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 Bless consciousness, for making blue different to me than it is to you.
I remember the moment a friend's son came home from school to recount with something between shock and exhilaration how he realized while talking to a classmate that the notion of a mental image is not merely a metaphor, that other people can conjure up in their minds things not before their eyes. And the moment another friend discovered that the inner stream of language with which most of us narrate our lives courses through neither his mother's nor his sister's mind. And always the moment I waded into the winter ocean with someone with whom I thought I shared uncommon understanding, and I exclaimed "Those needles!" as the icy water stabbed at my flesh, and she stared at me blankly, and when I asked what her sensation was, she took a long pause, then said: "Pressure." Two bodies so seemingly similar, sharing 99.9% of their genome and 100% of their trust, immersed in the exact same environment, governed by consciousnesses so invisibly different as to render the contact between self and world sharp for one and blunt for the other.  Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up — a lyrical picture-book about the artist within Moments like these jolt us awake from the dream of perfect understanding, stagger us with the realization that no one ever really knows what it is like to be somebody else, that between one consciousness and another there always gapes an abyss black as the inside of a skull, and though we may try to reach each other with love and reason, they twine but a tenuous footbridge across it. The best we can do is hold on to the ropes and hope that they will not fray before we reach the rim of understanding, the outer edge of the other, which is all we can ever touch — and still it is enough, this sliver of salvation from the loneliness of being ourselves, this outstretched hand across the icy blue. Anne Enright faces this abyss in her lyrical novel The Wren, the Wren (public library), drawing from it not a point of despair but portal of possibility. She writes: 
We don't walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.
Looking back on viewing empathy "like it's the solution (and it is! it is!) to pretty much everything," the protagonist reflects: I had a big beautiful cake in my head called "Feeling the Pain of Others" and I sliced it this way and that because I thought that emotion is the bridge between people, sentiment crosses space, sympathy is a gas, exhaled by one, inhaled by the other. Empathy! It's just like melting. We can merge, you know. We can connect. We can cry at the same movie. You and I.
And yet, she comes to see, we struggle to do this, for it is at bottom a profoundly complicated thing. But perhaps we struggle because we have the wrong goal in mind — merging, in the end, is not the measure of closeness, of understanding, of the proximity between consciousnesses in the icy waters of being. Enright writes: There is a real gap between me and the next person, there is a space between every human being. And it is not a frightening space. The empty air which exists between people might be crossed by emotion, but it might not. You need something else, or you need something first… Now, I think the word we need is "translation."
Given the co-evolution of vision and consciousness, this gap in how we perceive the world is reflected in our actual sight — we each see the same photons differently due to variations in how our eyes and brains process light. While science is not there to furnish us with metaphors — its task is truth — we are creatures of meaning who cannot help but turn to metaphor as our best footbridge between truth and meaning. Enright's protagonist reflects: These days I am obsessed by light, it is so hard to commodify. I am not talking about a beautiful dawn, or holidays in the sun, or the light that makes a photograph look good. I am talking about brightness itself, the air lit up. The gleam on the surfaces of my typing hands. I love the gift of its arrival. The light you see is always eight and a half minutes old. Always and again. And you think it is shared by everyone but it is not shared, exactly — our eyes are hit by our own, personal photons.
Perhaps, in the end, the measure of understanding — which is "love's other name" — is not seeing the same light but seeing the light in each other, the shy light shimmering over the ocean of our singularity.  Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For eighteen years, it has remained free and ad-free 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 this labor 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. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |  | |  |
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The year is 1174. Gravity, oxygen, and electricity have not been discovered. Clocks, calculus, and the printing press have not been invented. Earth is the center of the universe, encircled by heavenly bodies whose motions are ministered by angels. Most people never live past their thirties. Medicine abides by the Greek theory of the humors and treats all ailments with a combination of bloodletting, herbal tinctures, amputation, and the King's Touch. No university will educate a woman. In fact, no university exists. 
At seventy-six, Hildegard of Bingen — poet, painter, healer, composer, philosopher, mystic, medical writer — has just finished writing and illustrating her third and farthest-seeing book: The Book of Divine Works, chronicling seven years of prophetic visions. God had first begun speaking to her in "the voice of the Living Light" when she was three, but she never suffered the hubris of a self-appointed prophet — rather, she considered herself "a totally uneducated human being," a "wretched and fragile creature," who is merely a channel for divine wisdom. She may be the Western world's first great crusader against dualism — in the sermons she delivered to priests, bishops, abbots, and ordinary people all over present-day Germany and Switzerland, she preached that "God is Reason," that "Reason is the root" from which "the resounding Word blooms," but also that "from the heart comes healing," that we apprehend the world and its wisdom most clearly through the intuitions of the "inner eye" and "inner ear." Hildegard was fifty-six when she began receiving the vision that would become her Book of Divine Works. On its pages, between writings about birds and trees and stones and stars, between reckonings with the nature of eternity and the fundaments of love, she conceptualizes something the word for which would not be coined for another seven centuries: ecology. 
Long before Alexander von Humboldt invented modern nature with his recognition that "in this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation," before John Muir insisted that "when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe," Hildegard places at the center of her cosmology the notion of viriditas, from the Latin for "green" — a greening life-force pervading the world, mirrored in the virtues that enlush the soul. Human beings, she writes, are "co-creators with God" in the operations of nature. We must cooperate with one another in the task of protecting and nourishing this interconnected creation, and we must do so by integrating the rational and the intuitive in us. Hildegard's human being is "the fragile vessel where soul and reason are active," filled with "the fullness of time." 
In one of her visions, collected in the wonderful translation Hildegard of Bingen's Book of Divine Works: With Letters and Songs (public library), she paints a menacing picture of a world in which we have grown disconnected from the greening life-force of our own souls. Seven centuries before Eunice Newton Foote discovered greenhouse gasses, and an epoch before we had any sense of climate change or our own hand in it, Hildegard prophecies: Then the greening power of the virtues faded away, and all justice entered upon a period of decline. As a result, the greening power of life on Earth was reduced in every seed because the upper region of the air was altered in a way contrary to its first destiny. Summer now became subject to a contradictory chill while winter often experienced a paradoxical warmth. There occurred on Earth times of drought and dampness… As a result, many people asserted that the Last Day was near at hand.
She was unambiguous about what stands between us and such fate: If… we give up the green vitality of [our] virtues and surrender to the drought of our indolence, so that we do not have the sap of life and the greening power of good deeds, then the power of our very soul will begin to fade and dry up.
And yet Hildegard believed in "the green vitality of human volition," believed that "the soul knows what is good and what is harmful." By integrating our rational faculty with our heart-honed intuition, by refusing to dishonor our own souls, we have within us the power to revivify this Earth. It what may be the clearest, most succinct manifesto for climate action, she writes: Our thinking affects our greening power… The soul is the green life-force of the flesh… When we humans work in accord with the strivings of our soul, all our deeds turn out well.
This, indeed, is the beating heart of Hildegard's viriditas: the insistence that the stewardship of Earth's life-force is not merely our moral obligation to the universe but our spiritual duty to our own souls. And this can only be so — the words holy and whole share a Latin root; if an ecological conscience is a way of seeing the world whole, it is a way of seeing its holiness, of seeing our own holiness — not above it, but nested within it. Rachel Carson knew this when, picking up Hildegard's torch eight centuries later to catalyze the modern environmental movement, she observed that "there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity," that the task now before humanity is "to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself." It was Hildegard who gave us the original model of poetic ecology. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For eighteen years, it has remained free and ad-free 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 this labor 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. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. | | | |
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donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For eighteen years, it has remained free and ad-free 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 this labor 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. | | 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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In one crucial respect at least, the human animal does not pass the mirror test of self-knowledge: We move through the world by impulse and emotion, then look back and rationalize our choices, declaring ourselves creatures of reason. Western civilization, with its structural bias favoring the left brain, has been especially culpable in this dangerous dissociation from ourselves, our full and feeling selves. Despite everything our analytical tools have revealed about how the mind constructs the world, about how our entire experience of reality is a function of that great sieve of emotional relevance — attention — we continue casting ourselves in the theater of rationality, only to find ourselves bewildered again and again by our own nature, by the constant revelation of illusion we mistake for reality.  Card from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards. The pioneering psychiatrist Otto Rank (April 22, 1884–October 31, 1939) — who strongly influenced Carl Jung and served as therapist to Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and other visionary artists — pulls the curtain on that illusion in Beyond Psychology (public library) — a book "pleading for the recognition and the acceptance of the irrational element as the most vital part of human life"; the book he knew would be his last, the wartime publication of which he never lived to see. A century before philosopher Martha Nussbaum made her rigorous case for the intelligence of emotion, observing that "emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature [but] parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature's reasoning itself," Rank writes as humanity is breaking into its second world war: Our present general bewilderment… lays bare the irrational roots of human behavior which psychology tries to explain rationally in order to make it intelligible, that is, acceptable… People, though they may think and talk rationally — and even behave so — yet live irrationally. […] Bound by the ideas of a better past gone by and a brighter future to come, we feel helpless in the present because we cannot even for a moment stop its movement so as to direct it more intelligently. We still have to learn, it seems, that life, in order to maintain itself, must revolt every so often against man's* ceaseless attempts to master its irrational forces with his mind.
Much of our self-delusion, Rank observes, is due to the fact that we live in language — "a rational phenomenon meant to communicate thoughts and to explain actions in rational terms." (This is what makes The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows so wonderfully countercultural and altogether reality-expanding.) Art in all its forms, from poetry to painting, has tried to find the emotional language of the unconscious, to embrace the surge of the irrational. (Nin herself articulated this memorably in her insistence on the importance of emotional excess for creativity: "Great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them," she wrote in her diary between sessions with Rank.) And yet we remain storytellers, telling the story of our own lives largely in language. With the exception of dreams — the imagistic language evolution invented in the brains of birds — the mind navigates the world by talking to itself in a constant inner stream of language. And so it may be, Rank intimates, that the "beyond" of language is simply unreachable to us, that we are trying to dismantle our own captivity with the captor's tools. He considers the paradox: In their extremely conscious effort to reproduce what they call the "unconscious" modern painters and writers have followed modern psychology in attempting the impossible, namely to rationalize the irrational. This paradoxical state of affairs betrays itself in the basic axiom of psychoanalysis, a mechanistic theory of life according to which all mental processes and emotional reactions are determined by the Unconscious, that is, by something which in itself is unknown and undeterminable. Modern art has adopted this rational psychology of the irrational legitimately, because art itself, like psychology, has been from the beginning an attempt to master life rationally by interpreting it in terms of the current ideologies, that is, it has striven to re-create life in order to control it. The socio-political events of our day amply justify the need for something "beyond" our psychology which has proved inadequate to account for such strange happenings.
 René Magritte. The False Mirror. 1929. (Museum of Modern Art.) Echoing the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray's haunting observation that "we ourselves are events in history [and] things do not merely happen to us, they happen through us," Rank insists that the only way of avoiding the socio-political upheavals that periodically rupture humanity is to embrace the irrational within ourselves. A century after Macmurray wrote that "our individual tensions are simply the new thing growing through us into the life of mankind" and that we must recognize them in this universal setting in order for our private difficulties to "become really significant," Rank writes: Because of the inherent nature of the human being, man* has always lived beyond psychology, in other words, irrationally. If we can grasp this paradoxical fact and accept it as the basis of our own living, then we shall be able to discover new values in place of the old ones which seem to be crumbling before our very eyes — vital human values, not mere psychological interpretations predetermined by our preferred ideologies. These new values which have to be discovered and rediscovered every so often are in reality old values, the natural human values which in the course of time are lost in rationalizations of one kind or another.
These elemental values, Rank observes, lie beyond reason — we rediscover them when we cease trying to control life by rationalizing it and surrender to its experiential flow, inherently irrational and pulsating through the life of the body, which, we now know, is the true locus of consciousness. He writes: We are born in pain, we die in pain and we should accept life-pain as unavoidable — indeed a necessary part of earthly existence, not merely the price we have to pay for pleasure… Man* is born beyond psychology and he dies beyond it but he can live beyond it only through vital experience of his own.
And this precisely why you must not spare yourself. ALSO: A BOOK OF CARDS ALSO: A LIVE EVENT  To celebrate the centennial of The Morgan Library & Museum — one of my favorite cultural institutions, stewarding some of the most influential works in the history of creative culture — I have chosen several items from the collection that I especially love to serve as springboards for larger conversations about art and life with some of the most interesting and creative women I know. The final event in the series — a conversation with composer Paola Prestini (whose breathtaking new opera about Sor Juana is setting The Met's Cloisters on creative fire this month) — draws on the music manuscripts of Fanny Mendelssohn (long attributed to her famous brother Felix) and Clara Schumann (who worked in her famous husband's shadow) for a broader reckoning with inclusion and exclusion in creative culture, the challenges and superpowers of working in the margins of the mainstream, and the long history of women owning their genius against the odds. Tickets (pay-what-you-can) and livestream (free) here. |
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