“What’s the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as-you-were?” Mary McCarthy asked her friend Hannah Arendt in their correspondence about love. The question resonates because it speaks to a central necessity of love — at its truest and most potent, love invariably does change us, deconditioning our painful pathologies and elevating us toward our highest human potential. It allows us, as Barack Obama so eloquently wrote in his reflections on what his mother taught him about love, “to break across our solitude, and then, if we’re lucky, [be] finally transformed into something firmer.”
But in the romantic ideal upon which our modern mythos of love is built, the solidity of that togetherness is taken to such an extreme as to render love fragile. When lovers are expected to fuse together so closely and completely, mutuality mutates into a paralyzing codependence — a calcified and rigid firmness that becomes brittle to the possibility of growth. In the most nourishing kind of love, the communion of togetherness coexists with an integrity of individuality, the two aspects always in dynamic and fluid dialogue. The philosopher Martin Heidegger captured this beautifully in his love letters to Hannah Arendt: “Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.”
This difficult balance of intimacy and independence is what the great Lebanese-American artist, poet, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) explores with uncommon insight and poetic precision in a passage from his 1923 masterwork The Prophet (public library).
By way of advice on the secret to a loving and lasting marriage, Gibran offers:
Let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
In a recent conversation with my poetic physicist friend Alan Lightman, sparring over whether the creative spirit can be usefully divided into complementary arts and science (Alan’s view) or whether these are simply different side doors to our ongoing yearning to bridge matter and mystery in order to make meaning (my view), I was reminded of a forgotten speech by one of the most original minds and brightest spirits of the past century.
On Valentine’s Day 1971, a year after the publication of her classic Centering, the poet and potter M.C. Richards (July 13, 1916–September 10, 1999) was invited to speak at an arts festival in Maine. Going “from horticulture to alchemy to the history of consciousness, with a few poems sprinkled in, and relying heavily on paradox,” the address she delivered, later included in The Crossing Point: Selected Talks and Writings (public library), is one of the most honest, imaginative, and articulate investigations of creativity I have encountered — a bold defiance of the fracturing of culture anchored in the passionate insistence that “the center is everywhere,” that it is “made up of differences, uniquenesses, in a tissue of relationships, interactions, interpenetrations.”
Mary Caroline Richards at Black Mountain College (Getty Research Institute. Photographer unknown.)
At the center of her cosmogony of creativity are the connections between the life of the individual human being and the life of the universe; between the inner invisible realm, which she calls “the force,” and the outer visible realm of its manifestation, which she calls the “the flower”; between the different fields of study and work through which we explore these realms. She writes:
Artists are sometimes particularly attuned to these connections, scientists too, mystics too… There may be a message in this way of working. Maybe that’s what a subject is, a gathering of ideas as set in motion by a central impulse. Like a magnetic field. Start the field going, and elements begin to swarm. By what logic? By attraction. By resonance. Maybe that’s what relevance is: the feeling of attraction and resonance between ideas and people.
This feeling, Richard observes, is what we call creativity — the mystery to which we try to give shape in matter — and it begins not in the mind but in the heart. She considers the force by which the cabbage flowers:
Cabbage… grows a big heart. Out of this heart come leaves. As the leaves grow, the heart grows. The cabbage gets its leaves from the inside, where there aren’t any. Cabbages grow from the inside, from the heart. And by growing they create their hearts.
A neurophysiologist from Yale says that brains too are created in this way: from un-brain forces. He says that the human brain is created by thinking, that ideas and values create chemical reactions in tissue. Like a cabbage, somehow the physical form grows from an invisible realm.
This invisible realm must be a powerfully creative region. It furnishes us not only with cabbages and brains, but with our scientific hypotheses, religious experiences, and works of art.
With the recognition that works of art begin with “a feeling for things, a feeling which is a way of knowing about things,” she adds:
We tend to call any undertaking an art when it seems to be drawing upon the fullness of inner feeling and upon careful regard for physical expression. To live and to work in the world mindful of the processes which are necessary to infuse matter with soul forces, to use techniques on behalf of living forms, is a great art.
In this sense, she observes, living itself is an art — the art of connection. Just as Erich Fromm was formulating the ideas that would become The Art of Being, Richards writes:
Life is best understood and practiced as an art, the way that art is understood and practiced. We rely on inspiration, feeling for materials, knowledge of how to put things together well, patience, physical strength and awareness that we are part of a process which we don’t know much about yet but which we live within and are sustained by. The verbal arts we practice, or visual arts, or graphic arts, or theater arts, or musical arts, or liberal arts, are part of something. They are not the whole story. And they are interconnected at the center with all the other parts.
1573 painting by the Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Pulsating beneath this interconnected totality is the essence of all creative work. While the young Jane Goodall was contemplating the indivisibility of art and science, Richards considers what creativity in all its forms asks of us and what it gives us:
Total concentration, total focus, enjoyment, discovery, inner effort, creating something, feeling secure in the process yet not knowing or demanding to know how it will come out. Many of the things we do may have this quality. Take gardening, for example, or making lab experiments, or working out a new equation, or cooking supper, or having a child, or teaching a class, or running a college, or praying, or going for a walk, or getting married, or dying.
This feeling of generative not-knowing — something the artist Ann Hamilton so beautifully articulated a generation after Richards — is also our best path to knowledge, integral to the creative process of science:
When we live in the spirit of science, we live in a quality of inquiry, of wonder. We put one foot in front of the other, standing firmly balanced on the earth, finding our way on. Each step is both an answer and a question. We both know and don’t know what we are doing… We need to learn to hear the yesin the no; the no in the yes. To hear what is not said. To see what is not visible.
“What we see from the air is so simple and beautiful,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote after her first airplane flight, “I cannot help feeling that it would do something wonderful for the human race — rid it of much smallness and pettiness if more people flew.”
I am writing this aboard an airplane. An earthbound ape in my airborne cage of metal and glass, I wonder who we would be, in the soul of the species, if we could fly — really fly, the way birds do; if we were born not just seeing “the world all simplified and beautiful and clear-cut in patterns,” as Georgia did out of that small round window, but feeling it. And yet you and I shall never know the open sky as a way of being — never know the touch of a thermal or the taste of a thundercloud, never see our naked shadow on a mountain or slice a cirrus with a wing. What cruel cosmic fate to live on this Pale Blue Dot without ever knowing its blueness. And yet we are recompensed by a consciousness capable of wonder — that edge state on the rim of understanding, where the mind touches mystery.
It is wonder that led us to invent science — that quickening of curiosity driving every discovery — so that science may repay us with magnified wonder as it reveals the weft and warp of nature — the tapestry of forces and phenomena, of subtleties and complexities, woven on the enchanted loom of reality. To look at any single thread more closely, in all its hidden wonder, is to see more clearly how the entire tapestry holds together, to strengthen how we ourselves hold together across the arc of life. For, as Rachel Carson so memorably wrote, the greatest gift you could give a child — or the eternal child in you — is “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments… the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”
Art by Nikki McClure from Something About the Sky — Rachel Carson’s serenade to the wonder of the clouds
Take the wonder of a bird — this living poem of feather and physics, of barometric wizardry and hollow bone, in whose profoundly other brain evolution invented dreams. That so tiny a creature should defy the gravitational pull of an entire planet seems impossible, miraculous. And yet beneath this defiance is an active surrender to the same immutable laws that make the whole miracle of the universe possible.
In one of the three dozen fascinating essays collected in The Miraculous from the Material: Understanding the Wonders of Nature (public library), the poetic physicist and novelist Alan Lightman illuminates the lawful wonder of avian flight, from evolution to aerodynamics, from molecules to mathematics, beginning with the fundamental wonderment of how a bird creates strong enough an upward force to counter gravity’s pull on its weight:
[The force] is created by a net upward air pressure, which in turn is created by the bird’s forward motion and the shape of its wings. The topside of an avian wing is curved, while the bottom side is rather flat. This difference in shape, together with the angle and some smaller adjustments of the wing, cause the air to flow over the top of the wing at higher speed than on the bottom. The higher speed on top reduces the air pressure above the wing compared to the air pressure below the wing. With more pressure pushing up from below than pressure pushing down from above, the wing gets an upward lift.
Anatomy of a bird by French artist Paul Sougy. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
It may seem counterintuitive that a higher air speed above the wing would produce a lower pressure, but our creaturely intuitions have often been poor reflections of reality — it took us eons to discern that the flat surface beneath our feet is a sphere, that the sphere is not at the center of the universe, and that there is an invisible force acting on objects without touching them to make the universe cohere — a force which a bored twenty-something sitting in his mother’s apple orchard called gravity.
Alan explains the reality of chemistry and physics that makes flight possible as air molecules strike against the underside of the wing to lift the bird up:
Air consists of little molecules that push against whatever they strike, causing pressure. Molecules of air are constantly whizzing about in all directions. If no energy is added, the total speed of the molecules must be constant, by the law of the conservation of energy. But that speed is composed of two parts: a horizontal speed, parallel to the wing, and a vertical speed, perpendicular to the wing. Increase the horizontal speed of air molecules above the wing, and the vertical speed of those molecules must decrease. Lower speed of molecules striking the wing from above means less pressure, or less push. The molecules on the bottom of the wing, moving slower in the horizontal direction but faster in the vertical direction (with greater upward pressure), lift the wing upward.
The lift is greater the larger the wing area and the faster the speed of air past the wing. There’s a convenient trade-off here. The necessary lift force to counterbalance the bird’s weight can be had with less wing area if the animal increases its forward speed, and vice versa. Birds capitalize on this option according to their individual needs. The great blue heron, for example, has long, slender legs for wading and must fly slowly so as not to break them on landing. Consequently, herons have relatively large wingspan. Pheasants, on the other hand, maneuver in underbrush and would find large wings cumbersome. To remain airborne with their relatively short and stubby wings, pheasants must fly fast.
There are, however, limits to this factorial conversation between surface and speed. Alan considers why there are no birds the size of elephants:
As you scale up the size of a bird or any material thing, unless you drastically change its shape, its weight increases faster than its area. Weight is proportional to volume, or length times length times length, while area is proportional to length times length. Double the length, and the weight is eight times larger, while the area is only four times larger. For example, if you have a cube of 1 inch on a side, its volume is 1 cubic inch, while its total area is 6 (sides) × 1 square inch, or 6 square inches. If you double the side of the cube to 2 inches, its volume goes up to 8 cubic inches, or 800 percent (with a similar increase in weight), while its area goes up to 24 square inches, or 400 percent. Since the lift force is proportional to the wing area while the opposing weight force is proportional to the bird’s volume, as you continue scaling up, eventually you reach a point where the bird’s wing area is not enough to keep it aloft. Although birds have been experimenting with flight for 100 million years, the heaviest true flying bird, the great bustard, rarely exceeds 42 pounds. The larger gliding birds, such as vultures, are lifted by rising hot air columns and don’t carry their full weight.
But all this elaborate molecular and mathematical aerodynamics of upward motion is not enough to make flight possible — birds must also propel themselves forward without propellers. For a long time, how they do this was a mystery. (The mystery was even deeper for the singular flight of the hummingbird, hovering between science and magic.) It was the birth of modern aviation that finally shed light on it. In the early nineteenth century, watching how birds glide, the pioneering engineer and aerial investigator George Cayley became the first human being to discern the mechanics of flight, identifying the three forces acting on the weight of any flying body: lift, drag, and thrust.
Alan details the physics of drag and thrust that allow birds to move forward:
Birds do in fact have propellers, in the form of specially designed feathers in the outer halves of their wings. These feathers, called primaries, change their shape and position during a wingbeat. Forward thrust is obtained by pushing air backward with each flap. In a similar manner, we are able to move forward in a swimming pool by vigorously moving our arms backward against the water.
All of this helps explain why larger birds often fly in a V formation — each bird benefits from the uplifting air pockets produced by the bird in front of it, conserving 20 to 30 percent of the calories needed for flight compared to flying solo. Because the lead bird takes most of the aerodynamic and caloric brunt shielding the rest from the wind, the flock takes turns in the frontmost position.
This, too, is the physics of any healthy community, any healthy relationship — the physics of vulnerability and trust. Because life always exerts different pressures on each person at different times, internal or external, thriving together is not a matter of always pulling equal weight but of accommodating the ebb and flow of one another’s vulnerability, each trusting the other to shield them in times of depletion, then doing the shielding when replenished. One measure of love may be the willingness to be the lead bird shielding someone dear in their time of struggle, lifting up their wings with your stubborn presence.
“The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer,” quantum pioneer Niels Bohr wrote of the subjective reality in which we live out our human lives, as he distinguished it from the objective reality of the universe. But for all that religions have done to moor us amid the uncertainty of time, space, and being, to give us a sense of agency and a sense of morality, they have also spurred the most violent conflicts in the history of our species — that infinitely dangerous mass rationalization of self-righteousness we call war.
My mother is very religious so I’m very much aware of the attitude that these are the last days. But, let’s face it, no matter where we have been in history, whoever has existed has been living in the last days… their own. When each of us dies the world ends for us.
[…]
The kind of religion that I’m seeing now is not the religion of love and it scares me. We need to outgrow it.
Religion has played such a large part in the lives of human beings throughout human history. In some ways, I wish we could outgrow it; I think at this point it does a lot of harm. But then, I’m fairly sure that if we do outgrow it, we’ll find other reasons to kill and persecute each other. I wish we were able to depend on ethical systems that did not involve the Big Policeman in the sky.
A better way of relating to each other, Butler intimates, can be found in the science of the natural world. Influenced by evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’s pioneering work on symbiosis, she reflects:
[Lynn Margulis] was not talking about people. She’s talking mainly about microorganisms, but still, it’s true, I think with people as well as some animals and microorganisms, on many levels, we wind up being strengthened by what we join, or what joins us, as well as by what we combat.
There is something lovely in reconfiguring religion as this relational interdependence of selves, rooted not in our ideology but in our biology. This, perhaps, is what moved Butler to write nearly two decades later: “To shape God, shape Self.”
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