Re-interpretation
This week was quite a big one for the workshop team—as in, the messages document is getting a complete rehaul. We’re at a bit of a standstill as it were; my boss has been shuffling around with the same messages for about a year, about engineering and creativity and Watt and entrepreneuring, but the workshop doesn’t support them. Since the entire exhibit was based around the workshop coming out of storage, some drastic re-framing was needed. It was a bit of a frustrating week, lots of meetings with the higher-ups one way or another all saying that they wanted something different, and our team trying to find a way to satisfy them all and yet still make a good exhibit.
My old research with finding modern objects may no longer be relevant. In fact, I hope it isn’t—it may be a bit of a clumsy comparison, now that I think about it. What I’ve been doing for the past few days is reading Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder, about science in the age of Romanticism. It’s gotten rave reviews and really lives up to expectations. Holmes has a great flair for narrative, illustrating convincingly that in that age, science and poetry and literature were one and the same, centred around the goal of seducing Nature to reveal its secrets. The focus of the book is on the lives of William Herschel and Humphry Davy, the astronomer and the chemist respectively, but it intwines a lot of other people, Watt included. The age of wonder, Holmes says, is roughly bookended by two “voyages of discovery,” Captain Cook’s Endeavour and Charles Darwin’s first trip to the Galapogos.
Reading some of the chapters, I’ve realised how specialized we are in today’s occupations. We tend to think of science as objective, cold, impersonal. Specialization may be best for the economy, but what of it for the soul? Sailing around the world and interacting with different cultures, looking at the skies on a clear night and musing on our existence, pushing the bounds of the human experience by taking nitrous oxide, riding up on a balloon to see our own world in a different light—how can these things be any less than Romantic? No wonder it inspired poets during the age of wonder. I feel that our society is for the worse for not emphasizing science as a means to understand our selves and our world, connecting it with liberal arts.
Humphry Davy was both a poet and a chemist, which is the reason Holmes chooses to focus on his life, for him he embodies the conflict between scientific and artistic temperament. Reading his chapter was especially poignant for me because I’d just gone to West Cornwall the week before, and recognized many place names and was able to picture Davy’s childhood. It’s truly beautiful there, one of the prettiest places I’ve ever been. I saw Davy’s statue on Market Jew Street in Penzance, walked along the promenande during the Golowan festival, saw a parade, perused through the markets. I spent a considerable time in the shops and on the beaches in St. Ives, which draws in about 300 artists at a single time, with little art galleries everywhere. I walked through Marazion to St. Michael’s Mount, home to the St. Aubyn family, formerly a monastery and a place of pilgrimage—some fishermen once saw an apparition of Archangel Michael there. The tides there are so cool—at high tide the mount becomes an island, and at other times there is a causeway.
This weekend was a low key one—I stayed in London. Ani came on Saturday and we went to the Tate Modern and Borough Market. Borough Market is amazing, I loaded up on fresh groceries. The mushrooms were perfect—that’s really the mark of quality, since mushrooms go so bad quickly. It was also incredibly inexpensive, and only about a half hour walk from my flat, so I’ll be going there again for certain. Walking there also includes a walk past St. Paul’s Cathedral and crossing the Millennium Bridge, a pedestrian footpath, which offers a lovely view of the Thames and the Tower Bridge in the distance.