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 Hello Blog! This is the weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — teenage Frida Kahlo's poignant love letters to her first love, how flamingos got their pink, and a poem — you can catch up right here. And if my labor of love touches your life in a meaningful way, please consider supporting its ongoingness with a donation — for twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know.
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There comes a moment in every life when you find yourself suddenly wondering about the point of it all — the point of all that productivity, the point of so-called success, the point of the poem that is the universe. It is a hollowing, a withering, a deadening of the spirit that can manifest as burnout or creative block, as a breakdown or a midlife crisis, or as the persistent low-frequency din of despair.
Often, it comes in the wake of some great achievement.
Often, it strikes at 4AM.
Always, you simply have to live through it until you glance over your shoulder staggered by the recognition that it had been a vital period of recalibration and regeneration — fallow ground for the rewilding of your spirit. 
Brian Eno
In 1995, shortly after a major retrospective of his work had been released, Brian Eno hit that point of pointlessness. In a stirring entry from A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary (public library), he writes:
 After several months of work, I slowly grind down and it all starts to seem like “my job.” I do it, and I probably don’t do it too badly, but I find myself working entirely from the momentum of deadlines and commitments, as though the ideas are not springing forth but being painfully squeezed out. At the back of my mind, unadmitted to, are some nasty thoughts swimming about in the darkness. They whisper things like: “You’ve had it” and “You’re out of steam.”
Experience has shown me that, when I reach this point, all the distractions I can muster are only postponements. It’s time to face up to total, unmitigated despair.
I sometimes do this by going alone on a “holiday” — though that word scarcely conveys the crashing tedium involved, for I usually choose somewhere uneventful, take nothing with me, and then rely on the horror of my own company to drive me rapidly to the edge of the abyss.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.
One thing experience shows us over and over, if we pay enough attention, is that the way out of such suffering, out of the abyss of self-concern with our mattering project, is always unselfing. Eno describes the cycle:
It goes like this: me thinking, “What’s it all for?/ What’s the bloody point?/ I haven’t done anything I like and I don’t have a clue what to do next/ I’m a completely empty shell.” This lasts two days or so… Then I suddenly notice — apropos of something very minor, like the way a plane crosses the sky, or the smell of trees, or the light in the early evening, or remembering one of my brother’s jokes — that I am thoroughly enjoying myself and completely, utterly glad to be alive. Not one of the questions I asked myself has been answered. Instead, like all good philosophical questions, they’ve just ceased to matter.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.
By the end of the year, Eno had pioneered generative music and had traveled to war-torn Bosnia, across the border from where I was growing up, to lead music therapy workshops for orphaned children in the grounds of a shelled primary school.
Half a century earlier, traveling through these same troubled lands in the interlude between two world wars, Rebecca West had written:
Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.
It is, in the end, the taste of aliveness that saves us. But we must choose to raise the cup, may even have to make it. A generation after Albert Camus observed that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” Eno captures the resuscitation of the creative spirit — that terrifying, transcendent transmutation of despair into a defense of joy:
The process involves reaching the point of not trying any more to dig inside, but just letting go, ceding control… And at the point of giving up I’m suddenly alive again. It’s like jumping resignedly into the abyss and discovering that you can just drift dreamily on air currents.
[…]
This feeling, of sheer mad joy at the world, is ageless. It’s the fresh, clear stream at the bottom of the abyss.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human 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.
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The great paradox, the great pain of human relationships is that they are so often not relational: two lonelinesses colliding without real contact, one or both orienting to the other not as a person but as a projection, mistaking for intimacy its myriad illusions — admiration, adoration, desire. It is always dangerous and damaging, and we are almost never aware — or never willing to listen to the parts of us who are aware — that it is happening until the delirious turbine of the dynamic has spat us out with a concussing confusion and a dislocated heart.
We use each other all the time, of course, in benign ways — to draw inspiration from another mind, to see the world with another set of eyes, to broaden the repertoire of the heart. But such uses are more akin to the relationship between symbionts: two differently specialized organisms nurturing each other with their strengths. The damage happens when the relationship takes on the form of parasite-host or predator-prey, when the user devours the used and discards them after their use. 
Art from Birds by Brian Wildsmith
It can be hard to see these dangerous dynamics from the inside of our own lives, but we can shine a sidewise gleam on them through the lives of others, real or imagined. The great gift of all the works of the imagination — literature, theater, film — is that they hand us our experience back to ourselves, annealed and clarified, unfiltered by self-judgment or pride. This is why, as Zadie Smith observes in her magnificent essay collection Dead and Alive (public library), the people about whom such works are most curious are “the conflicted, the liars, the self-deceiving, the wilfully blind, the abject, the unresolved, the imperfect, the evil, the unwell, the lost and divided” — the people almost all of us have at some point loved, or been.
In one of the essays, anchored in the movie Tár, she paints a haunting portrait of one such dynamic: The protagonist, a narcissistic and image-conscious composer, has had some passionate involvement, never clearly detailed, with another woman and has terminated it abruptly, leaving her lover reeling with heartache and confusion, gaslighting her and giving the world the impression it never happened in order to rinse the knowledge that she has done harm:
First, like any bad guy, [Tár] attempts to cover her tracks. We watch her emailing everyone she knows in the music community to warn them of an unstable young woman called Krista Taylor, who may be spreading untrue rumours about her. Then checking Twitter to see if said rumours have broken out into the world. We begin to get the picture. Krista is a young, aspiring conductor. Tár was her mentor. Also (secretly) her lover — although only briefly… We never meet Krista, but from our glimpses of the many pleading emails she sends Tár’s assistant, we gather that an affair that proved seismic for Krista barely registered on her older lover’s radar… For Tár, it’s as if it never happened at all. She is already on to the next distraction.
It is one of the most discomposing experiences in life, to have felt a profound connection with someone and then to discover that it had been trivial to them — a fleeting fantasy, a frivolous experiment, a use. Smith writes:
There’s a word for this behaviour: instrumentalism. Using people as tools. As means rather than ends in themselves. To satisfy your own desire, or your sense of your own power, or simply because you can.
Tár’s instrumentalism begins in actions but completes itself in words as she recasts the facts of her choices as another’s figments, accusing her lover of having imagined it all. Language itself becomes an instrument of manipulation.
In the introduction to the 25th-anniversary edition of his diaries, Brian Eno addresses this obliquely in observing the same dynamic that plays out on the scale of the personal playing out on the scale of the political, the cultural, the civilizational:
This era has been called post-truth because language is increasingly intended to be instrumental — that is, intended to bring about an effect — rather than accurate.
It is not incidental that instrumentalizers always use emotionally charged language in their mendacity, preying on our human tendency to mistake the strength of the emotion for the strength of the evidence. And yet, in the end, the user is the true victim of her use: The instrumentalizer is left with the emptiness of her own incapacity for connection. We find Tár “stripped bare at last, with no theory, no defence, no prefabricated arguments,” faced with the aftermath of her lies, facing the final truth:
There is no redemption. Nothing to be said or done except feel it.
The paradox, and perhaps the redemption, is that the user always loses more than the used, for one has chosen erasure and the other is left with life — experience that is, however painful, lived. The person who is truly alive will always choose experience over erasure, for experience is the pulse-beat of aliveness while erasure — the disavowal of experience by means of denial, dissociation, and deceit — is always a living death.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human 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. |
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one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |
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| 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. |
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This essay and poem are part of the Universe in Verse book.
 Trees grant us some of the richest metaphors for our own lives — a polished lens on the quality of attention we pay the world. “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” wrote William Blake. Walt Whitman considered them our greatest teachers in living with authenticity. For Hermann Hesse, the key to existential joy was in learning how to listen to the trees.
But far beyond the realm of human-wrested metaphor, trees are sovereign marvels of nature, dazzling in the native poetics of their biological and ecological reality. Their photosynthesis is nature’s way of making life from light. Chlorophyll — which shares a chemical kinship with the hemoglobin in our blood — allows a tree to capture photons, extracting a portion of their energy to make the sugars that make it a tree — the raw material for leaves and bark and roots and branches — then releasing the photons at lower wavelengths back into the atmosphere. A tree is a light-catcher that grows life from air — an enormous eye tuned to the light of the universe. 
Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse.
Trees hungrily absorb red light — the longer wavelengths of the visible spectrum — but the neighboring infrared passes straight through them. Under the canopy, where fierce competition for these wavelengths rages, red light is depleted and infrared dominates. Even though trees cannot absorb infrared, they, unlike humans, can “see” it with chemical photoreceptors called phytochromes. The ratio between the two types of light tells trees how much to grow and in which direction, with phytochromes acting as on-off switches for growth. An abundance of red light under uncrowded skies turns the switch on, signaling to the tree to spread its branches wide into any gaps in the canopy; in the crowded shade where infrared dominates, the switch turns off, reducing the growth of side branches and prompting the tree to grow straight up, reaching for the open sky above. 
Ever/After by Maria Popova. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
As summer recedes into autumn, cooling the air and dimming the light, the alchemy of transmuting light into growth becomes too metabolically costly for deciduous trees. Chlorophyll begins to break down, revealing the other pigments that had been there all along — the yellow of xanthophyll, the orange of carotenoids, the reds and purples of anthocyanins, turning the canopy into an aria of color.
Meanwhile, the layer of cells by which the stem holds on to the branch is fraying. Leaves begin to let go — a process known as abscission.
But as they denude the branches, they reveal the subtle nubs of the new buds that had been forming all summer, readying next spring’s growth.
Skeletal and pulmonary, winter trees rise into the leaden sky, their skin a braille poem of resilience. 
Winter Moon at Toyamagahara, 1931 — one of Japanese artist Hasui Kawase’s stunning vintage woodblocks of trees. (Available as a print.)
OPTIMISM
by Jane Hirshfield
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human 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. |
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| 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. |
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MY NEW BOOK
A SIDEWISE LABOR OF LOVE
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