The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Indissoluble Filament Connecting Us All: Patti Smith on What It Means to Be an Artist

The Indissoluble Filament Connecting Us All: Patti Smith on What It Means to Be an Artist

Every visionary, every person of greatness and originality, is a resounding yes to life — to the truth of their own experience, to the demanding restlessness of the creative spirit, to the beauty and brutality and sheer bewilderment of being alive — a yes made of unfaltering nos: no to the way things are commonly done, no to the standard models of what is possible and permissible for a person, no to the banality of approval, no to every Faustian bargain of so-called success offering prestige at the price of authenticity.

One night after a long day shift as a waitress, a young mother tucked her sickly daughter into bed and handed her one of the few precious remnants of her own childhood — a 19th-century book of illustrated poems for boys and girls titled Silver Pennies.

Just as The Fairy Tale Tree awakened the young Nick Cave to art, this was Patti Smith’s precocious awakening as an artist. The opening sentence enchanted her:

You must have a silver penny to get into Fairyland. But silver pennies are hard to find.

It seemed like a clear instruction, the price of what she yearned for: “entrance into the mystical world.” In that way children have of touching the elemental truth of things, she intuited the two things needed for entry: “the heart to pierce other dimensions, the eyes to observe without judgment.”

She couldn’t have known it then, but this may be the purest definition of what it takes to be an artist; she couldn’t have known that she would spend the rest of her life not finding silver pennies but making them — for others to find, for her own salvation, for paying the price of her nos in living the enchanted yes of being an artist.

Art by Winifred Bromhall from Silver Pennies by Blanche Jennings Thompson, 1887. (Available as a print, benefitting The New York Public Library.)

In her moving memoir Bread of Angels (public library), she traces the trajectory of a life stubbornly defiant of the odds — the odds of bodily survival, with a “Proustian childhood” punctuated by tuberculosis, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, chicken pox, and the A/H2N2 virus; the odds of success: born into a poor family, her father, unable to afford a car, walking two miles to take the bus for his night shift; the odds of spiritual survival, with losses so harrowing to read about it is hard to imagine living with, from the death of her childhood best friend at twelve to a season of being marked by an incomprehensible cascade of losses: her artistic soul mate is taken by AIDS, her husband falls ill and dies at the hospital where their children were born, and in the wake of all that grief her beloved brother is slain by a stroke while wrapping a Christmas present for his daughter.

Art by Winifred Bromhall from Silver Pennies by Blanche Jennings Thompson, 1887. (Available as a print, benefitting The New York Public Library.)

What saves her again and again is her reverence for the magic and mystery of life. She recounts her early sense of it when, between eviction notices and temporary dwellings in urban buildings marked for demolition, her family moves into a modest house in a rural marshland area:

There was mystery here, not so much in the people, but in the land itself, in the barns, the outhouse, surrounding wetlands, the red earth containing the clay of being. I felt it calling to me, inviting me to experience a frequency I had not yet known. I was consumed with a sense that each of us knows everything, possessing our own lock and the key to turn it. I wondered what I would find, what my contribution might be, and what I might add to the infinite pool above.

Not long after that, she discovers the door to which her heart is the key:

Our sole family visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art was a revelation… We had never been to a museum or a gallery, we had never been to the movies or a restaurant together. There was no money to do anything save to picnic in the summer together.

When she encounters Dalí and Picasso for the first time in those alien marble halls, she is overcome by the sense of being among allies who would lead her “to a whole new world.” It is through that “invisible transformation” that she manages to break away from her Jehovah’s Witness upbringing and begins charting her own map of meaning, discovering what there is to believe in that holds — “the woolgatherers” and “soul-catchers,” “the many tongues of nature, the moral lessons of fairy tales, the language of trees, and the clay of the Earth.”

Art by Winifred Bromhall from Silver Pennies by Blanche Jennings Thompson, 1887. (Available as a print, benefitting The New York Public Library.)

Looking back on her sense that the artist is “the material mouthpiece” of the divine and on her longing to discover “an equation that would include all things,” she writes:

I cast off my religion, not without escaping a bitter sorrow, yet also accompanied by a feeling of liberation. I had chosen my own path, gave my evolving self to art, and decided to prepare myself for the life of an artist pledging to be steadfast no matter the consequences… The braid of the mind seemed to have many strands winding around each other, containing everything. All of history, all of knowledge, waiting to reveal itself, if only one could crack the code… We are born with a mind, open to everything, no fear, no known boundaries, but with each new rule, restriction the mind divides. We learn to live as in the age of reason, in relation to the world, to social order, balancing a compliance between imagination and the respirable kingdom.

Once the imagination is set free, the revelations can only keep coming. When she chances upon Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant, she is entranced by it, so unlike anything she had ever read, yet so full of the same “shock of aesthetic recognition” she had found in the paintings of Picasso, the poems of Yeats, and the photographs in Vogue.

Art by Lisbeth Zwerger from a rare edition of The Selfish Giant published the year I was born.

She pulls at the mysterious golden thread binding these disparate enchantments and suddenly the entire tapestry of the creative spirit is revealed:

Then it struck me: Everything was a potential poem. The stoic prayers of the mantis, the knowing eyes of my dog, the pen scratching. The white snake stirred, and the invisible lines of the rebel hump flickered then shimmered like the coat of many colors.

Every poem, whatever its form, is marked by “a sudden shaft of brightness containing the vibration of a particular moment,” and it is to that brightness that she decides to devote her life, leaving home to become an artist, sharing the path with heroes and friends and heroes who became friends by that centripetal force that draws those true to themselves to one another: Rimbaud and Bob Dylan (“both poets seemed trapped in a static present while perceiving future dimensions folding and unfolding into one another”), Alice in Wonderland and Allen Ginsberg, Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag. She reflects:

I felt chiefly a worker and believed our struggle a privilege. There were walls everywhere, the cracks were formed by others. All we had to do was kick with all our power, topple them, clear the rubble and create space.

Art by Winifred Bromhall from Silver Pennies by Blanche Jennings Thompson, 1887. (Available as a print, benefitting The New York Public Library.)

Through the struggle — the seasons of subsisting on eggs and oranges, the accident that landed her in a neck brace for months, the mothering of small children — she stays true to her vision, wielding her nos like machetes to make her path through the bramble of the givens: no to the gender norms of dress and demeanor, no to the photographers insisting on airbrushing her peculiarities, no to the posh producer promising to make her a star if she let him take “full command,” no to changing the raw lyric line for polished politeness.

Life responds with its slow-burning yes, radiant and redemptive: Her first record is pressed at the selfsame New Jersey plant where she had once been turned away in applying for a factory.

Buoyed by the knowledge that those given a gift have a responsibility to serve it well, she comes to see the struggle as the holy price of the real work: “to open the wounds of poetry.” In a sentiment that calls to mind Kafka’s reckoning with what keeps the gifted from living up to their gifts, she writes:

Eventually we must act, set in motion a process that will push us closer to the open wound.

Out of her particular life arises the larger sense that art is the alchemy of transmuting the wound into wonder, the sense that to be an artist is to remain ever “enthralled by small things” — the wild roses climbing up the ramshackle house, the “impossible blue” of the morning glories, the same doves returning to the balcony each spring — and ever animated by the “incandescent restlessness” of striving “to materialize the indissoluble filament connecting us all,” giving form to those “unpremeditated gestures of kindness” that are “the bread of angels.”

Art by Winifred Bromhall from Silver Pennies by Blanche Jennings Thompson, 1887. (Available as a print, benefitting The New York Public Library.)

Pulsating beneath it all is “love, the ineffable miracle” — that delicate art of holding on and letting go, our training ground for trusting time. She writes:

All must fall away… Shedding is one of life’s most difficult tasks… We evolve, we falter, we learn from our transgressions, and then repeat them. We plunge back into the abyss we labored to exit and find ourselves within another turn of the wheel. And then having found the fortitude to do so, we begin the excruciating yet exquisite process of letting go.

What emerges from the pages is the sense that art, like love, is that mysterious alchemical reaction between time, truth, and trust — trust in the truth of one’s vision, trust in the kairos of creativity across the lineage of artists, trust in the tenacity of the creative spirit. With such trust, time becomes not a river but a fountain, pouring in every direction into a pool of itself at the center of the sunlit plaza of the possible, and we, corpuscles of mist gilded for a moment before we drop to wash the silver pennies of the dead, and then begin again.

BP

Aldo Leopold on How to Hear the Song of Life

Aldo Leopold on How to Hear the Song of Life

The point, of course, is to see the whole — what Virginia Woolf called “the thing itself.” Not just to uncover the fragments and discover how each works but to understand their harmonic unity — the sum that, as the forgotten genius Willard Gibbs knew, “is simpler than its parts,” simpler and more beautiful, the way myriad complex chords played by a vast orchestra of disparate instruments become a symphony — a single unit of transcendence.

The philosopher, naturalist, and pioneering conservationist Aldo Leopold (January 11, 1887–April 21, 1948) takes up this question in a wonderful essay about the Rio Gavilan — a vast watershed in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental, where Leopold had spent time with his son in the 1930s and where his conservation philosophy had begun to ripen — later included in the indispensable collection A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (public library), published months after his death.

Aldo Leopold (Photograph: National Portrait Gallery / Aldo Leopold Foundation)

Leopold writes:

The song of a river ordinarily means the tune that waters play on rock, root, and rapid.

The Rio Gavilan has such a song. It is a pleasant music, bespeaking dancing riffles and fat rainbows laired under mossy roots of sycamore, oak, and pine. It is also useful, for the tinkle of waters so fills the narrow canyon that deer and turkey, coming down out of the hills to drink, hear no footfall of man or horse… This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it — a vast pulsing harmony — its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss.

Two generations after the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology, two decades before the American marine biologist Rachel Carson made it a household word as she catalyzed the modern environmental movement, and an epoch before Robert Macfarlane, who carries the torch of Carson’s legacy, made his poignant case for why a river is alive, Leopold considers the shared metabolism underpinning the ecosystem of the river to make it a single living organism:

Food is the continuum in the Song of the Gavilan. I mean, of course, not only your food, but food for the oak which feeds the buck who feeds the cougar who dies under an oak and goes back into acorns for his erstwhile prey. This is one of many food cycles starting from and returning to oaks, for the oak also feeds the jay who feeds the goshawk who named your river, the bear whose grease made your gravy, the quail who taught you a lesson in botany, and the turkey who daily gives you the slip. And the common end of all is to help the headwater trickles of the Gavilan split one more grain of soil off the broad hulk of the Sierra Madre to make another oak.

At the dawn of the century of specialization, in which we butchered the continuum of reality into more and more discrete parts to be studied by narrower and narrower disciplines, with no dialogue between quantum mechanics and epigenetics, astrobiology and neuroscience, Leopold cautions against mistaking the instruments for the song:

There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university. A professor may pluck the strings of his own instrument, but never that of another, and if he listens for music he must never admit it to his fellows or to his students. For all are restrained by an ironbound taboo which decrees that the construction of instruments is the domain of science, while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets. Professors serve science and science serves progress. It serves progress so well that many of the more intricate instruments are stepped upon and broken in the rush to spread progress to all backward lands. One by one the parts are thus stricken from the song of songs. If the professor is able to classify each instrument before it is broken, he is well content.

While his contemporary Carl Rogers was mapping out the three elements of the good life from the perspective of psychology, Leopold considers the crux of the good life through a lens best described as ecomusicology:

Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts; it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may. One of the facts hewn to by science is that every river needs more people, and all people need more inventions, and hence more science; the good life depends on the indefinite extension of this chain of logic. That the good life on any river may likewise depend on the perception of its music, and the preservation of some music to perceive, is a form of doubt not yet entertained by science.

Science has not yet arrived on the Gavilan, so the otter plays tag in its pools and riffles and chases the fat rainbow from under its mossy banks, with never a thought for the flood that one day will scour the bank into the Pacific, or for the sportsman who will one day dispute his title to the trout. Like the scientist, he has no doubts about his own design for living. He assumes that for him the Gavilan will sing forever.

Photograph: NASA / International Space Station

Couple with Annie Dillard on what a weasel knows about the secret of live, then revisit Walt Whitman on listening to the song of existence and Alexander von Humboldt on the essence of science and how to read the poetry of nature.

BP

Alphabet in Motion: Artist Kelli Anderson’s Wondrous Pop-up Biography of the Letters

Alphabet in Motion: Artist Kelli Anderson’s Wondrous Pop-up Biography of the Letters

It is astonishing enough that we invented language, this vessel of thought that shapes what it contains, that we lifted it to our lips to sip the world and tell each other what we taste, what it is like to be alive in this particular sensorium. But then we passed it from our lips to our hands and gave it form so we can hear it with our eyes and see with our minds, making shapes for sounds and meaning from the shapes.

We take it for granted now, this makeshift miracle permeating every substrate of our lives, and go on tasking these tiny concrete things with conveying our most immense and abstract ideas. We forget how young this technology of thought is, younger than Earth’s largest living organism, and yet it tells a richer story of who we are than any archeological artifact, touches more of what makes us human than the fossil record. Our letters carry the history of our species and of our world, their shapes shaped by a conversation between the creativity of our imagination and the constraints of our creaturely reality, from the rotational geometry of the human wrist to the chemistry of the first paints into which the first brushes were dipped.

Kelli Anderson, maker of material magic, brings that layered history to life in Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape — a large-format two-volume marvel, many years and myriad prototypes in the making, full of paper pulleys and accordion delights that illustrate the biography of each letter.

Through a kaleidoscope of disciplines, from art and design to anthropology and history, Kelli shines a dazzling light on how we went from ink to lead to pixel, drawing on everything from Plato’s Cratylus to an 1882 textbook on the workings of the Jacquard loom to (which sparked the concept of the first computer code in the fertile mind of the the young Ada Lovelace) to the punch card revolution and its hidden history of women working under pseudonyms to conjure up the digital universe.

In one of the wonderful short essays accompanying each letter, she writes:

For many cultures over time, the A’s triangular form has represented strength and stability. This association likely originated in the physical world. The triangle is is the most stable load-bearing shape because it distributes force and tension to either side of its wide base. In terms of physics, the majority of simple machines utilize the triangle’s intrinsic morphological power: the wedge, inclined plane, and lever all work thanks to their triangular forms.

Long before physics provided a cogent explanation, early human civilizations had observed and utilized the structural strength of the triangle in their architecture and simple machines. By extension, for hundreds of years across the Hellenic world, the A was thought to have the power to curse and to heal, and regularly appeared in religious and medicinal rituals. The letter A neatly connected symbolic mysticism with the demonstrable power of the built world. (There exists a symmetry between “to spell” and “a spell.”)

Observing that “every letter has a long history,” Kelli traces the lineage of A:

The A we recognize today is the result of various cultures’ remapping of this shape to sights and concepts of local environments.

The A’s triangular form begins in Egypt in 3100 BCE as a pictogram of a perched eagle, a bird central to ancient Egyptian religion.

The more agrarian-minded Phoenicians transformed the eagle into aleph (from the Hebrew word for “ox”). Now rotated, this bovine appears in profile with its horns pointing to the right, its nose to the left. A vertical line defines the back of the ox’s head, which introduces the A’s horizontal crossbar.

One of the great blind spots of our cultural hindsight is the continuity of ideas — we look back and gasp at what appears as a breakthrough, failing to see its combinatorial nature, the way everything builds on what came before. Kelli writes:

The word “text” comes from the Latin verb texere, which means “to weave” (hence the origin of an expression like “to spin a yarn”). Computers, which were first used for typesetting and are direct technological descendants of weaving, seem to perfectly bridge texere’s dual meanings. Weaving is a binary technology: Its vertical warp and horizontal weft (and the way those two components, together, render a yarn visible/invisible) are a precursor to how the 1s and 0s of today’s computers work. Woven binary code memory served as the rudimentary computer navigation system onboard the Apollo 11 mission.

Alongside the paper playground of ideas is a rigorously researched magazine chronicling the history of technology and the evolution of typography. What emerges is something thoroughly unexampled: part pop-up exploratorium, part encyclopedia, part wunderkammer with twenty-six compartments of wonder, part homage to the unsung heroes who, working in the shadow of their time and place, shaped the modern world.

Alphabet in Motion, the tactile delight of which is thoroughly untranslatable onto a digital screen, lives in that rare place where imagination and illumination meet to become a portal of wonder — the gift of a lifetime.

BP

How to Be Human: Kahlil Gibran’s Recipe for Our Spiritual Perfection as a Species

How to Be Human: Kahlil Gibran’s Recipe for Our Spiritual Perfection as a Species

We walk this earth as bewildered animals trying to recover the divinity within — descendants of the great apes who invented gods to mirror back to us the best in ourselves and bridle the worst, but we are still and always have been our own only shepherds.

In times of crisis for humanity, amid the genocides and the wars and the burning forests and the firing squads of self-righteousness, the only true remedy is to remember what it means to be human — the complexity of it, the contradictions, the panoply of capacities from which get to choose in becoming who we are, as persons and as peoples.

Every crisis of and for humanity is evidence that we have forgotten what we are — what Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931), writing in the interlude between two world wars, calls a “divinity which walks among the nations and speaks of love, pointing toward the paths of life, while the people laugh and mock its words and teachings.” In The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul (public library) — the wonderful collection of meditations, essays, and poems drawn from Gibran’s Arabic writings about the spiritual life — he writes:

We were a silent, hidden thought in the folds of oblivion, and we have become a voice that causes the heavens to tremble.

We were a faint spark buried in the ash, but have become a fire blazing above the sheltered ravine.

Art by Ariana Fields from What Do You Know? by Aracelis Girmay

An epoch before Maya Angelou reckoned with our multitudes in her breathtaking spaceborne poem, insisting that “we are neither devils nor divines,” Gibran considers what it would take for us, “scions of the apes,” to attain spiritual perfection as a species:

Humankind will proceed toward perfection when it feels that humanity is: A limitless sky and a shoreless ocean, an ever-blazing flame, an eternally gleaming light, a wind when it gusts and when it is calm, a cloud when it thunders and lightnings and rains, a stream when it sings or roars, a tree when it blossoms in the spring and disrobes in the autumn, a mountain when it towers, a valley when it descends, and a field when it is fertile or barren.

When humankind has felt all these things, it will have reached the midpoint in its path toward perfection. If it wishes to arrive at the road to perfection, it must, if it perceives its own essence, feel that humanity is: An infant relying on its mother, a mature man responsible for his dependents, a youth lost among his desires and passions, an elderly man whose past and future wrestle with one another, a worshipper in his hermitage, a criminal in his cell, a scholar amidst his books and papers, a fool between the black of night and the dark of his day, a nun among the flowers of her faith and the thorns of her loneliness, a prostitute between the talons of her weakness and the claws of her neediness, the indigent between his bitterness and complaisance, the rich man between his ambitions and his submission, the poet between the fog of his evenings and the rays of his dawns.

Should humankind prove able to experience and know all these things, it will arrive at perfection and become one shadow among the shadows of Gods.

If you could use some kindling for the fire of your faith in humanity, warm yourself with the story of how humanity saved the ginkgo and with E.B. White’s magnificent response to a man who had lost faith in humanity, then revisit Gibran on the building blocks of friendship, how to raise children, and how to weather the uncertainties of love.

BP

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