Seven years after the improbable idea of cross-pollinating poetry and science came abloom on a Brooklyn stage in a former warehouse built in Whitman’s lifetime, after it traveled to the redwoods of Santa Cruz and the sunlit skies of Austin, The Universe in Versehas become a book — fifteen portals to wonder, each comprising an essay about some enchanting facet of science (entropy and dark matter, symmetry and the singularity, octopus intelligence and the evolution of flowers), paired with a poem that shines a sidewise gleam on these concepts (Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Maya Angelou and Sylvia Plath, Tracy K. Smith and Marie Howe).
It was a joy to write, and a joy to collaborate with two of the most thoughtful and talented people I know: The print book features original art by Ofra Amit (who painted my favorite piece in A Velocity of Being), and the audiobook features the living artwork that is Lili Taylor’s voice narrating the essays (I read the poems).
For a sense of the spirit of it, here is my introduction as it appears in the book:
We live our human lives in the lacuna between truth and meaning, between objective reality and subjective sensemaking laced with feeling. All of our longings, all of our despairs, all of our reckonings with the perplexity of existence are aimed at one or the other. In the aiming is what we call creativity, how we contact beauty — the beauty of a theorem, the beauty of a sonnet.
The Universe in Verse was born in 2017 as a festival of wonder: stories from the history of science — the history of our search for truth and our yearning to know nature — told live onstage alongside readings of illustrative poems — those emblems of our search for meaning and our yearning to know ourselves. Year after year, thousands of people gathered to listen, think, and feel together — a congregation of creatures concerned with the relationship between truth and beauty, between love and mortality, between the finite and the infinite.
Poetry may seem an improbable portal into the fundamental nature of reality — into dark matter and the singularity, evolution and entropy, Hubble’s law and pi — but it has a lovely way of sneaking ideas into our consciousness through the back door of feeling, bypassing our ordinary ways of seeing and relating to the world, our biases and preconceptions, and swinging open another gateway of receptivity. Through it, other scales of time, space, and significance — scales that are the raw material of science — can enter more fully and more faithfully into our worldview, depositing us back into our ordinary lives broadened and magnified so that we can return to our daily tasks and our existential longings with renewed resilience and a passion for possibility.
Poetry and science — individually, but especially together — are instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it more deeply. We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other. At the crossing point of the two we may find a way of clarifying our experience and of sanctifying it; a way of harmonizing the objective reality of a universe insentient to our hopes and fears with the subjective reality of what it feels like to be alive, to tremble with grief, to be glad. Both are occupied with helping us discover something we did not know before — something about who we are and what this is. Their shared benediction is a wakefulness to reality aglow with wonder.
You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal.
I think about this and a passage from Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum (public library) flits across the sky of my mind:
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
This, of course, is what life evolved to be — an aria of affirmation rising like luminous steam from the cold dark silence of an indifferent cosmos that will one day swallow all of it. Every living thing is its singer and its steward — something the poetic paleontologist Loren Eiseley captures with uncommon poignancy in his 1957 essay “The Judgment of the Birds,” found in his altogether magnificent posthumous collection The Star Thrower (public library).
Raven by Jackie Morris from The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane
Eiseley recounts resting beneath a tree after a day of trekking through fern and pine needles collecting fossils, dozing off in the warm sunlight, then being suddenly awakened by a great commotion to see “an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak” perching on a crooked branch above. He writes:
Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents. No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death. And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable. The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.
We move through the world as surfaces shimmering with the visibilia of our accomplishments, the undertow of our suffering invisible to passers-by. The selective collective memory we call history contributes to this willful blindness, obscuring the tremendous personal cost behind some of humanity’s most triumphant achievements — the great discoveries, the great symphonies, the great paradigm shifts. This is not to say that suffering is a prerequisite for greatness — I don’t subscribe to the dangerous myth of the tortured genius. But because the engine of all creative energy is connection, suffering can serve as a mighty instrument of unselfing, of contacting that place where the spirit meets the bone of being, that common core of human experience. “It is only through the gates of suffering, either mental or physical,” a gifted young poet who wouldn’t live past 30 wrote to Emily Dickinson, “that we can pass into that tender sympathy with the griefs of all of mankind which it ought to be the ideal of every soul to attain.” People of uncommon creative vision have often touched the soul of humanity not because of their suffering but through it. Perhaps the supreme mark of greatness is leaving something of substance and sweetness in the mouth of the world despite the bitter disappointments and heartbreaks you suffer. (I wrote Figuring largely as an ode to seven such people.)
John James Audubon (April 26, 1785–January 27, 1851) was eighteen when he arrived alone in America with a fake passport, fleeing conscription in Napoleon’s army. Born Jean-Jacques Rabin, he was the illegitimate son of a French plantation owner and a Creole mother who had died in a slave rebellion when he was a small boy. The love of birds that had buoyed him through a lonely childhood became the guiding passion of his new life. Despite having only rudimentary portraiture training, he taught himself to draw nature and set out “to complete a collection not only valuable to the scientific class, but pleasing to every person.” He winced at his first attempts — “My pencil gave birth to a family of cripples.” — but her persisted. Every year, he would burn entire batches of bird drawings that didn’t satisfy him and start all over, often spending fourteen continuous hours on a single bird.
All the while, struggling to support his family, he tried his hand at various businesses — indigo, a saw mill, a steamer — all ending catastrophically, costing him more than he had put in. Accepting that he had no gift for business, Audubon leaned on his creative gifts: He gave dance lessons, drew portraits in black chalk for $5 each, wrote to President Monroe in the hope of getting an appointment as artist and naturalist on a government expedition. (He never heard back.)
The hardships kept coming. While traveling down the Mississippi, a bottle of gunpowder exploded in his chest, damaging 200 of his bird drawings. He had left another 200 in storage with a friend, only to discover upon his return that “a pair of Norway rats had taken possession of the whole, and reared a young family among gnawed bits of paper, which but a month previous, represented nearly one thousand inhabitants of the air!”
19th-century Japanese woodblock depicting Audubon’s discovery of the rat-savaged drawings.
Despite the biochemical blessing of a bright disposition, Audubon felt at times that his spirit would break from the weight of disappointment, and yet his passion for the work buoyed him, saved him. From the fortunate platform of his old age, he would look back on one especially dispiriting period early in the project:
The world was with me as a blank, and my heart was sorely heavy, for scarcely had I enough to keep my dear ones alive; and yet through these dark ways I was being led to the development of the talents I loved, and which have brought so much enjoyment to us all.
Throughout the struggle, Audubon kept at his vision. He worked tirelessly, with fiery passion bordering on possession. In the journal later edited by his grand-daughter Maria, he writes during on particularly flaming stretch in the autumn of 1829:
I wish I had eight pairs of hands… still I am delighted at what I have accumulated in drawings this season. Forty-two drawings in four months, eleven large, eleven middle size, and twenty-two small, comprising ninety-five birds, from Eagles downwards, with plants, nests, flowers, and sixty different kinds of eggs. I live alone, see scarcely any one, besides those belonging to the house where I lodge. I rise long before day and work till nightfall, when I take a walk, and to bed.
When he pitched his book of birds to publishers, he got only rejections. And so, like Whitman would a quarter century later, Audubon decided to self-publish his magnum opus, relying on subscribers, asking for a pledge of $1,000 for the full body of work. It took him four years to complete the first volume, by which point he had lost more than a third of his subscribers.
America, too unrefined in its art and too young in its science, did not seem ready for him. So Audubon headed to Europe in search of subscribers, painting the ship’s cabins to pay his passage, drawing portraits of a shoemaker and his wife to acquire proper shoes. The trip was his wife’s idea. While his friends thought him a madman to keep laboring at something doomed to failure, Lucy’s encouragement sustained him. “My wife determined that my genius should prevail, and that my final success as an ornithologist should be triumphant,” he would later reflect.
An American born in England, Lucy had helped Jean-Jacques become John James not only on paper but in his mastery of the new language that eventually made him one of the most lyrical nature writers humanity has produced, writing about birds the way he felt about them: with reverence, tenderness, and poetic ardor.
To assist with the publication of her husband’s work, Lucy began teaching — tirelessly, taking on more and more students, until she was earning a staggering $3,000 per year: more than $100,000 today. An epoch before Arthur Rackham revolutionized the business of book art with his Alice in Wonderland illustrations, printing books with text and color images was an expensive and laborious process. By the time Audubon completed his Birds of America, the final work — an immense four-volume “Double Elephant Folio” — had cost him $115,640 to print: more than $2,000,000 today. It had taken him fourteen years. “Few enterprises, involving such labour and expense, have ever been carried through against such odds,” the great naturalist John Burroughs exulted in his short and splendid biography of Audubon.
John James Audubon by John Syme (White House Historical Association)
One of the most extraordinary things among all these adverse circumstances was that I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way that I could; nay, during my deepest troubles I frequently would wrench myself from the persons around me, and retire to some secluded part of our noble forests; and many a time, at the sound of the wood-thrush’s melodies have I fallen on my knees, and there prayed earnestly to our God.
This never failed to bring me the most valuable of thoughts and always comfort, and, strange as it may seem to you, it was often necessary for me to exert my will, and compel myself to return to my fellow-beings.
In the end, every artist’s art is their coping mechanism for the soul-aches of living, and what we make of our creative potential is largely a matter of how we bear our suffering, of learning to save ourselves by finding and feeding those things that most reliably nourish our strength and our sanity — friendships and forests, song and sea, and above all the tug of wonder.
It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of events that turned atoms born in the first stars into you — into this temporary clump of borrowed stardust that, for the brief interlude between not having existed and no longer existing, gets to have ideas and ice cream and orgasms, gets to yearn and to suffer and to love.
Perhaps the most hopeful thing about being alive is that we are never finished and complete. Perhaps the most exasperating is that we are never entirely new, that we are nested with every self we have ever been, each stage of our development shaped by the singular needs and tensions of each preceding stage, our character shaped by how those needs and tensions were met and resolved.
The influential psychoanalyst Erik Erikson (June 15, 1902–May 12, 1994), who coined the term identity crisis and readily recognized that “an individual life is the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history,” took up this tessellated question of our incremental becoming in his 1950 book Childhood and Society (public library) — an investigation of “the growth and the crises of the human person as a series of alternative basic attitudes.”
Erikson identifies eight sequential stages of human development, each marked by a particular battery of opposite psychic charges — one a positive developmental achievement that strengthens one’s self-trust, world-trust, and creative potency, the other a danger that fosters antagonism, isolation, and despair. He writes:
The strength acquired at any stage is tested by the necessity to transcend it in such a way that the individual can take chances in the next stage with what was most vulnerably precious in the previous one.
[…]
There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding, which constitutes a new hope and a new responsibility for all.
[…]
In view of the dangerous potentials of man’s long childhood, it is well to look back at the blueprint of the life-stages and to the possibilities of guiding the young of the race while they are young.
The first intense experience of life is separation — infant and mother are no longer one, and the infant must learn to trust that the mother is still there even when she vanishes from view. Erikson writes:
The infant’s first social achievement, then, is his willingness to let the mother out of sight without undue anxiety or rage, because she has become an inner certainty as well as an outer predictability. Such consistency, continuity, and sameness of experience provide a rudimentary sense of ego identity.
[…]
This forms the basis in the child for a sense of identity which will later combine a sense of being “all right,” of being oneself.
This kind of trust is the foundation of confidence, for it is also training ground for the self-trust necessary to withstand separation, to have faith in one’s inherent okayness. The absence of such maternal consistency and continuity, Erikson observes, may be one of the most difficult cards to be dealt in life, predisposing people to habitual “depressive states” in later stages.
This is also the stage in which we learn to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins — the vital distinction that enables us to differentiate between the rewards of interdependence and the dangers of codependence, to navigate the myriad traps that strew the meeting ground between self and other. Erikson writes:
The early process of differentiation between inside and outside [is] the origin of projection and introjection which remain some of our deepest and most dangerous defense mechanisms. In introjection we feel and act as if an outer goodness had become an inner certainty. In projection, we experience an inner harm as an outer one: we endow significant people with the evil which actually is in us… These mechanisms are, more or less normally, reinstated in acute crises of love, trust, and faith in adulthood and can characterize irrational attitudes toward adversaries and enemies in masses of “mature” individuals.
2. AUTONOMY VS. SHAME AND DOUBT (18 MONTHS-3 YEARS)
The hallmark of the second stage is a physiological development that becomes an analogue for one of the most important psychological skills in life — to hold on and to let go, central to such fundamental capacities as intimacy, compassion, tenacity, and forgiveness. Erikson writes:
Muscular maturation sets the stage for experimentation with two simultaneous sets of social modalities: holding on and letting go. As is the case with all of these modalities, their basic conflicts can lead in the end to either hostile or benign expectations and attitudes. Thus, to hold can become a destructive and cruel retaining or restraining, and it can become a pattern of care: to have and to hold. To let go, too, can turn into an inimical letting loose of destructive forces, or it can become a relaxed “to let pass” and “to let be.”
This is the stage at which the experience of shame first emerges and we must learn to have our “basic faith in existence” not jeopardized by the embarrassments of getting things wrong. (“Shame is an experience that affects and is affected by the whole self,” the pioneering sociologist and philosopher Helen Merrell Lynd would write a few years later in her insightful take on shame and the search for identity.) For the infant at this stage, Erikson observes, shame springs from the emergence of a new developmental phenomenon: the “sudden violent wish to have a choice, to appropriate demandingly, and to eliminate stubbornly.” He writes:
Shame supposes that one is completely exposed and conscious of being looked at: in one word, self-conscious. One is visible and not ready to be visible… Shame is… essentially rage turned against the self.
With an eye to the development of these crucial capacities for holding on, letting go, and withstanding shame, he adds:
This stage, therefore, becomes decisive for the ratio of love and hate, cooperation and willfulness, freedom of self-expression and its suppression, From a sense of self-control without loss of self-esteem comes a lasting sense of good will and pride; from a sense of loss of self-control and of foreign overcontrol comes a lasting propensity for doubt and shame.
3. INITIATIVE VS. GUILT (AGES 3-5)
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Kenny’s Window — his little-known philosophical first children’s book.
As we begin to take initiative in completing tasks, we develop what Erikson calls “anticipatory rivalry” — which may be another word for envy — toward those who complete the same tasks better. Here, we learn that what the world asks of us often requires the repression and inhibition of our own hopes and desires.
The danger of this, if we successfully cede desire to demand, is a sense of self-righteousness — “often the principal reward of goodness,” Erikson astutely observes a decade before Joan Didion admonished against mistaking self-righteousness for morality, a tendency painfully pronounced in our own time of virtue signaling.
This is the stage at which our natural creativity and capacity for play begin being sublimated to our civilizational cult of productivity. School starts, forcing the child to part with earlier hopes and wishes as their “exuberant imagination is tamed and harnessed… to be a worker.”
The danger in this overidentification with accomplishment, building upon the earlier development of envy, is “a sense of inadequacy and inferiority,” which may lead the child to believe themselves “doomed to mediocrity or inadequacy.” (This, of course, is the perennial danger of all self-comparison, acute even for adults in today’s broadcast selfhood of social media.)
Here begins our concern with what we appear to be to others versus what we feel we are — an integration that marks the emergence of our ego identity. Erikson considers the many guises in which the great danger of this stage — role confusion — can appear:
To keep themselves together [adolescents] temporarily overidentify, to the point of apparent complete loss of identity, with the heroes of cliques and crowds. This initiates the stage of “falling in love,” which is by no means entirely, or even primarily, a sexual matter — except where the mores demand it. To a considerable extent adolescent love is an attempt to arrive at a definition of one’s identity by projecting one’s diffused ego image on another and by seeing it thus reflected and gradually clarified. This is why so much of young love is conversation.
In a passage of far-reaching insight and extraordinary empathy for the vulnerabilities of the psyche, which most people would rather fault than fathom, he adds:
Young people can also be remarkably clannish, and cruel in their exclusion of all those who are “different,” in skin color or cultural background, in tastes and gifts, and often in such petty aspects of dress and gesture as have been temporarily selected as the signs of an in-grouper or out-grouper. It is important to understand (which does not mean condone or participate in) such intolerance as a defense against a sense of identity confusion. For adolescents not only help one another temporarily through much discomfort by forming cliques and by stereotyping themselves, their ideals, and their enemies; they also perversely test each other’s capacity to pledge fidelity. The readiness for such testing also explains the appeal which simple and cruel totalitarian doctrines have on the minds of the youth.
This is the stage at which emotional integrity develops — we learn the particular form of self-trust and self-respect that come from making commitments and keeping them, even when it is difficult to do so. The self-permission to break promises and cancel plans stems from a failure at the developmental achievement of this stage and the price we pay for it, quite apart from disappointing and hurting others, is always an erosion of self-trust and self-respect. Erikson writes:
The young adult, emerging from the search for and the insistence on identity… is ready for intimacy, that is, the capacity to commit himself to concrete affiliations and partnerships and to develop the ethical strength to abide by such commitments, even though they may call for significant sacrifices and compromises.
Observing that this is when we first face the “fear of ego loss” in situations that may require compromise and sacrifice, he adds:
The avoidance of such experiences because of a fear of ego loss may lead to a deep sense of isolation and consequent self-absorption.
The great challenge of this stage is that “intimate, competitive, and combative relations are experienced with and against the selfsame people.” It is necessary to learn to tolerate and resolve such tensions, or otherwise we face the great danger of this stage — isolation, which Erikson defines as “the avoidance of contacts which commit to intimacy.”
7. GENERATIVITY VS. STAGNATION (AGES 40-65)
Art by Carson Ellis from What Is Love? by Mac Barnett
Erikson counters our culture’s hyperfocus on children’s dependence on parents with the insistence that the older generation is also dependent on the younger, for elders “need to be needed.” (A generation before him, Jane Ellen Harrison addressed this with great geniality and great percipience in her meditation on Old Age and Youth.)
Erikson terms the animating achievement of this life-stage generativity, which he defines as “the concern in establishing and guiding the next generation,” noting that it is “meant to include such more popular synonyms as productivity and creativity, which, however, cannot replace it.”
Whether generativity manifests as physically producing the next generation through procreation or contributing to the world through acts of creation, a failure to attain it results in “a pervading sense of stagnation and personal impoverishment.”
“One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her sixties as she reflected on the art of growing older. That we must die is precisely what impels us to render our lives valuable. We can only do so, Erikson argues, by moving through the prior seven stages toward this final fruition of what he calls ego integrity — “the ego’s accrued assurance of its proclivity for order and meaning,” built of our adaptation “to the triumphs and disappointments adherent to being.”
[Ego integrity] is a post-narcissistic love of the human ego—not of the self — as an experience which conveys some world order and spiritual sense, no matter how dearly paid for. It is the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle as something that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substitutions.
One consequence of this acceptance is “a new, a different love of one’s parents.” Another is that “death loses its sting,” for the fear of death stems from the lack of a sense of cohesion and consonance with universal life — a lack that takes shape as despair. (This may be why D.H. Lawrence called death “the last wonder” and wrote: “If you want to live in peace on the face of the earth / Then build your ship of death, in readiness / For the longest journey.”)
Erikson ends with one of the most potent formulae in the science of the psyche:
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
In the late morning of the first day of August in 2023, exactly twenty summers after I arrived in Philadelphia as a lone teenager from a country thirteen centuries America’s senior, I experienced that wonderful capacity for self-surprise as tears came streaming down my face in a windowless government office. I had taken the naturalization ceremony to be just the final checklist item on a long and tedious bureaucratic process. But standing there between an Ethiopian family holding a newborn and a beautiful Burmese woman older than my grandmother, born just after women became citizens of mankind, I found myself profoundly moved, a shaky voice in the chorus reciting the Oath of Allegiance — all these beautiful people from every corner of the world, who had left behind everything they knew of home to partake of this imaginative experiment in freedom, flourishing, and dignity for all.
Detail from the art in Cueva de las Manos, Argentina, created between 7,300 BC and 700 AD.
In preparing for my first election — an election so historic it may be the litmus test for the experiment’s success or failure — I was reminded of an uncommonly insightful investigation of democracy not as a political but as a psychological phenomenon by the reliably revelatory pediatrician turned psychiatrist Donald Winnicott (April 7, 1896–January 28, 1971).
In a 1958 essay found in his posthumous essay collection Home Is Where We Start from (public library), Winnicott examines the meaning of democracy in a way that may “give unconscious emotional factors their full import.” He writes:
An important latent meaning [is] that a democratic society is “mature,” that is to say, that it has a quality that is allied to the quality of individual maturity which characterizes its healthy members.
[…]
In psychiatric terms, the normal or healthy individual can be said to be one who is mature; according to his or her chronological age and social setting there is an appropriate degree of emotional development… Psychiatric health is therefore a term without fixed meaning. In the same way the term “democratic” need not have a fixed meaning… In this way one would expect the frozen meaning of the word to be different in Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, and yet to find that the term retains value because of its implying the recognition of maturity as health.
The full realization of democracy, Winnicott argues, requires the study of society’s emotional development beneath the political machinery of democratic election, which is itself rooted in a fundament of our psychological experience as persons:
The essence of democratic machinery is the free vote (secret ballot). The point of this is that it ensures the freedom of the people to express deep feelings, apart from conscious thoughts. In the exercise of the secret vote, the whole responsibility for action is taken by the individual, if he is healthy enough to take it. The vote expresses the outcome of the struggle within himself, the external scene having been internalized and so brought into association with the interplay of forces in his own personal inner world. That is to say, the decision as to which way to vote is the expression of a solution of a struggle within himself. The process seems to be somewhat as follows. The external scene, with its many social and political aspects, is made personal for him in the sense that he gradually identifies himself with all the parties to the struggle. This means that he perceives the external scene in terms of his own internal struggle, and he temporarily allows his internal struggle to be waged in terms of the external political scene. This to-and-fro process involves work and takes time, and it is part of democratic machinery to arrange for a period of preparation. A sudden election would produce an acute sense of frustration in the electorate. Each voter’s inner world has to be turned into a political arena over a limited period.
In a sentiment evocative of Toni Morrison’s magnificent 2004 commencement address, in which she celebrates true maturity an achievement that is “a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory,” Winnicott offers a perspectival definition:
A democracy is an achievement, at a point of time, of a limited society, i.e. of a society that has some natural boundary. Of a true democracy (as the term is used today) one can say: In this society at this time there is sufficient maturity in the emotional development of a sufficient proportion of the individuals that comprise it for there to exist an innate tendency towards the creation and re-creation and maintenance of the democratic machinery.
Out of this insight can arise a kind of formula for predicting the fate of a society:
It would be important to know what proportion of mature individuals is necessary if there is to be an innate democratic tendency. In another way of expressing this, what proportion of antisocial individuals can a society contain without submergence of innate democratic tendency?
The danger of that proportion is what Whitman contoured a century before Winnicott in his own reckoning with democracy, admonishing that “America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without.”
Artist Margaret C. Cook’s illustration for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)
The antisocial, Winnicott observes, come in three main psychological varieties: the overt kind, who “show their lack of sense of society by developing an antisocial tendency”; those “reacting to inner insecurity by the alternative tendency — identification with authority,” whom he calls “hidden antisocials”; and “indeterminates who would be drawn by weakness or fear into association with [the antisocials].” Of these, he highlights the hidden antisocials as the most dangerous, for their motives are most unconscious. (In every region of life, down to our most intimate relationships, the most unsafe people are those most lacking in self-awareness, most governed by unconscious complexes.)
He considers the psychological peril of the hidden antisocials:
This is unhealthy, immature, because it is not an identification with authority that arises out of self-discovery. It is a sense of frame without sense of picture, a sense of form without retention of spontaneity… Hidden antisocials are not “whole persons” any more than are manifest antisocials, since each needs to find and to control the conflicting force in the external world outside the self. By contrast, the healthy person, who is capable of becoming depressed, is able to find the whole conflict within the self as well as being able to see the whole conflict outside the self, in external (shared) reality. When healthy persons come together, they each contribute a whole world, because each brings a whole person.
In an insight of staggering pertinence to our present political climate, not just in America but throughout the so-called democratic world courting totalitarianism under the guise of individualism, he adds:
Hidden antisocials provide material for a type of leadership which is sociologically immature. Moreover, this element in a society greatly strengthens the danger that derives from its frank antisocial elements, especially since ordinary people so easily let those with an urge to lead get into key positions. Once in such positions, these immature leaders immediately gather to themselves the obvious antisocials, who welcome them (the immature anti-individual leaders) as their natural masters.
In the remainder of the essay, Winnicott goes on to explore the creation of that necessary “innate democratic factor,” which begins with “the ordinary man and woman, and the ordinary, common-place home” — the work of parenting. (The morning after the 2016 presidential election, fearing my new home might come to resemble the dictatorship I was born into, I reached out to the wisest elder I knew — a 100-year-old Holocaust survivor — for perspective and consolation. Reminding me that the grimmest crime against humanity began with a legal election, she insisted that abating the unconscionable cannot be done purely on the level of politics — it must begin, she said, deeper and earlier: by laying the moral foundation of the young.)
Sign in an Italian mountain village. (Available as a print.)
In a passage of astonishing prescience, Winnicott considers the staggering gender disparity in political leadership over history and its root in our developmental psychology:
In psychoanalytical and allied work it is found that all individuals (men and women) have in reserve a certain fear of WOMAN. Some individuals have this fear to a greater extent than others, but it can be said to be universal. This is quite different from saying that an individual fears a particular woman. This fear of WOMAN is a powerful agent in society structure, and it is responsible for the fact that in very few societies does a woman hold the political reins. It is also responsible for the immense amount of cruelty to women, which can be found in customs that are accepted by almost all civilizations.
The root of this fear of WOMAN is known. It is related to the fact that in the early history of every individual who develops well, and who is sane, and who has been able to find himself, there is a debt to a woman — the woman who was devoted to that individual as an infant, and whose devotion was absolutely essential for that individual’s healthy development. The original dependence is not remembered, and therefore the debt is not acknowledged, except in so far as the fear of WOMAN represents the first stage of this acknowledgement.
With haunting foresight into both the fault lines and the opportunities of our time, he adds:
As an offshoot of this consideration, one can consider the psychology of the dictator, who is at the opposite pole to anything that the word “democracy” can mean. One of the roots of the need to be a dictator can be a compulsion to deal with this fear of woman by encompassing her and acting for her. The dictator’s curious habit of demanding not only absolute obedience and absolute dependence but also “love” can be derived from this source.
Among the things I most cherish about science is the way it anneals curiosity. True curiosity is an open wonderment at what something is and how it works without emotional attachment to the outcome of observation and experiment. It is only when we cede emotional attachment that we can be truly free from judgment, for all judgment is feeling — usually some species of fear — masquerading as thought. And when we judge, we cannot understand. True curiosity is therefore a form of love, because, as the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh so plainly and poignantly put it, “understanding is love’s other name.”
There have been few more curious and loving observes of this world than Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862). “Life! who knows what it is, what it does?” he exclaimed on the pages of his journal — perhaps the book in my library most populous with highlights and marginalia — a tender record of Thoreau’s yearning to understand the nature and workings of life in all its physical and psychic manifestations, not as a scientist but as a poet. “Every poet has trembled on the verge of science,” he conceded as he read books of ornithology to deepen his reverence for the birds he observed, and yet it was with a poet’s eyes that he observed them, animated by the belief that “the poet’s relation to his theme is the relation of lovers.”
Because curiosity is a supreme act of unselfing, it is at its most difficult and most rewarding when aimed at what is most unlike ourselves — as Thoreau’s is in his journal account of a singular encounter from the autumn of 1855.
One “raw and windy” October afternoon, paddling down a stream under the overcast skies, Thoreau sees a small screech-owl perched on the lee side of a three-foot hemlock stump, looking at him with its “great solemn eyes” and raised horns. An epoch before science began illuminating the mysteries of what it’s like to be an owl, he marvels at this creature so profoundly other:
It sits with its head drawn in, eying me, with its eyes partly open, about twenty feet off. When it hears me move, it turns its head toward me, perhaps one eye only open, with its great glaring golden iris. You see two whitish triangular lines above the eyes meeting at the bill, with a sharp reddish-brown triangle between and a narrow curved line of black under each eye…. You would say that this was a bird without a neck. Its short bill, which rests upon its breast, scarcely projects at all, but in a state of rest the whole upper part of the bird from the wings is rounded off smoothly, excepting the horns, which stand up conspicuously or are slanted back.
After observing the bird for ten minutes, transfixed by its strangeness, Thoreau decides he must study the creature closely to better understand its umwelt. He lands the boat and carefully makes his way to the hemlock from the windward side, surprised to find the owl unperturbed by his approach. Unlike the ornithologists of his day, who killed in order to know and reduced living species to “specimens” — even Audubon, for all his tenderheartedness, shot every bird he drew and described — Thoreau sets out to capture the living bird. (“If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others,” he writes in another journal entry.) Sneaking up behind the hemlock, he springs out his arm to gently grasp the little owl, which is so surprised that it offers no resistance but only glares at him “in mute astonishment with eyes as big as saucers.” He swaddles it in his handkerchief, rests it at the bottom of the boat, and paddles home, where he builds a small cage for observation. He marvels at the seemingly neckless owl puffing out its feathers and stretching out its neck, slowly rotating its head in that singular owl way. He tries to imitate its hiss “by a guttural whinnering.” He offers his hand, to which the bird clings so tightly that it draws blood from his fingers. He regards its “squat figure” and “catlike” face, the fine white down covering its legs all the way down to the sharp talons.
When dusk falls, he sits down to record his observations and becomes the object of observation himself, the owl looking out at him with its immense eyes, intent and perfectly still. Thoreau writes:
It would lower its head, stretch out its neck, and, bending it from side to side, peer at you with laughable circumspection; from side to side, as if to catch or absorb into its eyes every ray of light, strain at you with complacent yet earnest scrutiny. Raising and lowering its head and moving it from side to side in a slow and regular manner, at the same time snapping its bill smartly perhaps, and faintly hissing, and puffing itself up more and more, — cat-like, turtle-like, both in hissing and swelling. The slowness and gravity, not to say solemnity, of this motion are striking.
[…]
He sat, not really moping but trying to sleep, in a corner of his box all day, yet with one or both eyes slightly open all the while. I never once caught him with his eyes shut.
When morning comes, Thoreau sets out to return the bird to its home, rowing back to the hill with the hemlock. But to his surprise, the owl refuses to leave the box and has to be gently shaken out of it. With raw reverence for this creature, this mind so incomprehensibly other yet so strangely kindred, he records their farewell:
There he stood on the grass, at first bewildered, with his horns pricked up and looking toward me. In this strong light the pupils of his eyes suddenly contracted and the iris expanded till they were two great brazen orbs with a centre spot merely. His attitude expressed astonishment more than anything. I was obliged to toss him up a little that he might feel his wings, and then he flapped away low and heavily to a hickory on the hillside twenty rods off.
There is something poignant in this account — a disquieting reminder of how accustomed we too grow to the false comforts of our traps, how unwilling to leave them for the terror of freedom, how we too may need a gentle push to feel our own wings. Our habitual way of seeing is also a comfort and a trap. In another entry, Thoreau wonders what it might be like to “witness with owls’ eyes” the life of the forest, then concludes that what we perceive of the world is what we receive in the world and each person “receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally.”
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