You wouldn’t have bet on it, this battered rock orbiting a star from the discount bin of the universe, you wouldn’t have bet 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 500 million years from trilobite to telescope, and the unhurried orange lichen growing on the black boulder two hundred times more slowly than the continental plates beneath are drifting apart, and the marbled orca carrying her dead calf the length 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 love.
It is all so improbable, this wild and wondrous world, against all we know about the universe. And yet here it is, and here we are, set on it to know that we are dying and live anyway, and love anyway.
Our most beautiful, most transformative, most vivifying experiences and encounters are like that — they enter our lives through the back door of expectation, shattering the laws of probability with the golden gavel of the possible.
In The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship (public library), poet and philosopher David Whyte captures the terror and transcendence we are hurled into as we encounter, without looking for it, “a degree of mutually encoded knowledge” with another person that touches the center of our being and discomposes the superstructure of life as we know it.
Lee Miller and Friend by Man Ray. Paris, 1930.
Whyte considers the insuperable force of truth pulsating beneath our resistance to such experiences:
Something inside the protective walls of… our established sense of our self may be preparing us, willingly or unwillingly, for an emancipation, a life beyond it which if intuited too early might be frightening to us, beyond our ability to reach.
Trying to navigate the situation, we tend to rely on the intellect to “to contrast and compare, to measure carefully and weigh things in the balance,” forgetting its immense blind spots and, still victims of Descartes all those epochs later, forgetting that the most alive parts of life are often profoundly unreasonable. Whyte writes:
Beneath [our intellectual assessments], untiring but seldom listened to, we have…. a swirling internal formation called the intuition, the imagination, the heart, the almost prophetic part of a person that at its best somehow seems to know what is good and what is bad for us, but also what pattern is just about to precipitate, what out of a hundred possibilities is just about to happen, in a sense, an unspoken faculty for knowing what season we are in. What is about to die and what is about to come into being.
It is not easy, this reconstitution of the self, this uncharted exploration of the possible in the improbable. But if the universe can do it, so can the living fractals of it that we are.
Long ago, we traded the trees for tools, trying to bend the world to our will. We rose to our feet, ambling under the weight of an oversized brain that grew the opposable thumb we call thinking and made with it more tools — language to name what we saw, organizing principles for what we named, theories to explain it explain it all.
Among all of our technologies of thought, none has been more useful, more dangerous, more double-edged than the category — a living fossil of our hunter-gatherer days, impelling us to put things into little baskets of similitude, compulsively analyzing reality in order to classify and contain it.
The price we paid for our extraordinary cognitive capacity is a docile faith in the analytical mind as the most effective tool to wield at the problem of reality. This yearning for order amid the chaos of the universe, for something to allay the fundamental bewilderment of being alive, may be what makes us human; it may also be the root of our alienation from the rest of nature, for it is inherently antinatural: A century after Descartes severed the body from the mind, Linnaeus severed the organism from the ecosystem, dividing nature into discrete categories, dismembering the interdependence that makes this rocky planet a living world. Over and over we discover that the most resilient organisms in nature traverse the borders between kingdoms and blur the boundary between selves, just as the richest loves defy labels, and yet we continue living under Linnaeus’s spell. But as my astrophysicist friend Natalie Batalha observes in her wonderful Where Shall We Meet interview, “we humans like to put things in jars, we like to classify things, but what we’ve learned is that nature is quite continuous — you can’t neatly put things in jars.”
Cyanotype by Thomas Smillie, The Smithsonian’s first photographer (1890)
English novelist John Fowles (March 31, 1926–November 5, 2005) makes an impassioned case for the unjarring of life in his altogether wonderful 1979 arboreal memoir The Tree (public library). He writes:
I am a heretic about Linnaeus, and find nothing less strange, or more poetically just, than that he should have gone mad at the end of his life. I do not dispute the value of the tool he gave to natural science — which was in itself no more than a shrewd extension of the Aristotelian system and which someone else would soon have elaborated, if he had not; but I have doubts about the lasting change it has effected in ordinary human consciousness.
Evolution has turned man into a sharply isolating creature, seeing the world not only anthropocentrically but singly, mirroring the way we like to think of our private selves. Almost all our art before the Impressionists — or their St John the Baptist, William Turner — betrays our love of clearly defined boundaries, unique identities, of the individual thing released from the confusion of background. This power of detaching an object from its surroundings and making us concentrate on it is an implicit criterion in all our judgements on the more realistic side of visual art; and very similar, if not identical, to what we require of optical instruments like microscopes and telescopes — which is to magnify, to focus sharper, to distinguish better, to single from the ruck. A great deal of science is devoted to this same end: to providing specific labels, explaining specific mechanisms and ecologies, in short for sorting and tidying what seems in the mass indistinguishable one from the other. Even the simplest knowledge of the names and habits of flowers or trees starts this distinguishing or individuating process, and removes us a step from total reality towards anthropocentrism; that is, it acts mentally as an equivalent of the camera view-finder. Already it destroys or curtails certain possibilities of seeing, apprehending and experiencing. And that is the bitter fruit from the tree of Uppsalan knowledge.
Cyanotype by Thomas Smillie, The Smithsonian’s first photographer (1890)
A century after the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology and a decade before trailblazing Candian forester Suzanne Simard began her revelatory isotope research into the rhizomatic communication of trees, Fowles adds:
It also begs very considerable questions as to the realities of the boundaries we impose on what we see. In a wood the actual visual “frontier” of any one tree is usually impossible to distinguish, at least in summer. We feel, or think we feel, nearest to a tree’s “essence” (or that of its species) when it chances to stand like us, in isolation; but evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than ourselves they are social creatures, and no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor or a hermit. Their society in turn creates or supports other societies of plants, insects, birds, mammals, micro-organisms; all of which we may choose to isolate and section off, but which remain no less the ideal entity, or whole experience, of the wood — and indeed are still so seen by most of primitive mankind.
Scientists restrict the word symbiotic to those relationships between species that bring some detectable mutual benefit; but the true wood, the true place of any kind, is the sum of all its phenomena. They are all in some sense symbiotic, being together in a togetherness of beings. It is only because such a vast sum of interactions and coincidences in time and place is beyond science’s calculation (a scientist might say, beyond useful function, even if calculable) that we so habitually ignore it, and treat the flight of the bird and the branch it flies from, the leaf in the wind and its shadow on the ground, as separate events, or riddles — what bird? which branch? what leaf? which shadow? These question-boundaries (where do I file that?) are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only culturally and intellectually, but quite physically, by the restlessness of our eyes and their limited field and acuity of vision. Long before the glass lens and the movie-camera were invented, they existed in our eyes and minds, both in our mode of perception and in our mode of analysing the perceived: endless short sequence and jump-cut, endless need to edit and range this raw material.
Art by Violeta Lopíz and Valerio Vidali from The Forest by Riccardo Bozzi
Wincing at his early life as “a pseudo-scientist, treating nature as some sort of intellectual puzzle, or game, in which being able to name names and explain behaviourisms — to identify and to understand machinery — constituted all the pleasures and the prizes,” Fowles laments how this orientation distracted him from “the total meaning and total experience of nature,” and adds:
The particular cost of understanding the mechanism of nature, of having so successfully itemized and pigeon-holed it, lies most of all in the ordinary person’s perception of it, in his or her ability to live with and care for it — and not to see it as challenge, defiance, enemy. Selection from total reality is no less necessary in science than it is in art; but outside those domains (in both of which the final test of selection is utility, or yield, to our own species) it seriously distorts and limits any worthwhile relationship.
We know this, not in the mind but in the marrow of our being — our own richest, profoundest, most transformative experiences elude classification, their essence unreachable by analysis, for it is a synthesis of myriad forces and phenomena only a fraction of which we are conscious of. To analyze such experiences is not to understand them more deeply but to grow alienated from them and from the part of ourselves that did the experiencing, the part wild with aliveness. Fowles writes:
Ordinary experience, from waking second to second, is in fact highly synthetic (in the sense of combinative or constructive), and made of a complexity of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history… quintessentially “wild” in the sense [of] unphilosophical, irrational, uncontrollable, incalculable. In fact it corresponds very closely — despite our endless efforts to “garden,” to invent disciplining social and intellectual systems — with wild nature. Almost all the richness of our personal existence derives from this synthetic and eternally present “confused” consciousness of both internal and external reality, and not least because we know it is beyond the analytical.
Love is a fire that takes two to keep burning, but one to extinguish — if the hearth of either heart is too damp with doubt, both wake up one day to find their hands cupping ashes. And yet when two people have loved each other and parted, the fire is forever embering between them, however great the distance in space, in time, in thought. The wind of a single word and the gust of the smallest gesture can rekindle it in a flash, often to the surprise of both. All true love is a smoking spell against forgetting.
That is the aspect of love I feel burning through “If You Forget Me” by Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) — a breakup poem and a poem of unbreaking, one that begins as an ode, twists into an ultimatum, and finally reveals itself to be a lamentation, a hymn of longing, a bittersweet acknowledgement that once a person has entered another’s heart, they always have a place in it, but also a recognition of how they ought to show up in order to honor that place.
That, at least, is how I receive this poem, at this particular point in my life — for, as the teenage Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother, “once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.” It is read here by two dear friends a generation apart — Karen Maldonado in Spanish and Rose Hanzlik in English, as translated by Donald Devenish Walsh in the bilingual pocket-sized collection of immensities Love Poems (public library). It is a poem that warrants as accompaniment nothing less than Bach’s transcendent Cello Suite No. 1, performed by none other than the great Spanish cellist Pablo Casals.
IF YOU FORGET ME by Pablo Neruda
I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
SI TÚ ME OLVIDAS Pablo Neruda
Quiero que sepas
una cosa.
Tú sabes cómo es esto:
si miro
la luna de cristal, la rama roja
del lento otoño en mi ventana,
si toco
junto al fuego
la impalpable ceniza
o el arrugado cuerpo de la leña,
todo me lleva a ti,
como si todo lo que existe,
aromas, luz, metales,
fueran pequeños barcos que navegan
hacia las islas tuyas que me aguardan.
Ahora bien,
si poco a poco dejas de quererme
dejaré de quererte poco a poco.
Si de pronto
me olvidas
no me busques,
que ya te habré olvidado.
Si consideras largo y loco
el viento de banderas
que pasa por mi vida
y te decides
a dejarme a la orilla
del corazón en que tengo raíces,
piensa
que en ese día,
a esa hora
levantaré los brazos
y saldrán mis raíces
a buscar otra tierra.
Pero
si cada día,
cada hora
sientes que a mí estás destinada
con dulzura implacable.
Si cada día sube
una flor a tus labios a buscarme,
ay amor mío, ay mía,
en mí todo ese fuego se repite,
en mí nada se apaga ni se olvida,
mi amor se nutre de tu amor, amada,
y mientras vivas estará en tus brazos
sin salir de los míos.
One day not long after I moved to New York, I looked up from my writing desk at a shared studio space on the Brooklyn waterfront and saw the Manhattan Bridge halved, only the Brooklyn side remaining, the rest vanished into a sea of fog that had erased Manhattan.
A sight with the strangeness of a dream, piercing the reality of the late-autumn morning.
An augury, a living metaphor, a revelation: Every moment of transition is a bridge receding from the firm ground of the known life it into the fog of the possible, promising and menacing in all its opacity. We can only see one step ahead, but the bridge reveals itself firm under our feet as we keep walking, advancing by “the next right thing,” parting the fog to touch the future.
For all its mystical quality, fog has a materiality that embodies the metabolism of this rocky world. It is a conversation between the landscape, its bodies of water, and the wind. Fog forms when the atmosphere cools enough for water droplets to condense into a low-flying cloud. In fact, it is a species of stratus cloud that has landed — an endangered species: Throughout Europe, fog has declined by 50% since 1970 and coastal fog all around the world is vanishing due to climate change, parching ecosystems and leaving landscapes much more vulnerable to wildfires.
While it is still here, let it come — sudden as an owl or slow as daybreak, lasting just long for you to feel the breath of the Earth on your cheek, wet and primordial.
In Chasing Fog (public library), writer and photographer Laura Pashby composes a beguiling love letter to “the wonder and soothing balm of fog,” to “the irresistible romance of stepping into a cloud at ground level,” to what it teaches us about the visible and the invisible.
Laura Pashby: self-portrait in fog
A childhood like hers — spent under the sunless leaden skies of the Dartmoor’s wilderness margined with fog, a castle ruin as her playground, the desolate moor as her pool — shapes a person, shapes how she sees the half-seen world. She writes:
Fog is my muse: when I am in it, I see things differently. The known becomes unknown, the familiar unfamiliar. Fog disorientates, blurring the edges of everything — changing landscape, altering colour and softening light… A foggy morning is rich with mystery and magic, but also with possibility — the everyday feels otherworldly… Fog, like salt water, is completely other — it provides a shock, an escape, a release.
[…]
While fog may seem to hang heavy, it is often vital, not static: dipping, waving, seeping, drifting and flowing. Fog is unpredictable — it is not soft and benign like cotton wool. In his 1919 essay “Das Unheimliche,” Freud defined the uncanny as something that is both frightening yet familiar: the strangeness of the ordinary. This is exactly the effect that fog can have upon a landscape: when it quickly descends, it disorientates us, obscuring sight, changing familiar surroundings and making the known world seem odd and unsettling. It was this sensory experience that I felt compelled to explore first: the loss of sight as our vision is diminished by fog’s descent; the feeling of a veil being drawn.
Photograph by Laura Pashby
In a lovely instance of the unphotographable, Pashby paints an enchanting picture in words:
The fog flows up from the valley and slowly, slowly it fills the town. From my little loft-room study window, I watch it edge along the street like a whisper made visible, gently enveloping house after house, until it reaches mine. The huge beech tree in the garden opposite disappears completely, leaving only the echoing calls of its resident jackdaws — ghostly in the viscous air. The world beyond my open window fades to white. I want the fog to drift right in, curl cool tendrils around me and encircle me like smoke.
What emerges is the sense that fog is not only a phenomenon but an invitation — to draw the veil of the world and see it more closely, to see yourself unveiled and saturated with aliveness. (Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror.) Pashby writes:
By paying close attention to fog… I have tried (imperfectly, truthfully) to bear witness, looking for beauty in a darkening world, for abundance where there so often is none, for clarity through a misted lens.
[…]
If we listen, fog has much to teach us: about the landscape, the weatherscape and about who we are. We are all made of water — it passes through us and moves on, into the rain, into the river, into the ocean, into the fog. Each of us is fluid, mutable, magic, and we are not distinct from nature, we are nature. We are fog.
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You wouldn’t have bet on it, this battered rock orbiting a star from the discount bin of the universe, you wouldn’t have bet 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 500 million years from trilobite to telescope, and the unhurried orange lichen growing on the black boulder two hundred times more slowly than the continental plates beneath are drifting apart, and the marbled orca carrying her dead calf the length 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 love. 
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