The best laid plans do not always come to fruition, and this was unfortunately the case when capturing the video content from our Electromagnetic Field event. As a way to capture the stories, and energy of the evening, we asked members of the panel to share thoughts with us on what they remember. From Richard Harrison…
What I Can Tell You About What I Recall is how supportive the audience was. I probably should have expected it – it was a D.Talks event after all – but there was a surprise for me: how many people from the energy sector were there to talk about their own hopes for a transformation from a “that which we destroy to create energy” to “that which we can use creatively to transform already created energy into a form we can use.” To use the language of high school physics, we were all of a mind on the idea that instead of going from potential to kinetic, we can re-route kinetic energy from one form to another. That was a revelation to me. I thought the conversation excelled when it was about that.
It may have something to do with the nature of public speaking, but I don’t remember much of what I personally said outside the poem that I read. In Reimagining Fire, this poem appears alongside three others of mine, alongside printmaker Kate Baillies’ beautiful piece that depicts a microscopic view of soil in which the darkened earth appears like the night sky. It’s as close as I’ve seen to Blake’s instruction that to see rightly is to see the universe in a grain of sand. So here they are, the best words I had to offer that night.
And it Bursts with Light
Near the end of my travels in Ghana,
I saw a young woman begging
near the market where
I went to spend the last of my Ghanaian money,
which cannot be switched
for other money once you leave.
I had already seen things that changed my eyes:
The generation of river-blind grandparents holding the hands
of the children bound to them by family to lead them
through the cacophonous streets.
Men with alms’ bowls in their mouths, their hands fisted around
blocks of wood, hauling the legs that polio left curled like trumpet pipe
where taxi cabs from the airport sat stopped by red lights.
And then I met the woman at the market who,
said a shopkeeper, was a leper, the disease her name,
“leper”, like “believer” or “follower”
essence before existence,
that essence, a terror of medieval thought.
She was looking for money. She was alone. I know.
I know.
I knew leprosy was not contagious.
I knew being within range of her breath would
put me in no danger. Still,
when I gave her the rest of my money,
I let her put her fingers on one side of the bills
while I held the other.
But after she accepted my money,
she smiled and looked me in the face,
and put out her hand again,
offering it to mine to shake,
to touch and be touched,
human being, human being,
giving me a chance to do something
my life had never asked.
I took her hand.
I thanked her. I wished her well.
When I came back from Africa, I asked Lisa to marry me.
The limits of your poetry
are the words you never write,
and I have never written the story of
the day I held a leper’s hand.
Perhaps I thought that reaching
across the kind of fearful ignorance
that knowledge alone cannot dispel
but tells you that you must
is something I would need to do only once.
Perhaps I’d hoped that to be true,
though I know it isn’t.
Perhaps I haven’t known what I would do
if I had to do it over.
Perhaps I’ve never seen what I did not just
as defying what I felt, but as in defiance of
everything that raised me, right or wrong.
I have been less intimate with the Earth
than those who drill for oil.
I have loved the land less
than a rancher loves it.
The biology I studied in the 1970s
is the biology of a planet that no longer exists.
The Earth I have known
has always been sick.
But now the machine
we have tried to make of the world,
the pistons of its great engines,
the vaults of its boilers and
the secret labs of its chemical combinations
and microscopic explosions are crumbling
all around us;
the fires have leapt from their furnaces;
the Earth is a holy thing, alive, dying, terrible,
reaching out, and
we cannot flee the falling plinths of the sky,
the roof of the atmosphere so shattered that
the sun looks down with its destroyer’s face.
I want to retreat into every treasured mistake I’ve been taught
that got me here.
But their collapse is telling us everything we do now
must be done with love for what we have treated
with the contempt of young thieves
robbing their parents
and blaming them for their own dishonesty.
Here. Look here.
Here is the soil, a word that entered
our language 800 years ago
as a combination of
“tub” and “filth” to mean,
“a pig’s wallowing place,” it is the soil
as the miracle of microbes and elements
below the level of our sight;
not a carbon capture machine,
or a natural resource to be doused
with fertilizers and pesticides year after year
until it can give no more;
the soil is a billion billion billion mouths to feed — us,
a giant mothering around the Earth
that would be dead as Mars without it;
the soil’s darkness is our own. Touch it, says this artwork.
Touch me, says the hand I would have
shunned were it never open to me
to release error’s hold, and touch – touch
the divine and giving
and it bursts, it bursts with light.
I found the other panelists’ presentations fascinating – and the silence of attention in the room while they were speaking says the audience did, too. I’m sure the other panelists will speak more fully on what they presented, so I won’t try to recap it all. I will say that of the talks, the one I’ve spoken of most since has been Chris Cheng’s presentation on geothermal energy. What excited me most about it was the way in which it embodies the principles of energy redirection rather than destruction: heat from below the surface of the earth used to power our energy-consuming devices on top of it. And that we can transform abandoned oil wells – of which there are thousands blighting the Alberta landscape – is both poetic and ecological: gold from lead. I’d heard of geothermal energy, of course, but to see it as something we are already using at scale was heartening. We need hope, not as an illusion, but as a motivator, and hope with an example is hope we can sustain.
One last thing, though I think this overlaps with what we do have a recording of, was the conversation about just how much energy we have put into the atmosphere that has created the crisis we knew we were experiencing at the time of the talks and that we have been feeling in the air with our own failing bodies as we watch it consume our forests these past few weeks. I think of the physicist who talked about how much energy it takes to raise the world’s temperature by a degree Celsius. He used the “Hiroshima bomb” as a unit of measure. It was a shockingly enormous number of them – how much destructive power it takes to change the planet – destructive power we have used blithely. And I thought a couple of things. One was the way in which one generation’s unimaginable unleashed force has become a unit of measure two generations later. Such a short time for the weapon we once thought the worst we could make to become a word for energy the way barrel serves to measure oil. Secondly, and more important, how many lives that bomb took in 1945; that’s how many lives are in the balance every time we use that much energy now, only now our use of that energy is hidden in everyday life, so our work, illustrated so profoundly by the electromagnetic art of Allora & Calzadilla that we were there to honour, is to make that invisible energy noticed, make it understood as the life and death meaning it has.
Richard Harrison
July 30, 2023.