In my upcoming supernatural mystery, Requiem for Parish, number four in the series,  Detective Eilert Weiss and Carly Rouhl are in pursuit of serial killers. Weiss has a current open case, but Carly is caught up in a mystery that is all but forgotten. Between them lies a lake house jammed with boxes of memorabilia and collectables. Can you imagine a room so crammed with the cluttered debris of a bygone era that it becomes a sort of black hole, drawing Carly’s imagination inward until it collapses into the recent past? 

It’s an odd notion and it’s never explicit in the story—I don’t think anyone would buy it—but it exists in my mind as a sort of personal metaphor, and it’s a very modern one. There have been many stories built around the idea of a time portal, but that particular visualization wouldn’t have occurred to earlier writers, simply because science hadn’t yet postulated such a phenomenon.

My point is, authors are alive to the culture around them, and to the scientific understanding of the day. It creeps into their prose as they choose words and grope for imagery. After all, it isn’t just poets who mull over words.

This makes me think of a school of poetry from the 17th century that includes such varied poets as John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Andrew Marvel. Though he’s a bit early early, I think of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Give me my scallop-shell of quiet/ My staff of faith to walk upon,”. The image of the poet cupping his ear with a shell is so startling that critics called it ‘a conceit’, and yet somehow it is unutterably apt.

These writers were called ‘the metaphysical poets’. The commonality in this group is the way they used analogy, metaphor and simile. Aware of the traditional grand allusions of the great poets of the past, they sought instead a kind of modernity by thinking in fresh ways, by ‘yoking ideas with violence’. This meant seeking comparisons that were novel and less obvious—and therefor striking. Such imagery could be mundane, as when two lovers are compared to the spread arms of a draughtsman’s compass. (Think protractor, not dial.) The further apart the jointed arms of the compass spread, the more the two arms lean towards each other. The further apart the lovers, the more they long for each other. You get it. 

These poets were men educated in the science and technical language of the day.  A greenhouse was ‘a standing pool of air’. The effect must have been at least a little jarring, but it also complimented the listener, suggesting there was a common sophistication and learning there. It’s a decision a writer makes, not to underestimate his readers.

As artists and story-tellers we’re awake to the buzz of modern scientific thought. We’re not scientists for the most part, so these awe-inspiring ideas don’t come to us as equations or even as true understanding. Instead they come to us as images and notions. As Werner Heisenberg said, “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” The poet, and by extension the novelist, writes in a new and confounding universe. He draws his world view not just from modern fashions and mores, but from current ideas about perceived reality. 

It’s an exciting time to be writing ‘metaphysical fiction’ when even laymen are questioning the notion of what is real. When we entertain the possibility that spacetime is an illusion, or a simulation, or a hologram, or a thought—well, writers have always groped for the apt word or phrase, and here’s a whole new realm of wonder. As authors, we scoop up fragments of speculative research and, despite our imperfect understanding, our prose sings with new and audacious imagery. Sure, we’re not equipped to absorb the science, but like children listening to the grown ups talk about sex and politics, we drink in the intensity, we learn the jargon. And sometimes we come out with the most surprising things.