Jody's Notes
Maybe this poem needs some explanation. Newton's relationship with Flamsteed was a bit rocky. That's true. Appropriate citations to Flamsteed appear in the first and second editions of the Principia but Newton sheds them spitefully for the third. Newton is interested in alchemy and astrology and numerology and Bible studies too. (He's interested in a lot of things.) The rest of the poem isn't even sheer speculation; it's just made up. (You can do that in poems. Fiction too.)
(I think some people have lost touch with how important it is to make things up. To recognize how far making things up can go. They shouldn't spend their days just reading popular biographies and digests of current events. They need to recognize that the imagination is always at work even in the stuff they think is just being reported.)
The poem was reprinted in the second edition of The Lust for Blueprints, 2001.
Newton casts horoscopes,
juggles numbers from Deuteronomy,
dabbles in lead (and mercury).
And that's hardly the whole
of it. Flamsteed, royal
astronomer (gloved hand on astrosphere),
keeps his eyebrows in place: each
point an eye? he asks. "No, no, those
are mere abstractions." (Oh right.)
"Space itself (everywhere), God's
sensorium": epidermis in 3-D.
Flamsteed laughs ("Flamsteed," by the way,
does not appear in the third edition).
© 1999, 2001 Jody Azzouni