The vital force of life is charged by the poles of holding on and letting go. We know that the price of love is loss, and yet we love anyway; that our atoms will one day belong to generations of other living creatures who too will die in turn, and yet we press them hard against the body of the world, against each other's bodies, against the canvas and the keyboard and the cambium of life.
This is the cruel contract of all experience, of aliveness itself — that in order to have it, we must agree to let it go.
Poet Jane Kenyon (May 23, 1947–April 22, 1995) offers a splendid consolation for signing it in her poem "Things," found in her altogether soul-slaking Collected Poems (public library).
THINGS
by Jane Kenyon
The hen flings a single pebble aside
with her yellow, reptilian foot.
Never in eternity the same sound —
a small stone falling on a red leaf.
The juncture of twig and branch,
scarred with lichen, is a gate
we might enter, singing.
The mouse pulls batting
from a hundred-year-old quilt.
She chewed a hole in a blue star
to get it, and now she thrives….
Now is her time to thrive.
Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last: water, a blue heron's
eye, and the light passing
between them: into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.
Shortly before leukemia claimed her life at only forty-seven, Kenyon captured the miraculousness of the light having passed through us at all — which contours the luckiness of death — in a haunting poem that puts any complaint, any lament, any argument with life into perspective:
OTHERWISE
by Jane Kenyon
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
Couple with Kenyon's immortal advice on writing and life, then revisit poet Donald Hall — her mate — on the secret of lasting love and Pico Iyer on finding beauty in impermanence and luminosity in loss.
"The book of love is full of music," sing The Magnetic Fields. "In fact, that's where music comes from."
The book of love is written in the language of wonder — our best means of loving life more deeply. To love anything — a person, a pond, the world — is to see the wonder in it, to hear the music in it. Both love and wonder are in mysterious conversation with the deepest substrate of us, the complete message of which is unintelligible to the analytical mind, inaccessible by any explanatory model. Both require a surrender to the musicality of the experience — a trust that the music is the message.
In the late 1960s, just before philosopher Thomas Nagel challenged our notions of more-than-human consciousness with his catalytic essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" and long before Robert Macfarlane challenged our notions of animacy by asking whether a river is alive, the Finnish sound researcher Antti Jansson began wondering about the inner life of water, of its unheard creatures. As John Cage was discovering the musicality of silence while listening to his own nervous system in a sensory deprivation tank, Jansson — possibly a distant relative of beloved Moomins creator Tove Jansson — discovered the musicality of ponds. He grew particularly interested in the water boatman beetle Cenocorixa, capable of producing an astonishing 85 decibels — the noise level of New York City traffic — by rubbing its genitalia against its own body, much as cicadas play themselves.
Here was a whole new universe of bioacoustics, never before heard by human ears.
Sonogram of water boatmen
Half a century later, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg picked up where Jansson left off, bringing rigor and tenderness to the world of animal sounds. After his fascinating exploration of why birds sing, he turned his compassionate curiosity to the most neglected recesses of nature's sonic consciousness — the ponds that punctuate forests, savannas, and suburbs alike.
As the human world grew quiet in the early pandemic, Rothenberg decided to drop a hydrophone into his local pond and just listen. To his astonishment, he discovered a portal into a secret universe of what he calls "undersound," evocative of Rachel Carson's landmark 1937 essay Undersea, which invited the terrestrial imagination for the first time to consider the hidden lives of the water world.
"In the great silence of the brackish waters behind our homes," he heard the voices of myriad unknown creatures joining together in something between the buzzing of the nervous system in an anechoic chamber and the wistful moan of the gyaling, the Buddhist oboe. He heard photosynthesis itself — the regular rhythm of plants exchanging oxygen through the water, a metronome for the wild symphony orchestra of insects. And all of it he rendered in sonograms — maps of sound frequency against time — revealing the layered complexity of undersound, "music between, music no one species could make alone." He writes:
Go deep looking for one sound and you may find the meaning of all of them. Everything sings, everything sounds; it all swirls around us together.
Hungry to discover more of this bioacoustic cosmos, he traveled to ponds all over the world, recording the bubbling of a passing turtle in Russell Wright's Lost Pond in upstate New York and the late-night underwater calls of the painted frog in a pond at the Botanical Garden of Paris.
Soon, as cellist Beatrice Harrison had done with the nightingales a century earlier in what became the world's first recorded interspecies musical collaboration, Rothenberg began accompanying the pond orchestra — sometimes with his beloved contralto clarinet, sometimes with electronic instruments.
It is mysterious, this universal impulse to join in with music, to sing along, to dance together. Conversation doesn't seem to impel us in the same way. There, the impulse is often to counter and contradict rather than harmonize. Peter Gabriel (who has a magnificent cover of "The Book of Love") articulates this perfectly when he runs into Rothenberg at an MIT conference:
With music, people dance, fall in love, sing along. With words on a page, you make enemies. People turn their back on you and get ready to argue.
Perhaps this is because music trades in mystery, while conversation trades in opinion — that subterranean species of certainty. Rothenberg's undersound is a "cavalcade of lilting unknowns" — no sonogram can discern exactly which creature makes which sound and for what reason. A century and a half before him, Thoreau had captured this while pacing Walden Pond:
All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts.
In his fascinating multimedia record of the project, Secret Sounds of Ponds (public library), Rothenberg reflects:
I have long been fascinated by the sounds made by other creatures on this planet, wondering how we can engage with them without explaining them all away. I never wanted to translate the language of birds, whales, or bugs, but always wanted to join in with them in some uncertain way.
Peter Gabriel is right, if you hear the world as music, you can sing along with it, join in with it, celebrate and dance with it even while never knowing precisely what is going on.
[…]
Those sounds right at the edge of our comprehension might in fact become the most interesting… That is why music is more accessible than language… It just is, beaming to us from the thrum of the world, the universal lyre inside of everything, this animate Earth, this booming, living pond.
This, I suppose, could also be said of love — it just is, a bloom of aliveness within us and between us. Rothenberg's project, for all its originality at the crossing point of art and science, is above all an act of love — a reverent reminder that we are here to play our small, indispensable part in the symphony of life and to listen wonder-smitten to our co-creation.
"Man* is by Nature a migratory animal," the elderly Frederick Douglass reflected in an 1887 speech about his global travels. "It does not appear that he was intended to dwell forever in any one locality. He is a born traveler."
A generation after him, Maya Angelou observed that "you only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all."
Partway in time between Douglass and Angelou, the painter, printmaker, and philosopher Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882–March 13, 1971) captured this vital interplay between freedom and belonging, between nature and human nature, in the preface to Wilderness (public library) — the exquisite record of the seven months he spent on a remote Alaskan island with his young son in the gloaming hour of the Spanish flu pandemic and the First World War, at the dawn of his artistic life.
Moonlight, Winter by Rockwell Kent. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
We each have a particular style of wanderlust, pulled by particular types of nature that best speak to our own — those places where we most freely lose ourselves and, in consequence, find ourselves. For some, they are the austere open space of blue skies and red canyons. For me, they are the mossy old-growth forests of New Zealand and the American Pacific Northwest. For Kent, it was the severe majesty of the Great North:
It has always been hard for me to understand myself, to know why I work and love and live. Yet it is fortunate that such matters find a way of caring for themselves. I came to Alaska because I love the North. I crave snow-topped mountains, dreary wastes, and the cruel Northern sea with its hard horizons at the edge of the world where infinite space begins. Here skies are clearer and deeper and, for the greater wonders they reveal, a thousand times more eloquent of the eternal mystery than those of softer lands.
In a new preface to his journals, penned in the final year of his life, Kent looks back on the wanderlust of his youth — the roaming restlessness that had shaped his spirit, the spirit from which his art sprang, the art that established him as one of the most celebrated creators of his time — and exhorts the generations of wanderers to come:
Wander where you will over all the world, from every valley seeing forever new hills calling you to climb them, from every mountain top farther peaks enticing you. Always the distant land looks fairest, till you are made at last a restless wanderer never reaching home — never — until you stand one day on the last peak on the border of the interminable sea, stopped by the finality of that.
The Star-Lighter by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Contemplating the existential pull beneath it all — the rippling, resonant why of our wanderlust — Kent adds:
We are part and parcel of the big plan of things. We are simply instruments recording in different measure our particular portion of the infinite. And what we absorb of it makes for character, and what we give forth, for [our art].
These are salutary words to read a century later, as our own world is only just shaking off its straitjacket of two-year terror and becoming wanderable again.
Complement with Rebecca Solnit's wanderlusting history of walking, then revisit Kent's breathtaking reflections on wilderness, solitude, and creativity.
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