The Speed of Darkness
quantified poetry ,opposites, difficulty in getting the correct directionality of the arrow of cause and effect, electricity vs. current (50/50 chance of getting the direction right), the speed of light . . . is darkness an absence or its own thing and is its speed the speed at which light recedes.
. . . in other words . . . how quickly we are left behind . . .
or, in the spirit of NMR trails, if the speed of applied electromagnetic waves, even in the frequency range of radiowaves, follows the onset of the pulse, then, the speed of its opposite follows turning off the pulse, giving rise to the speed of delay. A relaxation is sure to follow.
My greatest resonance is with the stanza with which I opened my slide deck at the Chemistry Department’s ResearchFest:
IX
Time comes into it.
Say it. Say it.
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.
. . . Clearly structure and dynamics is function and “time comes into it” is our NMR dynamics.
. . . Next is the importance of scientific communication, “say it say it”
. . . and we end with models, for what is a model but a story. And a good story is consistent, makes intuitive sense, tells us something bigger about our world, aids our imagination,, and at its best is predictive.
Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness” from The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Copyright © 2006 by Muriel Rukeyser. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management.
Source: Out of Silence: Selected Poems (TriQuarterly Books, 1992)
nmr trails 