"Achieving Perspective," by Pattiann Rogers; read by David Byrne

SALT’s newest short film is “Achieving Perspective,” made in collaboration with “The Universe in Verse,” an annual festival of science and poetry, the brainchild of Maria Popova (of the Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) and this year a nine-part collaboration with On Being.

This is the same event for which SALT made the short film, “Singularity,” two years ago (a Vimeo “Staff Pick”!), based on the wonderful poem of the same name by Marie Howe.

The team that came together to make this year’s film is equally amazing: the poet Pattiann Rogers, the performer David Byrne, the artist Maira Kalman (who we think still holds the record for the most New Yorker covers), the composer Jherek Bischoff, and the animator Mariana Lopez. Directed by SALT Project, “Achieving Perspective” is a labor of love and wonder.

Rogers’ poem is below; click the image above to watch the film and hear David Byrne read it.

+++

“Achieving Perspective”

Straight up away from this road,
Away from the fitted particles of frost
Coating the hull of each chick pea,
And the stiff archer bug making its way
In the morning dark, toe hair by toe hair,
Up the stem of the trillium,
Straight up through the sky above this road right now,
The galaxies of the Cygnus A cluster
Are colliding with each other in a massive swarm
Of interpenetrating and exploding catastrophes.
I try to remember that.

And even in the gold and purple pretense
Of evening, I make myself remember
That it would take 40,000 years full of gathering
Into leaf and dropping, full of pulp splitting
And the hard wrinkling of seed, of the rising up
Of wood fibers and the disintegration of forests,
Of this lake disappearing completely in the bodies
Of toad slush and duckweed rock,
40,000 years and the fastest thing we own,
To reach the one star nearest to us.

And when you speak to me like this,
I try to remember that the wood and cement walls
Of this room are being swept away now,
Molecule by molecule, in a slow and steady wind,
And nothing at all separates our bodies
From the vast emptiness expanding, and I know
We are sitting in our chairs
Discoursing in the middle of the blackness of space.
And when you look at me
I try to recall that at this moment
Somewhere millions of miles beyond the dimness
Of the sun, the comet Biela, speeding
In its rocks and ices, is just beginning to enter
The widest arc of its elliptical turn.

+ Pattiann Rogers