|
|  Hello Blog! This is the weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — he light in the abyss between us, pioneering psychoanalyst Otto Rank on the countercultural sanity of the irrational, Hildegard on how not to waste your greening life-force — you can catch up right here, and you can find the best of The Marginalian 2024 in one place at this link. If my labor of love touches your life in a meaningful way, please consider supporting it with a donation — for eighteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to these small, immense kindnesses. If you already donate, know that your support makes all the difference.
|
If you live long enough and wide enough, you come to see that love is simply the breadth of the aperture through which you let in the reality of another and the quality of attention you pay what you see. It is, in this sense, not a phenomenon that happens unto you but a creative act. The poet Robert Graves knew this: "Love is not kindly nor yet grim, but does to you as you to him," he wrote as a young man a lifetime before the old man came to define love as "a recognition of truth, a recognition of another person's integrity and truth in a way that… makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other." Most of our heartbreak, most of our aching sense of failure at love, comes from the idea, central to our dominant cultural mythology, that this truth, this recognition, is a static reward to be attained — through effort, through bargaining, through self-negation — rather than the dynamic process it is, an end-point state of soul-merging rather than an infinite vector of growing understanding, of deepening mutual compassion, of simultaneous self-possession and unselfing. D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) mounts a passionate defense of the process over the product in his autobiographically tinted 1922 novel Aaron's Rod (free ebook | public library), animated by the perennial question and perennial confusion of what love actually is, what it looks like between people and how it lives within a person.  D.H. Lawrence Unwilling to risk love's danger of self-abandon yet unable to accept loneliness as a state of fulfillment, the protagonist attributes the irreconcilable tension to a broken cultural model of love as "a battle in which each party strove for the mastery of the other's soul." He reckons with the necessary recalibration:  We have pushed a process into a goal. The aim of any process is not the perpetuation of that process, but the completion thereof. Love is a process of the incomprehensible human soul: love also incomprehensible, but still only a process. The process should work to a completion, not to some horror of intensification and extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately perish. The completion of the process of love is the arrival at a state of simple, pure self- possession… Only that. Which isn't exciting enough for us sensationalists. We prefer abysses and maudlin self-abandon and self-sacrifice, the degeneration into a sort of slime and merge.
[…] Perhaps, truly, the process of love is never accomplished. But it moves in great stages, and at the end of each stage a true goal, where the soul possesses itself in simple and generous singleness. Without this, love is a disease.
 Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards. Given this processes demands everything of us, given it asks us to risk everything, perhaps it is just easier to spare ourselves the pain of longing and the anxiety of loss by not undertaking it at all. He considers this, seduced by the fantasy of a life free from longing and therefore immune to disappointment, and tries to find affirmation for it in nature, whose living metaphors are always the clearest mirror for the soul: The lily toils and spins hard enough, in her own way. But without that strain and that anxiety with which we try to weave ourselves a life. The lily is life-rooted, life-central. She cannot worry. She is life itself, a little, delicate fountain playing creatively, for as long or as short a time as may be, and unable to be anxious… Happy lily, never to be saddled with an idee fixe, never to be in the grip of a monomania for happiness or love or fulfillment.
 Available as a print. And yet, he realizes, this way of being is a negation of something elemental. It gives the illusion of "life-rootedness," but denies the soul its necessary flight. He considers another way of being, one truer to the nature of love and the nature of the soul — being "happily alone in all the wonders of communion, swept up on the winds, but never swept away from one's very self." Drawing on "The Dalliance of the Eagles" — exulting in the birds' "rushing amorous contact high in space together," their way of attaining "a motionless still balance in the air, then parting" — Lawrence reflects on the balance between communion and self-possession that it models: Two a eagles in mid-air, maybe… Two eagles in mid-air, grappling, whirling, coming to their intensification of love-oneness there in mid-air. In mid-air the love consummation. But all the time each lifted on its own wings: each bearing itself up on its own wings at every moment of the mid-air love consummation. That is the splendid love-way.
 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. Couple with Kahlil Gibran writing in that same epoch about this same difficult balance of intimacy and independence, then revisit Lawrence on the art of divination, how to live with our conflicted parts, the strength of sensitivity, and the key to living fully. 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. |  | |  |
|
| 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. |
|
The year the young Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809–April 19, 1882) boarded The Beagle, Mary Shelley contemplated the nature of the imagination in her preface to the most famous edition of Frankenstein, concluding that creativity "does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos" — the chaos, she meant, of ideas and impressions and memories seething in the cauldron of the mind, out of which we half-consciously select and combine fragments to have the thoughts and ideas we call our own.  Charles Darwin in his twenties The chaos of ideas Darwin was about to absorb on the Galapagos would lead him to devote his life to understanding the astonishing imagination of nature, the way it selects and combines traits to create different species of dazzling diversity, each exquisitely adapted to its environment. Unlike his contemporaries, he did not consider the human animal the pinnacle of nature's imagination. "Never say higher or lower," he scribbled in the margin of a book, arguing with the author. "Say more complicated." Darwin knew that we are complicated by our imagination, although other animals — and this, he knew, was a "highly irreligious" view — "possess the same faculties of imitation, attention, deliberation, choice, memory, imagination, the association of ideas, and reason, though in very different degrees." (He was especially awed by the creativity of the bowerbird.) He knew that our triumphs of invention — fire and language he held above all others — are the fruits of our ability to reason, to question, and to make observations, but he believed that nothing has been more crucial, more fertile, more responsible for our evolutionary success than our "powers of the imagination, wonder, curiosity, [and] an undefined sense of beauty." (Darwin himself relished the "chaos of delight" afforded by nature's beauty, by the sense of wonder that so stirs the imagination when beholding a primeval forest or a shimmering mountain peak.) Toward the end of his life, Darwin took up the question of the imagination on the pages of The Descent of Man (free ebook). This "highest prerogative" of the human animal, he wrote, "unites former images and ideas, independently of the will, and thus creates brilliant and novel results." (A century later, Einstein — who believed that "imagination is more important than knowledge" — would place this unifying work at the heart of creativity, terming it "combinatory play.")  Emily Dickinson at work. Detail from art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse. By making the imagination the crux of our humanity, Darwin argued — in an era when women and people were barred from higher education, barred from the professional institutions of art and science, barred from general citizenship in humanity — that true equality between human beings could only be achieved when all have their "reason and imagination exercised to the highest point" from a young age. But he placed the imagination above reason in the development of "the moral faculties" — empathy, after all, is always a creative act of unselfing, a way of imagining what it is like to be someone else. A century and a half before Jane Goodall insisted that evolving our empathy is the key to reaching our highest evolutionary potential, Darwin wrote: This affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being. No doubt a man with a torpid mind, if his social affections and sympathies are well developed, will be led to good actions, and may have a fairly sensitive conscience. But whatever renders the imagination more vivid and strengthens the habit of recalling and comparing past impressions, will make the conscience more sensitive.
Because he understood the statistical distribution by which natural selection develops, tests, and improves traits, he understood that minds too exists along a vast continuum "from absolute imbecility to high excellence," and that different individuals within the same species fall at different points on it. But he believed that we can propel ourselves along the continuum and cultivate high excellence of the imagination by being vigilant over what we feed the chaos out of which we create — an evolutionary case for the "garbage in, garbage out" model of the mind: The value of the products of our imagination depends of course on the number, accuracy, and clearness of our impressions, on our judgment and taste in selecting or rejecting the involuntary combinations, and to a certain extent on our power of voluntarily combining them.
 Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up It is worth questioning how much of our evolutionary inheritance we are squandering by bathing in confirmation bias that only narrows the pool of ideas at our disposal in the combinatorial work of creativity, by feeding our minds divisive narratives that fray our empathy for what is other than ourselves and thus diminish the sensitivity essential for a creative conscience. On his deathbed, Darwin himself lamented having failed to keep feeding his mind those greatest nourishments of the empathic imagination — none mightier, he believed, than poetry and music — turning it instead into "a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts." He saw, from the wistful vantage of nearing the void, how "the loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness." The most creative mind, in the end, as well as the most felicitous, may be the mind that never loses its appetite for wonder and its largehearted curiosity about what it is like to be another. 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. | | | |
|
| 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. |
|
"The universe is made of stories, not atoms," Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her poem "The Speed of Darkness" not long after James Baldwin told an audience of writers that "we made the world we're living in and we have to make it over." We make the world not with our ballots — though they do, oh they do matter — but with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are capable of, the stories we believe to be true. Politics, after all, is just the weaponized business of belief. And it may be that the only real antidote to the insanity of our times, to this planet-wide storm system of helplessness and disorientation, is to resist with everything we've got the belief that our story is finished, that we and our organizing principles are the final word of this universe, dragging behind us the fourteen-billion-year comet tail that blazed from the first atoms to the atomic bomb. I know no mightier or more mellifluous voice of resistance to this dangerous belief than the poet, anthropologist, and ecological steward Gary Snyder (b. May 8, 1930), who would surely resist being called a philosopher, but who for nearly a century has been teaching us with his writing and his living how to live and how to die — and what else is philosophy? Born into a family that survived by subsistence farming after the Great Depression hurled them into poverty, Snyder was seven when an accident left him bedridden for months. He spent them devouring book after book from the public library, so that by the time he was back on his feet, he had read more than a college freshman. Reading, of course, teaches us that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives — it complicates our story of what it means to be alive, it opens our eyes and our hearts to how other people and peoples in other times and other places have lived, how their ways of being might deepen and broaden and elevate our own.  Art by Ofra Amit from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print. By the time he was a young man, Snyder was determined to bend his gaze beyond his era's horizon of possibility. He took a job as a seaman to better understand other cultures and enrolled in a graduate program for Asian languages at Berkeley. He worked as a vagabond laborer up and down the West Coast, a trail-builder in Yosemite, a crewman in the engine room of an oil tanker, a fire lookout in the North Cascades, and a timber scaler on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. He roomed for a while with Jack Kerouac, studied for a while with Alan Watts, and climbed Glacier Peak with Allen Ginsberg at the belay. He discovered Zen through D.T. Suzuki and learned ink and watercolor painting from Chiura Obata. He spent fifteen years living in Buddhist communities after boarding a marine freighter to study Zen Buddhism in Japan. And all the while, he wrote poetry, thought deeply about the nature of the mind and the substance of the spirit, and paid tender attention to the living world, to the relational nature of being, to the meaning and making of freedom.  Art by Icinori from Thank You, Everything Snyder's increasingly urgent and clarifying vision for remaking the world by rewriting our stories of the possible comes alive in Earth House Hold (public library) — the 1969 collection of his journal entries and poem fragments. Long before Doris Lessing urged us to examine the prisons we choose to live inside, Snyder makes a piercing parenthetical observation in a diary entry penned after "two days contemplating ecology, food-chains and sex": Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.
He considers the cages of our cultural ideologies: There is nothing in human nature or the requirements of human social organization which intrinsically requires that a culture be contradictory, repressive and productive of violent and frustrated personalities… The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.
The most merciless danger of our present world order is that we have turned these "violent and frustrated personalities" into leaders, largely because the power structures of secular life, which we call politics, are modeled on the power structures of large organized religions. But there are other organizing principles to be drawn from other, older spiritual traditions that may better address the problem of being alive in this time and place, of managing the superorganism we have become and the inner life of the spirit in each of us cells. In Distant Neighbors (public library) — the absolutely wonderful record of his epistolary friendship with Wendell Berry — Snyder (whose poetically titled graduate thesis "He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village" explored the wisdom of indigenous traditions) reflects: Whereas "world religions" tend to have great charismatic human leader-founders, the natural religions, the old ways, take their teachings direct from the human mind, the collective unconscious, the ground of being. Rather than theology, they have mythology and visionary practice… The two levels, of course, are (1) acting as social glue and intensifying the bonds of the culture and the coherence of it; the other is liberating and transcendent, of freeing one from the bonds of ego and conditioning. It's fascinating to see the dialectic of these two roles as they work out in different times and places. Some traditions within great traditions tend toward total mysticism, others ground themselves entirely in secular affairs. All religions are one at the point where life is given to the spirit, and real breakthrough is achieved. I doubt that any of the world religions ever have or could achieve a fusion of the two levels; I like to believe that some ancient religions — Old Ways — did achieve it: like perhaps the Hopi. The thing is, "world religions" are always a bad deal: they are evoked by the contradictions and problems of civilization, and they make compromises from the beginning to be allowed to live. The Great Fact of the last 8,000 years is civilization; the power of which has been and remains greater than the power of any religion within that time span.
 One of Hildegard's ecological cosmology paintings. Some mystics, Snyder observes, have always found ways to "crack through dogma" — he names Meister Eckhart among them, and I would add Hildegard of Bingen and Simone Weil — but he laments that Christianity, the dominant religion of the capitalist West, has become more and more of "a centralist teaching." In most Eastern spiritual traditions, on the other hand, "the center of being is everywhere." He writes: Zen, as the arm of Buddhism most given to the life of the spirit, really doesn't care about theology or dogma; it takes people where the spirit leads, and has a complete authenticity of its own, one must adjust this authenticity to whatever received teachings one started from on one's own.
Echoing Nietzsche's eternal admonition that "no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life," he writes elsewhere: Nobody else can do it for you; the Buddha is only the teacher.
Drawing on his life in Zen, he considers what he made for himself of the ancient teachings: Wisdom is intuitive knowledge of the mind of love and clarity that lies beneath one's ego-driven anxieties and aggressions… Morality is bringing it back out in the way you live, through personal example and responsible action, ultimately toward the true community (sangha) of "all beings." This last aspect means, for me, supporting any cultural and economic revolution that moves clearly toward a free, international, classless world. It means using such means as civil disobedience, outspoken criticism, protest, pacifism, voluntary poverty and even gentle violence if it comes to a matter of restraining some impetuous redneck. It means affirming the widest possible spectrum of non-harmful individual behavior — defending the right of individuals to smoke hemp, eat peyote, be polygynous, polyandrous or homosexual. Worlds of behavior and custom long banned by the Judaeo-Capitalist-Christian-Marxist West. It means respecting intelligence and learning, but not as greed or means to personal power. Working on one's own responsibility, but willing to work with a group. […] The traditional cultures are in any case doomed… The coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past. If we are lucky we may eventually arrive at a totally integrated world culture with matrilineal descent, free-form marriage, natural-credit communist economy, less industry, far less population and lots more national parks.
 Art by Beatrice Alemagna from We Go to the Park The story the "Judaeo-Capitalist-Christian-Marxist West" has sold us is that self-interest is the only path to growth — there goes Silicon Valley lining up with the fault line that is Donald Trump — and that parasitism the only way of securing resources for oneself. Snyder's vision for this coming revolution of consciousness is not against growth but for symbiosis rather than parasitism, for interdependence rather than selfing, as the path to growth. In Turtle Island (public library) — his 1974 book of poems and essays, titled after the Native American term for North America — he reflects: The longing for growth is not wrong. The nub of the problem now is how to flip over, as in jujitsu, the magnificent growth-energy of modern civilization into a nonacquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature… If people come to realize that there are many nonmaterial, nondestructive paths of growth — of the highest and most fascinating order — it would help dampen the common fear that a steady state economy would mean deadly stagnation.
In The Real Work (public library) — the collection of interviews and talks he gave in the 1960s and 1970s — he elaborates on this idea, considering what those alternative paths to growth look like and what they ask of us. Just as Rachel Carson was signing her untimely farewell to the world with her haunting instruction for how to save it, he writes: The danger and hope politically is that Western civilization has reached the end of its ecological rope. Right now there is the potential for the growth of a real people's consciousness. […] All of industrial/technological civilization is really on the wrong track, because its drive and energy are purely mechanical and self-serving — real values are someplace else. The real values are within nature, family, mind, and into liberation… And how do we make the choices in our national economic policy that take into account that kind of cost accounting — that ask, "What is the natural-spiritual price we pay for this particular piece of affluence, comfort, pleasure, or labor saving?" […] The only hope for a society ultimately hell-bent on self-destructive growth is not to deny growth as a mode of being, but to translate it to another level, another dimension… The change can be hastened, but there are preconditions to doing that… Nobody can move from [one] to [the other] in a vacuum as a solitary individual…. What have to be built are community networks… When people, in a very modest way, are able to define a certain unity of being together, a commitment to staying together for a while, they can begin to correct their use of energy and find a way to be mutually employed. And this, of course, brings a commitment to the place, which means right relation to nature.
 Art by Icinori from Thank You, Everything A decade later, Snyder would distill the essence of this orientation in a talk he delivered to an audience of college students: What we'd hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds.
And while it is true that no one else can walk the path and do the real work for us, it is also true that we can be helped and guided, that we especially need the help and guidance in such times of helplessness and disorientation. Snyder writes: True teachers are called into being by the contradictions generated by civilization… We need them.
Who are the true teachers of our time? 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. | | | |
|
| 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. |
|
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. |
| | |
Nema komentara:
Objavi komentar