There we were: Three women — a neuroscientist, a mycologist, and me — talking about the perplexities of love when a cloud in the perfect shape of a broken heart appeared in the gloaming sky backlit by the sun setting over the Andes. Suddenly, we found ourselves wondering about the origin of the heart icon as the universal symbol of love. It doesn’t figure into the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or the Aztecs’ elaborate pictogram language of embodied emoji, and yet by the time of the Romantics, it had become a fixture of love letters and lockets, Queen Victoria’s favorite jewelry shape, recognized today by every culture in every language, dominating tattoo parlors and text threads, drawn into the wet sand by our children, traced on our backs by our lovers, emblazoned on the tombstones of our dead.
The answer, drawn out by the tenuous thread of selective collective memory we mistake for history, is a story of empire and ecology, of love and ruin and more love.
Coins from Cyrene circa 510–470 B.C.E.
In 1990, Expedition magazine published an image of a coin excavated almost a decade earlier at the Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone in Cyrene, present-day Libya. Emblazoned on the silver drachm circa 500 B.C.E. is a small heart so familiar it feels strangely modern — a depiction not of the human organ but of the seed of a mysterious plant, whose stem and bloom appear on the back of another Cyrenean coin.
The ancients called it silphium. Its fate may be the first case of extinction in the common record. Its legacy is the most enduring graphic symbol of the modern world.
With its golden pom-pom blossoms and neatly fractal branches, silphium didn’t just look magical — it was heralded as a panacea. But none among its panoply of medicinal properties was more revered than its dual potency as aphrodisiac and contraceptive, which earned it the moniker “the lovers’ plant.” In a society where women had no political power and no civil rights, here was a path to empowered embodiment, here was a plant that put their pleasure and their reproductive rights into their own hands.
But despite how meticulously the ancients tended to their silphium, it resisted cultivation. Hippocrates himself reported two failed attempts to transplant it from Cyrene to Athens. Long before Erasmus Darwin sensationalized the sexual reproduction of plants, before Gregor Mendel seeded the modern science of genetics, the Greeks had no way of understanding how silphium’s peculiar evolutionary adaptation crippled it, made them all the more responsible for its survival.
Silphium seed from La vérité sur le prétendu Silphion de la Cyrénaïque, 1876.
A monoecious shrub, silphium grows both male and female flowers on the same plant, the male ones fruitless and the female ones giving the heart-shaped seeds. But unlike the androgynous plants known as “perfect flowers” — which contain both the male pollen-producing stamen and the female ovule-producing pistils, and can therefore self-pollinate — silphium’s female flowers grow under the leaves and the male ones above, so that they need the help of an insect or a human gardener to pollinate.
For seven centuries, the Greeks meticulously tended to it, passing down the lore of its vulnerable secret from generation to generation. By the time of the Roman Empire, silphium had become so precious that it was traded at the price of silver and accepted as tax payment to be held at the public treasury.
But as the Romans began their brutal conquest and cultural assimilation, they did what all colonizers do, discounting the indigenous knowledge that had ensured silphium’s survival. By the first century of the modern era, Pliny the Elder lamented in his Natural History that only “a single stem was found.” In a cruel twist of irony, the last of this ancient symbol of female empowerment was given to the troubled tyrant Nero, who famously murdered his mother and all of his wives, then played his lyre while Rome was burning before committing suicide.
Nero by Auguste Rodin, 1900-1910.
Considered extinct for two thousand years, silphium grew so remote in our collective memory that some began to doubt it ever existed.
But then came a bright testament to how the love of life and of truth is always more powerful than the lust for power: In the early 2020s, Turkish botanist Mahmut Miski, leading a group of researchers and farmers in Anatolia, discovered a rare endemic shrub — Ferula drudeana — whose morphology and chemical properties closely match the ancients’ descriptions of silphium.
Ferula drudeana (Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh)
Two civilizations after the Greeks failed to cultivate the precious plant, Miski and his team found that it could be grown in a greenhouse using cold stratification — a process of breaking seed dormancy by mimicking winter conditions: cold, moist, and dark. This means that, with proper tending, silphium can go the way of the black robin, the way of the ginkgo, and come back from extinction, its tiny hearts once again growing roots and shoots into Earth’s soil — a lovely reminder that even after all the depredations of time and terror, the heart can come back to life.
“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 —
“Music,” the trailblazing composer Julia Perry wrote, “has a unifying effect on the peoples of the world, because they all understand and love it… And when they find themselves enjoying and loving the same music, they find themselves loving one another.” But there is something beyond humanistic ideology in this elemental truth — something woven into the very structure and sensorium of our bodies; as the great neurologist Oliver Sacks observed, “music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”
Psychologist Dacher Keltner examines what that unmediated something is and how it pierces us in a portion of his altogether fascinating book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (public library) — a taxonomy of wonder derived from his study of twenty-six cultures around the world, across which music, above all other forms of beauty and spirituality, emerges as the most universal of our creaturely portals into transcendence.
After observing the virtuoso concert cellist Yumi Kendall respond bodily to the music she plays and cast an embodied enchantment upon those hearing it, Keltner writes:
When Yumi moves her bow across her cello’s strings, or when Beyoncé’s vocal cords vibrate as air moves through them, or when Gambian griot superstar Sona Jobarteh plucks the strings of her kora, those collisions move air particles, producing sound waves — vibrations — that move out into space. Those sound waves hit your eardrums, whose rhythmic vibrations move hairs on the cochlear membrane just on the other side of the eardrum, triggering neurochemical signals beginning in the auditory cortex on the side of your brain.
Sound waves are transformed into a pattern of neurochemical activation that moves from the auditory cortex to the anterior insular cortex, which directly influences and receives input from your heart, lungs, vagus nerve, sexual organs, and gut. It is in this moment of musical-meaning making in the brain that we do indeed listen to music with our bodies, and where musical feeling begins.
This neural representation of music, now synced up with essential rhythms of the body, moves through a region of the brain known as the hippocampus, which adds layers of memories to the ever-accreting meaning of the sounds. Music so readily transports us from the present to the past, or from what is actual to what is possible, spatiotemporal journeys that can be awe-inspiring.
And finally, this symphony of neurochemical signals makes its way to our prefrontal cortex, where, via language, we endow this web of sound with personal and cultural meaning. Music allows us to understand the great themes of social living, our identities, the fabric of our communities, and often how our worlds should change.
Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky, 1920s, inspired by the artist’s experience of listening to a symphony. (Available as a print.)
With an eye to a suite of studies examining the neurophysiology of awe through the lens of music — how different types of music affect our heart rate and hormones, how different people’s brains synchronize when listening to the same music — he adds:
When we listen to music that moves us, the dopaminergic circuitry of the brain is activated, which opens the mind to wonder and exploration. In this bodily state of musical awe, we often tear up and get the chills, those embodied signs of merging with others to face mysteries and the unknown… Music breaks down the boundaries between self and other and can unite us in feelings of awe… When we listen to music with others, the great rhythms of our bodies — heartbeat, breathing, hormonal fluctuations, sexual cycles, bodily motion — once separate, merge into a synchronized pattern. We sense that we are part of something larger, a community, a pattern of energy, an idea of the times — or what we might call the sacred.
“The encounter between two differences is an event,” French philosopher Alain Badiou wrote in his tremendous treatise on why we fall and how we stay in love. “On the basis of this event, love can start and flourish. It is the first, absolutely essential point.”
And yet at the heart of this essential event is often something beyond the two — something often improbable, almost always inessential in itself, which somehow magnetizes the two differences into a unit of belonging.
The power of that mysterious and magical something is what the poet and essayist Donald Hall (September 20, 1928–June 23, 2018) explores in a gorgeous essay titled “The Third Thing,” which appeared on the pages of Poetry — the world’s most enduring and visionary poetry magazine — in the autumn of 2004.
Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon
Reflecting on his life with the love of his life — the poet Jane Kenyon, herself the keeper and giver of uncommonly clarifying wisdom on writing and life — Hall considers the secret to the kind of lasting love that blooms between the mundane and the magical. An epoch after Virginia Woolf exulted in “the bead of sensation” that punctuates the dailiness of any durational love to make it last, Hall writes:
Jane Kenyon and I were married for twenty-three years. For two decades we inhabited the double solitude of my family farmhouse in New Hampshire, writing poems, loving the countryside. She was forty-seven when she died. If anyone had asked us, “Which year was the best, of your lives together?” we could have agreed on an answer: “the one we remember least.” There were sorrowful years — the death of her father, my cancers, her depressions — and there were also years of adventure: a trip to China and Japan, two trips to India; years when my children married; years when the grandchildren were born; years of triumph as Jane began her public life in poetry: her first book, her first poem in the New Yorker. The best moment of our lives was one quiet repeated day of work in our house. Not everyone understood. Visitors, especially from New York, would spend a weekend with us and say as they left: “It’s really pretty here” (“in Vermont,” many added) “with your house, the pond, the hills, but … but … but … what do you do?”
What we did: we got up early in the morning. I brought Jane coffee in bed. She walked the dog as I started writing, then climbed the stairs to work at her own desk on her own poems. We had lunch. We lay down together. We rose and worked at secondary things. I read aloud to Jane; we played scoreless ping-pong; we read the mail; we worked again. We ate supper, talked, read books sitting across from each other in the living room, and went to sleep. If we were lucky the phone didn’t ring all day… Three hundred and thirty days a year we inhabited this old house and the same day’s adventurous routine.
But the substance of this daily love, Hall argues, is not the stuff of romantic tropes. Echoing Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s beautiful insistence that “love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction,” Hall writes:
We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly.
For Hall and Kenyon, the third thing was the pond near their home. He writes:
We had our summer afternoons at the pond, which for ten years made a third thing. After naps we loaded up books and blankets and walked across Route 4 and the old railroad to the steep slippery bank that led down to our private beach on Eagle Pond. Soft moss underfoot sent little red flowers up. Ghost birches leaned over water with wild strawberry plants growing under them. Over our heads white pines reared high, and oaks that warned us of summer’s end late in August by dropping green metallic acorns. Sometimes a mink scooted among ferns… Jane dozed in the sun as I sat in the shade reading and occasionally taking a note in a blank book. From time to time we swam and dried in the heat.
Hall’s most piercing point is that the third thing, rather than being an extraneous adornment of the relationship, is a central form of companionship. But while it is indispensable, it is not irreplaceable — it doesn’t so much matter what the thing is, only that it is.
When a landfill leakage destroyed their beloved pond, Hall and Kenyon still had their other third thing — poetry. Reflecting on its unparalleled power of perspective, its power to connect and console in the face of life’s darkest moments, he writes:
We lived in the house of poetry, which was also the house of love and grief; the house of solitude and art; the house of Jane’s depression and my cancers and Jane’s leukemia. When someone died whom we loved, we went back to the poets of grief and outrage, as far back as Gilgamesh; often I read aloud Henry King’s “The Exequy,” written in the seventeenth century after the death of his young wife. Poetry gives the griever not release from grief but companionship in grief. Poetry embodies the complexities of feeling at their most intense and entangled, and therefore offers (over centuries, or over no time at all) the company of tears. As I sat beside Jane in her pain and weakness I wrote about pain and weakness. Once in a hospital I noticed that the leaves were turning. I realized that I had not noticed that they had come to the trees. It was a year without seasons, a year without punctuation. I began to write “Without” to embody the sensations of lives under dreary, monotonous assault. After I had drafted it many times I read it aloud to Jane. “That’s it, Perkins,” she said. “You’ve got it. That’s it.” Even in this poem written at her mortal bedside there was companionship.
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