I'm going with route B

Cheap, Dirty, Addictive

Everyone is wining about the Eskom tariff hike. But cheap electricity has done more harm than good.

At approximately 21c/KWh, South Africa's electricity price was one of the lowest in the world. Cheap electricity may sound like a blessing in a country where large segments of the population are still not supplied with power at all, but cheap electricity has encouraged bad energy habits that may be much, much more costly in the long run than we realise.

A brief look into the secret history of South Africa's cheap electricity shines some uncomfortable light onto our current energy practices, and demonstrates the importance of nationwide, systematic change.

Fact: we are supplied almost exclusively by coal-produced electricity

Economic sanctions placed on the Apartheid government lead to an urgent desire for energy independence. Taking advantage of our rich mineral supplies, we developed a highly productive coal-based electricity production system. Because coal and cheap labour were both so readily available, this system was able to produce a large amount of electricity for a very low price. However, this came at an enormous human and environmental price.

Today, nearly 80% of our electricity is produced through coal-powered steam turbine generators. South Africa now produces 224 tones of marketable coal every year, making it the fifth largest coal-producing country in the world (and the third largest exporter).

The under-pricing of electricity has caused South Africans to become addicted to habits of energy wastage.

Fact: the real cost of electricity is higher than you think

Ash, sulphur, nitrogen oxides, organic compounds, heavy metals, radioactive elements, greenhouse gasses ... creating electricity out of coal results in more forms of waste than any other energy source.

Burning coal to make electricity releases large volumes of Carbon Dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gasses. South Africa is the 11th highest emitter of CO2 in the world, and is responsible for 40% of Africa's greenhouse gas emissions. Coal pollution not only contributes to global warming, but it also has disastrous local environmental effects: contributing to land degradation, acid rain and smog. Communities living close to coal power stations are at a high risk of health problems like respiratory diseases.

The cost of electricity that used to appear on our electricity bills was deceptively low. To get an accurate reflection of the cost of electricity, we should have been taking into account:
- the loss of agricultural revenue due to land degradation resulting from coal pollution
- the cost of healthcare for people affected by coal-pollution-induced respiratory diseases, and coal mining accidents
- the likely international tariffs and trade barriers currently in the pipeline for countries that do not comply with international environmental standards
- the loss to our economy is our energy usage continues to outstrip our supply, resulting in continued blackouts
- the possibility that South Africa's coal reserves could run out in the next 50-150 years

The increased cost of electricity will not only fund Eskom's new build programme; it will also bring it some way closer to accurately portraying the real costs of energy production.

Fact: we are not yet doing enough to cut back on energy wastage

In 2007, South Africans were warned that we needed to start saving 10% of our electricity usage every year for the next five years, or our energy supply would be threatened. In early 2008, periodic blackouts demonstrated to us all with no uncertainty that our reserve margin was unsustainably low. But by October 2008, we had only managed to generate a measly saving of 0.4%.

Over the long term, South Africa needs to invest in clean, renewable sources of energy. Our green technologies already lag far behind those of other emerging countries. Brazil has been extremely successful in developing solar home systems in rural areas, wind farms, biomass power and photovoltaics. India has set up an entire ministry of New and Renewable Energy, which is successfully co-ordinating government investment in renewable energy technologies. China has become one of the world's leading investors in renewable energy, and in 2005 invested US$6-billion in renewable energy solutions.

Fact: we are faced with an unprecedented opportunity to alter our energy addiction

South Africa has never been in a better position to change its energy habits. Because the true cost of electricity is finally being made real to us, we are beginning to take pro-active steps to curb our addiction to cheap, polluting electricity.

We can easily reach our 10% target simply by making small changes to our homes and habits. From there, the opportunity is ours to explore the renewable energy sources of the future.

Poem: Postcards from Canada

My mind affixes to this image I have of you
Drawn years ago now, penciled in over countless meetings:
The shape of eyebrows, the curve behind ears,
The meeting places of skin - knees and underarms,
Stray hairs on thighs, the arrangement of moles.

Notes that assembled into something that became
You:
your skin,
your eyebrows,
your thighs.

But since it all ended, I have been assembling you
Out of words cramped into postcards from Canada
You tell me only the general now - you tell me:
I've dyed my hair blonde and bobbed it short
I've lost my tan, I've bags under my eyes from lack
of sleep, I'm smoking again, but I'm going to they gym,
Things that scare me, unknown things,
Not additions to my sketches but erasings -
Not news, but things I no longer know about you

Reminders, two or three every month, that you are gone
In the most essential way; that you are dissapearing
Day by day, even in my mind. A long, slow departure

To a Skylark

Shelley's famous "To a Skylark" begins:

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert-
That from heaven or near it
Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

The Romantics wrote countless songs about similarly unpremeditated bird-poets. The bird was thought of as the ultimate untrained artist, who sang whatever its "full heart" prompted it to. This notion is premised on the idea that birdsong is individualistic, random and fully innate.

The terribly un-Romantic truth, though, is that bird song is far more a learnt behaviour than one would imagine. Bird song is actually pre-set for each species, and very little individualistic variation goes into it. Baby birds that are raised away from any other birds of their species never learn to sing "properly", and end up unintelligable to other birds of their kind. These birds might be the only "unpremeditated" singers - but their song is more like the ungrammatical speech of feral children than like the creativity of the artist.

Actually, it all boils down to two messages that the bird might actually be saying: "fuck me" or "fuck off" - as birdsong generally relates to territoriality or mating (or, in fewer cases, warning of predators). The cynical side of me might suggest that most poets are expressing one of the same messages - but never mind ...

Quitting

Imagine a pill was invented which contained all the nutrients, vitamins, proteins and starches that one needs for optimal health. One takes the pill once a day, drinks water, and one is guaranteed a healthy body. However, only half of the population takes this pill; other people still eat food. Life, they argue, is about quality, and they take great joy in the religion of food.

Of course, there is a powerful correlation between food-eaters and younger mortality (they die of heart disease, they get osteoporosis, are a lot more likely to develop cancer because of food-additives etc.), which leads the pill-takers to characterise the food-eaters as suicidal, stupid, as well as unattractive (eating carries with it a range of aesthetic problems: it stains clothes, it destroys teeth, it can cause halitosis and so on).

So, some food eaters attempt to become pill-takers, but they find that even though their bodies soon adapt to not needing food, they still crave it. Their friends go out for meals in restaurants and they feel excluded. They miss the physical satisfaction of putting things in their mouths and chewing. They miss the ritual moments it marks in their day. They miss food as a crutch when they have a bad day, and as something basic they can rely on to make themselves feel good. They miss celebratory meals and religious feasts.

In short, they feel they have lost something intrinsic to themselves. They are healthy, but they feel like they have sacrificed something important in order to be so, and they feel hollow.

This is what it feels like to give up smoking. The only difference is that people are born needing to eat, and learn to need to smoke. But I promise you, the need becomes no less intense.

W H Auden and the eternal anxiety of the poet

"Whatever his future life as a wage earner, a citizen, a family man may be, to the end of his days his life as a poet will be without anticipation. He will never be able to say: 'Tommorow I will write a poem and, thanks to my training and experience, I already know I shall do a good job.' In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever."

William Carlos Williams and the Metaphors of Science

Picabia - The Love Machine

What does physics have to do with poetry?

Ever since the Romantics famously let their hair grow wild and declared that poets were better off rejecting science and turning inward to seek truth by the imagination, academics have been reluctant to draw strong parallels between the work of scientists and the work of poets. Our theories tend to rely upon uncovering sociological histories, and we tend to think of poets as bohemians who write “from the heart”; whose work entails uncovering the psychological life rather than in probing physical reality.

Now, William Carlos Williams was certainly no bohemian. Although he maintained productive friendships with numerous artists and writers of his day, he spent his life working as a paediatrician in a small New Jersey town. He was as well-educated in the sciences as in the arts; he read scientific journals and went to lectures by the pioneers of thermodynamics and atomic chemistry of the early 20th century. Williams often writes explicitly about the discoveries of early 20th century physics – much like the theme of evolution repeatedly appears in Thomas Hardy. For instance, in 1915, Albert Einstein published the paper outlining the General Theory of Relativity; and 6 years later Williams Published the following poem:

Oscar Dominguez - Nostalgia of Space

Overture to a Dance of Locomotives [extract]

A leaning pyramid of sunlight, narrowing
out at a high window, moves by the clock:
disaccordant hands straining out from
a centre: inevitable postures infinitely
repeated –
two – twofour – twoeight!

…

Poised horizontal
on glittering parallels the dingy cylinders
packed with a warm glow – inviting entry –
pull against the hour. But brakes can
hold a fixed posture till –
The whistle!

Not twoeight. Not twofour. Two!
Gliding windows. Colored cooks sweating
in a small kitchen. Taillights –

In time: twofour!
In time: twoeight!

- rivers are tunnelled: trestles
cross oozy swampland: wheels repeating
the same gesture remain relatively
stationary: rails forever parallel
return on themselves infinitely.
The dance is sure.

This is probably quite an obscure example – but you can see that he talks explicitly about both Special and General relativity. Note that the metaphor of trains is the one that Einstein himself chose to illustrate Special Relativity – and we are aware of how much science communicates through metaphor in this way. The poem closes with the phrase “the dance is sure” – expressing, perhaps, an appreciation for the certainty of physical law. [The trains – the older symbol of technological advancement; operates on the laws of Newtonian physics – now transformed into the “dancing” locomotives of Einsteinian relativity]

So – although it is an amusing game to trace the scientific themes within Williams’s poems, I am actually interested in a more meta-physical (or, meta-poetical) question – given that Williams clearly believed in the power of scientific metaphors to explain reality and truth; what does the poem do? Does the language of poetry operate differently to the language of science? And if so, what does poetry offer us that other uses of language can not?

Henry Adams, in The Education of Henry Adams, describes why the scientific changes of the turn of the century were so revolutionary. He says,

In these seven years [between 1895 and 1902] man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old. He had entered a supersensual world, in which he could measure nothing except by chance collisions of movements imperceptible to his sense … [We] seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of universes interfused – physics stark mad in metaphysics.[1]

Newtonian physics, which had dominated scientific thought until the 20th century, presents a view of the universe as stable. Objects are inert unless acted upon by some force. His paradigm largely describes our common sense experience of matter. Einstienian physics, on the other hand, proves that space and time are themselves dynamic quantities that are effected by forces and movements – and in turn, the curvature of space-time influences the way in which bodies move and forces act. All of the universe is in motion; E = mc2 - mass is energy. 20th century physics asks us to imagine reality on scales that we have never experienced, and to believe that the laws of nature are not what we would expect. This requires a leap of imaginative faith that is near-religious:

Where then will you find the only true belief in our day? Only in science. That is the realm of the incomplete, the convinced hypothesis – the frightening embodiment of mysteries, of transmutations from force to body and from body to – nothingness. Light.[2]

Williams reflects this exhilarating sense of a universe in motion by presenting us with poems that are built with verbs. Objects are never static; he does not paint still lives. Churches “tremble”, trees “arch”, and socks “endure”. This process is not simple personification; rather it is a recognition of a universal animating force, and a record of the mind encountering the world through language.

A Sort of a Song

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

- through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

Note that the metaphoric relationship is between the snake and the poem about the snake; in this way he is drawing explicit attention to the disjunct between signified and signifier. “No ideas but in things” was his motto – and he preferences concrete words over abstract ones. However, the tension for us as reader lies in the fact that we do not have access to the snake but only to the word or the idea, “snake”. “No ideas but in things” is problematic, then, as long as we insist on reading the poem as a signifier or a secondary representation of reality (and some hypothetical real snake). Clearly, the poem insists that we don’t. Instead, we must take the poem itself as the object. Here is another example:

Picasso - Nature Mort

The Dish of Fruit

The table describes
nothing: four legs, by which
it becomes a table. Four lines
by which it becomes a quatrain,

the poem that lifts the dish
of fruit, if we say it is like
a table – how will it describe
the contents of the poem?

Clearly I am drawing here on Structuralist and Post-Structuralist assuming that language can function as a closed system. But the image that Williams chose is perhaps more illuminating. He fixed upon the metaphor of the dynamo, and claimed that the poem is a machine. This image is far removed from the Romantic conception which sees poetry as sentimental or emotional; something written in times of grief or two express love. No, he argued,

There is nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.[3]

Williams was not alone amongst Modernist poets in arguing that good poetry should aim to be objective; that the “I” persona of the lyric should vanish; that the distinction between the speaking subject and the described object is an illusory one. T. S. Eliot argues something similar in Tradition and the Individual Talent[4], and Williams’s once-mentor Ezra Pound pioneered a similar notion. The poem is not expressive but creative – it creates meaning rather than communicates it. Therefore it does not matter if the subject matter of the poem is banal and mundane. For instance, the short poem called, Poem.

Poem

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

Because the content is so mundane, what is foregrounded is the poetic process itself – as is highlighted by the title. We are almost tempted construct meaning out of it – to claim that the cat symbolizes the phallus and the flowerpot the nihilistic void – but what is interesting about the poem (and there are many others like it) is the fact that it is powered so vigorously by the mechanisms of poetry: syntax and rhythm; or, form and sound.

The first word in the poem, “As”, places the poem within a continuous tense. The cat and its actions are conjured “as” the poem is read. The “as” also requires the sentence to be completed by a second clause, and this expectation propels the poem. The action is slowed down, the cat moves part by part – first “the right forefoot” and then “the hind”. The action is slowed down further by the modifier “carefully”; and the crucial verb “stepped” is withheld until the eighth line.

Rhythm reinforces the pace postulated by the syntax; the trotting rhythm of “as the cat / climbed over / the top of // the jamcloset” is interrupted by “carefully”, the rhythm is interrupted, mimetically reinforcing the considered, uncomfortably tense moment as the cat shifts its centre of balance – and then is resumed as the undefiable law of gravity takes over. It is an immensely satisfying poem to read, as it creates the sensation of a physical experience. This is the poetic engine. It is the foregrounding the mechanisms of language that are objects to be experienced in themselves.

But, of course, engines must have functions; dynamos must power a system. What system does Williams’s poetry power?

If Relativity was one cornerstone of 20th century science, then another was surely thermodynamics. Thermodynamics and the notion of entropy developed during the 19th century, but entered popular culture as metaphysical concepts in the early 20th. Entropy, simply put, is the rule of energy dissipation; the notion that the universe becomes increasingly chaotic and finally runs down. Entropy is the reason for the irreversibility of time, it is the rule that ash cannot again be flame. Like evolution, entropy became a metaphor for the decadence of Western culture, and it is cultural entropy that is expressed in works like Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s Waste Land. Both works, with their numerous allusions to literary tradition and the chaos of their forms, argue for an old culture, a tradition that has become so overbearing that it allows no space for comprehension; it is the information overload that becomes nonsensical, that Don Delillo will later call “noise”. Life continues but there is less and less energy in the system, and living becomes painful, leading Eliot to call April “the cruellest month / breeding lilacs out of the dead land”.

Williams knew that Eliot was a great poet, but felt that his pessimism and his clinging on to the European tradition of poetry betrayed the poetic responsibility of the American Modernist, which was to “make it new”, as Ezra Pound says. Williams was working on his epic poem Paterson at the same time that Eliot was composing the Waste Land – he published books 4 and 5 after he had read Eliot’s great eulogy for European poetry, and consciously subverts Eliot’s idioms within them. Here are just two small examples:

Williams

The sea is our home whither all rivers
(wither) run .

the nostalgic sea
sopped with our cries
Thalassa! Thalassa!
…
. draws us in to drown, of losses
and regrets .
(Paterson Book IV)


This is the blast
the eternal close
the final somersault
the end.
(Paterson Book IV)

Eliot

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
…
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
(The Waste Land)

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
(Hollow Men)

Paterson is built around the central image of a waterfall, which is perhaps the ideal metaphor for entropy (it is a deadly force that only runs in one direction). However, by the end of the poem, Williams insists that the river has begun to run backwards, because of the power of the poem to create sensual experience, within a poem, “the scent of a rose / startle[s] us anew”.

The concept of the permanence of the poem in a world that is otherwise filled with death and decay is an old one; one that occurs for instance in Shakespeare’s sonnets. What is unique in Williams’s poetics is a consciousness that the poem does not preserve lived experience; rather it constructs an experience using uniquely poetic mechanisms. The energy of poetry is immediate and sensual.

A life that is here and now is timeless … All things otherwise grow old and rot. By long experience the only thing that remains unchanged and unchangeable is the work of art.

Often, in traditional poetic discourse, the fertility of love and sex is the figure for this renewing force. Williams consciously rejects this, however. He makes reference to an essay by Henry Adams called “The Dynamo and the Virgin”. In this article Adams (with his idiosyncratic wit) argues that America has never quite managed to free itself from the fear of sex that they inherited from their Puritan ancestors. In American culture, the woman is substituted by the machine, which is eroticised and fetishised. The mechanised woman is a recurring figure in Modernist art (e.g. Kandinsky and Duchamp) and occurs over and over in Williams’s poems.

In book IV of Paterson, he subverts the image of the Holy Virgin by presenting her as Marie Curie, and in her praises a feminine power that is scientific rather than r(R)omantic.

From Paterson Book IV

a cavity aching
toward fission; a hollow,
a woman waiting to be filled

- a luminosity of elements, the
current leaping!
Pitchblende from Austria, the
valence of Uranium inexplicably
increased. Curie, the man, gave up
his work to buttress her.

But she is pregnant!
Poor Joseph,

the Italians say.

Glory to God in the highest
and on earth, peace, goodwill to
men!

Believe it or not.

A dissonance
in the valence of Uranium
led to the discovery [dissonance = juxtaposing, anti-metaphor]

Dissonance
(if you are interested)
leads to discovery

- to dissect away
the block and leave
a separate metal:

hydrogen
the flame, helium the
pregnant ash

[1] Adams, Henry (1918; 1931). The Education of Henry Adams. Random House, NewYork: p. 1069.
[2] Williams, William Carlos (
[3] Williams, William Carlos (
[4] Page 41.