The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Ocean of Stars: A Painted Poem About How to Bear the Astonishment of Life

By Maria Popova

Ocean of Stars: A Painted Poem About How to Bear the Astonishment of Life

Here we are, bewildered miracles of chemistry and chance, trembling embers of dead stars capable of sign and song, a wild bet against probability that won.

We have dreamt up origin myths and cosmological models, built the Taj Mahal and the Large Hadron Collider, to fathom where we came from and where we are going. We have invented mathematics to describe the mystery we live in and poetry to describe the mystery we are. But beneath it all, we are born knowing — though we spend our lives unlearning — the elemental truth about us: A human being is a living question the only answer to which is love.

That is what emanates from the pages of Azita Ardakani’s uncommonly wonderful Ocean of Stars (public library). Like all great children’s books, it is a work of philosophy disguised as a painted poem — one Azita composed while trying to conceive her first child, reckoning with the alien wonder of how a small universe could grow inside the ocean of her body.

Having grown up with a Sufi mother and made a home in the biological sciences, she weaves together scientific fact and poetic truth into a modern cosmogony that unfolds like a lullaby, a prayer for belonging, a blessing for life.

The story came to her the way love does — unbidden, unreasoned, unasked for: a visitation of extraordinary clarity in a moment of pure presence with wild nature, arriving so fully formed that she had to run home from the forest to transcribe it.

Artist Rebecca Rebouché, who had never worked on a children’s book before, created a breathtaking visual language to meet the story’s whimsy, painting on a single master canvas more than seven feet wide, then dividing it by the golden ratio into frames to make each spread of the book.

Once upon a time, in a far away place,
darkness drifted, knowing no time.
Reaching for infinity,
only knowing beyond.

One day, in the web of inky
endlessness, it asked itself:
“Can I see you?”

The darkness
waited and waited.

And then, in answer,
a star.
And then another
and another and another.
Another is where
reflection began.

As the cosmological story moves from stars to sentience — we see our Pale Blue Dot form “to reflect the stars back to themselves,” we see the “star beings” constellate out of the cosmic dust and descend “to touch the ocean, to greet themselves” — a sense of interbeing begins to emerge, a tender awareness that without this reflection, without this reciprocity between thing and thing, between one and all, nothing would exist.

The water stars
stretched onto the soil,
mixed into the clay,
and became…
everything.

Mixed from clay and star,
flesh and breath,
a hollow canal opened
so life could reach back
to the darkness.

Page by page comes the quickening that this is not a myth of creation but a truth of homecoming, not a new learning but an elemental remembering. The story ends with a spell against forgetting what we are:

Once upon a time, in a far away place,
darkness drifted and you drifted inside of it.

You are the wish
you once wished for.

Azita writes in the author’s afterword:

We live in a time of deep forgetting.

The living world has become something we visit, something we manage, something outside ourselves. We move through days full of noise and urgency, rarely stopping to feel the improbable intimacy of being alive. In losing touch with our kinship to all that is, we have also lost something within ourselves — a felt sense of being part of a story far larger than the span of a single life. In its absence, many of us carry a quiet loneliness, untethered from wonder, from awe, from the deep reassurance of being held by something vast and alive.

Perhaps this is why the stories that help us to remember matter so much. To remember is not to retrieve something lost. It is to come home, again and again, to the mystery that has been here all along, patiently waiting for us to notice and to shine once more.

What emerges from this scroll of wonder is a reminder that we are here to mirror and magnify the light between us and within us; that this rapturous reflection — which poet Diane Ackerman so unforgettably calls “the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else” — is our cosmic inheritance, is the redemption of our transience, is love.

BP

The Common Language of Science: Einstein’s Clarion Call to Divided Humanity in a Rare 1941 Recording

By Maria Popova

What makes Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) endure as “the quintessential modern genius” isn’t merely his monumental contribution to science but also his unflinching faith in the human spirit and in our civilizational capacity for good even in the face of undeniable evil. At the peak of WWII — exactly a decade after his little-known correspondence with W.E.B. Du Bois on racial justice and exactly a decade before his letter to a disheartened young woman (incidentally, a Brain Pickings reader’s mother) affirming why we are alive — Einstein penned a piece titled “The Common Language of Science,” which aired as a radio broadcast for London’s Science Conference on October 2, 1941. It was eventually included in the altogether indispensable anthology Ideas and Opinions (public library), which also gave us Einstein’s views on the value of kindness and the combinatory nature of creativity.

Einstein traces how language developed as a tool of transmuting thought into acoustic expression and evolved into “an instrument of reasoning,” then argues that science is the most international language there is — humanity’s sole shared instrument of reasoning — but the scientific method alone, without moral direction, is insufficient in assuring our civilizational welfare.

But there is another, subtler aspect of the recording that makes it profoundly pause-giving — perhaps one more discernible to those of us who live and think in a language not our native: Here is one of humanity’s most extraordinary minds, struggling to articulate its brilliant contents in a foreign language — slowly, imperfectly, with painfully measured words. There is no more jarring a reminder of our chronic tendency to mistake the presence of an accent for the absence of acumen — how often do people, even well-meaning and educated people, hear such verbal delivery by a stranger and immediately judge her intelligence as inferior to their own?

“You’ve got to tell the world how to treat you [or else] you are in trouble,” James Baldwin told Margaret Mead in their superb conversation on identity and the immigrant experience. And yet a central source of trouble in the immigrant experience is precisely the world’s inability to unbridle what you are saying from how you are saying it. It is wholly reasonable to surmise that even Einstein — who was once a little boy reticent to use even his native language — felt the weight of the unconscious social biases to which we are all susceptible.

This original recording of the piece, in Einstein’s own wonderfully accented voice, is nothing short of a cultural treasure. Transcribed highlights below — please enjoy.

The mental development of the individual and his way of forming concepts depend to a high degree upon language. This makes us realize to what extent the same language means the same mentality. In this sense thinking and language are linked together.

What distinguishes the language of science from language as we ordinarily understand the word? How is it that scientific language is international? What science strives for is an utmost acuteness and clarity of concepts as regards their mutual relation and their correspondence to sensory data.

[…]

The supernational character of scientific concepts and scientific language is due to the fact that they have been set up by the best brains of all countries and all times. In solitude, and yet in cooperative effort as regards the final effect, they created the spiritual tools for the technical revolutions which have transformed the life of mankind in the last centuries. Their system of concepts has served as a guide in the bewildering chaos of perceptions so that we learned to grasp general truths from particular observations.

What hopes and fears does the scientific method imply for mankind? I do not think that this is the right way to put the question. Whatever this tool in the hand of man will produce depends entirely on the nature of the goals alive in this mankind. Once these goals exist, the scientific method furnishes means to realize them. Yet it cannot furnish the very goals. The scientific method itself would not have led anywhere, it would not even have been born without a passionate striving for clear understanding.

Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem — in my opinion — to characterize our age. If we desire sincerely and passionately the safety, the welfare, and the free development of the talents of all men, we shall not be in want of the means to approach such a state. Even if only a small part of mankind strives for such goals, their superiority will prove itself in the long run.

Complement with the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice and this rare 1929 recording of A.A. Milne reading from Winnie the Pooh, then revisit Einstein’s answer to a little girl’s question about whether scientists pray and his correspondence with Freud on war, peace, and human nature.

BP

How to Say “YES” to Life

By Maria Popova

It started with an urn for living gone wrong, the clay kiltering off center, resisting my every effort to force it back into shape. The harder I pushed to control it, the more it took on a life of its own, folding like flesh, bending like mind. I pushed and despaired, pushed and despaired, until, exhausted and exasperated, I gave up and simply let my hands follow the momentum of the clay, saying “YES” to its will.

And then, magic: I watched the vessel turn into what I could have never imagined, never created by force: an enormous seashell, a miniature Guggenheim, a great open ear — asymmetrical yet perfect in its secret logic, the proof beyond the postulate.

Here was an antidote to all the urns and bowls I had controlled into perfect symmetry, almost factory-like, pushing so hard to center that a stress injury incapacitated my left arm for seven months. Here was a hard, fragile material — pulverized stone that vitrifies like glass — taking a soft, organic shape.

I found myself wondering what life itself would be like if, rather than willing it to conform to our design only to end up in despair, we simply said “YES” to its will, collaborating with rather than resisting the centrifugal force of the heart, the angular momentum of memory, the gravity of change. “YES” to the necessary losses. “YES” to the fear that signals growth. “YES” to the death of the dream of perfection.

“The great difficulty is to say Yes to life,” James Baldwin observed in reckoning with the paradox of freedom not long after Viktor Frankl looked back on surviving the Holocaust to insist that our task here is to say “yes to life in spite of everything.”

Beyond basic physical survival, most of our psychological suffering, when closely examined, is a form of saying “NO” to life — a refusal, vehement or subtle, to bend the idea of how things should be to the raw reality of how they are, the reality that is the only arena in which we can act to change anything. All things not pliant enough to bend will break — fragility is a function of rigidity.

We contact this elemental law most clearly and most painfully in relationships, which have a will of their own greater than the sum of two intents and which are never, however reciprocal, perfectly symmetrical. Have too rigid an idea of what a relationship should be, and it will inevitably shatter; look back on the most enduring and rewarding relationships of your life, and you will discover that they have found their own right form, different from your first intent, a form that is never final.

And yet, paradoxically, rupture and repair are how relationships are stress-tested and fortified across the long horizon of life. In this regard, love is more like embroidery than like pottery — you make a hole to make a stitch.

So began a daily practice of collaborating with rather than forcing the clay, then embroidering the result — vessels to hold a life that says “YES” to itself, a life needful of constant reminding that all things forced are false and fragile. We need these reminders, all of us, if we are to be true to our own hearts.

And so, as with my other ceramics, I am letting the impartial hand of chance, which forces nothing yet shapes everything, give a dozen of these vessels — yessels? — away: To enter the raffle, make a donation by November 30 in any amount that feels unforced for you, so long as you end it with the decimal .12, whether it is $1.12 or $1,000.12. (For greater odds, consider joining my twentieth anniversary celebration — another set will be raffled off at the Museum of Delight there.)

And because the hand and the mind, the body and the spirit, are in constant conversation, somewhere along the way of this reckoning with life in clay and thread, a poem wrote itself in me:

VESPER FOR A BURNING WORLD
by Maria Popova

You need not be a saint,
stripped bare of all desire,
or a savior,
dragging the drowning
out of their pain
by the regret-stained collar
of their discontent.
You need not leaven
the world’s heavy toll of hope
by propping the sky up
with your sunburnt hands
or fence yourself off
in the flowerless meadow
of detachment.
All you need to do
is look in the mirror of morning
and say “Yes.”

BP

Richard Dawkins on the Luckiness of Death

By Maria Popova

Richard Dawkins on the Luckiness of Death

We are born into the certitude of our eventual death. Every once in a while, something — perhaps an encounter with a robin’s egg, perhaps a poem — staggers us with the awful, awe-filled wonder of aliveness, the sheer luck of it against the overwhelming cosmic odds of nonexistence. But alloyed with the awe is always the half-conscious grief that one day the light of consciousness will be extinguished. It is a heavy gift to hold, this doomed delirium of aliveness. It is also a buoyant gladness, if we are limber enough to stretch into the cosmic perspective that does not come naturally to us small, Earth-bound bipeds corticed with tender self-importance.

Consider this.

For each of us, one thing is true: Had any one variable been ever so subtly different — had your parents mated on a different day or at a different altitude, had the early universe cooled a fraction of a second faster after the Big Bang, you would not exist as the particular constellation of atoms configuring the particular consciousness that makes you you. Because chance plays such dice with the universe, and because the die dictates that the vast majority of energy and matter never had the luck of cohering into this doomed delirium of aliveness, it is, in some profound and practical sense, a staggering privilege to die — one that betokens the privilege of having lived. To lament death, then, is to lament our luck, for any negation of the possibility of death is a negation of the improbable miracle of life, a wish for there to be nothing to do the dying — nothing to have partaken of the beautiful, bittersweet temporality of aliveness.

Possible Certainties. Photograph by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

It is easier to bend the intuitive mind into this correct but counterintuitive perspective while walking in a cemetery at the height of summer. Doing this very thing while thinking these very thoughts, I was reminded of a passage from one of the most lucid and lens-clearing books written this side of Darwin — Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (public library) by the visionary and often controversial (which is the social fate of every visionary) British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

A civilization after Marcus Aurelius celebrated mortality as the key to living fully, half a millennium after Montaigne observed that “to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago,” and a scientific epoch after Darwin contemplated the meaning of mortality in the wake of his beloved daughter’s death, Dawkins writes:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

Complement with astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson’s exquisite “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” Nick Cave on grief as a portal to aliveness, and Christopher Hitchens on how to live with our mortality, then revisit the science of how alive you really are, examined through the curious lens of trees and Alan Turing.

BP

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