Poems of David Jou
Translated from Catalan by Laia Cartro
The dialogue or the conflicts between science and religion go beyond an intellectual and political question and permeate into deep emotional dimensions and implicit cultural and psychological prejudices. Studying how these questions appear in poetry may be helpful to realize from a relatively unusual perspective these relations. On the other side, the relations between science and religion may be a fresh source of inspiration for poetry bringing to a relatively general audience some of the new conceptual aspects of science in the context of a religious expression, in an indirect but accessible way. The poems of Cantico cosmico by the well-known poet, priest and social activist Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua, 1925 – 2020) are an outstanding example of this endeavour, in which the contemporary views on cosmology, on evolution on neurosciences and on social sciences are reflected on and celebrated from a human and religious perspective in powerful verses.
In this section, several poems on science and religion by David Jou are presented. David Jou (Sitges, Catalonia, Spain, 1953) has been a professor of Condensed Matter Physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, until his retirement in 2018. His research is devoted to non-equilibrium thermodynamics and statistical physics, in the so-called extended irreversible thermodynamics, with applications to transport theory in nanosystems, superfluids, complex fluids, and cosmological models. He has published twenty-five books of poetry, in Catalan language, and eleven essays, in Spanish and Catalan. His books of poetry deal with science, with religion, with arts and politics, and with formal poetical research. Among those books stand Les escriptures de l’univers Poemes sobre ciència (The scriptures of the Universe: Poems on science), devoted to scientific topics, Poemes sobre ciència i fe (Poems on science and faith), Cartografies de Déu (Cartographies of God), poems on Judaism, Christianity, Islam and contemporary cultural challenges, Cant espiritual (Spiritual Song), Els ulls del falcó maltès (The eyes of the Maltese hawk), poems on cinema, and Palaus i equacions: Una celebració de Sicília (Palaces and equations: a celebration of Sicily), on sciences and arts in Sicily. Some of his poems have been translated to several languages, as English, German, Russian, Hungarian, Polish and Italian. Among his essays, we mention Déu, cosmos, caos: horitzons del diàleg entre ciència i religió (God, cosmos, chaos: hozions of the dialog between science and religion), Poesia de l’infinit: ciència i mística (Poetry of infinity: science and mysticism), Cerebro y universo: dos cosmologías (Brain and universe: two cosmologies), Reescribiendo el Génesis (Rewriting the Genesis), Introducción al mundo cuántico (Introduction to the quantum world). He is currently president of the Fundació Joan Maragall, of Barcelona, for the dialogue between Christianity and culture.
GOD OF THE UNIVERSE
They ask you: “What is the point of so many galaxies,
these immense spaces,
these vertiginous expanses,
if the objective and the sense of the universe is Love?
Is it not ridiculous and pathetic arrogance
to think we can be recipients of so much immensity?
But you know it isn’t, that maybe it isn’t
neither ridiculous, nor pathetic, nor arrogant:
that our atoms have formed in stars
while the universe was swiftly expanding,
that the design of our organs has been perfected
in a long evolutionary testing
while the universe was swiftly dilating,
and that therefore, we could only exist
in an immense universe,
in a fusion of glory and desolation,
in a superposing of fullness and emptiness.
It does not disgust reason to be this way:
that the handwriting of the universe is matter,
that the spirit of the universe is reason,
that the fire of the universe is Love,
and that, without embarrassment, you can name “God”
this Reason that surpasses you,
this Love that exceeds you,
this feeling of openness and mystery.
UNIVERSE AND HUMANS
“How ridiculous is to think that the universe
has been made for humans!”, some say.
And I agree with them:
I do not think it was made for us,
but for something much bigger than us:
Love.
And also for us,
inasmuch as we let Love
impregnate us and overpower us,
a Love greater than an ephemeral party
of the contact of hands and eyes, and of love-making,
a Love that perceives itself Reason and Sense,
wildly overflowing,
intimately welcoming, avidly cosmic,
quietly majestic.
Only in the measure of Love
was the universe made for us.
Without Love, there only remains exile,
absurdity, fate, death, inertia:
a universe, certainly,
not made for us.
INFINITY
You denied me, infinity,
you blotted me out in a deluge of indifferent light,
you overwhelmed me with abysses of emptiness,
you petrified me with the silence of dead stars,
you grew endlessly in every telescope,
and we knew that you were there beyond any eyesight,
beyond any fantasy of desire and any boldness of the mind.
But now we hear another music:
if you were not that great we could not exist,
the fire of stars could not have produced our atoms.
Our price is infinity,
maternal, paternal, coldly condescending,
nailed to our soul in the shape of nostalgia,
a weight too great to resist,
not of emptiness
but of not knowing what to name our dark flesh
with a clarity comparable to that of so many stars.
Brothers of infinity but nailed to death,
without knowing how to accept the finitude of time,
nor how to fill life with infinitude,
under a deluge of indifferent light,
under abysses of emptiness,
under the silence of dead stars,
but knowing that they are a price we cannot value.
THE WORLD AS A LOVE LETTER
You received a love letter
and you started, without reading it, to analyze its matter:
the molecules of ink and the paper fibres.
“Everything is matter and only matter”, some had told you.
Still without reading it,
you measured the energy consumed
in making the ink and the paper,
you weighed the time taken to write
with such vigour the strokes of its words.
“Everything is matter and energy, only matter and energy”,
others had told you.
But there was something more than matter and energy:
a call, a love, a promise of happiness,
a possible abundance,
a volcano, a hurricane, a breeze, a storm,
but, on the other hand,
you only measured out, counted, analyzed,
pontificated in conferences and congresses,
and you complained of a certain emptiness, of a lack of meaning.
Until one day, finally, you decided to read on your own,
to free yourself of wise men filled with equations and axioms,
and you realized that what you had been grinding to dust,
crumbling, scorning,
was a love letter.
How much time lost!
How much happiness wasted!
LOOKING AT A GRAIN OF SAND
That things are made of atoms
-whou doubts this, nowadays?-
it doesn’t exhaust their presence,
their existence and their mystery.
This grain of sand, for example, has a story:
it was a rock, it was stripped away, swept along,
carried, sculpted, polished by the force of the waves,
brought here, and now I look at it and I am surprised.
To all of those who say: the grain of sand
is only its atoms,
this story does not count
-neither the rock, nor the waves, nor my gaze-,
but this story has existed
-and this poem is a part of it-:
it does not appear in chemical analyses,
it is not captured in any equation,
it is irrelevant to its melting point
or to its specific heat,
but time is part of the existence of things,
invisible, intangible, a premonition
of what we call soul.
The scientist will break this entire chain
of interweavings and ressonances
and he will say: the grain of sand is only its atoms:
matter and structure.
It is not so, but it is encouraging to think so:
it allows us to talk about things with aplomb and conviction,
as if possessing them and knowing them entirely.
But its story is a part of it,
like a subtle, rebellious and ungraspable dimension,
irreducibly opened and unfolded,
like a secret background we will never possess.
THE EYE AND THE TRIANGLE
The Eye and the Triangle, one of the great symbols of the Creator:
cosmic architecture and attention to the created reality
-but, at the same time, an ambiguous symbol:
the sharp rigidity of the triangle
and the relentless watchfulness of an ever wakeful eye-.
Seen in this light the Creation, I wondered:
where is the open and sinuous wind of the Spirit?,
where is the warm tenderness of Love?,
where can we find freedom, intimacy, shelter
out of reach of the incessantly scrutinizing gaze?
But now, suddenly, in this prodigious light around me,
everything seems to float in the splendour of surprise,
gratuitously, magnanimously, inexplicably:
the cosmic laws could have been different
and this world would have never existed.
There was no need for anything, but here you have it all:
matter, form, energy, consciousness, paradox.
And in the pleasure of this gift –so pure, so magnificent-
you feel part of a divine Whole that calls you and sweeps you along.
VARIATIONS ON THE SUBJECT OF LIGHT IN THE BOOK OF GENESIS
In the beginning, God intended a Love greater than any sky or any land. And He said: “Let there be light” to illuminate it. And God’s thought became light, brilliant intuition, unique and supreme equation.
And light, like turbulent water, was not only light, but also time and space, matter and antimatter, heat and expansion, all that was necessary to make, little by little, atoms and galaxies, stars and planets, life and intelligence.
And God thought that He could finally rest, that light would spread out before him in a myriad of stars and lives that sooner or later would come upon the Love He had imagined.
But intelligence arrived, and rather than being lit up by love, it flamed up in protest, pride, violent greed and distance.
And God knew that He would no longer be able to rest, that he would have to listen to many tears, comfort many souls accompany much loneliness and pity many defeats.
How beautiful it would be to discover the primordial equation, the surprising harmony of its physical constants and its initial conditions with the existence of life!
But even so, the reason of the universe would not be in numbers but in Love –the mysterious Reason, perhaps, of the origins-.
