“to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”
(Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1833/1842, Ulysses)
Publisher’s Note
As a multidisciplinary journal, we embrace the concept of consilience proposed by E. O. Wilson in his 1998 book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Wilson believed that “the humanities, ranging from philosophy and history to moral reasoning, comparative religion, and interpretation of the arts, will draw closer to the sciences and partly fuse with them” (J. Horgan, Scientific American, June 25, 2021).
This is the first time that the concept of consilience is used to “unite” applied, psychoanalytic, medical, and organizational anthropology; psychohistory; psychoanalytic study of workplace organizations; rural medicine and rural health; and many more fields of knowledge, especially written in a poetic form. Even the sequence of the presented poems interweaves all seasons of life and daily experiences, some of which are as (deceptively) simple as opening a carton of milk or appreciating an old exercise bicycle, while the others delve into the darkest or the brightest corners of one’s soul. We thank the author, Howard F. Stein, for such a unique contribution to humanity.
Author’s Introduction
Most broadly conceived, consilience is the creative science and art of juxtaposing and attempted synthesizing, of ideas and concepts that, superficially, do not seem to belong together. They are not widely considered to be part of the same taxonomic “family” (dwell in separate universes of discourse). Sometimes they are even officially prohibited from being linked. The possibility of any convergence is counterintuitive or unthinkable.
Consider the widespread American slogan, “You cannot mix apples and oranges,” or “You are confusing apples with oranges.” Certainly, at one level of discourse, pomology science, they are different kinds of seed-bearing fruits of different species of trees. Yet, in ordinary cultural language, they both have in common that they are in the same taxonomic category as fruit, in contrast, say, with vegetables or meats. Apples and oranges as categories, converge into fruits.
To pursue this homely metaphor, from the perspective of consilience, it is not only acceptable but encouraged to conduct Galilean “thought experiments,” that is, in mind, that would see what happens when you put symbolic apples and oranges together. The history of science is replete with the discovery of new entities and theories, and with integrating, or at least placing side by side, thoughts that may appear unrelated to each other.
Before proceeding to the poems, I wish to add a caveat: as devil’s advocate, to be fair, there are limits even to consilience. To my knowledge, not everything can be gathered into a single, ever-more encompassing system. On the one hand, Einsteinian and Heisenbergian relativity and quantum physics could subsume Newtonian and Galilean theory within its boundaries, as a special case under specific conditions. But water and oil are immiscible, cannot dissolve and constitute a single entity. With this qualification in mind, consilience remains a powerful meta- or overarching framework for “more than meets the eye.”
Let me now turn to the seven poems in this collection. The set consists of at once separate, distinct poems, each to be read and reflected upon on its own terms; and are, I propose, related members of a larger group, perhaps overlapping sets as in Venn diagrams. The search for “common denominators” and convergences takes place at a mentally deep level, where they are never the same, identical, with each other, but exemplify and participate in similar underlying processes, a kind of underground river.
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The titles of the individual poems are: “Finality,” “Exercise Bicycle, Senior Cener,” “Anatomy Lesson of a Light Bulb Socket,” “Lunchtime, or Nobody Home,” “Lavender Pink,” “Open Other Side,” and “My Worst Day.” These poems are about the many universes in which I dwell. Let me now offer some “associations” about (or backstories of) the poems.
(1) “Finality”
Year after year, I navigated through the often-violent waters of the change of seasons, from infernal summer through stormy and relentlessly rainy autumn, and the triumphant invasion of winter.
(2) “Exercise Bicycle, Senior Center”
As I grow older and more physically infirm, I hold close the near-redemptive quality of spending two days per week at a Daily Living Center as a boost to my morale with fellow elderly human beings who face uncertain futures, and many staff members who care and offer gentle pats and real hugs. Here I have developed an almost personal relationship with a massive old stationary exercise bicycle.
(3) “Anatomy Lesson of a Light Bulb Socket”
Amid chronic experience of emotional abandonment and isolation in my own home of 25 years, I developed a bizarre (even clinically diagnosable?) yet comforting “personal” relationship with an ordinary incandescent table lamp on a table next to my bed, by gently running my fingers along the socket, touching its smooth metallic surface, and feeling touched back, even by an inanimate object.
(4) “Lunchtime,” or “Nobody Home”
I experience a sense of surprise and wonder at being able to communicate with an elderly woman whom I thought I could never “reach,” but who reached out to me and opened for me a carton of milk.
(5) “Lavender Pink”
In the organization where I worked for many years, a particular co-worker, Helen, and I often collaborated on projects. We quickly resonated with each other; our minds interwoven as if we were dancing in addressing any given task. Our relationship deepened into friendship, intensity alternating with playful flirting. We began to complete each other’s sentences, quickly comprehend each other’s thoughts, then take them further. In the opposite of competitive rivalry, we urged each other on. Time and again, we were amazed about where our ideas took us, places entirely different from where we had planned and originally thought we were going. It was as if some sort of separate mind took us where we needed to go.
Then, suddenly, Helen’s husband’s job took him to another, distant city. Her own skills were transferrable virtually anywhere. … And then she was gone, disappeared. I was devastated at every imaginable level, from task to entwined lives and emotions. From somewhere in this void, a poem began to form in my mind.
(6) “Open Other Side”
At the largely senior Daily Living Center where I spend 1-2 days per week, several staff aides summon us to the lunch tables in the back of the room around 11:15 AM. As we “residents” seat ourselves at the long tables, one aide brings a cart around that contains small cartons of milk with a straw. She sets them whenever participants ask for one.
Each carton is marked at the top of one side “Open” and on the other “Open other side.” Many of us can open them easily; others struggle; sometimes people in adjacent chairs or across the table help open cartons for those who are unable. For many people, staff open the cartons for them and insert the straw. One lesson I quickly learned from this single event is that nothing is always obvious, and nothing is always simple. From this realization emerged a fantasy, then a poem, in part humorous, in part earnest, about the mystery of opening a simple plastic covered cardboard milk carton.
(7) “My Worst Day” (originally “Nooses”)
“Co-morbidities” is a medical term for when a person/patient suffers from multiple, concurrent diseases. What about those days, or periods, in life when just about everything goes wrong? Goat rope hints at it. One day — and there have been many — I was so overwhelmed that I asked myself something like “What is the point of living like this — or even of living?” My discouragement bordered on despair. I was not “suicidal,” but I felt lifeless.
As I dwelled in the midst of this abyss, seeing no way out, a poem began to take shape in my mind. About bleakness, about hopelessness, about nowhere to turn. I thought of a heavy rope and a hangman’s noose. Then suddenly the last line descended upon me. I burst out laughing, as a cliche twisted into a pun. My mood immediately lifted: I had been saved by my own poem.
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These poems and the lives behind them do not somehow “add up.” I experience their relationship as more a confluence of streams into some undiscovered river. They weave themselves into an unfinishable tapestry, a rhythm of merging and separating and flowing into each other again – to create something I could not have imagined.
This group of poems is thus a “collection,” an “assortment” of strangers who, in me, become familiars to each other, a community. The rule and cliché read that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. True, but it misses the flow of the poems, and the wells from which they draw, into each other, re-creating and astonishing even the supposed poet who created them.
To use a different metaphor, imagine all these words, images, metaphors, emotions all existing in some kind of interwoven constellation, like mythic configurations in the night sky (I detest the more mathematical, abstract notion of “matrix” in this context.). That is the fabric in which all these poems are interconnected, though they can be read and understood separately. Does this image and evocation make any sense to You, my Reader? After you read – I hope aloud, and hear – the poems, I encourage you to return to this Introduction and see if it rings true for you – another test of consilience!
