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The Wound Is the Gift: David Whyte on the Relationship Between Anxiety and Intimacy

It takes a long time to know a person — to unbutton the costume of personality and unlace the corset of coping mechanisms in order to touch the naked soul. It is a process delicate and difficult, riven by anxiety and absolutely terrifying to both, requiring therefore great courage and great vulnesrabitliy — a process the hard-won product of which we call intimacy. “There is no terror like that of being known,” Emerson anguished in his journal while trying to navigate his deep and complicated relationship with Margaret Fuller. It is a wise terror, for it knows that there is no greater pain than the pain of intimacy severed — by betrayal, by distance, by death. To triumph over that terror in order to know and be known on the level of the naked soul is an act of faith — perhaps the greatest act of faith there is. Because all faith requires a surrender to something we cannot control, all faith begins with the anguishing anxiety that prefaces the leap.

Poet and philosopher David Whyte explores the terrifying and transcendent work of intimacy in Consolations II — the second volume of his short, splendid essays, each reckoning with the deeper meaning of some ordinary and overused word to reveal its unexamined emotional etymology. In “Intimacy,” he writes:

Intimacy is presence magnified by our vulnerability, magnified by increasing proximity to the fear that underlies that vulnerability. Intimacy and the vulnerabilities of intimacy are our constant, invisible companions, yet companions who are always wishing to make themselves visible and touchable to us, always emerging from some deep interior, to ruffle and disturb the calm surface of our well apportioned lives. Intimacy is a living force, inviting me simultaneously from the inside as much as the outside. Something calling from within that wants to meet something calling in recognition from without. Intimacy is the art and practise of living from the inside out.

[…]

Our need and our fear of intimacy is felt through an ever present almost volcanic force emerging from some unknown origin inside us, exhibiting to all and sundry, our previously hidden unspoken desires, flowing out against all efforts to the contrary, through our unconscious and conscious behaviours.

Art from *An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days*.

And yet intimacy is haunted by a central paradox:

To become intimate is to become vulnerable not only to what I want and desire in my life, but to the fear I have of my desire being met.

This is the paradox of longing: Because longing can be an addiction, because no active addict ever wants to give up their addiction — or can without a great deal of suffering — it can be terrifying and almost unbearably vulnerable to surrender to an intimacy so amply fulfilling that it leaves nothing to long for. And yet in that vulnerability lies our power and our freedom to transform a relationship from a tether of dependency into a slender cord of grace.

David writes:

Intimacy cannot occur without a robust sense of vulnerability, and is tied to the sense of being pulled along in the gravitational field of any newly felt openness. In that new openness we feel as if we are pulled through the very doorway of our needs for something we desire deeply but cannot fully identify, partly because what we are about to identify is intimately connected with our own ability or inability to love.

Ultimately, he observes, intimacy is an instrument of discovery and self-discovery — a way of turning the walls between us and within us into sunlit windows through which to see and be seen:

Intimacy always carries the sense of something hidden about to be felt and known in surprising ways; something brought out and made visible, that previously could not be seen or understood. In intimacy what is hidden will become a gift, discovered and rediscovered again and again in the eyes of both giver and receiver.

[…]

To become human is to become visible, while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

Because what is visible is vulnerable, because what can be seen can be touched and what can be touched can be wounded, he adds:

Intimacy is intimately related to our sense of having been wounded, and the startling intuition that my way forward into life, or into another person’s life will be through the very doorway of the wound itself. Intimacy invites me to learn to trust the way being wounded has actually made me more available, more compassionate and possibly more intimate with the world, by being opened in ways I never realised it was possible to be open… Intimacy is always calibrated by the letting go of or the taking on of fear. Almost always our fear is experienced as an intimate invitation to understand and feel fully our particular form of wounded-ness.

[…]

Intimacy finds its ultimate expression in all the forms of surrender human beings find difficult to embrace.

The difficulty of that surrender almost always takes shape as anxiety — a word to which David devotes another of the book’s essays. Anxiety, he observes, is often an avoidance mechanism and a dissociation device — “a protection against real intimacy, real friendship and real engagement with our work,” a way not to feel “the full vulnerability of being visible and touchable in a difficult world.” In anxiety, we disallow ourselves “the ability to stop and rest and the spacious silence needed for… a new understanding” — and all true intimacy opens into a new understanding of ourselves, so that “we learn that what we thought we knew is not equal to what we are discovering… that who we thought we were is not who we are now.”

By allowing true intimacy on the smallest scale of personal love — the bond between one and one — we open into the largest scale of belonging, into cohesion with what Margaret Fuller, inspired by Goethe, called the All. David writes:

The need for intimacy in a human life and in a human social life is as foundational as our daily hunger and our never ending thirst, and needs to be met in just the same practical way, every day, just as necessarily and just as frequently: in touch, in conversation, in listening and in seeing, in the back and forth of ideas; intimate exchanges that say I am here and you are here and that by touching our bodies, our minds or our shared work in the world, we make a world together… Intimacy is our evolutionary inheritance, the internal force that has us returning to another and to the world from our insulated aloneness again and again, no matter our difficulties and no matter our wounds.

Couple these fragments of the thoroughly soul-slaking Consolations II — other essays in which explore such overused, underexamined words as shame, time, love, burnout, and end — with a wonderful read on lichens as a lens on intimacy, Kahlil Gibran on love’s difficult balance of intimacy and independence, and Eric Berne on the key to true intimacy, then savor this excellent interview with David by one of my oldest friends.

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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 | 4 Dec 2024 | 4:20 am(NZT)

The Cosmogony of You

We live in a state of perpetual dissociation from the almost unbearable wonder of being alive. Wonder is always an edge state, its edge so sharp it threatens to rupture the mundane and sever us from what we mistake for reality — the TV, the townhouse, the trauma narrative. If we fell asleep each night remembering “the singularity we once were” and awoke each morning with the bright awareness that every atom in our bodies can be traced to one of the first stars — a particular star in the infant universe that made this particular body to sinew this particular soul across billions and billions of blind steps each one of which could have gone otherwise — we would be too wonder-struck by the miraculousness of it all to deal with the mundane. But the dishes have to be washed and the emails have to be written, so we avert our eyes from the majesty and mystery of a universe that made them in order to look at itself, from the majesty and mystery of what we are.

Card from *An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days*, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.

Azita Ardakani offers a lyrical antidote to this self-expatriation from our cosmic inheritance in this breathtaking piece she has kindly let me publish on The Marginalian — part poem and part lullaby, part compact history of science and part creation myth, radiating the revelatory simplicity of a children’s book and the causal complexity of a cosmogony.

Azita writes:

Once upon a time,

In a place far far away,

The darkness drifted.

The darkness knew no time.

Reaching for infinity, only knowing beyond.

One day in the web of inky forever, it asked itself, can I see you?

It waited, and waited, and then, answered, a star.

And then another, and another, and, another.

Another was where it began,

and as the star beings asked to be born to meet the darkness from which they came, one particular planet created water so it too could reflect the stars back to themselves.

The stars seeing their reflection were filled with joy and delight.

Curiosity was born in their light millions of years away.

One by one they made their way down, to touch the ocean, to see themselves.

The soil darkness watched with awe as the stars arrived,

A heart’s desire asked: Can I see you closer?

The water stars stretched onto the soil, and mixed into the clay, and became,

everything.

Yes you too, coyote who hears this, wise owl, mouse and rabbit, you too sleeping fawn, you too tree and root and seed, you too nested flight, and you too, sitting two legged.

Mixed from clay and star, flesh and life, a hollow canal opened so breath too could reach back to the darkness.

Missing the beginning, it exhaled a bridge, home.

The star water became everything we know, and you? The story of us?

Well, to experience the closest thing to the very beginning of star meeting water, we learned to create a small ocean inside of us, where it could all be felt, all over again.

Once upon a time, in a place far far away, the darkness drifted, and you drifted inside it.

You were the wish you once wished for.

Art by Derek Dominic D’souza from *Song of Two Worlds* by physicist Alan Lightman

Complement with Pattiann Rogers’s stunning poem about how stardust became sapiens and the wondrous science of how stars begot souls, then revisit N.J. Berrill’s forgotten 1958 masterpiece You and the Universe and Hannah Emerson’s poem “Center of the Universe” — perhaps the best instruction I know on how to be alive.

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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 | 2 Dec 2024 | 3:59 am(NZT)

How to Love Yourself and How to Love Another: A Playful and Poignant Vintage Fable about Cherishing the Particular

The great problem of consciousness is that all it knows is itself, and only dimly. We can override this elemental self-reference only with constant vigilance, reminding ourselves again and again as we forget over and over how difficult it is — how nigh impossible — to know what it is like to be anybody else. It does not come naturally to us, this recognition that every other consciousness is a different operating system governed by different needs and different responses to the same situations, encoded by different formative experiences. This is why the Golden Rule, a version of which is appears in all major spiritual and ethical traditions, may be the most narcissistic of our moral codes, with its assumption that others want done unto them the same things we ourselves want. One measure of love — perhaps the greatest measure — may be the understanding that another’s needs, as incomprehensible as they may appear to us and as orthogonal to our own, are a fundamental part of who they are; that to love someone is to love whatever they need to be their fullest, truest self rather than a projection of who we imagine or desire them to be.

In 1963, two years before she composed her iconic ode to friendship, the prolific children’s book author, theologian, and novelist Sandol Stoddard (December 16, 1927–January 4, 2018) took up this fundamental challenge of connection in her playful and poignant book My Very Own Special Particular Private and Personal Cat (public library).

The story, illustrated with great vivacity and typographic virtuosity by artist, dancer, choreographer, and theater director Remy Charlip (January 10, 1929–August 14, 2012), begins with a boy declaring ownership of his cat, in that classic “MINE!” way that children have of feeling out the boundary between where they end and the rest of the world begins — a boundary we spend our lives trying to locate as ever-changing selves moving through an ever-changing world, trying to discern the contours of belonging.

“Come up on my lap and have a little nap,” the boy commands the cat, who looks in no mood for a nap on a lap. Page after page, we see the boy treat the cat as his plaything — dressing the cat in a sweater, putting the cat in a stroller, tucking the cat into a crib — until the forbearing cat finally has it and claws out the sweater, leaps from under the blanket, breaks out of the bed, breaking the bed.

With the fury of a dispossessed tyrant that so readily comes to children (and to the petulant child nested in every maturity), the boy roars an indignant declaration of ownership at the cat, who gently sings back the fundamental dignity of personhood.

In consonance with Alan Watt’s prescription for how to become who you truly are, in which he insisted that “Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others,” the cat’s outpouring of self-possession undams the boy’s own.

In the end, the boy discovers what we all must eventually, if we are to grow into the full bigness of the heart: that in every relationship of trust and tenderness, each is the guardian of the other’s particularity; that to love someone not for the comfort or compliance they can give you but for exactly who they are, the special and particular person, is the greatest, the only kind of love; that it is impossible to achieve this without first learning to love yourself for exactly who you are, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires — for, as e.e. cummings so memorably wrote, “to be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” Or any cat can fight. The story ends with the companionable quietude of boy and cat coming to rest in their parallel particularities — that supreme measure of a healthy bond.

And, as another excellent writer wrote in another cat-story of what it means to be human: “You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.”

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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 Nov 2024 | 1:55 am(NZT)

Delight Between Science and Magic: Euler’s Disk and the Sound of the Singularity

One afternoon in the late 1980s, sitting in the company cafeteria, aerospace engineer Joseph Bendik found himself so bored that he took a coin out of his pocket and began spinning it atop the table. In a testament to the eternal paradox of boredom and wonder as two sides of the same coin — the currency of life that is attention — he was suddenly wonder-smitten by the exquisite elegance of the physics making the coin seem to levitate, spinning faster and faster rather than slower and slower before shuddering to a stop.

Here was a demonstration of laws undergirding everything from the motions of planets to the photosynthesis of plants — the conservation of angular momentum and the conservation of energy — a demonstration made not in equations but in sheer delight.

Bendik realized that if he toyed with a few variables — the smoothness of the surface, the mass of the spinning disk, the width of its edge — he could magnify the delight and make the science border on magic. And so he turned the mathematics — that most splendid plaything of the mind — into a toy: a heavy disk spinning into near-infinity atop a mirror surface.

He named it Euler’s Disk for Leonhard Euler, who had died two centuries earlier to be remembered by many as the greatest mathematician to ever live.

Along with a copy of The Universe in Verse and a baby lemon tree planted from a seed, Euler’s Disk may be my favorite gift to give, and the one most certain to bring unalloyed delight. Here is a gleeful demonstration of it by my former partner turned best friend upon receiving it:

This is how it works: Holding the disk upright on the mirror, you give it a hard manual spin that adds kinetic energy to its potential energy. Once in motion, the disk relies on its angular momentum to try to remain upright as gravity pulls it downward and the mirrored base exerts an upward counterforce. These opposing tugs make it spin faster and faster, appearing to levitate, its sound whirring at a higher and higher frequency as the disk’s points of contact with the mirror make a circle oscillating with a constant angular velocity.

If there were no friction, this motion would continue forever — the product of a power law modeling what is known as finite-time singularity. But the mirror, smooth though it is, still provides some friction. Coupled with resistance from the air — the same air drag central to the physics of how birds fly — it eventually causes the whirring disk to sigh to a sudden stop: the sound of the singularity.

Couple with the story of how Emmy Noether illuminated the conservation of energy (a story crowned with an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem), then revisit the poetic science of how cicadas sing — the sound of a living singularity.

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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 | 27 Nov 2024 | 7:24 am(NZT)

How to Live a Miraculous Life: Brian Doyle on Love, Humility, and the Quiet Grace of the Possible

Suppose we agree that we are here to love anyway — to love even though the work is almost unbearably difficult, even though we know that everything alive is dying, that everything beautiful is perishable, that everything we love will eventually be taken from us by one form of entropy or another, culminating with life itself. Suppose we agree that, as Rilke so passionately insisted, “for one human being to love another… is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

This, then, is the agreement: Learning to live is learning to love, and learning to love is learning to die — the imperative in the inevitable that renders our transience meaningful and holy. The price of this holiness is absolute humility: There is no pact to be made with the universe — we die, whether or not we agree to it, whether or not we have learned how to love in the bright interlude between atom and dust. We may or may not be lucky enough to live out the two billion heartbeats our creaturely inheritance has allotted us. But no matter how many we actually get, it matters how we spend them and what we spend them on. It may be the only thing that matters.

Art from *An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days*. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

Not long before his untimely death by an aggressive brain tumor, Brian Doyle — who described himself as “a muddle and a conundrum shuffling slowly along the road, gaping in wonder, trying to just see and say what is” — took up these immense and eternal questions in what became his posthumous essay collection One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder (public library).

Because the harshest realities of our own lives are often easiest to see and easiest to bear lensed through the lives of other creatures cushioned in symbol and metaphor — this is why we have fables and fairy tales — Doyle finds himself reckoning with mortality and the meaning of life as he examines the dead body of a Townsend’s mole (Scapanus townsendii) in his garden. Curious about the animal, he turns to the scientific literature and is suddenly disquieted by reading about the species as a lump-sum of data points. Overcome with tenderness for “this particular individual, and the flavor and tenor and yearning of this one life,” he writes:

This tribe of mole is thought to be largely solitary, I read, and I want to laugh and weep, as we are all largely solitary, and spend whole lifetimes digging tunnels toward each other, do we not? And sometimes we connect, thrilled and confused, sure and unsure at once, for a time, before the family cavern empties, or one among us does not come home at all, and faintly far away we hear the sound of the shovel.

Art by Charlie Mackesy from *The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse* — a tender illustrated fable about what it means to love

Over and over, through the different winding paths of the different essays, Doyle returns to his animating ethos that “love is our greatest and hardest work” — nowhere more poignantly articulated than in an essay about the people seen leaping out of the Twin Towers hand in hand, their hands “nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.” He reflects on this harrowing and holy emblem of our deepest humanity:

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe… that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

The trick, of course, is learning how to be here — how to remain fully present and filled with that ferocious love — knowing we will one day be gone, knowing it might be tomorrow. In what may be the most soulful and sensible advice on how to live an actualized life since Whitman’s, Doyle offers an anchor to that holy here:

You do your absolute best to find and hone and wield your divine gifts against the dark. You do your best to reach out tenderly to touch and elevate as many people as you can reach. You bring your naked love and defiant courage and salty grace to bear as much as you can, with all the attentiveness and humor you can muster. This life is after all a miracle and we ought to pay fierce attention every moment, as much as possible.

Paradoxically, this active and conscious effort is a heart that can only beat in the chest of surrender. Doyle adds the ultimate disclaimer:

You cannot control anything. You cannot order or command everything. You cannot fix and repair everything. You cannot protect your children from pain and loss and tragedy and illness. You cannot be sure that you will always be married, let alone happily married. You cannot be sure you will always be employed, or healthy, or relatively sane. All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference.

At the center of this recognition is that most difficult triumph of unselfing for us creatures of self-importance: humility. In Doyle’s definition, humility is not a lowering down to the ground, as the word’s Latin root (humus) suggests, but a rising up and a reaching toward something we can never quite touch yet must trust is there. Some call this faith — faith that the world holds together, that our tiny and transient lives are nonetheless an essential part of the whole, that the choices we make within them change the shape of the whole, that love is the mightiest choice we could ever make and the highest form of faith.

Doyle writes:

Humility does not mean self-abnegation, lassitude, detachment; it’s more a calm recognition that you must trust in that which does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly, ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture. You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow… That doing your chosen work with creativity and diligence will shiver people far beyond your ken. That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling.

[…]

This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love, and then there is everything else. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, is love.

Complement with Seamus Heaney’s kindred advice on life and W.H. Auden’s kindred poem “The More Loving One,” then revisit Christian Wiman on love and the sacred and Oliver Sacks on finding meaning without religious faith

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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 | 25 Nov 2024 | 2:10 pm(NZT)

Grace Against Gravity and the Physics of Vulnerability: How Birds Fly and Why They Flock in a V Formation

“What we see from the air is so simple and beautiful,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote after her first airplane flight, “I cannot help feeling that it would do something wonderful for the human race — rid it of much smallness and pettiness if more people flew.”

I am writing this aboard an airplane. An earthbound ape in my airborne cage of metal and glass, I wonder who we would be, in the soul of the species, if we could fly — really fly, the way birds do; if we were born not just seeing “the world all simplified and beautiful and clear-cut in patterns,” as Georgia did out of that small round window, but feeling it. And yet you and I shall never know the open sky as a way of being — never know the touch of a thermal or the taste of a thundercloud, never see our naked shadow on a mountain or slice a cirrus with a wing. What cruel cosmic fate to live on this Pale Blue Dot without ever knowing its blueness. And yet we are recompensed by a consciousness capable of wonder — that edge state on the rim of understanding, where the mind touches mystery.

It is wonder that led us to invent science — that quickening of curiosity driving every discovery — so that science may repay us with magnified wonder as it reveals the weft and warp of nature — the tapestry of forces and phenomena, of subtleties and complexities, woven on the enchanted loom of reality. To look at any single thread more closely, in all its hidden wonder, is to see more clearly how the entire tapestry holds together, to strengthen how we ourselves hold together across the arc of life. For, as Rachel Carson so memorably wrote, the greatest gift you could give a child — or the eternal child in you — is “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments… the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

Art by Nikki McClure from *Something About the Sky* — Rachel Carson’s serenade to the wonder of the clouds

Take the wonder of a bird — this living poem of feather and physics, of barometric wizardry and hollow bone, in whose profoundly other brain evolution invented dreams. That so tiny a creature should defy the gravitational pull of an entire planet seems impossible, miraculous. And yet beneath this defiance is an active surrender to the same immutable laws that make the whole miracle of the universe possible.

In one of the three dozen fascinating essays collected in The Miraculous from the Material: Understanding the Wonders of Nature (public library), the poetic physicist and novelist Alan Lightman illuminates the lawful wonder of avian flight, from evolution to aerodynamics, from molecules to mathematics, beginning with the fundamental wonderment of how a bird creates strong enough an upward force to counter gravity’s pull on its weight:

[The force] is created by a net upward air pressure, which in turn is created by the bird’s forward motion and the shape of its wings. The topside of an avian wing is curved, while the bottom side is rather flat. This difference in shape, together with the angle and some smaller adjustments of the wing, cause the air to flow over the top of the wing at higher speed than on the bottom. The higher speed on top reduces the air pressure above the wing compared to the air pressure below the wing. With more pressure pushing up from below than pressure pushing down from above, the wing gets an upward lift.

Anatomy of a bird by French artist Paul Sougy. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

It may seem counterintuitive that a higher air speed above the wing would produce a lower pressure, but our creaturely intuitions have often been poor reflections of reality — it took us eons to discern that the flat surface beneath our feet is a sphere, that the sphere is not at the center of the universe, and that there is an invisible force acting on objects without touching them to make the universe cohere — a force which a bored twenty-something sitting in his mother’s apple orchard called gravity.

Alan explains the reality of chemistry and physics that makes flight possible as air molecules strike against the underside of the wing to lift the bird up:

Air consists of little molecules that push against whatever they strike, causing pressure. Molecules of air are constantly whizzing about in all directions. If no energy is added, the total speed of the molecules must be constant, by the law of the conservation of energy. But that speed is composed of two parts: a horizontal speed, parallel to the wing, and a vertical speed, perpendicular to the wing. Increase the horizontal speed of air molecules above the wing, and the vertical speed of those molecules must decrease. Lower speed of molecules striking the wing from above means less pressure, or less push. The molecules on the bottom of the wing, moving slower in the horizontal direction but faster in the vertical direction (with greater upward pressure), lift the wing upward.

The lift is greater the larger the wing area and the faster the speed of air past the wing. There’s a convenient trade-off here. The necessary lift force to counterbalance the bird’s weight can be had with less wing area if the animal increases its forward speed, and vice versa. Birds capitalize on this option according to their individual needs. The great blue heron, for example, has long, slender legs for wading and must fly slowly so as not to break them on landing. Consequently, herons have relatively large wingspan. Pheasants, on the other hand, maneuver in underbrush and would find large wings cumbersome. To remain airborne with their relatively short and stubby wings, pheasants must fly fast.

There are, however, limits to this factorial conversation between surface and speed. Alan considers why there are no birds the size of elephants:

As you scale up the size of a bird or any material thing, unless you drastically change its shape, its weight increases faster than its area. Weight is proportional to volume, or length times length times length, while area is proportional to length times length. Double the length, and the weight is eight times larger, while the area is only four times larger. For example, if you have a cube of 1 inch on a side, its volume is 1 cubic inch, while its total area is 6 (sides) × 1 square inch, or 6 square inches. If you double the side of the cube to 2 inches, its volume goes up to 8 cubic inches, or 800 percent (with a similar increase in weight), while its area goes up to 24 square inches, or 400 percent. Since the lift force is proportional to the wing area while the opposing weight force is proportional to the bird’s volume, as you continue scaling up, eventually you reach a point where the bird’s wing area is not enough to keep it aloft. Although birds have been experimenting with flight for 100 million years, the heaviest true flying bird, the great bustard, rarely exceeds 42 pounds. The larger gliding birds, such as vultures, are lifted by rising hot air columns and don’t carry their full weight.

But all this elaborate molecular and mathematical aerodynamics of upward motion is not enough to make flight possible — birds must also propel themselves forward without propellers. For a long time, how they do this was a mystery. (The mystery was even deeper for the singular flight of the hummingbird, hovering between science and magic.) It was the birth of modern aviation that finally shed light on it. In the early nineteenth century, watching how birds glide, the pioneering engineer and aerial investigator George Cayley became the first human being to discern the mechanics of flight, identifying the three forces acting on the weight of any flying body: lift, drag, and thrust.

Alan details the physics of drag and thrust that allow birds to move forward:

Birds do in fact have propellers, in the form of specially designed feathers in the outer halves of their wings. These feathers, called primaries, change their shape and position during a wingbeat. Forward thrust is obtained by pushing air backward with each flap. In a similar manner, we are able to move forward in a swimming pool by vigorously moving our arms backward against the water.

All of this helps explain why larger birds often fly in a V formation — each bird benefits from the uplifting air pockets produced by the bird in front of it, conserving 20 to 30 percent of the calories needed for flight compared to flying solo. Because the lead bird takes most of the aerodynamic and caloric brunt shielding the rest from the wind, the flock takes turns in the frontmost position.

This, too, is the physics of any healthy community, any healthy relationship — the physics of vulnerability and trust. Because life always exerts different pressures on each person at different times, internal or external, thriving together is not a matter of always pulling equal weight but of accommodating the ebb and flow of one another’s vulnerability, each trusting the other to shield them in times of depletion, then doing the shielding when replenished. One measure of love may be the willingness to be the lead bird shielding someone dear in their time of struggle, lifting up their wings with your stubborn presence.

Couple this fragment of The Miraculous from the Material — the rest of which explores the science behind wonders like fireflies and eclipses, hummingbirds and Saturn’s rings — with the peregrine falcon as a way of seeing and a state of being, the enchanting otherness of what it’s like to be an owl, and the science of what birds dream about.

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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 Nov 2024 | 3:05 am(NZT)

There’s a Ghost in the Garden: A Subtle and Soulful Illustrated Fable about Memory and Mystery

One of the things no one tells us as we grow up is that we will be living in a world rife with ghosts — all of our disappointed hopes and our outgrown dreams, all the abandoned novels and unproven theorems, all the people we used to love, all the people we used to be. A ghost is a palpable presence of an absence charged with feeling, the contour of something half-known, half-remembered, half-forgotten — a halfway house between what we understand and what we cannot, between what we have let go and what we cannot.

Children are especially prone to perceiving ghosts because childhood itself is such a halfway house between imagination and reality, because what they know is so small against the vastness of what there is yet to know and what may never be known that they invent their own answers to the immense open question of life, answers wild and wondrous and often true.

Writer Kyo Maclear and artist Katty Maurey conjure up this primal reckoning with the unknowns of love and loss in There’s a Ghost in the Garden (public library) — the subtle and soulful story of a little boy who believes a ghost haunts his grandfather’s garden.

In the course of trying to discern the source and nature of the ghostly presence — a ghost mischievous but friendly, knocking down flower pots, leaving “little presents” in the bird nest and tracks on the path that “was once a cool, dark stream” — the boy discovers that his grandfather also had a childhood, that inside the old man lives the ghost of a long-ago boy who also had fantasies and fears, who also used to play in the flickering sunlight, who once swam in the stream that is now a dry path.

As the two converse, shadows flit across the gloaming garden — a hare, a fox, a deer, a bird — never fully revealing themselves, there and then gone, as the stars, clear and constant, rise in the night.

There is no grandmother in the picture — only a young boy and an old man talking about ghosts, about what is remembered, about the seen and the unseen.

What emerges from the story is the intimation that forgetting — those who have left us, and the parts of ourselves we have left behind — is a kind of death, but we can come back from it through memory and love, which twine the lifeline tethering us to everything that is beautiful and enduring.

Complement There’s a Ghost in the Garden with a different lens on the garden and the spirit and a different lens on the living ghost in each of us — the mystery of what makes you and your childhood self the same person, despite a lifetime of physical and psychological change.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova

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Source: The Marginalian | 22 Nov 2024 | 1:00 pm(NZT)

The Avenging Heroes Among Us: John Berger on the Courage to Create

“The powerful fear art, whatever its form… because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us… becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring.”

“What makes Heroic?” asked Nietzsche as he was emerging from depression, then answered: “To face simultaneously one’s greatest suffering and one’s highest hope.” That is the heroism of the inner world, yes, but what makes a person heroic in the world we share is to face the greatest suffering — their own and the world’s — then make of it a found of hope and fulcrum of strength for others. Heroes are transmutation agents — people who alchemize suffering and restlessness and rage into love, who compost disappointment into fertilizer for growth, who break down cynicism to its building blocks of helplessness and hubris, then metabolize the toxin out of the system we call society.

There are myriad kinds of heroes capable of myriad heroisms — the epochal heroisms of speaking truth to power that mobilize the consciousness of a civilization and the small daily heroisms of the invisible labor that makes the world cohere, the heroism of planting a tree and the heroism of abolishing a plantation, the heroism of keeping faith in a friend through a hard time and the heroism of leaving a false love.

It helps to remember this diversity of heroisms, because it saves us from imprisoning our heroes in the expectation that everyone contribute to the shared cause — the great project of human flourishing — in the same way. The protest marcher and the poet are very different kinds of heroes, and it is an act of oppression against the gift of each to measure them on the register of the other. Only when we cease doing that can we begin to recognize the heroes who across the history of every civilization have kept the lighthouse blazing through the dark times — the heroes we call artists.

*The Star-Lighter* by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

These are the heroes John Berger (November 5, 1926–January 2, 2017) celebrates in one of the essays in his 1991 collection Keeping a Rendezvous (public library) — the heroes we need in times “when the just cause is defeated… when our past is dishonoured and its promises and sacrifices shrugged off with ignorant and evil smiles, when whole families come to suspect that those who wield power are deaf to reason and every plea, and that there is no appeal anywhere, when gradually you realize… that They are out to break you, out to break your inheritance, your skills, your communities, your poetry, your clubs, your home and, wherever possible, your bones too.” Of such times, Berger writes:

The avenging heroes are now being dreamt up and awaited. They are already feared by the pitiless and blessed by me and maybe by you.

I would shield any such hero to my fullest capacity. Yet if, during the time I was sheltering him, he told me he liked drawing, or… she told me she’d always wanted to paint, and had never had the chance or the time to do so, if this happened, then I think I’d say: Look, if you want to, it’s possible you may achieve what you are setting out to do in another way, a way less likely to fall out on your comrades and less open to confusion.

Art by Giuliano Cucco from *Before I Grew Up* — a lyrical picture-book about the artist within

Echoing Iris Murdoch’s abiding observation that “tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify” and Auden’s insistence that “the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act,” Berger adds:

I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honour.

Complement with Leonard Cohen on what makes a modern saint, James Baldwin on the artist’s role in society, Toni Morrison on the artist’s task in troubled times, and Ernst Becker on heroism and our search for meaning, then revisit Berger on the power of music.

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Source: The Marginalian | 20 Nov 2024 | 8:43 am(NZT)

Kafka on Friendship and the Art of Reconnection

Among the paradoxes of friendship is this: All friendships of depth and durability are based on a profound knowledge of each other, of the soul beneath the costume of personality — that lovely Celtic notion of anam cara. We bring this knowledge, this mutual understanding, to every interaction with a true friend — that is what makes friendship satisfying, steadying, safe; it is what makes it, in Kahlil Gibran’s immortal words, a “field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.” And yet, if we are alive enough, each time we meet we are meeting for the first time, getting to know each other afresh, for only the self that goes on changing goes on living. A true friend blesses both the abiding and the possible in us.

Another paradox: It is often the loneliest people, those most riven by self-doubt and most unsure of where they belong, that make the most steadfast and salutary friends once they break through the barriers of insecurity and fear to allow connection. Because for them the gift of being understood is especially hard-earned, they give it back redoubled with gratitude.

Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883–June 3, 1924) was one such person.

“Am I broken?” he asks on the pages of Diaries: 1910–1923 (public library) — the journal in which he grappled so desperately with self-doubt — and answers himself: “Almost nothing but hope speaks against it.” When his hope dwindled, he declared himself “unfit for friendship,” doubted whether friendship is “even possible” for someone as strange and solitary as himself, and yet he yearned for it: “I am incapable, alone, of bearing the assault of my own life, the demands of my own person.”

In a particularly dispirited diary entry from the last year of his thirties, which was also one of the last years of his life, he declares himself “forsaken” and writes:

[I am] incapable of striking up a friendship with anyone, incapable of tolerating a friendship, at bottom full of endless astonishment when I see a group of people cheerfully assembled together.

It takes just one unwavering friend — a friend to the soul beneath the self that does the doubting — to quietly and consistently revise these punishing stories we tell ourselves. All along, through all the years of all this punishing self-talk, Kafka’s childhood friend Max Brod had been the greatest champion of his talent, never losing faith in his friend or in the friendship. Though Kafka frequently withdrew into his self-elected isolation, Max never withdrew his love.

Art by Marianne Dubuc from *The Lion and the Bird* — a tender illustrated story about loyalty and the gift of friendship

With time, Kafka came to understand that in every friendship, life happens and interrupts the continuity of connection, making it difficult to reconnect — difficult but infinitely important, for in moving through the difficulty of discontinuity, in the repair of the rupture, the deeper substratum of trust and durability is laid down and reaffirmed again and again.

In another diary entry, he writes:

Since a friendship without interruption of one’s daily life is unthinkable, a great many of its manifestations are blown away time and again, even if its core remains undamaged. From the undamaged core they are formed anew, but as every such formation requires time, and not everything that is expected succeeds, one can never, even aside from the change in one’s personal moods, pick up again where one left off last time. Out of this, in friendships that have a deep foundation, an uneasiness must arise before every fresh meeting which need not be so great that it is felt as such, but which can disturb one’s conversation and behaviour to such a degree that one is consciously astonished, especially as one is not aware of, or cannot believe, the reason for it.

Like all deep and complex people, Kafka was not fully aware of the reasons for his frequent withdrawals. But some part of him hoped, trusted that true friendship withstands the elasticity of presence. When he finally realized that the tuberculosis he had been living with for years was going to take his life, he left all his papers and manuscripts to Max, instructing him to destroy everything. In an act of love — refusing to enable a friend’s damaging self-doubt is always an act of love — Max disobeyed, instead preserving Kafka’s writing for posterity, publishing a tender biography of his friend, and immortalizing their friendship in his 1928 novel The Kingdom of Love.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from a vintage ode to friendship by Janice May Udry

Complement with Comet & Star — a cosmic fable about the rhythms and consolations of friendship — and an introvert’s guide to friendship from Thoreau, another strange and solitary person riven by self-doubt, then revisit Kafka on the nature of reality, the power of patience, and the four psychological hindrances that keep the talented from manifesting their talent.

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Source: The Marginalian | 18 Nov 2024 | 8:20 am(NZT)

The Dictionary Story: A Love Letter to Language Tucked Into a Delightful Fable about the Difficult Question of How to Be Yourself

“Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf rasped in the only surviving recording of her voice — a love letter to language as an instrument of thought and a medium of being. “Words are events, they do things, change things,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a generation after her. To care about the etymologies of words is to care about the origins of the world’s story about itself. To broaden and deepen the meanings of words, to celebrate — as David Whyte did — “their beautiful hidden and beckoning uncertainty,” is to broaden and deepen life itself. It is of words that we build the two great pylons propping up our sense of reality: concepts and stories. Without the concept of a table, you would be staring blankly at the assemblage of incongruent surfaces and angles. Without arranging the facts and events of your life into a story — that narrative infrastructure of personhood — it would not be you looking out of your eyes. To know yourself is to tell a congruent story of who you are, a story in which your concept of yourself coheres even as it evolves. Without this central organizing principle of selfhood, life would be a continuous identity crisis.

Crisis, of course, is important — it is, as Alain de Botton writes in his deeply assuring meditation on the importance of breakdowns, “an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.” There come times when the tedium and turmoil of being yourself become too much to bear, exasperate you, exhaust you, make you wish to be someone else, send you searching for a different organizing principle. (It takes some living to reach that point, which is why midlife can be such a time of tumult and transformation.)

We live and die with these questions, rooted in our earliest childhood, in those first reckonings with what makes us ourselves, those first experiments in self-acceptance. They are deep and difficult questions, but Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston bring great playfulness and delight to them in their second collaboration, The Dictionary Story (public library) — a charming fable about the yearning for inner congruence and the existential exhale of self-acceptance, and a love letter to language carried by Oliver’s joyful paintings, his singular hand-lettering, and Sam’s symphonic collage compositions.

The story begins on the bookshelf, where “most of the time, all the books knew what they were about” — except one book. Because she contains “all the words that had ever been read, which meant she could say all the things that could ever be said,” Dictionary is perpetually unsure of herself, her organizing principle not coherence but alphabetic order, the words in her not a story but a list.

It is often the most unexpected and improbable things that save us from ourselves: An Alligator suddenly leaps from the A pages and, ravenous for a snack, heads to the D pages for a Donut, who, not wanting to be eaten, darts across the alphabet.

A chaos of delight ensues as other words come alive as other characters — a Ghost, a Cloud, a Queen, a Tornado, the Moon — each trying to understand their part in the confusing story writing itself through their animacy.

Dictionary’s thrill at finally having a story unfold on her pages turns into terror as things get out of hand. Suddenly, her natural order starts to look a whole lot more desirable than this unbridled disarray of characters with incompatible desires. (And who hasn’t felt the discomposing overwhelm of trying to make too many changes to the story of life all at once, to harmonize the discord of conflicting desires, only to end up in even deeper incoherence.)

In the end, Dictionary calls on her friend Alphabet to restore her to herself — a lovely reminder that the greatest gift a friend can give is to sing back to you the song of yourself when you forget it.

Couple The Dictionary Story with Oliver and Sam’s previous collaboration, A Child of Books, then revisit The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — John Koenig’s uncommonly wonderful invented words (based on real etymologies from around the world) for what we feel but cannot name, words like maru mori (“the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things”) and apolytus (“the moment you realize you are changing as a person”).

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Source: The Marginalian | 16 Nov 2024 | 10:42 am(NZT)

The Managed Heart: Emotional Labor and the Psychological Cost of Ambivalence

What are you unwilling to feel? This is one of the most brutal, most clarifying questions in life, answering which requires great courage and great vulnerability. Out of that unwillingness arises the greatest inner tension of the heart: that between what we wish we felt and what we are actually feeling.

There are two ways of keeping that tension from breaking the heart — a surrender to the truth, or a falsification of feeling. When we don’t feel strong enough or safe enough to face our emotional reality, we manipulate it. It may be an outward act, masking for others what we fear would be unwelcome or judged, or it may be an inner one, lying to ourselves about what we are actually feeling to dull the discomfort and ambivalence of feeling it. The stab of loneliness at the party, the relief at the funeral, the love that requires nothing less than changing your life — whether internally sundering or socially inappropriate, we render these emotions impermissible and suppress them. That falsification, whether conscious or not, maps the fault line between the person and the personality — that costume the soul wears to perform and protect itself.

But there is a high psychological cost to putting on the performance, the costume, the mask — a cost sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild terms emotional labor.

In her revelatory 1983 book The Managed Heart (public library), she draws on a wealth of case studies and interviews to explore emotional labor as “a distinctly patterned yet invisible emotional system” governing our private and public exchanges through individual acts of “emotion work” and social “feeling rules” that shape what we allow ourselves to show and what we allow ourselves to feel. Much of our emotional labor is invisible even to us, but we become aware of it when we experience what Hochschild calls “the pinch” between a real but unwelcome feeling and a preferred, idealized one.

René Magritte. *The False Mirror*. 1929. (Museum of Modern Art.)

Two decades ahead of philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s case for the intelligence of our emotions and half a century ahead of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s case for feeling as the crucible of consciousness, Hochschild writes:

Emotion functions as a messenger from the self, an agent that gives us an instant report on the connection between what we are seeing and what we had expected to see, and tells us what we feel ready to do about it… Emotions signal the secret hopes, fears, and expectations with which we actively greet any news, any occurrence.

[…]

Emotional labor… requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others… This kind of labor calls for a coordination of mind and feeling, and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honor as deep and integral to our individuality.

There is emotional labor involved each time we put someone else’s needs before our own, each time we force a binary conclusion to resolve our ambivalence about a nuanced matter of the heart. This “subterranean work of placing an acceptable inner face on ambivalence” is painfully exhausting because it makes us less ourselves. Hochschild draws an analogy:

Beneath the difference between physical and emotional labor there lies a similarity in the possible cost of doing the work: the worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self — either the body or the margins of the soul — that is used to do the work. The factory boy’s arm functioned like a piece of machinery used to produce wallpaper. His employer, regarding that arm as an instrument, claimed control over its speed and motions. In this situation, what was the relation between the boy’s arm and his mind? Was his arm in any meaningful sense his own?

Owning what we feel — which involves both allowing it and expressing it — is fundamentally a way of claiming ourselves. But because permission and expression are so intricately entwined, the very act of suppressing what we express changes what we feel, alters the very self. Hochschild writes:

If we conceive of feeling not as a periodic abdication to biology but as something we do by attending to inner sensation in a given way, by defining situations in a given way, by managing in given ways, then it becomes plainer just how plastic and susceptible to reshaping techniques a feeling can be. The very act of managing emotion can be seen as part of what the emotion becomes.

Art by Olivier Tallec from *Big Wolf & Little Wolf*

This matters because attention is the lens that renders reality and attention is a function of feeling — by changing our feelings, we change our lens, ultimately changing what we experience as reality:

Feeling… filters out evidence about the self-relevance of what we see, recall, or fantasize… Every emotion does signal the “me” I put into seeing “you.” It signals the often unconscious perspective we apply when we go about seeing. Feeling signals that inner perspective.

In this sense, feeling is an orienteering tool, a clue about where we stand in relation to something or someone. And yet it is prey to one great complication: the interpretation of the clue. Often unconscious, our interpretation of feeling is regularly garbled by what was and by what we think should be — the ghosts of the past and the fantasies of the future haunting the present, warping the present, warping reality itself, effecting what George Eliot called a “double consciousness.” Because to know what is real is the measure of self-trust, confusion and ambivalence about our feelings erode our self-trust.

Unable to bear the internal dissonance, or entirely unaware of it, we cope by feigning to feel something other than what we are actually feeling. Whether performed for others or for the audience of our own confused conscience, this is acting work. Hochschild, who grew up as the child of diplomats, classifies two key varieties — surface acting and deep acting. She writes:

Feelings do not erupt spontaneously or automatically in either deep acting or surface acting. In both cases the actor has learned to intervene — either in creating the inner shape of a feeling or in shaping the outward appearance of one.

[…]

In surface acting we deceive others about what we really feel, but we do not deceive ourselves. Diplomats and actors do this best, and very small children do it worst (it is part of their charm). In deep acting we make feigning easy by making it unnecessary.

We make it unnecessary by replacing our actual feeling with the feeling we wish to project, wish to feel, so that in a sense we no longer need to feign it — we have induced ourselves to feel it. Hochschild, whose study of emotional labor began with hundreds of flight attendants in training, offers an illustrative example:

Can a flight attendant suppress her anger at a passenger who insults her?… She may have lost for awhile the sense of what she would have felt had she not been trying so hard to feel something else. By taking over the levers of feeling production, by pretending deeply, she alters herself.

Art by Guridi from *The Day I Became a Bird* — an illustrated allegory about falling in love and learning to unmask the true self

This alteration of the real self requires tremendous emotional labor, which comes at a great psychological cost — we lose sense of who we are and where we stand. (Those of us who have had to take care of a parent’s emotional needs and feelings from a young age at the expense of feeling our own, at the expense of knowing our own, are particularly vulnerable to such self-abandonment in adult life.)

This notion of deep acting originates in Russian theater pioneer Konstantin Stanislavski’s influential century-old system for training actors in what he called “the art of experiencing” — a practice of tapping into the actor’s conscious thought, will, and memory in order to trigger the unconscious into experiencing, rather than just representing, the emotion the actor must perform in their part.

In one of the many case studies substantiating the book, Hochschild gives the example of a man trying to stop feeling deep love for a woman with whom he is no longer able to have a reciprocal relationship. Applying Stanislavski’s method, the man would draw on his emotional memory to make a list of all the times the woman disappointed him or hurt him, prompting himself to feel the pain and disappointment as an antidote to his love. “He would not, then, fall naturally out of love,” she writes. “He would actively conduct himself out of love through deep acting.”

We are conducting ourselves into and out of feeling all the time as we play the parts of the lives we think we ought to live. Most of the time, we are not even aware we are doing this. We do it especially deftly in love. “I was afraid of being hurt, so I attempted to change my feelings,” an exceptionally self-aware woman tells Hochschild in one of the interviews, naming plainly the commonest contortion of the heart we perform in the pit of fear — after all, falling in love is always and invariably a surrender to the fear of loss. In love, Hochschild observes, one always “wavers between belief and doubt” — and it is precisely when afflicted with ambivalence, when unable to tolereate doubt and reconcile conflicting feelings, that we exert the most toilsome emotional labor.

One of Hochschild’s interview subjects is a woman riven by a common ambivalence — a marriage she has outgrown, yet one in which she continues to stay out of a misplaced feeling of responsibility for her child’s future, forgetting somehow that the greatest gift a parent can give a child is to model the courage of living one’s truth. She tells Hochschild:

I am desperately trying to change my feelings of being trapped [in marriage] into feelings of wanting to remain with my husband voluntarily. Sometimes I think I’m succeeding — sometimes I know I haven’t. It means I have to lie to myself and know I am lying. It means I don’t like myself very much. It also makes me wonder whether or not I’m a bit of a masochist.

Lying to ourselves, Hochschild admonishes, erodes our trust in knowing what is real, what is true. In acting, the actor is aware of the illusion; in life, deluding ourselves is a form of bad faith and self-betrayal, the price of which — paid upon the reluctant but inevitable admission of our inner truth — is a loss of self-respect. She writes:

It is far more unsettling to discover that we have fooled ourselves than to discover that we have been fooling others… When in private life we recognize an illusion we have held, we form a different relation to what we have thought of as our self. We come to distrust our sense of what is true, as we know it through feeling. And if our feelings have lied to us, they cannot be part of our good, trustworthy, “true” self… We may recognize that we distort reality, that we deny or suppress truths, but we rely on an observing ego to comment on these unconscious processes in us and to try to find out what is going on despite them.

Hochschild offers a single, merciless antidote to this all too human tendency toward self-delusion: “constant attention, continual questioning and testing” of what we believe about ourselves, what we trust in ourselves. Then and only then can we begin to treat our hearts not as something to be managed but as something to be met, discovering in that meeting the truth of who we are.

Couple The Managed Heart with Javier Marías on the courage to heed your intuitions, then revisit the fascinating science of how emotions are made.

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Source: The Marginalian | 15 Nov 2024 | 4:29 am(NZT)

Louise Erdrich on the Deepest Meaning of Resistance

“Resist loss of the miraculous by lowering your standards for what constitutes a miracle. It is all a fucking miracle.”

The best advice we have for anyone else is always advice to ourselves, honed on the sincerity of living, learned through life’s best teaching tool: suffering. Otherwise it becomes that most untrustworthy of transmissions: preaching. It is in speaking to ourselves that we practice speaking the truth — the unflattering truth, the incongruous truth, the truth trembling with all the terror and tenderness of knowing ourselves in order to know the world, of loving ourselves in order to love the world.

That is what Native American novelist, poet, and children’s book author Louise Erdrich — she who urged us so passionately to love anyway — offers in “Advice to Myself #2: Resistance,” originally published in a special edition of Orion Magazine — a poem evocative of Derek Walcott’s classic “Love After Love,” of Leonard Cohen’s lyric reckoning with resistance, and yet entirely original for the simple reason of drawing from the freshest spring of the universal: the most deeply personal.

ADVICE TO MYSELF #2: RESISTANCE
by Louise Erdrich

Resist the thought that you may need a savior,
or another special being to walk beside you.
Resist the thought that you are alone.
Resist turning your back on the knife
of the world’s sorrow,
resist turning that knife upon yourself.
Resist your disappearance
into sentimental monikers,
into the violent pattern of corporate logos,
into the mouth of the unholy flower of consumerism.
Resist being consumed.
Resist your disappearance
into anything except
the face you had before you walked up to the podium.
Resist all funding sources but accept all money.
Cut the strings and dismantle the web
that needing money throws over you.
Resist the distractions of excess.
Wear old clothes and avoid chain restaurants.
Resist your genius and your own significance
as declared by others.
Resist all hint of glory but accept the accolade
as tributes to your double.
Walk away in your unpurchased skin.
Resist the millionth purchase and go backward.
Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book —
maybe the book you give away.
Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
Resist traveling except where you want to go.
Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.
Nothing, everything, is personal.
Resist all pressure to have children
unless you crave the torment of joy.
If you give in to irrationality, then
resist cleaning up the messes your children make.
You are robbing them of small despairs they can fix.
Resist cleaning up after your husband.
It will soon replace having sex with him.
Resist outrageous charts spelling doom.
However you can, rely on sun and wind.
Resist loss of the miraculous
by lowering your standards
for what constitutes a miracle.
It is all a fucking miracle.
Resist your own gift’s power
to tear you away from the simplicity of tears.
Your gift will begin to watch you having your emotions,
so that it can use them in an interesting paragraph,
or to get a laugh.
Resist the blue chair of dreams, the red chair of science, the black chair of the humanities, and just be human.
Resist all chairs.
Be the one sitting on the ground
or perching on the beam overhead
or sleeping beneath the podium.
Resist disappearing from the stage,
unless you can walk straight into the bathroom and resume the face,
the desolate face, the radiant face, the weary face, the face
that has become your own, though all your life
you have resisted it.

Couple with e.e. cummings on the courage to be yourself — the ultimate act of resistance “in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else” — then revisit Grace Paley on the art of growing older, predicated on how you hold your face.

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Source: The Marginalian | 14 Nov 2024 | 7:06 am(NZT)

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside: Doris Lessing on Redeeming Humanity

This is the history of the world: revolutionaries turning into tyrants, leaders who claim to stand with the masses turning the individuals within them on each other, stirring certainties and self-righteousness to distract from the uncomfortable unknowns, from the great open question of what makes us and keeps us human, and human together.

This is also the history of the world: artists — those lighthouses of the spirit — speaking truth to power, placing imagination ahead of ideology, the soul above the self, unselfing us into seeing each other, into remembering, as James Baldwin told Margaret Mead in their epochal conversation, that “we are still each other’s only hope.”

Born in Iran months after the end of the First World War and raised by farming parents in present-day Zimbabwe, Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was still a girl when she sensed something deeply wrong with the unquestioned colonial system of her world, with the oppression that was the axis of that world. By the time she was a young woman — a time when our urge to rebel against the broken system is fiery but we don’t yet have the tools to rebel intelligently, don’t yet know the right questions to ask in order to tell whether the answer we are holding up as an alternative is any better or worse — she rebelled by embracing Communism as “an interesting manifestation of popular will.” Working by that point as a telephone operator in England, she joined the Communist Party. “It was a conversion, apparently sudden, and total (though short-lived),” she would later recall. “Communism was in fact a germ or virus that had already been at work in me for a long time… because of my rejection of the repressive and unjust society of old white-dominated Africa.” It didn’t take her long to see the cracks in Communism. She left the party, discovered Sufism, grew fascinated with the nascent field of behavioral psychology and its revelatory, often disquieting findings about the inner workings of the mind, of its formidable powers to act and its immense vulnerabilities to being acted upon. But she found no ready-made answer to the problem of social harmony.

And so, in that way artists have of complaining by creating, she devoted her life — almost a century of life, a century of world wars and violent uprisings, of changes unimaginable to her parents — to asking the difficult, clarifying questions that help us better understand what makes us human, how we allow ourselves to dehumanize others, and what it takes to cohere, as individuals and as societies. At 87, she became the oldest person to receive the Nobel Prize, awarded her for writing that “with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny.”

In 1985, months after I was born under Bulgaria’s Communist dictatorship, Doris Lessing delivered Canada’s esteemed annual Massey Lectures, later adapted into a series of short essays under the haunting title Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (public library) — a searching look at how it is that “we (the human race) are now in possession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do not use it to improve our institutions and therefore our lives,” lensed through a lucid faith that we have all the power, urgency, and dignity we need to choose otherwise, to use what we have learned about the worst of our nature to nurture and magnify the best of our nature, to figure out “how we behave so that we control the society and the society does not control us.”

One of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s original watercolors for *The Little Prince*. (Morgan Library & Museum)

In a sentiment Rebecca Solnit would echo three decades later in her modern classic Hope in the Dark, Lessing writes:

This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that — a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice — or if we notice, belittle — equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.

To be realistic about our own nature, Lessing argues, requires attentiveness to both of these strands — the destructive and the creative. This is the cosmic mirror Maya Angelou held up to humanity in her stunning space-bound poem, urging us to “learn that we are neither devils nor divines.” An epoch before her, Bertrand Russell — also a Nobel laureate in Literature, though trained as a scientist — reckoned with our twin capacities to define them in elemental terms — “We construct when we increase the potential energy of the system in which we are interested, and we destroy when we diminish the potential energy.” — and in existential terms: “Construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power, but construction is more difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more satisfaction to the person who can achieve it.”

Our sanity, Lessing observes, lies in “our capacity to be detached and unflattering about ourselves” — and in the understanding that our selves are not islanded in time but lineages of beliefs and tendencies with roots much longer than our lifetimes, not sovereign but contiguous with all the other selves that occupy the particular patch of spacetime we have been born into. It is vital, she insists, that we examine ourselves — our selves, and the constellation of selves that is our given society — from various elsewheres.

Art by Felicita Sala from *A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader*.

This is why we need writers — those professional observers, in Susan Sontag’s splendid definition, whose job it is to “pay attention to the world” and shine the light of that attention on every side of the kaleidoscope that is a given culture at a given time. A decade after Iris Murdoch wrote in her superb reckoning with the role of literature in democracy that “tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify,” Lessing writes:

In totalitarian societies writers are distrusted for precisely this reason… Writers everywhere are aspects of each other, aspects of a function that has been evolved by society… Literature is one of the most useful ways we have of achieving this “other eye,” this detached manner of seeing ourselves; history is another.

Because we are the future of our own past, the posterity of our ancestors, looking back on history from our present vantage point offers fertile training ground for looking forward, for shaping the world of tomorrow. Lessing writes:

Anyone who reads history at all knows that the passionate and powerful convictions of one century usually seem absurd, extraordinary, to the next. There is no epoch in history that seems to us as it must have to the people who lived through it. What we live through, in any age, is the effect on us of mass emotions and of social conditions from which it is almost impossible to detach ourselves.

[…]

There is no such thing as my being in the right, my side being in the right, because within a generation or two, my present way of thinking is bound to be found perhaps faintly ludicrous, perhaps quite outmoded by new development — at the best, something that has been changed, all passion spent, into a small part of a great process, a development.

Doris Lessing, 1950s. (National Portrait Gallery, London)

In consonance with Carl Sagan’s admonition against “the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth” and with Joan Didion’s admonition against mistaking self-righteousness for morality, Lessing offers:

This business of seeing ourselves as in the right, others in the wrong; our cause as right, theirs as wrong; our ideas as correct, theirs as nonsense, if not as downright evil… Well, in our sober moments, our human moments, the times when we think, reflect, and allow our rational minds to dominate us, we all of us suspect that this “I am right, you are wrong” is, quite simply, nonsense. All history, development goes on through interaction and mutual influence, and even the most violent extremes of thought, of behaviour, become woven into the general texture of human life, as one strand of it. This process can be seen over and over again in history. In fact, it is as if what is real in human development — the main current of social evolution — cannot tolerate extremes, so it seeks to expel extremes and extremists, or to get rid of them by absorbing them into the general stream.

Looking back on the colonialist Zimbabwe of her childhood, on the “prejudiced, ugly, ignorant” attitudes of the ruling whites, she reflects:

These attitudes were assumed to be unchallengeable and unalterable, though the merest glance at history would have told them (and many of them were educated people) that it was inevitable their rule would pass, that their certitudes were temporary.

At the center of Lessing’s inquiry is the paradox of how seemingly sound-minded, kind-hearted people get enlisted in ideologies of oppression. Kierkegaard had written in the Golden Age of European revolutions — those idealistic but imperfect attempts to unify fractured feudal duchies into free nations, attempts that modeled the possibility of a United States of America — that “the evolution of the world tends to show the absolute importance of the category of the individual apart from the crowd,” that “truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because… the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.” An epoch and a world order later, Lessing considers how regimes of terror take hold:

Nearly everyone in such situations behaves automatically. But there is always the minority who do not, and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody, depends on this minority. And that we should be thinking of ways to educate our children to strengthen this minority and not, as we mostly do now, to revere the pack.

Art by Jeska Verstegen from *Bear Is Never Alone* by Marc Veerkamp

The mess we have made, she intimates, may be the most effective teaching tool we have — a living admonition against doing the same, a clarion call to rebel by doing otherwise:

Perhaps it is not too much to say that in these violent times the kindest, wisest wish we have for the young must be: “We hope that your period of immersion in group lunacy, group self-righteousness, will not coincide with some period of your country’s history when you can put your murderous and stupid ideas into practice. “If you are lucky, you will emerge much enlarged by your experience of what you are capable of in the way of bigotry and intolerance. You will understand absolutely how sane people, in periods of public insanity, can murder, destroy, lie, swear black is white.”

As for us, here in the roiling mess, our sole salvation lies in learning to “live our lives with minds free of violent and passionate commitment, but in a condition of intelligent doubt about ourselves and our lives, a state of quiet, tentative, dispassionate curiosity.” Lessing writes:

While all these boilings and upheavals go on, at the same time, parallel, continues this other revolution: the quiet revolution, based on sober and accurate observation of ourselves, our behaviour, our capacities… If we decided to use it, [we may] transform the world we live in. But it means making that deliberate step into objectivity and away from wild emotionalism, deliberately choosing to see ourselves as, perhaps, a visitor from another planet might see us.

Art by Diana Ejaita from *Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way* by poet Aracelis Girmay

This, in fact, was the conditional clause in Baldwin’s words to Mead — in order to be “each other’s only hope,” he said, we ought to be “as clear-headed about human beings as possible.” This, too, was Maya Angelou’s conditional optimism for humanity: “That is when, and only when, we come to it” — to that “Brave and Startling Truth,” balanced on the fulcrum of our conflicted capacities, “that we are the possible, we are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world.”

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Source: The Marginalian | 12 Nov 2024 | 8:49 am(NZT)

Oliver Sacks on Despair and the Meaning of Life

“The meaning of life… clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love.”

Meaning is not something we find — it is something we make, and the puzzle pieces are often the fragments of our shattered hopes and dreams. “There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote between two World Wars. The transmutation of despair into love is what we call meaning. It is an active, searching process — a creative act. Paradoxically, we make meaning most readily, most urgently, in times of confusion and despair, when life as we know it has ceased to make sense and we must derive for ourselves not only what makes it livable but what makes it worth living. Those are clarifying times, sanctifying times, when the simulacra of meaning we have consciously and unconsciously borrowed from our culture — God and money, the family unit and perfect teeth — fall away to reveal the naked soul of being, to hone the spirit on the mortal bone.

The poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) — who thought with uncommon rigor and compassion about what it means to be human and all the different ways of being and remaining human no matter how our minds may fray — takes up this question of life’s meaning in one of his magnificent collected Letters (public library).

Oliver Sacks by his partner, Bill Hayes.

In his fifty-seventh year, Sacks reached out to the philosopher Hugh S. Moorhead in response to his anthology of reflections on the meaning of life by some of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and thinkers. (Three years later, LIFE magazine would plagiarize Moorhead’s concept in an anthology of their own, even taking the same title.) Sacks — a self-described “sort of atheist (curious, sometimes wistful, often indifferent, never militant)” — offers his own perspective:

I envy those who are able to find meanings — above all, ultimate meanings — from cultural and religious structures. And, in this sense, to “believe” and “belong.”

[…]

I do not find, for myself, that any steady sense of “meaning” can be provided by any cultural institution, or any religion, or any philosophy, or (what might be called) a dully “materialistic” Science. I am excited by a different vision of Science, which sees the emergence and making of order as the “center” of the universe.

It is in this 1990 letter that Sacks began germinating the seeds of the personal credo that would come abloom in his poignant deathbed reflection on the measure of living and the dignity of dying thirty-five years later. He tells Moorhead:

I do not (at least consciously) have a steady sense of life’s meaning. I keep losing it, and having to re-achieve it, again and again. I can only re-achieve (or “remember”) it when I am “inspired” by things or events or people, when I get a sense of the immense intricacy and mystery, but also the deep ordering positivity, of Nature and History.

I do not believe in, never have believed in, any “transcendental” spirit above Nature; but there is a spirit in Nature, a cosmogenic spirit, which commands my respect and love; and it is this, perhaps most deeply, which serves to “explain” life, give it “meaning.”

Nine years later, in a different letter to Stephen Jay Gould, he would take issue with the idea that there are two “magisteria” — two different realms of reality, one natural and one supernatural — writing:

Talk of “parapsychology” and astrology and ghosts and spirits infuriates me, with their implication of “another,” as-it-were parallel world. But when I read poetry, or listen to Mozart, or see selfless acts, I do, of course feel a “higher” domain (but one which Nature reaches up to, not separate in nature).

Art by Ariana Fields from *What Love Knows* by poet Aracelis Girmay

A century and a half earlier, his beloved Darwin had articulated a similar sentiment in contemplating the spirituality of nature after docking the Beagle in Chile, as had Whitman in contemplating the meaning of life in the wake of a paralytic stroke — exactly the kind of physiological and neurological disordering Sacks studied with such passion and compassion for what keeps despair at bay, what keeps life meaningful, when the mind — that meeting place of the body and the spirit — comes undone. At the heart of his letter to Moorhead is the recognition that there is something wider than thought, deeper than belief, that animates our lives:

When moods of defeat, despair, accidie and “So-what-ness” visit me (they are not infrequent!), I find a sense of hope and meaning in my patients, who do not give up despite devastating disease. If they who are so ill, so without the usual strengths and supports and hopes, if they can be affirmative — there must be something to affirm, and an inextinguishable power of affirmation within us.

I think “the meaning of life” is something we have to formulate for ourselves, we have to determine what has meaning for us… It clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love.

Art by Sophie Blackall from *Things to Look Forward to*

As if to remind us that the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness, which is itself the crowning achievement of the universe, which means that we may only be here to learn how to love, he adds:

I do not think that love is “just an emotion,” but that it is constitutive in our whole mental structure (and, therefore, in the development of our brains).

Complement this small fragment of Oliver Sacks’s wide and wonderful Letters with Rachel Carson on the meaning of life, Loren Eiseley on its first and final truth, and Mary Shelley — having lost her mother at birth, having lost three of her own children, her only sister, and the love of her life before the end of her twenties — on what makes life worth living, then revisit Oliver Sacks (writing 30 years before ChatGPT) on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning and his timely long-ago reflection on how to save humanity from itself.

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Source: The Marginalian | 9 Nov 2024 | 6:29 am(NZT)

A Lighthouse for Dark Times

This is the elemental speaking: It is during phase transition — when the temperature and pressure of a system go beyond what the system can withstand and matter changes from one state to another — that the system is most pliant, most possible. This chaos of particles that liquefies solids and vaporizes liquids is just the creative force by which the new order of a more stable structure finds itself. The world would not exist without these discomposing transitions, during which everything seems to be falling apart and entropy seems to have the last word. And yet here it is, solid beneath our living feet — feet that carry value systems, systems of sanity, just as vulnerable to the upheavals of phase transition yet just as resilient, saved too by the irrepressible creative force that makes order, makes beauty, makes a new and stronger structure of possibility out of the chaos of such times.

Light distribution on soap bubble from the 19th-century French physics textbook *Le monde physique*. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Cultures and civilizations tend to overestimate the stability of their states, only to find themselves regularly discomposed by internal pressures and tensions too great for the system to hold. And yet always in them there are those who harness from the chaos the creative force to imagine, and in the act of imagining to effect, a phase transition to a different state.

We call those people artists — they who never forget it is only what we can imagine that limits or liberates what is possible. “A society must assume that it is stable,” James Baldwin wrote in reckoning with the immense creative process that is humanity, “but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” In the instability, the possibility; in the chaos, the building blocks of a stronger structure.

A century of upheavals ago, suspended between two World Wars, Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) considered the strange power and possibility of such societal phase transitions in his novel Steppenwolf (public library). He writes:

Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilisation. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.

We too are living now through such a world, caught again between two ages, confused and conflicted, suffocating and suffering. But we have a powerful instrument for self-understanding, for cutting through the confusion to draw from these civilizational phase transitions new and stronger structures of possibility: the creative spirit.

Hesse observes that artists feel these painful instabilities more deeply than the rest of society and more restlessly, and out of that restlessness they make the lifelines that save us, the lifelines we call art. A century before Toni Morrison, living through another upheaval, insisted that “this is precisely the time when artists go to work,” Hesse insists that artists nourish the goodness of the human spirit “with such strength and indescribable beauty” that it is “flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment.”

*The Dove No. 1* by Hilma af Klint, painted during World War I. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Often, they do the nourishing at great personal cost. He considers what it means, and what it takes, to be an artist:

You will, instead, embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace.

Most people, Hesse laments while watching his contemporaries, are instead “robbed of their peace of mind and better feelings” by the newspapers they read daily — the social media of his time — through which the world’s power-mongers manipulate our imagination of the possible. “The end and aim of it all,” he prophecies, “is to have the war over again, the next war that draws nearer and nearer, and it will be a good deal more horrible than the last.”

That is what happened. The next war did come, the world’s grimmest yet — a phase transition that nearly destroyed every particle of humanity. And yet something was left standing, stirring — that same creative force that made of the chaos a new era of possibility never previously imagined: civil rights and women’s liberation, solar panels and antibiotics, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Nina Simone.

On the other side of that war’s ruins, another thinker of uncommon depth and sensitivity considered the role of the artist and of art in the collapse and reconfiguring of civilizations. In a 1949 address before the American Academy of Arts and Letters, later included in his lifeline of a collection Two Cheers for Democracy (public library), the English novelist, essayist, and broadcaster E.M Forster (January 1, 1879–June 7, 1970) celebrates the stabilizing power of art in times of incoherence and discord:

A work of art… is the only material object in the universe which may possess internal harmony. All the others have been pressed into shape from outside, and when their mould is removed they collapse. The work of art stands up by itself, and nothing else does. It achieves something which has often been promised by society, but always delusively. Ancient Athens made a mess — but the Antigone stands up. Renaissance Rome made a mess — but the ceiling of the Sistine got painted. James I made a mess — but there was Macbeth. Louis XIV — but there was Phèdre. Art… is the one orderly product which our muddling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths; it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden.

Art by Nina Cosford from the illustrated biography of Virginia Woolf, who wrote *To the Lighthouse* in a transitional time.

Because art is the antipode to the destructive forces sundering society, the artist — endowed with the personal and political power of the sensitive — will invariably tend to be an outsider to the society in which they are born. A decade before Auden observed that “the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act,” before Iris Murdoch observed that “tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify,” Forster writes:

If our present society should disintegrate — and who dare prophesy that it won’t? — [the figure of the artist] will become clearer: the Bohemian, the outsider, the parasite, the rat — one of those figures which have at present no function either in a warring or a peaceful world. It may not be dignified to be a rat, but many of the ships are sinking, which is not dignified either — the officials did not build them properly. Myself, I would sooner be a swimming rat than a sinking ship — at all events I can look around me for a little longer — and I remember how one of us, a rat with particularly bright eyes called Shelley, squeaked out, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” before he vanished into the waters of the Mediterranean… The legislation of the artist is never formulated at the time, though it is sometimes discerned by future generations.

This, he assures us, is not a pessimistic view — it is a kind of faith in the future, made of our creative devotion to the present. (I am reminded here of his contemporary Albert Camus’s insistence that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,” and of C.S. Lewis, who reckoned with our task in troubled times from the middle of a World War to remind us that “the present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”) Forster writes:

Society can only represent a fragment of the human spirit, and that another fragment can only get expressed through art… Looking back into the past, it seems to me that that is all there has ever been: vantage-grounds for discussion and creation, little vantage-grounds in the changing chaos, where bubbles have been blown and webs spun, and the desire to create order has found temporary gratification, and the sentinels have managed to utter their challenges, and the huntsmen, though lost individually, have heard each other’s calls through the impenetrable wood, and the lighthouses have never ceased sweeping the thankless seas.

Art by Caldecott-winning children’s book author and artist Sophie Blackall

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Source: The Marginalian | 7 Nov 2024 | 5:34 am(NZT)

The Great Blind Spot of Science and the Art of Asking the Complex Question the Only Answer to Which Is Life

“Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you,” says the Skin Horse — a stuffed toy brought to life by a child’s love — in The Velveteen Rabbit. Great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise; this is a fundamental question: In a reality of matter, what makes life alive? A generation later, the Ukrainian Jewish writer Vasily Grossman answered with a deeply original proposition: that life is best defined as freedom, that freedom is the boundary between inanimate matter and animacy.

To me, freedom is the boundary condition where matter reaches for meaning — life, after all, is the only component of the universe free to comprehend the rest. And yet all of our technologies of thought have so far failed to discern what life actually is, how it emerged from non-life, and what to look for when we are looking for it in our laboratories and in the great unfolding experiment that is the universe itself. We have sequenced the human genome and discovered the “God particle,” yet genetics and particle physics have found no common language for communicating and harmonizing their respective discoveries to address the complex question the single answer to which is life.

Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

A century ago, the philosopher Simone Weil admonished against this fragmentation of the problem of reality into parochial questions addressed by disjointed scientific disciplines — “villages” of thought, she called them — each too blinded by its own axioms to make headway on illuminating the whole. “The villagers seldom leave the village,” she wrote. Watching her mathematician brother — the number theory pioneer André Weil — try to reduce the problem of reality to his own science, watching the founding fathers of quantum mechanics do the same, she lamented: “The state of science at a given moment is nothing else but… the average opinion of the village of scientists [who] affirm what they believe they ought to affirm.”

An epoch later, the villages have drifted so far apart as to grow foreign to each other. Gravitational waves, radioactivity, and DNA belong to the same reality — the reality that made life possible — and yet cosmology, chemistry, and biology are too mute to each other to make sense of the deeper meaning behind their respective discoveries. We are still left wondering how reality happens unto life and how life becomes reality.

Art by Komako Sakai for a modern Japanese interpretation of *The Velveteen Rabbit*

Astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker takes up these complex and abiding questions in Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence (public library).

Trained as a theoretical physicist and disenchanted with her discipline’s insistence that life is a conceptually banal scientific problem subservient to the fundamentals of space, time, energy, and matter, she holds modern physics accountable for providing “a fundamental description of a universe devoid of life” — that is, a description of the universe that negates the very existence of its describers, we who are very much alive. She writes:

We cannot see ourselves clearly because we have not built a theory of physics yet that treats observers as inside the universe they are describing.

Plate from *An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe* by Thomas Wright, 1750. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

In this quest to understand ourselves and the universe that made us, she argues, the vitalists of the eighteenth century — who believed that a concrete non-physical element, a “vital spark,” grants life its aliveness — were no more misguided than the modern materialists who believe that life — that poetry, that whale song, that love — is just a property of physical matter. Reckoning with a colleague’s startling remark that “life does not exist,” she considers the deeper logic beneath this koan-like formulation of the great scientific blind spot of our time:

What modern science has taught us is that life is not a property of matter… There is no magic transition point where a molecule or collection of molecules is suddenly “living.” Life is the vaporware of chemistry: a property so obvious in our day-to-day experience — that we are living — is nonexistent when you look at our parts. If life is not a property of matter, and material things are what exist, then life does not exist.

(And of course, none of it had to exist at all. Life seems to be the imperative of the unnecessary. Long before modern physics, Darwin marveled at how, on this planet shaped by unfeeling forces and moved by fixed laws, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.” Here was a biologist trained as a geologist shining a sidewise gleam on a cosmological question — a rare vagabond between the villages of science, from a time before they had become separate continents of thought.)

At the heart of the book is the rigorous, passionate insistence that we need a softer and more elastic explanatory membrane between the three hard problems of reality: the hard problem of consciousness (rooted in the mystery of qualia, that inarticulable essence of what it feels like to be oneself, the felt interiority of being alive in a particular embodiment and enmindment), the hard problem of matter (the fact that everything observable arises from the interaction of particles and forces), and the hard problem of life (sculpted of information and an observer of information). Sara writes:

Cast in this way, all three hard problems become one more fundamental problem we cannot seem to avoid any more than we can seem to answer it: Why do some things exist (or experience existence) and not others? It is perhaps the most perplexing question of our existence that anything should exist at all. And if something exists, then why not everything?

By contracting the pinhole of our scrutiny to the question of life, she intimates, we might be able to begin extrapolating an answer to this largest of questions — something that calls not only for new principles but for a new theory of physics and a dismantling of disciplinary boundaries. A century after Weil, Sara points to the same paradox standing between the life of science and the science of life in our own time:

We don’t yet have a general understanding of the category of things that we should group together and call “life.” Therefore either our categorization is wrong or life is not something to be categorized.

[…]

We cannot always see this clearly because of the arbitrary boundaries we set between the current classification of disciplines we think are needed to solve the problem, which are based on paradigms not suited for solving what life is.

Observing that “the boundary between the phenomena we want to think of as life and not life is fuzzy at best and may not exist at all,” she considers the present state of our disciplinary parochialism:

Biologists approach the problem by defining life in terms of observed features of life on Earth, which is not especially useful when you’re looking for life’s origins or for life elsewhere in the universe. Astrobiologists need guiding principles to inform how they conduct their search, but they, too, end up being overly anthropocentric in their reasoning: their search is most often directed at signs of life that would indicate biology exactly as we observe it here on Earth. Chemists either think life does not exist or that it is all chemistry (probably these are equivalent views). Computer scientists tend to focus too much on the software — the information processing and replicative abilities of life — and not enough on the hardware, i.e., the fact that life is a physical system that emerges from chemistry, and that the properties of chemistry literally matter. Physicists tend to focus too much on the physical — life is about thermodynamics and flows of energy and matter — and miss the informational and evolutionary aspects that seem to be the most distinctive features of the things we want to call life. Philosophers focus too much on the need for a definition or the flaws of providing one, and not enough on how we can move as a community beyond the definitional phase into a new paradigm.
Nature does not share these boundaries between disciplines. They are artifacts of our human conception of nature, our need to classify things, and historical contingencies in how our understanding of the reality around us has evolved over the last few centuries. That is, they are the product of paradigms established in the past. We are in part pre-paradigmatic in understanding life as a general phenomenon in the universe because there is no defined discipline that can fully accommodate the intellectual discussion that needs to be had about what life is.

1573 painting by the Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

The solution to the unsolved problem of life, she argues, may not be one of new evidence but one of new explanation, just as we watched the planets move for eons before we discerned the laws of their motion to concede a heliocentric universe. Without a clear explanatory model for life here on Earth, she argues, we might never be able to detect life on other worlds — the central task of her own science. With an eye to how the new science of plant intelligence deepens the mystery of what a mind is, Sara considers what kindred blind spots may be afflicting astrobiology:

Plants are just one example that makes clear how the boundary of our imagination does not even intersect with what it is to be among the other multicellular life that surrounds us on this planet.

If we cannot even shift our reference frame enough to understand what it is like to be other inhabitants of our own planet, how could we possibly imagine the truly alien? “Truly alien” here should be understood as other life that does not share any ancestry with our own: that is, that has an entirely unique history with an independent origin. There are no aliens on Earth because as far as we know, all the life we have encountered shares a common history. Even artificial intelligences — sometimes described as alien, are not alien; they are trained on human data, which is itself the product of nearly four billion years of evolution on Earth. AI is as much a part of life on Earth as any of the biological organisms that have evolved here.

Art by Pepita Sandwich from *The Art of Crying*

A century and a half after the Victorian visionary Samuel Butler presaged the emergence of a new “mechanical kingdom” extending the kingdoms of biological life into our machines, Sara argues that our mechanical and algorithmic creations may not only alter the definition of life but help illuminate its origins:

The emergence of a technosphere may be precisely what is required for a biosphere to solve its own origins and therefore to discover others like it. To make this transition and make first contact, it may be critical to where we sit now in time that we recognize how thinking technologies are the next major transition in the planetary evolution of life on Earth. It is what we might expect as societies scale up and become more complex, just as life simpler than us has done in the past. The functional capabilities of a society have their deepest roots in ancient life, a lineage of information that propagates through physical materials. Just as a cell might evolve along a specific lineage into a multicellular structure (something that’s not inevitable but has happened independently on Earth at least twenty-five times), the emergence of artificial intelligences and planetary-scale data and computation can be seen as an evolutionary progression — a biosphere becoming a technosphere.

“Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can,” Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in one of her finest, least known poems. A proper understanding of life, Sara argues, must account for that fact — for the tenacity with which life not only continues to exist despite the infinitely greater odds of nonexistence (which anchored Richard Dawkins’s wonderful counterintuitive insistence on the luckiness of death) but continues to exist in its particularity despite the infinitely many other possible configurations. She writes:

If we are ever to understand what life really is, we need to recognize that among the unimaginably large number of things that could exist, or even the smaller subset of ones that we can imagine, only an infinitesimal fraction ever will. Things come into existence when and where it is possible to — and what we call life is the mechanism for making specific things possible when the possibility space is too large for the universe to ever explore all of it.

Out of this arises a crucial distinction between life and being alive (highlighted in the biological fact that most of you is dead). Nearly a century after cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener made the then-radical assertion that “we are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves,” Sara adds:

DNA cannot exist unless there is a physical system (e.g., a cell) with memory of the steps to assemble it. All objects that require information to specify their existence constitute “life.” Life is the high-dimensional combinatorial space of what is possible for our universe to build that can be selected to exist as finite, distinguishable physical objects. Being “alive,” by contrast, is the trajectories traced through that possibility space. The objects that life is made of and that it constructs exist along causal chains extended in time; these lineages of information propagating through matter are what it is to be “alive.” Lineages can assemble individual objects, like a computer, a cup, a cellular membrane, or you in this very instant, but it is the temporally extended structure that is alive. Even over your lifetime you are alive because you are constantly reconstructing yourself — what persists is the informational pattern over time, not the matter.

[…]

The fundamental unit of life is not the cell, nor the individual, but the lineage of information propagating across space and time. The branching pattern at the tips of this structure is what is alive now, and it is what is constructing the future on this planet.

One of computing pioneer Alan Turing’s little-known diagrams of morphogenesis

In the remainder of Life as No One Knows It, Sara goes on to explore assembly theory — a new framework for understanding the complexity of living organisms by discerning the minimal number of steps required to assemble them from the most fundamental building blocks — as a possible solution to the abiding problem of what we are. Complement it with pioneering biologist Ernest Everett Just — one of the first scientists to consider this question holistically — on what makes life alive, then revisit Meghan O’Gieblyn on our search for meaning in the age of AI and Alan Turing’s favorite boyhood book about the strange science of how alive you really are.

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Source: The Marginalian | 5 Nov 2024 | 6:17 am(NZT)

The Science of Tears and the Art of Crying: An Illustrated Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Deepest Humanity

“All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us,” Muriel Rukeyser writes in her timeless ode to the power of poetry. “Cry, heart, but never break,” entreats one of my favorite children’s books — which, at their best, are always philosophies for living. It may be that our tears keep our hearts from breaking by making living poems of our pain, of our confusion, of the almost unbearable beauty of being. They are our singular evolutionary inheritance — we are the only animals with lacrimal glands activated by emotion — and our richest involuntary language. They are how we signal to each other what makes us and breaks us human: that we feel life deeply, that we are moved by moving through this world, that something, something that matters enough, has punctured our illusion of control just enough to open a pinhole into the incalculable fragility that grants life its bittersweet beauty. To cry is to claim our humanity, to claim our very lives. It is an indelible part of mastering what the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm called “the art of living.”

That is what Argentine visual artist Pepita Sandwich explores in The Art of Crying: The Healing Power of Tears (public library) — part memoir of a lacrimal life, part investigation of the creaturely and cultural function of tears, part manifesto for unabashed crying as a radical act of emotional intelligence.

She begins with the science of crying, taxonomizing the three kinds of tears we produce: basal tears (the lubricant that makes our vision possible), reflex tears (the body’s cleansing response to irritation and foreign particles), and emotional tears (those “custodians of the heart,” as she calls them, biologically unique to the human animal).

Crying, however, is an embodied process — a Rube Goldberg machine of reactions between the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the autonomic nervous system — that does not require tears: We are born without fully developed lacrimal glands and can’t produce tears for the first two months of life, yet new babies dry-cry just the same to express their physiological and emotional needs.

The history of tears emanates the history of science itself, of our yearning to know what we are and what the world is, with all our misguided guesses along the way.

She details a succession of theories about why we cry — from the Galean notion that tears were “the humors of the heart,” to the medieval belief that tears were a tonic that could cure infections and release souls from purgatory, to Darwin’s studies of emotional expressions, which led him to believe that tears gave us an evolutionary advantage in being able to signal for help but puzzled him in their positive manifestation.
We cry when we need to be held, yes — the tears of distress, signaling a need for comfort — but we also cry at what we cannot hold — the tears of joy and awe, which Darwin himself barely held back in his encounter with the spiritual aspect of raw nature. Pepita recalls weeping before one of the world’s largest waterfalls, not knowing how to hold and how else to express her overflowing joy at the transcendent spectacle.

This kind of crying betokens what Iris Murdoch so wonderfully termed “an occasion for unselfing,” locating its twin springs in nature and in art. To cry before a painting, at the movies, or while listening to music is training ground for empathy. (The word empathy itself only came into popular use in the early twentieth century to describe the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a work of art in an effort to understand why art moves us.)

This is why crying may be a precious foothold on our own humanity in an age of artificial intelligence that makes the criteria for consciousness increasingly slippery. Pepita writes:

It doesn’t matter how well people program robots and machines; the capacity to feel spontaneous emotion and intuitive empathy is what makes our interactions uniquely and intrinsically human.

It is not surprising, then, that tears punctuate not only the biological history of our species but the cultural history of every civilization — the ancient Egyptian myth that the tears Isis cried over her husband Osiris’s death flooded the Nile; the ritual weeping of the Aztecs; the Incan belief that silver came from the tears of the Moon (and gold from the sweat of the Sun); the ancient Chinese wailing performances for mourning called ku; the Mexican folklore legend of La Llorona, the eternally weeping woman who haunts the forests and rivers at night looking for small children who have misbehaved; the Victorian tear-catcher vials known as lachrymatories.

Because every artist’s art is an instrument of self-understanding and a coping mechanism for whatever haunts their interior world, Pepita’s interest in the phenomenon of crying springs from the amplitude of unabashed tears in her own life. She writes of crying on the subway, crying at the museum, crying at a Halloween party, crying with her young brother upon his first heartbreak, crying while reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids on the airplane taking her from her homeland to a new life in New York City, crying underwater after finishing Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking at the beach, crying “with pure love at the grocery store line.”

She goes on to explore such facets of our lacrimal lives as the mystery of crying in dreams, the biological and sociological role of gender in crying, the physiological hazards of trying to suppress tears and the physiological benefits of a good cry, and how crying together strengthens human relationships.

Complement with artist Rose-Lynn Fisher’s mesmerizing photomicroscopy of tears cried with different emotions (which makes a cameo in The Art of Crying as one of many celebrations of other artists’ art), then savor the fascinating evolutionary history of dreaming — our other complex language for reckoning with the mystery of who and what we are.

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Source: The Marginalian | 3 Nov 2024 | 10:54 am(NZT)

Emerson on the Singular Enchantment of Indian Summer (and a Better Term for These Luminous Liminal Days Today)

“There are days… wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony.”

For all the singular magic of autumn, there is also a singular enchantment to those unbidden days in it when summer seems to make a brief and bright return — as if to assure us that time is not linear but planar, that life will always recompense loss, that in the liminal we find the immanent and in the ephemeral the eternal.

No one has captured that enchantment more vividly than Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) in a rhapsodic entry from his journal penned one late and luminous October day in his thirties.

Emerson writes:

On this wonderful day when heaven and earth seem to glow with magnificence, and all the wealth of all the elements is put under contribution to make the world fine, as if Nature would indulge her offspring, it seemed ungrateful to hide in the house. Are there not dull days enough in the year for you to write and read in, that you should waste this glittering season when Florida and Cuba seem to have left their glittering seats and come to visit us with all their shining hours, and almost we expect to see the jasmine and cactus burst from the ground instead of these last gentians and asters which have loitered to attend this latter glory of the year? All insects are out, all birds come forth, the very cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great thoughts, and Egypt and India look from their eyes.

He would later draw on this journal entry for the opening passage of his landmark book-length essay Nature (public library), considered the founding document of Transcendentalism (a term his visionary friend Elizabeth Peabody coined). Following a short poem, the essay begins:

There are days… wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of Indian Summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely.

The phrase “Indian summer” entered the lexicon in Emerson’s lifetime, peaked a century and a half later, and has since been falling out of use in the slow repair work of culture. But we have failed to replace it with a new term for those golden echoes of summer that harmonize the hymn of letting go that is fall. Perhaps “the halcyons” can do.

Complement with ornithologist and wildlife ecologist J. Drew Lanham on autumn and the sensual urgency of aliveness and Colette on the autumn, in nature and in life, as a beginning rather than a decline, then revisit Emerson on how to trust yourself, how to live with presence, how we become our most authentic selves.

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Source: The Marginalian | 2 Nov 2024 | 6:37 am(NZT)

The Strength of the Sensitive: E.M. Forster on the Personal and Political Power of Empaths and the Relationship Between Creativity and Democracy

“I believe in… an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet.”

“In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for our selves,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her exquisite statement of belief, having lived through two World Wars and stood with the anarchists of the Spanish Civil War and used her own art as an instrument of cohesion and translation between selves. In times of political crisis, we seem to forget that societies are made of selves, are made at all — that they are collaborative acts of the imagination, works of the creative spirit emanating from the collective conscience of this relational constellation of individuals. As such, they require of us a deep and imaginative sensitivity to other selves, to what it is like to be someone else — that hallmark of our humanity we call empathy.

The English novelist, essayist, and broadcaster E.M Forster (January 1, 1879–June 7, 1970) takes up these questions in an essay titled “What I Believe,” originally written just before the outbreak of WWII and later included in the out-of-print treasure Two Cheers for Democracy (public library) — his 1951 collection of essays based on and building upon his wartime anti-Nazi broadcasts.

A decade after D.H. Lawrence extolled the strength of sensitivity and a decade before James Baldwin observed in his timeless essay on the creative process that “society must accept some things as real; but [the creative person] must always know that visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and achievement rest on things unseen,” Forster writes:

The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power, and such people get more of a chance under a democracy than elsewhere. They found religions, great or small, or they produce literature and art, or they do disinterested scientific research (or they may be what is called “ordinary people,” who are creative in their private lives, bring up their children decently, for instance, or help their neighbors.) All these people need to express themselves; they cannot do so unless society allows them liberty to do so, and the society which allows them most liberty is a democracy.

Art by Ofra Amit from *A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader*. Available as a print.

But more than thriving in democracy, creative people — who are people of deep sensitivity to the world outside and the world within and the worlds others carry — make democracy thrive. Half a century before the word “empath” entered popular use, Forster upholds just that kind of person as the pillar of a harmonious society that serves and is served by the highest human potential of its citizens. In a passage of staggering pertinence to our own time, to this world once again teetering on the event horizon of totalitarianism in countless countries, he writes:

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too… I believe in aristocracy, though… Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke… Their temple… is the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.

With this type of person knocking about, and constantly crossing one’s path if one has eyes to see or hands to feel, the experiment of earthly life cannot be dismissed as a failure.

Detail from the art in Cueva de las Manos, Argentina, created between 7,300 BC and 700 AD.

Because democracy starts “from the assumption that the individual is important, and that all types are needed to make a civilization,” the relationships between individuals — that living reliquary of the Heart’s affections — are the golden threads that give the whole tapestry its shape and vibrancy. (This is why, as Hannah Arendt so incisively observed, dictators prey on loneliness.) With so little left to believe in when the world falls apart, Forster argues that what we can still and always have faith in is one another. With an eye to our personal relationships as “something comparatively solid in a world full of violence and cruelty” despite how opaque we remain to ourselves and each other, he writes:

Psychology has split and shattered the idea of a ‘Person,’ and has shown that there is something incalculable in each of us, which may at any moment rise to the surface and destroy our normal balance. We don’t know what we are like. We can’t know what other people are like. How, then, can we put any trust in personal relationships, or cling to them in the gathering political storm? In theory we cannot. But in practice we can and do. Though A is not unchangeably A, or B unchangeably B, there can still be love and loyalty between the two.

Redoubling his insistence on the power of personal loyalties — which, in their contrast to political loyalties, embody Bertrand Russell’s poignant distinction between “love-knowledge” and “power-knowledge” — Forster adds:

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

A country — a civilization — is only possible if we don’t betray each other. In consonance with his visionary contemporary Donald Winnicott, who listed reliability among the key qualities of a healthy mind, Forster writes:

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one down. They often do. The moral of which is that I must, myself, be as reliable as possible, and this I try to be. But reliability is not a matter of contract… It is a matter of the heart, which signs no documents. In other words, reliability is impossible unless there is natural warmth… One can, at all events, show one’s own little light here, one’s own poor little trembling flame, with the knowledge that it is not the only light that is shining in the darkness, and not the only one which the darkness does not comprehend.

Complement with Winnicott on the psychology of democracy and Jenn Shapland on the power of a thin skin, then consider the radical act of choosing to love anyway.

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Source: The Marginalian | 1 Nov 2024 | 3:28 am(NZT)

Beautiful Bacteria: Mesmerizing Photomicroscopy of Earth’s Oldest Life-forms

For as long as humans have been alive, we have mistaken the limits of our sense-perception for the full extent of reality — thinking our galaxy the only one, because that was as far as we could see; thinking life impossible below 300 fathoms, because that was as far as we could reach — only to discover, as we wield our minds to develop prosthetic extensions of our senses, scales of complexity infinitely wider and vaster than we had imagined, full of wonders we could not conceive with our self-referential imagination.

“I have observed many tiny animals with great admiration,” Galileo reported after converting his telescope into a compound microscope to reveal a cosmos inside the world, an exponent of life never before imagined.

“I examined water in which I had steeped the pepper,” the artist turned scientist Robert Hooke wrote a generation later in his pioneering 1665 book Micrographia, “and as if I had been looking upon a Sea, I saw infinite of small living Creatures swimming and playing up and down in it, a thing indeed very wonderful to behold.”

Within two centuries, Darwin had drawn a link of kinship between us and these tiny wonders. “Each living creature,” he wrote, “must be looked at as a microcosm — a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.”

Today, we know that there are more bacteria in your body than there are stars in the Milky Way, more in a single teaspoon of soil than there are people living in Europe. In the body of the Earth itself, there are microbes that breathe rock rather than oxygen and live for millions of years — a mysterious intraterrestrial universe that may have sculpted the continents we live on. Microbes touch every aspect of our planet’s history and health, from climate change to the origin of life. They are the golden threads in the tapestry connecting everything alive.

Centuries after it enchanted the early microscopists, their strange and subtle wonder comes aglow magnified by our modern tools and thinking on the pages of
Beautiful Bacteria: Encounters in the Microuniverse (public library) by synthetic biologist Tal Danino.

Multiple colonies of *E. coli* cultivated in a petri dish

Against the backdrop of bacteria’s billions of years of evolutionary history, here is a young art (photography, born in 1839) drawing on a young science (bacteriology, established in the 1860s) and using an even younger canvas (the petri dish, devised in 1887) to capture the primordial, eternal beauty of Earth’s first life-forms.

Samples of *Proteus mirabilis* and *Paenibacillus dendritiformis* isolated from soil and printed on handmade washi paper

Part artist and part futurist, Danino runs a lab working on microbial programming that aims to turn these ancient organisms into futuristic aids for human life, ranging from living environmental sensors to bespoke probiotics that target specific diseases.

Two of 100 samples of bacteria collected from different women

Centuries after the pioneering microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek used saffron to stain the cells he was observing in order to reveal their intricate structure, Danino’s dazzling array of samples — bacteria from the sands of Venice Beach in California and the rocks of Breakneck Ridge in New York; bacteria from a man’s foot, a woman’s bellybutton, and a baby’s hand; bacteria from the soil of South Korea and of New York City — are stained with vibrant dyes that render their enchantment partway between expressionist painting and psychedelic vision.

A strain of bacteria isolated from a cracked probiotic capsule

Multiple bacterial colonies in two different communal samples, stained, dried, and embedded in resin

Complement Beautiful Bacteria with artist Rose-Lynn Fisher’s photomicroscopy of tears cried with different emotions, neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s stunning drawings of brain cells under a microscope, and the mesmerizing microscopy of tree tissues, then revisit the haunting science of mental health, free will, and your microbiome.

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Source: The Marginalian | 30 Oct 2024 | 6:18 am(NZT)

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“The powerful fear art, whatever its form… because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us… becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring.”

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“Resist loss of the miraculous by lowering your standards for what constitutes a miracle. It is all a fucking miracle.”

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“The meaning of life… clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love.”

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“There are days… wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony.”

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“I believe in… an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet.”

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