Letters of Love and Loss: Writing Mileva Einstein

• In Event: What Is a Poem Good For? The Possibilities of Poetic Inquiry Within Educational Research

Abstract

Purpose
Poetic renderings of love letters and biographies serve as an empathic bridge into the courtship, marriage, heartbreak and breakdown of Mileva Maric, Albert Einstein’s first wife. While Einstein re-wrote science and became synonymous with genius, his first wife Mileva Maric—a math prodigy and brilliant student in her own right—became barely a footnote. Through attending to the aesthetics of language in personal communications and public accounts of their lives, I connect her intimate and emotional experiences of loss—loss of knowing and loss of love—with her social situation. In this way, I seek to show something of how genius is made and unmade through complex and pervasive inner and outer forces. I ask: How might poetic inquiry nurture epistemological astuteness and protect against loss of knowing? How might attending to the aesthetic in stories about science support ethical relations?

Theoretical framework
Denzin (2008) says, “We need to re-narrate the past. We need to tell the past and its stories in ways that allow us to disrupt conventional narratives and conventional history.” (p. 119) I use poetic inquiry to deconstruct and re-vision an iconic story of love and knowledge development. Hillman (1983/2005) says:
A love story is…only the outer history of emotional events…unless it be recollected in tranquility, put through a psychological operation…. be put through the qualifying intelligence, the history-making of the psyche, sifted and weighed in the disciplined reflection of loving, or ritual, or dialectics, of an art…. (p. 27)

Data sources
A series of love letters exchanged by Albert and Mileva (Renn & Schulmann, 1992), and biographical information about the latter half of their lives (Gabor, 1995; Overbye, 2000; Oregon Public Broadcasting, 2003; Popovik, 2003).

Mode of Inquiry
I wrote “found poems” based on my data and then through poetic play and attention, I delved deeper into the language, images, rhythm and silences of these poems to sense into and render visible underlying connections and patterns.

my mind
my mind
pulses
in my skull while
somewhere an ancient mollusk
forms a pearl in its shell,

my heart
beats still

(proof of infinity: a million hearts
in concert do not roar like the ocean.)

Then, as the poems progressed, I began to merge my own lived moments with Mileva’s imagined experiences in empathic leaps.

You have two studies
with doors.
I count them
from where I lurk
behind the couch.
Can’t sort
my thoughts
let alone my heap
of books. Words
barnacle under foot.

Conclusions & Scholarly significance
The process of working poetically with scientific biography helps us understand the perspectives of those excluded from traditional historical accounts and helps us to “digest” these stories (Hillman 1983/2005), to enable conscious awareness of lived experiences of knowledge construction. This work is significant in showing how poetic response supports equitable spaces for advanced human learning and development.

Author

• Pamela Richardson, The University of British Columbia