It is the sunset of the 1600s. Milton has just pioneered the use of the word space to connote outer space. Kepler has just pioneered science fiction by imagining space travel, but going only as far as the Moon. Gravity is a brand new concept and the notion of a galaxy is still more than two centuries away. The universe is as big as our Solar System, which has six planets orbiting a sun we have only just conceded, after burning the seers at the stake, does not revolve around us.
Against this backdrop, having set the Scientific Revolution into motion with his landmark contributions to optics, mechanics, and astronomy, the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens has just finished his most daring work: Cosmotheoros: or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants of the Planets — our world’s first treatise speculating on the existence of life on other worlds not from a theological but from a scientific standpoint.
Although Huygens outlived his era’s life expectancy twofold, he never lived to see its publication — published in Latin and English by his brother at his own expense, Cosmotheoros entered the world like a shockwave three years after Huygens’s death, changing not only the course of science but of art. It was the spark that led Shelley to scandalize Georgian England with the “plurality of worlds” he augured in his philosophical poem Queen Mab. It was the seed for the marvelously multifaceted field of astrobiology, at the beating heart of which is the question not of where life is but what life is.
More than three centuries later, Chilean artist Alejandra Acosta conjures up the visionary spirit of Cosmotheoros in a gorgeous Spanish edition illustrated with her intricate embroideries of the life-forms Huygens imagined inhabiting other worlds, radiating a lovely strangeness partway between Borges’s imaginary beings and the creatures of Indian folk mythology, yet entirely original, as daring artistically as the book was scientifically.
Without the concept at the center of Cosmotheoros, we wouldn’t have one of the finest metaphors in all of literature: “There is nothing new under the sun,” Octavia Butler wrote, “but there are new suns.”
Loneliness is the fundamental condition of life — we are born by another, but born alone; die around others (if we are lucky and loved), but die alone; we spend our lives islanded in our one and only human experience — in these particular bodies and minds and circumstances drawn from the cosmic lottery — amid the immense ocean of time and chance teeming with all possible experience. Everything of beauty and substance that we make — every poem, every painting, every friendship — is an outstretched hand reaching out from one loneliness to another, reaching into the mute mouth of forever for the vowels of a common language to howl our requiem for the evanescent now.
But despite being so fundamental, or perhaps precisely because of it, loneliness is fractal — the closer you look at the granularity of life, the more you see it branching into myriad lonelinesses, which, like the kinds of sadness, all have different emotional hues.
The loneliness of feeling invisible or misunderstood, bottomless and bone-chilling as the Scottish fog.
The loneliness of seeing what others look away from, remote and shoreless as a lighthouse.
The loneliness of public humiliation, a red-hot iron rod.
The loneliness of your most private failure, inky and arid like the desert at night.
The loneliness of success, shiny and sharp as obsidian.
In his 2008 psychology classic Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection (public library), Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson groups all the possible lonelinesses into the three core kinds that pulsate beneath our daily lives and govern our search for love: the past-oriented loneliness of missing what once was and never again will be, the future-oriented loneliness of longing for what could be but has not come to pass, and what he calls “the profound loneliness of being close to God.” This I take to mean the existential disorientation of feeling your transience press against the edge of the eternal, your smallness press against the immensity that dwells at the intersection of time, chance, and love; God is just what some call their dream of a crosswalk when they face that intersection.
The first two lonelinesses are rooted in time, which is itself fractal — there are many kinds of time we live with. The third kind of loneliness deals not with the temporal but with the eternal; it exists outside of time — like music, like wonder, like love. It is an existential loneliness, a creative loneliness, made not from the atoms of now that compose the other two lonelinesses but from the atoms of forever.
Because we, creatures made of time, cannot comprehend forever, it is easy to call it God — that catchall for everything immense and incomprehensible we face in ourselves. But this is an illusion — forever too is fractal, with myriad visitations of it in our daily lives. In a testament to James Baldwin’s timeless insistence that “the poets… are finally the only people who know the truth about us,” it is not the psychologists or the philosophers but the poets who part the veil of illusion to reveal the truth:
SOME KINDS OF FOREVER VISIT YOU by Brenda Hillman
The unknowns are up early;
they browse through the bronze
porch bells. Crows
call & late
apples blaze
toward western emptiness.
In your illness,
the edges hesitate;
like the revolt
of workers, they
will take a while…
Here comes the fond
mild winter; other
realms are noisy
& unanimous. You tap
the screen & dream
while waiting; four
kinds of forever
visit you today:
something, nothing,
everything & art,
greater than you are
& of your making —
“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her poem “The Speed of Darkness” not long after James Baldwin told an audience of writers that “we made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.” We make the world not with our ballots — though they do, oh they do matter — but with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are capable of, the stories we believe to be true. Politics, after all, is just the weaponized business of belief. And it may be that the only real antidote to the insanity of our times, to this planet-wide storm system of helplessness and disorientation, is to resist with everything we’ve got the belief that our story is finished, that we and our organizing principles are the final word of this universe, dragging behind us the fourteen-billion-year comet tail that blazed from the first atoms to the atomic bomb.
I know no mightier or more mellifluous voice of resistance to this dangerous belief than the poet, anthropologist, and ecological steward Gary Snyder (b. May 8, 1930), who would surely resist being called a philosopher, but who for nearly a century has been teaching us with his writing and his living how to live and how to die — and what else is philosophy?
Born into a family that survived by subsistence farming after the Great Depression hurled them into poverty, Snyder was seven when an accident left him bedridden for months. He spent them devouring book after book from the public library, so that by the time he was back on his feet, he had read more than a college freshman. Reading, of course, teaches us that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives — it complicates our story of what it means to be alive, it opens our eyes and our hearts to how other people and peoples in other times and other places have lived, how their ways of being might deepen and broaden and elevate our own.
By the time he was a young man, Snyder was determined to bend his gaze beyond his era’s horizon of possibility.
He took a job as a seaman to better understand other cultures and enrolled in a graduate program for Asian languages at Berkeley.
He worked as a vagabond laborer up and down the West Coast, a trail-builder in Yosemite, a crewman in the engine room of an oil tanker, a fire lookout in the North Cascades, and a timber scaler on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.
He roomed for a while with Jack Kerouac, studied for a while with Alan Watts, and climbed Glacier Peak with Allen Ginsberg at the belay.
He discovered Zen through D.T. Suzuki and learned ink and watercolor painting from Chiura Obata.
He spent fifteen years living in Buddhist communities after boarding a marine freighter to study Zen Buddhism in Japan.
And all the while, he wrote poetry, thought deeply about the nature of the mind and the substance of the spirit, and paid tender attention to the living world, to the relational nature of being, to the meaning and making of freedom.
Snyder’s increasingly urgent and clarifying vision for remaking the world by rewriting our stories of the possible comes alive in Earth House Hold (public library) — the 1969 collection of his journal entries and poem fragments.
Long before Doris Lessing urged us to examine the prisons we choose to live inside, Snyder makes a piercing parenthetical observation in a diary entry penned after “two days contemplating ecology, food-chains and sex”:
Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.
He considers the cages of our cultural ideologies:
There is nothing in human nature or the requirements of human social organization which intrinsically requires that a culture be contradictory, repressive and productive of violent and frustrated personalities… The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.
The most merciless danger of our present world order is that we have turned these “violent and frustrated personalities” into leaders, largely because the power structures of secular life, which we call politics, are modeled on the power structures of large organized religions. But there are other organizing principles to be drawn from other, older spiritual traditions that may better address the problem of being alive in this time and place, of managing the superorganism we have become and the inner life of the spirit in each of us cells. In Distant Neighbors (public library) — the absolutely wonderful record of his epistolary friendship with Wendell Berry — Snyder (whose poetically titled graduate thesis “He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village” explored the wisdom of indigenous traditions) reflects:
Whereas “world religions” tend to have great charismatic human leader-founders, the natural religions, the old ways, take their teachings direct from the human mind, the collective unconscious, the ground of being. Rather than theology, they have mythology and visionary practice… The two levels, of course, are (1) acting as social glue and intensifying the bonds of the culture and the coherence of it; the other is liberating and transcendent, of freeing one from the bonds of ego and conditioning. It’s fascinating to see the dialectic of these two roles as they work out in different times and places. Some traditions within great traditions tend toward total mysticism, others ground themselves entirely in secular affairs. All religions are one at the point where life is given to the spirit, and real breakthrough is achieved. I doubt that any of the world religions ever have or could achieve a fusion of the two levels; I like to believe that some ancient religions — Old Ways — did achieve it: like perhaps the Hopi. The thing is, “world religions” are always a bad deal: they are evoked by the contradictions and problems of civilization, and they make compromises from the beginning to be allowed to live. The Great Fact of the last 8,000 years is civilization; the power of which has been and remains greater than the power of any religion within that time span.
Some mystics, Snyder observes, have always found ways to “crack through dogma” — he names Meister Eckhart among them, and I would add Hildegard of Bingen and Simone Weil — but he laments that Christianity, the dominant religion of the capitalist West, has become more and more of “a centralist teaching.” In most Eastern spiritual traditions, on the other hand, “the center of being is everywhere.” He writes:
Zen, as the arm of Buddhism most given to the life of the spirit, really doesn’t care about theology or dogma; it takes people where the spirit leads, and has a complete authenticity of its own, one must adjust this authenticity to whatever received teachings one started from on one’s own.
Nobody else can do it for you; the Buddha is only the teacher.
Drawing on his life in Zen, he considers what he made for himself of the ancient teachings:
Wisdom is intuitive knowledge of the mind of love and clarity that lies beneath one’s ego-driven anxieties and aggressions… Morality is bringing it back out in the way you live, through personal example and responsible action, ultimately toward the true community (sangha) of “all beings.” This last aspect means, for me, supporting any cultural and economic revolution that moves clearly toward a free, international, classless world. It means using such means as civil disobedience, outspoken criticism, protest, pacifism, voluntary poverty and even gentle violence if it comes to a matter of restraining some impetuous redneck. It means affirming the widest possible spectrum of non-harmful individual behavior — defending the right of individuals to smoke hemp, eat peyote, be polygynous, polyandrous or homosexual. Worlds of behavior and custom long banned by the Judaeo-Capitalist-Christian-Marxist West. It means respecting intelligence and learning, but not as greed or means to personal power. Working on one’s own responsibility, but willing to work with a group.
[…]
The traditional cultures are in any case doomed… The coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past. If we are lucky we may eventually arrive at a totally integrated world culture with matrilineal descent, free-form marriage, natural-credit communist economy, less industry, far less population and lots more national parks.
The story the “Judaeo-Capitalist-Christian-Marxist West” has sold us is that self-interest is the only path to growth — there goes Silicon Valley lining up with the fault line that is Donald Trump — and that parasitism the only way of securing resources for oneself. Snyder’s vision for this coming revolution of consciousness is not against growth but for symbiosis rather than parasitism, for interdependence rather than selfing, as the path to growth. In Turtle Island (public library) — his 1974 book of poems and essays, titled after the Native American term for North America — he reflects:
The longing for growth is not wrong. The nub of the problem now is how to flip over, as in jujitsu, the magnificent growth-energy of modern civilization into a nonacquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature… If people come to realize that there are many nonmaterial, nondestructive paths of growth — of the highest and most fascinating order — it would help dampen the common fear that a steady state economy would mean deadly stagnation.
In The Real Work (public library) — the collection of interviews and talks he gave in the 1960s and 1970s — he elaborates on this idea, considering what those alternative paths to growth look like and what they ask of us. Just as Rachel Carson was signing her untimely farewell to the world with her haunting instruction for how to save it, he writes:
The danger and hope politically is that Western civilization has reached the end of its ecological rope. Right now there is the potential for the growth of a real people’s consciousness.
[…]
All of industrial/technological civilization is really on the wrong track, because its drive and energy are purely mechanical and self-serving — real values are someplace else. The real values are within nature, family, mind, and into liberation… And how do we make the choices in our national economic policy that take into account that kind of cost accounting — that ask, “What is the natural-spiritual price we pay for this particular piece of affluence, comfort, pleasure, or labor saving?”
[…]
The only hope for a society ultimately hell-bent on self-destructive growth is not to deny growth as a mode of being, but to translate it to another level, another dimension… The change can be hastened, but there are preconditions to doing that… Nobody can move from [one] to [the other] in a vacuum as a solitary individual…. What have to be built are community networks… When people, in a very modest way, are able to define a certain unity of being together, a commitment to staying together for a while, they can begin to correct their use of energy and find a way to be mutually employed. And this, of course, brings a commitment to the place, which means right relation to nature.
A decade later, Snyder would distill the essence of this orientation in a talk he delivered to an audience of college students:
What we’d hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds.
And while it is true that no one else can walk the path and do the real work for us, it is also true that we can be helped and guided, that we especially need the help and guidance in such times of helplessness and disorientation. Snyder writes:
True teachers are called into being by the contradictions generated by civilization… We need them.
I was a latecomer to poetry, curling my nose at it in that confounding and rather embarrassing way we have of discounting what we don’t understand, dismissing as useless what we don’t know how to use. And then I met Emily Levine. Across the aisle on a transatlantic flight, across our half century of age difference, we became instant and abiding friends.
Emily Levine (Portrait by John Keatley)
Intellectually dazzling, creatively mischievous, and ecstatically funny, Emily took it upon herself to open my world to poetry, reading me a poem a day, peppering with poems our rapturously roaming conversations about semiotics and the singularity, the physics of flight and the evolution of flowers, Hannah Arendt and The Beatles, until I came to love poetry and, eventually, to write it. Emily is the reason The Universe in Verse exists.
When she was dying — which she did with such vivifying reverence for reality — we began taking long weekends by the ocean, reading poetry and talking about the meaning of life. The poems she brought were always a revelation, down to the very last one, which became a lifelong favorite I revisit whenever I lose perspective.
But it was the first poem Emily ever read to me, to break me in, that stands as eternal testament to her spirit, to the playfulness with which she approached even the most poignant aspects of this life.
Marianne Moore (Photograph: George Platt Lynes)
Marianne Moore (November 15, 1887–February 5, 1972) was in her early thirties and the world had just come undone by its first global war when, reckoning with the eternal question of what the point of art is in these matters of life and death, she composed this perfect poem — a vindication, a consecration, and, perhaps above all, an invitation:
POETRY by Marianne Moore
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us — that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—
ball fan, the statistician — case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination” — above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion —
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