The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Don’t Waste Your Wildness

By Maria Popova

Don’t Waste Your Wildness

Once, while writing my first book, I lived on a lush volcanic island balding with so-called civilization, lawnmowers muffling its birdsong to turn its jungles into golf courses.

I watched waves taller than factory chimneys break into cliffs black as spacetime, making mansions look like a maquette of life.

I beheld the ancient indifferent faces of turtles older than the light bulb hatching their young under the NO TRESPASSING sign on a billionaire’s private beach.

I looked into the open mouth of the volcano taunting the sky in the language of time.

I kept thinking about how those fault lines between the elemental and the ephemera of human life most readily expose our gravest civilizational foible: regarding nature as something to conquer, to neuter, to tame, “forgetting that we are nature too,” forgetting that we are taming our own wildness, neutering our very souls.

Jay Griffiths offers a mighty antidote in her 2006 masterpiece Wild: An Elemental Journey (public library) — the product of “many years’ yearning” pulling her “toward unfetteredness, toward the sheer and vivid world,” learning to think with the mind of a mountain and feel with the heart of a forest, searching for “something shy, naked and elemental — the soul.” What emerges is both an act of revolt (against the erasure of the wild, against the domestication of the soul) and an act of reverence (for the irrepressible in nature, for landscape as a form of knowledge, for life on Earth, as improbable and staggering as love.)

Art by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. (Available as a print.)

A century and a half after Thoreau “went to the woods to live deliberately” (omitting from his famed chronicle of spartan solitude the fresh-baked doughnuts and pies his mother and sister brought him every Sunday), Griffiths spent seven years slaking her soul on the world’s wildness, from the Amazon to the Arctic, trying “to touch life with the quick of the spirit,” impelled by “the same ancient telluric vigor that flung the Himalayas up to applaud the sky.” She writes:

I was looking for the will of the wild… The only thing I had to hold on to was the knife-sharp necessity to trust to the elements my elemental self.

I wanted to live at the edge of the imperative, in the tender fury of the reckless moment, for in this brief and pointillist life, bright-dark and electric, I could do nothing else.

[…]

The human spirit has a primal allegiance to wildness, to really live, to snatch the fruit and suck it, to spill the juice. We may think we are domesticated but we are not.

It all began by getting lost in “the wasteland of the mind, in a long and dark depression” that left her unable to walk or write, “pathless, bleak and bewildered, not knowing which way to turn.” (A decade later, Griffiths would write an entire book about that discomposing yearlong episode of manic depression.) Searching for “the octaves of possibilities,” reckoning with “the maybes of the mind,” yearning for release from the supermarket aisles of the psyche, she set out to find the savage antipode to “this chloroform world where human nature is well schooled, tamed from childhood on, where the radiators are permanently on mild and the windows are permanently closed.” She writes:

I felt an urgent demand in the blood. I could hear its call. Its whistling disturbed me by day and its howl woke me in the night. I heard the drum of the sun. Every path was a calling cadence, the flight of every bird a beckoning, the color of ice an invitation: come. The forest was a fiddler, wickedly good, eyes intense and shining with a fast dance. Every leaf in every breeze was a toe tapping out the same rhythm and every mountaintop lifting out of cloud intrigued my mind, for the wind at the peaks was the flautist, licking his lips, dangerously mesmerizing me with inaudible melodies that I strained to hear, my eyes yearning for the horizon of sound. This was the calling, the vehement, irresistible demand of the feral angel — take flight. All that is wild is winged — life, mind and language — and knows the feel of air in the soaring “flight, silhouetted in the primal.”

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

She lived for months with a hill tribe in the forests of the Burmese border, lost all her toenails climbing Kilimanjaro, met “cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelized them,” felt “what it is like to whimper with sheer loneliness on a Christmas Day in a jungle on the other side of the world,” learned to live in the seasons and the elements, “right within nature because there is nothing that is not nature.”

She reflects:

To me, humanity is not a strain on wilderness as some seem to think. Rather the human spirit is one of the most striking realizations of wildness. It is as eccentrically beautiful as an ice crystal, as liquidly life-generous as water, as inspired as air. Kerneled up within us all, an intimate wildness, sweet as a nut. To the rebel soul in everyone, then, the right to wear feathers, drink stars and ask for the moon… We are — every one of us — a force of nature, though sometimes it is necessary to relearn consciously what we have never forgotten; the truant art, the nomad heart.

Moonlight, Winter by Rockwell Kent. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Pulsating beneath the passionate poetics is an indictment and a beckoning. A decade after Maya Angelou channeled the selfsame polarity of human nature in her staggering space-bound poem “A Brave and Startling Truth,” Griffiths writes:

There are two sides: the agents of waste and the lovers of the wild. Either for life or against it. And each of us has to choose.

Reclaiming our wildness emerges as an act of courage and resistance amid the conspicuous consumption by which late-stage capitalism drugs us into mistaking having for being, anesthetizing the urgency of our mortality — that wellspring of everything beautiful and enduring we make. What Griffiths offers is a wakeup call from this near-living, a spell against apathy, against air con and asphalt, against our self-expatriation from our own nature:

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary. In wildness, truth. Wildness is the universal songline, sung in green gold, which we recognize the moment we hear it. What is wild is what drives the honeysuckle, what wills the dragonfly, shoves the wind and compels the poem. Wildness is insatiable for life; neither truly knows itself without the other. Wildness… sucks up the now, it blazes in your eyes and it glories in everyone who willfully goes their own way.

Complement Wild — a vivifying read in its entirety — with Wendell Berry’s timeless poem “The Peace of Wild Things” and artist Rockwell Kent, writing a century earlier, on wilderness and creativity, then revisit Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s magnificent rewilding of the human spirit.

BP

Kahlil Gibran on Silence, Solitude, and the Courage to Know Yourself

By Maria Popova

Kahlil Gibran on Silence, Solitude, and the Courage to Know Yourself

Something strange and wondrous begins to happen when one spends stretches of time in solitude, in the company of trees, far from the bustle of the human world with its echo chamber of judgments and opinions — a kind of rerooting in one’s deepest self-knowledge, a relearning of how to simply be oneself, one’s most authentic self. Wendell Berry knew this when he observed that “true solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation” — the places where “one’s inner voices become audible.”

But that inner voice, I have found, exists in counterpoise to the outer voice — the more we are tasked with speaking, with orienting lip and ear to the world without, the more difficult it becomes to hear the hum of the world within and feel its magmatic churns of self-knowledge. “Who knows doesn’t talk. Who talks doesn’t know,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in in her superb poetic, philosophical, feminist more-than-translation of the Tao te Ching.

Kahlil Gibran, self-portrait

Two and a half millennia after Lao Tzu, and a century before Le Guin and Berry, Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) — another philosopher-poet of the highest order and most timeless hold — addressed the relationship between silence, solitude, and self-knowledge in a portion of his 1923 classic The Prophet (public library).

When Gibran’s prophet-protagonist is asked to address the matter of talking, he responds:

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.
And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.
For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

One of Andrea Dezsö’s haunting illustrations for the original, uncensored edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales

Echoing Hermann Hesse’s insistence on the courage necessary for solitude, Gibran’s prophet adds:

There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone.
The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape.
And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought reveal a truth which they themselves do not understand.
And there are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in words.
In the bosom of such as these the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence.

Complement this fragment of the The Prophet — an abidingly rewarding read in its totality — with sound ecologist Gordon Hempton on the art of listening in a noisy world and Paul Goodman on the nine kinds of silence, then revisit Gibran on the building blocks of true friendship, the courage to weather the uncertainties of love, and what may be the finest advice ever offered on parenting and on the balance of intimacy and independence in a healthy relationship.

BP

What Happens When We Die

By Maria Popova

What Happens When We Die

When my atheist engineer grandfather died, my atheist engineer grandmother leaned over the body in the hospice bed that had contained half a century of shared life and love, cradled the cranium in which his stubborn and sensitive mind had dwelt, and whispered into the halogen-lit ether:

“Where did you go, my darling?”

Whatever our beliefs, these sensemaking playthings of the mind, when the moment of material undoing comes, we — creatures of moment and matter — simply cannot fathom how something as exquisite as the universe of thought and feeling inside us can vanish into nothingness.

Even if we understand that dying is the token of our existential luckiness, even if we understand that we are borrowed stardust, bound to be returned to the universe that made it — a universe itself slouching toward nothingness as its stars are slowly burning out their energy to leave a cold austere darkness of pure spacetime — this understanding blurs into an anxious disembodied abstraction as the body slouches toward dissolution. Animated by electrical impulses and temporal interactions of matter, our finite minds simply cannot grasp a timeless and infinite inanimacy — a void beyond being.

Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Even Walt Whitman, who could hold such multitudes of contradiction, could not grasp the void. “I will make poems of my body and of mortality,” he vowed as a young man as he reverenced our shared materiality in his timeless declamation that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” It was easy, from the shimmering platform of his prime, to look forward to becoming “the uncut hair of graves” upon returning his own atoms to the grassy ground one day.

But then, when that day loomed near as he grew old and infirm, “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul” suddenly could not fathom the total disbanding of his atomic selfhood, suddenly came to “laugh at what you call dissolution.”

And then he did dissolve, leaving us his immortal verses, verses penned when his particles sang with the electric cohesion of youth and of health, verses that traced with their fleshy finger the faint contour of an elemental truth: “What invigorates life invigorates death.”

“Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death.” Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare English edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print)

I wish I could have given my grandmother, and given the dying Whitman, the infinitely invigorating Mr g: A Novel About the Creation (public library) by the poetic physicist Alan Lightman — a magical-realist serenade to science, coursing with symphonic truth about our search for meaning, our hunger for beauty, and what makes our tender, transient lives worth living.

Toward the end of the novel, Mr g watches, with heartache unknown in the Void predating the existence of universes and of life, an old woman on her deathbed, the film of her long and painful and beautiful life unspooling from the reel of memory, leaving her grief-stricken by its terminus, shuddering with defiant disbelief that this is all.

“How can a creature of substance and mass fathom a thing without substance or mass?” wonders Mr g as he sorrows watching her succumb to the very laws he created. “How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?”

And then, as a faint smile washes across her face, she does die. Lightman writes:

At that moment, there were 3,​147,​740,​103,​497,​276,​498,​750,​208,​327 atoms in her body. Of her total mass, 63.7 percent was oxygen, 21.0 percent carbon, 10.1 percent hydrogen, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, plus a smattering of the ninety-odd other chemical elements created in stars.

In the cremation, her water evaporated. Her carbon and nitrogen combined with oxygen to make gaseous carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which floated skyward and mingled with the air. Most of her calcium and phosphorous baked into a reddish brown residue and scattered in soil and in wind.

But then we see that every atom belonging to her — or, rather, temporarily borrowed by her — truly does belong to everything and everyone, just as you and I are now inhaling the same oxygen atoms that once inflated Walt Whitman’s lungs with the lust for life:

Released from their temporary confinement, her atoms slowly spread out and diffused through the atmosphere. In sixty days’ time, they could be found in every handful of air on the planet. In one hundred days, some of her atoms, the vaporous water, had condensed into liquid and returned to the surface as rain, to be drunk and ingested by animals and plants. Some of her atoms were absorbed by light-utilizing organisms and transformed into tissues and tubules and leaves. Some were breathed in by oxygen creatures, incorporated into organs and bone.

Pectanthis Asteroides — one of the otherworldly drawings of jellyfish by the 19th-century German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel, who coined the word ecology. (Available as a print.)

In a passage evocative of the central sentiment in Ursula K. Le Guin’s spare, stunning poem “Kinship,” he adds:

Pregnant women ate animals and plants made of her atoms. A year later, babies contained some of her atoms… Several years after her death, millions of children contained some of her atoms. And their children would contain some of her atoms as well. Their minds contained part of her mind.

Will these millions of children, for generations upon future generations, know that some of their atoms cycled through this woman? It is not likely. Will they feel what she felt in her life, will their memories have flickering strokes of her memories, will they recall that moment long ago when she stood by the window, guilt ridden and confused, and watched as the tadr bird circled the cistern? No, it is not possible. Will they have some faint sense of her glimpse of the Void? No, it is not possible. It is not possible. But I will let them have their own brief glimpse of the Void, just at the moment they pass from living to dead, from animate to inanimate, from consciousness to that which has no consciousness. For a moment, they will understand infinity.

And the individual atoms, cycled through her body and then cycled through wind and water and soil, cycled through generations and generations of living creatures and minds, will repeat and connect and make a whole out of parts. Although without memory, they make a memory. Although impermanent, they make a permanence. Although scattered, they make a totality.

Here we are, you and me, Walt and Alan, my grandmother who is and my grandfather who is no more — each of us a trembling totality, made of particles both absolutely vulnerable and absolutely indestructible, hungering for absolutes in a universe of relatives, hungering for permanence in a universe of ceaseless change, famished for meaning, for beauty, for emblems of existence.

Out of these hungers, out of these contradictions, we make everything that invigorates life with aliveness: our art and our music, our poems and our mathematics, our novels and our loves.

BP

The Majesty and Mystery of Ice: 200 Years of Artists Reverencing the Wonder of Water’s Wintry Face

By Maria Popova

Just before he formulated his revolutionary laws of planetary motion and just after completing the world’s first work of science fiction, which landed his mother in a witchcraft trial, Johannes Kepler grew fascinated with the geometry of ice crystals in snow. A quarter millennium later, Michael Faraday would use ice in a historic experiment that illuminated how electric charge works, setting into motion the Electric Age that defines our modern lives. The transmutation of water into ice casts its spell over scientists and schoolchildren alike perhaps because phase transition is so profoundly strange. Few things in nature are more astonishing, more dazzling, more confounding to common sense than matter changing states, unsettling our basic intuitions about how the world holds together, hinting at the fundamental laws by which the universe coheres. Even with all of our science behind it, the strangeness of phase transition is so insuperable that it retains an ember of magic, something of the mysterious, something we can only truly touch with the most powerful technology we have invented for plumbing our bewilderment at life: art. Here are five artists whose reckonings with ice have cast their spell on me.

WILSON BENTLEY

Wilson Bentley (February 9, 1865–December 23, 1931) was fifteen when his mother, aware of her son’s sensitive curiosity and artistic bent, strained the family’s means to give him a microscope for his birthday. Over the next four years, while Walt Whitman was exulting a state over that “a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” Wilson placed every curio he could find under his microscope: blades of grass, pebbles, insects. The day he managed to place a snowflake on the glass plate and to savor its microscopic perfection before it melted, he was besotted. Snowflakes became his life. “Miracles of beauty,” he called them. He began sketching what he saw through his microscope, but felt that his drawings failed to capture the full miraculousness before it vanished into liquid erasure. Although his father was already irate with the boy’s artistic deviation from farm labor, “fussing with snowflakes” rather than pulling potatoes, Wilson somehow persuaded him to invest in a camera.

Weeks before his twentieth birthday, he mounted his new 1.5-inch microscope eyepiece to the lens of his enormous view camera with its accordion-like body fully extended. On January 15, 1880, Wilson Bentley took his first photograph of a snowflake. Mesmerized by the beauty of the result, he transported his equipment to the unheated wooden shed behind the farmhouse and began recording his work in two separate sets of notebooks — one filled with sketches and dedicated to refining his artistic photomicroscopy; the other filled with weather data, carefully monitoring the conditions under which various snowflakes were captured.

For forty-six winters to come, this slender quiet boy, enchanted by the wonders of nature and attentive to its minutest manifestations, would hold his breath over the microscope-camera station and take more than 5,000 photographs of snow crystals — each a vanishing masterpiece with the delicacy of a flower and the mathematical precision of a honeycomb, a ghost of perfection melting onto the glass plate within seconds, a sublime metaphor for the ecstasy and impermanence of beauty, of life itself.

WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM

In 1948, well before she became one of Britain’s most celebrated modernist artists, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (June 8, 1912–January 26, 2004) joined some friends on a trip to Swiss Alps. Wielding her pick-axe and rope, she climbed glacier after glacier, awed by the icy immensity, by an otherworldliness partway between the Romantic sublime and a Jules Verne novel. She returned home changed by the experience and began painting. For almost half a century, she didn’t stop, abstracting the mysterious enchantment of glaciers in paintings both subtle and striking, almost mathematical yet full of feeling.

Blue Snout, Glacier Study, 1951-1978. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust .)
Glacier Embrace 3 (Evening), 1951-1986. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust .)
Variation on a Theme (Suspended Ice), 1987. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust .)

She later reflected in a Tate exhibition catalogue:

The massive strength and size of the glaciers, the fantastic shapes, the contrast of solidity and transparency, the many reflected colours in strong light, the warmth of the sun melting and changing the forms, in a few days a thinness could become a hole, a hole a cut out shape losing a side, a piece could disintegrate and fall off, breaking the silence with a sharp crack and its echoes. It seemed to breathe!

Glacier, 1978. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust .)
Glacier Field, 1978. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust .)
[Untitled: Splintered Ice], 1993. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust .)
Glacier Crystal, Grindelwald, 1950. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust .)
Blue Glacier, 1978. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust .)
Glacier, 1978. (Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust .)

RYOTA KAJITA

In his series Ice Formation, Japanese-born, Alaska-based artist Ryota Kajita photographs natural ice formations in the waters of Fairbanks, Alaska: otherworldly geometric patterns created by the bubbles that form as lake and river water freezes gradually from the surface down, trapping major greenhouse gasses like methane and carbon dioxide in the crystal lattice of ice.

Beneath the artful depiction of the phenomenon may lie a scientific key to climate change — scientists in Alaska are studying the frozen bubbles to better understand global warming.

ERIK HOFFNER

For a quarter century, artist Erik Hoffner has been capturing the dazzling crystalline skin that grows over the circular holes made by ice fishermen in his series Ice Visions — images ambiguous and enchanting, reminiscent of Thomas Wright’s 1750 pictorial theories of the universe, of Rose-Lynn Fisher’s photomicroscopy of tears, of nebulae and craters and chrysanthemums, cellular and celestial at the same time, yet elementally earthly.

In a piece of prose that is itself an artwork, he writes:

Our world is wild by nature, destroying and creating anew in a process that may seem random but in practice is measured, methodical, and impressive. My inspiration stems from seeking out these wilds to understand and express their untamed nature, savage indifference, and orderly beauty.

[The] series documents ephemeral formations created by ice fishermen in partnership with elemental forces. The holes that fishermen cut in a lake refreeze overnight, creating fertile ground for nature’s wild artistic side. These perfectly augered circles become worlds at once interstellar and cellular: in the morning light, with tiny bubbles from below fixed almost magically in place among new inches of ice, these scenes come to life as eyes, galaxies, stars, or mitochondria when rendered in fine detail in black and white.

MEGHANN RIEPENHOFF

Long ago, while visiting the photographic glass plates of nebulae and constellations at the Harvard College Observatory archives, I was overcome by the palpitations of paradox — how we think that photography immortalizes, while its very roots are in doing the opposite: making of the ephemeral an illusion of the eternal, razing us on the edge of our own transience as we gasp at the beauty of long-dead flowers and peer at the light of long-dead stars.

In her breathtaking project Ice, artist Meghann Riepenhoff both celebrates and subverts this paradox of temporality in her stunning cyanotype prints of ice formation, for which she spent four years wading into freezing waters all over this pale blue dot — from Walden Pond to the Seine to the mountain creeks of Western Washington’s old-growth forests — to capture one of the most surreal facets of reality: the haunting alchemy of phase transition.

In this singular collaboration between human and landscape, she dragged blanket-sized sheets of photographic paper coated with potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate — compounds sensitive to the blue portion of the spectrum spilling into ultraviolet, developed and fixed by only water and sunlight — to emerge with otherworldly images of crisp crystal lattices and feathery fractals: fluid becoming solid becoming wonder.

Radiating from her prints is a kind of magical realism — you peer at these freezing waters, this hallmark of our blue world, and see the atmospheres of other planets, the plumage of a bird from some undiscovered paradise, the hieroglyphics of some ancient civilization encoding elemental wisdom we have long forgotten.

At the heart of it all is a layered meditation on time and transformation, on the subtle dance between fluidity and solidity that may be the highest art of life, on how something, in becoming other, can become more fully itself.

BP

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