At the end of her trailblazing life, having swung open the gate of the possible for women in science with her famous comet discovery, astronomer Maria Mitchell confided in one of her Vassar students that she would rather have authored a great poem than discovered a comet.
A century later, a little girl named Vera had a flash of illumination while reading a children's book about Maria Mitchell: her nightly pastime of gazing wondersmitten at the stars outside her bedroom window could become a life's work, work that would culminate in one of the greatest revelations in the history of science.
Vera Rubin confirmed the existence of dark matter by studying the rotation of galaxies. "I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly," she reflected in her most personal interview — a playful echo of Keats's poignant postulate that "beauty is truth, truth beauty."
A decade after Vera Rubin returned her borrowed stardust to the universe, the observatory named in her honor opens its oracle eye to the cosmos and blinks back at us the mysteries of ten million bright galaxies. Atop one of the first images captured by the VRO's 8.4-meter telescope — 678 exposures of the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae taken over the course of seven hours, two trillion pixels of cosmic truth combined into a single gasp of beauty — I have remixed the text of the National Science Foundation press release into a poem using my bird divination process:
Available as a print and a postcard.
If you want to befriend time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone.
Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock.
Walk a beach and comb your fingers through the golden dust that was once a mountain.
Pick up a perfect oval pebble and feel its mute assurance that time can grind down even the heaviest boulder, smooth even the sharpest edge.
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to
Rising forty feet above the rocky cliffs of Carmel is a great poem of gravity and granite that Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20, 1962), poet laureate of the co-creation of time and mind, composed with his wife Una and their twin sons.
A decade before Carl Jung built his famous stone tower in Zurich and conceptualized the realized self as an elemental stone, Jeffers apprenticed himself to a local stonemason to build Tor House and Hawk Tower. As this rocky planet was being unworlded by its first world war, he set about making "stone love stone."
Seeing stonecutters as "foredefeated challengers of oblivion" and poets as stonecutters of the psyche, he went on hauling enormous slabs of granite up from the shore, carrying time itself, cupping its twelve consolations in his mortal hands, writing about what he touched and what touched him.
Hawk Tower
OH, LOVELY ROCK
by Robinson Jeffers
We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.
The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian firs that stare up the cataracts
Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.
We lay on gravel and kept a little camp-fire for warmth.
Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay-leaves
On the ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay down again. The revived flame
Lighted my sleeping son's face and his companion's, and the vertical face of the great gorge-wall
Across the stream. Light leaves overhead danced in the fire's breath, tree-trunks were seen: it was the rock wall
That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no fern nor lichen, pure naked rock…as if I were
Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange… I cannot
Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and childlike loveliness: this fate going on
Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling child. I shall die, and my boys
Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid agonies of change and discovery; this age will die,
And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem: this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies
That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above: and I, many packed centuries ago,
Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.
A generation later, another great poet displaced from the bedrock of belonging by another world war tried to make sense of being human by turning to stone:
STONE
by Charles Simic
Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.
From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river,
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.
I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed.
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill —
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star charts
On the inner walls.
And although we are "creatures shaped by the planet's rocky logic," we are also creatures shaped by the myriad mercies of time, saved over and over by the leap beyond logic that is trusting time.
FORGIVENESS
by Maria Popova
May the tide
never tire of its tender toil
how over and over
it forgives the Moon
the daily exile
and returns to turn
mountains into sand
as if to say,
you too can have
this homecoming
you too possess
this elemental power
of turning
the stone in the heart
into golden dust.
Every day at sundown I would hear him, the invisible shepherd singing on the other side of the ridge, his song filling the gloaming with the sound of the centuries — the same song his father had sung on that same mountain, and his father's father, and the generations of shepherds before him, their lives wool on the loom of time weaving the story of a place that is a scale model of the world.
The Bulgaria I grew up in was the poorest country in Europe and the most biodiverse per square kilometer. I spent much of my childhood in its remotest mountains, where my grandparents worked as government-deployed elementary school teachers in largely illiterate villages. My grandmother, now ninety, had grown up in those mountains herself, sharing a single straw bed with her three siblings and a three-room house with her trigenerational family of twelve. There were always animals around — pigs and chickens and goat and cows and oh so many sheep — their rhythms, their needs, their moods intertwined with our own. I feel their absence today and in it a reminder that the world we live in — a world of skyscrapers and screens, sterilized of the nonhuman — is unnatural, impoverished, lonely.
After coming of age in New Zealand and living in Scotland, poet and novelist Kapka Kassabova returned to Bulgaria, where she was born a decade before me, to live in its mountains with the nomadic Karakachan shepherds and their ancient breed of dogs in a remote village brought back from the brink of oblivion by a small retinue of young idealists. The modest life of physical toil and privation recompenses her with a new understanding of the tessellated meanings of loyalty, courage, and love, of what it means to be human and how, once we strip the constellation of complexities and artifices that is the modern self, we can begin to see the world as a whole simpler than its parts, unfinished yet complete. Pouring from the pages of Anima: A Wild Pastoral (public library) — one of those books that leave you taking fuller breaths of life — is an elixir to lift the spell that has us entranced by the cult of more, languishing with the loneliness of not enough in a civilization obsessed with scaling business models, having forgotten that the only thing worth scaling is a mountain. It is a love letter to the Karakachan way of being — to the shepherds who in a lifetime of walking with the animals circumambulate the world more than once with their combined footfall, and to their guard dogs who look part wolf and part teddy bear, their growl a volcano erupting in space, their eyes earnest and knowing; it is a love letter to life itself, to the soul of the world coursing through us, the soul beneath the self.
Kassabova writes:
This job requires three things: liking your own company, liking the animals and liking the outdoors, plus not being afraid of anything.
[…]
We have forgotten that this too is something we can do… walk with animals, live with animals, care for animals and be cared for by them. Even make a living from it. Today, it is just as difficult to make a living from pastoral farming as it is from making noncommercial art, music or literature. You must be fuelled by a devotion that can't be dampened by rain or burned up by fire.
Those who are willing to live such a life are rewarded with a singular sense of purpose, more transcendence than teleology — a kind of repatriation into the family of things, a benediction of time and a consecration of presence:
It was a soothing monastic monotony, a balm for troubled souls, to know your purpose, follow an itinerary and bring the gang back, tired and satisfied after another day of fulfilling your mission. The days were beads in a rosary that passed through your fingers and you felt their texture and shape. The same, but different.
Morning prayer: milk the sheep and take the flock to pasture. Midday prayer: pladnina. Evening vespers: bring the flock home, feed the dogs. Have a humble supper, lie on your hard bed, then rise early and morning prayer.
Drink your coffee, lace up your shoes, strap on your rucksack, take your stick and in sickness and in health, in rain and sunshine, go. The dogs are waiting. The flock is waiting. The hills are waiting. You are needed.
Karakachan dogs guarding their flock
She comes to contact the life-force of water in Black River and the consolation of stone in Thunder Peak. In that way we have of calling love the longing for our own missing pieces — those parts of ourselves we have repressed or abandoned that another embodies — she falls in love with one of the young shepherds, only to discover alongside his extraordinary vitality the self-abandonment of addiction. She wanders the last indigenous pine forests of the Balkans, slakes her soul on a river so icy blue and clean it feels "like the dawn of the earth," eats with elders who know the real meaning of might: "There are hundred-year-old trees," say the Karakachans, "but there is no hundred-year-old power."
All the while, the life of the mountain whispers its invitation to aliveness. In a passage evocative of the French surrealist poet, philosopher, and novelist René Daumal's alpine metaphor for the meaning of life, she writes:
You go up, always up. There is something higher, brighter, more saturated in colour, more perfect in shape, different from yesterday, although it's the same mountain every day. The dogs are by your side, they too are astonished by this moving picture and sometimes when you walk, you feel so light that your feet barely touch the ground, and you realise that these are some of the happiest days of your life.
One of the hardest things to learn in this life — in this epoch, in this civilization — is that all true happiness is the work of unselfing, the kind of surrender to the will of being that some find in a monastery and some in a mountain. Two centuries after Margaret Fuller's encountered transcendence on a hilltop, Kassabova recounts a moment of pure presence pulsating with the essence of anima — the Latin root of "animal," meaning "soul," which the Karakachans believe is embodied by the wind, the breath of life:
I have no face or body when I lie like this on the boundless bed of the hills, I have nothing at all. I am a vessel through which passes the breath of the world.
[…]
The wind is a messenger travelling from afar and I try to catch the message. Like a word that's not a word, it is a continuous movement of grass and light, of animals and the sun's orbit. The wind is alive like a being. The wind is the world's soul passing over me and its message is this, the world's soul. Anima.
It passes over us when we lie down with the animals. It touches us and moves on. I don't know where it goes but one day, I will go with it and not wake up anymore.
Such glimpses of the fathomless totality beyond this boundary of skin and story that we call a self wake us up from the illusion we live with. There are infinitely many peepholes into that grander reality, the smallest flower as good as the largest telescope, a hare as good as a hummingbird. Kassabova reflects on hers:
To keep up with the goats required surrender and a suspension of self, at least self in the modern sense, the self that demands to be at the centre of things and not a companion to a bunch of other animals. But maybe the modern self is not quite real. Maybe its understanding of centre and periphery is an illusion. Maybe it wouldn't be that difficult to give it up. It might be a relief.
She finds this unselfing to be an exponential surrender — to the mountain, to its time and its timefulness:
The higher you went, the harder physical survival became, the more equal you felt to everything. Personas disappeared and essence remained. There is just one essence in all of life. Anima.
[…]
All our lives, we try to arrive somewhere. Where are my ambitions now? I can't find them. They were never real. How can something unreal take up so much of my time on earth when the only thing that's real is this mountain? I can't fathom it. Pirin was named after the old divinity of thunder and fertility, Perun, who is covered in dragon scales. I can see why humans worshipped mountains when they wandered over nine mountains with their flocks. Thunder Peak is the original cathedral. When Notre Dame burns, Thunder Peak is here every morning.
In the end, she discovers what we all do if we live long enough and deep enough — that it is not what we search for but what finds us, what comes unbidden through the side door of our expectations, through the cracks in our plans, that most rewilds our lives with meaning. And that meaning is always inarticulable, something glowing in the abyss between one consciousness and another, something on which language can only shine a sidewise gleam.
I open my laptop and my fingers struggle to type. They are too thick and have almost forgotten their way around the keyboard. Must I squeeze my experiences into such a small space when they are so much larger? As large and layered as the mountain. I look the same as ever, but I feel like a giant. Something has expanded. I don't know how to explain this. Between the lower world and the upper world there is a problem of language.
And all the time, the earth is trying to make contact.
[…]
The milk, the blood, the rain. All our lives we perform tasks while waiting for something to click into place. For somewhere to put our love.
[…]
Now… I understand what it's like to have seen something so true and beautiful, you want everyone to be touched by it. Saved, even.
Hello Blog! This is the weekly email digest of 
Nema komentara:
Objavi komentar