Mapping

Josh Mcloughlin

No science and no art alone maps truth:
Each with its fragile beam undims a part
And through these close consorting increments
We chart its fringes and its nooks.
No more than wisdom’s edges and the lip
Of learning have we lit; alcoves of gloom,
The anxious contours of our certainty,
Hard won, yet in a fitful moment lost.
Leibniz, that candle of Enlightenment,
Thought universal substances inhered
Called monads, each with a partial viewpoint;
A scattered truth of distant singulars
United by the searching eye of God. 
But we don’t need to call on heaven’s light
To crack the blinding prison of our dark
And unabridge the gospel of the mind:
Connecting art and science is enough,
Though our frontiers are vast and progress slow.
With this combined percipience and sense
We’ll map our winding odyssey to truth,
And inch by inch, and grain by grain we’ll light
The continent of knowledge with the lamp
Of intellect and wisdom’s humble spark.

The Science

‘Mapping’ is inspired by the great Enlightenment German polymath Gottfried Leibniz and his theory of monadism. Leibniz argued that the universe is composed, at the most fundamental level, of ‘substances’ called ‘monads’. These monads, ‘each with partial viewpoint’ on the universe, form a ‘scattered truth of distant singulars’, that is mapped together to form the complete truth when ‘United by the searching eye of God’. This poem borrows Leibniz’s idea of combining partial truths into total wisdom and is in general inspired by his attempt to combine all the disciplines of knowledge available to him at the time he lived. However, whereas Leibniz says it is God who unites all the chunks of truth into one, the poem offers a secular perspective: ‘we don’t need to call on heaven’s light’ because ‘connecting art and science is enough’ to begin to map truth, ‘inch by inch’, until we ‘light / The continent of knowledge’.

The Poet

Josh Mcloughlin is the editor-in-chief of New Critique and an incoming Wolfson Scholar at University College, London. He was shortlisted for the Jane Martin Poetry Prize 2018 and his work is published or forthcoming in The Times, The Fence, South London Review, Time Out London, Business Insider, UnderPinned, Now Then Manchester, and others.

Next poem: Mg: A Biography by Gregory Leadbetter