ART - Brain Pickings ｜澳纽网Ausnz.net聚合阅读

How to Befriend Time: The Gospel of Pete Seeger and Nina Simone

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”

“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future.” A generation after her, Henry Miller placed at the heart of the art of living the fact that “on how one orients himself to the moment depends the failure or fruitfulness of it.”

We know this. We know that we are creatures of time, that the arrow of time pins us to our own finitude, that time is change and change is entropy and without entropy there would be no being. Still, the deepest part of us — the part that yearns for permanence against all reason — cannot accept living in this lending library for loss, cannot but be unsettled by each birthday, each Monday, each turn of seasons.

*Discus chronologicus* — a German depiction of time from the early 1720s, included in *Cartographies of Time*. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.)

And yet inner peace — that crucible of happiness — is largely a matter of the peace we make with the passage of time.

That is what Pete Seeger knew when he adapted, nearly verbatim, a passage from the Hebrew Bible — Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 — into the classic 1959 song “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season).” And that is what Nina Simone, who thought deeply about time, knew when she sang her soul into Seeger’s song in what remains one of the most breathtaking covers of all time:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to gain that which is to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time of love, and a time of hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

Complement with Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Hymn to Time” and Kahlil Gibran on befriending time, then revisit 200 years of great writers reckoning with the mystery of it all.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 22 Sep 2023 | 2:39 pm(NZT)

Octavia Butler’s Advice on Writing

“No matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can’t possibly do this, somehow you do.”

Once, Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) set out to write a memoir. But she found that “it felt too much like stripping in public,” so she abandoned it. Today, all of her autobiographical reflections, all of her overt politics, all of her creative credos come down to us solely through her interviews, now collected in Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (public library).

These conversations are also the reliquary of Butler’s hard-honed wisdom on the craft of writing, which she taught herself and mastered against the odds of her time and place to become one of the most abiding and beloved literary voices of the past century — part prophet, part poet of possibility.

Octavia Butler by Katy Horan from *Literary Witches* — an illustrated celebration of women writers who have enchanted and transformed our world.

In an interview given just as she was beginning what would become her iconic Parable of the Sower, she offers young writers the pillars of the craft:

The first, of course, is to read. It’s surprising how many people think they want to be writers but they don’t really like to read books… The second is to write, every day, whether you like it or not. Screw inspiration.

More than a decade later, having proven it with her own life, she redoubles her faith in work ethic over inspiration as the central drive of art. An epoch after Tchaikovsky observed that “a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood” and Camus insisted that “works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity,” Butler exhorts young writers:

Forget about inspiration, because it’s more likely to be a reason not to write, as in, “I can’t write today because I’m not inspired.” I tell them I used to live next to my landlady and I told everybody she inspired me. And the most valuable characteristic any would-be writer can possibly have is persistence. Just keep at it, keep learning your craft and keep trying.

Art by Beatrice Alemagna from *A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader*.

Echoing James Baldwin’s fiery admonition against the laziness of talent, she adds the third pillar of the craft:

Forget about talent, whether or not you have any. Because it doesn’t really matter. I mean, I have a relative who is extremely gifted musically, but chooses not to play music for a living. It is her pleasure, but it is not her living. And it could have been. She’s gifted; she’s been doing it ever since she was a small child and everyone has always been impressed with her. On the other hand, I don’t feel that I have any particular literary talent at all. It was what I wanted to do, and I followed what I wanted to do, as opposed to getting a job doing something that would make more money, but it would make me miserable.

It was not easy for Butler to follow what she wanted to do. She did have to take terrible job after terrible job. She worked at a hospital laundry. She worked as a telemarketer. (“I have a good phone voice,” she says apologetically. “I am told I have a good phone presence, and I actually sold things to people. I’m very ashamed.”) But all along, she was writing and writing. Looking back on the dogged devotion of those early days, that vital time when the foundations of one’s craft and credo are laid down, she reflects:

I remember another writer and I corresponding, and he had dropped out. I said, “Why haven’t I seen more from you?” He said, “Well, I didn’t make anything on my first three books.” My comment was, “Who makes anything on their first three books?” I remember that the time I quit that laundry job, it was to go to a Worldcon in Phoenix… I decided I was going to try to live as frugally as possible, and at that time you really could live very frugally. My rent was one-hundred dollars a month. So if you were content not to drive, and if you were content to wear the same clothes that you’d been getting along on for a long time… and there were other ways of not spending lots of money. I didn’t eat potatoes for years after that. I decided that I was going to live off the writing, somehow.

[…]

No matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can’t possibly do this, somehow you do.

One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrett’s 1920 illustrations for old French fairy tales. (Available as a print.)

When an interviewer relays the apocryphal story of how Bram Stoker spent years producing mediocre writing without anyone’s notice until one day lightning struck him and out came Dracula, Butler immediately refutes this myth of divine inspiration with its dangerous intimation that excellence is the product of circumstance or chance. Having placed at the heart of her Parable of the Talents the question of creative drive, having framed it as a matter of “a sweet and powerful positive obsession,” she insists once again on the immense creative power of simply showing up for the work:

It’s one of the things that I try to keep young writers from thinking, that you have to wait, that it’s all luck, lightning will strike and then you’ll have a wonderful bestseller. So I think it’s like the old idea that fortune favors the prepared mind. If you’ve developed the habit of paying attention to the things that happen around you and to you, then, yeah, you’ll get hit by lightning.

Complement with Mary Oliver’s advice on writing, Maya Angelou on our responsibility to our creative gifts, and May Sarton on how to cultivate your talent, then revisit Butler on the meaning of God.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 21 Sep 2023 | 1:21 am(NZT)

Mars and Our Search for Meaning: A Planetary Scientist’s Love Letter to Life

“It is the search for infinity, the search for evidence that our capacious universe might hold life elsewhere, in a different place or at a different time or in a different form.”

In ten billion years, the Sun will run out of hydrogen and burn out, swallowing the inner planets of our Solar System into the abyss of its collapse as the outer planets drift farther and farther. In time, the cosmos itself will run out of energy and none will be left to succor life — the fact of it or the possibility of it — as the universe goes one expanding into the austere emptiness of pure spacetime. So will end the short line of life in the ledger of eternity. In the meantime, we are here on our improbable planet, living our improbable lives — perishable triumphs against the immense cosmic odds of nonexistence, haunted by our earthly existential loneliness nested into our cosmic loneliness. Is it any wonder that, since we first looked up at the night sky, we have been yearning to find what Whitman called “beings who walk other spheres,” searching for life on other worlds that tells us something about how to live on this one, something about the deepest meaning of life itself?

Planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson takes up these questions in The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World (public library) — a sweeping civilizational memoir of our longing for cosmic companionship and the particular pull of the red planet on our imagination, rendered by our science into an affirmation of Ray Bradbury’s Mars-fomented insistence that it is part of our nature “to start with romance and build to a reality,” living proof of Richard Feynman’s passionate conviction that “nature has the greatest imagination of all.”

mars1 — 1877 drawing of Mars by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, as seen through the era’s most powerful telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Reverencing the long arc of transmuting theory into truth, Johnson traces how we went from the illusory Martian “canals” of the early observers to the discovery of real water-lain sedimentary rocks by our space probes, how all the things we got wrong paved the way for the revelation of reality — a reminder, she observes, that “the truth can be a chimeric thing, the collapse of an abiding belief is always just one flight, one finding, one image, away.”

Across the centuries, this romance of reality is populated by some remarkable characters: We meet the naturalist and amateur astronomer who, convinced that Mars was an undiscovered wilderness and its canals were made of vegetation, strode into town in the middle of a World War on one of his two horses, Jupiter and Saturn, to cable his reports; the commodities broker turned adventurer who, after swimming the English Channel and climbing most of the world’s tallest mountains, grew bored of Earth and set out to observe Mars from a balloon, only to be swarmed in a savage thunderstorm, barely surviving his crash into the shark-infested Coral Sea; the woman who learned to grind telescope mirrors when she was ten, became the first in her family to go to college and the first in her high school to earn a doctorate, then transformed planetary cartography by devising an elaborate laser-based system for mapping the topography of Mars while rearing two small children.

Sheet music cover, 1901. (Available as a print.)

Johnson’s own search for life on other worlds began by studying life in the most otherworldly regions of this one. Plumbing the Siberian permafrost for evidence of ancient bacteria, she finds herself holding cells twenty thousand times her own age. An epoch after Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry contemplated the desert and the meaning of life while stranded in the Sahara, she pitches a small yellow tent in the eerie expanse between Death Valley and the Mojave Desert, reading Blake and Dostoyevsky and West with the Night like sacred texts, probing them for clues about the meaning of it all, about the nature and mystery of life. She reflects:

All I wanted was to find some solid points, some method to triangulate, some way to pattern a sense of human understanding onto the vast physical world around me, a world marked by human absence. Soon, though, I began to realize the Granite Mountains weren’t as intensely empty as they seemed. When I’d first gazed into the Mojave, everything seemed muted. All the color had been drained, sipped away by the parched air. The plants were a whitish khaki green, like fistfuls of dried herbs. I had the urge to spit on them, thinking it was the least I could do, a small act of kindness. But after a while, my senses started to adjust. The sagebrush began to look like splashes, almost like raindrops hitting a lake. I started to see the life all around me — in the spine-waisted ants and blister beetles, even in the dark varnish of the desert rocks, a sheen potentially linked to microscopic ecosystems… I had a visceral sense of the world popping from two dimensions into three, of seeing a landscape in a way I’d never viewed it before.

One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for *The Little Prince*

It is this yearning to understand the fundaments of life that drives Johnson toward the mystery of Mars. Still in her twenties, she becomes part of the historic Opportunity mission and watches in awe as the rover beams back the first images of the immense Endurance Crater’s walls — an unprecedented glimpse of “layers that had been stacked like the pages of a closed book, one moment in time pressed close against the next,” hinting at the planet’s history and at the possible future of our own world. She recalls:

Ours were the first human eyes to peer into that mysterious abyss, and it was one of the most breathtaking things I’d ever seen. As I stared into the center of the crater, I felt like Alice in Wonderland falling through a rabbit hole. “What is this world?” I thought, there on the verge of Endurance, my eyes wide. “What is this piercingly wild place?” The giant cavity was laced with hummocks of sand. The most ethereal gossamer dunes filled the void at its center, unlike any dunes I’d ever seen. They looked like egg whites whipped into soft pinnacles. And enveloping the edges, there was undulating outcrop, cut with gorgeous striations, deeper than I was tall.

In between peering into fractures, studying chemical gradients, and looking for evidence of subterranean aquifers, the search is laced with existential questions — questions Voltaire took up epochs ago in his visionary parable Micromégas, from which Johnson draws inspiration; question Carl Sagan and Ray Bradbury contemplated in their own reckoning with Mars. The most disquieting of them is the question of what life looks like in the first place — perhaps Martian life is of substance so alien and scale so discrepant that we might not even recognize it; perhaps it is composed of an entirely new biochemistry, built upon an entirely different molecular foundation, which we have neither the tools nor the minds to discern.

Mars surface, various missions. (Available as a print.)

In a passage that echoes the sentiment at the heart of “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” — Whitman’s timeless gauntlet at the limits of scientific knowledge — Johnson considers our creaturely blind spots:

We have human brains within human skulls, and we understand little of what surrounds us. The limits of our perception and knowledge are palpable, especially at the extremes, like when we’re exploring space. There is so little data to tell us who we are and where we are going, why we are here, and why there is something rather than nothing. This is the affliction of being human in a time of science: We spend our lives struggling to understand, when often we will have done well, peering out through those narrow chinks, just to apprehend.

Still, we go on searching, go on trying to understand, because the search itself shines a sidewise gleam on the ultimate questions pulsating beneath our touchingly human lives. Johnson writes:

We are unique and bounded, and we may well be in decline, for we know that species come and go. We are a finite tribe in a temporary world, marching toward our end.

And what of life itself? Must it be finite as well? What if life is a consequence of energetic systems? What if the nothing-to-something has happened time and again and, because the chinks in our cavern are so small, we don’t know it? For me, this is what the search for life amounts to. It is not just the search for the other, or for companionship. Nor is it just the search for knowledge. It is the search for infinity, the search for evidence that our capacious universe might hold life elsewhere, in a different place or at a different time or in a different form.

Ultraviolet images of Mars by NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. (Available as a print.)

But perhaps loveliest of all is that tucked into her passionate search for life on another world is her passionate love letter to this one — a soulful reminder that while we are expending superhuman resources on searching for a mere microbe on Mars, we are living on a planet capable of trees and bioluminescence and Bach. It is on this world that she learns just how rare life is, and how possible. “Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can,” Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in one of her finest poems — a mirthful fact Johnson discovers while ascending the desolate summit of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano:

As the road climbed, we passed the tree line, then the last of the scrub and the last of the lichens, until we were above even the clouds. The landscape was gray and red and black in every direction; in places it even smoldered with a sheen of purple. There were shards and ash and cinder cones. It felt like a bruise, crystallized in the world. One day, when everyone was having lunch, I wandered over to check out the view from a distant ridge, where the solid lava gave way to pyroclasts and tephra. Without really noticing, I was kicking at the rocks as I stepped. I overturned a surprisingly large one with the toe of my boot, and as my eyes fell to my feet, I startled. Beneath the vaulted side of that adamantine black rock, a tiny fern grew, its defiant green tendrils trembling in the air. There in the midst of all that shattered silence was a tiny splash of life. I crouched down to see it better.

[…]

It was just so impossibly triumphant. I couldn’t pull myself away; I looked at it for so long that the others had to come find me. I showed it to them, but I didn’t have the words to explain its beauty, its significance. I couldn’t tell them that somehow, huddled under a rock, growing against the odds, that fern stood for all of us.

The Sirens of Mars is a wondrous read in its entirety. Complement it with Annie Dillard — whom Johnson read in that desert tent — on our planetary destiny, then revisit this breathtaking animated poem from former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s collection Life on Mars.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 19 Sep 2023 | 8:10 am(NZT)

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating: An Uncommon Meditation on Presence and the Aperture of Wonder

“Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility.”

Anything you lavish with attention will become a mirror, a portal, a lens on the meaning of life — a dandelion, a muskrat, a mountain.

A snail.

Not long after I wrote an existentially hued children’s book about a snail, a friend sent me Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s slender, splendid memoir The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (public library) — the record of an uncommon experiment in learning that the smaller the aperture of attention, the more wonder rushes in.

Snail by Paul Sougy. (Available as a print.)

At thirty-four, while traveling through Europe, Bailey was felled by severe neurological symptoms — the result of a mysterious viral or bacterial invasion that savaged her mitochondria, vanquishing youth’s sense of invincibility, subverting the common faith in modern medicine: In and out of hospitals as treatment after treatment failed to help, she was eventually left pinned to her bed at home, the distance to the bookshelf across the room an expedition demanding a whole day’s energies. She reflects:

Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties.

She slips into the time-warp of illness — the way it has of making an eternity of a single moment while letting entire days vanish. Millennia after Seneca contemplated the balance of time spent, saved, and wasted and a decade before Zadie Smith considered the pandemic as a lens on time, Bailey observes:

Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.

And then the blur is suddenly interrupted by a peculiar gift: One day, a friend brings her a pot of violets from the nearby forest, housing a single Neohelix albolabris — a common woodland snail.

Art by Ping Zhu from *The Snail with the Right Heart*

At first indignant about what she could possibly do with a bivalve pet when she can hardly sit up, Bailey grows quickly fascinated by the creature’s feeding habits, its sleep rhythms, its gentle insistence on survival. She decides to give it a proper home. In a dusty corner of the barn next to the studio where she is bedridden, her caretaker finds a discarded glass aquarium that soon becomes a lavish terrarium filled with native plants from the snail’s woodland home.

Having once made a living as a professional gardener, Bailey takes vivifying delight in populating the tiny botanical garden, listing out plants she doesn’t know whether she will ever again see in the wild:

Goldthread — aptly named for its colorful roots — holding its trio of delicate, paw-shaped leaves high on a thin stem; partridgeberry, with its round, dark green leaves and its small, bright red berries, which lasted for months; the larger, waxy leaves of checkerberry; many kinds of moss; small polypody ferns; a tiny spruce tree; a rotting birch log; and a piece of old bark encrusted with multicolored lichen.

Fern by Anne Pratt. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Captive in her bedroom, she comes to see the snail’s home as a microcosm of existence — its terrarium an entire world, its miniature movements an ongoing odyssey, emanating what the great naturalist Henry Beston celebrated as the sacredness of smallness. In paying such tender and total attention to the snail’s life, she learns to pay attention to life itself at the focal point of the living moment, which is the only share of eternity we have. She reflects:

Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility. Or something more ephemeral: the way the sun passes through the hard, seemingly impenetrable glass of a window and warms the blanket, or how the wind, invisible but for its wake, is so loud one can hear it through the insulated walls of a house.

Looking in on the snail’s miniature universe, she learns to look out — out of the human-sized terrarium of her bedroom, out of the painful circumstance of her illness, out of the limiting if-only mind that tells us we need certain conditions in order to feel the majesty and mystery of life; she learns that even the smallest opening is enough for beauty and wonder to pour in, and that we make the opening with the sharpness of our attention — for attention is how we render reality what it is.

With an eye to her widened lens of wonder, she writes:

As I window-watched, I observed the comings and goings of my neighbors; they, too, were part of the rhythm of my familiar rural landscape. They would depart for work or errands and later return, walk their dogs, cut firewood, and check their roadside mailboxes. As twilight deepened, the low dart of a nighthawk over the field would catch my eye. Darkness brought the sparking of secret codes from the mate-seeking fireflies. Then, black on black, the swift shapes of bats would swoop for late-night morsels, and the hooting of owls would come softly, softly, from the woods — until all was quiet and still beneath the ancient brightness of distant stars and the shape-shifting moon.

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is a benediction of a book in its entirety — the kind rapturous to read, difficult to write about. Couple it with Virginia Woolf on illness as a portal to self-understanding, then revisit Helen Macdonald’s stunning memoir of what a hawk taught her about life.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 17 Sep 2023 | 5:19 am(NZT)

The Living Wonder of Leafcutter Ants, in Mesmerizing Stop Motion

Alongside humans, leafcutter ants form some of nature’s vastest, most sophisticated societies — a single mature colony can contain as many ants as there are people on Earth, living with a great deal more social harmony and consonance of purpose than we do.

They are also one of our planet’s most dazzling testaments to evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’s insistence that “we abide in a symbiotic world”: For 50 million years, leafcutter ants have been practicing a form of agriculture in their mutualist relationship with a fungus they cultivate as a food source, growing it in fungus gardens and feeding it plant matter, which the fungus converts into nutrients the ants can feed on in turn.

In fact, leafcutter ants evolved their sharp mandibles and deft prehensile legs precisely in order to cut and manipulate leaf fragments, which they then carry to their fungal garden. A single ant can carry twenty times its bodyweight — the equivalent of me carrying three grand pianos. In less than a day, a colony can clear entire trees. Emblems of emergence, they do all this as complexity theory incarnate, not a single individual aware of the big-picture goal of the labor.

In her mesmerizing film Antworks, artist Catherine Chalmers captures the strange beauty of this communal consciousness as a leafcutter ant colony dismantles a kaleidoscopic plant in the jungles of Costa Rica, then carries the fragments — “tiny Abstract Expressionist paintings” she calls them — to their secret garden.

Complement with the poetic science of the ghost pipe — another of Earth’s most enchanting mutualisms — then dive into the wonders of other non-human minds with The Soul of an Octopus.

HT Kottke

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 17 Sep 2023 | 12:15 am(NZT)

The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul

“Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.”

It is an ongoing mystery: What makes you and your childhood self the same person. Across a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, some center holds. Eudora Welty called it “the continuous thread of revelation.” Walt Whitman saw it as something “independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal.” Complexity theory traces it to the quantum foam.

The best shorthand we have for it is soul.

“One can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes,” Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) lamented in her diary. But writing directly about the soul, and with tremendous insight, is precisely what she does in a wonderful essay about the essays of Montaigne — his epochal “attempt to communicate a soul,” a “miraculous adjustment of all these wayward parts that constitute the human soul” — included in her classic Common Reader (public library).

Contemplating the soul — that most private part of us — as “so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little to the version which does duty for her in public,” she writes:

Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

That courage is what Whitman celebrated when he decreed to “dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” Only by listening to the voice of the soul — a voice by definition nonconformist, rising above the din of convention and expectation and should — do we become fully and happily ourselves. To be aware of ourselves is to hear that voice. To be content in ourselves is to listen to it. Woolf writes:

The man* who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream. Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Whitman’s *Leaves of Grass*. (Available as a print)

Observing that the souls we most wish to resemble “are always the supplest” — for “a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living” — Woolf arrives at what it takes to be fully oneself:

Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle — for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says.

Complement with E.E. Cummings on the courage to be yourself, Tracy K. Smith’s short, splendid poem “The Everlasting Self,” and the poetic science of how we went from cells to souls, then revisit Woolf on self-knowledge, the remedy for self-doubt, the relationship between loneliness and creativity, what makes love last, the consolations of growing older, and her epiphany about the meaning of creativity.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 13 Sep 2023 | 12:53 pm(NZT)

Eunice Newton Foote and the Birth of Climate Science: The Forgotten Woman Who Discovered the Greenhouse Effect

On an anonymous desk in a spartan classroom of the pioneering Troy Female Seminary, a teenage girl with blue-grey eyes and an oceanic mind is bent over an astronomy book, preparing to revolutionize our understanding of the planet.

The year is 1836.

No university anywhere in the world would admit her.

No scientific society would grant her membership.

Still, Eunice Newton Foote (July 17, 1819–September 30, 1888) would go on to become the first scientist to link atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to rising planetary temperature.

One August day half a lifetime after graduating from Troy and throwing her energies at the suffrage movement — Susan B. Anthony would celebrate her as one of its founders — Eunice folded her hands into her lap in an auditorium full of distinguished scientists and their dressed up wives as she waited to watch someone else present her own work. A decade earlier, astronomer Maria Mitchell had become the first woman admitted into America’s scientific pantheon, the American Association for the Advancement of Science — but on the default certificate of admission, the word Fellow had been crossed out in pencil and Honorary Member handwritten over it. Women were still in the shadows of science. Like Beatrix Potter’s revelatory research into the reproduction of algae, Eunice Foote’s paper was read on her behalf by a man: the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

That paper — Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays, published in 1856 — would remain the only physics paper published by an American woman for three decades, until a year after Eunice’s death.

In it, she detailed her simple, ingenious experiments demonstrating the heat-absorbing properties of water vapor and carbon dioxide:

Using four thermometers, an air pump, and two glass cylinders — one filled with carbon dioxide (or “carbonic acid gas,” as it was then known) and the other with ordinary air — she found that when placed in direct sunlight, the CO₂ cylinder trapped more heat and maintained it longer than the other.

She concluded that “an atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature” and that if carbon dioxide levels in our current atmosphere were to rise, so would the planet’s temperature.

Solar protuberances, observed on May 5, 1873, 9:40 A.M. — Solar protuberances by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. (Available as a print, as stationery cards, and as a face mask.)

Here was the first human being to whisper the threat of global warming. And here was an era that silenced half its voices. The very man who presented her paper commented that while her experiments were “interesting and valuable,” they were of dubious significance. For more than a century, our cultural mythos would celebrate the Irish physicist John Tyndall — an ardent opponent of women’s suffrage — as the discoverer of what we now call the greenhouse effect. In 1859, he linked carbon dioxide and global warming in 1859. Three years earlier, he had contributed to the same issue of The American Journal of Arts and Sciences in which Eunice Foote’s paper was published; it was customary for publishers to send copies to all contributors.

Today, Eunice Foote is honored with an eponymous medal awarded by the American Geophysical Union for groundbreaking scientific research.

Complement her story with that of the polymathic Scottish mathematician Mary Somerville, for whom the word scientist was coined and these visionary maps of time, space, and thought by Emma Willard — America’s first female cartographer and information designer, founder of the Troy Female Seminary where Eunice Foote first fell under the spell of science — then leap forward a century with Rachel Carson and the birth of the modern environmental movement.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 13 Sep 2023 | 2:53 am(NZT)

Milan Kundera on the Power of Coincidences and the Musicality of How Chance Composes Our Lives

“Human lives… are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence… into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life.”

There is a model of reality in which every action you take, from falling in love with a particular person to reading this essay right now, is dictated by a Rube Goldberg machine of events set into motion by the Big Bang — a classical universe of clockwork determinism, in which there is no room for choice. There is also a model in which every event is the product of randomness and probability fluctuations — a quantum universe, in which chance is God’s other name.

Hovering between these two versions, haunted by the paradox of free will, is our experience of what we call serendipity — the gladsome coincidence of two events, rendered meaningful by the emotional weight of each and the infinitesimal cosmic odds of their co-occurrence.

But these highly improbable gifts of chance are also rendered meaningful by the focus of our attention, by choosing to attend to those particular elements of reality amid the myriad others swarming us at the same time — for how we choose to pay attention renders the world what it is. The Nobel-winning poet Wisława Szymborska captured this enchanting interplay of mind and reality in her wonderful poem “Love at First Sight.” The Nobel-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli and his unlikely friend Carl Jung named it synchronicity and placed it at the nexus of physics and psyche.

Whatever their cause, in such moments of dazzling coincidence we feel that beyond the seeming reality of this world lies another, sending us signs, hinting at the possibility of the impossible.

That is what Milan Kundera (April 1, 1929–July 11, 2023) explores throughout his 1984 classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being (public library).

Kundera places chance at the center of the love story unfolding between two people who believe they have chosen each other. Teresa — a romantic full of existential longing and Anna Karenina — is working as a waitress in a restaurant. One evening, a man looks up from his book to order a cognac. At that very moment, Beethoven comes on the radio. Long ago a string quartet had come to play in Tereza’s small town and had rendered Beethoven “her image of the world on the other side, the world she yearned for.” She takes it as a sign — Tomas must be the answer to her yearning. She goes on seeking other signs — when he charges the cognac to his room, she realizes his room number is the same as the street number of the house she grew up in. “Tomas appeared to Tereza in the hotel restaurant as chance in the absolute,” Kundera writes as he considers the psychological machinery of how we imbue such coincidences with meaning:

Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. “Co-incidence” means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet: Tomas appears in the hotel restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven. We do not even notice the great majority of such coincidences. If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed the radio was playing Beethoven… But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty.

*Composition 8* by Wassily Kandinsky, 1920s, inspired by the artist’s experience of listening to a symphony. (Available as a print.)

In serendipity, we find an organizing principle for meaning amid the randomness that governs the universe of which our own lives are but an echo. It is the music amid the noise of being. Kundera writes:

Human lives… are composed like music. Guided by his* sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence… into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life… Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress.

It is important, Kundera argues, to be awake to serendipity — for letting coincidences go unnoticed deprives our lives of “a dimension of beauty.” But his very metaphor undermines the case for pure chance as the conductor of our lives: Music, after all, is not the product of chance but of the composer’s deliberate choice in sequencing the notes and silences. Our experience of beauty is the product of the quality of attention we choose to pay an object. Simone de Beauvoir, writing in the same era as Kundera, came closer to the composite truth when she contemplated how chance and choice converge to shape our lives.

Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Still, Kundera captures an elemental fact: We may choose to love whom we love, but it is chance that first intersects our fates. Coincidences remind us that chance may not be the sole conductor of our lives, but it is what gives life the capacity for surprise, for sudden deviation from the predicted path — those quickenings of the soul that elevate life above mere existence and envelop it in an aura of magic that makes it worth living. He writes:

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute.

[…]

Necessity knows no magic formula — they are all left to chance.

Complement with Iris Murdoch on love and chance and a Borges-lensed meditation on chance, the universe, and what makes us who we are, then revisit Kundera on the central ambivalences of life and love and the key to great storytelling.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 12 Sep 2023 | 4:29 am(NZT)

The Half-Life of Hope

After “Spell Against Indifference,” an offering of another poem — this one inspired by a lovely piece of science news that touched me with its sonorous existential echoes.

THE HALF-LIFE OF HOPE
by Maria Popova

Walking beneath the concrete canopy
     of Manhattan
I find myself thinking about
Charles B. Kaufmann
     who
just after the end
of the Second World War
invented bird spikes
     who
thought it a fine idea
to fang the roofs
of hospitals and banks,
to weaponize the libraries
to keep the thing with feathers
from perching on our homes
to keep the angels
     from alighting.

Twenty bird generations later
atop a maple tree
outside a hospital in Belgium
a magpie has heisted
a thousand metal spikes
to make of them
     a nest
to sing from it
the requiem
     of the saved.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 10 Sep 2023 | 12:36 pm(NZT)

How to Live in Light: A Blind Hero of the French Resistance on Seeing the Heart of Life and Contacting the Oneness of Being

“There is only one world. Things outside only exist if you go to meet them with everything you carry in yourself. As to the things inside, you will never see them well unless you allow those outside to enter in.”

“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote as she contemplated the art of seeing just before the Little Prince sighed his timeless sigh: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

No one has written about what it takes to see — and how to do the looking — more poignantly than Jacques Lusseyran (September 19, 1924–July 27, 1971) in his stirring memoir And There Was Light (public library).

Looking back on his blissful early childhood, Lusseyran recounts his formative enchantment with the world:

Light cast a spell over me. I saw it everywhere I went and watched it by the hour… flowing over the surface of the houses in front of me and through the tunnel of the street to right and left. This light was not like the flow of water, but something more fleeting and numberless, for its source was everywhere. I liked seeing that the light came from nowhere in particular, but was an element just like air. We never ask ourselves where air comes from, for it is there and we are alive. With the sun it is the same thing.

There was no use my seeing the sun high up in the sky in its place in space at noon, since I was always searching for it elsewhere. I looked for it in the flickering of its beams, in the echo which, as a rule, we attribute only to sound, but which belongs to light in the same measure. Radiance multiplied, reflected itself from one window to the next, from a fragment of wall to cloud above. It entered into me, became part of me. I was eating sun.

Art by Ping Zhu from *The Snail with the Right Heart* by Maria Popova

Nightfall didn’t end the spell of the light, for he felt it in the very fabric of being:

Darkness, for me, was still light, but in a new form and a new rhythm. It was light at a slower pace. In other words, nothing in the world, not even what I saw inside myself with closed eyelids, was outside this great miracle of light.

And then, one May morning when he was seven, the light of the world went out — a classroom scuffle ended in a violent fall onto the corner of the teacher’s desk, leaving Lusseyran completely blind.

Somehow, he adapted, guided by the light within and by the discovery that the light without is a kind of vibration can we feel whenever we assume “the attitude of tender attention” — a vibration that reveals the world, its materiality and its mystery:

Objects do not stand at a given point, fixed there, confined in one form. They are alive, even the stones. What is more they vibrate and tremble. My fingers felt the pulsation distinctly, and if they failed to answer with a pulsation of their own, the fingers immediately became helpless and lost their sense of touch. But when they went toward things, in sympathetic vibration with them, they recognized them right away… Being blind I thought I should have to go out to meet things, but I found that they came to meet me instead.

In a passage evocative of Virginia Woolf’s transcendent epiphany about the oneness of the world, he adds:

If my fingers pressed the roundness of an apple, each one with a different weight, very soon I could not tell whether it was the apple or my fingers which were heavy. I didn’t even know whether I was touching it or it was touching me. As I became part of the apple, the apple became part of me. And that was how I came to understand the existence of things.

[…]

The reality — the oneness of the world — left me in the lurch, incapable of explaining it, because it seemed obvious. I could only repeat: “There is only one world. Things outside only exist if you go to meet them with everything you carry in yourself. As to the things inside, you will never see them well unless you allow those outside to enter in.”

Art by Giuliano Cucco from *Before I Grew Up*

Lusseyran was still a teenager when, unnerved by Hitler’s rise to power, he set out to teach himself German in order to understand the menacing radio broadcasts. In 1941, shortly after the Nazi invasion of France, he formed a resistance group and began publishing an underground newspaper that soon became the voice of the French freedom fighters. He was seventeen.

Two months before his nineteenth birthday, Lusseyran was betrayed by a member of the resistance, arrested by the Gestapo, and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. For six months, he was kept in “a space four feet long and three feet wide, with walls like a medieval fortress, door three fingers thick with a peephole through which the jailers watched day and night, and a sealed window.” But his bright spirit remained undimmed — devoted to stirring the spirit of resistance among the thousands of inmates, he came to see the place not as a prison but as “a church underground.” He would recount:

The mechanism of hope in our hearts must have a thousand springs, almost all of them unknown to us.

When liberation finally came two years later, Lusseyran was one of thirty inmates to leave the camp alive. Looking back on how he survived the unsurvivable, he returns to the lifeline of the light and the radiance of what the poet Muriel Rukeyser called “the living moment… in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future.” Aliveness, he intimates, is a matter of our receptivity to light, which is the quality of attention we pay the world — no matter our circumstance:

When a ray of sunshine comes, open out, absorb it to the depths of your being. Never think that an hour earlier you were cold and that an hour later you will be cold again. Just enjoy. Latch on to the passing minute. Shut off the workings of memory and hope… Take away from suffering its double drumbeat of resonance, memory and fear. Suffering may persist, but already it is relieved by half. Throw yourself into each moment as if it were the only one that really existed.

And There Was Light is a remarkable read in its entirety. Complement it with Viktor Frankl, shortly after his release from the concentration camps, on life’s deepest source of meaning, then revisit Rebecca Elson’s poetic love letter to the light of the universe.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 7 Sep 2023 | 7:55 am(NZT)

Kate Sessions and the Devotion to Delight: The Forgotten Woman Who Covered California with Trees and Flowers

In May 1941, next to news of the Nazi savagely bombing London, The Los Angeles Times published a memorial profile of “California’s Mother of Gardens” — a hopeful antidote to the undoing of the human world, celebrating the woman who covered Southern California with the loveliest trees and flowers, having made a life at the crossing point of nature’s capacity for beauty and human nature’s capacity for delight.

After becoming the first woman to earn a degree in science from Berkeley in 1881, Kate Sessions (November 8, 1857–March 24, 1940) took a job teaching mathematics at a San Diego public school. It was a shock to leave the redwoods for what appeared to her a desert landscape — plants had always been her great love: She had spent her childhood climbing trees and filling her herbarium with wildflowers; as a teenager, she had made an art of elaborate flower arrangements; as a young scientist, she had reveled in the dazzling molecular structure of trees under her microscope. Restless to do something about the dearth of greenery in her new home, she launched her own nursery and flower shop.

But then she dreamt bigger.

Just before her thirty-fifth birthday, Kate persuaded the city of San Diego to let her lease a 30-acre piece of barren public land to use as growing grounds. In exchange, she grew 100 new trees in it each year and gave another 300 to be planted along the city’s streets, around its plazas, in its public school yards. Soon, San Diego was covered in pine, oak, elm, cypress, eucalyptus, and pepper trees.

People rushed to her nursery to populate their own gardens with beauty. Vivacious and warmhearted, clad in her practical working clothes, Kate greeted visitors with a hug and led them through garden — across the miniature meadow of mesembryanthemums the colors of the rainbow, under the fragrant Australian eucalyptus trees never previously seen in California, past the rare heathers from South Africa — excited to show them “the latest plant pet,” as one friend recalled.

Auriculas from *The Temple of Flora*, 1812. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

She traveled up and down the California coast, searching for beautiful overlooked plants that could thrive in a drought-prone climate, which she cultivated in her nursery and shared with the community. Soon, gardeners all across Southern California were walking through their backyard wonderlands, lovingly touching their proudest plants and saying, “Kate Sessions gave me that.”

In the interlude between the two World Wars, Kate set out to learn about the world’s plants. She traveled to Hawaii and the Alps, drank in the “warm though bracing air and the wonderful blue of the Mediterranean” and admired the cypress-covered mountains of Italy “silvering with lichens on the rugged rocks,” visited the majestic gardens of Versailles and a tiny nursery on the shore of Lake Geneva, a stone’s throw from where Mary Shelley dreamt up Frankenstein.

Kate returned from her expedition with 140 new species, among them the purple-blooming tree now so iconic of Southern California — the beloved Jacaranda mimosifolia, also known as fern tree, which for forty million springs has been gracing sub-tropical South America with its ravishing blossoms.

Jacaranda from a French botany book, 1822. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Throughout her life, Kate corresponded tirelessly with other horticulturalists, hosted tree-planting parties, and wrote hundreds of magazine articles and papers — notes from her foreign expeditions, reports from flower shows, meticulous growing tips for particular plants, from wisteria to Chilean jasmine.

She never married. Her life was animated by her relationship with the Canadian horticulturalist Alice Eastwood, rooted in their shared love of flowers: “our children,” Kate told Alice, “which I am growing and you are naming.”

When San Diego declared September 15 Kate Sessions Day, celebrating her botanical makeover of the city, she responded simply:

I didn’t do it. It was the plants that did it.

Complement her story with that of the Victorian visionary Marianne North, who traveled the world at the risk of her life to revolutionize art and science with her botanical paintings, then revisit this centuries-wide meditation on flowers and the meaning of life and this posy of poems celebrating the delights of gardening.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 6 Sep 2023 | 5:11 am(NZT)

The Moon and the Yew Tree: Patti Smith Reads Sylvia Plath’s Haunting Portrait of Depression

“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.”

One of the most menacing things about depression is its elasticity — its way of suddenly receding, swinging open a window of light, only to return just as suddenly with redoubled darkness, just when life has begun to feel livable again, even beautiful.

On September 16, 1962, a voice unspooled from the BBC airwaves carrying an emblem of that cruel elasticity.

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932–February 11, 1963) — who spent her life living with the darkness and making light of the barely bearable lightness of being, until she could no more — had composed the poem a year earlier, shortly after moving to a quiet market village in Devon. For the first time, she had a room of her own to write in. “My whole spirit has expanded immensely,” she wrote to her mother as she filled the house with “great peachy-colored gladiolas, hot red & orange & yellow zinnias” from the garden, that great living poem.

Within a month, in the fading autumn light, her spirit had begun contracting again in the grip of the familiar darkness. One night, unable to sleep, she tried a meditative writing exercise: to simply describe what she saw in the Gothic churchyard outside her window. That exercise became one of her finest poems and one of the most poignant portraits of depression in the history of literature.

Found in Plath’s indispensable Collected Poems (public library), it comes alive with uncommon poignancy in Patti Smith’s planetary voice — one of her regular poetry readings from her online journal.

THE MOON AND THE YEW TREE
by Sylvia Plath

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs at my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky —
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness —
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness — blackness and silence.

Complement with Jane Kenyon’s magnificent poem about living to the other side of depression and Galway Kinnell’s lifeline for the darkest hour, then revisit Zoë Keating reading Plath’s “Mushrooms,” Meryl Streep reading her “Morning Song,” the poet herself reading “Tulips,” and Patti Smith reading Emily Dickinson.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 5 Sep 2023 | 5:18 am(NZT)

Leaning Toward Light: A Posy of Poems Celebrating the Joys and Consolations of the Garden

“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone,” the poet and passionate gardener May Sarton wrote as she contemplated the parallels between these two creative practices — parallels that have led centuries of beloved writers to reverence the garden. No wonder Emily Dickinson spent her life believing that “to be Flower, is profound Responsibility.” No wonder Virginia Woolf had her epiphany about what it means to be an artist in the garden.

The garden as a place of reverence and responsibility, a practice of ample creative and spiritual rewards, comes alive in Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands that Tend Them (public library). Envisioned and edited by poet and gardener Tess Taylor, it is a blooming testament to the etymology of anthology — from the Greek anthos (flower) and legein (to gather): the gathering of flowers — rooted in her belief that “the garden poem is as ancient as literature itself.”

Dahlias by cyanotype artist Rosalind Hobley.

Punctuating some of the loveliest poetic voices of our time are a handful of classics — Keats’s ode to autumn, a yawp of wildness from Whitman’s Song of Myself, Lucille Clifton’s spare, stunning “cutting greens” — and a miniature modern counterpart to the vintage gem John Keats’s Porridge: Favorite Recipes of American Poets: garden-grown delicacies like Jane Hirshfield’s braised fava beans, Ashley M. Jones’s glazed carrots, and Ellen Bass’s melon and cucumber gazpacho with basil oil.

In the garden, the poets find consolation for grief, connection to the cosmic compost that made us, consecration of our finitude and of the infinite in us — for “the gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end… the Amen beyond the prayer.”

Mostly, they find vitality, find reassurance, find reasons for rejoicing in the aliveness of life. Again and again, the most exultant of poetic forms rises from the page like a sun: There is an ode to the tulip and to the turnip, to fennel and to its cousin the carrot, that kindest of vegetables, and not one but two odes to garlic — but no ode more splendid than that to the peach by Ellen Bass, uncommon poet of perspective.

Gilded peach from *Peach Culture* by James Alexander Fulton, 1882. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

ODE TO THE FIRST PEACH
by Ellen Bass

Only one insect has feasted here —
a clear stub of resin
plugs the scar. And the hollow
where the stem was severed
shines with juice.
The fur still silvered
like a caul. Even
in the next minute,
the hairs will darken,
turn more golden in my palm.
Heavier, this flesh,
than you would imagine,
like the sudden
weight of a newborn.
Oh what a marriage
of citron and blush!
It could be a planet
reflected through a hall
of mirrors. Or
what a swan becomes
when a fairy shoots it
from the sky at dawn.

At the beginning of the world,
when the first dense pith
was ravished and the stars
were not yet lustrous
coins fallen from the
pockets of night,
who could have dreamed
this would be curried
from the chaos?
Scent of morning and sugar,
bruise and hunger.
Silent, swollen, clefted life,
remnant always remaking itself
out of that first flaming ripeness.

With her Buddhist training and her singular sensitivity to the elemental in us, Jane Hirshfield considers the meaning of faith:

NOVEMBER, REMEMBERING VOLTAIRE
by Jane Hirshfield

In the evenings
I scrape my fingernails clean,
hunt through old catalogues for new seed,
oil workboots and shears.
This garden is no metaphor —
more a task that swallows you into itself,
earth using, as always, everything it can.
I lend myself to unpromising winter dirt
with leaf-mold and bulb,
plant into the oncoming cold.
Not that I ever thought
the philosopher meant to be taken literally,
but with no invented God overhead,
I conjure a stubborn faith in rotting
that ripens into soil,
in an old corm that rises steadily each spring:
not symbols, but reassurances,
like a mother’s voice at bedtime reading a long-familiar book,
the known words barely listened to,
but joining, for all the nights of a life,
each world to the next.

Broken tulips by Clarissa Munger Badger, who inspired Emily Dickinson. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Given the special place snails hold in my heart, I was delighted to see Thom Gunn celebrate a creature regarded by many gardeners as a foe:

CONSIDERING THE SNAIL
by Thom Gunn

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later

I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.

Snail by Paul Sougy, 1955. (Available as a print.)

Ross Gay — poet laureate of the garden’s delights — offers a poem almost too beautiful and bittersweet to bear, a poem as necessary as sunlight:

A SMALL NEEDFUL FACT
by Ross Gay

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

From W.S. Merwin comes a lush prayer for presence, originally published in his poetic farewell to life — his breathtaking final collection Garden Time:

BLACK CHERRIES
by W.S. Merwin

Late in May as the light lengthens
toward summer the young goldfinches
flutter down through the day for the first time
to find themselves among fallen petals
cradling their day’s colors in the day’s shadows
of the garden beside the old house
after a cold spring with no rain
not a sound comes from the empty village
as I stand eating the black cherries
from the loaded branches above me
saying to myself Remember this

Complement these fragments from the wholly wonderful Leaning toward Light with Diane Ackerman’s sensuous poem “The Consolation of Apricots” and the Victorian poet and painter Rebecca Hey’s illustrated encyclopedia of poetic lessons from the garden, then revisit two centuries of great writers and artists on the creative and spiritual rewards of gardening.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 1 Sep 2023 | 4:11 am(NZT)

D.H. Lawrence on the Hypocrisies of Social Change and What It Actually Takes to Shift the Status Quo

“Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” Zadie Smith wrote in her superb meditation on optimism and despair. But the paradox of progress is that because there is no universal utopia — every utopia is built on someone’s back — there can be no universal progress, no absolute measure of it. Its relativism conceals a euphemism for moving the world in the direction of the one’s own desires, relativism laced with myriad hypocrisies that keep us from building the kind of world Gabriel García Márquez envisioned in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech — a world “where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible.”

Those hypocrisies, and how to transcend them, are what D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) addresses with his characteristic passionate conviction in a letter to one of his literary friends, Lady Cynthia Asquith, found in The Letters of D.H. Lawrence (public library).

Writing a year into the First World War and a week before his thirtieth birthday, Lawrence reports of a failed collaboration with Bertrand Russell — a series of joint lectures that came disjointed from the start over ideological differences regarding the fundaments of human nature and moral progress. Lawrence fumes at the hypocrisy beneath many of the archetypal attitudes toward social change:

I am sick of people: they preserve an evil, bad, separating spirit under the warm cloak of good words. This is intolerable in them. The Conservative talks about the old and glorious national ideal, the Liberal talks about this great struggle for right in which the nation is engaged, the peaceful women talk about disarmament and international peace… and all this, all this goodness, is just a warm and cosy cloak for a bad spirit. They all want the same thing: a continuing in the state of disintegration wherein each separate little ego is an independent little principality by itself… To keep [one’s] own established ego, [one’s] finite and ready-defined self intact, free from contact and connection… to be ultimately a free agent. That is what they all want, ultimately — that is what is at the back of all international peace-for-ever and democratic control talks they want an outward system of nullity, which they call peace and goodwill, so that in their own souls they can be independent little gods, referred nowhere and to nothing, little moral Absolutes, secure from question.

Lamenting that “the Conservative either wants to bully or to be bullied” and “the young authoritarian” turns to religion “in order to enjoy the aesthetic quality of obedience” — hypocrisies that leave him so exasperated that he dreams of learning to ride a horse and living entirely alone away from civilization — he adds:

It is too bad, it is too mean, that they are all so pettily selfish, these good people who sacrifice themselves. I want them… — anybody — to say: “This is wrong, we are acting in a wrong spirit. We have created a great, almost overwhelming incubus of falsity and ugliness on top of us, so that we are almost crushed to death. Now let us move it.”

The monolith of ugliness and wrong spirit, Lawrence argues, is moved by the will of the people and the right spirit with which they choose their leaders. Nearly a century before Octavia Butler penned her superb parable of how (not) to choose our leaders, he writes:

It is a question of the spirit. Why are we a nation? We are a nation which must be built up according to a living idea, a great architecture of living people, which shall express the greatest truth of which we are capable… A bad spirit in a nation chooses a bad spirit in a governor. We must begin to choose all afresh, for the pure, great truth… If we have a right spirit, then our [leaders] will appear, as the flowers come forth from nowhere in spring.

Tulips from *The Temple of Flora*, 1812. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

What poisons the right spirit, Lawrence argues, is the cultural imbroglio that worships at the altar of wealth, mistaking the rich for the right. Reasserting his admonition against the malady of materialism as a taproot of war and divisiveness, he considers the way out:

We must rid ourselves of this ponderous incubus of falsehood, this massive London, with its streets and streets of nullity: we must, with one accord in purity of spirit, pull it down and build up a beautiful thing. We must rid ourselves of the idea of money. A rich man with a beautiful house is like a jewel on a leper’s body…. Our business is not in jewellery, but in the body politic…. What good is it to a sick, unclean man, if he wears jewels.

[…]

Russell says I cherish illusions, that there is no such spirit as I like to imagine, the spirit of unanimity in truth, among mankind… Frieda [Lawrence’s wife] says things are not so bad as I pretend, that people are good, that life is also good, that London is also good, and that this civilisation is great and wonderful. She thinks if the war were over, things would be pretty well all right.

But they are all wrong.

Against such passive optimism, Lawrence weighs what it actually takes to move the world in the direction of its betterment. With an eye to the vital role of kindred spirits and community in effecting change, he writes:

I don’t know how to begin to lecture or write, publicly, these things of the real truth and the living spirit. Everything is so awful and static, so large and ponderous… And one must shift that mass; it is the mountain that faith must move. I do believe there are people who wait for the spirit of truth. But I think one can’t find them personally. I had hoped and tried to get a little nucleus of living people together. But I think it is no good. One must start direct with the open public, with out associates… I don’t want any friends, except the friends who are going to act, put everything — or at any rate, put something into the effort by bringing about a new unanimity among us, a new movement for the pure truth, and immediate destruction — and reconstructive revolution in actual life.

Complement with Thoreau on the long cycles of social change and Rebecca Solnit on the art of actionable hope for a better world, then revisit Lawrence on the strength of sensitivity and the key to fully living.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 30 Aug 2023 | 3:23 am(NZT)

Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being

“You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness out of which all these emerge.”

“This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole,” quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger wrote as he bridged his young science with ancient Eastern philosophy to reckon with the ongoing mystery of what we are.

A century later — a century in the course of which we unraveled the double helix, detected the Higgs boson, decoded the human genome, heard a gravitational wave and saw a black hole for the first time, and discovered thousands of other possible worlds beyond our Solar System — the mystery has only deepened for us “atoms with consciousness,” capable of music and of murder. Each day, we eat food that becomes us, its molecules metabolized into our own as we move through the world with the illusion of a self. Each day, we live with the puzzlement of what makes us and our childhood self the “same” person, even though most of our cells and our dreams have been replaced. Each day, we find ourselves restless miniatures of a vast universe we are only just beginning to fathom.

In Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being (public library), the Buddhist scientist Neil Theise endeavors to bridge the mystery out there with the mystery of us, bringing together our three primary instruments of investigating reality — empirical science (with a focus on complexity theory), philosophy (with a focus on Western idealism), and metaphysics (with a focus on Buddhism, Vedanta, Kabbalah, and Saivism) — to paint a picture of the universe and all of its minutest parts “as nothing but a vast, self-organizing, complex system, the emergent properties of which are… everything.”

Theise defines the core scientific premise of his inquiry:

Complexity theory is the study of how complex systems manifest in the world… Complexity in this context refers to a class of patterns of interactions: open-ended, evolving, unpredictable, yet adaptive and self-sustaining… how life self-organizes from the substance of our universe, from interactions within the quantum foam to the formation of atoms and molecules, cells, human beings, social structures, ecosystems, and beyond.

[…]

Neither we nor our universe is machinelike. A machine doesn’t have the option to change its behavior if its environment changes or becomes overwhelming. Complex systems, including human bodies and human societies, can change their behaviors in the face of the unpredictable. That creativity is the essence of complexity.

A century after Schrödinger made his haunting assertion that “the over-all number of minds is just one,” Theise considers the ultimate reward of this lens on reality:

Complexity theory can foster an invaluable flexibility of perspectives and awaken us to our true, deep intimacy with the larger whole, so that we might return to what we once had: our birthright of being one with all.

Central to complexity theory is the notion of emergent phenomena like ant colonies, like crowds, like consciousness. Theise writes:

A distinguishing feature of life’s complexity is that, in every single instance, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Even if one knows the characteristics and behaviors of all the individual elements of a living system (a cell, a body, an ecosystem), one cannot predict the extraordinary properties that emerge from their interactions.

[…]

The emergent phenomena of ant colonies do not arise because some leader in the colony is planning things. While emergence often looks planned from the top down, it is not. A simple ant line provides a good example. Ants take food from wherever they find it and bring it back to the colony. Back and forth the ants go, so efficient and well ordered it seems as though someone must certainly have set it all up. But no one did. The queen ant doesn’t perform an administrative function; she does not monitor the status of the colony as a whole. She serves only a reproductive function. There is no single ant or group of ants at the top planning the food line or any other aspect of the colony. The organization arises only from the local interactions between each ant and any other ant it encounters.

Zooming out to the planetary scale, he argues that all living beings on Earth are a single organism animated by a single consciousness that permeates the universe. The challenge, of course, is how to reconcile this view with our overwhelming subjective experience as autonomous selves, distinct in space and time — an experience magnified by the vanity of free will, which keeps on keeping us from seeing clearly our nature as particles in a self-organizing whole.

To allay the paradox, Theise leans on a centerpiece of quantum theory: Neils Bohr’s notion of complementarity — the idea that because two different reads on reality can both be true but not at the same time, to describe reality we must choose between the two in order to keep the internal validity and coherence of one from interfering with that of the other. Inviting such a complementarity of perspectives, he writes:

The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime… Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief unit of a single vast body that is life on Earth. From this point of view, the passing of human generations, in peace or turmoil, is nothing more than the shedding of cells from one’s skin.

This is more than a metaphysical orientation to reality — it is a profoundly physical fact, of which cells themselves are the living proof. Furnishing the scientific affirmation of Whitman’s timeless poetic insistence that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Theise writes:

Most of the body’s cells are continually turning over. Some cells renew over a period of years, while other types of cells are replaced every few days. So, most of the molecules (and therefore atoms) of our bodies return to the planet as well, in an endless atomic recycling and replacement. From this perspective, then, are we living beings moving around upon this rock we call Earth? Or are we in fact the Earth itself, whose atoms have self-organized to form these transitory beings that think of themselves as self-sufficient and separate from each other, even though they only ever arose from and will inevitably return to the atomic substance of the planet?

Art by Lia Halloran for *The Universe in Verse*. (Available as a print.)

This holds true across the scale of matter, on the molecular level above atoms and below cells:

We breathe out molecules (carbon dioxide) and perspire molecules (water, pheromones) and excrete molecules (urine, feces) into the environments around us, and in turn, we eat food that we break down into absorbable molecules (proteins, carbohydrates, fats), breathe in oxygen molecules from the planetary plant mass, and absorb molecules through our skin… since every surface we touch potentially has absorbable molecules on it. While you might say that molecules are only your own when they are within your body, complementarily, there are no real distinctions between “our own” molecules and the molecules of the world around us. They move from us, outward, and come into us from the outside. At the molecular level, just as at the cellular level, each of us is in perpetual, direct continuity with the entire biomass of the planet.

An epoch after Max Planck discovered the minutest scales of existence — energy quanta — then contemplated the limits of science given the fact that “we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve,” Theise adds:

At the smallest, Planck scales, the very smallest creations of all are wholes without parts that merely emanate from space-time and dissolve back into it like phantoms — there but not there, real but not real. Everything only looks like a thing from its own particular vantage point, the level of scale at which it can be seen as “itself,” as a whole. Above that level of scale, it is hidden from view by the higher-level emergent properties it gives rise to. Below that level, it disappears from view into the active phenomena from which it emerged.

It is difficult to consider this perspective without trembling with the question of what it even means to exist — and to cease existing. With his particular life-focused lens on mortality — as the child of two Holocaust survivors, as a gay man who survived the AIDS epidemic that killed many of his friends — Theise offers a redemptive answer:

While we feel ourselves to be thinking, living beings with independent lives inside the universe, the complementary view is also true: we don’t live in the universe; we embody it. It’s just like how we habitually think of ourselves as living on the planet even as, in a complementary way, we are the planet.

[…]

You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness out of which all these emerge, Planck moment by Planck moment.

Throughout the rest of his lucid and luminous Notes on Complexity, Theise goes on to intertwine the discoveries of Western science — from particle physics to neuroscience to chaos theory — with Eastern metaphysical traditions and his own longtime Zen Buddhist practice. Couple it with physicist David Bohm on wholeness and the implicate order, then revisit Virginia Woolf’s exquisite epiphany about the totality of being.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 28 Aug 2023 | 3:10 am(NZT)

The Poetic Science of the Ghost Pipe: Emily Dickinson and the Secret of Earth’s Most Supernatural Flower

“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”

In the late autumn of 1890, four years after Emily Dickinson’s death, her poems met the world for the first time in a handsome volume bound in white. Beneath the gilded title was a flower painting by Mabel Loomis Todd — the complicated woman chiefly responsible for editing and publishing Dickinson’s poems and letters.

Any flower would have been a fitting emblem for the poet who spent her life believing that “to be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” but none more than this one — a flower she had collected in the woods of Amherst as “a wondering Child,” then pressed into her teenage herbarium and into her poems, enchanted by its “almost supernatural” appearance.

She considered it “the preferred flower of life.”

Monotropa uniflora, known as ghost pipe, is unlike the vast majority of plants on Earth. White as bone, it lacks the chlorophyll by which other plants capture photons and turn light into sugar for life.

Throughout the summer — usually after rainfall, usually under beech trees — the ghost pipe emerges from the darkest regions of the forest floor in clusters, from the Himalayas to Costa Rica to Amherst. Each stem bears a single nodding flower — a tiny chandelier of several translucent petals encircling its dozen stamens and single pistil. Bumblebees, drawn to the pale beauty despite their astonishing ultraviolet vision, are the ghost pipe’s most passionate pollinators.

*Monotropa uniflora*. (Photograph: Walter Siegmund.)

The secret of Earth’s most “supernatural” flower is its uncommon relationship with the rest of nature:

Rather than reaching up for sunlight like green plants, the ghost pipe reaches down. Its cystidia — the fine hairs coating its roots — entwine around the branching filaments of underground fungi, known as hyphae. So connected, the ghost pipe begins to sap nutrients the fungus has drawn from the roots of nearby photosynthetic trees.

Out of this second-hand survival, such breathtaking beauty.

The mystery of how the ghost pipe flourishes without chlorophyll has enchanted scientists since the dawn of botany. The answer began bubbling up with the discovery of the mycorrhizal network undergirding the forest — a term coined in 1885 by the German botanist, plant pathologist, and mycologist Albert Bernhard Frank, from the Greek mykos (fungus) and rhiza (root). But for nearly a century, the mycorrhizal network — and its relation to the mystery of the ghost pipe — remained a purely theoretical notion, until in 1960 the Swedish botanist Erik Björkman used sugars laced with the radioactive carbon-14 isotope to trace how nutrients move between trees and nearby ghost pipes via the underground fungi.

It was a revelatory notion — an entirely new type of relationship we had never before imagined, as old as the living world.

Less than a century later, we know that 90% of plants rely on these mycorrhizal relationships for their survival — an interdependence for which the English botanist David Read coined the term “the Wood Wide Web,” to describe the groundbreaking research of Canadian plant ecologist Suzanne Simard, who furnished the definitive evidence for it in the 1990s.

Pressed ghost pipe from Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, labeled in her hand.

By late autumn, the ghost pipe has turned black and brittle. By winter, it has vanished.

“That it will never come again,” Dickinson wrote, “is what makes life so sweet.”

From the brevity and beauty of the ghost pipe’s bloom emerges a tender living poem about the transience of life, about its mystery, about the delicate interdependence that deepens its sweetness.

Complement with a Dickinson-inspired adventure in nature’s nonbinary botany and some Dickinson-lensed reflections on the flower and the meaning of life, then relish the ongoing mystery of chlorophyll.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 24 Aug 2023 | 12:00 pm(NZT)

Albert Camus on Writing and the Importance of Stubbornness in Creative Work

“There is no greatness without a little stubbornness… Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity.”

Three years after he became the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize, awarded him for literature that “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience,” Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) died in a car crash with an unused train ticket to the same destination in his pocket. The writings he left behind — about the key to strength of character, about creativity as resistance, about the antidotes to the absurdity of life, about happiness as our moral obligation — endure as a living testament to Mary Shelley’s conviction that “it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on.”

Camus addressed his views on writing most directly in a 1943 essay about the novel, included in his altogether indispensable Lyrical and Critical Essays (public library).

He reflects:

One must be two persons when one writes… The great problem is to translate what one feels into what one wants others to feel. We call a writer bad when he expresses himself in reference to an inner context the reader cannot know. The mediocre writer is thus led to say anything he pleases.

In a sentiment James Baldwin would echo in his advice on writing, insisting that “beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance,” Camus observes that all creative endeavor demands of us “a certain constancy of soul, and a human and literary knowledge of sacrifice.” He writes:

To someone who asked Newton how he had managed to construct his theory, he could reply: “By thinking about it all the time.” There is no greatness without a little stubbornness.

Nearly a century after Tchaikovsky asserted that “a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood,” Camus adds:

Great novels… prove the effectiveness of human creation. They convince one that the work of art is a human thing, never human enough, and that its creator can do without dictates from above. Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity.

Complement with more excellent advice on writing from Mary Oliver, Rachel Carson, Maya Angelou, George Saunders, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway, then revisit the beautiful letter of gratitude Camus sent to his childhood teacher shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 23 Aug 2023 | 3:20 am(NZT)

Spell Against Indifference

I was a latecomer to poetry — an art form I did not understand and, as we tend to do with what we do not understand, discounted. But under its slow seduction, I came to see how it shines a sidewise gleam on the invisible and unnameable regions of being where the truest truths dwell, the most difficult and the most beautiful; how it sneaks in through the backdoor of consciousness to reveal us more fully to ourselves; how it gives us an instrument for paying attention, which is how we learn to love the world more.

When I first began writing poetry, it was privately, almost secretly, certainly shyly. But I have come to see that while poetry may be a language for the silent places in us, it is also a language of connection — a way of finding the intimate in the universal and the universal in the intimate — and so it is meant to be shared.

In that spirit, and with immense gratitude to my poetry teachers — Marie Howe and Ellen Bass — here is a poem.

SPELL AGAINST INDIFFERENCE
by Maria Popova

The rain falls and falls
cool, bottomless, and prehistoric
falls like night —
not an ablution
not a baptism
just a small reason
to remember
all we know of Heaven
to remember
we are still here
with our love songs and our wars,
our space telescopes and our table tennis.

Here too
in the wet grass
half a shell
of a robin’s egg
shimmers
blue as a newborn star
fragile as a world.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 21 Aug 2023 | 4:33 am(NZT)

Into the Blue Beyond: William Beebe’s Dazzling Account of Becoming the First Human Being to See the Deep Ocean

“It was stranger than any imagination could have conceived… an indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything I have ever seen in the upper world.”

“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses,” Rachel Carson wrote in her pioneering essay Undersea in an era when the deep ocean was more mysterious than the Moon. The essay became the basis of her lyrical 1951 book The Sea Around Us, which won her the National Book Award and which she dedicated to William Beebe (July 29, 1877–June 4, 1962) — the visionary naturalist, ornithologist, marine biologist, and explorer who in the 1930s became the Poseidon of deep sea exploration.

William Beebe inside the Bathysphere (Wildlife Conservation Society Photo Collection)

Diving off the coast of Bermuda in the Bathysphere — a pioneering spherical deep-sea submersible that looks like something out of a Jules Verne novel, named after the Greek word for “deep”: bathús — Beebe became the first scientist to observe the creatures of the deep in their native environment.

No human being had ever ventured deeper into the blue abyss.

He saw strange and wondrous creatures defying all earthly imagination, menacing and beautiful as they moved through the inky waters sleek and jawed and tentacled.

He saw an alien world at the bottom of the world.

Previously unknown giant dragonfish (*Bathysphaera intacta*) circling the Bathysphere. Art by Beebe’s scientific artist, Else Bostelmann

In his 1934 account of the dive, Half Mile Down (public library | public domain), Beebe channeled the raw astonishment of it all. “Only dead men have sunk below this,” he gasped at 600 feet, then wrote:

Ever since the beginnings of human history, when first the Phoenicians dared to sail the open sea, thousands upon thousands of human beings had reached the depth at which we were now suspended, and had passed on to lower levels. But all of these were dead, drowned victims of war, tempest, or other Acts of God. We were the first living men to look out at the strange illumination: And it was stranger than any imagination could have conceived. It was of an indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything I have ever seen in the upper world, and it excited our optic nerves in a most confusing manner. We kept thinking and calling it brilliant, and again and again I picked up a book to read the type, only to find that I could not tell the difference between a blank page and a colored plate. I brought all my logic to bear, I put out of mind the excitement of our position in watery space and tried to think sanely of comparative color, and I failed utterly. I flashed on the searchlight, which seemed the yellowest thing I have ever seen, and let it soak into my eyes, yet the moment it was switched off, it was like the long vanished sunlight — it was as though it never had been — and the blueness of the blue, both outside and inside our sphere, seemed to pass materially through the eye into our very beings.

Complement with Carson on why the sea is blue and her almost unbearably beautiful meditation on the ocean and the meaning of life, then revisit artist Else Bostelmann’s stunning scientific illustrations of what the Bathysphere saw.

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 20 Aug 2023 | 4:02 am(NZT)

Uses of the Erotic: Audre Lorde on the Relationship Between Eros, Creativity, and Power

“There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.”

To be a complete human being, to fully inhabit your own vitality, is to live undivided within your own nature. No part of us is more habitually exiled, caged, and crushed under the weight of millennia of cultural baggage than Eros — the part that includes sexuality but transcends it to also include our capacity for spontaneity and playfulness, our tolerance for uncertainty, our unselfconscious creative energy.

W.H. Auden understood the centrality of Eros when he looked up at the stars that made us and realized how we too are “composed like them of Eros and of dust, beleaguered by the same negation and despair.” Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) understood it with singular clarity of vision in a paper she delivered at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women at Mount Holyoke College on August 25, 1978, titled “Uses of the Erotic,” later adapted as an essay in the altogether indispensable Lorde collection Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (public library).

She writes:

There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling… We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society… It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power.

[…]

The erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation.

She offers an expansive definition of Eros:

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

[…]

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects — born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

Eros, she observes, springs from our capacity to feel — a capacity that demands of us the difficult courage of authenticity, for, as E.E. Cummings knew, “whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.”

Observing that “we have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings,” Lorde writes:

The erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.

Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print.)

In consonance with the existential psychologist Rollo May’s insight that eros “elicits in us the capacity to reach out… to preform and mold the future,” Lorde argues that “recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world,” and writes:

When we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society.

Out of this refusal of self-negation arises raw creative vitality, irradiating every aspect of life:

There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.

Indeed, Lorde insists that a fundamental function of erotic connection is to serve as “the open and fearless underlining” of our capacity for joy. In a sentiment the poet Ross Gay would echo a generation later in contemplating connection as the broadest portal to joy, she writes:

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

[…]

That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.

This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.

Complement with Rilke on the relationship between sexuality and creativity, then revisit Lorde on feeling as an antidote to fear, turning fear into fire for creative work, and her poignant poem “The Bees.”

donating = loving

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Source: The Marginalian | 19 Aug 2023 | 3:36 am(NZT)

ART - Brain Pickings ｜ 澳纽网Ausnz.net聚合阅读

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”

donating = loving

newsletter

“No matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can’t possibly do this, somehow you do.”

donating = loving

newsletter

“It is the search for infinity, the search for evidence that our capacious universe might hold life elsewhere, in a different place or at a different time or in a different form.”

donating = loving

newsletter

“Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility.”

donating = loving

newsletter

donating = loving

newsletter

“Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.”

donating = loving

newsletter

donating = loving

newsletter

“Human lives… are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence… into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life.”

donating = loving

newsletter

donating = loving

newsletter

“There is only one world. Things outside only exist if you go to meet them with everything you carry in yourself. As to the things inside, you will never see them well unless you allow those outside to enter in.”

donating = loving

newsletter

donating = loving

newsletter

“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.”

donating = loving

newsletter

donating = loving

newsletter

donating = loving

newsletter

“You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness out of which all these emerge.”

donating = loving

newsletter

“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”

donating = loving

newsletter

“There is no greatness without a little stubbornness… Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity.”

donating = loving

newsletter

donating = loving

newsletter

“It was stranger than any imagination could have conceived… an indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything I have ever seen in the upper world.”

donating = loving

newsletter

“There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.”

donating = loving

newsletter

ART - Brain Pickings ｜澳纽网Ausnz.net聚合阅读