The Marginalian
The Marginalian

How to Speak Forest

By Maria Popova

How to Speak Forest

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most passionate letter. “As a man is, so he sees.”

Because we are social apes who descended from the trees and invented language to tell each other what we see, saying is a way of seeing. To name something is to instate it in the family of things, to make it a node in the relational web we call reality. A word can be a pinhole, pinching a vista of complexity to a narrow point, but it can also be a magnifying glass for the invisible processes and nuances that tessellate that complexity. Few things in this world are more complex, more dazzling and dynamic, more irreducible and irrepressibly alive, and therefore more needful of proper naming, than a forest and its fractal, the tree.

In A Forest Language: Words That Illuminate the Astonishing World of Trees (public library), Hannah Fries — a poet of uncommon potency and a passionate naturalist who reverences the crossing point of science and spirit — rewilds the imagination with words you’ve never heard and words you know in different contexts, from nautical engineering to music theory, that mean something entirely different in the arboreal realm. Together, they constellate a lexicon of wonder that invites you to eavesdrop on ancient silent conversations with gravity, time, and light in the language of hormones and motor cells, revealing a universe of symmetries and deviations, mathematical yet sensual, full of its self-healing wounds and chemical whispers, resinous with metaphors for resilience and self-reliance, for belonging and love, for the art of letting go and the meaning of enough.

Art by Julie Paschkis from The Wordy Book

Hannah writes:

Although recent research has opened up fascinating new realms of possibility regarding the embodied intelligence of the plant world, there is much we don’t know. Trying to understand, we are tempted to compare their way of being to our own, but if we’re not careful, these comparisons can blind us to the mystery of never truly knowing another species. As humans, however, we apply language, our great meaning-making tool, to describe what we’ve learned of their world as best we can. How we do so often says as much or more about us than it does about that of which we speak.

[…]

At their heart, so many of these words and concepts seemed to reflect a blurring of the line between life and death, between the individual and the whole. Forest time operates on a scale indifferent to the rush of human time; it is slower and wider, riding the waves of geologic time, reaching toward spacetime. Always in flux — always already growing, dying, changing, and regenerating — the forest embodies the truth that impermanence is a constant state of being.

A glimpse into this other world requires a shift in thinking. With each glimpse, each shift, a wild ecology of wonder grew up around me. I believe we have to be open to these shifts — to seeing forests
in a context that is thrillingly different from the one we are used to — if we are to be better stewards of these ecosystems in our uncertain future. After all, in the end, we are all part of the same great unfolding mystery.

Art by Violeta Lopíz and Valerio Vidali from The Forest by Riccardo Bozzi

Each of the sixty-one words comes alive in a essay with the feeling-tone of a prose poem, weaving together science and memoir, etymology and ecology, fact and poetic truth. Some of my favorites are samara (the winged seed of the maple), preforest (“the time and space between forest and forest,” when a devastation opens up the space for a rush of light that summons dormant seeds into new growth), rhizosphere (the subterranean ecosystem laced with rhizomes, “a world that hums, pulses, nearly glows with activity… both a microcosm and an intimate, specialized place unique to itself”), whorl (“a group of branches radiating from the same level on a conifer’s trunk, making a springy resting place for fresh snow”), lenticels (the pores through which bark breathes), gallery (the curly hieroglyphics made by the beetle larvae as they feed on the soft phloem between bark and wood), gemel (“when two separate trees become joined together in a process akin to natural grafting,” sharing a Latin root with gemini), and bud break (the moment when the first fragile leaves unfurl in the early spring light that “comes like a shiver of knowledge — that, yes, it’s worth it all, everything to come.”)

What emerges from this lovely book is a reminder that wording is an instrument of worlding; that if “the word for world is forest,” as Ursula K. Le Guin so prophetically wrote, then to word the forest — to name its majesty and its mystery, the subtlety and vehemence of the phenomena pulsating through it — is to reclaim the world.

If you find yourself in Manhattan, which was once a lush and biodiverse temperate deciduous forest, join me and Hannah for a conversation about words as an instrument of wonder:

BP

Nietzsche on How to Find Yourself and the True Value of Education

By Maria Popova

“Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?” Elizabeth Gilbert asked in framing her catalyst for creative magic. This is among life’s most abiding questions and the history of human creativity — our art and our poetry and most empathically all of our philosophy — is the history of attempts to answer it.

Friedrich Nietzsche (October 15, 1844–August 25, 1900), who believed that embracing difficulty is essential for a fulfilling life, considered the journey of self-discovery one of the greatest and most fertile existential difficulties. In 1873, as he was approaching his thirtieth birthday, Nietzsche addressed this perennial question of how we find ourselves and bring forth our gifts in a beautiful essay titled Schopenhauer as Educator (public library), part of his Untimely Meditations.

Nietzsche, translated here by Daniel Pellerin, writes:

Any human being who does not wish to be part of the masses need only stop making things easy for himself. Let him follow his conscience, which calls out to him: “Be yourself! All that you are now doing, thinking, desiring, all that is not you.”

Every young soul hears this call by day and by night and shudders with excitement at the premonition of that degree of happiness which eternities have prepared for those who will give thought to their true liberation. There is no way to help any soul attain this happiness, however, so long as it remains shackled with the chains of opinion and fear. And how hopeless and meaningless life can become without such a liberation! There is no drearier, sorrier creature in nature than the man who has evaded his own genius and who squints now towards the right, now towards the left, now backwards, now in any direction whatever.

Echoing Picasso’s proclamation that “to know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing,” Nietzsche considers the only true antidote to this existential dreariness:

No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!

Illustration by Tove Jansson for a rare edition of Alice in Wonderland.

But this path to finding ourselves, Nietzsche is careful to point out, is no light stroll:

How can man know himself? It is a dark, mysterious business: if a hare has seven skins, a man may skin himself seventy times seven times without being able to say, “Now that is truly you; that is no longer your outside.” It is also an agonizing, hazardous undertaking thus to dig into oneself, to climb down toughly and directly into the tunnels of one’s being. How easy it is thereby to give oneself such injuries as no doctor can heal. Moreover, why should it even be necessary given that everything bears witness to our being — our friendships and animosities, our glances and handshakes, our memories and all that we forget, our books as well as our pens. For the most important inquiry, however, there is a method. Let the young soul survey its own life with a view of the following question: “What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?” Assemble these revered objects in a row before you and perhaps they will reveal a law by their nature and their order: the fundamental law of your very self. Compare these objects, see how they complement, enlarge, outdo, transfigure one another; how they form a ladder on whose steps you have been climbing up to yourself so far; for your true self does not lie buried deep within you, but rather rises immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you commonly take to be your I.

Art by Isabelle Arsenault from Mr. Gauguin’s Heart.

With this, Nietzsche turns to the true role of education in the excavation of this true self — something Parker Palmer addressed a century later in his beautiful meditation on education as a spiritual journey — and writes:

Your true educators and cultivators will reveal to you the original sense and basic stuff of your being, something that is not ultimately amenable to education or cultivation by anyone else, but that is always difficult to access, something bound and immobilized; your educators cannot go beyond being your liberators. And that is the secret of all true culture: she does not present us with artificial limbs, wax-noses, bespectacled eyes — for such gifts leave us merely with a sham image of education. She is liberation instead, pulling weeds, removing rubble, chasing away the pests that would gnaw at the tender roots and shoots of the plant; she is an effusion of light and warmth, a tender trickle of nightly rain…

In a sentiment that calls to mind David Foster Wallace’s superb commencement address on the true value of education, Nietzsche concludes:

There may be other methods for finding oneself, for waking up to oneself out of the anesthesia in which we are commonly enshrouded as if in a gloomy cloud — but I know of none better than that of reflecting upon one’s educators and cultivators.

Complement the altogether fantastic Schopenhauer as Educator with Nietzsche on the power of music and his ten rules for writers, then revisit Florence King on how to find yourself and Parker Palmer on how to let your life speak.

Thanks, Dani

BP

How to Fall in Love Better: A Field Guide to Enlightened Enchantment

By Maria Popova

How to Fall in Love Better: A Field Guide to Enlightened Enchantment

Enchantment, J.R.R. Tolkien believed, is “as necessary for the health and complete functioning of the Human as is sunlight for physical life.” But enchantment is a story we tell ourselves that tells us back to ourselves, and like every story, it can be true or false.

Love is the most powerful enchantment we know, the most transformative if true and the most dangerous if false.

“When we are falsely enchanted, we desire either to possess the enchanting being or be possessed by it,” W.H. Auden observed in one of the most insightful things I have ever read, adding the haunting admonition: “All true enchantments fade in time… A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.”

False enchantments are those we cast upon ourselves — by confusing love and longing, by mistaking the myths of our culture for our own truths, by replaying the patterns that keep breaking our hearts. True enchantments come unbidden, take us by surprise, defy wish and will. True love, then, is a kind of enlightened enchantment — haunted, yes, by the fundament of loss, but redeemed by how it sharpens and magnifies our contact with life, how it allows us, paradoxically, to touch the bare skin of reality and tremble with bewilderment that such a wonder is possible.

Art from Reweaving the Rainbow

In Art and Enchantment: How Wonder Works (public library), anthropologist and ecological philosopher Patrick Curry offers a field guide to the difficult discernment of the true from the false, treating love as both a special case of and a fulcrum for our arts, both love and art being a way of “adding to, while partaking of, the creative processes of life itself.”

In a sentiment that conjures up that lovely line from The Velveteen Rabbit — “Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you.” — he writes:

Enchantment is not something you do; it’s something that happens to you. Its opposite is thus will and all its relations… When and where you are trying to make something happen, or make someone (including yourself) do something — or when you are the object of those desires — enchantment is absent.

It is absent because then you are in projection, in a transactional paradigm, exerting an effort in order to be repaid by a desired end. Curry writes:

Enchantment is fundamentally relational. It is wonder at, or enchantment by, another… Apprehending the enchanting other, one is apprehended by them.

[…]

The other party in this process can be anyone or anything: a human being, another animal, a plant, a place, a sight, sound, smell, taste, texture, or even an idea. But we are a particular kind of being — not random, infinitely variable or, in that self-flattering delusion, universal – so enchantment tends to happen in certain domains: principally love, art, religion, food and drink, learning, sport, humour, and nature.

Paradoxically, the engine of enchantment is not similarity but complementarity, which implies difference. It is the hand that touches another across the abyss between us. A generation after Mary Oliver contemplated how differences bring couples closer together, Curry observes:

Enchanted relationship takes place as an encounter, typically across a gap of difference. The boundaries remain, but in being bridged they cease to matter… transcended in connection. When that happens, you are in enchantment’s realm: the more-than-human, which includes but also exceeds the human. However, friendship — less showy than erotic love — can run just as deep, and is often more enduring.

With an eye to Wallace Stevens’s koan-like pronouncement that “in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of reality,” Curry reflects:

William James once asked of a scenario where Jack is deeply in love with Jill, whom everyone else sees as perfectly ordinary: who sees her more as she truly is? He answered, surely it is Jack; he apprehends a truth about Jill which is inaccessible to the rest of us. That is why enchantment doesn’t have the qualities of a dream, or a spell, but rather of reality. Indeed, enchanted reality is more real than either ordinary reality or dreams, which are daylight reason’s inversion but not its opposite. In this sense, enchantment is our baseline natural condition while, as Stevens says, so-called realism “is a corruption of reality.”

This dreamlike quality also means that enchantment is impervious to the workings of the will, untouchable by the commands and petitions of our ordinary waking consciousness:

Because no one is in charge, enchantment is wild, unbiddable. That inconvenient truth means that although it can be invited, it cannot be created, commanded, or managed.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

This aspect of enchantment may be the supreme reminder that we are children of chance, a felicitous accident of atoms. We may have the illusion of choice — an illusion Adrienne Rich so poignantly ventriloquized in her insistence that “no one’s fated or doomed to love anyone” — but it is only ever an illusion, one James Baldwin so poignantly annihilated when he observed that “people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.” Unable to bear that something as indifferent as chance may steer the course of our lives, we give it a valence and call it fate. But the feeling of fatedness is simply a measure of our hunger for meaning. Curry writes:

In the sharpest possible contrast with the boredom, despair and ultimately nihilism of serious disenchantment… experiences of enchantment are intensely meaningful. On that account, they are also fateful… Even refusing the enchantment — difficult, but possible — is fateful, because you always do it too late; you have already been affected, so the refusal too will prove momentous… When one is enchanted, and the world therefore overflows with fateful meaning, we could say that one is living mythically.

This is where Amy Lowell’s taxonomy of myths, facts, and poetic truth is useful — because in enchantment, while living mythically, one is also living more truthfully; in enchanted love — which Curry defines as “the unpossessive love of another” — one is loving more truly.

In such love, “the movement starts with delight but exceeds it” — something it shares with music. The parallel is apt, for the etymology of the word itself — from the Latin, then Old French en chantment — means “to be in a song.” This may be why a musician’s relationship to the music offers the finest field guide to the unpossessive love at the heart of true enchantment. Curry quotes the virtuosic Irish fiddler Martin Hayes:

To get to the essence of music, I more often spend time talking about it and hoping for it than achieving it… It’s when I finally accept that I’ve completely missed the point, and that I don’t really get it, that I have this moment when I get it. And of course I want to put my arms around it, I want to put it in a bottle, I want to keep it, I want to store it, I love it, and I can’t. And I have to let go of it again.

Nick Cave — whose three-decade relationship with his wife Susie may be the truest love I know — echoes this in his breathtaking book-length love letter to her:

Through the countless words I have written about Susie, in song and prose… Susie remains as much a mystery to me now as when I first saw her.

All true enchantment may be just this — an ongoing encounter with the mystery of the other, which can never be possessed in words or ideas, only held in wonder.

BP

Emerson on How to Trust Yourself

By Maria Popova

“I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way,” the young Whitman wrote of his momentous critique-walk with his greatest literary hero, Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) — the walk from which the young poet wrested his wisdom on how to keep criticism from sinking your soul, for Emerson, who had inspired Leaves of Grass, had just lashed upon one of its primary poem sequences “argumentstatement, reconnoitring, review, attack, and pressing home, (like an army corps in order, artillery, cavalry, infantry,) of all that could be said against [it].”

But rather than offended, Emerson must have been pleased with Whitman’s decision to stay his course — for Whitman was in many ways the embodiment of the spirit Emerson so fiercely celebrated against the tide of his time: a spirit animated by the central doctrine “trust thyself,” anchored in resolute resistance to the tyranny of opinion, and rooted in the belief that had gotten Emerson banned from Harvard’s campus for thirty years when he was Whitman’s age — the belief that divinity is to be found not in some outside deity, but in the human soul itself, in its fidelity to itself as a fractal of nature, a particle of the perfect totality of the universe, which Margaret Fuller — Emerson’s greatest influence — called “the All.”

Art by Violeta Lópiz for At the Drop of a Cat

Throughout Emerson’s immense body of work, no question vibrates more resonantly than that of how to trust yourself. He takes it up in his essay “Character,” found in his indispensable Essays and Lectures (public library | free ebook):

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man* is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

In “Nature” — perhaps his finest essay, for being the most all-encompassing and spiritually lucid — he considers what solitude actually means, refuting the common conception of it as a kind of self-isolation from other selves behind the walls of seclusion, for even the thinking mind, the writing mind, the creating mind is a symposium of outside voices when trapped within itself.

Art by David Byrne from his History of the World (in Dingbats)

A century and a half before Wendell Berry observed that “true solitude is found in the wild places, where… one’s inner voices become audible,” Emerson writes:

To go into solitude, a man* needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.

[…]

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase’s stunning vintage Japanese woodblocks. (Available as a print.)

Complement with Emerson’s young protégé Thoreau on solitude and the salve for melancholy, artist Rockwell Kent on wilderness, solitude, and creativity, and Kahlil Gibran on silence, solitude, and the courage to know yourself, then revisit Hermann Hesse on the wisdom of the inner voice and Octavia Butler on the meaning of “God.”

BP

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