Walt Whitman once wrote a snotty little poem called “I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” He wrote plenty of splendidly moving verses, too, but trust me: This one is a snicker, not an aria.
A guy listens to a technical lecture about the stars and planets, gets fed up and walks outside, whereupon he gazes up at the night sky. Take that, you pompous, fact-stuffed fool, the poem implies. The real truth about astronomy lies in how the stars make us feel.
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Whitman’s poem depends upon an assumption that the two realms — the dry realities of science and the rapturous emotions of a poet’s soul — are mutually exclusive, that a scientist and a poet are natural enemies. One deals in the concrete; the other in the metaphorical. It’s an old idea, this notion that technology and art are violently opposed. Everybody knows it.
Yet all progress depends upon taking what everybody knows and saying, “Oh, really?” Galileo did it to the conception of an Earth-centered solar system. And now, on a lesser but still important scale, a trio of Chicago cultural institutions is doing it to the idea that art and science must always be sniping at each other, like Whitman and his pedantic professor.
This weekend, the Field Museum, Steppenwolf Theater and the University of Chicago will collaborate on a production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo,” followed by a discussion among Field scientists, U. of C. faculty and the audience. If it catches the public’s fancy, more such events will follow, said Bernard Sahlins, the veteran Chicago theatrical impresario who is directing “Galileo.”
“There’s something nagging at the back of our minds,” Sahlins said. “There’s a deep concern about the ethical and practical problems we’re confronted with.” He cited issues such as cloning and genetic modification of food.
Scientists change the world; artists listen for the sound those changes make when they strike the human soul. But if scientists and artists can’t talk to each other, Sahlins mused, what chance do we have of keeping an eye on our leaping technological achievements?
Brecht’s “Galileo” is a vivid play about the 17th Century scientist’s discoveries and tribulations. The moment Galileo aimed his invention — the telescope — at the heavens, his fate was sealed. And so, of course, was ours.
John McCarter, president of the Field, said drama is the perfect test tube in which to mix science and the humanities. “It’s a way of getting at some of these issues and grappling with them. Theater is such an intense experience.”
He and Sahlins first kicked around the idea of collaborating a few months ago, McCarter recalled. They were discussing “The Two Cultures,” C.P. Snow’s legendary 1959 essay about the chasm between the arts and the sciences, and how many of Snow’s observations still resonated some four decades later. As the late Snow complained, “We have lost even the pretense of a common culture.”
Undaunted, a museum, a university and a theatrical troupe will try to create that single culture, at least long enough to contemplate some of the momentous issues that loom over humanity like a stubborn rack of stars: Should technology have an ethical component? What has scientific progress done for the quality of our lives? And what if, having asked the questions, we don’t like the answers?
“We crawl by inches,” Galileo declares in Brecht’s play. “What we find today we will wipe from the blackboard tomorrow and reject it — unless it shows up again the day after tomorrow . . . Take the cloth off the telescope and turn it on the sun.”
The telescope is turned. Step up and take a peek.
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“Galileo” will be performed at several sites and times. For information call the Field at 312-665-7400.