paired with “Asters and Goldenrod”

This activity invites students to expand on Kimmerer’s chapter by putting it in conversation with selections from Andrea Chapela’s “The Act of Seeing Through,” which could be used as either in-class or at-home reading and writing.

Introduction

ET: Kimmerer is far from alone in wanting to put different ways of knowing in conversation. Bringing Chapela into the conversation, with her essay on glass and its in-between state – not quite solid or liquid – gives students another vantage point into how ways of knowing across chemistry and poetry and the language each field uses affects one’s perception of what understanding means.

While discussing how we might teach Kimmerer’s chapter, we talked about how different experiences, expressive media, and disciplines function as lenses showing how one might see the world. I shared with my co-authors an instance of a student who was struggling with revising her paper. Since I knew that student was a photographer, I asked her to think about her writing as she would a photographic composition: What is centered? What details are in focus? What is outside of the frame? By calling on that framework, the student could more readily think of how she could reconsider balance and focus in her essay. Even in my late return to studying mathematics, integral calculus made more sense to me through metaphor: that I should always be on the lookout for the “caterpillar” version of the butterfly function in front of me.

“The Act of Seeing Through” is one of three essays in Chapela’s collection The Visible Unseen, which explores scientific and literary conventions while working out understanding herself. Nine of the numbered 61 sections appear here and were selected because they speak more directly to the language of science and poetry.

Guide

Read and Write: The Scientist Turned Poet

Read and take notes in the margins of how Chapela’s language changes and of what she sees as the limits and possibilities of scientific writing versus poetic writing. How does the borderline state of glass concretize the challenges of understanding through only one way of seeing: chemistry OR poetry?

5 I’d be lying if I said that my mother, the Mathematician, and my father, the Physicist, tried to stop me from quitting chemistry. They knew that after four years of the study of matter, and twenty-five years of scientific cohabitation, I’d digested scientific thought and language. I was the only one who ignored this fact when I left Mexico for the United States to write. But there’s no escape if what you find when you look inside is always science. Little by little its language seeped into my poems, and I started writing about bonds, synthesis, reactions, and decay. Hybrid words trapped between two worlds.

11 What is glass? (Consult entries 4, 26, and 57.) Even the most basic sources disagree. The Royal Spanish Academy (RAE): glass is a hard, fragile, and transparent or translucent solid without a crystalline structure. A delicate and breakable thing or a person of delicate temperament, easily irritated or angered. Colloquial Spanish expression meaning to take the blame: “to pay for broken glass.” When I google “glass is a liquid”: glass is a supercooled liquid, a viscous material that flows very slowly, so slowly that it would take hundreds of years to flow at room temperature. Wikipedia: common glass. Composition: silica, lime, and soda melted together at 1800°C (3272°F) and cooled until they form a disordered structure. A material that doesn’t behave like either a solid or a liquid.

19 Main characteristics of a solid: resists changes in form or volume, has a defined shape, particles are closely packed and ordered. Main characteristics of a liquid: has a defined volume regardless of pressure, but takes the form of its container. A cubic milliliter of water is the same in a cup, a bowl, a vase, the palm of my hand, a bathtub. And all those milliliters share the most important characteristic of a liquid: the ability to flow.

26 Supercooled liquids are partway between a solid and a liquid. Near the melting point, the molecules are moving, but run the risk of spontaneous crystallization. A glass is cooled beyond cold, beyond its freezing point, beyond solid, until the molecules have lost all possibility of movement: they’re stuck between order and disorder in a metastable state (consult entry 56). Christian Bök said it best in his poem “Glass”:

Glass represents

a poetic element

exiled

to a borderline

between

states of matter:

breakable water

not yet frozen,

yet unpourable.

49 Knowing I’ll be traveling soon makes me take up writing again. I read Glass (Object Lessons) by John Garrison. I admire his attempt to track glass through the depictions of the past and the imaginations of the future. I write down a quote: “Even when it’s transparent and trying its best to be invisible, it’s still affecting how we experience what is beyond it.” He’s talking about glass, but this idea could apply to all of language–scientific language, to be precise. How can I write about science from outside it? How can I stop seeing through language, using it as a tool, pretending exactitude is possible in words? What happens to scientific words when they’re observed? If we extend the metaphor, we’d say they become unstable and change aggregation states.

58 To pursue science is to assume that each repeatable experiment and proven hypothesis brings us closer to some absolute truth. At its core is the conviction that one day we’ll be able to understand everything around us. When I studied chemistry, I developed the bad habit of searching for precision in words, but my mistake was in forgetting that language is an approximation. Like believing that when I can see my breath in winter, I’m observing an ideal gas. I thought words were solid, reliable, but the exercise of writing has taught me that they mold to whatever container I put them in. They flow.

59 Glass, because of its metastability, is an orphaned material. This is due to the limitations of our language, the strictness of its taxonomy. Definitions in scientific language can’t be fluid, yet faced with the mystery of glass, we have to accept the fragility of words, their lack of precision. Accepting this opens the door to searching for a way of talking about the most elusive experiences–the sensations and feelings that can only be grasped through metaphor, though we often fail in our attempt to capture them in language. In failing to define glass, in having to make comparisons and create new categories, I discover that the orphanhood of glass is also, in its turn, the fundamental failure and the very orphanhood of writing.

60 I’m told that the day I arrived in Madrid was the first cold day since summer ended. In the morning, as I cross El Retiro, the chilly air feels crystalline, and under my feet the leaves crunch. I no longer need a map to find the Palacio de Cristal. I amble through it, more occupied with searching for my own reflection in the windows than studying the names on the floor. Unlike my house, the Palacia was built for gazing out: the pond, the blue sky, the trees in the park. The glass magnifies the birdsong. In Mexico, I always looked outward. But now, in Madrid, I’m looking inward. I pause before one of the walls, consider my reflection, and think about how I always have to go against the flow. So I focus on the glass and on the idea that one day everything around me will crystallize, will shatter, and in doing so will find equilibrium. Will I find it too? It’s hard to determine the final state of the system when you’re halfway through the process. Between two states is a transition, which sometimes reaches equilibrium and sometimes stays metastable–it always depends on the circumstances. Only with the passage of time, by looking back, can you tell which was the path.

Reflect: How Your Training Guides Your Vision

Focus on passage number 58. Consider how language is an approximation and how it is precise. Consider why Chapela might think of chemistry as more precise. Take this sentence: “In failing to define glass, in having to make comparisons and create new categories, I discover that the orphanhood of glass is also, in its turn, the fundamental failure and the very orphanhood of writing.” What about her training as a chemist might provoke such a strong desire for a precise definition that leaves no gray space between solid and liquid? Is that writing a “failure” to the chemist or the poet? To both?

Now that you have thought about those questions, return to a piece of your own writing and focus on a paragraph or two. Write a one-page reflection that discusses how your writing reveals something about how you see the topic at hand. Pull out 2-3 sentences from your own writing and break down what assumptions, perspectives, and disciplinary ways of knowing might be playing into how you understand the meaning of your topic.