The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Measure of a True Visionary: Jane Goodall on the Indivisibility of Art and Science

The aim of science is to illuminate the mysteries of nature and discover the elemental truths pulsating sublime and indifferent beneath the starry skin of the universe. The aim of art is to give us a language for wresting meaning from the truth and living with the mystery. Creativity in both is a style of noticing, of attending to the world more closely in order to love it more deeply, of seeing everything more and more whole — a word that shares its Latin root with “holy.”

This is why the greatest visionaries bend their gaze beyond the horizon of their discipline and of their era’s givens to take in the vista of life as a totality of being. How inseparable Einstein’s passion for the violin was from his physics and Goethe’s passion for morphology from his poetry, how difficult to tell where Kepler the mind ends and Kepler the body begins.

There are few visionaries in the history of our species who have changed our understanding of nature and our place in it more profoundly than Jane Goodall (April 3, 1934–October 1, 2025) — something she was able to do in large part because she never saw science as a walled garden separate from the wilderness of life. Formed by her love of books since childhood, she placed the raw material of literature — compassion — at the center of her scientific work, drawing on her passion for artistic creativity to make her revelatory discovery of chimpanzee tool use — that selfsame impulse to bend the world to the will that sparked human creativity when we descended from the trees to the caves to invent fire and figurative art.

Jane Goodall with the young chimp Flint at Gombe (Photograph: Hugo van Lawick, Goodall’s first husband, courtesy of Jane Goodall Institute)

The essence of Goodall’s integrated, holistic view of life comes ablaze in a passage from a letter to a friend found in Africa in My Blood: An Autobiography in Letters (public library) — that magnificent record of how she turned her childhood dream into reality. The day before New Year’s Eve 1958, visiting her family in London for the first time since her departure to Africa twenty months earlier, she writes:

It is lovely to be in an artistic atmosphere again. I realize now, more than ever before, that I can never live wholly without it. It feels so heavenly to be able to just sit in front of the fire & talk for hours — of cabbages & kings — poetry, literature, art, music, philosophy, religion. It’s wonderful, marvellous, terrific… I will stop now, because I have to wash my hair.

Shampoo, song, and science — all of it the stuff of life, intertwined and integrated, lest we forget that only an integrated human nature can begin to apprehend nature itself — that “great chain of causes and effects” in which “no single fact can be considered in isolation,” in the lovely words of Alexander von Humboldt, who knew that artists too are all the greater for taking a passionate interest in the realities of nature subject to science. It was Humboldt who first conceived of nature as a system, who saw “the unity and harmony of this stupendous mass of force and matter.” It was Jane Goodall whose science revealed that kinship is the software the system runs on, and whose life reminds us that just the kinship within a creature — the unity and harmony between all parts and passions of a person — is as essential to being fully alive as the kinship between creatures.

BP

The Feather Detective: How Roxie Laybourne Pioneered Forensic Ornithology

The Feather Detective: How Roxie Laybourne  Pioneered Forensic Ornithology

You wouldn’t know it, looking at the tiny elderly woman in the white lab coat bent over a table in a halogen-lit government office, you wouldn’t know she had spent her youth doing science with her whole body: extracting herself from a deadly mudflat with stubbornness and applied physics; narrowly escaping permanent tendon damage after severe sunburn on the tops of her feet during a daylong barefoot tide pool expedition; managing to return ashore by manually rigging a rudder after her boat’s steering apparatus had broken and left her stranded in the open ocean; surviving blood poisoning in the pre-penicillin era after handling snails with bare blistered hands.

Trained as a mathematician and a plant ecologist at a time when seven percent of women attained a university education, Roxie Laybourne (September 15, 1910–August 7, 2003) had done her graduate thesis on moss — that splendid training ground for scaling attention. Struggling to find a job, she spent a decade working at the taxidermy and exhibition departments of museums. Eventually, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service — which also employed Rachel Carson — hired her at the small laboratory the agency ran at the National Museum of Natural History’s Division of Birds, expecting her to do little more than steward the existing bird collection.

Instead, she went on to pioneer forensic ornithology.

With nothing more than a microscope and a mind, Roxie Laybourne developed a revolutionary method of identifying birds by the shapes and patterns of particular microstructures in their feathers known as barbules — a technique she would apply to help federal agents solve murders, conservationists bring poachers to justice, and airlines dramatically lower the incidence of bird-induced plane crashes.

Roxie Laybourne at work in her seventies. (Photograph: Smithsonian Institution.)

In The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne (public library), Chris Sweeney writes:

Nothing on earth compares to feathers, in form or function. They are a remarkable output of millions of years of evolution, first originating in dinosaurs and slowly morphing into a kaleidoscope of colors, shapes, and textures. Made of beta-keratin, the same rigid protein that forms reptiles’ scales, feathers are light and soft, yet strong enough to withstand the punishing forces of high-speed aerial acrobatics and long-distance journeys over harrowing landscapes and through treacherous conditions.

[…]

For all the variation in how they look and what they do, most feathers follow a similar structural blueprint. There is a central shaft, the lower tip of which is called the calamus or quill and the upper portion of which is called the rachis. Branching off the central shaft are the barbs — there are pennaceous barbs that are bladelike and plumulaceous barbs that are soft and fluffy and tend to be clustered near the base of the feather. Branching off the barbs are tiny microstructures invisible to the naked eye called barbules.

Hummingbird down barbules. (MicrolabNW)
Parakeet down barbules. (MicrolabNW)
Mallard duck down barbules. (MicrolabNW)

Delicate and invisible to the naked eye, barbules need to be both clean and undamaged for their shape and pattern to be revealed under a microscope — a difficult task given dead birds are often covered in dirt, debris, and decaying matter, and cleaning agents powerful enough to remove these are too harsh to preserve the barbules. Part of the loveliness and defiant originality of Laybourne’s work is that she saw science not as a sterile endeavor separate from daily life but as part and parcel of the same messy, gritty stuff that is the raw material of living. Sweeney describes how she approached the challenge of cleaning the fine down she wanted to study, which she did with equal parts diligence and delight:

The trial-and-error process of finding the right soap stressed out Roxie. She worried that liquid detergents and dish soaps could leave behind residues that affected the microscopic barbules that she wanted to inspect. She settled on Ivory Snow powdered soap, mixed in a beaker of warm water. She’d drop the feather pieces into the sudsy bath and use forceps to whip up a small whirlpool. The feathers would bend and swirl, the barbs clumping together and forking apart. Stir too hard and the feather fragments twisted with one another — potentially bad news if the airlines only sent a little bit of material. Stir too gently, and the grime remained in the barbules. Depending on the condition and the size of the feather pieces, the water turned various shades of gray during the cleanse. Roxie would change it out several times as needed, until the fragments looked as if they had just been preened by their previous owner.

After they were sufficiently clean, they had to be dried in a manner that helped restore their natural fluff, another delicate process. On occasion, Roxie used the wall-mounted hand dryer in the women’s room. When the lab was outfitted with lines for compressed air, Roxie insisted that some feathers fluffed up better if she administered it in a musical rhythm rather than a steady, hissing stream. When dealing with doves, she preferred a cha-cha cha-cha-cha, cha-cha cha-cha-cha.

Washing and drying feathers is the type of tedious bench work that senior scientists often pawn off on lowly postdocs and grad students. Roxie found that she extracted enormous value from the almost ritualistic process of cleaning and re-fluffing the fragments, developing an intimate connection with the raw material of her new trade.

The key to all great science and all great art, the hallmark of the best experiences we can have, might be precisely this — the singing combination of ritual and rigor, applied with diligence and delight.

BP

The Cell vs. the Crystal: The Philosopher-Naturalist John Burroughs on What Makes a Great Poem and a Great Person

The Cell vs. the Crystal: The Philosopher-Naturalist John Burroughs on What Makes a Great Poem and a Great Person

A person is a perpetual ongoingness perpetually mistaking itself for a still point. We call this figment personality or identity or self, and yet we are constantly making and remaking ourselves. Composing a life as the pages of time keep turning is the great creative act we are here for. Like evolution, like Leaves of Grass, it is the work of continual revision, not toward greater perfection but toward greater authenticity, which is at bottom the adaptation of the self to the soul and the soul to the world.

In one of the essays found in his exquisite 1877 collection Birds and Poets (public library | public domain), the philosopher-naturalist John Burroughs (April 3, 1837–March 29, 1921) explores the nature of that creative act through a parallel between poetry and personhood anchored in a brilliant metaphor for the two different approaches to creation. He writes:

There are in nature two types or forms, the cell and the crystal. One means the organic, the other inorganic; one means growth, development, life; the other means reaction, solidification, rest. The hint and model of all creative works is the cell; critical, reflective, and philosophical works are nearer akin to the crystal; while there is much good literature that is neither the one nor the other distinctively, but which in a measure touches and includes both. But crystallic beauty or cut and polished gems of thought, the result of the reflex rather than the direct action of the mind, we do not expect to find in the best poems, though they may be most prized by specially intellectual persons. In the immortal poems the solids are very few, or do not appear at all as solids, — as lime and iron, — any more than they do in organic nature, in the flesh of the peach or the apple. The main thing in every living organism is the vital fluids: seven tenths of man is water; and seven tenths of Shakespeare is passion, emotion, — fluid humanity.

Glial cells of the cerebral cortex of a child. One of neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s drawings of the brain.

This, of course, is what makes identity such a tedious concept — a fixity of past experience and predictive narrative that crystallizes a person’s natural fluidity, makes them impermeable to possibility, and is therefore inherently uncreative. True creativity, Burroughs observes, is rooted in this dynamism, this fluidity, this irrepressible and ever-shifting aliveness:

All the master poets have in their work an interior, chemical, assimilative property… flaming up with electric and defiant power, — power without any admixture of resisting form, as in a living organism.

It can only be so because we are a fractal of nature, the supreme creative agent, whose processes are a ceaseless flow of change and self-revision. Burroughs writes:

The physical cosmos itself is not a thought, but an act. Natural objects do not affect us like well-wrought specimens or finished handicraft, which have nothing to follow, but as living, procreating energy. Nature is perpetual transition. Everything passes and presses on; there is no pause, no completion, no explanation. To produce and multiply endlessly, without ever reaching the last possibility of excellence, and without committing herself to any end, is the law of Nature.

Burroughs sees this as “the essential difference between prose and poetry,” between “the poetic and the didactic treatment of a subject.” A great life, he intimates, is more like a great poem than like a great teaching:

The essence of creative art is always the same; namely, interior movement and fusion; while the method of the didactic or prosaic treatment is fixity, limitation. The latter must formulate and define; but the principle of the former is to flow, to suffuse, to mount, to escape. We can conceive of life only as something constantly becoming. It plays forever on the verge. It is never in loco, but always in transit. Arrest the wind, and it is no longer the wind; close your hands upon the light, and behold, it is gone.

Available as a solo print. Find the story and process behind these bird divinations here.

And yet because these interior movements are fundamentally untranslatable between one consciousness and another, belonging to that region of absolute aloneness that accompanies the singularity of being oneself, there is always an element of the ineffable in all great creative work and all great persons:

There must always be something about a poem, or any work of art, besides the evident intellect or plot of it, or what is on its surface, or what it tells. This something is the Invisible, the Undefined, almost Unexpressed, and is perhaps the best part of any work of art, as it is of a noble personality… As, in the superbest person, it is not merely what he or she says or knows or shows, or even how they behave, but in the silent qualities, like gravitation, that insensibly but resistlessly hold us; so in a good poem, or any other expression of art.

Couple with Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem, then revisit Burroughs on the measure of a visionary, the art of noticing, and how to live with the uncertainties of life.

BP

Fernando Pessoa on Unselfing into Who You Really Are

Fernando Pessoa on Unselfing into Who You Really Are

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,” E. E. Cummings wrote in his timeless summons for the courage to be yourself. But what does it really mean to be oneself when the self is an ever-moving target of ever-changing sentiments and cells, a figment of fixity to dam the fluidity that carries us along the river of life, to soften the hard fact that we never fully know who we are because we are never one thing long enough. “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion,” Iris Murdoch insisted in her magnificent case for unselfing, and yet we do live out our entire lives in it — the self is our sieve for reality, the sensory organ through which we experience love and politics and the color blue. How to inhabit it with authenticity but without attachment might be the great task of being alive.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.

The great Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) takes up these immense and intimate questions in The Book of Disquiet (public library) — his posthumously published collection of reflections and revelations partway between autobiography and aphorism, profoundly personal yet shimmering with the universal.

Considering himself “the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he’s a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it,” with a soul “impatient with itself,” Pessoa writes:

Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I’d languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.

[…]

Perhaps it’s finally time for me to make this one effort: to take a good look at my life. I see myself in the midst of a vast desert. I tell what I literarily was yesterday, and I try to explain to myself how I got here.

[…]

I retreat into myself, get lost in myself, forget myself in far-away nights uncontaminated by duty and the world, undefiled by mystery and the future.

A generation before the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh lost his self and found himself in a dazzling epiphany at the library, Pessoa recounts one such moment when the veils of the self parted long enough to glimpse the vastness of the unself:

All that I’ve done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I’d always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn’t I.

I’m dazed by a sarcastic terror of life, a despondency that exceeds the limits of my conscious being. I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought… This sudden awareness of my true being, of this being that has always sleepily wandered between what it feels and what it sees, weighs on me like an untold sentence to serve.

It’s so hard to describe what I feel when I feel I really exist and my soul is a real entity that I don’t know what human words could define it. I don’t know if I have a fever, as I feel I do, or if I’ve stopped having the fever of sleeping through life. Yes, I repeat, I’m like a traveller who suddenly finds himself in a strange town, without knowing how he got there, which makes me think of those who lose their memory and for a long time are not themselves but someone else. I was someone else for a long time — since birth and consciousness — and suddenly I’ve woken up in the middle of a bridge, leaning over the river and knowing that I exist more solidly than the person I was up till now.

And yet, like Virginia Woolf’s garden epiphany about the creative spirit and Margaret Fuller’s hilltop unselfing into “the All,” such moments of revelation in which the soul contacts reality are but brief sidewise glances at some elemental truth we cannot bear to look at continuously less we dissolve into it. Pessoa reflects:

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think. To know yourself in a flash, as I did in this moment, is to have a fleeting notion of the intimate monad, the soul’s magic word. But that sudden light scorches everything, consumes everything. It strips us naked of even ourselves.

Complement with Herman Melville on the mystery of what makes us who we are and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein on what makes you and your childhood self the “same” person despite a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, then revisit Jack Kerouac on the self illusion and the “Golden Eternity” found in its wake.

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.)