusses left-handed (intuitive) and right-handed (rational) physiology and consciousness, and calls for their integration within psychology. C. L. Tart goes further in States of Consciousness and State-Specific Sciences, Science 176, 1203–1210 (16 June 1972). arguing that knowledge of certain ‘altered’ states of consciousness can only be obtained through personal experience of them. An early version of Tart's article carried an initial footnote which described the article itself as a direct result of Tart's first session of Rolfing therapy. See The Nature of Human Consciousness, edited by R. E. Ornstein, p. 41. W. H. Freeman, San Francisco (1973).
27.
GoodmanP., Can Technology Be Humane? New York Review of Books8, No. 9, 27–34(20 November1969). See also Goodman's New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative, Random House, New York(1970). Goodman's call for a humanized technology has been made by many others, most notably by technology critic Lewis Mumford. There are signs that these pleas are having some effect, at least at the academic level. The November 1976 issue of STPP News (published by the Program in Science, Technology and Public Policy, Department of Political Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA) describes the seven-year-old Humanistic Studies in Engineering Program at Princeton University, and mentions similar programs at other schools. The Cornell University Program on Science, Technology, and Society - which contains a subprogram called Humanities, Science, and Technology – in 1976 published a comprehensive survey of teaching and research activities in this area in the United States. Science Technology, and Society: A Guide to the Field (600 pp.) is available from the Program, 620 Clark Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA. A check for $8.00 payable to Cornell University should accompany an order.
28.
Goodman's mistrust of big systems and their abstractions had very concrete roots, as he noted in a tentative comparison of himself and Coleridge: ‘Maybe what we have in common is our obsessional needs, his drug addiction, and my frustrated homosexuality. These keep us in touch with animal hunger, so we are not overly impressed by progress and the Gross National Product.’ See ‘Notes of a Neolithic Conservative,’ in New Reformation. Science-related problems are also a frequent theme of the historian Theodore Roszak, who is critical of a quality of objectivity in the procedures and mindset of modern science which he feels is responsible for a culture-wide alienation from emotion. Against this ‘myth of objective consciousness’ Roszak sets the work of three literary champions of intuition-Blake, Wordsworth, and Goethe - who advocated different varieties of the holistic vision Roszak seeks as a remedy for current social disorders. See Theodore Roszak, The Myth of Objective Consciousness, in his The Making of a Counter Culture, Doubleday & Co., NewYork (1969); and Mind on Fire: Notes on Three Old Poets, in his Where the Wasteland Ends, Doubleday & Co., New York (1972).
29.
SontagS., One Culture and the New Sensibility. In herAgamt Interpretation, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, NewYork (1966).
30.
StentG. S., The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress, Natural History Press, Garden City (1969). More recently Stent has been involved in an exchange with Leonard Meyer over comparative qualities of the sciences, the arts, and the humanities. See Leonard B. Meyer, Concerning the Sciences, the Arts-AND the Humanities, Critical Enquiry1, No. 1, 164–217 (September 1974); also, in Critical Enquiry1, No. 3 (March 1975). Stent's Response, pp. 683–694, Meyer's Rejoinder, pp. 694–696, and an Editors’ Comment, pp. 696–698.
31.
BouldingK. E., Plains of Science, Summits of Passion. Technot. Rev. 77, No. 2, 6 (December1974).
32.
GreenM., Science and the Shabby Curate of Poetry: Essays About the Two Cultures, Longmans, London (1964).
33.
KoestlerA., The Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler, Anchor, New York (1960). Originally published as part of Koestler's The Sleepwalkers, Macmillan, New York (1959).
34.
GreenM., Science and the Shabby Curate of Poetry: Essays About the Two Cultures, p. 152. Longmans, London (1964).
35.
SteinerG., The Retreat from the Word, in his Language and Silence, Atheneum, New York (1970). See also the Foreword and Life-lines in Steiner's Extraterritorial, Atheneum, NewYork (1971); and Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture, p. 124. Yale University Press, New Haven (1971).
36.
JonesW. T., The Sciences and the Humanities: Conflict and Reconciliation, University of California Press, Berkeley (1965).
37.
SypherW., Literature and Technology: The Alien Vision, Random House, New York (1968).
38.
LeviA. W., The Humanities Today, Indiana University Press, Bloomington (1970).
39.
DavenportW. H., The One Culture, PergamonPress, New York (1970).
40.
Examples of such curricula in the United States are: Science and the Imagination, General and Continuing Education in theHumanities, Columbia University, New York, NewYork 10027; Concentration in Human Studies, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912; NEXA: Science-Humanities Convergence Program, School of Humanities, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, California 94132; and Cultural and Technological Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201. (See also note 27 for an experimental engineering curriculum and a survey of science-and-society teaching and research activities in the United States).#####At the1964Boulder (Colorado) Conference on Physics for Non-Science Majors, there was a call for ‘constellation courses’ on the relation of physics to literature and other fields. Since that time, theAmerican Journal of Physics has published a number of articles on such courses. See, for instance, HallettandL. R.KalmanC. S., Constellation Course: interaction Between the Sciences and the Arts, Am, J. Phys. 44, No. 7, 606–608(July 1975), which also refers to several earlier articles.#####Cross-disciplinary study within a less conventional framework is being conducted in the United States at such institutions as: (1) the Lindisfarne Association (47 West 20th St, New York, New York 10011), which describes itself as a community of scholars ‘devoted to the study and realization of a new planetary culture’ based on new nature-culture relations and ‘a paradigm- shift in Western Science in which art, religion, and science reconverge in a new way of thinking and being’; (2) the Naropa Institute (1441 Broadway, Boulder, Colorado 80302), which offers instruction in the arts, the sciences, and religion with emphasis on the Buddhist Three Wheels of Learning-intellectual study, meditation, and the application of these two to everyday living.
41.
See The Scientist vs. the Humanist, edited byLevineG. and ThomasO., W. W. Norton & Co., New York (1963); also Cultures in Conflict: Perspectives on the Snow-Leavis Controversy, edited byCorneliusD. K. and StE.. Vincent, Scott, Foresman and Co., Chicago (1964). A reader with a more literary orientation is Science and Literature, edited byCaddenJ. J. and BrostowinP. R., HeathD. C. and Co., Boston(1964). Science and Literature: New Lenses for Criticism, edited byJenningsE. M., Anchor/Doubleday, Garden City (1970), is a collection of essays with some emphasis on the use of science in the study of literature.
42.
Among the newsletters are STTP News, described in note 27 above, and the Newsletter on Science, Technology, and Human Values, produced under the auspices of the Harvard University Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy, Aiken Computation Laboratory 231, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
43.
Both these newsletters carry current bibliographies with notes, and the Harvard newsletter has published several review articles in the area of literature and science. SeeDavenportW. H., ‘Some Contemporary Humanists’ Perceptions of Science: A Survey, Newsletter No. 5, 16–29(October1973); and R. Freedman, An Annotated, Selective Checklist of Imaginative Literature Concerning the Relationships between Science, Technology and Human Values, Newsletter No. 10, 28–33 (January 1975). Fuller current bibliographies are prepared annually by the Modern Language Association's Division of Literature and Science, and are published in the journal Clio, which is published at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Kenosha, Wisconsin 53140, USA.
44.
For earlier works, thetwo references are The Relations of Literature and Science: A Selected Bibliography 1930–67, edited byDudleyF. A., MicrofilmsUniversity, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor(1968); and M. Nicholson, Literature and Science, AmiJ. Phys, 33, No, 3, 175–182(1965). A bibliography of works relating to the impact of modern physics on major modern writers is being compiled by A. J. Friedman (director of Astronomy Education, Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720), who is currently seeking contributions to that project.
45.
In the last several years a number of U.S. foundations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the private Rockefeller Foundation have had among their humanities research priorities projects on the two-cultures problem and on the relations between science and technology and contemporary arts. Within the (American) National Science Foundation there is a program called ‘Ethical and Human Value Implications of Science and Technology’ which funds, among other projects, the Harvard Newsletter described in note 42 above.
46.
On the literary side, the Literature and Science Division of the Modern Language Association met in 1976 to discuss over a dozen subjects, among them: Chaucer and Astronomy, Melville and Technology, Science Fiction (several topics), and Literature and the Environment.
47.
BellowS., Herzog, Viking, New York (1964).
48.
BellowS., Mr. Sammler's Planet, Viking, New York (1970).
49.
Bellow emphasized this theme in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, remarking: ‘At the center humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul.’New York Times, 9 (Monday 13 December1976).
50.
BellowS., Machines and Storybooks: Literature in the Age of Technology. Harper's249, No. 1491, 48–59(August1974).
51.
BellowS., Humboldt'sGift, pp. 20, 487. Viking, New York (1975).
52.
BellowS., Machines and Storybooks.
53.
VonnegutK.Jr, Cat's Cradle, Holt, Rinehart and Winston. New York (1963).
54.
VonnegutK.Jr, Slaughterhouse-Five: or the Children's Crusade. Delacorte Press, New York (1969).
55.
VonnegutK.Jr, Fortitude, a science fiction screenplay, the sole piece of fiction in Von negut'sWampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, Delacarte Press, New York (1975).
56.
VonnegutK.Jr, Breakfast of Champions: or Goodbye Blue Monday, Delacorte Press, New York (1973). See especially Vonnegut's Preface. Vonnegut also refers to himself as a ‘writing machine’ and as being ‘programmed at fifty to perform childishly.’
57.
VonnegutK.Jr, Address to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1971. fn hisWampeters, Foma & Granfalloons.
58.
PirsigR. M., Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Wm. Morrow & Co., New York (1974).
59.
C. P. Snow's Corridors of Power [Macmillan, London (1964)] treats the conflict between scientists and nonscientists in the government debate over British nuclear weapons policy in the late 1950s. In Snow's The Sleep of Reason [Macmillan, London (1968)] and Last Things [Macmillan, London (1970)] there is a mellowing of relations and some emphasis on convergence of the two ctiltures, though characters are still clearly identified through ‘cultural’ affiliation.
60.
WatsonJ. D., The Double Helix, Atheneum, New York (1968).
61.
J. Bruner suggests the establishing of an informal narrative genre of ‘protopsychological writing’, which would permit psychologists to write about their searching as well as about their discoveries, and thus to share what Bruner regards as ‘some of the most fruitful sources of our ideas.’ SeeOn Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand, pp. 4–5. See Reference 26.
62.
Watson's poetic licence has brought charges of unfair treatment, particularly on behalf of Rosalind Franklin - in spite of Watson's praise of her abilities and character in his Epilogue. See Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA, Norton, NewYork (1975). C. P. Snow's commentary on the books and the personafities may be found in the New York Review of Books, pp. 3–4(13 November 1975).
63.
The narrative line or plot in such works is rudimentary, often limited to the narrator's ‘getting the story’ in the journalistic sense of figuring out a slant.
64.
MailerN., Of a Fire on the Moon, Little, Brown and Co., Boston (1970).
65.
N. Mostert Supership, Knopf, New York (1974).
66.
See Supership, Chapter 2, for a discussion of the Coriolis force and other details pertaining to the tankers’ great mass.
67.
FriedmanA. J., an astronomer, suggests that much current science fiction takes the form of ‘cultural impact statements.’ (Towards Convergence in Science and Literature, unpublished, Modern Language Association discussion paper dated 27 December1975.)
68.
The genre of science fiction, of course, also contains a large element of the bizarre that lies outside the limits of this discussion. Historically the attempt to tell stories based on science has not always produced results that pleased scientists or literary people. Scientific ideas and human interest were often treated with either too much or too little imagination. Two recent developments, however, have made science fiction more attractive to Interested sceptics. First, there has been a shift in emphasis from fantastic to more realistic or probable extensions of science and technology, presumably the sign of some collective realization that the terrestrial near-future itself holds a great deal of interest-and some of the fantastic, as well, A second and related trend is toward increased complexity in the treatment of both literary and scientific materials.
69.
ScortiaT. N. and RobinsonF. M., The Prometheus Crisis, Doubleday & Co., New York (1975). A related work with a different emphasis is Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, Random House, New York (1969), the story of a space program's accidental introduction of a hostile life-form into the Earth's biosphere.
70.
Scortia and Robinson's earlier collaboration, The Glass Inferno, Doubleday & Co., New York (1974), dramatized the potential threat to public safety in certain construction practices and had a successful run as a motion picture disaster thriller, The Towering Inferno.
71.
BrunnerJ., The Sheep Look Up, Ballantine Books, New York (1973).
72.
BurgessA., A Clockwork Orange, Heineman, London (1962), Published in the USA by Norton, New York (1963), Burgess's book, for all its interest, comes out divided against itself, condemning both the hero's violent behavior and society's only ‘cure’ for it. To add to the confusion, the last chapter-omitted by the book's American publisher-does a puzzling all's-for-the- best, boys-will-be-boys turnabout on the rest of the book.
73.
HuxleyA., Island, Harper &Row, New York (1962). For Huxley's second thoughts about Brave New World, see his preface to the second edition of Brave New World, Harper and Bros., New York and London (1946).
74.
AsimovI., The Gods Themselves, Doubleday, New York (1972).
75.
ClarkeA. C., 2001: A Space Odyssey, New American Library, New York (1968). Clarke wrote this novel while film producer Stanley Kubrick and he were collaborating on the screenplay for the film of the same name.
76.
ClarkeA. C., Science and Spirituality. In his Voices From the Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age, Harper &Row, New York (1965).
77.
One collection. Great Science Fiction by Scientists (edited byConklinG., Crowell-Collier, New York(1962)1 contains stories by Asimov, Clarke, J. B. S. Haldane, J, Huxley, W. Ley, L, Ridenour, L. Szilard, and N. Weiner, among others,
78.
See, for example, Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud, Harper, New York (1957). Hoyle's example is interesting for what it suggests beyond the obvious about literary-scientific relations in such cases. Hoyle sees his science fiction writing as a constructive distraction from his science that permits solutions to scientific problems to work themselves out undisturbed in a quiet part of his brain. In science, Hoyle says, ‘the frontal approach is never best.’
79.
LemS., The Cyberiad, Seabury Press, New York (1974). Originally published in Poland in 1967.
80.
LemS., Solaris, Walker and Co., New York (19701. Originally published in Poland in 1961.
81.
LeGuinU. K., The Left Hand of Darkness, Ace Books, New York (1965).
82.
LeGuinU. K., The Dispossessed, Harper &Row, New York (1974).
83.
NabokovV., In interview with Alfred Appel, An Interview with Nabokov, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literatures, 140–141(Spring1967).
84.
NabokovV., Speak, Memory, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York (1967).
85.
NabokovV., ADA or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, McGraw- Hill, NewYork (1969).
86.
For a brief discussion of time in Nabokov's works seeFriedmanA. J., The Novelist and Modern Physics: New Metaphors for Traditional Themes, J. College Sci. Teach. 4, No. 5, 310–312(May1975).
87.
PynchonT., The Crying of Lot 49, J. B. Lippincott, New York (1966).
88.
PynchonT., V., J. B.Lippincott, New York (1963).
89.
PynchonT., Gravity's Rainbow, Viking, New York (1973).
90.
Pynchon was a student of Nabokov's white he was studying engineering at Cornell. One of Pynchon's early stories is titled Entropy [KenyoniReview22, 277–292(Spring I960)). For a discussion of Pynchon and science, see A. J. Friedman and M. Puetz, Science as Metaphor: Thomas Pynchon and Gravity's Rainbow, Contemporary Literature15, 345–359 (Summer1974).
91.
CalvinoI., Cosmicomics, Harcourt, Brace &World, New York (1968). Originally published in Italy in 1965.
92.
Calvino's t zero, Harcourt, Brace &World, New York (1969) (originally published in Italy in 1967), includes a sequence called Priscilla whose three parts-Mitosis, Meiosis, and Death - are prefaced by quotations on cellular reproduction. Von Neumann's theory of automata, the double helix, the burden of parents, and mutability.
93.
BorgesJ. L., Labyrinths, 2nd Edn. New Directions, New York (1964); also The Aleph and Other Stories, Bantam Books, New York (1971).
94.
On Borges’ relations to science, I rely on the testimony of an astronomer, FriedmanA. J., in ‘Toward Convergence in Science and Literature,’ an unpublished Modern Language Association discussion paper dated 27 December1975.
95.
DickeyJ., AudenW. H., KunitzS. and EberhartR.are among those mentioned in D. Allen, What Rough Beast: SF-Oriented Poetry, Extrapolation17, No. 1, 8–17 (December 1975). More poetry of space may be found in such works as D. Wakoski, The Magellanic Clouds, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles (1973); A. M. Worden (an American astronaut). Hello Earth: Greetings From Endeavour, Nash Publishing, Los Angeles (1974); and D. Ackerman, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral, William Morrow, New York (1976).
96.
BlyR., The Light Around the Body, Harper &Row, New York (1967).
BlyR., I Came Out of the Mother Naked, in his Sleepers Joining Hands, Harper &Row, New York (1973).
99.
SnyderG., The Back Country, New Directions, New York (1968) ; Earth House Hold, New Directions, New York (1969) ; Regarding Wave, New Directions, New York (1970) ; Turtle Island, New Directions, New York (1974).
100.
SnyderG., Poetry and the Primitive: Notes on Poetry as an Ecological Survival Technique, in his Earth House Hold, New Directions, New York (1969).
101.
HughesI., Wodwo, Faber and Faber, London (1967).
102.
HughesT., Crow:iFrom the Life and Songs of the Crow, Faber and Faber, London (1970).
103.
Hughes’ poetic ideal is well described by Hughes himself, writing on a slightly different subject: ‘words that live in the same dimension as life at its most severe, words that cannot be outflanked by experience.’ As to poetic mode, one feels Hughes writing about himself in this passage from his introduction to Vasco Pops: Selected Poems, Penguin, Harmondsworth (1969): ‘Folktale surrealism is always urgently connected with the business of trying to manage practical difficulties so great that they have forced the sufferer temporarily out of the dimension of coherent reality into that depth of imagination where understanding has its roots and stores its X-rays.’ I am indebted for these two self- referential statements to Keith Sagar, Ted Hughes (Writers & their Work series No. 227), Longman Group Ltd., Harlow (1972).
104.
lo is published by North Atlantic and lo Books. Information is available through Richard Grossinger, c/o The Book People, 2940Seventh Street, Berkeley, California 94710, USA. The CoEvolution Quarterly, successor to the Whole Earth Catalogue, is published quarterly by POINT, Box 428, Sausalito, California 94965, USA.
105.
Among the regular contributors to lo are poetsCreeleyR., KellyR, AntinD., DuncanR. and EnsfinT.. Also the poets J. Rothenberg, D. McAllester, A. Schwerner and E. Field, who have been working in various ways with the songs and stories of ‘primitive’ cultures - some of their work sponsored by American science foundations. lo co-editor R. Grossinger's Solar Journal: Oecological Sections, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles (1970), is a series of poetic prose meditations on subjects that stimulated cross-fertilization between scientific ideas (particularly from anthropology, linguistics, ecology) and aspects of contemporary culture. Grossinger's interest in poetry as a ‘scientific’ tool for the discovery of meta-human relations is clear in his comparison of the function of poetry and alchemical ‘signatures’: ‘In poetry the alchemist is no longer concerned with making gold or discovering its seed; language itself, thought, the internal processes of growth, form, and perception, the flow of images on the eye and how they enter the brain, all these lead to an instantaneous record of the dialogue with angels, or whatever we call the conscious forms that lie outside our lives.’ (The Doctrine of Signatures, lo 5, 6–14 (Summer 1968).
106.
BurnshawS., The Seamless Web, George Braziller, New York (1970).
107.
A collection of essays recently published in Koestler's honor attests to his contributions to fields such as fiction, aesthetics, systems theory, epistemology, and the history and philosophy of science. See Astride the Two Cultures: Arthur Koestler at 70, edited byHarrisH., HouseRandom, YorkNew (1976).
108.
KoestlerA., TheiAct of Creation, Random House, New York (1964). See also Koestler's earlier Insight and Outlook: An Inquiry into the Common Foundations of Science, Art, and Social Ethics, Macmillan, New York (1949).
109.
KoestlerA., The Ghost in the Machine, Macmillan, London (1967); also Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences, edited byKoestlerA. and SmythiesJ. R., Macmillan, London (1969).
110.
KoestlerA., The Case of the Midwife Toad, HutchinsonPublishing Group, London (1972).
111.
KoestlerA., The Roots of Coincidence, Random House, New York (1972).
112.
What could be less probable, Koestler asks, than Pauli's massless, chargeless, fieldless neutrino, Dirac's minus- mass electrons, or Feynman's electrons traveling backward in time-all of which have won their discoverers the Nobel Prize?
113.
HardinG., The Tragedy of the Commons, Science162, 1243–1248(13 December1968).
114.
HardinG., Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship“Beagle”, The Viking Press, New York (1972).
115.
Hardin's rationale for this practice is that art's indirect approach may reach an unarmed psyche, where a frightening argument will generate opposition regardless of its merits. In the words of one of his characters: ‘(Fiction's) denial is the door through which truth enters. Wordsworth (a stand-in for Hardin), knowing the failure of Matthus, (William Foster) Lloyd, and Milt, opened that door’. (Exploring New Ethics for Survival, p. 225.) Something of the same reasoning may have governed biologist Paul R. Ehrlich's choice of a narrative mode for his doomsday scenario ‘Eco-catastrophel’ (Ramparts 8, No. 3, 24–28) (September1969). Fiction's powers of suspending disbelief have even been used by the relatively circumspect Federation of American Scientists to convey the real possibility of an unwanted nuclear war. See, ‘How One Decisionmaker Triggered the End of the World,’ F.A.S. Public Interest Report28, No. 9, 1–3 (November 1975).
116.
MeekerJ. W., The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology, Scribner'sNew York (1974).
117.
MeekerJ., The Comedy of Survival, p. 134. Scribner'sNew York (1974).
118.
EiseleyL., The Immense Journey, Random House, New York (1957).
119.
EiseleyL., The Unexpected Universe, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., New York (1969).
120.
EiseleyL., The Night Country, Charles Scribner's Sons, NewYork (1971).
121.
EiseleyL., The Night Country, p. 148, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York (1971).
122.
DillardA., Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Harper &Row, New York (1974).
123.
It is interesting that while Dillard's own style is very poetic and idiosyncratic, in her choice of subject, she has remarked, he tries to ‘shy away from the arts, from the human emotional stew.,. (to) read what the men with telescopes and microscopes have to say about the landscape.’ See her comments in ‘Fecundity’, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 179. Harper &Row, New York (1974).
124.
Bleibtreu cites scientific work suggesting that religious notions such as communion, sacrifice, resurrection, and immortality have analogues in the natural world and may in fact be derived from them.
125.
ThomasL., The Lives of a Cell, The Viking Press, New York (1974).
