Research

Cosmology today can give the age of the universe to within less than one per cent and knows that almost everything that exists gives off no light, and yet none of its diagrams offers a picture of that whole that would fit inside a reader’s head. The cosmic web of the simulations and the particle drawn as a little ball work inside each science as shortcuts and, outside it, go round as if they were portraits. Between a body of knowledge that keeps growing and an understanding that does not grow at the same pace opens the interval this research is concerned with.

For centuries poetry had a scene for that interval, that of a man to whom the whole universe shows itself at once, assembled like an engine, and who has to say what he saw. Dante sets it above every heaven, Camões on the summit of a hill, Drummond on a road in Minas Gerais at the end of the afternoon, where the machine opens before someone who no longer wants it. I have been reading these scenes since 2014, and what they show, read in sequence, is that the place from which the whole lets itself be seen comes down from one to the next, and that the descent measures how far each age trusted that it could see. After Drummond’s refusal the inherited question changes shape and becomes that of what figure totality can have for an understanding that knows itself to be finite.

I read the scenes with the science that built them, from Ptolemy to Pedro Nunes’s treatise on the sphere, and with the mining that ate away the Pico do Cauê, and I give a name to the contemporary condition, a scarcity of figures of the whole that coexists with the persistence of the wish to see it and with the mediations by which science itself makes up for it, locally and provisionally. In place of the old machines I propose a minimal figure, a curve that approaches two axes without touching them, and the position that follows from inhabiting it, while the poems of Noemáfagos, written as a pair with the thesis, ask the same question by other means.