Einstein & Ursula:  A Sonnet Suite

This series arose recently when I was meditating on the power of illusions, handed down from parent to child, from culture to child, when a child's troubled mind is relatively defenseless; on how illusions can unconsciously direct and shape a life. These sonnets are an attempt to understand for myself something of those effects in my own life; specifically, how my beliefs about the "saving grace" of scientific genius (personified by Einstein as the ultimate exemplar) and the "saving grace" of romantic love (embodied in the woman named here Ursula) imprisoned and misled me even as they awakened me to unsuspected beauty.

                                                                                —for Anthony Hecht

Preface

There are delusions worth remembering,

And there are the others. All are best left

Post haste. But when love’s at the heart of it,

Every move away seems a move against

That self they brought to life: that deepened you

And breathed you. —Unnatural contrary,

The life-force so cleaved to dream and nightmare,

Yet in our fallen kind a commonplace.

The long trial of aftermath revealed

The falsities: question’s knife was required,

And despair’s, to peel off the fancied selves,

Flay the raw underlayer down to bone.

And still this habit of stylish language

Lay by death: know I loved them, lie or not.

 Einstein

                        I want to know the mind of God.

                                                —A. Einstein

My belovèd Einstein, you seemed the answer:

That deep intelligence a fortress world.

“Greatest mind on the planet,” people said.

And your face, the laugh of sorrows made wisdom.

And everywhere respect followed your name.

Time, Movietone, how the newsreels loved you.

Your scenes were shot like an old silent movie,—

Always the narrator’s voice, never yours.

Perfect. Perfect. You were perfect. And I

Was their dark child, their shame, their imperfection.

In that little household of stunted lives,

Genius was the Olympian god

They cried out to in the rooms of their midnight,

And I thought if I were you, then their love.

 Ursula

                        Leave me just enough love to hold in my hand…

                             —Ne Me Quitte Pas, J. Brel, R. McKuen (transl.)

To write this poem I must feel what

I do not feel. To write this poem I must

Believe again. —Not all of it,

Not even something of what I thought it was;

But what now it is must be invaluable,

Blue sapphire of truth, love’s ruby,

Which believed would mean the past had not been false.…

Woman, the hand is empty. The past confesses.

It can no longer make this poem,

Nor can the skill of my thought

Or some late flourish of rehashed opinion.

This poem makes nothing,

Because nothing is left, nothing believed,

No thought holds: only memory, worthless memory.

Wishful Thinking Love

Just say I could not truly imagine it.

For all the ecstasies I constructed

Of perfect lovers, myst’ries, myself fire.…

No, my stories never had their measure.

But how fabulous were the bedroom scenes,

The passion was a poetry singing,

It sang the endless afternoon to them,

The hours like a river, and silver speech.

And always in these reveries they left.

I could be done without. Always. Come dusk

They’d tell me of their elsewhere lives, kindly

Sometimes, more often that indifference.

There you have it, my dream to dream at will,

And I could imagine nothing more than this.

 Elements of Reality: a Lesson

                        If, without in any way disturbing a system,
                        we can predict with certainty… the value
                        of a physical quantity, then there exists
                        an element of physical reality corresponding
                        to this physical quantity.

                                      —A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, & N. Rosen

“Yes, yes, but what is it really?” I asked.

He took several long puffs on his pipe

To signal he was thinking very hard,

Trying out in his mind different words.

This would be the third time through. He would fail;

Only the failure would be mine. I’d leave

His office, my stupidity confirmed,—

(Physics grad student? Christ, who was I fooling!)…

The “it” was mass—the reality of mass

Is how I would raise the question today.

Then, the new professor from Fermi Lab

Said there wasn’t a problem. I half believed him.

Mediocrity, in that moment, felled me.

Now I muse on what Einstein might have countered.

Q.E.D.

I imagined new sonnets like redemption.

Signatures of insight; the salve of wisdom;

My life revalued. I found only error.

I found a person who’d fled every moment,

Yet the memory of failure on failure

Something unshakable in the near distance

And faceless like a shrouded doppelganger,—

One’s familiar as the lie of unknowing.

In the end, Einstein was by his own making

Alone, half discredited. Only time and

The curved space it plays in will reinstate him.

And the woman? she has kept to her secrets;

They have gone with her, into time, the question

Of whom or what she loved rendered eternal.

 Afterword

What is missing is what was gained: something

Not them, though “caused” by them. Not loss exactly,

But what memory carries of absences,

A shaping sight, the wounded world seen true,

Which can pull down one’s vanity. —Some good,

No doubt, to be bettered. But it can ruin,

Hollow out the wilding spirit that made it

And leave the foundered self bereft of fire.

Things were once otherwise, of course. Fool’s gold,

And not merely youthful folly. Well into

The middle years the vein ran, there to worsen:

Calculus and sonnets and insane love.

When is the fool one was the better part?

—And if in the black deeps, the lesser burn?

David Cummings