“No man is an island,” John Donne wrote in his timeless ode to our shared human experience. And yet each of us is a chance event islanded in time; in each of us there is an island of solitude so private and remote that it renders even love — this best means we have of reaching across the abyss between us — a mere row-boat launched into the turbulent waters of time and chance from another island just as remote.
Prefacing her short illustrated instructions for being a good citizen of such a self-contained world — “walk tender,” “leave no wake,” “thank” — she writes:
I think that there’s no truer place than an island. Whether it’s a sandbar or a bubble-up of volcanic rock or a jut of tropical coral, an island stands only by some whim of fate, given a chancy foothold among the chaos. When I go to an island, I know that I’m in that state of grace in which anything can happen.
There’s an island near where I live that keeps disappearing underwater and then reappearing again every few decades… I like to go out there and just stand on it. It almost convinces me that there is such a place as the present.
Map from Insularium illustratum by Henricus Martellus Germanus, 1495 — an early descriptive atlas of island maps. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Once, in the wake of a great upheaval of the heart, I moved to a remote mossy island to live for a time in solitude, to try to escape the grip of the past and find my foothold on the future. Instead, like Gingras, I found the present expanding. I found that change can be not just a vector of time but a point in place — here was a small station of land never in stasis, no hour of sunshine safe from a sudden storm, no forest trail the same from one day to the next, no beach stone unchurned from one tide to the next. I came to see the island as a daily defiance of entropy, a lesson in the imperative of self-renewal.
With an eye to this salutary elasticity of being an island models for us captives of habit, Gingras writes:
Each day starts washed, swept, utterly different than the day before. The morning crackles like a never-turned page. Where else in the world do we get the chance to step out into so much renewal? Where else do we keep getting second chances at ourselves?
A single day on an island is a microcosm of that irrepressible aliveness:
The ground shifts and hisses, the boundaries grow and recede. The tides yearn. The moon pulls. The very air pushes us around. I can’t help but know that a day here is not that grounded predictable thing I thought (sometimes hoped) it was, but it’s as swervy and alive as we are.
Shortly after I began the year with some blessings, a friend sent me Lucille Clifton’s spare, splendid poem “blessing the boats.” We had met at a poetry workshop and shared a resolution to write more poetry in the coming year, so we began taking turns each week choosing a line from a favorite poem to use as a joint prompt. (The wonderful thing about minds, about the dazzling variousness of them, is what different things can bloom in them from the same seed.)
I had been thinking about forgiveness — about its quiet power to dislodge the lump of blame from the thorax of time and fill the lung of life with the oxygen of the possible, about how you bless your own life when you forgive your mother, forgive your father, forgive the person for whom your love was not enough, forgive the person for whom your love was too much, forgive yourself, over and over and over.
This is the poem that unfolded in me from Clifton’s opening line, read here by Nick Cave (who has written beautifully about self-forgiveness and who sparked my season of blessings by taking me to church, for the first time, the morning of my fortieth birthday).
FORGIVENESS by Maria Popova
May the tide
never tire of its tender toil
how over and over
it forgives the Moon
the daily exile
and returns to turn
mountains into sand
as if to say,
you too can have
this homecoming
you too possess
this elemental power
of turning
the stone in the heart
into golden dust.
In 1872, half a century before American women could vote, Victoria Woodhull (September 23, 1838–June 9, 1927) ran for President, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate.
Papers declared her candidacy “a brazen imposture, to be extinguished by laughter rather than by law.”
People — working-class people, people of color, people relegated to the margins of their time and place — clamored to hear her speak, rose up in standing ovation by the thousands, cried and cheered.
Victoria Woodhull by Mathew Brady, 1870
Born in Ohio to an illiterate mother and an alcoholic father who made a living by selling $1 bottles of opiate-laden “Life Elixir,” Victoria was named for the English Queen coronated the year she entered the world as the seventh of ten children, four of whom would not survive childhood. At eleven, when her father’s schemes ran the family into bankruptcy, she was forced to leave school after only three years of education. At fourteen, having been belted and starved all her childhood, she fled her father’s brutality in a desperate marriage to her 28-year-old physician, only to discover that he too was an alcoholic and a philanderer. Still in her teens, she bore two children — a son with developmental disabilities and a daughter whose delivery her husband so mishandled that both mother and baby almost bled to death.
Like Hildegard of Bingen, like Joan of Arc, like many people of uncommon strength and vision who have had to survive uncommon trials of circumstances, Victoria came to believe — had to believe — that she was guided and protected by the spirits. When her husband’s alcoholism became so disabling that it fell on her to support the family, she began working as a spiritual healer. As she traveled across America, she began to see the scale and depth of the suffering from which most people chose to avert their eyes — the pain of the enslaved, the struggle of the working class, the domestic enslavement of women’s minds and bodies, the syphoning of children’s souls by an education system that excluded most.
Solar system quilt from the same era, which another extraordinary woman spent seven years making to teach women astronomy before higher education was available to them.
Eventually, Victoria managed to divorce her husband — something so scandalous in her era that it would later lead tabloids to headline her “The Prostitute Who Ran for President.” She continued to work as a healer, remarried, and used her income to open a Wall Street brokerage firm with her sister. At thirty-two, Victoria Woodhull became America’s first female stock broker.
Central to her campaign were ideas an epoch ahead of their time. In a century when only four women obtained a divorce in all of England, she insisted that in America love should be “unbiased by any enacted law or standard of public opinion,” that neither social norms nor government regulation should tamper with the freedom to marry and to divorce. In an age when maternity was considered the fulfillment of a woman’s destiny, she declared it another form of slavery and insisted that women must never “give the control of their maternal functions over to anybody,” much less the government. “It is a fearful responsibility with which women are entrusted by nature,” she wrote in what stands as a founding credo of reproductive rights, “and the very last thing that they should be compelled to do is to perform the office of that responsibility against their will, under improper conditions or by disgusting means.”
Months before the election, Woodhull published a 39-page manifesto reclaiming the real meaning of equality, justice, and freedom. On its pages, she cautioned that the young dream of democracy was already slipping into a trance of authoritarianism — a rule of law seemingly chosen by the people, but in fact the product of coercive control and manipulation by a new breed of money-men who capitalize on human vulnerability and fear. True freedom, she argued, has never existed for individuals — in all systems of government thus far, “grades and castes of people have built themselves, the stronger upon the weaker, and the people as individuals have never appeared upon the surface.”
She writes:
There has never been such a thing as freedom for the people. It has always been concession by the government. There has never been an equality for the people. It has always been the stronger, in some sense, preying upon the weaker; and the people have never had justice. When there is authority, whether it be of law, of custom, or of individuals, neither of these can exist except in name. Neither do these principles apply to the people in their collective capacity but when the people’s time shall come they will belong to every individual separately.
This revolution would come about by a “double process,” yet unfinished — “the consolidation of nations into races, and the redistribution of power to the people.” She prophesies:
These two processes will continue until both are complete — until all nations are merged into races, and all races into one government; and until the power is completely and equally returned to all the people, who will no longer be denominated as belonging to this or that country or government, but as citizens of the world — as members of a common humanity.
America, she insists, is uniquely poised for the completion of this process. In it are the kindling and the spark of “the impending revolution” to benefit all of humanity:
As in this country the future race of the world is being developed, so also will the foundation of the future government be developed, which shall become universal… And that revolution will be the final and the ultimate contest between justice and authority, in which the latter will be crushed, never again to raise its despotic head among and to divide the members of a common humanity.
Such a triumph of justice, she argues, is only possible when true equality is achieved — another notion suctioned of meaning by misuse and overuse, needful of redefinition:
Equality for the people means… that no personal merit or demerit can interfere between individuals, so that one may, by arbitration or laws, be placed unequally with another. It means that every individual is entitled to all the natural wealth that he or she requires to minister to the various wants of the body… It also means that every person is entitled to equal opportunity for intellectual acquirements, recreation and rest, since the first is necessary to make the performance of the individual’s share of duty possible; while the second and third are the natural requirements of the body, independent of the individuality of the person, and which was not self-created but inherited… And yet it should be the duty of government, since it is a fundamental portion of its theory, to maintain equality among the people; otherwise the word is but a mere catch, without the slightest signification in fact.
Having thus defined freedom and equality, she argues that the deepest meaning of justice is “to maintain equal conditions among free individuals.” A century and a half before America elected, twice, a horseman of capitalism as President, Woodhull indicts the market forces already pulsating beneath the young nation as the great enemy of freedom — a way of replacing one system of exploitation and enslavement with another, “still more insidious in its character, because more plausible.” With an eye to the income inequality such a system invariably creates, she writes:
If penury and want exist, accompanied by suffering and privation, under the rule of a monarch, he may justly be held responsible. But when it exists under the reign of freedom, there is no responsibility anywhere, unless it may be said to be in the people themselves, which is equivalent to saying responsibility without application.
Market capitalists, she argues, can only serve as ruling monarchs of this experiment in democracy by means of extreme manipulation of the people — a theater of freedom, in which we are cast as actors, only to find ourselves commodities. She indicts the railroads — the Big Tech of her day, the first great monopoly and the original social media — as a “system of huckstery” that makes magnates of middlemen. (What would Victoria Woodhull have made of the sovereignty we have willingly ceded to the Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world.) More than a century before Doris Lessing urged us to examine the prisons we choose to live inside, Woodhull takes a stance of extraordinary courage, even more countercultural today:
I would rather be the unwilling subject of an absolute monarch than the willing slave of my own ignorance, of which advantage is taken by those who spend their time in endeavoring to prove to me that I am free and in singing the glories of my condition, to hoodwink my reason and to blind my perception… That system of government by which it is possible for a class of people to practice upon my credulity, and, under false pretenses, first entice me to acquiesce in laws by which immense corporations and monopolies are established, and then to induce me to submit to their extortions because they exist according to law, pursuing none but lawful means, is an infernal despotism, compared to which the Russian Czar is a thousand times to be preferred.
At the heart of her far-seeing manifesto is the insistence that a truly just system of government can take root in the soul of a people, in the souls of all people, only when we cease prioritizing wealth over wisdom; only then may humanity “join in a common effort for the great political revolution, after the accomplishment of which the nations shall have cause to learn war no more.” She writes:
The impending revolution, then, will be the strife for the mastery between the authority, despotism, inequalities and injustices of the present, and freedom, equality and justice in their broad and perfect sense, based on the proposition that humanity is one, having a common origin, common interests and purposes, and inheriting a common destiny.
No person who will take the trouble to carefully observe the conditions of the various departments of society can fail to discern the terrible earthquakes just ready to burst out upon every side, and which are only now restrained by the thick incrustations with which customs, prejudices and authorities have incased humanity. Indeed, the whole surface of humanity is surging like the billows of the stormy ocean, and it only escapes general and destructive rupture because its composition, like the consciences of its constituent members, is so elastic. But, anon, the restrained furies will overcome the temper of their fastenings, and, rending them asunder, will sweep over the people, submerging them or cleansing them of their gathered debris, as they shall have located themselves, with regard to its coming.
Days before the election, Woodhull was arrested on obscenity charges — her paper had published an exposé of the prominent minister Henry Ward Beecher’s affairs with too much detail for Victorian propriety standards. She was acquitted, but she was also disillusioned — the dream of a truly just America, she came to see, was premature, haunted by the nightmare of businessmen puppeteering politics and commodifying the commons. She eventually moved to England, where she continued lecturing on suffrage, became involved in education reform, helped establish a women’s aviation league, and founded a humanitarian magazine with her daughter Zula.
She never stood a chance, of course, in her time and place. But she opened the aperture of possibility, for a more possible future is only ever made by taking on what the present deems impossible.
I remember the moment a friend’s son came home from school to recount with something between shock and exhilaration how he realized while talking to a classmate that the notion of a mental image is not merely a metaphor, that other people can conjure up in their minds things not before their eyes. And the moment another friend discovered that the inner stream of language with which most of us narrate our lives courses through neither his mother’s nor his sister’s mind. And always the moment I waded into the winter ocean with someone with whom I thought I shared uncommon understanding, and I exclaimed “Those needles!” as the icy water stabbed at my flesh, and she stared at me blankly, and when I asked what her sensation was, she took a long pause, then said: “Pressure.” Two bodies so seemingly similar, sharing 99.9% of their genome and 100% of their trust, immersed in the exact same environment, governed by consciousnesses so invisibly different as to render the contact between self and world sharp for one and blunt for the other.
Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up — a lyrical picture-book about the artist within
Moments like these jolt us awake from the dream of perfect understanding, stagger us with the realization that no one ever really knows what it is like to be somebody else, that between one consciousness and another there always gapes an abyss black as the inside of a skull, and though we may try to reach each other with love and reason, they twine but a tenuous footbridge across it. The best we can do is hold on to the ropes and hope that they will not fray before we reach the rim of understanding, the outer edge of the other, which is all we can ever touch — and still it is enough, this sliver of salvation from the loneliness of being ourselves, this outstretched hand across the icy blue.
Anne Enright faces this abyss in her lyrical novel The Wren, the Wren (public library), drawing from it not a point of despair but portal of possibility.
She writes:
We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.
Looking back on viewing empathy “like it’s the solution (and it is! it is!) to pretty much everything,” the protagonist reflects:
I had a big beautiful cake in my head called “Feeling the Pain of Others” and I sliced it this way and that because I thought that emotion is the bridge between people, sentiment crosses space, sympathy is a gas, exhaled by one, inhaled by the other. Empathy! It’s just like melting. We can merge, you know. We can connect. We can cry at the same movie. You and I.
And yet, she comes to see, we struggle to do this, for it is at bottom a profoundly complicated thing. But perhaps we struggle because we have the wrong goal in mind — merging, in the end, is not the measure of closeness, of understanding, of the proximity between consciousnesses in the icy waters of being. Enright writes:
There is a real gap between me and the next person, there is a space between every human being. And it is not a frightening space. The empty air which exists between people might be crossed by emotion, but it might not. You need something else, or you need something first… Now, I think the word we need is “translation.”
Given the co-evolution of vision and consciousness, this gap in how we perceive the world is reflected in our actual sight — we each see the same photons differently due to variations in how our eyes and brains process light. While science is not there to furnish us with metaphors — its task is truth — we are creatures of meaning who cannot help but turn to metaphor as our best footbridge between truth and meaning. Enright’s protagonist reflects:
These days I am obsessed by light, it is so hard to commodify. I am not talking about a beautiful dawn, or holidays in the sun, or the light that makes a photograph look good. I am talking about brightness itself, the air lit up. The gleam on the surfaces of my typing hands. I love the gift of its arrival. The light you see is always eight and a half minutes old. Always and again. And you think it is shared by everyone but it is not shared, exactly — our eyes are hit by our own, personal photons.
Perhaps, in the end, the measure of understanding — which is “love’s other name” — is not seeing the same light but seeing the light in each other, the shy light shimmering over the ocean of our singularity.
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