By Maria Popova

By Maria Popova

A person is a perpetual ongoingness perpetually mistaking itself for a still point. We call this figment personality or identity or self, and yet we are constantly making and remaking ourselves. Composing a life as the pages of time keep turning is the great creative act we are here for. Like evolution, like Leaves of Grass, it is the work of continual revision, not toward greater perfection but toward greater authenticity, which is at bottom the adaptation of the self to the soul and the soul to the world.

In one of the essays found in his exquisite 1877 collection Birds and Poets (public library | public domain), the philosopher-naturalist John Burroughs (April 3, 1837–March 29, 1921) explores the nature of that creative act through a parallel between poetry and personhood anchored in a brilliant metaphor for the two different approaches to creation. He writes:

There are in nature two types or forms, the cell and the crystal. One means the organic, the other inorganic; one means growth, development, life; the other means reaction, solidification, rest. The hint and model of all creative works is the cell; critical, reflective, and philosophical works are nearer akin to the crystal; while there is much good literature that is neither the one nor the other distinctively, but which in a measure touches and includes both. But crystallic beauty or cut and polished gems of thought, the result of the reflex rather than the direct action of the mind, we do not expect to find in the best poems, though they may be most prized by specially intellectual persons. In the immortal poems the solids are very few, or do not appear at all as solids, — as lime and iron, — any more than they do in organic nature, in the flesh of the peach or the apple. The main thing in every living organism is the vital fluids: seven tenths of man is water; and seven tenths of Shakespeare is passion, emotion, — fluid humanity.

This, of course, is what makes identity such a tedious concept — a fixity of past experience and predictive narrative that crystallizes a person’s natural fluidity, makes them impermeable to possibility, and is therefore inherently uncreative. True creativity, Burroughs observes, is rooted in this dynamism, this fluidity, this irrepressible and ever-shifting aliveness:

All the master poets have in their work an interior, chemical, assimilative property… flaming up with electric and defiant power, — power without any admixture of resisting form, as in a living organism.

It can only be so because we a fractal of nature, the supreme creative agent, whose processes are a ceaseless flow of change and self-revision. Burroughs writes:

The physical cosmos itself is not a thought, but an act. Natural objects do not affect us like well-wrought specimens or finished handicraft, which have nothing to follow, but as living, procreating energy. Nature is perpetual transition. Everything passes and presses on; there is no pause, no completion, no explanation. To produce and multiply endlessly, without ever reaching the last possibility of excellence, and without committing herself to any end, is the law of Nature.

Burroughs sees this as “the essential difference between prose and poetry,” between “the poetic and the didactic treatment of a subject.” A great life, he intimates, is more like a great poem than like a great teaching:

The essence of creative art is always the same; namely, interior movement and fusion; while the method of the didactic or prosaic treatment is fixity, limitation. The latter must formulate and define; but the principle of the former is to flow, to suffuse, to mount, to escape. We can conceive of life only as something constantly becoming. It plays forever on the verge. It is never in loco, but always in transit. Arrest the wind, and it is no longer the wind; close your hands upon the light, and behold, it is gone.

And yet because these interior movements are fundamentally untranslatable between one consciousness and another, belonging to that region of absolute aloneness that accompanies the singularity of being oneself, there is always an element of the ineffable in all great creative work and all great persons:

There must always be something about a poem, or any work of art, besides the evident intellect or plot of it, or what is on its surface, or what it tells. This something is the Invisible, the Undefined, almost Unexpressed, and is perhaps the best part of any work of art, as it is of a noble personality… As, in the superbest person, it is not merely what he or she says or knows or shows, or even how they behave, but in the silent qualities, like gravitation, that insensibly but resistlessly hold us; so in a good poem, or any other expression of art.

Couple with Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem, then revisit Burroughs on the measure of a visionary, the art of noticing, and how to live with the uncertainties of life.

By Maria Popova

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

Because how we look at the world shapes the world we see, every act of noticing is an act of worlding. The Latin root of notice is to begin knowing, to have an instrument of recognition, and yet human consciousness is a prediction machine that recognizes only what it already knows, sees what it expects to see, lensed through its anticipations and past experience. “Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you,” cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz wrote about the science of looking. “To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote a century earlier about the art of seeing.

It does not come easily to us, true noticing — that transmutation of looking into seeing. We must apprentice ourselves to it daily. It is our life’s work.

The best apprenticeship I know is spending time in nature, there amid the ceaseless quivering of phenomena and quickening of aliveness, the deep stillnesses and broad silences, all the dazzling othernesses with their myriad occasions for unselfing. The second best is poet Lia Purpura’s magnificent essay collection On Looking (public library) — an invitation to see the world whole by apprehending its details and the dialogue between them: church spires and glaciers and seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, the wings of the house fly “gently veined like a fine pen drawing of tributaries,” the late-afternoon light silvering the sardines in the open can. What emerges is a reckoning with the way “events crosshatch” and “particulars mingle, particulars assert, conspire, assemble,” so that “the moments go layering up” to stratify life into the shape of being.

Purpura writes:

If looking… is a practice, a form of attention paid, which is, for many, the essence of prayer, it is the sole practice I had available to me as a child. By seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another, and rare.

[…]

I never thought to say, or call this “God,” which even then sounded like shorthand, a refusal to be speechless in the face of occurrences, shapes, gestures happening daily, and daily reconstituting sight. “God,” the very attitude of the word — for the lives of words were also palpable to me — was pushy. Impatient. Quantifiable. A call to jettison the issue, the only issue as I understood it: the unknowable certainty of being alive, of being a body untethered from origin, untethered from end, but also so terribly here.

To concentrate attention in an act of noticing is to consecrate this here — a way of blessing our own lives.

Purpura considers the consecration:

It’s the noticing that cracks us open, lets something in.

Shows we’re in use.

Uses us.

Right now.

Right this minute.

Anything we notice, then, becomes a pinhole through which the whole universe rushes in — but only if we open the valve of fear and preconception. A century after poet H.D. anchored her ravishing metaphor for how we see in a jellyfish, Purpura writes:

There is not, as many think, any air at all in a jellyfish, just organized cilia and bell muscles, a gelatinous scaffolding for hydrostatic propulsion. These simplest drifters are like bubbles of milky glass — and who doesn’t want to see through to a thing’s inner workings, the red nerves, and blood and poison with a clear pulse, circulating… In order to see their particular beauty, to see them, we have to suspend our fear. We have to love contraction. Filtration. The word “gelatinous,” too. The words “scull” and “buoyancy” are easy. We have to suspend “mucus web.” And realize that their bioluminescence, which is a show to see at night, is used to confuse and startle prey. You can look right through them. As if into a lit front room when it’s night outside.

Then there is the night itself, in the smallest patch of which Purpura finds evidence that “every scrap of matter bears a trace of the beginning of the universe, that a star lives in our blood, a star with its fingers in the riverbed of our bloodstream, tributaries, filigree, silver-etched, is a fern, an ice crystal.”

Scraps of matter, scraps of time, filigrees of flesh — these are the constituents of our lives. We see with the mind, but it is the body that does the looking. To notice is to orient the body to the world, to turn matter over on the tongue of the mind until, like a koan, it releases its meaning. And since time is the substance we are made of, to notice things is also, inevitably, to notice time — “the loops of years pierced and containing the point.” When a storm domes her neighborhood in a particular darkness that transports her to the storms of her childhood, Purpura observes:

What it is — is what else it is. Not just that this afternoon’s thick, boulder-clouds resemble the mountains I loved as a child, but that the one scene collapses in on the other, time reworks and folds together. And I live in both places.

What it is — is what else it is. For this reason I am often startled by the simplest gestures of things: a leaf scratching along sideways moves as a crab does, so much so that the animal’s likeness comes powerfully in, and the shock of seeing a crab on the sidewalk trumps reason. And though I tell myself “it’s fall; leaves dry, scratch and blow, not crabs,” I’m jittery walking down the street — not frightened exactly, I can’t say afraid — but always the scene I’m in breaks open and floods. The stuff of an elsewhere comes in, as when, among the dried, speckled shells of crabs this summer, a snowball rolled oceanward before returning itself to a clump of sea-foam. The flap of an awning blows in wind — and it’s a low-flying bird’s wing. The dark underside of a mushroom’s gills, grown tiered and up-curved after rain, makes a tiny Sydney Opera House. Right there, hillside of the reservoir. Australia, just a few blocks from home.

These Möbius moments of time folding in on itself often feel significant, sign-like — and yet they betoken the difference between signs and omens, living reminders that meaning does not inhere in the world but in the stories we tell ourselves about it. Purpura writes:

These moments of recurrence/concurrence are not messages fluttering toward, bearing secrets, but stories in which we are part of the telling. We are, for a spell, of the path where shape forms, where flux assembles, briefly, a center. And there are so many centers.

“The moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity,” Kierkegaard wrote a quarter millennium earlier in his refutation of time. And if Muriel Rukeyser, who was right about so much, was right that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms,” we are the makers of the moment with the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be alive.

On the first anniversary of a significant death, paging through a catalogue of model houses while thinking about Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” Purpura writes:

I keep coming back to this spot of green. That’s all, just the green, which, above all, holds me. It’s of ripe avocados and hard young apples. Thin-skinned lake plants, as they float, cloud and wave. A curl of lime peel. New moss. Peridot, milked down with light. This simple-flat, sad-tender green, suspended against the broom-swept cirrus sky… Of all the green I make a stillness. Of sun-through-leaves, now, this June, I make a stillness. Of all the green, transparent spots I make a moment.

A century after Virginia Woolf located the art of presence in those “moments of being” that make you who you are, Purpura touches the beating heart of one such moment:

The end of the day swells like a breaker, holds itself curled against the green field. Keeps itself brief above the grasses. Keeps itself sheer before it falls. Now in the half-light above the field, the day is something vanished-but-present, or present-but-going. A crest then a wobble, hovering.

“Into light all things / must fall, glad at last to have fallen,” Jane Kenyon wrote in one of my favorite poems. It is the falling we are here to notice in the half-light between never before and never again.

The vital force of life is charged by the poles of holding on and letting go. We know that the price of love is loss, and yet we love anyway; that our atoms will one day belong to generations of other living creatures who too will die in turn, and yet we press them hard against the body of the world, against each other’s bodies, against the canvas and the keyboard and the cambium of life.

This is the cruel contract of all experience, of aliveness itself — that in order to have it, we must agree to let it go.

Poet Jane Kenyon (May 23, 1947–April 22, 1995) offers a splendid consolation for signing it in her poem “Things,” found in her altogether soul-slaking Collected Poems (public library).

THINGS
by Jane Kenyon

The hen flings a single pebble aside
with her yellow, reptilian foot.
Never in eternity the same sound —
a small stone falling on a red leaf.

The juncture of twig and branch,
scarred with lichen, is a gate
we might enter, singing.

The mouse pulls batting
from a hundred-year-old quilt.
She chewed a hole in a blue star
to get it, and now she thrives….
Now is her time to thrive.

Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last: water, a blue heron’s
eye, and the light passing
between them: into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.

Shortly before leukemia claimed her life at only forty-seven, Kenyon captured the miraculousness of the light having passed through us at all — which contours the luckiness of death — in a haunting poem that puts any complaint, any lament, any argument with life into perspective:

OTHERWISE
by Jane Kenyon

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

Couple with Kenyon’s immortal advice on writing and life, then revisit poet Donald Hall — her mate — on the secret of lasting love and Pico Iyer on finding beauty in impermanence and luminosity in loss.

By Maria Popova

I once asked ChatGPT to write a poem about a total solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a dozen couplets of cliches that touched nothing, changed nothing in me. The AI had the whole of the English language at its disposal — a lexicon surely manyfold the poet’s — and yet Whitman could conjure up cosmoses of feeling with a single line, could sculpt from the commonest words an image so dazzlingly original it stops you up short, spins you around, leaves the path of your thought transformed.

An AI may never be able to write a great poem — a truly original poem — because a poem is made not of language but of experience, and the defining aspect of human experience is the constant collision between our wishes and reality, the sharp violation of our expectations, the demolition of our plans.

We call this suffering.

Suffering is the price we pay for a consciousness capable of love and the loss of love, of hope and the devastation of hope. Because suffering, like consciousness itself, is a full-body phenomenon — glands secreting fear, nerves conducting loneliness, neurotransmitters recoiling with regret — a disembodied pseudo-consciousness is fundamentally incapable of suffering and that transmutation of suffering into meaning we call art: An algorithm will never know anything beyond the execution of its programmed plan; it is fundamentally spared the failure of its aims because failure can never be the successful execution of the command to fail.

We create — poems and paintings, stories and songs — to find a language for the bewilderment of being alive, the failure of it, the fulness of it, and to have lived fully is not to have spared yourself.

In his exquisite reckoning with what makes life worth living, Nobel laureate Elias Canetti captures this in a diary entry from the late spring of 1942. Under the headline “very necessary qualifications for a good Persian storyteller,” he copies out a passage from an unidentified book he is reading:

In addition to having read all the known books on love and heroism, the teller of stories must have suffered greatly for love, have lost his beloved, drunk much good wine, wept with many in their sorrow, have looked often upon death and have learned much about birds and beasts. He must also be able to change himself into a beggar or a caliph in the twinkling of an eye.

A generation before Canetti, the philosopher-poet Rainer Maria Rilke articulated the same essential condition for creativity in his only novel, reflecting on what it takes to compose a great poem, but speaking to what it takes to create anything of beauty and substance, anything drawn from one life to touch another:

For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one has long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars — and it is not yet enough if one may think of all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.

Couple with Carl Jung on the relationship between suffering and creativity, then revisit Annie Dillard on creativity and what it takes to be a great writer and Oliver Sacks, writing thirty years before ChatGPT, on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning.

One of the most important things to have learned in life is that choosing joy in a world rife with reasons for despair is a countercultural act of courage and resistance, choosing it not despite the abounding sorrow we barely survive but because of it, because joy — like music, like love — is one of those entirely unnecessary miracles of consciousness that give meaning to survival with its bright allegiance to the most alive part of us. “We’ve all had too much sorrow — now is the time for joy,” Nick Cave sings in one of my favorite songs, and yet in a world trembling with fear and cynicism (which is the most cowardly species of fear), joy — the choice of it, the right to it — is in need of constant defense, none mightier or more delightful than the one Mario Benedetti (September 14, 1920–May 17, 2009) mounts in his poem “Defensa da la alegría” (“A Defense of Joy”), read here by the polymathic Chilean primatologist Isabel Behncke (who introduced me to this benediction of a poem) followed by my English translation and reading to the sound of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 4 in E-flat Major.

DEFENSA DE LA ALEGRÍA
Mario Benedetti

Defender la alegría como una trinchera
defenderla del escándalo y la rutina
de la miseria y los miserables
de las ausencias transitorias
y las definitivas

defender la alegría como un principio
defenderla del pasmo y las pesadillas
de los neutrales y de los neutrones
de las dulces infamias
y los graves diagnósticos

defender la alegría como una bandera
defenderla del rayo y la melancolía
de los ingenuos y de los canallas
de la retórica y los paros cardiacos
de las endemias y las academias

defender la alegría como un destino
defenderla del fuego y de los bomberos
de los suicidas y los homicidas
de las vacaciones y del agobio
de la obligación de estar alegres

defender la alegría como una certeza
defenderla del óxido y la roña
de la famosa pátina del tiempo
del relente y del oportunismo
de los proxenetas de la risa

defender la alegría como un derecho
defenderla de dios y del invierno
de las mayúsculas y de la muerte
de los apellidos y las lástimas
del azar
y también de la alegría.

A DEFENSE OF JOY
by Mario Benedetti
translated by Maria Popova

Defend joy like a trench
defend it from scandal and routine
from misery and misers
from truancies passing
and permanent

defend joy as a principle
defend it from bewilderments and bad dreams
from the neutral and the neutron
from sweet infamies
and grave diagnoses

defend joy like a flag
defend it from lightning and melancholy
from the fools and the frauds
from rhetoric and ruptures of the heart
from the endemic and the academic

defend joy as a destiny
defend it from fire and firefighters
from suicides and homicides
from vacations and ruts
from the obligation to be joyful

defend joy as a certainty
defend it from rust and smut
from the famous patina of time
from dew and exploitation
by the pimps of laughter

defend joy as a right
defend it from God and winter
from uppercase and the casket
from surnames and the pity
of chance
and of joy too.

Couple with the story behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” then revisit Benedetti’s wakeup call of a poem “Do Not Spare Yourself” (“No te salves”).

By Maria Popova