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Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror. Anything to which you give yourself fully, vest all your strength and risk all your vulnerability, will return you to your life annealed, magnified, both unselved and more deeply yourself. It can be a garden, or a desert, or a hare. It can be, perhaps most readily, a place. "Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered," the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote in her stunning love letter to a mountain long before neuroscience found the seat of personhood in the hippocampus — the brain's compass for navigating space. Places can become part of us, can imprint themselves on the soul like people we have loved. Because every place is part of a larger landscape, a cell in the body of the world, to fall in love with any one place — to contact its beckoning beauty, its vulnerability, its variousness — is to come to love the world itself more deeply. That is what Ann Zwinger (March 12, 1925–August 30, 2014) invokes in Wind in the Rock (public library) — her breathtaking 1978 account of falling in love with Utah's rocky canyons, finding a microcosm of the world in their desolate Martian landscapes threaded with cattle trails, touching both the immediacy of life and the size of time in their elemental majesty. 
She writes:  There is an enchantment in these dry canyons that once roared with water and still sometimes do, that absorbed the voices of those who came before, something of massive dignity about sandstone beds that tell of a past long before human breathing, that bear the patterns of ancient winds and water in their crossbeddings.
That enchantment only comes at the price of tremendous courage, for encountering the canyons is no picturesque excursion — Grand Gulch divides the plateau in half, its walls a menacing vertical drop of fifty feet cascading downward into a series of undercut steps nearly impossible to descend on foot except with razor caution. But impossible is just what we call the limits of our courage and imagination. One night after dinner, Zwinger sets out to climb the talus slope above her camp, four hundred feet straight up into the gloaming sky. When she finally reaches the top, crowned with a narrow pillar of rock, she sits down to write in her notebook until the last light fades, capturing the moment in what may well be a prose poem: The wind is fierce… but somehow it's the right wind. Up here it is fitting that there is wind, keeping open the slot in the wall, charging through, honing the air, taking voices away. The moon sharpens and brightens, bringing Saturn with it, rising in an open quadrant of sky. I absorb the strength of the earth through feet rooted in the rock. If I could raise my arms high enough I could garner thunderbolts and grasp them like a bouquet of crackling light.
She descends back to camp in the darkness — "a declivity of mind and feeling" — and when she looks up at the slope the next morning, it seems impossible that anyone could climb down in the dark. She reflects: Perhaps when one scratches the underside of heaven one is granted a special grace. But the euphoria remains, and I can still call back that feeling of being astride the world and what it was like to be charged with the energy of the universe. Perhaps one true gift of these canyons is that they become so deeply imprinted on the psyche that they can be invoked at will, bringing back their particular charge of serene energy whenever needed.
Over and over, Zwinger discovers what we all do if we live with maximum aliveness — that we fathom our depths only by pushing against our limits. She writes: When I crawl across a foot-wide ledge with nothing below, nearly nauseated with fear; when I claw up a sandstone wall, plastered against its abrasive curve; when I heave myself onto the top rim to see a view of such splendor that wonder washes away all my apprehension about getting back down; when I do what I knew I could not do — then I have a taste of glory.
Over and over, her stubborn courage is recompensed with something beyond beauty, beyond gladness — a rush of pure being: When I wake up to eternity I'd prefer it to be just like this: under a venerable cottonwood just leafing out, sunlight sliding down the canyon wall, the soft rustle of dried cottonwood leaves on the ground, a canyon wren caroling, and then the silence of an April morning.
Eternity, however, is always menaced by entropy — Zwinger finds herself trying to reconcile the ancient Indian cultures embedded in the canyons with the oil drilling now scarring the face of the mountain with the pockmarks of so-called civilization. She wonders: Will those who come after me know what it's like to wake up in one of these canyons, hear the tentative murmurs and scratchings, feel the sixth singing sense of quickening heartbeat of hunted and hunting, of life that shuttles and scuttles and plods and leaps, leaving tracks to tell who went where and sometimes why, and the wind erasing them so that it is only the cool sand that one ever remembers?
But one does remember, for such places embed themselves in the marrow of memory, become part of knowing ourselves, a map to the terra incognita of who and what we are. As she prepares to leave the canyons, she reflects on what these austere rocks have taught her about being alive: Darkness comes so softly now. The cliffs seem to retain the last light of day as they retain the heat of the sun and give it back at night. The willows are in silhouette but rose and tan and gray still glow on the cliffs, silver still shimmers on the river. Stars appear slowly, only the bright tones, and then galaxies of flights flood this clamshell-horizoned sky. I don't think I've ever sat and watched for so long, hypnotized with the splendor of this time, this place, this sense of being. It is enough to know why I came here: to breathe in the solitude and the silence. I simply accept what I've been learning in these canyons, finding resources I didn't know I had, stretching, accepting that there are times when one has no options, and I sit here in peace because of that. I know that I will never be content without risk and challenge and the opportunity to fail, to know pain, the chance to test my endurance, unwrap my horizons, know physical stress and the blinding satisfaction of coming through. If the cost is great, the rewards are greater. And I sit here in peace because of that.
In a sentiment evocative of Willa Cather's splendid definition of happiness as being "dissolved into something complete and great," Zwinger adds: And then, in that star-dark lightness, I shake open my sleeping bag and stretch out to watch the stars. A parure of ten stars lies in precise alignment against the eggshell curve of the canyon wall. They stand time still, in poised perfection, before wheeling on to other appointments. In the quiet, the air is singing.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nineteen 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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We are perishable matter yearning for meaning, and time is both the matter and the meaning of our lives. "Time is a river that sweeps me along but I am the river," Borges wrote in 1940. "Time is the substance I am made of." Around the same time, the chemist Willard Libby had a revolutionary insight that brought physics to the poetry of time, measurement to the mystery of this substance we are made of.  Discus chronologicus — a German depiction of time from the early 1720s, included in Cartographies of Time. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.) Science is stratified, layering discovery upon discovery, continually changing the landscape of knowledge we call reality. The late 1930s and early 1940s were a particularly volcanic time in the life of knowledge. After physicist Lise Meitner prevailed against the odds of her time and place to discover nuclear fission while working with isotopes — nuclear species of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei — physicist Serge Korff theorized that neutrons produced in the upper atmosphere by the newly detected cosmic rays would interact with the abundant isotope nitrogen-14 and become carbon-14 — an unstable isotope of carbon, also known as radiocarbon. Like all air molecules, radiocarbon makes its way from the atmosphere into living matter — it goes into your lungs with every breath you take, then into your bloodstream, into your digestive system and out of it, into the soil, into whatever grows in the soil, tagging everything along the way with the isotope. Libby, building on this cascade of discoveries and on his own Manhattan Project work in uranium enrichment, realized that you could measure the amount of radiocarbon in an object and use the isotope's half-life — the amount of time it takes for radioactive decay to exponentially vanquish the unstable atom, a constant for each element and around 5700 years for radiocarbon — to trace time back and establish the age of the object. So began what geologists and archeologists would call the "radiocarbon revolution."  Art by Vivian Torrence from Chemistry Imagined by Roald Hoffmann with Carl Sagan. Today, radiocarbon dating has been used to discern the age of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the shroud in which Jesus's crucified body was swathed, to discover the "wood wide web" of mycorrhizal communication by observing how carbon isotopes are exchanged between root systems, to reveal the biochemical pathways beneath the mysteries of photosynthesis and the metabolic pathways of molecules in the human body, to map disease prevalence and solar activity across time. But one of the most unexpected and revelatory uses of radiocarbon dating has been to locate an entire civilization in space and in time. In 1960, months before Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery, Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad (who happened to be married to each other) discovered the remains of Norse buildings in Newfoundland — astonishing evidence that the Viking civilization had reached the edge of North America, vindicating the feat of Icelandic sagas that historians had considered mythic hyperbole. The question became not whether but when it happened.  Viking Ship by Andreas Bloch, late 1800s Excavations went on for eight years. When a few logs of juniper and fir turned up among the archaeological ruins, no one thought much of them. Meanwhile, radiocarbon labs were being set up around the world — dozens of them by the end of the 1960s, finding unimagined uses for this young science that suddenly banked the river of time. But time takes time — as historian Eleanor Barraclough recounts in her altogether fascinating book Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (public library), it wasn't until decades after the excavation that researchers realized the Newfoundland wood samples were a once-living record of solar activity. Barraclough writes: Three of these wood samples bore the marks of a cosmic storm: a spike of the isotope carbon-14 from a solar event that took place in the year 993. They counted forward from the spike in the tree rings to the bark, which gave them the number of years between the cosmic storm and the tree being cut down. This told them that the trees had been cut down in 1021, giving them the only secure year when we know that the Norse categorically had to be present on the edge of North America.
The year the Ingstads completed the Newfoundland excavation, NASA began working on two space probes headed for Mars. They called the program Viking — across time and space, across technologies and civilizations, that same irrepressible human yearning to broaden the known world, to make contact with another.  Carl Sagan and a Viking lander in Death Valley, California. (Photograph courtesy of Druyan-Sagan Associates, Inc.) When Ray Bradbury sat down with Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke for a historic conversation about Mars and the mind of humanity, he captured this elemental impulse: It's part of the nature of man to start with romance and build to a reality.
This will always be our romance — to know the unknown, to transcend ourselves, to touch the edges of reality in the finite time we have. Longing may be the only thing in the universe with a half-life of zero. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nineteen 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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In the late summer of 1832, England was set aflame with wonder — a glimpse of something wild and flamboyant, shimmering with the lush firstness of a world untrammeled by the boot of civilization. Edward Lear (May 12, 1812–January 29, 1888), barely out of his teens, had been working on his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots for two years. Moved by the young man's talent and passion, one of William Turner's patrons — a wealthy woman with a deep feeling for nature and art — had procured for him an introduction to the newly opened London Zoo, which had denied other artists access. Lear spent endless hours at the parrot house. When the zoo closed, he dashed across Regent's Park to the museum of the London Zoological Society and continued drawing.  Macrocercus Aracanga. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)  Plyctolophus Leadbeateri. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.) In a letter to a friend penned at the feverish outset of the project, he is already becoming himself — passionate and playful, part Humboldt, part Lewis Carroll, entirely original, prototyping the nonsense verse he would be remembered for: For all day I've been away at the West End,
Painting the best end
Of some vast Parrots
As red as new carrots
Birds had always been Lear's great enchantment, the bellows to stoke the fire of his love of life. Parrots were special — "live emeralds," he wrote in his diary, emissaries of "the sense of freshness and freedom" he found in wild nature and craved ferociously in London's gilded cage. To render them true to life was to contact his own wildness. He couldn't bear to draw from "skins" and "specimens" — dead husks explorers brought back from expeditions for scientists to study life — so he spent small eternities waiting for the living birds at the zoo to perch at the perfect angle and hold the pose long enough for him to begin sketching.  Macrocercus Ararauna. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)  Plyctolophus Sulphureus. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.) Jenny Uglow — one of my favorite custodians of cultural hindsight — describes his process in her magnificent biography Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense (public library): At the zoo, he measured wingspan, length and legs while the young keeper Goss held the birds still. He chose their most striking, defining pose (and in his paintings they do seem to pose), then he sketched them — perched on branches, preening, nodding and blinking at the artist before them — in countless rough drawings, surrounded by jotted notes. He caught the arc of movement and the tilt of heads and drew their graduated feathers and soft down with painstaking accuracy, noting the smallest gradations of colour and texture. He made test sheets of colour, dabbing the tints around the sketches as a guide. But he also gave the birds character: the green and red Kuhl's parakeets seem to talk to each other; the salmon-crested cockatoo appears blushingly vain; the great red and yellow macaw turns its head with a wary, arrogant glance and the blue and yellow macaw leans forward, its feathers ruffled and high. It is hard to tell who is the observer, artist or bird.
 Psittacara Leptorhyncha. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.) Parrots saturated what Lear most relished in nature. Color poured from his brush, alive with the same feeling-tone he found during his long walks in the forests of the Lake District, marveling in his journal at "the emerald blue deep beneath, the pale blue beyond." He envisioned making a ravishing book of his birds, emanating all the vastness and vibrancy of life itself.  Macrocercus Hyacinthinus. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)  Platycercus Palliceps. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.) But the processes for reproducing such bright colors and printing such large folios were cumbersome and expensive. No publisher would take the risk. So, a century after William Blake pioneered the artist-entrepreneur model of self-publishing, Lear decided to crowdfund and self-publish his labor of love: He would produce 175 copies for subscribers at ten shillings each, then use the proceeds to publish a bound book for the public. He began offering subscriptions to old friends and neighbors, parents of his former students, dukes and duchesses, eminent naturalists, and even the president of the Linnaean Society, hoping they would become seed investors in his vision. The lavish large-format art he envisioned was modeled on Audubon's pioneering "elephant folio" of Birds of America, published five years earlier after fourteen years of struggle. Lear — who was around the age of Audubon's sons — had befriended the American artist during his European lecture tour and had become especially close with one of his sons. When Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots was finally published as a bound book, Audubon bought a copy and wrote admiringly about it in his journal.  Platycercus Erythropterus. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)  Platycercus Tabuensis. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)  Platycercus Barnardi. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)  Platycercus Brownii. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.) But the unexampled is always at odds with the commonplace, the visionary always at odds with the commodity: Commercially, the book was a dismal failure. Creatively, it changed the course of natural history illustration and paved the way for the future of book art; it changed the course of Lear's life — the unknown young man was soon tutoring the young Queen Victoria in painting and working for the eminent taxidermist turned ornithological writer John Gould, whose gifted wife Elizabeth also trained with Lear to become one of the world's greatest ornithological artists herself. (Her birds were even more joyous to work with than Audubon's in my divinations project.) Perhaps Lear's parrots are so striking, so alive, because he was always in an I-Thou relationship with the birds. The drawings that filled his room spoke to him: "A huge Maccaw is now looking me in the face as much as to say — 'finish me,'" he wrote to a friend; they spoke the language of his soul: The whole of my exalted & delightful upper tenement in fact overflows with them, and for the last 12 months I have so moved — looked at, — & existed among Parrots — that should any transmigration take place at my decease I am sure my soul would be very uncomfortable in anything but one of the Psittacidae.
 Palaeornis Rosaceus. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)  Palaeornis Novae-Holandiae. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)  Lorius Domicella. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)  Palaeornis Columboides. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.) Every artist's art is their coping mechanism for being alive. The parrots were not just an aesthetic passion for Lear. "A deep black bitter melancholy destroys me," he wrote in his journal. Just as Marianne North turned loneliness and loss into wonder with her pioneering paintings of exotic plants and Ernst Haeckel turned the deepest heartbreak into enchantment with his breathtaking drawings of jellyfish, Lear painted what he saw in order to keep looking out. All melancholy is a stranglehold of selfing. All joy is a surrender to something larger than oneself. In nature, in wildness, Lear came unselved, so that he could gasp in his journal after a day of walking in the forest and sketching: "Is it not wonderful to be alive?"  Palaeornis Torquatus. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.) donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nineteen 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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BIRD DIVINATION OF THE WEEK
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