Christopher Buckley on “Neutrinos”

Starting the late 1980s cosmology and science started to become subject matter for my poetry.  I came across some articles in The New Yorker on newly discovered Dark Matter and that caught my imagination and supported my agnosticism, my sense of doubt that had for years been pushing back against a childhood in which I was raised Catholic.  Faith vs. doubt was and remains a driving force in the writing.  I read more articles on recent findings and theories in cosmology and also read several books written for a popular audience, those of us with only 7th or 8th grade science educations.  To get across to us, to sell books, the science writers and astronomers had to use a lot of metaphors and leave out a lot of math.  Just the thing for me.  I watched many PBS Nova TV specials and eventually had enough material for a book of poems entitled DARK MATTER.  My method was to combine the science with life events and my own history as well as speculation about what is, or more to the point, isn’t there, finally.

In his BBC series and book by the same name, The Day the Universe Changed, James Burke pointed out that the universe has changed about every 50 years, meaning our understanding of it based on new discoveries changes.  Most of the “new” science in my book Dark Matter is now out of date or in question.  So it goes.

But the battle between hope and despair is the bedrock of a lot of the poems.  I realized early on that I shared an essential view with Charles Wright who said, “All my poems seem to be an ongoing argument with myself about the unlikelihood of salvation.” That is what an orthodox religious upbringing will do for you, once you realize what is most likely in the cards.  And if you share that view with Charles, there are not many crumbs left on the table when you get there.  Nevertheless, there it is, and I seem to come back to it often.   And voice has always been my concern, the authenticity of its tone that comes from essential human concerns and does more than report on amazing facts.

The events in “Neutrinos” were reported perhaps a number of years back.  Neutrinos have always been an amazing aspect of subatomic particle physics; they have a very small mass, which might even be zero—bits that are and are not there, that pass right through us largely undetected, that can move at near-light speed.  It is important to me to “do” something with the information, to find meaning in it for my life and thinking, hence the 3rd stanza of the poem.  I try to pull the details into my own orbit of thought and existence.  I never arrive at an absolute conclusion . . . I don’t know that the scientists arrive at one?  And like many, I love Einstein—beyond his genius, his grasp of the ironies and contradictions the cosmos presents as well as his understanding of humanity.  Time and eternity . . . it keeps me wondering.