There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance — the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation — are these little acts of mercy, of tenderness, the small clear voice rising over the cacophony of the quarrelsome, over the complaint choir of the cynics, to insist again and again that the world is beautiful and full of kindness.
It makes all the difference in a day, in a life, to hear that voice, all the more to be that voice. It is our evolutionary inheritance — we are the story of survival of the tenderest, the living proof that tenderness may be the ultimate fitness for being alive.
I know no better homily on this fundament of our humanity than Ellen Bass's poem "Kiss" from her altogether soul-salving collection Indigo (public library).
KISS
by Ellen Bass
When Lynne saw the lizard floating
in her mother-in-law's swimming pool,
she jumped in. And when it wasn't
breathing, its body limp as a baby
drunk on milk, she laid it on her palm
and pressed one fingertip to its silky breast
with just about the force you need
to test the ripeness of a peach, only quicker,
a brisk little push with a bit of spring in it.
Then she knelt, dripping wet in her Doc Martens
and camo T-shirt with the neck ripped out,
and bent her face to the lizard's face,
her big plush lips to the small stiff jaw
that she'd pried apart with her opposable thumb,
and she blew a tiny puff into the lizard's lungs.
The sun glared against the turquoise water.
What did it matter if she saved one lizard?
One lizard more or less in the world?
But she bestowed the kiss of life,
again and again, until
the lizard's wrinkled lids peeled back,
its muscles roused its own first breath
and she set it on the hot cement
where it rested a moment
before darting off.
Couple with Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk on storytelling and the art of tenderness, then revisit Ellen's magnificent poems "Any Common Desolation" and "How to Apologize."
"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales," Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. "If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales." Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a plasticity of being that allows us to navigate uncertainty, given that uncertainty is the pulse-beat of our lives, fairy tales are not — as J.R.R. Tolkien so passionately insisted — only for children. They are more than fantasy, more than fiction, shimmering with a surreality so saturated that it becomes a mirror for what is realest in us, what we are often yet to see. They enchant us with their strangeness because we are largely strangers to ourselves, ambivalent in our yearning for transformation, for redemption, for homecoming, restless in our longing to unmask the face of love and unglove the hand of mercy. They ask us to believe in magic and reward our trust with truth.
Art by Maurice Sendak for a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales
Fairy tales are above all in service of life's most difficult, most unfinishable task — knowing who we are and what we want. Their most revelatory function is to remind us that, because we know ourselves only incompletely, we don't always know what we are looking for until we find it, often by way of getting lost, or until it finds us, often in a guise we don't immediately recognize as the very thing we long for.
That is what Italian writer Cristina Campo (April 29, 1923–January 10, 1977) explores in her excellent posthumous essay collection The Unforgivable: And Other Writings (public library).
Observing that many fairy tales "end like a ring right where they began," she writes:
In a fairy tale, there are no roads. You start out walking, as if in a straight line, and eventually that line reveals itself to be a labyrinth, a perfect circle, a spiral, or even a star — or a motionless point the soul never leaves, even as body and mind take what appears to be an arduous journey. You seldom know where you are traveling, or even what you are traveling toward, for you cannot know, in reality, what the water ballerina, or the singing apple, or the fortune-telling bird may be. Or the word to conjure with: the abstract, culminating word that is stronger than any certainty.
One of Kay Nielsen's stunning 1914 illustrations for Scandinavian fairy tales. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Through these routeless convolutions, we map the terra incognita of your own interior world. In a passage evocative of the Chinese notion of wu-wei — "trying not to try" — Campo considers the paradox of self-discovery:
Since the thing you start out looking for cannot and must not have a face, how can you recognize the means to reach it until you've reached it? How can the destination ever be anything but an apparent destination?
[…]
No one arrives at the enlightenment he sets out to seek. It will come to him in its own sweet time. Thus the destination walks side by side with the traveler… Or it hovers behind him… In truth, the traveler has always had it within him and is only moving toward the motionless center of his life: the antrum near the spring, the cave — where childhood and death, in one another's arms, confide the secret they share. The idea of travel, effort, and patience is paradoxical, yes, but it is also exact. For in this paradox, we stumble on the intersection of eternity and time.
It is hardly surprising that, in their central project of loosening the clutch of certainties we call a self, fairy tales blur the ordinary experience of time — time, after all, is the substance we are made of.
Another of One of Kay Nielsen's Scandinavian fairy tales illustrations. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
In a passage brimming with the musicality Maurice Sendak considered the key to great storytelling, Campo — the daughter of a musician and a composer — writes:
The geometry of time and space is abolished as if by magic. You walk for hours in a circle, or conversely, you reach the edge of the infinite in a few quick steps. It isn't our state of heightened vigilance that casts a spell on the world around us; it is a much more recondite correspondence between discovering and letting ourselves be discovered — between giving shape and taking shape. Everything already was, but today it truly is. Today any peasant, pointing in any direction, will sound like a gnome or a fairy, will gesture at the path you nearly took a thousand times without suspecting it. The path that leads to four indescribably white springs suspended on the hillside, protected, for a hundred paces or a thousand miles, by fields of tall fragrant grasses; or to the royal tomb hidden by the Etruscans in a cave now covered with brambles, out of which white hounds and a man the size of an ifrit, carrying a shotgun, emerge; or down below the ridge secretly lighted by the sun, at a bend in the riverbank so deep it casts the whole hanging tangle of pink roots into shadow. Velvet water that looks motionless and yet moves. Water that runs off into the beyond without flowing, so that it would be enough just to follow it, for that beyond which is always forbidden, always intimated in our dreams, is transpiring here and now.
I am thinking now of Hannah Arendt's magnificent meditation on love: "Fearlessness is what love seeks," she wrote. "Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now." Perhaps this is why love is the central axis of most fairy tales, why love in real life has a certain dreamlike quality, why both love and dreams are ways of getting to know the stranger in us. "In each of us there is another whom we do not know," Carl Jung wrote, "[who] speaks to us in dreams."
One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrett's 1929 illustrations for French fairy tales. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)
There is the same dreamlike quality and the same capacity for revelation in the state we enter once a fairy tale ejects us from time and thrusts into nowness. Campo paints the dreamscape we enter:
Quick glances direct our steps, hands point beyond the thresholds. Behind windowpanes so clear they blind us move the figures of the ones we loved, the ones we've lost, who, behold, stand up from the piano bench or arrange fruit on a table. It all unfolds like a scroll from a mouth known yet unknown, a dark and luminous sentence, an irrefutable commentary set down between past and future.
In being both a portal between the known and the unknown and a still point between past and future, fairy tales help us discern our own nature by guiding us toward the deepest truths of who we are and helping us apply them to the mystery of being alive — a nonlinear process the fruits of which we call maturity. Campo writes:
Maturity is not the result of persuasion, much less an intellectual epiphany. It is a sudden, I would almost like to say biological, collapse. It is a point that must be reached by all the senses at once if truth is going to be turned into nature.
Complement with Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear and Anaïs Nin on the meaning of maturity, then revisit the greatest illustrations from 200 years of Brothers Grimm fairy tales.
In nearly two decades of The Marginalian, nothing has stirred a more passionate response from readers than the strangest, most sidewise, most private of my labors — the bird divinations I originally shared the morning of my fortieth birthday, after months of obsessive daily collaging drawn from the nightly unconscious.
Moved by the ardent response, I have teamed up with my friends at McNally Editions — the publishing branch of McNally Jackson, New York's most beloved independent bookstore — to make of them An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days: a handsome deck of oversized cards nested inside a "book safe" — a popular Victorian decoy for concealing valuables and love letters inside a box built into a thick tome to be shelved in the family library, passing for an ordinary book.
Accompanying the 100 cards in the box is a small pamphlet (featuring a 19th-century typeface called Cormorant) containing my essay about the story and process behind this unexpected visitation of the muse, which you can read below this gallery of some of my favorites:
a>I have found that the surest way of seeing the wondrous in something ordinary, something previously underappreciated, is coming to love someone who loves it. As we enter each other's worlds in love — whatever its shape or species — we double our way of seeing, broaden our way of being, magnify our sense of wonder, and wonder is our best means of loving the world more deeply.
When the wonder of birds entered my world, I came awake to the notation of starlings on the street wires, to the house wrens bathing in the dusty parking lot, to the robin serenading dawn in its clear and lovely voice, each trill as perfect as a Bach measure. One rainy afternoon, I watched two night herons sleep and wondered whether they were dreaming, went down a rabbit hole of research, wrote a
New York Times piece about how the evolution of REM in the avian brain shaped our human dreams.
Birds began populating my own dreams. A great blue heron glided across the sky of my mind, slow and prehistoric, carrying the world on her back. A million sandhill cranes unspooled from the horizon, turned into the Milky Way, turned into music, turned into time itself. A magpie spoke to me in my mother's voice.
Around the same time, I was discovering that multiple people I love and respect were fond of tarot — something I had always regarded as an embarrassing echo of medieval superstition, antiscientific and intellectually unsound, devised in a world where Satan was more real to the average person than gravity. But as I replaced contempt with curiosity, I came to see it simply as a coping mechanism for the difficulty of living with all this uncertainty, the difficulty of being so opaque to ourselves — a language for interpreting our intentions and experiences, the way the primary purpose of prayer is to clarify our hopes and fears.
I realized, too, that I am not impervious to such practices myself — each year on my birthday, I perform a "Whitman divination": I conjure up the most restless question on my mind, open Leaves of Grass with my eyes closed, and let my blind finger fall on a verse; without fail, Whitman opens some profound side door to my question that becomes its own answer, one inaccessible to the analytical mind.
In that strange combinatorial way the creative impulse has of collaging existing inspirations and passions into something entirely new, I awoke one day with the strange determination to create my own card deck of divinations from the birds — forty decks of forty cards each, to give away to forty people I love for my fortieth birthday.
I turned to my favorite nineteenth-century ornithological books, digitized by the wonderful Biodiversity Heritage Library — the many volumes of John James Audubon's Birds of America, illustrated by Audubon himself, and John Gould's Birds of Europe and Birds of Australia, illustrated by his gifted wife Elizabeth and by Edward Lear, who helped cultivate Elizabeth's talent; a couple of volumes of Henry Leonard Meyer's Colored Illustrations of British Birds and Their Eggs; and the ornithological portions of Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, the specimens from which Elizabeth Gould illustrated.
Each night before going to sleep, I would let a painted bird call out to me from the yellowed pages, then read the ornithological description of the species, taking down a handful of words and phrases speaking to something on my mind that day. Then, with the slanted reckoning of REM, the unconscious would do its mysterious work in the night. Upon waking, I would reread the ornithological text and a kind of message would come to enflesh the skeleton of the noted words — a divination from the bird, partway between koan and poem. I would spend the rest of the day cutting the words and rearranging them onto the illustration, digitally correcting only lightly for the corruptions of the centuries, but mostly embracing the blurry and uneven scans, the stains and smudges, the faded colors — embracing the price of time.
The words of long dead writers rose from the yellowed pages to transform into the voice of my own unconscious, speaking its secret knowledge — about love and friendship, about uncertainty and possibility, about fear and resistance and the capacity for change. The divinations were telling me what I needed to hear. (A part of us always knows what we need to hear and can always tell us where we need to go. The great challenge of life is not to silence that voice with fear or with hope, with indifference or compulsion or the tyranny of should.)
I started with the great blue heron — the closest thing I have to a spirit animal. Birds I already knew and loved called out to me first: the bowerbird, the nightingale, the osprey. Then I began discovering strange and wondrous creatures I had never seen: the fierce frigate, the tender linnet, the Dr. Seussian snake-bird.
I sorrowed for birds I would never see, like the extinct passenger pigeon and the ivory-billed woodpecker cusping on extinction. I delighted in birds I had not seen since I left Bulgaria in my late teens, the same age Audubon was when he left the France of his childhood for America — birds like the white stork and the magpie.
Each bird surprised me with the divination it brought. I didn't feel like I was writing these — they were writing me.
A kind of almanac was emerging — guidance for uncertain days.
I made a divination a day, in a state of what Octavia Butler called "a sweet and powerful positive obsession." When I had forty, I sent them off to the printer to make the forty decks.
But I couldn't stop.
The practice had become a metronome of my days.
The birds kept coming, kept speaking.
Then, at the eleventh hour of my thirties, life dealt a great difficulty.
The daily divinations became an unexpected consolation, helped compost the suffering into fertile ground for growth, held up mirrors I needed to look at. (Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror.)
By the time of my midsummer birthday, I had made twice as many divinations as were in the deck. Although the project had sprung from such a deeply private place, I decided to share it with my readers on The Marginalian, trusting that the birds might help others as much as they had helped me.
I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of delight — from bird-lovers, from tarot-lovers, from poetry-lovers, from other people like me simply looking for another language in which to communicate with themselves, the language of the unconscious. They asked where they could get a deck of their own — but all the forty decks I made were gone to friends as intended. I made prints and stationery cards publicly available (which you can find at bit.ly/birddivinations), which readers relished — but still they yearned for either a book or a deck. And so I made both: This book of cards — modeled on the 19th-century faux tomes known as "book safes," used to conceal banned books or love letters — is the product of that passionate insistence. It feels only right that I donate half the proceeds from it, as I did with the prints, to the Audubon Society in gratitude for their noble conservation work and for John James's beautiful birds — but, even more so, for his beautiful words.
John James Audubon was the 18-year-old illegitimate son of a French plantation owner when he arrived in America in the first years of the nineteenth century with a fake passport, fleeing conscription in Napoleon's army. His mother had died when he was a boy. (Like Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass, Audubon was an expert self-mythologizer — he claimed his mother was a Creole woman who perished in a slave uprising, but recently uncovered documents indicate she was a French chambermaid.) His two uncles — beloved father figures in a childhood marked by an absent father — had died in the French Revolution.
As he began this new chapter of life, not yet knowing he was writing his own myth, the love of birds that had buoyed him through a lonely childhood became his primary obsession. He set out "to complete a collection not only valuable to the scientific class, but pleasing to every person" — the first comprehensive guide to the continent's birds, many of them never before described.
He later recounted: "Prompted by an innate desire to acquire a thorough knowledge of the birds of this happy country, I formed the resolution, immediately on my landing, to spend, if not all my time in that study, at least all that portion generally called leisure, and to draw each individual of its natural size and coloring."
The minimal lessons in portraiture he had received as a boy in France had taught him nothing about drawing nature. So he decided to teach himself. "My pencil gave birth to a family of cripples," he winced at his first attempts. "So maimed were most of them that they resembled the mangled corpses on a field of battle compared with the integrity of living men." To improve his skills, he made an annual ritual of burning entire batches of drawings, resolving to redo those birds in the coming year. "After a few years of patience," he wrote, "some of my attempts began almost to please me and I have continued the same style ever since."
He fell in love with an American girl born in England who made him at home in the new language, so that he could describe the birds he was drawing. He became increasingly lyrical in his writing. He changed his name — he was born Jean-Jacques Rabin — to sound American. He would soon be naming American birds new to the ornithological literature. (When he came upon an unusually small three-toed woodpecker never before described, Audubon named it Maria's Woodpecker, after his friend Maria Martin — the botanical artist who drew most of the trees, flowers, and reeds on which his birds perch.)
Over the next three decades of his life, Audubon went on to paint and write about 435 birds, including several now extinct. He lavishes each bird with multiple pages of detailed description and anecdotes from his personal encounters, using vocabulary so beautiful that working with it felt like a cheat. I savored his unselfconscious use of words like "astonishment" and "bewildered" in the middle of ornithological description, rued that such lovely words as "betake" and "depredation" have fallen out of fashion since his time, delighted in seeing "ossified" — one of my favorite words, which I learned from Emily Dickinson's love letters to Sue — recur so frequently in the context of avian anatomy, delighted in using it in an entirely different context.
Beyond its spiritual rewards, beyond its quiet consolation, this daily practice became a tremendous source of creative vitality — a mighty antidote to the burnout I had started to feel nearly two decades into my primary writing practice. I know no greater catalyst of creativity — in art or in life — than constraint. It is the boundaries, chosen or imposed, that give shape to our lives; it is within them that we become truly creative about the kind of life we want to live. Without the constraint of bones, there would be no wings.
And what of the very notion of divination?
I don't believe in signs — I don't believe that this immense impartial universe concerns itself with the fate of any one of us motes of stardust, that it is giving us personalized clues as to how to live our tiny transient lives. But I do believe in omens. Omens are the conversation between consciousness and reality, between the self and the unconscious — a conversation in the poetic language of belief. A bird is never a sign from reality, but it can become an omen based on what we believe to be true, for reality is the truth that endures whether or not we believe in it, while meaning arises from what we believe to be true. We make our own omens by the meaning we confer upon chance events, and it is the making of meaning that makes us human, that makes us capable of holding something as austere and total as the universe, as time, as love without breaking.
If there is someone in your life who might enjoy this strange coping mechanism for the confusions of living, please do pass it along — it is those whispers between friends that wing our lonely labors with the sense of sympathy and kinship.
An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days is published in the U.S. in July by McNally Editions and in the U.K. in August by Canongate Books (who also published the U.K. edition of Figuring).
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