The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Dig for the “Submerged Sunrise of Wonder”

The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Dig for the “Submerged Sunrise of Wonder”

There is a myth we live with, the myth of finding the meaning of life — as if meaning were an undiscovered law of physics. But unlike the laws of physics — which predate us and will postdate us and made us — meaning only exists in this brief interlude of consciousness between chaos and chaos, the interlude we call life. When you die — when these organized atoms that shimmer with fascination and feeling — disband into disorder to become unfeeling stardust once more, everything that filled your particular mind and its rosary of days with meaning will be gone too. From its particular vantage point, there will be no more meaning, for the point itself will have dissolved — there will only be other humans left, making meaning of their own lives, including any meaning they might make of the residue of yours.

These are the thoughts coursing through this temporary constellation of consciousness as I pause at the lush mid-June dandelion at the foot of the hill on my morning run — the dandelion, now a fiesta of green where a season ago the small sun of its bloom had been, then the ethereal orb of its seeds, now long dispersed; the dandelion, existing for no better reason than do I, than do you — and no worse — by the same laws of physics beyond meaning: these clauses of exquisite precision punctuated by chance.

Nebular by Maria Popova. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy)

And yet, somehow, against the staggering cosmic odds otherwise, we get to experience this sky, these trees, these colors, these loves we live. The recognition of this unbidden miracle of chance is the fundamental matter of meaning — the great awakening from the myth.

How to awaken to this miraculousness and begin to make meaning is, of course, the great creative challenge of life.

All of this — the dandelion, the insistence on wonder as the sieve for meaning — reminded me of a some passages by G.K. Chesterton (May 29, 1874–June 14, 1936) — philosopher, impassioned early eugenics opponent, prolific author of several dozen books, several hundred poems and short stories, and several thousand essays — from The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton (public library).

G.K. Chesterton at seventeen

A century after Baudelaire observed that “genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will,” and a generation before Dylan Thomas insisted that “children in wonder watching the stars, is the aim and the end,” Chesterton looks back on his early life and how it fomented the animating ethos of his later life as a literary artist and thinker:

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.

With an eye to the absurdity of pessimism as a life-orientation, given the astonishing good luck of existing at all in a universe where the probability is overwhelmingly against it, he adds:

No man* knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he [is] actually alive, and be happy.

Once Chesterton found the art through which to channel this blaze of astonishment, he found his writing “full of a new and fiery resolution to write against the Decadents and the Pessimists who ruled the culture of the age.” He reflects:

The primary problem for me, certainly in order of time and largely in order of logic… was the problem of how men could be made to realise the wonder and splendour of being alive, in environments which their own daily criticism treated as dead-alive, and which their imagination had left for dead.

Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

And so we get to the dandelion:

I had from the first an almost violently vivid sense of those two dangers; the sense that the experience must not be spoilt by presumption or despair… I asked through what incarnations or prenatal purgatories I must have passed, to earn the reward of looking at a dandelion… [or a] sunflower or the sun… But there is a way of despising the dandelion which is not that of the dreary pessimist, but of the more offensive optimist. It can be done in various ways; one of which is saying, “You can get much better dandelions at Selfridge’s,” or “You can get much cheaper dandelions at Woolworth’s.” Another way is to observe with a casual drawl, “Of course nobody but Gamboli in Vienna really understands dandelions,” or saying that nobody would put up with the old-fashioned dandelion since the super-dandelion has been grown in the Frankfurt Palm Garden; or merely sneering at the stinginess of providing dandelions, when all the best hostesses give you an orchid for your buttonhole and a bouquet of rare exotics to take away with you. These are all methods of undervaluing the thing by comparison; for it is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all; and above all no wonder at being thought worthy to receive them.

Dandelion by Jackie Morris from The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane — a spell against the erasure of wonder from this world

Find some kindred thought in this epochs-wide meditation on the flower and the meaning of life, starring Emily Dickinson, Michael Pollan, and the Little Prince, then revisit Roar Like a Dandelion — poet Ruth Krauss’s lost serenade to wonder, found and turned into a modern picture-book by artist Sergio Ruzzier.

BP

The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet

We place life’s bets by countless calculations of probability, conscious and unconscious, only to discover over and over how short they fall of the wildest reaches of the possible, which always includes but exceeds the probable. It helps to remember that we ourselves are children of improbability, that everything we treasure exists not because it had to, not because it was likely or necessary, but because the universe took a gamble against the staggering odds otherwise.

THE WILDEST BET IS THE WINNING BET
by Maria Popova

You wouldn’t have bet on it,
the battered rock
orbiting a star
from the discount bin
of the universe,
wouldn’t have guessed
that it would bloom
mitochondria and music,
that it would mushroom
mountains and minds,

and the hummingbird wing
whirring a hundred times faster
than your eye can blink,

and your eye that took
five hundred million years
from trilobite to telescope,

and the unhurried orange lichen
growing on the black boulder
two hundred times more slowly
than the tectonic plates beneath
are drifting apart

and the marbled orca
carrying her dead calf
down the entire edge
of the continent,
carrying the weight
of consciousness

and consciousness
how it windows
this tenement
of breath and bone
with wonder,
how it hovers over everything,
gigantic and unnecessary,
like music,
like love.

BP

The One Hundred Milliseconds Between the World and You: Oliver Sacks on Perception

The One Hundred Milliseconds Between the World and You: Oliver Sacks on Perception

“If the doors of perception were cleansed,” William Blake wrote, “everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” But we are finite creatures, in time and in space, and there is a limit to how much reality we can bear — evolution gave us consciousness so that we may sieve the salient from the infinite, equipped it with attention so that we may narrow the aperture of perception to take in only what is relevant to us from the immense vista of now. The astonishing thing is that even though we all have more or less the same perceptual apparatus, you and I can walk the same city block together and perceive entirely different pictures of reality, because what is salient to each of us is singular to each particular consciousness — a function of who we are and what we want, of the sum total of reference points that is our lived experience, beyond the locus of which we cannot reach. (This is what makes the Mary’s Room thought experiment so compelling and unnerving, and why the best we can do to understand each other is not explanation but translation.)

Perception, then, is not a door but a mirror, not an automated computation of raw input data but a creative act that marshals all that we are and reflects us back to ourselves. Perhaps the most disorienting aspect of being alive together is that none of us will ever know what another perceives.

René Magritte. The False Mirror. 1929. (Museum of Modern Art.)

That is what Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) explores with his signature gift for bridging matter and meaning in the title essay of his altogether revelatory posthumous collection The River of Consciousness (public library), fusing his decades of medical practice as a neurologist studying how the brain works with a philosopher’s inquiry into what a mind is and a poet’s gift for rendering what it means to be alive.

Drawing on case studies of patients with peculiar neurological disorders and brain lesions that hurl them into “standstills” of consciousness — states in which time seems to freeze for them even though events and processes continue to unfold within and around them — he considers the temporal dimension of consciousness, most evident in our perception of motion — the change in spatial position over time.

Eadweard Muybridge: Animal Locomotion, Plate 62
Eadweard Muybridge: Running full speed (Animal Locomotion, Plate 62)

Drawing on Francis Crick and Christof Koch’s landmark work on qualia — those wholly subjective and deeply interior experiences of what it is like to be oneself — he writes:

We do not merely calculate movement as a robot might; we perceive it. We perceive motion, just as we perceive color or depth, as a unique qualitative experience that is vital to our visual awareness and consciousness. Something beyond our understanding occurs in the genesis of qualia, the transformation of an objective cerebral computation to a subjective experience. Philosophers argue endlessly over how these transformations occur and whether we will ever be capable of understanding them.

[…]

While the perception of a particular motion (for example) may be represented by neurons firing at a particular rate in the motion centers of the visual cortex, this is only the beginning of an elaborate process. To reach consciousness, this neuronal firing, or some higher representation of it, must cross a certain threshold of intensity and be maintained above it… To do that, this group of neurons must engage other parts of the brain (usually in the frontal lobes) and ally itself with millions of other neurons to form a “coalition.”

Such coalitions… can form and dissolve in a fraction of a second and involve reciprocal connections between the visual cortex and many other areas of the brain. These neural coalitions in different parts of the brain talk to one another in a continuous back-and-forth interaction. A single conscious visual percept may thus entail the parallel and mutually influencing activities of billions of nerve cells.

Finally, the activity of a coalition, or coalition of coalitions, if it is to reach consciousness, must not only cross a threshold of intensity but also be held there for a certain time — roughly a hundred milliseconds. This is the duration of a “perceptual moment.”

And yet it is because something immeasurable happens in those hundred milliseconds that we perceive the world not as it is but as we are.

Oliver Sacks by his partner, Bill Hayes.

Into the fourth wall he breaks a door to his qualia:

As I write, I am sitting at a café on Seventh Avenue, watching the world go by. My attention and focus dart to and fro: a girl in a red dress goes by, a man walking a funny dog, the sun (at last!) emerging from the clouds. But there are also other sensations that seem to come by themselves: the noise of a car backfiring, the smell of cigarette smoke as an upwind neighbor lights up. These are all events which catch my attention for a moment as they happen. Why, out of a thousand possible perceptions, are these the ones I seize upon? Reflections, memories, associations, lie behind them. For consciousness is always active and selective — charged with feelings and meanings uniquely our own, informing our choices and interfusing our perceptions. So it is not just Seventh Avenue that I see but my Seventh Avenue, marked by my own selfhood and identity.

To know this is to relinquish our habitual delusion of objective perception:

We deceive ourselves if we imagine that we can ever be passive, impartial observers. Every perception, every scene, is shaped by us, whether we intend it or know it, or not. We are the directors of the film we are making — but we are its subjects too: every frame, every moment, is us, is ours.

But how then do our frames, our momentary moments, hold together? How, if there is only transience, do we achieve continuity?

A century after Virginia Woolf contemplated the “moments of being” that make us who we are, he deepens the question and ventures an answer:

Our passing thoughts, as William James says (in an image that smacks of cowboy life in the 1880s), do not wander round like wild cattle. Each one is owned and bears the brand of this ownership, and each thought, in James’s words, is born an owner of the thoughts that went before, and “dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor.” So it is not just perceptual moments, simple physiological moments — though these underlie everything else — but moments of an essentially personal kind that seem to constitute our very being… We consist entirely of “a collection of moments,” even though these flow into one another like Borges’s river.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.

Complement with psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist on attention as an instrument of love and cognitive philosopher Andy Clarke on the power of expectation in how the mind renders reality, then revisit Oliver Sacks on despair and the meaning of life, the healing power of gardens, and the three essential elements of creativity.

BP

Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity

Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity

“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” William James wrote in his pioneering 1884 theory of how our bodies affect our feelings — the first great gauntlet thrown at the Cartesian dualism of body versus mind. In the century and a half since, we have come to see how the body and the mind converge in the healing of trauma; we have come to see consciousness itself as a full-body phenomenon.

Beyond the brain, no portion of the body shapes our mental and emotional landscape more profoundly than the tenth cranial nerve — the longest nerve of the autonomic nervous system that unconsciously governs the inner workings of the body. Known as the vagus nerve — from the Latin for “wandering,” a root shared with vagabond and vague — it meanders from the brain to the gut, touching every organ along the way with its tendrils, controlling everything from our heart rate and digestion to our reflexes and moods.

One of Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s little-known drawings of the brain.

In James’s lifetime, it was believed that synaptic communication within the brain was electrical. But when neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal discovered a gap between neurons — a miniature abyss electricity could not cross — it became clear that something else must be transmitting the signals between neurons. In 1921, the German pharmacologist Otto Loewi confirmed the existence of these theorized chemical messengers by stimulating the vagus nerve of a frog and discovering in the secreted substance the first known neurotransmitter. Every thought, feeling, and mood that has ever swept across the sky of your mind was forecast by your neurotransmitters and executed by your vagus nerve.

A century after James, while working with premature babies, the psychiatrist Stephen Porges uncovered two distinct vagal pathways in the nervous system — the much older dorsal vagus, which evolved around 500 million years ago in a fish now extinct to regulate fear response and activate shutdown, and the ventral vagus, a uniquely mammalian development about 200 million old, controlling our capacity for connection and communication. This research became the foundation of polyvagal theory — the science of how the interplay of these two systems shapes our sense of safety and danger, shapes our attachment styles and relationship patterns, shapes our very ability to tolerate the risks of living necessary for being in love with life.

In the decades since, no one has championed polyvagal theory more ardently than the clinical psychologist Deb Dana. In her book The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation (public library), written for therapists, she explores how trauma automates our adaptive responses in a survival story that puts the fear-based dorsal vagus in command to induce collapse and dissociation, and how we can rewire our neural pathways toward the emotional safety of the ventral vagal state, where our capacity for curiosity, connection, and change flourishes.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

Dana writes:

Connectedness is a biological imperative, and at the top of the autonomic hierarchy is the ventral vagal pathway that supports feelings of safety and connection. The ventral vagus (sometimes called the “smart vagus” or “social vagus”) provides the neurobiological foundation for health, growth, and restoration. When the ventral vagus is active, our attention is toward connection. We seek opportunities for co-regulation. The ability to soothe and be soothed, to talk and listen, to offer and receive, to fluidly move in and out of connection is centered in this newest part of the autonomic nervous system. Reciprocity, the mutual ebb and flow that defines nourishing relationships, is a function of the ventral vagus. As a result of its myelinated pathways, the ventral vagus provides rapid and organized responses. In a ventral vagal state, we have access to a range of responses including calm, happy, meditative, engaged, attentive, active, interested, excited, passionate, alert, ready, relaxed, savoring, and joyful.

This biological need for co-regulation with others is not dissimilar to the concept of limbic revision — “the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love,” and to have our own emotional pathways remodeled by the people who love us. This is only possible in safe relationships, and it is the vagus system that governs our sense of safety.

Central to polyvagal theory is the distinction between conscious perception and what Porges termed neuroception — the conditioned way the autonomic nervous system responds from within the body, without our awareness, to cues of safety and danger in the outside world. Because our vagal pathways are shaped by our earliest experiences of co-regulation in the infant-parent dyad, ruptures in that co-regulation — whether by abuse or neglect — condition the dorsal vagus to become dominant and make a neuroception of danger the default response, storying reality away from safety, nowhere more perilously than in intimate relationships. Dana writes:

Co-regulation is at the heart of positive relationships… If we miss opportunities to co-regulate in childhood, we feel that loss in our adult relationships. Trauma, either in experiences of commission (acts of harm) or omission (absence of care), makes co-regulation dangerous and interrupts the development of our co-regulatory skills. Out of necessity, the autonomic nervous system is shaped to independently regulate. Clients will often say that they needed connection but there was no one in their life who was safe, so after a while they stopped looking. Through a polyvagal perspective, we know that although they stopped explicitly looking and found ways to navigate on their own, their autonomic nervous system never stopped needing, and longing for, co-regulation.

Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little Wolf

Because we are physiologies first and psychologies second, but we are also storytelling and sensemaking creatures, our minds naturally create emotional narratives out of these unconscious vagal states — stories that, if we are not careful enough and conscious enough, may come to subsume reality. Dana observes:

The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.

Our early adaptive survival responses of trauma train the autonomic nervous system on a default neuroception of danger, replacing patterns of connection with patterns of protection in a fear-based narrative. And yet these reflexes can be recalibrated by retraining our regulatory pathways.

Because the feeling of reciprocity is one of the most powerful regulators of the autonomic nervous system, a great deal of repair and rewiring can happen in relationships winged with true reciprocity. Dana writes:

Reciprocity is a connection between people that is created in the back-and-forth communication between two autonomic nervous systems. It is the experience of heartfelt listening and responding. We are nourished in experiences of reciprocity, feeling the ebb and flow, giving and receiving, attunement, and resonance.

Art from The Human Body, 1959.

But the great paradox is that if our earliest template of connection is marked by rupture and deficient co-regulation, our very notion of reciprocity may be warped, leading us to tolerate immense asymmetries of affection and attention, to mistake deeply imbalanced relationships for reciprocal. The grounds for optimism lie in the very real possibility of changing the template through safe and nourishing relationships — ones we may not so much choose at first, for trauma can taint our choices with unhealthy patterns, as chance into and only then choose to nurture. The payoff is a gradual transition from the dorsal vagal state into the ventral vagal, a gradual willingness to release the patterns of protection in favor of connection, allowing the kinds of relationships Adrienne Rich celebrated as ones “in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love.'”

Complement with the science of how emotion are made and how love rewires the brain, then revisit Toni Morrison on reclaiming the body as an instrument of joy, sanity, and self-love.

BP

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