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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 — any common desolation, the half room of love, Thomas Merton on solitude and the soul — you can catch up right here. And if my labor of love touches your life in a meaningful way, please consider supporting it with a donation — for nearly two decades, 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.
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John Allyn Smith, Jr. was eleven when, early one morning in the interlude between two world wars, not long after his parents had filed for divorce, he was awakened by a loud bang beneath his bedroom window. He looked to see his father dead by his own gun. Within months, his mother had remarried, changing her last name and that of her son, who became John Berryman (October 25, 1914–January 7, 1972). He would spend the rest of his life trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Art being the best instrument we have invented for our suffering, he would become a poet. "I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong & so undone," he would write about his father in a poem, not realizing he was writing about himself. Berryman tried to medicate his deepening depression with alcohol and religion, but writing remained his most effective salve. He wrote like the rest of us draw breath — lungfuls of language and feeling to keep himself alive: ten poetry collections, numerous essays, thousands of letters, and a long biography of his favorite writer.  John Berryman Early one morning in the pit of his fifty-eighth winter — having won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a $10,000 grant from the newly founded National Endowment for the Arts, having dined with the President at the White House, having nurtured the dreams of a generation of poets as a teacher and mentor and unabashed lavisher with praise, and having finally quit drinking — John Berryman jumped from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis to his death, slain by the meaning confluence of biochemistry and trauma that can leave even the strongest of minds "so undone." Several months earlier, Berryman had written a long letter to his former teacher Mark Van Doren, who had emboldened him to make a life in poetry and who would lovingly remember him as "an overflowing man, a man who was never self-contained, a man who would have been multitudes had there been time and world enough for such a miracle." Despite reporting a routine of astonishing vitality — studying theology before breakfast, keeping up "a fancy exercise-programme" in the afternoon, reading a canon of medical lectures as research for a novel he was writing, responding to a dozen letters a day, and "and supporting with vivacity & plus-strokes & money various people, various causes" — Berryman placed at the center of the letter a self-flagellating lament about his "lifelong failure to finish anything," which he attributed to his twenty four years of alcoholism. (This may be the grimmest symptom of depression — a punitive hyperfocus on one's perceived deficiencies, to the total erasure of one's talents and triumphs.)  Art by Staffan Gnosspelius from Bear — a wordless picture-book for grownups about life with and liberation from depression. A generation after neuroscience founding father enumerated the six "diseases of the will" that keep the gifted from living up to their gifts and Kafka considered the four psychological hindrances of the talented, Berryman reflects on what he believed kept him from achieving all he wanted to achieve, distilling the three "capital vices" of creative work:  1. some bone-laziness but mostly DOLDRUMS, proto-despair, great-poets-die-young or at least unfulfilled like Coleridge & Co., all that crap.
2. the opposite, fantastic hysterical labor, accumulation, proliferation… 3. over-ambitiousness. Part of this is temperamental grandiosity but more of it — unless of course I am wrong — is legitimate self-demand on the largest conceivable scale.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who went on to become one of the most celebrated and influential poets of the nineteenth century not because of but despite the uncommon share of suffering she was dealt, had an antidote to the first. Seamus Heaney, whose poetry won him the Nobel Prize, had an antidote to the second. As we often give others the advice we most need ourselves, Berryman himself offered an antidote to the third — which he considered his "greatest problem" — in his answer to a student's question. That student would go on to become a great poet himself, immortalizing his mentor's advice in a poem that remains the finest blueprint I know to staying sane as an artist: BERRYMAN
by W.S. Merwin I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nearly two decades, 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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"We are bathing in mystery and confusion," Carl Sagan told his best interviewer. "That will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it." We have wielded our tools of reason at the mystery — theorems and telescopes, postulates and particle colliders — but the best tool we have invented for cutting through our confusion remains an instrument of love and not of reason: We make art. Long before we understood how stars made souls and what happens when we return our borrowed stardust to the universe, our ancestors sought an organizing principle for the mystery, drawing celestial maps and creating elaborate cosmogonies with no knowledge of gravity and orbits, of galaxies and exoplanets. Our arts anticipated our equations and counterbalance them — science has only deepened our confusion with discoveries intimating that this entire universe might exist inside a black hole, that it might not be the only universe, that the thingness of everything in it may just be a hologram. It would, of course, be thrilling to confirm any of these theories. But for all the thrill of truth, it is at the intersection of mystery and meaning that we become most fully human and find the things that make us most alive: wonder, beauty, love. This may be why I find myself so enraptured by the work of Tasmanian-born Australian artist Shane Drinkwater, which I came upon in Elements: Chaos, Order and the Five Elemental Forces (public library) — Stephen Ellcock's rigorously researched and passionately constellated cosmos of wonder. 
Partway between ancient Tibetan astrological thangka, Maria Clara Eimmart's 17th-century astronomical paintings, and Ella Harding Baker's 19th-century solar system quilt, bearing echoes of Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint, Drinkwater's paintings and collages are coded cosmogonies of color, form, and feeling — orbits and planets, comets and meteor showers, dashed and dotted and arrowed, simple yet mysterious, elemental yet deeply human. Emanating from them is the same transcendent bewilderment that prompted pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell to sigh in her diary: We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.
Couple with Native artist Magaret Nazon's stunning celestial beadwork, then revisit Thomas Wright's self-published and scrumptiously illustrated 1750 marvel An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nearly two decades, 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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"Let everything happen to you," wrote Rilke, "Beauty and terror." It is not easy, this simple surrender. The courage and vulnerability it takes make it nothing less than an act of heroism. Most of our cowardices and cruelties, most of the suffering we endure and inflict, stem from what we are unwilling to feel, and there is nothing we cower from and rage against more than our own incoherence — that intolerable tension between the poles of our capacities, which Maya Angelou so poignantly addressed in one of the greatest poems ever written, urging us to "learn that we are neither devils nor divines." We have been great inventors but poor students of ourselves: The religions we invented, helpful though they have been to our moral development, split us further into angels and demons destined for heaven or hell; the psychotherapy we invented, helpful though it has been to allaying our inner turmoil, secularized original sin in its pathology model of the psyche, treating us as problems to be solved rather than parts to be harmonized. Both have sold us the alluring illusion that a state of permanent happiness can be attained — in Eden, or across the finish line of our self-improvement project — ultimately denying our fulness of being, denying the oscillation of "beauty and terror" that makes life alive. James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) defies this marketable myth in a stunning passage from Giovanni's Room (public library) — the semi-autobiographical novel gave us Baldwin's equally incisive reflection on love, freedom, and the paradox of choice. 
When a man he encounters wonders why "nobody can stay in the garden of Eden," the narrator is stopped up short. With an eye to the banality of the question as a fractal of the banality of life — like the banality of evil, like the banality of survival — Baldwin writes: The question is banal but one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road — and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright — and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.
Considering the difficulty of reconciling our own darkness with our light, our innocence with our pain, he adds: Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
Complement with Walter Lippmann, writing in the wake of Amelia Earhart's disappearance, on what makes a hero and Leonard Cohen, wresting a secular truth from a religious concept, on what makes a saint, then revisit Baldwin on how to live through your darkest hour. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nearly two decades, 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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ALSO: A BOOK OF CARDS
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