|
|  Hello Blog! This is the weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's special edition — how to fix breakdowns in communication, a South Indian lullaby of wonder for the sleepless, and an antidote to the Cartesian myth of work/life balance — 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 — it remains free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know.
|
Here we are, living these lives bright and perishable as a poppy, hard and shimmering as obsidian. We know that they are entirely improbable, that we bless that bright improbability with each flash of gratitude for it all, that if we pay attention closely and generously enough we are always repaid in gladness, that it is the handle of the door to the world. And yet over and over we choose to live in the cage of complaint, too preoccupied with how the will of life betrayed our wishes, the wanting monster always growling in the other corner of the cage. Imagine parting the bars and stepping out. Imagine waking up with a rush of gladness at everything we were never promised but got anyway — trees and music, clouds and consciousness, the cobalt eye of the scallop, the golden fan of the gingko, the alabaster chandelier of the ghost pipe. In our age of competitive prostration, this is a headstand hard to hold for long. But it is trainable. It is possible to become strong enough to be tender, it is. 
Artist and poet Rachel Hébert offers a bright patch of training ground in The Book of Thanks: A Catalogue of Gratitudes — one of the most miraculous books I have ever encountered, trembling with tenacious tenderness for the bewilderment of being alive. Radiating from the pages is an invitation, extended in paintings and poems, to open "the sunlit fort of your attention" and let the world rush in, in all its minute and majestic loveliness: stalactites and Spanish moss, spiderwebs and skylights, snow and the call of the snowy owl, the heart's capacity for "an urgent, flashing, interrupting kind of love." What emerges is prayerful ("more cellos, touch, and rain, please") and singing with praise ("roots gripping, canyon carved, spine woven of baleen a thousand years old") — a manual for how to live in gratitude ("what is working wants your praise") and a theological statement ("there is nothing you must do to belong"). A taste: 
 What do we say to longing?
If you have sat in the chill
of early morning bleakness and watched as the deep blue
sighed and blushed, touched by the warm curve of dawn
and pinker than pink then apricot soft and spreading its
glow, you know. You know.
How
— in this dim parade of brutality —
might all be well? But if we trouble it with light,
train our sights on
the rebellious good, and work
to make it
truer.
Beneath the face
of the water,
wonder. In dark woods,
a gate. In the chapter
called lostness,
a friend. All the help
we could not
yet see.
It cannot be always comfortable.
So love the thousand knives as they enter
and see your shape still sitting. See that you too belong to paws
of soft silent hungers, to thirst-tangled
roots, to silver-spun constellations. Know you're no sicker than the rest of us.
The big secret is this: No one else can brave you.
Messy, yes. And marvelous.
What is more than we see
in this world we're pressed into,
its blistered barking noise? For what we build, speak, and ruin —
our efforts, our angers. For music. For wings.
donating=lovingThis year — the final year of the second decade of this reckoning with the search for meaning — I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. It remains 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 it 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. |  | |  |
|
| Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. |
|
The most profound experiences of our lives are unphotographable, untiktokable, irreducible to representation in image or gesture, for they summon the totality of our being: sensation and perception, thought and feeling, the pleasing propulsive confusion we call curiosity and the bright ablution of certainty we call wonder. Often, they are an occasion for unselfing in an encounter with the majesty and mystery of what is not ourselves — birds migrating at midnight, the magic of autumn, the grandeur of Machu Picchu; almost always, in consonance with William James's criteria for transcendent experiences, they are ineffable. Still, we are here to tell each other what it is like to be alive and language remains the best technology we have invented for bridging the abyss between one aliveness and another. Few encounters with the wildness and wonder of this world can be more powerful than that with an orca, and no one has painted a more moving word-portrait of that encounter than Danish biologist and whale researcher Hanne Strager. 
Seventeen centuries after the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder described the largest member of the dolphin family as "an enormous mass of flesh armed with teeth" in a small passage of his thirty-seven-volume natural history encyclopedia, Carl Linnaeus named it Orcinus orca — "the demon from the underworld." But while this striking marbled creature is nature's most successful and creative predator, it is also the tenderest, paying the same high price of consciousness that we pay. To encounter an orca is to both to face something almost incomprehensibly other and to face the depths of ourselves. Strager channels that transcendent duality throughout The Killer Whale Journals (public library) — the riveting record of how she escaped the cage of theory that was her landlocked biology degree and Trojan-horsed her way into an expedition to Norway's Lofoten Islands, breaking in through the cracks of the patriarchy to study Earth's most powerful matriarchal society by volunteering to cook on a small research vessel. She writes: Killer whales are unconcerned with our attitudes. They don't need our love or our hatred. How we understand and interact with a big predator like the killer whale is instead a reflection of ourselves and how we want to live with the complexity of other animals around us.
To come close to an orca is no easy endeavor, even for those who have ventured to the remotest and most undisturbed reaches of the oceanic wilderness. Strager recounts the thrill of trailing two elusive male orcas in the setting sun, the hint of their presence turning the sea into "a piece of heavy silk… gently moved by invisible hands." But even when they vanish beneath the still surface, other senses can reveal their presence. Recounting her first experience of eavesdropping on the sea's undersound with a hydrophone connected to an amplifier, she writes: Through the headphones, I could clearly hear the splash and gurgling from the hydrophone as it sunk, and then the quietness of the big sea, with a low thrumming in the background, which I would later learn was the sound of boat traffic in the distance. But through the muffled noises of engines and water, I also heard the most incredible sounds, eerie and melodious at the same time. Like a tropical bird singing a mournful song or people whistling from far away across a deep valley. […] Somewhere, in the vast ocean below me, in the great darkness under the leaden surface of the sea, animals were calling and responding to each other.
Understanding — which is a thing of the mind — that these majestic animals are dwelling below the surface is one thing, encountering them with the full creaturely sensorium of bodies meeting in space is something else entirely. Strager reflects on the inner transformation sparked by her first direct encounter with an orca: A large male came up right next to the boat, so close that I could see water running down his gleaming skin. A pearly black eye just in front of the white eyepatch stared right at me. It was just a quick moment, but it stayed with me after the whale was gone. I realized that this huge killer whale had been checking us out — just as we were checking them out. To sense the awareness and curiosity of another being, and perhaps even its desire to connect, shatters an invisible barrier. It perforates the solitude of being human in a wild world where we are surrounded by creatures we don't understand and can't reach.
Immense and indifferent, the orcas have no sense of or concern with the myths and legends we have woven them into, the Instagram sensations and the scientists' journals. And yet we share the kinship of curiosity, that yearning to apprehend what it is to be another — the only thing that saves us from the existential loneliness of being ourselves. Couple with the fascinating science of what it's like to be an owl, then revisit what orcas can teach us about love and loss. donating=lovingThis year — the final year of the second decade of this reckoning with the search for meaning — I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. It remains 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 it 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. | | | |
|
| Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. |
|
A self is a personal mythos — a story through which we sieve the complexity and contradictions of lived experience for coherence. The cruelest price of success — that affirmation of the self by the world — is the way it can ossify the story of person, ensnare them into believing their own myth. In this regard, learning to live with your success can be as challenging as learning to live with your failure — both are continual acts of courage and resistance to the petrification of personhood into a selfing story, a refusal to measure your soul by the world's estimation. Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882–March 13, 1971) labored at his singular paintings and prints in solitude, in penury, in obscurity for decades. When the New York art world declared him an overnight success, largely thanks to his transcendent account of nine months on a remote Alaskan island, he left the city and moved to a quiet farmstead upstate, then left the continent, returning to the austere solitudes of the Arctic to paint, write, and reflect on the meaning of it all. In a lovely passage from N by E (public library) — his altogether exquisite 1930 memoir of the year he spent in the far north, rife with wisdom on how to be more alive — he models that courage, recounting a thrift store encounter that stands as a scale model of the disorientation of success.  Bowsprit by Rockwell Kent, 1930. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.) Fifteen years earlier, living in Newfoundland during WWI, Kent had adorned his doorway with a statue of a maiden he had found "weatherbeaten and neglected in the rubbish heap of a ship store," which he had washed, sanded, painted, and bejeweled to restore her haunting beauty. When the time came for him to return to New York, he yearned to take her home, but could not afford the fees: I offered what I could for her. But I was poor and it was little. So I left her there.
A decade passed. The gallery world awoke to the shimmering originality of his paintings and Kent became one of New York's most celebrated artists. One day, he wandered into a thrift store and there was his maiden, "hardly changed" — a ghost of the life that had changed so profoundly, yet in that moment Kent realized how hard he must fight to keep it from changing him, from turning him into a statue of himself. He recounts: Out from among rare cabinets and chairs and clocks and porcelains, the frayed and mellowed chattels of decayed gentility, she stared — that sailor's sweetheart — vacantly, as if the room, the city and the world were part of the wide sea and firmament that she was born to. And as I turned and ran to her, and sweet memories and almost love crowded and clamored in my brain and breast, as I reached out to touch her as I used to — suddenly I dared not. And I knew what changes time and affluence had wrought. And I reproached myself. "Where did you find her?" I asked the salesman in a whisper. "In Boston," he whispered back. So then — not even asking what her city price might be — I tiptoed out.
Couple this modern koan, which releases more and more nuances of wisdom the more you turn it over on the tongue of the mind, with Arundhati Roy on the deepest measure of success, then revisit Kent on wilderness, solitude, and creativity. donating=lovingThis year — the final year of the second decade of this reckoning with the search for meaning — I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. It remains 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 it 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. | | | |
|
| Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. |
|
LAST DAY TO ENTER THE CERAMICS RAFFLE!
ALSO
|
| | |
Nema komentara:
Objavi komentar