{"id":8816,"date":"2024-09-19T18:20:49","date_gmt":"2024-09-19T22:20:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-science-of-what-made-you-you-with-a-dazzling-poem-read-by-david-byrne-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-09-19T18:20:49","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T22:20:49","slug":"the-science-of-what-made-you-you-with-a-dazzling-poem-read-by-david-byrne-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-science-of-what-made-you-you-with-a-dazzling-poem-read-by-david-byrne-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"The Science of What Made You You, with a Dazzling Poem Read by David Byrne \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We are each a chance constellation of elements forged in long-dead stars assembled by gravity, which may be the other word for God \u2014 the weakest of the four fundamental forces, yet the great cosmic compactor that made the first atoms cohere into a common center to form the first star: an immense ball of gas, at the core of which was a hydrogen sphere that eventually reached pressures of millions of atmospheres and heated up to millions of degrees. These extreme conditions triggered a new phenomenon in the cosmos \u2014 the first nuclear fusion<\/a> reactions: When two hydrogen atoms collide with immense force, neutrons are transferred from one nucleus to the other, making some atoms larger. After a series of such collisions, a nucleus with two protons forms and the second element \u2014 helium \u2014 is born. As the star ignites, illuminating the austere darkness of pure spacetime surrounding it, it keeps burning its hydrogen to make more helium. The fusion accelerates, forging carbon, then neon, then oxygen, and so forth across the periodic table, turning the star into a kind of onion with layers of fusion reactions. <\/p>\n

Most of the first twenty-six elements in the periodic table \u2014 the elements composing almost everything we can touch and see \u2014 were created by nuclear fusion in individual stars. If you could tag any individual atom in your body and follow it backward in time, across all the other matter it composed before it became yours \u2014 your mother\u2019s body, the food your mother ate, the soil in which that food grew, the geologic strata ground down by the oceans to make that soil \u2014 you could trace it all the way back to the core of a particular star that lived and died billions of years ago: an actual atom that is now in you, having prevailed over the infinite probabilities by which it could have ended up in someone else. <\/p>\n

To this Rube Goldberg machine of chance you owe all of your particularity \u2014 alter any part of that cosmic genealogy, and you would have ended up as someone else. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA \/ Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The victory march of our particularity against probability comes alive in a short, dazzling poem by Ruth Stone<\/strong> (June 8, 1915\u2013November 19, 2011).<\/p>\n

Stone was six and enchanted by her grandmother\u2019s dictionary when she began writing poetry. She was eight-four and the grandmother of seven when she received major recognition as a poet. By the time she died, having lived nearly a century and survived her husband\u2019s suicide, she had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Award with her singular poems bridging the domestic and the cosmic, lensing the world of love and loss, of rapture and regret, through the world of galaxies and particles \u2014 poems shimmering with the spirit of The Universe in Verse<\/em><\/a> (which is now a book<\/a>).<\/p>\n

This poem, found in What Love Comes To<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 Stone\u2019s final poetry collection, published just before her death at age 96 \u2014 was read at the seventh annual Universe in Verse<\/em> by David Byrne.<\/p>\n