In 1968, our standard-sized nuclear family moved from the western edge of Wolverhampton to a northern edge of London.  I was childminder, cook, cleaner and shopper.  One Thursday morning I drove the children, 4 and 2, into Finchley, where my supermarket of choice was MacFisheries: repurposed from a chain of fishmongers.

After shopping I thought the children might tolerate a short exploration of the WH Smith next door.  Drawn to a rotating stand of Penguin Books, I picked up Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Selected Poems, recently published in their Modern European Poets series. As I flicked through the slim volume, my mind was seized by the opening of summer poem:

anything is possible

                              that we are not dead yet

a door opens

                   and I prefer

new errors

                to every certainty

in my mouth

                    a taste of earlier times

The children were ready to leave so I couldn’t afford to be transfixed or read more. I quickly paid four shillings and took the children to the promised playground. With no idea why, how, or what, I started writing that evening. Something had happened and through time, trial and error, I became a poet.

Penguin Modern European Poets was an important strand of the reading I took up. Gunther Grass, Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz, Bertold Brecht, Anna Ahkmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Yevgeny Yevtushenko: back to Enzensberger. He quoted someone called Lao Tsu –one should work upon that which does not yet exist – so I must read the Tao Te Ching and old Chinese poets. Then English poets, Welsh poets, some American poets, anthologies of African poets: Enzensberger again.

I was school-teaching part time and enrolled in a sociology course    with weekly lectures and annual exams.  When in 1969 our son started school, I envisaged a time when I’d be less occupied with childcare and playgroups. I applied to Birkbeck University College which offered evening courses for undergraduates.

2. American physicist David Bohm had been Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck, University of London since 1961. Ten years earlier, while still living and working in the USA, he had published Quantum Theory, a well-received undergraduate textbook. In Infinite Potential, Bohm’s biographer F. David Peat referred to the theme of wholeness in the book: “Quantum concepts imply that the world acts …like a single indivisible unit, in which even the ‘intrinsic’ nature of each wave or particle depends to some degree on its relationship to its surroundings”. Albert Einstein reportedly liked Bohm’s book. He saw quantum theory as interim: a way of describing what happens at subatomic levels, but insufficient as a basis for the whole of physics.

Bohm had completed his doctorate during WW2 at the University of California, Berkeley, Radiation Laboratory. His supervisor, Robert Oppenheimer, was also Director of the Manhattan Project, working towards the first development of atomic weapons. Bohm was banned from joining the Project, on account of his trade union activities and communist associations; but Oppenheimer adopted some of his calculations. The first atomic bomb was successfully tested in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. Oppenheimer said later that the explosion brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” In August 1945, atomic bombs were dropped  on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to terrible, lasting effect. Oppenheimer became known as Father of the Atomic Bomb.

After the war, Bohm became an Assistant Professor at Princeton University. Einstein, exiled from Europe and working at  the nearby Institute for Advanced Study, had friends at the house where Bohm was rooming. The USA and the USSR were no longer allies and in 1949, the USSR tested its own nuclear device. The US House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC, wanted to know whether anybody had given the USSR classified information: (someone had). Bohm was under suspicion for the same reasons and friendships as had barred him from the Manhattan Project. In 1950, he was arrested for refusing to answer some of HUAC’s questions, and in May 1951, he was acquitted. Unexpectedly however, Princeton had suspended him and by declining to lift the suspension, dismissed him. Unable to work in his field in the USA or Europe, Bohm, on the recommendations of Einstein and Oppenheimer, accepted a professorship in Brazil. Soon after he arrived, a US consul confiscated Bohm’s passport, which he only regained years later. He worked in Brazil until 1955, and then in Israel, where he met and married Sarah ‘Saral’ Woolfson. He wanted to work in Europe and from 1957 held a post as Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, UK, until he went to Birkbeck in 1961.

In 1970, I had to turn down an undergraduate place at Birkbeck, but I wouldn’t have met Bohm anyway. He was a professor, I a student: his subject was theoretical physics, my choice at the time some amalgam of ‘soft’ sciences. By the time I read Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order in the early 1980s, I had a small daughter with my second husband.  We were living in an ex-farmhouse in rural Carmarthenshire, West Wales, keeping chickens and making a piece of sheep pasture into an organic garden. We had electricity, water from a spring, and more rundown outbuildings than we could afford to fix. I worked on a friend’s market stall and in a writers’ union, ran children’s playschemes and earned a pittance.

I must have read a review of Bohm’s book and my copy came to me from Pembroke Dock through the Inter Library Loan Scheme. I must admit, I initially found it hard going, but the book had something I recognised, and I persevered. Earlier, in The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra had described the universe as a dynamic web of interrelated events, with subtler connections than anyone thought.  Bohm recognised that dynamic web: reality as a coherent whole, and consciousness an aspect of perpetual change. He was thinking that the brain, at cellular levels, works according to the maths of some quantum effects. Rather than two substances, mental and physical, Bohm recognised two orders of reality, implicate and explicate. Like quantum entities, he said, thought is non-localised and distributed.

Bohm’s colleague, F. David Peat later proposed that in an inexhaustible cosmos, science only touches the surface. Before the advent of quantum theory, science dealt with one level, the order of space and time, separation and distance, mechanical force and effective cause: which Bohm called the explicate order. The deeper order, more in keeping with the indications of quantum theory and closer to our unconditioned thought, Bohm called the implicate or enfolded order. When Wholeness and the Implicate Order was published in 1980, Peat said that physicists and philosophers were wary of its thinking. Writers, artists, musicians and psychologists meanwhile recognised a powerful common metaphor.

Bohm  has now been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century, who contributed to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind. He warned of the dangers of unrestrained reason and technology, and advocated genuine dialogue to overcome conflict and divisions in society.  He saw thought as a system, a network of connections passing seamlessly between people throughout society. A fault in the functioning of thought, a system fault, infects the whole network. Bohm saw that thought objectifies itself: repeated thoughts and reactions become ‘hard-wired’ into consciousness. Our human and prehuman ancestors lived social lives, brimful with communication, and our language, thought and communication systems are not distinct from theirs. We inevitably sustain preconceptions from our families, cultures, and communities.  We create a world according to our mode of participation and create ourselves accordingly. Human thinking and consciousness in and between communities and societies constantly generate what Bohm called incoherence. Thinking in our present way has created and recreates our present world.

Bohm spoke about the implicate or enfolded order, a vast range of potentiality which can unfold. The way it unfolds depends on many things, including the way we think. In the implicate order, everything mutually participates with everything: nothing is complete in itself but realised only in participation. Consciousness is our immediate experience of the implicate order. Bohm advocated a form of dialogue which came to be known as Bohmian: live, shared enquiry into the movement of thought and the process of “thinking together”. Thought is a process which can go wrong and requires attention said Bohm.  Inevitably we prioritise the content of thought over the process. Individuals can attend to our own thought, but what is needed said Bohm is dialogue in its real sense of “flowing through” amongst people. Changing the way we think, together with others, might release humanity’s latent creativity.

3. The ultimate source of intelligence is enfolded into the whole, Bohm told Dutch artist and writer Louwrien Wijers. What is, he wrote earlier, is a whole movement in which each aspect flows into and merges with all other aspects. Movement is primary. Bohm’s thinking struck a deep rapport with Leroy Little Bear of the Blackfoot Confederacy, Professor Emeritus at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada.  “We talked late into the night” said Little Bear in a Preface to Bohm’s On Creativity “about how language leads the speaker down a particular thinking pathway”. Another time, Little Bear was struck by similarities between Native American “talking circles” and Bohm’s idea of dialogue: the same principles apply he said. “The Blackfoot mind is a repository of creativity because of the notion of constant flux”, said Little Bear. “It relates to reality from the perspective of order over chaos, eschewing or transcending boundaries”. A language like Blackfoot is about process, action and constant flux. Little Bear found that such aspects of the Blackfoot mind complement Bohm’s ideas on creativity.

For eight years, Bohm’s colleague F. David Peat shared his time between working with Bohm and Roger Penrose at Birkbeck and working for Canada’s National Research Council. In Canada, Peat initiated discussion between Western scientists and Native American elders, including Leroy Little Bear. Most European languages are closely related: their world-view implicitly carries similar notions of reality, time, space and causality. They dominate their original continent and through colonialism, are widespread elsewhere. Thought is generally inseparable from language, and the very activity of our analytic linear Western minds, said Peat in Blackfoot Physics, obstructs us from comprehending Indigenous thinking.

Algonkian speaking peoples, such as the Blackfoot, Cheyenne and Cree share a verb-based language family, expressing relationships and balances between energies, reflecting their experience. In indigenous North American societies, each language grew within a particular landscape. Spoken language is not a medium for communication, but communication itself, direct, alive as bird-song or the hum of bees, the sound of a stampeding herd or leaping salmon. In Mic Maq, Peat was told, the names of trees are the sound of Autumn wind moving through their leaves. English, said Peat’s friend Sa’ke’j Henderson, is a language for the eye, an Algonkian language is of the ear. When he had to speak English rather than Mic Maq, Sa’ke’j felt obliged to interact with a world of objects, boundaries and categories, rather than his familiar world of flows, processes, activities, transformations and energies. Seeing, eyes identify the surface world of object and material things:  hearing, ears deal with subtle levels of flux and change behind appearance. (F. David Peat: Blackfoot Physics – A Journey into the Native American Universe, Fourth Estate, London, pp.231)

Cultural incongruity and difference between Western and Indigenous sciences, said Peat, suggest they are from two worlds: but in the 20^th century, leading-edge physicists acknowledged nature as a flux of processes. In both quantum theory and Indigenous science, there is no separation between individual and society, matter and spirit, each of us and the whole of nature. Peat spoke of whole persons, body, mind and spirit, the interconnectedness of nature, Earth’s fragility and sensitivity.

An Algonkian language of flow and energy is more in tune than a European one, with the nature of things understood in quantum theory and modern physics.  When Bohm argued for a new sort of language, based on process, activity, transformation and change, he didn’t know that such a language already exists. Bohm wanted a language based primarily in verbs, and grammar deriving from verbs: a language adapted to a reality of enfolding and unfolding matter and thought. When Bohm met with Algonkian speakers such as Little Bear, he was struck by what seemed a ‘perfect bridge’ between their world view and his philosophy.

4. The opening of Enzensberger’s summer poem, quoted above, indicates its form, which the poet saw as openness. He identified the poem as “a net-like construction” with which new experiences can be caught again, even when the text is finished. I find that misleading. The form of the poem is open to be used again, for new experience: summer poem itself is, as the poet said, finished.

Enzensberger, born in 1929, was about 20 at the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany, of which he became a literary leading light. He lived into his 90’s and died in 2022: an author, poet, translator, and editor, whose more than 70 books are translated overall into 40 languages. Like Brecht, said Michael Hamburger, his sometimes translator, Enzensberger wanted his poems to be as publically accessible as graffiti on a wall. Reminded now of his eminence and the range, originality, brilliance of his work, I was briefly abashed to realise how little attention I had paid Enzensberger. Leafing backwards through the Penguin Selected Poems, I passed over titles familiar to me and arrived at bill of fare; a modest, superb example of a poet saying something about European civilisation, simply, and uniquely. Yet the matter in hand is not Enzensberger’s brilliance, eminence or range, nor the paradox of a German poet remotely changing the consciousness of an English housewife.

In Leroy Little Bear’s Preface to Bohm’s On Creativity I read that in a universe too vast for the human mind to comprehend, the essence of life is movement. This is the Blackfoot idea of constant flux: that creation consists of energy waves interrelated in a ‘spider-web’ network of relationships. My mind jumps to Enzensberger’s description of summer poem as a network in which experience can be caught.

The poem’s geographical centres, said Enzensberger, Prague in former Czechoslovakia  and  Lake Päijänne in Finland, are stations in a network of communication: the poem moves between them across time, space and distance in “flight and acceleration”. With words from a “vanished past” we take off into an unimaginable future.

At the same time, the poet is anchored in the present. His wife calling out from the bathroom brings Marilyn Monroe to mind: the radio reports on neo-capitalism. He has been reading a book on 18^th century human attempts at flight. There are strawberries and a dead fly; there is apartheid.   Fragments from Karl Marx  and from  the ancient Chinese Taoist philosopher Lao Tsu intrude. Lenin wondered what to do.

I’d like to say Enzensberger gave us a map of his consciousness during two European journeys in 1964, but according to the internet, the phrase map of consciousness has been appropriated in a different direction: and what is consciousness anyway? Online etymology tells me that the word appearing in the 1630s meant “internal knowledge” or a “state of being aware of what passes in one’s own mind”. Very good: but by 1746, the word also stood for the state of being aware of anything: she had lost consciousness. In some decades between the 18^th century and this, consciousness in the first sense appeared to some experts as a mirage, an illusion that accompanies the working of a brain.

That is materialism, the notion that matter is primary in the universe, and anything apparently non-physical – mind, thought, consciousness – can or will be explained in physical terms. Materialists see human beings as biological machines whose purpose is to survive and reproduce. In the mid twentieth century Zoology Professor, Alister Hardy, observed that consciousness was a dirty word in biology: philosopher Mary Midgley later wrote about a “taboo on consciousness” in the social sciences.

Midgley saw a beginning of this taboo in decisions of early 20^th century psychologists to abandon inner or mental experience as subject matter, in favour of outward behaviour.  Consciousness cannot be measured, or even observed, but behaviour can.  Psychologists’ conscious rational decisions to set consciousness aside as subject matter in favour of observable behaviour, led to the possibility that consciousness might be a meaningless by-product of behaviour, like the noise of a steam engine or whistling kettle. Yet, said Alister Hardy, everything that really matters to us – our sense of beauty, of good and evil, is in consciousness. We might wish he had avoided the word evil, and spoken of right and wrong, kindness, love, responsibility; art and music. Surely, though, he was right about the significance of consciousness.

“Where does consciousness come from? Why do some swirling electrical patterns, such as those in a brain, have thoughts and sensations attached, whereas others, such as those in the national grid, presumably do not?” asked physicist Paul Davies in a New Scientist article in 2002.  Physicists can avoid questions of consciousness, as if mental and physical worlds are distinct, but Davies is among those who think questions of consciousness are for physicists to answer. Fritjof Capra, also a physicist, went further. “Physicists may find it necessary to include human consciousness in descriptions of the world”, he said in 1975.  Now also a Systems Theorist and Deep Ecologist, Capra thought “consciousness may be an essential aspect of the universe…. to be included in a future theory of physical phenomena.”

The term “stream of consciousness” first appeared in a 19^th century medical handbook, and William James, psychologist and philosopher, later wrote that “consciousness…flows” like a stream. In the late 19^th and 20^th centuries some novelists, each in their own way, adopted “stream of consciousness” as a narrative device. They presented the thought processes of a speaker or character, rather than or as well as their behaviour. Writers as varied as William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf and Jack Kerouac have been identified as using ‘stream of consciousness’ methods.

Sometimes ‘stream of consciousness’ writers eschew or use minimal punctuation, as did Enzensberger in  summer poem: but that is not a stream of consciousness poem.  Neither a verbal representation of a flow of thought, nor a literary device, it has something of both. It goes some way to presenting one human consciousness directly, but here Enzensberger’s consciousness is selective and formalised, as well as verbal.

5. Bohm, Enzensberger and Little Bear came together in my mind around the idea of network. Thought is a system, said Bohm, an interconnected network of concepts, ideas and assumptions passing seamlessly between individuals and throughout society. A fault in the functioning of thought, a systemic fault, affects or infects the whole network. Enzensberger described the form of his summer poem as a netlike construction with which new experiences can be caught again and again: like language itself. Little Bear spoke of the constant flux, a ‘spider-web’ network of relationships in which everything is interconnected. Bohm and Little Bear met more than once and talked late into the night. They saw how any particular language leads participants down a particular thinking pathway. Enzensberger said that in summer poem, “all distances are the same”: a news item from Peking is as real in Finland as in New York. In the enfolded or implicate order, said Bohm, space  and time are inseparable, collapsed into the whole unless or until they appear explicately. The notion of thought or of consciousness as a system, network or web may seem unremarkable nowadays, but some decades ago, this was not so. There was no internet or world wide web when David Bohm first observed thought as a system. The possibility of computers communicating with each other emerged before most people knew about them, but until the 1990s, the information belonged to the US state. Once the last legal brakes against commercial development were removed, Joe and Jane Public could become modestly computer literate across distance and time. In this century digital communications have developed so fast that even elderly people can send emails. Despite our best efforts, and even without a smartphone, we become microcoglets in so many systems we need systems for remembering our passwords, lest we forfeit something important.

From the 1960s, the Toronto School of Communication Theory advanced the view that communication systems create psychological and social states. Marshall McLuhan argued that changes in communications, such as the emergence of electronic media, changes human consciousness. Successful technologies are not just useful inventions, they re-invent people. It was he who suggested we now live in a global village and the medium is the message; though that is just a message. McLuhan’s student and friend Walter Ong pointed out that writing itself is a technology which changed and changes consciousness. Both men thought that now, while we humans are going through yet another great change in communications, might be a good time to try to understand earlier changes in communications and society, but there were fortunes to be made, and no time for that.

And no more time to ponder difference between thought and consciousness, or to wonder whether it’s really fair to bring David Bohm, H.M. Enzensberger and Leroy Little Bear virtually together.  They are here to focus attention on thought as a system, an all-pervasive network that flows through each individual and through society: an everchanging worldwide system including thought, feelings and bodily states: a process and praxis which has evolved from ancient times. Thought is a system and a fault in the system affects or infects the whole system. New systems bring new faults.  “With the taste of a vanished past in our mouths,” said Enzensberger, “we take off into a future to which our imagination seems unequal…..”

Consciousness, Philosophy, Poetry, Science