FruitFly

Miroslav Holub. Holub is a Czechloslavakian poet, born in 1923. He died in 1998. He was an important scientist as well as a great poet. His field was immunology. His science informs his poetry on many levels. He has a characteristic maneouvre of ‘breaking down’ an object or situation into more complex parts. In science this is often referred to, sometimes pejoratively, as reductionism. With the simple but crucial difference that, in science, the parts are simpler than the whole. Holub subverts this. Consequently,  when Holub engages in this procedure it usually becomes surrealist and strange, the ‘parts’ animated by goals and agendas different from the whole. There is a famous essay of his on the death of a Muskrat, called ‘Shedding Life’. In it, he describes a Muskrat’s death, but on many different levels: at the immunological, hormonal, intracellular, etc. He observes that, even as the Muskrat lies cooling, components of it’s immune system are mounting a chemical defence on it’s behalf against the concrete it has been smashed onto. He mixes grotesque and disturbing but factual observation from science with Greek myth and episodes from history. Sometimes the former are radically at odds with the general meaning of the latter, the precision of scientific observation dissolves the bigger picture into a collection of little facts. He is not, however, nihilistic or pessimistic about the human endeavour. Science is, after all, a human invention and discipline. But Holub also nods towards another order of truth that he cannot fully relinquish while continuing to be a poet. Holub sometimes brings these two truths together, and simply lays them side by side, making no attempt to reconcile them. I don’t think they can be reconciled, ultimately. There’s a famous admission made by George Steiner (of all people), that you cannot ‘prove’ the greatness of Shakespeare. It’s not like mathematics or a problem in physics, where truth can be demonstrated by objective procedures. Wittgenstein and Tolstoy, for example, were both dissidents from Shakespeare. And Steiner could not think of any thing or way that would prove them wrong. Holub toys with the truths of science in a subversive way, often with political overtones, but still writes like the great poet he is.

(Zito the Magician)