“Let everything happen to you,” wrote Rilke, “Beauty and terror.”
It is not easy, this simple surrender. The courage and vulnerability it takes make it nothing less than an act of heroism. Most of our cowardices and cruelties, most of the suffering we endure and inflict, stem from what we are unwilling to feel, and there is nothing we cower from and rage against more than our own incoherence — that intolerable tension between the poles of our capacities, which Maya Angelou so poignantly addressed in one of the greatest poems ever written, urging us to “learn that we are neither devils nor divines.”
We have been great inventors but poor students of ourselves: The religions we invented, helpful though they have been to our moral development, split us further into angels and demons destined for heaven or hell; the psychotherapy we invented, helpful though it has been to allaying our inner turmoil, secularized original sin in its pathology model of the psyche, treating us as problems to be solved rather than parts to be harmonized. Both have sold us the alluring illusion that a state of permanent happiness can be attained — in Eden, or across the finish line of our self-improvement project — ultimately denying our fulness of being, denying the oscillation of “beauty and terror” that makes life alive.
When a man he encounters wonders why “nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,” the narrator is stopped up short. With an eye to the banality of the question as a fractal of the banality of life — like the banality of evil, like the banality of survival — Baldwin writes:
The question is banal but one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road — and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright — and it’s true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.
Considering the difficulty of reconciling our own darkness with our light, our innocence with our pain, he adds:
Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
When told that there are only two options on the table and when both are limiting, most people, conditioned by the option dispensary we call society, will choose the lesser of the two limitations.
Some will try to find a third option to put on the table; they may or may not succeed, but they will still be sitting at the same table.
The very few — those who refuse to mistake the limits of the permissible for the horizon of the possible — will build a whole new table, populating the fresh slate of its surface with options others have not dared imagine. These are the visionaries — the only people who have ever changed this world.
These dynamics come alive with uncommon sweetness and charm in Miss Leoparda (public library) by Natalia Shaloshvili, translated into English by Lena Traer.
We meet Miss Leoparda asleep in her tree after another day of driving the packed community bus — something she does with gusto and a sense of purpose, delighted to provide a commons for all the animals going about their different daily tasks.
But this mobile idyll comes to a halt when one day “something unusual” passes by Miss Leoparda’s bus and speeds off into the distance — “a little black car coughing up clouds of smoke.”
Never having seen something so fast, all the animals fall under the spell of its expedience.
And so, the next morning, there is an empty seat on the bus. Day by day, more seats open up as more animals are seduced by this sleek private chamber of alienation and exhaust, more and more cars filling the street, until one day Miss Leoparda finds herself alone on the bus.
Abandoned amid the chaos of cars “coughing and spitting and passing each other” in a ruckus of arguments, Miss Leoparda grows visibly dispirited — but not defeated.
The animals, ensnared by their new addiction, begin demanding more space for their cars. And then the unthinkable happens: Miss Leoparda watches helplessly as her tree is cut down and carried away. (It is astonishing what infinities of emotion Shaloshvili can render with so few dabs of color and almost no defined lines.)
Shaken with disbelief but knowing that the most valiant way to complain is to create, she picks up one of the broken branches and plants it in a pot, then goes to sleep in the only home she has left — her bus — knowing she might have to wait a long time for a new tree to grow.
And then one day, as the city has turned to one great traffic jam swarmed by exhaust and quarrels, a leaf finally appears on the branch, and with it an idea — that flash of creative defiance in a mind, that inspired remaking of the world’s givens into the unimagined.
A new wave of amazement washes over the other animals and bicycles begin to punctuate the traffic.
Soon, the city is aspin with spokes and smiles, and I too — a lifelong bicyclist and tree-lover in a world of cars and concrete — smile as I reach the end of this simple, charming parable about the most difficult of choices for us creatures of momentum and mimicry: to find a new way askance from the status quo. “We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over,” wrote James Baldwin, who knew that although we don’t choose our lives, we can always choose to plant the new tree and build the new table.
A recent visit to Teotihuacán — the ancient Mesoamerican city in present-day Mexico, built by earlier cultures around 600 BCE and later rediscovered by the Aztecs — left me wonder-smitten by the see-saw of our search for truth and our search for meaning, by a peculiar confluence of chemistry, culture, and chance that unrinds the layers of reality to put us face to face with the mystery at its core.
Situated at the foot of a dormant volcano, Teotihuacán stunned the Toltec settlers with the discovery of a lustrous black material partway between stone and glass, brittle yet hard, breathlessly beautiful. Soon, they were laboring in obsidian workshops by the thousands, making from it delicate beaded jewelry and deadly weapons, household tools and ritual figurines, mirrors and surgical instruments, which traveled along trade routes to become the pillar of the Toltec economy. Its abundance and versatility may be why they never arrived at metallurgy, but obsidian became as important to the development of their civilization as steel has been to ours.
It would also become the ouroboros of their civilization — the source of prosperity by which they would flourish for centuries and the ominous overlord by which they would perish.
Not a mineral but a volcanic glass made of igneous rock, obsidian forms as lava cools too rapidly for mineral crystals to nucleate. It is composed primarily of silicon dioxide, with trace amounts of various oxides — mostly aluminum, iron, potassium, sodium, and calcium — the ratio of which varies by the circumstances of each eruption, creating a particular chemical fingerprint, so that each piece of obsidian can now be traced to its original source using nuclear and X-ray analyses.
As if volcanic glass weren’t already miraculous enough, the discovery of a special kind of obsidian — iridescent, with a green-gold sheen — catapulted Teotihuacán to the status of an ancient metropolis. Rainbow obsidian soon became the most valuable kind of obsidian in Mesoamerica, attracting people from faraway lands in search of wealth, much as the Gold Rush changed the demographics of nineteenth-century North America.
Rainbow obsidian
With the discovery of this doubly dazzling obsidian, Teotihuacán became home to people from different cultures with no common language and no common rituals. And yet they lived together harmoniously in the fertile valley, sharing its riches — it is hard to fight while flourishing — until the eruption of a different volcano in present-day Ecuador induced regional climate change that sent entire ecosystems into a protracted draught and left Teotihuacán on the brink of famine. Suddenly, the bedrock of this composite society began fissuring along class lines as the nobles feasted and the starving laborers clashed over resources. A kind of civil war broke out, from which Teotihuacán never recovered. The survivors abandoned the city, but not before burning the dwellings of the ruling class to the ground. Only its pyramids — Toltec temples to the Sun and the Moon — stood intact by the time the Aztecs came upon it nearly a thousand years later and named it “City of the Gods.”
One of the geochemical wonders of this Earth, iridescent obsidian occurs when nanoparticles of magnetite — an iron oxide present in most obsidian — form a thin film that reflects light waves at the upper and lower boundaries of the material in such a way that they interfere with one another, magnifying the reflection at some wavelengths and diminishing it at others. This process, known as thin-film interference, is what produces the colorful luster of oil spills and soap bubbles.
Magnetite gave Teotihuacán its rare rainbow obsidian, but it also fomented the destruction of Mesoamerican civilization by the Spaniards. Humans discovered the property of magnetism through naturally magnetized pieces of rock containing magnetite, known as lodestones, which became the first magnetic compasses, revolutionizing navigation. Without magnetite, Columbus may have ended up another anonymous sailor shipwrecked on an anonymous shore.
A seeming triumph of human nature’s ingenuity, the invention of the compass turned out to be a mere refraction of nature’s own imagination: Magnetite crystals have been found in the upper beaks of homing pigeons and many migratory birds — a kind of built-in internal compass that allows them to orient by Earth’s magnetic fields in their staggering feats of navigation. (Small amounts of magnetite are also found in various regions of the human brain, including the hippocampus — the crucible of our autonoeic consciousness; my friend Lia is convinced that my homing-pigeon sense of direction, which overcompensates for the mediocrity of my other senses, is due to abnormal amounts of magnetite in my brain.)
A built-in compass explains why, for instance, bar-tailed godwits — some of the longest-distance migrants on Earth — can leave their nesting grounds in Alaska and head for their breeding grounds in New Zealand not along the continental arc of Asia and the rim of Australia, where they can easily orient by visual landmarks like mountains and cities, but over the open Pacific Ocean. Across the immense monotony of blue, where a mistake by even a fraction of a degree would take them to a wholly different destination, they have found their way year after year, eon after eon.
Geologist and geophysicist Joe Kirschvink discovered magnetite while studying honeybees and homing pigeons as a graduate student at Princeton University in the 1970s. The idea that some animals navigate by magnetism was not new. At the dawn of the century, the Belgian playwright and amateur apiarist Maurice Maeterlinck had observed that bees navigate by “senses and properties of matter wholly unknown to ourselves,” which he termed “magnetic intuition.” A generation before him, and a decade before Darwin staggered the world with his evolutionary theory, the Russian zoologist and explorer Alexander Theodor von Middendorff had speculated:
The amazing steadfastness of migratory birds — despite wind and weather, despite night and fog — may be due to the fact that the birds are constantly aware of the direction of the magnetic pole and therefore know exactly how to keep to their direction of migration.
To have located the basis of biomagnetism in magnetite seemed like a triumph of science over mystery. But in the decades since, as our instruments have become more sophisticated and our theories more testable, research has revealed the presence of a protein in the retinal cells of birds — cryptochrome — that may be making use of quantum entanglement to provide a whole other mechanism of magnetoreception. More knowledge has only unlatched more mystery: The total system may involve multiple build-in instruments interacting with multiple fundamental laws and forces. I think of Henry Beston, who wrote a century ago that “in a world older and more complete than ours,” other animals “move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” I think of the difference between science and civilization: Science knows it is unfinished, a perennial process, whereas every civilization mistakes itself for the end point of progress.
Walking down Teotihuacán’s central promenade and watching the Sun pyramid gradually eclipse the volcano, the evolutionary triumph of my peripheral vision registers a flash of yellow. I turn to see a small bird aglow against the ruins, perched on a stone ledge above a man in a sombrero selling obsidian souvenirs. The warblers — godless, tradeless, needful only of sky and song — are among the most regular border-crossers between North and South America, their migratory routes stretching from Alaska to the Amazon. Older than the Toltecs, older than the sediment deposits that separated the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to bridge the Americas, older than our oldest myths, they have seen civilizations rise and crumble, and will one day see Hollywood overgrown with poppies and Manhattan returned to the sea. And when they fly over the ruins of the Sistine Chapel and Silicon Valley, they will be guided by the same mysterious forces that guided the first of their kind.
“From the basic biological perspective,” concluded a team of scientists studying the magnetic compass of warblers, “the perception of the magnetic field remains the only sense for which the sensory mechanism and its location still remain unknown.”
It is salutary for us to have regular reminders that we don’t understand many of nature’s mysteries because we don’t, and may never, understand ourselves; that all of our creative restlessness, everything of beauty and substance we have ever made — our temples and our theorems, the Moonlight Sonata and general relativity — has sprung from our confrontation with the mystery of which we are a part. The Toltecs and the Aztecs gave shape to the mystery in Quetzalcoatl — their feathered god of creation and knowledge — staring at me from the base of the pyramid with the stony serenity of the centuries, knowing everything and knowing nothing.
“I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it,” the British psychoanalyst Marion Milner wrote under a pseudonym in her superb century-old field guide to the art of knowing what you really want — that most difficult, most rewarding among the arts of living. It is hard to know what we want because, disquieted daily by “this sadness of never understanding ourselves,” it is hard to know who we are. To want anything is to acknowledge a lack, a gap between the real and the ideal, between the life we have and the life we desire, which is fundamentally a gap between who we are and who we wish to be.
In our yearning for an answer, for a bridge between the real self and the ideal self, we have invented religion and psychotherapy, we have turned to shamans and self-help gurus, we have fasted and prayed, filled out personality tests and followed autosuggestion protocols. But while a certain level of restlessness is necessary to our creative vitality — that “divine dissatisfaction” out of which art is born — living with a sense of perpetual deficiency petrifies the possible in us. For, as Kurt Vonnegut knew, there is no greater enemy to happienss than the sense of not enough, the feeling that we need to have more or be more in order to live with a fullness of being and an inner completeness.
British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips offers an antidote to our civilizational cult of self-improvement in his slender, potent book On Getting Better (public library).
We are trapped, he observes, by our frame of reference:
If you have a broken leg, or a fever, you know what is to be aimed for; if you have a broken heart or a sense of shame, it is not quite so clear… Patients come to psychoanalysis with an idea of cure because, historically, they have been to medical doctors, and before that they have been to religious healers. A culture that believes in cure is living in the fallout, in the aftermath, of religious cultures of redemption.
[…]
Self-improvement can be self-sabotage. Too knowing; too knowing of the future. A distraction, a refuge from one’s personal vision.
He considers the paradox at the crux of our zeal for self-improvement:
We can’t imagine our lives without the wish to improve them, without the progress myths that inform so much of what we do, and of what we want (we don’t tend to think of ourselves as wanting to be what we are already). Whether we call it ambition, or aspiration, or just desire, what we want and what we want to be is always our primary preoccupation, but it is always set in the future, as though what could be — our better life, our better selves — lures us on. As though it is the better future that makes our lives worth living; as though it is hope that we most want.
The problem with an idealized future is that every ideal is not only a form of wanting but a form of presumed knowledge — about what is optimal and desirable, about the vector of change — and yet the future is fundamentally unknowable. (This is why the things we most ardently desire are the most transformative, but we suffer a congenital blindness to what lies on the other side of transformation.) Phillips writes:
One cannot know the consequences of one’s wanting, because one can’t know the future except as an assumed replication of the past… It is almost certain that we won’t or can’t get what we want, partly because, from a psychoanalytic point of view, we are largely unconscious, unaware, of what we want.
With an eye to a word so fashionable that we have hollowed it of meaning by overuse and mususe, by making it a catchall for anything that challenges and disquiets us — trauma — he adds:
There is, after all, no life without trauma; indeed, the word misleadingly makes us think of something being interrupted, rather than of something integral, something essential to our lives. So much depends on what we can make of what happens to us, and on what we make of what we do; on our being able to metabolize or digest our experience; on our capacity or willingness to transform our experience rather than be merely victimized by it. When getting better doesn’t only mean getting safer, it means being able to risk feeling more alive, to risk taking risks, to risk learning and not learning from experience.
[…]
Learning from experience means learning what your experience can’t teach you — the nature and quality of future experience.
Those soul-broadening, life-deepening risks, those blessed unknowns of the future fometing the capacity for self-surprise that keeps us from ossifying, are precisely what Mario Benedetti placed at the center of his stunning poem “Do Not Spare Yourself.”
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