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 Hello Blog! This is the weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — Wendell Berry on creativity, love, and how to have enough; Joan Didion on letting go; the power of being a liminal person — you can catch up right here. And if my labor of love touches your life in a meaningful way, please consider supporting its ongoingness with a donation — for twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know.
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“Nothing like this has ever happened before or will ever happen again,” a friend said to me about a lucky turn of events — a statement that struck me as touchingly self-negating: a recognition that life has violated her predictions about what is possible, immediately followed by a reassertion of unquestioned confidence in her powers of prediction.
The very fact that life surprises us is evidence that it can surprise us, that it will surprise us over and over. To mistake our theories of probability for a realistic representation of possibility is to forget that the improbable gave us all we know of existence.
And yet precisely because the future is a garden of infinitely forking paths in which any outcome is possible, we yearn to know the direction our lives will take.
This is absolutely and categorically impossible.
We may, of course, have expectations and beliefs about what is likely to happen. But they are simply imaginative stories to which reality bears no obligation, stories negating the fundamental fact that the imagination of life is always greater than that of the living. 
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Because we cannot bear this indeterminacy, we have been inventing technologies of divination since ancient times. But while they may be futile in foretelling the future, they are not useless — their misunderstood gift is that they tell us back to ourselves, revealing regions of our psyche over which our conscious thought casts an impenetrable shadow, giving us a tuning fork for the purest note of the inner voice. (This, of course, is the concept of the bird divinations.)
D.H. Lawrence knew this when he observed that divination is really just an annealing of attention and that “an act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer.”
Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky articulates this beautifully in The Way of Tarot (public library) — his insightful exploration of one of our oldest and most enduring divination technologies not as a predictive mechanism but as a spiritual path.
Declaring himself “absolutely opposed to reading hypothetical futures,” and “repulsed” by the notion that we are prisoners of destiny — a notion that began in the Greek theater of antiquity and was replicated in the determinism of twentieth-century physics — he writes:
 If, from the moment we are born, a god is directing every step we take, what is the good of striving for anything at all? Should we believe that our life is inevitably laid out in advance and all we are allowed to do is submit? To confront the idea of reading the cards, I had to define my notion of future. The reading subject either has or does not have a purpose in his life; he acts in accordance with projects, and he makes plans. When he starts worrying about knowing his future, he is depreciating his present actions, which he doubts. But the present is a fleeting instant: what weighs upon the development of the person receiving the reading is the past, which can act like ballast that tends to cause the future repetition of traumatic experiences from childhood (I will either do or not do what others have done or did not do to me), or as a source of energy that pushes us to progress, to change — in the best cases, transform ourselves. If I have to accept the existence of a preordained future, I would visualize the present as a point from which a fan of infinite paths departs. An intentional action or an accident, something that happens by chance, projects us forward and obliges us to live one of the countless fates possible. This would allow me to declare, even when “everything has been written,” that the divine menu does not consist of a single dish but a huge selection. Free will consists of choosing one of these infinite sentences Fate hands down.
Just as the primary function of prayer is to clarify our own hopes and fears, to hone our priorities and reassert our values, the primary purpose of tarot is not to give us a telescope aimed at the frontiers of the future but a microscope aimed at the most elusive intricacies of the self. Jorodowsky writes:
When we eliminate the illusion of “reading the future,” the Tarot becomes a psychological tool and a tool for self-knowledge. By honestly confronting the characteristics of our personalities that have gone off course — habits, identifications, manias, vices; narcissistic, antisocial, schizoid, and paranoid disorders; personal delusions, crazy ideas, depressive feelings, emotional immaturity, twisted desires, and needs imposed by the family, society, or culture — we can attain knowledge of our real essence, in other words, what is innate in us and not acquired. The individual can stop being what others want so that he can become who he truly is.
For a kindred approach to the problem of knowing ourselves, which will always exceed the problem of knowing the future, dive into An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If it makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,'” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. But despite all we know about the power of liminality and threshold states, we yearn for a firm foothold on one side of every blurry line and move through the fundamental mystery of life armored in opinions, mistaking the magnitude of our surety for the measure of the truth, resisting with every fiber of our being the fertile, flickering in-betweenness that beckons us to not-know in order to touch the beating heart of reality with something greater than understanding.
Certainty is the dominant addiction of the modern mind.
Japanese culture offers a potent antidote to it in the ancient concept of ma, which Ann Tashi Slater details in her moving memoir Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World (public library):
Ma means “interval” or “opening,” both in space and time. Often referred to as negative (empty) space, it’s positive in that it can birth something new. An invitation to heightened awareness, it’s seen, for instance, as open space in rooms and gardens. With regard to time, it’s a pause that invites contemplation. Ma is found in unpainted areas on folding screens, void areas in a photograph, silence during conversation, the hush between breaking waves. It’s about the vitality generated by emptiness, in the way a blank page gives rise to creative energy. It’s about being in relationship, because our engagement with ma allows fresh perspectives to emerge.
Winter Moon at Toyamagahara by Hasui Kawase, 1931. (Available as a print.)
Encoded in ma is an ancient understanding of what modern science calls embodied cognition — the recognition that the body is the mind and we think not with the brain but with the world. Slater quotes architect Kengo Kuma:
In traditional Japanese space, the most important space is the void. We call that kind of void space ma. In the void, we can feel the change of light, the change of time, the change of smell, the change of temperature… The void and the human body are working together to feel something.
Drawing on one of my favorite books of all time, she adds:
The character for ma is “gate” (門) together with “sun” (日): 間. It evokes light filtering through a doorway, an idea suggested by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki in his essay about the Japanese aesthetic tradition, In Praise of Shadows… “The light from the garden steals in but dimly through paper-paneled doors,” Tanizaki writes, “and it is precisely this indirect light that makes for us the charm of a room.”
It strikes me that ma is literally written as light, for it carries the indeterminacy of light itself — how we have no way of knowing whether it will pass through the double slit as particle or wave, how consciousness may be the double slit of space and time through which reality passes between the everythingness we experience as life and the nothingness of the void, the interval repeating like a sunbeam flickering across a doorway.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If it makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.
monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. |
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one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |
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| Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. |
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HOW TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE
by Maria Popova
Don’t try to wash
your tired hands
clean from the bloodshed
of your private wars.
Just unclench the fist
that has come to feel like home
and let the story slip
between your trembling fingers
into the river of time,
silver and indifferent.
You may have to kneel
for days
or decades
in a pool of silence
blue and lonely as a heron
but it will be there,
the small green stone
lying at the bottom
lustrous with a peace
larger than joy.
When you rise,
kiss the tombstone
of your past
and step barefoot
into the garden of the future,
the garden of infinitely forking paths
in which any flower can be yours,
any one at all.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If it makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.
monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. |
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one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |
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| Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. |
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LAST WEEK TO ENTER THE RAFFLE
THE MARGINALIAN TURNS 20: COME CELEBRATE
Details and tickets here.
BIRD DIVINATION OF THE WEEK
Available as a print and more. Find the full set of 100 bird divinations, along with the story and process behind them, here.
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