The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Something in You Hungers for Clarity: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Writing and the Power of Words to Remake the World

By Maria Popova

Something in You Hungers for Clarity: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Writing and the Power of Words to Remake the World

“Words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on,” Mary Shelley wrote in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars that laid the template for the colonialist power structure of the modern world, in an era when her chromosomes denied her the authority of her natural powers.

Who gets to write shapes what gets to be written, which shapes what is remembered — that is the making of the collective selective memory we call history, and it is made of words. We invented words to name the world and invented power to apportion the named. It is our inventions that tell the fullest story of our nature. The range of them — the range between chocolate and racism, between the Benedictus and the bomb — is the measure of what James Baldwin called “the doom and glory” of what we are, metered by the words that tell the story of our self-creation.

Drawing by David Byrne from A History of the World (in Dingbats)

“What I have always wanted is to expand the frame of humanity, to shift the brackets of images and ideas,” Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects in The Message (public library) — his soulful and sobering reckoning with the power of words and the power structures roiling beneath the landscape of permission for making the images and ideas we call art. What emerges is a manifesto for reexamining who gets to word the world’s story and render human the worlds within the world, pulsating with the urgency of the writer’s job to clarify in order to galvanize — for “you cannot act upon what you cannot see.”

Writing, Coates recalls, was one of the great “obsessions” of his childhood — he relished the “private ecstasy” found in “the organization of words, silences, and sound into stories,” in “the employment of particular verbs, the playful placement of punctuation,” this mysterious alchemy of skill and vision with the power to “make the abstract and distant into something tangible and felt,” to dismantle the myths told by the wardens of the status quo and tell a different story about the world and its horizons of possibility. An epoch after John Steinbeck insisted in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that a writer ought to bear the torchlight of clarity in humanity’s “gray and desolate time of confusion,” Coates considers what it takes to do that, in all its ecstasy and power:

There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own.

Art by Beatrice Alemagna from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

Permeating the book is Coates’s countercultural courage not to mistake for reality what he so aptly terms “the haze” of his own experience — a needed reminder that we lens everything before us through everything behind us and bow to the image in the lens, calling it the world. And yet what the visionary physicist John Archibald Wheeler wrote of the nature of reality — “this is a participatory universe [and] observer-participancy gives rise to information” — is true of the nature of writing. Coates reflects:

There are dimensions in your words — rhythm, content, shape, feeling. And so too with the world outside. The accretion of imperfect, discomfiting life must be seen and felt so that the space in your mind, gray, automatic, and square, fills with angle, color, and curve… But the color is not just in the physical world you observe but in the unique interaction between that world and your consciousness — in your interpretation, your subjectivity, the things you notice in yourself.

Just as the writer writes with all of themselves, the reader reads with all of themselves, adding another layer of subjectivity in the act of interpretation. Sylvia Plath understood this when she was only a teenager: “Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.” So too with all creative work, much as a child enters the world to become their own person. “Your children are not your children,” Kahlil Gibran wrote in one of his most poignant poems. “They come through you but not from you.” Echoing Plath and Gibran, Coates reflects on his own writing:

I imagine my books to be my children, each with its own profile and way of walking through the world… It helps me remember that though they are made by me, they are not ultimately mine. They leave home, travel, have their own relationships, and leave their own impressions. I’ve learned it’s best to, as much as possible, stay out of the way and let them live their own lives.

Art by Ofra Amit from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. (Available as a print.)

This is not, however, a recusal from responsibility — over and over, Coates celebrates, demands even, the power of the written word to change the life of the world and the course of what will one day be history by changing the present landscape of possibility and permission we call politics. He writes:

History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order… A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined. And our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture, and our myths.

[…]

Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics… Novels, memoirs, paintings, sculptures, statues, monuments, films, miniseries, advertisements, and journalism all order our reality.

Half a century after Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in her forgotten poem “Book Power” that “books feed and cure and chortle and collide,” that they are “flame and flight and flower,” Coates considers the singular power of writing among the other tendrils of the creative spirit — the power of revelation and self-revelation:

Film, music, the theater — all can be experienced amidst the whooping, clapping, and cheering of the crowd. But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see. Their power is so intimate, so insidious, that even its authors don’t always comprehend it.

Complement these fragments of The Message with James Baldwin’s advice on writing and some excellent tips from Mary Oliver, then revisit May Sarton on how to cultivate your talent.

BP

A Heron’s Antidote to Fear of Death

By Maria Popova

They didn’t imagine it, the dying dinosaurs, that they would grow wings and become birds, become the laboratory in which evolution invented dreams and the cathedral in which it invented faith.

“There is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin consoled himself as his beloved daughter was dying, for he knew that death is the engine of life, that across the history of natural selection the death of the individual is what ensured the adaptation and survival of the species. And yet against this natural grandeur, we suffer the smallness of our imagination about death, as about the myriad small deaths punctuating life — the losses, the endings, the falterings of hope — forgetting somehow that every ending is a beginning in retrograde, that what may seem like a terminus may be a transformation.

Great white heron, Holbox Island. (Available as a print.)

These are the thoughts thinking themselves through me as I watch a great white heron rising from the water’s edge, from this boundary line between worlds, this lapping memory of how life emerged from non-life.

Because my bird divinations began with its great blue cousin, I cannot help but ask the majestic white bird for a message.

Combing the eleven pages of Audubon’s ornithological text about the species, I follow the usual process and let the words rearrange themselves into this koan from the unconscious:

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, available as stand-alone print benefitting the Audubon Society.

Working on this divination, I was reminded of a long-ago counterpart — one of Mary Oliver’s least known poems, found in her 2003 collection What Do We Know (public library) and read here by 19-year-old poet, artist, and heron-lover Rose Hanzlik to the sound of Debussy’s “Reverie.”

HERON RISES FROM THE DARK, SUMMER POND
by Mary Oliver

So heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wings

open
and she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticks

of the summer pond,
and slowly
rises into the air
and is gone.

Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is

that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed

back into itself —
the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,
the turtle,
the fallen gate.

And especially it is wonderful
that the summers are long
and the ponds so dark and so many,
and therefore it isn’t a miracle

but the common thing,
this decision,
this trailing of the long legs in the water,
this opening up of the heavy body

into a new life: see how the sudden
gray-blue sheets of her wings
strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing
takes her in.

Great white heron, Holbox Island. (Available as a print.)

Complement with the poetic science of what happens when we die and astronomer Rebecca Elson’s magnificent poem “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” then revisit the great blue heron as a lens on our search for meaning.

BP

The Wound Is the Gift: David Whyte on the Relationship Between Anxiety and Intimacy

By Maria Popova

The Wound Is the Gift: David Whyte on the Relationship Between Anxiety and Intimacy

It takes a long time to know a person — to unbutton the costume of personality and unlace the corset of coping mechanisms in order to touch the naked soul. It is a process delicate and difficult, riven by anxiety and absolutely terrifying to both, requiring therefore great courage and great vulnerability — a process the hard-won product of which we call intimacy. “There is no terror like that of being known,” Emerson anguished in his journal while trying to navigate his deep and complicated relationship with Margaret Fuller. It is a wise terror, for it knows that there is no greater pain than the pain of intimacy severed — by betrayal, by distance, by death. To triumph over that terror in order to know and be known on the level of the naked soul is an act of faith — perhaps the greatest act of faith there is. Because all faith requires a surrender to something we cannot control, all faith begins with the anguishing anxiety that prefaces the leap.

Poet and philosopher David Whyte explores the terrifying and transcendent work of intimacy in Consolations II — the second volume of his short, splendid essays, each reckoning with the deeper meaning of some ordinary and overused word to reveal its unexamined emotional etymology. In “Intimacy,” he writes:

Intimacy is presence magnified by our vulnerability, magnified by increasing proximity to the fear that underlies that vulnerability. Intimacy and the vulnerabilities of intimacy are our constant, invisible companions, yet companions who are always wishing to make themselves visible and touchable to us, always emerging from some deep interior, to ruffle and disturb the calm surface of our well apportioned lives. Intimacy is a living force, inviting me simultaneously from the inside as much as the outside. Something calling from within that wants to meet something calling in recognition from without. Intimacy is the art and practise of living from the inside out.

[…]

Our need and our fear of intimacy is felt through an ever present almost volcanic force emerging from some unknown origin inside us, exhibiting to all and sundry, our previously hidden unspoken desires, flowing out against all efforts to the contrary, through our unconscious and conscious behaviours.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days.

And yet intimacy is haunted by a central paradox:

To become intimate is to become vulnerable not only to what I want and desire in my life, but to the fear I have of my desire being met.

This is the paradox of longing: Because longing can be an addiction, because no active addict ever wants to give up their addiction — or can without a great deal of suffering — it can be terrifying and almost unbearably vulnerable to surrender to an intimacy so amply fulfilling that it leaves nothing to long for. And yet in that vulnerability lies our power and our freedom to transform a relationship from a tether of dependency into a slender cord of grace.

David writes:

Intimacy cannot occur without a robust sense of vulnerability, and is tied to the sense of being pulled along in the gravitational field of any newly felt openness. In that new openness we feel as if we are pulled through the very doorway of our needs for something we desire deeply but cannot fully identify, partly because what we are about to identify is intimately connected with our own ability or inability to love.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days.

Ultimately, he observes, intimacy is an instrument of discovery and self-discovery — a way of turning the walls between us and within us into sunlit windows through which to see and be seen:

Intimacy always carries the sense of something hidden about to be felt and known in surprising ways; something brought out and made visible, that previously could not be seen or understood. In intimacy what is hidden will become a gift, discovered and rediscovered again and again in the eyes of both giver and receiver.

[…]

To become human is to become visible, while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

Because what is visible is vulnerable, because what can be seen can be touched and what can be touched can be wounded, he adds:

Intimacy is intimately related to our sense of having been wounded, and the startling intuition that my way forward into life, or into another person’s life will be through the very doorway of the wound itself. Intimacy invites me to learn to trust the way being wounded has actually made me more available, more compassionate and possibly more intimate with the world, by being opened in ways I never realised it was possible to be open… Intimacy is always calibrated by the letting go of or the taking on of fear. Almost always our fear is experienced as an intimate invitation to understand and feel fully our particular form of wounded-ness.

[…]

Intimacy finds its ultimate expression in all the forms of surrender human beings find difficult to embrace.

The difficulty of that surrender almost always takes shape as anxiety — a word to which David devotes another of the book’s essays. Anxiety, he observes, is often an avoidance mechanism and a dissociation device — “a protection against real intimacy, real friendship and real engagement with our work,” a way not to feel “the full vulnerability of being visible and touchable in a difficult world.” In anxiety, we disallow ourselves “the ability to stop and rest and the spacious silence needed for… a new understanding” — and all true intimacy opens into a new understanding of ourselves, so that “we learn that what we thought we knew is not equal to what we are discovering… that who we thought we were is not who we are now.”

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days.

By allowing true intimacy on the smallest scale of personal love — the bond between one and one — we open into the largest scale of belonging, into cohesion with what Margaret Fuller, inspired by Goethe, called the All. David writes:

The need for intimacy in a human life and in a human social life is as foundational as our daily hunger and our never ending thirst, and needs to be met in just the same practical way, every day, just as necessarily and just as frequently: in touch, in conversation, in listening and in seeing, in the back and forth of ideas; intimate exchanges that say I am here and you are here and that by touching our bodies, our minds or our shared work in the world, we make a world together… Intimacy is our evolutionary inheritance, the internal force that has us returning to another and to the world from our insulated aloneness again and again, no matter our difficulties and no matter our wounds.

Couple these fragments of the thoroughly soul-slaking Consolations II — other essays in which explore such overused, underexamined words as shame, time, love, burnout, and end — with a wonderful read on lichens as a lens on intimacy, Kahlil Gibran on love’s difficult balance of intimacy and independence, and Eric Berne on the key to true intimacy, then savor this excellent interview with David by one of my oldest friends.

BP

The Cosmogony of You

By Maria Popova

We live in a state of perpetual dissociation from the almost unbearable wonder of being alive. Wonder is always an edge state, its edge so sharp it threatens to rupture the mundane and sever us from what we mistake for reality — the TV, the townhouse, the trauma narrative. If we fell asleep each night remembering “the singularity we once were” and awoke each morning with the bright awareness that every atom in our bodies can be traced to one of the first stars — a particular star in the infant universe that made this particular body to sinew this particular soul across billions and billions of blind steps each one of which could have gone otherwise — we would be too wonder-struck by the miraculousness of it all to deal with the mundane. But the dishes have to be washed and the emails have to be written, so we avert our eyes from the majesty and mystery of a universe that made them in order to look at itself, from the majesty and mystery of what we are.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.

Azita Ardakani offers a lyrical antidote to this self-expatriation from our cosmic inheritance in this breathtaking piece she has kindly let me publish on The Marginalian — part poem and part lullaby, part compact history of science and part creation myth, radiating the revelatory simplicity of a children’s book and the causal complexity of a cosmogony.

Azita writes:

Once upon a time,

In a place far far away,

The darkness drifted.

The darkness knew no time.

Reaching for infinity, only knowing beyond.

One day in the web of inky forever, it asked itself, can I see you?

It waited, and waited, and then, answered, a star.

And then another, and another, and, another.

Another was where it began,

and as the star beings asked to be born to meet the darkness from which they came, one particular planet created water so it too could reflect the stars back to themselves.

The stars seeing their reflection were filled with joy and delight.

Curiosity was born in their light millions of years away.

One by one they made their way down, to touch the ocean, to see themselves.

The soil darkness watched with awe as the stars arrived,

A heart’s desire asked: Can I see you closer?

The water stars stretched onto the soil, and mixed into the clay, and became,

everything.

Yes you too, coyote who hears this, wise owl, mouse and rabbit, you too sleeping fawn, you too tree and root and seed, you too nested flight, and you too, sitting two legged.

Mixed from clay and star, flesh and life, a hollow canal opened so breath too could reach back to the darkness.

Missing the beginning, it exhaled a bridge, home.

The star water became everything we know, and you? The story of us?

Well, to experience the closest thing to the very beginning of star meeting water, we learned to create a small ocean inside of us, where it could all be felt, all over again.

Once upon a time, in a place far far away, the darkness drifted, and you drifted inside it.

You were the wish you once wished for.

Art by Derek Dominic D’souza from Song of Two Worlds by physicist Alan Lightman

Complement with Pattiann Rogers’s stunning poem about how stardust became sapiens and the wondrous science of how stars begot souls, then revisit N.J. Berrill’s forgotten 1958 masterpiece You and the Universe and Hannah Emerson’s poem “Center of the Universe” — perhaps the best instruction I know on how to be alive.

BP

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)