Julia Schwartz
February 11, 2004
Gerald Stern – “I Remember Galileo”
In his poem “I Remember Galileo,” poet Gerald Stern equates the human mind, and conversely, the human life, with two clashing images: Galileo’s floating piece of paper, and a squirrel hopping across the busy Route 80. Stern’s epiphany of the squirrel as a metaphor for life as we live it in this technological age is developed through the poem, ending full circle as the scrap of paper and the “green ungoverned hillside” seem not so far apart.
The initial presentation of the mind is as a “piece of paper blown around by the wind,” an interpretation of the mind being lightweight and free, moved about by circumstances beyond its control. As he progresses through the first stanza of his poem, Stern examines this definition, as compared to that of the mind being a squirrel suddenly “caught crossing / Route 80 between the wheels of a giant truck.” In the new definition, the mind has more control, as the squirrel has chosen to run across the highway in that dance of life, as opposed to succumbing to the passivity of a scrap of paper tossed about “by the wind.”
It is the very fact that that squirrel does indeed have initial control over its action – he had “great purpose” and “alertness [to] his dancing,” which gives rise to the illusion of hope, of conquering the hazard that life is, to escape the “shadows” and the “hot wind,” and instead let his spirit reach the other side, that “ungoverned” hillside – to release his mind to the state of a piece of paper blowing upon the winds – a “mind of paper,” the “philosophical mind” that is the ideal of human existence, as opposed to the “terror” and “loud noise” that our bustling life has evolved into. The squirrel’s is caught in “a wild dash across the highway,” but this is a greater reality to the way we live our lives in the 21st century than is a drifting piece of paper, born into Galileo’s mind in a time where people did live more slowly, when piecing together the universe was only a sham. Now, we have perhaps too much control over our universe, with all our leaps and bounds in science. Or, we have less. We have more distractions and activities and events – more cars rushing across that busy highway that in Galileo’s time would have only been a dirt road, if not merely a green “ungoverned” hillside. Galileo’s treatises were an attempt to govern the universe, and he ultimately betrayed himself and his own theory of the mind as a “piece of paper blown about by the wind.” If the mind is in this state, it is free. Why tie strings to it?
Life is an unknown, just as is the squirrel’s mortality as he is full of “terror” dodging the wheels of a truck. He is “frightened” and his head is “jerking,” identifiers of one who is about to be destroyed, but he is fighting back against what might be his fate: he is traveling with “speed” and “lowness to the ground” – “his great purpose” provides him with the gumption to get across that dangerous highway and live another day. This is life to the speaker – the terror of uncertainty, but also the resolve to continue and fight danger as long as we can. “For this life” – the life full of “metal chairs” and “shadow[s]” – he needs a squirrel, a little tiny entity in the kingdom of life, but an individual, like the speaker himself. The “hot wind rushing through his hair” grants him feeling, and the “loud noise shaking him from head to tail” involves his whole being in this experience of peril.
The harsh reality of the situation is what reminds the squirrel he is alive, trapped in this crazy cycle we call a game, in the oftimes harsh reality that is indeed life. Life is no longer philosophy coined in the mind of a 16th century astronomer; it is that “wild dash” of the squirrel, rushing across the highway of a metropolis in the 21st century. And even still, both minds – the paper and the squirrel – end up back in nature, stuck to a tree or scrambling up a green hillside. Both find their piece, one through living, and the other through being and dancing. Isn’t it the danger what makes it all worthwhile?