Ayre Hotel, Kirkwall, 5 September 2007

James Clerk Maxwell (photo - courtesy of the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge).

I WAS a big Enid Blyton fan, and looking back, it was Not Good for me. I blame her for my hatred of French (scary foreign nervy woman probably a spy always in the story), for my lack of engagement with sums,(23 per cent in Year 2; “Morag does not appreciate the importance of Arithmetic in everyday life”) and for a lifelong distrust of Science, also fuelled by The Eagle comic, which featured a scary green person with a big domed head and connection to Other Planets.

There were those who were conversant with the big Periodic Table on the Science Room wall. I was just always aware of how very unpoetic the abbreviations were.

So it was interesting for me to visit Howie Firth’s 17th International Science Festival in Orkney, and learn about James Clerk Maxwell in a show called ‘And The Lights In Water Dancing’ – a quote from the scientist’s poetry.

Maxwell was featured in the Edinburgh Science Fesitival a couple of years ago, and – as always happens in Scotland – all of a sudden we discovered him and took him to our bosom, this son of the manse, the boy called Daftie because he came to school with home made shoes, this remarkable bridge between Newton and Einstein, mischevious poet, assiduous worker for scientific truth and Christian witness, who died at 48.

He’s now, it seems, an Officially Great Briton – and an even Greater Scot. Howie Firth finds him a fascinating character: a bridge between two cultures, an undeservedly neglected Scottish figure.

In the Ayre Hotel, Howie took a packed audience on a journey, exploring the life of this man. It helped, in a strange way, that Howie’s domed head was silhouetted against the last light of the Orkney summer, with a microphone – how persuasive, to have a faceless voice telling you things, accompanied by lots of images and music.

It’s – remarkably – making science sexy and pretty, to those of us who never thought it was. When Howie tells you, with real enthusiasm, “this is a story about the non-stoppability of gas!”, either you listen or you don’t. Everybody in the Ayre was listening.

Maxwell loved mirrors. He was the world’s first colour photographer. He did his earliest original work, on curves, aged 14, and subsequently graduated in maths, wrote about colour blindness, Saturn’s rings, and – most importantly – electricity, the connection between light and electromagnetism.

Howie showed us what a major figure he was – and then let us also hear, courtesy of Lise Simpson from Fair Isle, Three In A Bar (Lesley MacLeod, Fran Gray and Hamish Bayne) plus Slovenian Katarina Juvanicec and Dejan Lapanja – how he made poems and how they sounded when sung.

It was a Victorian thing, of course, to cross the curriculum, to write poetically about what you were meditating upon scientifically, but Clerk Maxwell has an engaging, playful poetic voice. His best known riff goes:

Gin a body meet a body
Flyin through the air
Gin a body hit a body,
Will it fly? And where?

As good a conjunction of parody sex and science as you’ll find, I think.

It’s always a gamble to set poetry to music, and Clerk Maxwell’s poetry may not be the easiest to place in the musical canon. It certainly doesn’t go with the Scottish fiddle and accordion style of playing which is Three In A Bar’s forte, but the unacompanied singing of his words was really moving.

One of his most interesting poems, ‘Lectures to Women on Physical Science’, a pastiche of Tennyson, is about Thomson’s Mirror Galvanometer, a beautiful brass instrument which measured the currents in the Atlantic. How modern is this introduction to a poem? He begins it:

Place – a small alcove with dark curtains
The class consists of one member….

Then Maxwell tells his student – in the alcove with dark curtains –

O love! You fail to read the scale
Correct to tenths of a division
To mirror heaven those eyes were given
And not for methods of precision…

Another perfect collision between objects – physics and sex colliding. This is the same man who, at three, asked his mother about everything that moved or shone or made noises, ‘”What’s the go o’ that? Show me how it doos!”

We had the story, we heard the songs, his poems set to music, or unaccompanied, and we were also shown images. That was just a bit News At Ten-ish, I thought, as if someone thought, Electricity! Oh ,OK, here’s a rushing burn. Curves! Oh OK, here’s a bit of an eclipse I took. Physics? – oh aye, here’s some sheep under a rainbow, which didn’t quite seem to fit in somehow.

I could have done without those, though they were lovely pictures, made by Selena Kuzman.The ideas and the words were enough, and we were left with Howie’s epitaph ringing in our ears: “His soul will live and grow for a long time to come.”

And here was me thinking scientists hadna a romantic bone in their bodies. Will Enid Blyton please leave the building.
It’s a remarkable achievement, the Science Festival. It’s especially important because Firth is interested in crossovers – have a look at the brochure, it’s full of scientific poets, the physics of pizza, the corrosion of piers, why Swedish women should be avoided on Sundays, how the men at the Auction Mart signal bids to each other, what Margaret Tait scratched out in her films. Check it out next year.

© Morag MacInnes, 2007

Links

• Orkney International Science Festival