The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Lighthouse Keeper: A Tender Illustrated Meditation on What Saves Us

The Lighthouse Keeper: A Tender Illustrated Meditation on What Saves Us

“I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,” James Baldwin wrote in one of his finest essays. “I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.”

It happens so rarely because we so often choose the wrong person to be our savior, so often try to save someone not wanting to be saved. But the saviors, the true saviors, do live among us — they are what John Berger called “the avenging heroes,” what Leonard Cohen called “the balancing monsters of love.”

Tender and exuberant at the same time, The Lighthouse Keeper (public library) by Mexican writer Eugenio Fernández Vázquez and artist Mariana Villanueva Segovia tells the story of one such savior who looks over the stormy ocean from his lonely tower, shining his lonely light into the shoreless sea of night, always there to help those who have lost their way, those not waving but drowning, always embracing “everyone he finds floating lost and alone.”

Page after vibrant page, we see the lighthouse keeper throw lifelines for the body and the soul. (I think of Patti Smith, who in her moving recent memoir recounts once trying to move into a defunct lighthouse; I think of how she became a lighthouse keeper anyway — it is the artists who keep us from losing our way in the dark, who save us over and over from drowning.)

Pulsating beneath that immensity of kindness is the uneasy question of what saves the savior: How does one who gives so much to so many replenish that vital energy in order to go on giving?

“Relationship is the fundamental truth of this world,” wrote the Indian poet and philosopher Tagore (whom Segovia’s lighthouse keeper greatly resembles in likeness). So it is that a relationship is revealed to be what sustains the savior’s spirit: The Moon “casts her spell from above” to nourish him, but who also needs his tenderness in turn, with that life-magnifying reciprocity that marks every deep and durable relationship; the Moon, who vanishes but always returns, ever-changing and eternal, like every great love.

If you too could use a lighthouse in these dark times, here is one.

BP

Little Free Library Divinations: Searching for the Meaning of Life in Discarded Books and Found Objects

The son of a Wisconsin schoolteacher, Todd Bol was well into his fifties when he dreamt up the first Little Free Library, not expecting that tens of thousands of these tiny shrines to the love of reading would sprout around the world to outlive him.

I was visiting a friend on the other side of the continent when I encountered a Little Free Library for the first time. I fell in love instantly. Years passed. I kept thinking about it. As soon as I moved into my Brooklyn home in the autumn of 2018, I put one up in front of my house, painted it yellow, and left a few well-loved books inside.

That week, Todd Bol died.

In the years since, in our community of artists and low-income families with kids, nowhere near a bookstore, with only an understocked and overrun public library branch to suffice, I have watched my Little Free Library bustle with books given and taken, spanning the entire spectrum of genres, eras, and sensibilities.

A day in the life of my Little Free Library

One day during a challenging season of being, longing for something that would turn my spiraling mind outward, knowing that a daily creative practice has always been my best medicine and that constraint is the mightiest catalyst of creativity, I decided to try applying my bird divination process to the Little Free Library, trusting the lovely way our imagination has of surprising us and, in doing so, reminding us that even in the bleakest moments it is worth turning the page of experience because the imagination of life is always greater than that of the living.

Every day for thirty days, I took a random book from the Little Free Library, opened to a random page, and worked with the text on it, making no aesthetic judgments about the literary value of the books — self-help, airport romance novels, finance textbooks, breastfeeding guides, Lemony Snicket, Tolstoy, Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and the Bible were all raw material on equal par.

As every creative person knows, and as Lewis Carroll so perfectly articulated in his advice on working through difficulty in math and in life, our most original and unexpected ideas arrive not when we strain the mind at the problem, but when we relax it and shift the beam of attention to something else entirely; it is then that the unconscious shines its sidewise gleam on an unexpected solution no deliberate effort could have produced.

After reading over the page, I would take a long walk to let the words float in my mind as I knelt to look at small things — pebbles, petals, leaves, feathers, and a whole lot of that great teacher in resilience, lichen — picking one thing up to take home. The words invariably arranged themselves unconsciously into the day’s… divination? koan? poem?… that always surprised me, always revealed what I myself needed to hear that some part of me already knew.

Upon returning home, I would place the found object under my microscope and take a photograph — cellular and planetary at the same time, itself an invitation to a shift in perspective — then begin laying out the text over the image.

Here they all are — perhaps uncommon gifts for the book-lover in your life, perhaps simply inspiration to try the practice yourself — available as translucent 4×4 blocks with proceeds supporting my endeavor to put up Little Free Libraries in book deserts throughout the five boroughs of New York City — communities more than a mile from a public library or bookstore.

Words from a page in Ever After by Nora Roberts over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in The Decline of Pleasure by Walter Kerr over micrograph of mica from my hometown in Bulgaria. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in The Daughter of the Queen of Sheba by Jacki Lyden over micrograph of maple leaf. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover over micrograph of woodpecker feather. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Homo Viator by Gabriel Marcel over micrograph of bluejay feather. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Bee Season by Myla Goldberg over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in the Bible over micrograph of the season’s last fig from the neighborhood tree. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Squeeze by Steven J. Pipe over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West by Victoria Glendinning over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Stuff White People Like by Christian Lander over micrograph of paperback birch leaf. Available as an acrylic block.Words from a page in
Words from a page in Room by Emma Donoghue over micrograph of red cedar needle. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell over micrograph of smokebush leaf. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Naked by David Sedaris over micrograph of mica from Coney Island beach. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Mountains by John Cleare over micrograph of ginkgo leaf. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in The Life of Chuck by Stephen King over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Reflections on Language by Stuart Hirschberg and Terry Herschberg over micrograph of withered trillium leaf. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Scarpetta by Patricia Cornwell over micrograph of smokebush leaf. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in House of Incest by Anaïs Nin over micrograph of Japanese maple leaf. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling over micrograph of smokebush leaf. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure by James West Davidson and John Rugge over micrograph of spirea leaf. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Freak of Nurture by Kelli Dunham over micrograph of maple leaf. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Dark Fires by Nora Roberts over micrograph of madrone bark. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch over micrograph of dying ficus leaf. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in The Changing World Order by Ray Dalio over micrograph of popcorn. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Becoming a Person by Carl R. Rogers over micrograph of bluebird feather. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand over micrograph of calendula from my grandmother’s garden. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in The Arc by Tory Henwood Hoen over micrograph of lichen. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in All Adults Here by Emma Straub over micrograph of ginkgo leaf. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende over micrograph of staghorn sumac bloom. Available as an acrylic block.
Words from a page in The Girls by Emma Cline over micrograph of wild persimmon seed. Available as an acrylic block.
BP

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

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