“Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” wrote Rachel Carson. “Our world, and the worlds around and within it,” wrote Sy Montgomery a generation later, “is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom… far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine.”
There are people whose eye is more sharply focused on those brilliances, whose ear is more finely tuned to the murmurations of the mountains and the oceans and the trees, whose orientation to the world is more tenderly in touch with our creaturely origins. Some of them become artists, some scientists, and some boundary-spanners who refuse the divide, who know that to partition our ways of seeing is to keep ourselves from apprehending the magnificent whole.
Growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a child so shy as to dream of being able to communicate via bioluminescence, Ash Eliza Williams came to realize that, lacking the luciferin necessary for the language of light, the human animal has evolved its own alchemical means of silent communication: art.
Animated by “a fascination with alternative languages and methods of connection,” Williams draws on medieval bestiaries and geophysics, on 19th-century zoological illustrations and graphic novels, to conjure up the wonder Rachel Carson insisted is our inheritance and our best protection from ourselves. Emanating from the paintings and sculptures are the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” that enchanted Darwin — from bioluminescent moths to the bat (that living triumph of the possible over the probable), from chlorophyl (that ongoing mystery of chemistry and chance) to clouds (those abiding spells against indifference) — arranged in series whose very titles are miniature poems, titles like Urgent Beings and The History of Weather.
One began as a book about Rachel Carson and instead became a series of durational paintings about the lives of different creatures — a starling, a violet-eared waxbill, an orange fruit-dove, a hickory tree — using the graphic novel format to explore their experience of time, “to think,” Williams writes, “about the expansiveness or endlessness of a creature’s Umwelt.”
Radiating from it all is what may be the most fruitful orientation a person can have to a world — an obsessive yet spacious curiosity that, through the pinhole of the minutest details, reveals the grandeur of the big picture. “The whole is simpler than its parts,” observed the visionary physicist Willard Gibbs in what remains the finest koan of science, but it is only by attending closely and with a great kindness to the parts, discrete yet intertwined by threads of ceaseless silent communication, that we can contact the majesty and mystery of the whole.
Relationships are the great creative work of our lives. They are, like every creative endeavor, a process demanding both systematic intentionality and surrender. If we show up for that process with courage and consistency, it will surprise us, shatter our complacency, take us places we never thought we could go if we followed the vector of our preconceived plans.
The most rewarding relationships come the way creative breakthroughs do — not as a reasoned conclusion but as a revelation, breaking the momentum of our assumptions about what is possible and what we deserve, rising like a mountain from the fault line of our expectations to change the landscape of our lives.
Just as the most compelling creative work tends to blur the boundaries between disciplines, between materials, between genres, the most revelatory relationships tend to blur the boundaries between the common categories of connection, with all the disorientation and overwhelm that entails — nowhere more disorienting than when a friend becomes a lover.
H.G. Wells (September 21, 1866–August 13, 1946) explores the price and the reward of this blessing discomposure in his 1911 novel The New Machiavelli (public domain) — a story largely autobiographical, for which Wells paid a high price, but which he must have felt would offer a compass through the confusions of a complex yet mutely common human experience. (All writers write about their own experience, however many degrees of abstraction it may be refracted through. The great writers make of the personal a handle for the door of the universal so that others may enter the secret rooms of their own experience, those regions of our lives we are too afraid or confused or alienated from ourselves to visit, those places where ultimately we discover who we are and what we want.)
Along the way of his well-planned life, the protagonist meets a young Oxford graduate named Isabel. The two are immediately magnetized into a rare intellectual connection. But as they magnify each other’s minds in sweeping, soaring conversations, beneath the surface of their conscious awareness the body is silently begging for participation:
At that time I think we neither of us suspected the possibility of passion that lay like a coiled snake in the path before us. It seemed to us that we had the quaintest, most delightful friendship in the world… Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays — among easy-going, liberal-minded people. For the most part, there’s no sort of harm, as people say, in them. The two persons concerned are never supposed to think of the passionate love that hovers so close to the friendship, or if they do, then they banish the thought. I think we kept the thought as permanently in exile as any one could do. If it did in odd moments come into our heads we pretended elaborately it wasn’t there.
One day, in one of those small, unpredictable moments that change everything, something shifts in the middle of one of their intoxicating conversations:
I turned to Isabel’s voice, and saw her face uplifted, and her dear cheeks and nose and forehead all splashed and barred with sunlight and the shadows of the twigs of the trees behind me. And something — an infinite tenderness, stabbed me. It was a keen physical feeling, like nothing I had ever felt before. It had a quality of tears in it. For the first time in my narrow and concentrated life another human being had really thrust into my being and gripped my very heart… Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment… From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure. Yet it is curious that it never occurred to me for a year or so that this was likely to be a matter of passion between us.
Suddenly, the “long and frank an intimacy” between the two friends turns into “an extraordinary accession of friendship and tenderness” that comes to include passion as naturally as it had included poetry and philosophy:
The change came so entirely without warning or intention that I find it impossible now to tell the order of its phases. What disturbed pebble started the avalanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply that the barriers between us and this masked aspect of life had been wearing down unperceived… It was as if we had taken off something that had hindered our view of each other, like people who unvizored to talk more easily at a masked ball.
This exquisite mutual recognition is why Tom Stoppard would come to define love as “the mask slipped from the face,” but there is a reason we move through the world masked — there is nothing more vulnerable than the naked face of the soul. Emerson knew this: “There is no terror like that of being known,” he wrote as he was falling in love with his friend Margaret Fuller and resisting it.
And so, as Wells’s characters both feel the energy between them, they resist it, wielding the combined power of their formidable minds at bridling it from involving the body:
The quick leap of her mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the response of an induction wire; her way of thinking was like watching sunlight reflected from little waves upon the side of a boat, it was so bright, so mobile, so variously and easily true to its law. In the back of our minds we both had a very definite belief that making love is full of joyous, splendid, tender, and exciting possibilities, and we had to discuss why we shouldn’t be to the last degree lovers.
In that way we have of feeling safer in negative certainty than in uncertainty, forestalling the vulnerable possibility of losing what we desire by turning away from it by our own will or convincing ourselves we don’t desire it in the first place, they reason through their list of reservations:
There is a phase in every love affair, a sort of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions to the prospect. It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity. Timid people may hesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive terror of the immensity of the oppositions they challenge, but neither Isabel nor I are timid people.
Jolted awake from their Cartesian stupor, they discover that what hadn’t seemed possible, that what neither their culture nor their past experience modeled, could actually exist: a love not subtractive of the rest of life but infinitely additive, one not predicated on a tradeoff of devotions between the relationship and their individual work, a fully integrated love in which the passions of the mind and the passions of the body are entwined, annealed, magnified:
It wasn’t as if we could throw everything aside for our love, and have that as we wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn’t altogether, or even chiefly, a thing in itself — it is for the most part a value set upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other interests; to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us like killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best as activities.
As they become lovers, they enter the magical world all new lovers enter — an island all their own lightyears away from the mainland of their familiar lives:
For a brief time we had been like two people in a magic cell, magically cut off from the world and full of a light of its own, and then we began to realise that we were not in the least cut off, that the world was all about us and pressing in upon us, limiting us, threatening us, resuming possession of us.
Every uncommon love requires constant vigilance and protection from the pressures of the commonplace, a trust that its reality is deeper and larger and more powerful than the so-called real world. Eventually, the protagonist discovers that despite the profound reconfiguration of life his relationship with Isabel demands of both of them, it is worth the toil — because it is worth everything. Wells writes:
There is no describing the reality of love. The shapes of things are nothing, the actual happenings are nothing, except that somehow there falls a light upon them and a wonder… No one can tell love — we can only tell the gross facts of love and its consequences.
With every relationship that reorients life, that remaps the landscape of permission and possibility for both people, the question is always the same: Which is the higher price — the price of the consequences or the price of a life without such love? And the answer is always arrived at by the same path: the courage of living.
The most assuring thing about life is that we can change, that things can change, that they are always changing. The most maddening is that despite living in a universe that is one constant transmutation of energy and matter, despite living in bodies and minds whose cells and ideas are constantly being replaced, we so vehemently resist change, too afraid to unsettle the structure of our lives — even when it doesn’t serve us. “People wish to be settled,” Emerson wrote, “[but] only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” In another epoch, another prophet consecrated the elemental: “All that you touch you change,” wrote Octavia Butler. “All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”
If suffering is the magnitude of our resistance to reality, and if change is the fundamental constant of reality, then our resistance to change is our self-directed instrument of suffering.
Speaking to a part that lives in all of us — the “self-cancelling, centerpoised personality” that leads us “to look at things defensively” — one character urges another:
Why are you so afraid of yourself… of changing things? Try to detach yourself from yourself and try to see your own viewpoint from the outside, objectively. You are afraid of losing your balance. But change need not unbalance you; life’s not a static object, after all. It’s a process. There’s no holding still. Intellectually you know that, but emotionally you refuse it. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice. Life — evolution — the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy — existence itself — is essentially change… When things don’t change any longer, that’s the end result of entropy, the heat-death of the universe. The more things go on moving, interrelating, conflicting, changing, the less balance there is — and the more life.
Observing that life itself, like love, is “a huge gamble against the odds,” he insists that, just as we must love anyway, we must live anyway:
You can’t try to live safely, there’s no such thing as safety. Stick your neck out of your shell, then, and live fully.
Because birds so beguile us, they magnetize our attention, and anything we polish with attention becomes a mirror. In every reflection, a reckoning; in every reckoning, a possibility — a glimpse of us better than ourselves.
That is what Nobel laureate Derek Walcott (January 23, 1930–March 17, 2017) conjures up in his shamanic poem “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” — an eternal vision for reprieve from the worst in us, written in the final years of the Cold War, the war that could have ended the world but was abated, not because we are perfect but because we are perfectible, because peace is possible, because, as Maya Angelou wrote in another eternal mirror of a poem, we are the possible.
THE SEASON OF PHANTASMAL PEACE by Derek Walcott
Then all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill —
the net rising soundless as night, the birds’ cries soundless, until
there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.
And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes
that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;
it was the light
that you will see at evening on the side of a hill
in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
what change had brought into the raven’s cawing,
the killdeer’s screech, the ember-circling chough
such an immense, soundless, and high concern
for the fields and cities where the birds belong,
except it was their seasonal passing, Love,
made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,
something brighter than pity for the wingless ones
below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices
above all change, betrayals of falling suns,
and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.
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