All scientists require an alter ego spouting poetry, if they cannot manage to do so implicitly. Neal Stephenson says something to this effect in Anathem, comparing mystics and poets, where the later are willing to find a beautiful analogy and then let it go. So much of both is fleeting.
The two passions nourish each other, increasing the power of language and vision. General practitioners are sometimes poets; it makes things easier to bear. Science - in its more theoretical incarnations - deals merely with the death and transformation (amputation, transmutation) of ideas, still, the pain.
I thin that few are good enough to do one to the exclusion of the other. I think that the Internet is the place for rough drafts as well as precise labyrinths. I think it beneficial to shed my mother's tongue for this.
English is the Latin of this century, leading the polyphony. Lingua franca, beehive dance, pheromone leading from Changsha to Cambridge to Christchurch and back, it incorporates levels of depth: Concept has complex grammatical honours and swinish Anglo-Saxon roots. Therefore English, and for the distance it provides.
Because I like maps and clocks and computers and soft things and breathing, I combine.
Because it calms me I sing.
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