The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Marianne Moore on the There Elements of Persuasive Writing

By Maria Popova

Marianne Moore on the There Elements of Persuasive Writing

Several years ago, rummaging through the archives of the Academy of American Poets, I came upon a box labeled “Ballots 1950” — the record of the secret vote by the chancellors the year the Academy’s prestigious fellowship was awarded to E.E. Cummings, catapulting him into renown. The voting process is a black box — no one outside the Academy ever finds out who else is in the running and by how much the winner wins.

Leafing through the ballots, one other name appeared over and over, so much so that I was impelled to count.

Marianne Moore had lost by one vote, never knowing how close she had come. It would be many more years until, at 77, she was finally awarded the fellowship.

Long before that, before she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award (sharing a table with Rachel Carson at the ceremony), Moore had set down her views on writing in a series of essays later collected in the out-of-print gem Predilections (public library). Pulsating through them is a reckoning with the impossible task of the writer — to weave tapestries of truth and meaning from the tenuous thread of words on the ramshackle loom of language.

Marianne Moore (Photograph: George Platt Lynes)

In an essay titled “Feeling and Precision,” Moore writes:

Feeling at its deepest — as we all have reason to know — tends to be inarticulable. If it does manage to be articulate, it is likely to seem overcondensed, so that the author is resisted as being enigmatic or disobliging or arrogant.

How we name what we feel is not so much a matter of our writing style as of our style of being, because in order to articulate something we must first apprehend it and we apprehend every smallest thing with the whole person — with the frame of reference that is our entire life, the sum of our experience and memory. When “one of New York’s more painstaking magazines” asked Moore to distill her poetic style into a formula, she fought back the “dictatorial” reflex to quip:

You don’t devise a rhythm, the rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of the personality.

And yet a personality can write with more or less persuasion — that is, write more or less well — depending on what the person brings to the writing. In another essay from the collection, Moore identifies the three psychological elements necessary for persuasive writing: “humility, concentration, and gusto.” A generation after Mark Twain assured his friend Helen Keller when she was accused of plagiarism that “substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources,” she writes:

Humility… is armor, for it realizes that it is impossible to be original, in the sense of doing something that has never been thought of before. Originality is in any case a by-product of sincerity; that is to say, of feeling that is honest and accordingly rejects anything that might cloud the impression.

Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses

By “concentration” Moore means a kind of discipline — annealing the essence of the sentiment by cutting away all superfluous explanations, elaborations, and distractions of stylistic posturing, being maximally truthfully in the most minimal way possible. Observing that there is always a “helpless sincerity which precipitates a poem” and that a good poem is always “a concentrate,” she writes:

Concentration — indispensable to persuasion — may feel to itself crystal clear, yet be through its very compression the opposite… I myself would rather be told too little than too much.

Long before we had the language of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, of finite and infinite games, Moore uses a lovely word, now dusty, for that peculiar private zeal propelling all creative work with its twin dynamos of discipline and deliverance: “gusto.” Echoing Rachel Carson’s abiding advice on writing — “If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in,” she had counseled a young writer, “the chances are very high that you will interest other people as well.” — Moore offers:

Gusto thrives on freedom, and freedom in art, as in life, is the result of a discipline imposed by ourselves. Moreover, any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.

She maps the fundamental relationship between the three:

Humility is an indispensable teacher, enabling concentration to heighten gusto.

When creating in integrity with these three values, it ceases to matter how the work is received because the process of locating and articulating the truth as you feel it, the world as you see it, is its own reward. In what may be the best advice I have encountered on how to orient to your own work, Moore writes:

There are always objecters, but we must not be sensitive about not being liked or not being printed… The thing is to see the vision and not deny it; or care and admit that we do.

Complement with Walt Whitman on how to keep criticism from sinking your soul and Mary Oliver’s advice on writing, then savor the moving story of how Marianne Moore saved a rare tree with a poem.

BP

The First Scientist’s Guide to Truth: Alhazen on Critical Thinking

By Maria Popova

Born into a world with no clocks, telescopes, microscopes, or democracy, Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–c. 1040), known in the West as Alhazen, began his life studying religion, but grew quickly disenchanted by its unquestioned dogmas and the way it turned people on each other with the self-righteous fist of zealous subjectivity. Instead, he devoted himself to the search for objective truth, pure and impartial, taken from the open hand of Mother Nature — the study of reality raw and rapturous, unmediated by interpretation.

Eight centuries before the birth of photography, Alhazen gave the first clear description of a camera obscura, which he constructed to observe a partial solar eclipse. Drawing on his experiments with pinhole projection, he became the first person to proffer a correct theory of vision, refuting the two competing theories that had been dominating since Ancient Greece: that we see by emitting rays of light from our eyes, as Euclid and Ptolemy believed, and that sight is the product of objects entering the eye as physical forms, as Aristotle believed. After conducting various experiments on reflection and refraction with lenses and mirrors, he correctly described the anatomy of the eye as an optical system, laying the groundwork for the entwined history of vision and consciousness.

Alhazen’s description of the human optical system.

To avoid persecution by the tyrannical caliph whose ire he had spurred, Alhazen feigned insanity and was placed under house arrest. There, he spent a decade detailing his experiments and reckoning with their far-reaching implications in his revolutionary seven-volume Book of Optics, which went on to influence Galileo and Kepler, Descartes and Newton, Da Vinci and Chaucer.

Half a millennium before Copernicus, he criticized Ptolemy’s cosmology in a treatise titled Dubitationes in Ptolemaeum (Doubts on Ptolemy). On its pages, he formulates what is essentially the first succinct description of the scientific method, five centuries ahead of its bloom in the Renaissance. In this regard, Alhazen could be considered the first true scientist, eight centuries before the word itself was coined (incidentally, for a woman).

Nearly a millennium before Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit for critical thinking, Alhazen writes (as translated by the late Harvard scholar Abdelhamid Ibrahim Sabra):

Truth is sought for itself; and in seeking that which is sought for itself one is only concerned to find it… The seeker after the truth… is not he* who studies the writings of the ancients and… puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. It is thus the duty of the man who studies the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency. If he follows this path, the truths will be revealed to him, and whatever shortcomings or uncertainties may exist in the discourse of those who came before him will become manifest.

Complement with Galileo on critical thinking and the folly of believing our preconceptions and Bertrand Russell on the will to doubt, then revisit the illustrated story of Alhazen’s polymathic Persian contemporary Ibn Sina, who shaped the course of medicine.

BP

A Place for Intimacy: bell hooks on Language and Desire

By Maria Popova

A Place for Intimacy: bell hooks on Language and Desire

“Words are events, they do things, change things… transform both speaker and hearer… feed energy back and forth and amplify it… feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her magnificent meditation on how we tell ourselves to the world and each other two centuries after Mary Shelley prophesied that “words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on.”

I have been thinking lately about words, the power of them and the prison of them, the way we task them with containing the inarticulable and then come to mistake them for the contents, the way they are still our best hope for bridging the abyss between us in order to be understood. And yet outside of music and mathematics, the dream of a common language is just a dream. We speak of language as if it were unitary, forgetting that within any one tongue are nested infinities — the slang of subcultures, the vernacular of different generations and heritages, the private lexicon of lovers. When the parts we live with try to speak to each other, they speak in different tongues we keep translating to discern the whole and articulate it to others, to say who we are and what we want, how we suffer and how we like to be loved.

bell hooks, 1960s

bell hooks takes on these infinities in one of the essays collected in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (public library). With an eye to a line from an Adrienne Rich poem that lodged itself in her soul and became the lever for her reckoning with language, she writes:

Words impose themselves, take root in our memory against our will… to challenge and assist.

“No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone,” Rich wrote in her epochal collection The Dream of a Common Language. We speak our loves to make them true, to make them tender. To say “I want you” is to walk right up to the edge of the abyss and leap, hoping to be caught; it is to say “I want to live.” A generation after Pablo Neruda made words an object of desire, hooks makes desire the subject of words:

Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body.

[…]

To recognize that we touch one another in language seems particularly difficult in a society that would have us believe that there is no dignity in the experience of passion, that to feel deeply is to be inferior, for within the dualism of Western metaphysical thought, ideas are always more important than language.

Art by Julie Paschkis from The Wordy Book

We are not, however, merely the users of language — we are its makers. Language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents. The great revelation of Einstein’s relativity was that spacetime — the fabric of the universe — tells matter how to move and matter tells spacetime how to bend. Language is the fabric of our lives. Language tells thinking how to move and thought tells language how to bend. We can bend ideas with words, we can even break them to make a mosaic of the pieces in the image of the world we want to live in, in the shape of our desires.

Reflecting on desire as the antidote to dualism, the most primal integration of the body and the mind, hooks writes:

To heal the splitting of mind and body, we marginalized and oppressed people attempt to recover ourselves and our experiences in language. We seek to make a place for intimacy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we create the ruptured, broken, unruly speech of the vernacular… There, in that location, we make English do what we want it to do… liberating ourselves in language.

Couple with hooks on hove, then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin on the power of language to transform and redeem and artist Julie Paschkis’s illustrated love letter to words.

BP

The Woman Who Saved Native Song

By Maria Popova

The Woman Who Saved Native Song

Tucked into a corner of the Library of Congress is the Densmore Collection of cylinder phonographs — a bygone medium containing the living songs of an ancient culture.

In the early twentieth century, the U.S. government continued its assault on Native Americans by demanding they relinquish their tribal languages and belief systems, teach their children English, and enter the American mainstream. As a result of this concerted erasure campaign, the average American came to see indigenous peoples as living fossils on the brink of cultural extinction.

Frances Densmore (May 21, 1867–June 5, 1957) — a young music teacher from Red Wing, Minnesota — was appalled. In consonance with the eternal truth that the best way to complain is to create, she set out to singlehandedly preserve a vital aspect of indigenous culture, the one art that is the heartbeat of every culture: music.

Frances Densmore

Thomas Edison had invented the phonograph — a mechanical means of recording and reproducing sound, using a wax-coated cardboard cylinder and a cutting stylus — when Frances was ten. Around that time, listening to the songs of the Dakota Indians near her home, she fell in love with music. In an era when higher education was closed to women with only limited exceptions, she spent three years studying music at Oberlin College — the first university to admit women, and the first to admit students of ethnic minorities — then devoted herself to teaching Western music to Native Americans (the academic term for whom was then “American Indians”) and learning their own traditional songs as they taught her in turn.

With her simple box camera and cylinder phonograph, wearing trousers and a bow-tie, Frances Densmore spent years traveling to remote settlements where no scholar dared venture. She worked with dozens of tribes — the Sioux, the Chippewa, the Mandan, the Hidatsa, the northern Pawnee of Oklahoma, the Winnebago and Menominee of Wisconsin, the Seminoles of Florida, the Ute of Utah, the Papago of Arizona, the Pueblo Indians of the southwest, the Kuna Indians of Panama, and various tribes across the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia.

Everywhere she went, her pure-hearted devotion to preserving traditional music magnetized the warmth of the community. The eminent Sioux elder Red Fox adopted her as a daughter.

Frances Densmore during a phonograph recording session with Mountain Chief of the Blackfoot Confederacy, 1916.

Whenever Frances returned to her monastic one-room apartment, she perched at her heavy black typewriter to record her evolving understanding of a complex musical world in a way that no scholar before her had, and none since, detailing everything from children’s songs to the design of wind instruments to the spell-like songs sung as “love charms.”

Word of her work had spread beyond academic journals. In 1907, the Smithsonian approached her to make recordings for their Bureau of American Ethnography. Within a year, she had compiled her recordings in the popular LP Healing Songs of the Native Americans.

To use an ahistorical term she far predates, Frances Densmore became the premiere ethnomusicologist of her time and place. She opened her 1926 book The American Indians and Their Music (public library | public domain) with an insight that reaches beyond culture, into the very heart of our species:

Music is closely intertwined with the life of every race. We understand the people better if we know their music, and we appreciate the music better if we understand the people themselves.

In the book, she detailed the singular role of music in Native American culture, teleologically distinct from the spiritual function it served in early Western culture:

The radical difference between the musical custom of the Indian and our own race is that, originally, the Indians used song as a means of accomplishing definite results. Singing was not a trivial matter, like the flute-playing of the young men. It was used in treating the sick, in securing success in war and the hunt, and in every undertaking which the Indian felt was beyond his power as an individual. An Indian said, “If a man is to do something more than human he must have more than human power.” Song was essential to the putting forth of this “more than human power,” and was used in connection with some prescribed action.

This function of music shaped its form:

One of the musical requirements of the white race is that a song and its accompaniment shall be “exactly together,” but an Indian song may be either a little faster or a little slower than the accompanying drum without disturbing the Indian musician. The Indian takes his music seriously and has nothing that corresponds to our popular songs. There are standards of excellence in his music and he practices in order to attain them, although Indians do not have musical performances corresponding to our concerts. The Indians have no melody-producing instruments except the flute, which has its special uses, so the voices of the singers around the drum are like the melody-producing instruments in our orchestras or bands, while the drum is like the bass or percussion instruments which supply the rhythm. The singers and the drum provide the music at all dances and social gatherings as well as at the tribal ceremonies. They have rehearsals, as we do, and practice and learn new songs. If a man goes to visit another tribe he tries to remember and bring home songs, which are always credited to the source whence they came. Songs are taught to one person by another, and in the old days it was not unusual for a man to pay the value of one or two ponies for a song. He did not buy such a song for his own pleasure but because it had a ceremonial connection or was believed to have magic power. To this class belong the songs for treating the sick and those believed to bring rain.

In some elemental sense, however, this is the selfsame function music serves in every culture since the dawn of our species: We use music to heal ourselves, to save ourselves. We have, since before we discovered the mathematics of harmony. We will, long after everything we know of civilization has crumbled into discord. Nothing refracts the light of being like music. Nothing reflects the health of a culture and nothing predicts its durability better than how well it treats its song-makers.

BP

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