Stephen Hawking Was a Poet

One Christmas in Dominica, my parents gave me unexpected gifts: two books about the universe. They were big, heavy, black coffee-table books, filled with glossy photos of moons, nebulae, and asteroid belts. I was entranced. I had already intuited from gazing at the stars with my German Shepherds in our mountain home that I was small and the universe was vast by imagining that every star was a planet like ours, filled with people looking up just like me—a particular smallness much tinier than most people imagine when they use such casual language. Through my newfound books, I began to realize that Earth and its intelligent inhabitants—who had only lived on Earth for a fraction of a second on the clock of the cosmos—were far smaller than I’d imagined, making the visions I heard each weekend in church, of earth being the center of all, seem less plausible still. I devoured the books and searched for more, and, through this, found Stephen Hawking’s wonderful books: A Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell.

Hawking was a poet, translating the scatter and flit, the endless summer and autumn, of the cosmos into language. All things contain poetry, are alive even if they are not, technically, alive. A hurricane is a horrific, furious, fatalistic poem, as is a meteor, a quasar, a black hole. A black hole, Hawking speculated, did not merely devour matter; instead, he said early on, they might bridge to baby universes, filled with that matter, or, as he declared later in his life, might re-release that matter, albeit garbled, like a TV show grainy with static. (Television static, incidentally, contains about one percent of cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang. “The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe,” as Bill Bryson put it in his majestic A Short History of Nearly Everything.) Hawking provided a vision of a finite, yet unbounded universe that was able to exist without a theistic deity’s creation, a universe that might even lead to other universes wholly distinct from our own.

He was a deadpan jester as well as a poet—he once jokingly bet his friend and fellow theoretical physicist Kip Thorne (who he would make multiple famous wagers with) a year-long subscription to Penthouse if someone could prove black holes did not exist, a gamble he was happy to concede defeat on, as most of his work was on black holes, though, he added wryly, the Penthouse subscription, which featured softcore pornography, came at “the outrage of Kip’s liberated wife.” (Had Hawking won, he would have received a four-year subscription to the lampooning British magazine, Private Eye.) But above all, he wanted to share the news about the universe, crafting rolling models of reality that defied common sense, yet held the soft elegance of a chandelier in a room lit only by moonlight.

For Williams Carlos Williams in “Asphodel,” poetry contained the news, a news more necessary and vital than that in journalistic headlines; for Pound, literature was “the news that stays news”; for Clarice Lispector, lyrical language was itself a translation of life and dream, a newspaper of the swirling inside-out. All of this, of course, is too simple on the surface. Poetry is not a newspaper. But in a deeper, more lasting, less ephemeral sense, poetry is the news, the news that works less on our orderly clocks than on slower, less definite timepieces. Hawking was not a poet, conventionally defined, yet he was a poet in another: he brought things nearly beyond language, like the unreality of a black hole or quantum fluctuations, into our homes in simple, yet deeply imagistic language.

Italo Calvino did this, too, in his playful, poignant, lovable Cosmicomics, as did Ray Bradbury in The Martian Chronicles; the time travel in Octavia Butler’s visceral novel Kindred may have no scientific explication, but it owes as much to H.G. Wells and to the African-American students she heard gloss over the horrors of slavery as it does to work by Einstein and Hawking. The difference between Hawking and such writers was that Hawking was directly transcribing from the cosmos, as it were. Hawking’s brilliance, it turned out, was as much for physics as it was for translation, for bringing the seemingly illegible news of a non-commonsensical world—the cosmos—to us. To wit, in 2002, Hawking asked that the formula for Hawking radiation be engraved on his tombstone. Poetry, of a sort, even to the end.

To be sure, Hawking was far from the first popularizer and translator of the universe; in this tradition, he joined Galileo, the Herschels (William, his son John, and John’s oft-overshadowed-but-brilliant scientist wife, Caroline), James Jeans, Arthur Eddington, Einstein, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lisa Randall, and many others. Yet his work stood out, not simply because he did, but because it was at once simple and elegant, and even in the simplicity of his sentences, I can sometimes hear, in his computerized voice, a quietly rhapsodic tone. There is a gentle dance, a terpsichorean love, in his books, even if his visions of the future—where natural disasters prevail and artificial intelligence leads to our destruction—are bleak and dark. Less obviously but still as brightly as Sagan, I felt he held up a candle in the dark.

*

I had long imagined being a scientist of some sort, though I knew from my days as a child that I wanted to write. Science was more dream than devotion, vision rather than vocation. First, I dreamt of being a marine biologist, chasing, like the scientist idol of my youth, Steve O’Shea, after the elusive, at-the-time-never-seen-alive giant squids that rushed through the incomprehensible black of the ocean’s lightless depths; I sailed away on the submersible of my books, studying the taxonomies of sharks, eels, cephalopods, and corals, until I knew so well the things in the sea that could kill me that I temporarily became afraid of all water, and the borders of the world took on the unpredictable blur of nightmares. The red line at the bottom of a public pool was, through my shortsighted eyes, the reclining tentacle of a great, cantankerous squid, waiting for me to get in when no one else was around; the tub might suddenly have flopping, fanged denizens of the blue; every stone in the water might become a stonefish, every step into sand a descent onto an indignant stingray’s barbed tail; even the showerhead briefly took on proportions of an impassioned horror, as I remember asking my mum if sharks, caught somehow in the plumbing, might end up in the shower. I clearly knew less about plumbing—that of pipes and of reality—than the ocean.

As a teen in secondary school, I switched into imagining myself an astronomer, exploring the cosmos alternately like Stephen Hawking and Spaceman Spiff from Calvin and Hobbes. Women who plumbed the reaches of the cosmos intrigued me in particular as I grew older, though the field, like so many, had been dominated by the names of men.

What moved me about Hawking was that I knew, even before reading anything about him, that he must have suffered at the hands of others, been bullied and mocked in the way Katt Williams would notoriously deem the eminent scientist a “crippled guy with a bad idea” in 2011, upon learning that Hawking was an atheist. I knew the way people would take apart the slight jut of his lip, the visible tooth, the blinking, the signature roboticized voice. When you have been bullied yourself, you can sometimes recognise it in others, or at least its smirking potential, the haze it puts before your eyes. It is easy to transform disability into stereotype and romanticization, whereby to be disabled is be “so strong” and to always be in a process of overcoming, ideas that fail to see that a “disabled” body is only defined as such by a narrow definition of what is “able.”

Still, by any measure, Hawking was indeed strong. I wonder, now, if I could have been as strong as he was, had our situations been switched. I cannot really imagine it. But I can imagine I might have given up, too frustrated and prone to listening hopefully for the flutter of Death’s gentle wings, and finally asked her to land, by my side, so she could take my hand and quiet the loneliness.

I think, again, of Hawking’s voice. Earlier this week, I found myself breaking down in tears when someone asked about my own history with voice, and I began to tell her about the way people had mocked me from as long as I can remember for sounding strange in some way, long before I transitioned. Kids laughed and said I was mentally retarded and a freak and shoved me in-between classes because I was reclusive and had a weird way of pronouncing things and an uncertain trepid smile. Simply talking began to fill me with fear and an ugly purple shame, dark like a welt. I do not know if this is why I learnt to speak softly, a trait I have retained into adulthood, but I know it is why I avoided raising my hand in class for years, why I thought, for a long time, that I would have to live alone and work from a distance away from others so I could avoid the shame of how I sound, even, perhaps, why I turned to writing, where no one could hear the pathetic, orcish voice behind the words, why I still do not give readings. My voice has transformed from what it used to be, yet I still struggle to make it sound the way I wish it did: like the voice of a cisgender woman. Almost every time I hear myself not sounding quite right, it reminds me of being bullied, of my purple self-loathing.

Once, I dreamt I was in a graveyard in Dominica, then, in a flash, was a princess on the deck of a green spaceship, having switched lives with someone else, or simply, inexplicably, teleported. I was so happy in the dream. I was a woman, no longer sea-heavy with dysphoria, and no one knew my history. I could start over, perhaps. No one would call me those demeaning names. Then I woke up.

I often retreated into dreaming of space so I could imagine escaping my pains, my agons, on my own planet. I also just loved the sidereal visions. Hawking, it seemed, did all this as well, in his own, resplendent, inspiring way.

*

“I want to show that people need not be limited by physical handicaps as long as they are not disabled in spirit,” he said, appositely, in 2007, after taking part in a zero-gravity flight on a Boeing 727 that allowed him to experience sudden lift and weightlessness, allowing him to almost swim, on these evanescent moments, in the air. A photo of him in the aircraft shows him smiling like a happy kid as he floats, gently steadied by three crew members in a circle around him, his eyes wide and hair seeming softly tugged upwards. He seems to levitate, body still faintly in the position of sitting in a chair at an angle even as no chair sits beneath him. There is a quiet transcendent rapture, an élan, in this photo.

It is my favorite image of him, magical yet mundane, imbued with a silent joie de vivre. A poet, gloriously afloat.