Category: Reality

Here’s the link to this article. Definitely worth your time!

“You can expect good and bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

Dougal Robertson (January 29, 1924–September 22, 1991) was still a teenager, the youngest of a Scottish music teacher’s eight children, when he joined the British Merchant Navy. After a Japanese attack on a steamship during WWII killed his wife and young son, he left the navy and moved to Hong Kong, where he eventually met and married a nurse.

Together, they began a new life as dairy farmers in the English countryside, on a farm without electricity or running water. Eventually, they had a daughter, then a son, then a pair of twins.

After nearly two decades on the farm, the family had an unorthodox idea for how to best educate their children, how to show them what a vast and wondrous place the world is, full of all kinds of different people and all kinds of different ways of living: They sold everything they had, bought a schooner, and set out to sail around the world, departing on January 27, 1971.

After more than a year at sea, just as they were rounding the tip of South America to begin their Pacific crossing, killer whales attacked the schooner 200 miles off the coast of Galapagos, sinking it in less than a minute. They piled into the inflatable life-raft, managed to grab a piece of sail from the water, and rigged it to the 9-foot dinghy they had on board to use it as a tugboat for the raft now housing six human beings.

Suddenly, they were a tiny speck in Earth’s largest ocean, enveloped by the vast open emptiness of infinite horizons. With no nautical instruments or charts, powered only by their makeshift sail, they had no hope of reaching land. Their only chance was rescue by a passing vessel. Given the immensity of the Pacific Ocean, it was an improbability bordering on a miracle.

Seventeen days into their life as castaways, the raft deflated. All they had now was the narrow fiberglass dinghy, its rim barely above the water’s edge with all the human cargo.

By that blind resilience life has of resisting non-life, they persisted, eating turtle meat and sweet flying fish that landed in the bottom of the boat, drinking rainwater and turtle blood. Storms lashed them. Whales menaced them. Thirst and hunger subsumed them. Their bodies were covered in salt-water sores. Enormous ships passed within sight, missing their cries for help. But they pressed on, hoping against hope, toiling in every conceivable way to keep the spark of life aflame.

After 37 days as castaways, chance smiled upon them — a Japanese fishing boat spotted their distress flare and came to their rescue. Their tongues were so swollen from dehydration that they could hardly thank their saviors.

Throughout it all, Dougal kept a journal in case they lived — an act itself emblematic of that touching and tenacious optimism by which they survived. He later drew on it to publish an account of the experience, then distilled his learnings in Sea Survival: A Manual (public library).

Nested amid the rigorously practical advice is a poetic sentiment that applies not only to survival at sea but to life itself — a soulful prescription for what it takes to live through those most trying periods when you feel like a castaway from life, beyond the reach of salvation, depleted of hope.

He writes:

I have no words to offer which may comfort the reader who is also a castaway, except that rescue may come at any time but not necessarily when you expect it; and that even if you give up hope, you must never give up trying, for, as the result of your efforts, hope may well return and with justification.

Echoing Einstein’s views on free will and personal responsibility, he adds:

You can expect good and bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative, as is good or bad management.

This simple advice reads like a Zen koan, to be rolled around the palate of the mind, releasing richer and richer meaning, deeper and deeper assurance each time.

Complement with John Steinbeck on the true meaning and purpose of hope, Jane Goodall on its deepest wellspring, and some thoughts on hope and the remedy for despair from Nick Cave and Gabriel Marcel, then zoom out to the civilizational scale and revisit Road to Survival — that wonderful packet of wisdom on resilience from the forgotten visionary who shaped the modern environmental movement.

Thanks, Nina

Here’s the link to this attention-grabbing article by Maria Popova.

“Attention without feeling,” Mary Oliver observed in her magnificent memoir of love and loss, “is only a report.” In Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (public library) — an extraordinary celebration of smallness and the grandeur of life, as humble yet surprisingly magical as its subject — botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer extends an uncommon and infectious invitation to drink in the vibrancy of life at all scales and attend to our world with befitting vibrancy of feeling.

One of the world’s foremost bryologists, Kimmerer is a scientist blessed with the rare privilege of belonging to a long lineage of storytellers — her family comes from the Bear Clan of the Potawatomi. There is a special commonality between her heritage and her scientific training — a profound respect for all life forms, whatever their size — coupled with a special talent for rendering that respect contagious, which places her prose in the same taxon as Mary Oliver and Annie Dillard and Thoreau. Indeed, if Thoreau was a poet and philosopher who became a de facto naturalist by the sheer force of poetic observation, despite having no formal training in science, Kimmerer is a formally trained scientist whose powers of poetic observation and contemplative reflection render her a de facto poet and philosopher. (So bewitching is her book, in fact, that it inspired Elizabeth Gilbert’s beautiful novel The Signature of All Things, which is how I first became aware of Kimmerer’s mossy masterwork.)

Scale by Maria Popova

Mosses, to be sure, are scientifically impressive beyond measure — the amphibians of vegetation, they were among the first plants to emerge from the ocean and conquer the land; they number some 22,000 species, whose tremendous range of size parallels the height disparity between a blueberry bush and a redwood; they inhabit nearly every ecosystem on earth and grow in places as diverse as the branch of an oak and the back of a beetle. But beyond their scientific notoriety, mosses possess a kind of lyrical splendor that Kimmerer unravels with enchanting elegance — splendor that has to do with what these tiny organisms teach us about the art of seeing.

She uses the experience of flying — an experience so common we’ve come to take its miraculousness for granted — to illustrate our all too human solipsism:

Between takeoff and landing, we are each in suspended animation, a pause between chapters of our lives. When we stare out the window into the sun’s glare, the landscape is only a flat projection with mountain ranges reduced to wrinkles in the continental skin. Oblivious to our passage overhead, other stories are unfolding beneath us. Blackberries ripen in the August sun; a woman packs a suitcase and hesitates at her doorway; a letter is opened and the most surprising photograph slides from between the pages. But we are moving too fast and we are too far away; all the stories escape us, except our own.

Illustration by Peter Sís from The Pilot and the Little Prince

We, of course, need not rise to the skies in order to fall into the chronic patterns of our myopia and miss most of what is going on around us — we do this even in the familiar microcosm of a city block. Kimmerer considers how our growing powers of technologically aided observation have contributed to our diminished attentiveness:

We poor myopic humans, with neither the raptor’s gift of long-distance acuity, nor the talents of a housefly for panoramic vision. However, with our big brains, we are at least aware of the limits of our vision. With a degree of humility rare in our species, we acknowledge there is much we can’t see, and so contrive remarkable ways to observe the world. Infrared satellite imagery, optical telescopes, and the Hubble space telescope bring vastness within our visual sphere. Electron microscopes let us wander the remote universe of our own cells. But at the middle scale, that of the unaided eye, our senses seem to be strangely dulled. With sophisticated technology, we strive to see what is beyond us, but are often blind to the myriad sparkling facets that lie so close at hand. We think we’re seeing when we’ve only scratched the surface. Our acuity at this middle scale seems diminished, not by any failing of the eyes, but by the willingness of the mind. Has the power of our devices led us to distrust our unaided eyes? Or have we become dismissive of what takes no technology but only time and patience to perceive? Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens.

But the rewards of attentiveness can’t be forced into manifesting — rather, they are surrendered to. In a sentiment that calls to mind Rebecca Solnit’s spectacular essay on how we find ourselves by getting lost, Kimmerer writes:

A Cheyenne elder of my acquaintance once told me that the best way to find something is not to go looking for it. This is a hard concept for a scientist. But he said to watch out of the corner of your eye, open to possibility, and what you seek will be revealed. The revelation of suddenly seeing what I was blind to only moments before is a sublime experience for me. I can revisit those moments and still feel the surge of expansion. The boundaries between my world and the world of another being get pushed back with sudden clarity an experience both humbling and joyful.

[…]

Mosses and other small beings issue an invitation to dwell for a time right at the limits of ordinary perception. All it requires of us is attentiveness. Look in a certain way and a whole new world can be revealed.

[…]

Learning to see mosses is more like listening than looking. A cursory glance will not do it. Starting to hear a faraway voice or catch a nuance in the quiet subtext of a conversation requires attentiveness, a filtering of all the noise, to catch the music. Mosses are not elevator music; they are the intertwined threads of a Beethoven quartet.

Echoing Richard Feynman’s iconic monologue on knowledge and mystery, Kimmerer adds:

Knowing the fractal geometry of an individual snowflake makes the winter landscape even more of a marvel. Knowing the mosses enriches our knowing of the world.

Moss and air plant sculpture by Art We Heart

This knowing, at its most intimate, is a function of naming — for words are how we come to know meanings. Kimmerer considers this delicate dialogue between a thing’s essence and its name:

Having words for these forms makes the differences between them so much more obvious. With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.

[…]

Having the words also creates an intimacy with the plant that speaks of careful observation.

[…]

Intimacy gives us a different way of seeing, when visual acuity is not enough.

The remarkable diversity of moss varieties known and named only adds to the potentiality for intimacy with the world at all scales. But among this vast multiplicity of mosses is one particular species inhabiting the small caves carved by glaciers into the lakeshore, which alone embodies immense wisdom about the mystery and meaning of life. Kimmerer writes:

Schistostega pennata, the Goblins’ Gold, is unlike any other moss. It is a paragon of minimalism, simple in means, rich in ends. So simple you might not recognize it as a moss at all. The more typical mosses on the bank outside spread themselves to meet the sun. Such robust leaves and shoots, though tiny, require a substantial amount of solar energy to build and maintain. They are costly in solar currency. Some mosses need full sun to survive, others favor the diffuse light of clouds, while Schistostega lives on the clouds’ silver lining alone.

Goblins’ Gold (Photograph: Matt Goff)

This singular species subsists solely on the light reflections emanating from the lake’s surface, which provide one-tenth of one percent of the solar energy that direct sunlight does. And yet in this unlikely habitat, Schistostega has emerged as a most miraculous jewel of life:

The shimmering presence of Schistostega is created entirely by the weft of nearly invisible threads crisscrossing the surface of the moist soil. It glows in the dark, or rather it glitters in the half light of places which scarcely feel the sun.

Each filament is a strand of individual cells strung together like beads shimmering on a string. The walls of each cell are angled, forming interior facets like a cut diamond. It is these facets which cause Schistostega to sparkle like the tiny lights of a far-away city. These beautifully angled walls capture traces of light and focus it inward, where a single large chloroplast awaits the gathering beam of light. Packed with chlorophyll ad membranes of exquisite complexity, the chloroplast converts the light energy into a stream of flowing electrons. This is the electricity of photosynthesis, turning sun into sugar, spinning straw into gold.

But more than a biological marvel, Schistostega presents a parable of patience and its bountiful rewards — an allegory for meeting the world not with grandiose entitlement but with boundless generosity of spirit; for taking whatever it has to offer and giving back an infinity more. Kimmerer writes:

Rain on the outside, fire on the inside. I feel a kinship with this being whose cold light is so different from my own. It asks very little from the world and yet glitters in response.

[…]

Timing is everything. Just for a moment, in the pause before the earth rotates again into night, the cave is flooded with light. The near-nothingness of Schistostega erupts in a shower of sparkles, like green glitter spilled on the rug at Christmas… And then, within minutes, it’s gone. All its needs are met in an ephemeral moment at the end of the day when the sun aligns with the mouth of the cave… Each shoot is shaped like a feather, flat and delicate. The soft blue green fronds stand up like a glad of translucent ferns, tracking the path of the sun. It is so little. And yet it is enough.

This tiny moss is a master of “the patient gleaming of light” — and what is the greatest feat of the human spirit, the measure of a life well lived, if not a “patient gleaming of light”? Annie Dillard knew this when she wrote: “I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.” And Carl Jung knew it when he insisted that “the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” The humble, generous Schistostega illuminates the darkness of mere being into blazing awe at the miracle of life itself — a reminder that our existence on this unremarkable rock orbiting an unremarkable star is a glorious cosmic accident, the acute awareness of which calls to mind poet Mark Strand’s memorable words: “It’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.”

To pay attention, indeed, is the ultimate celebration of this accidental miracle of life. Kimmerer captures this with exuberant elegance:

The combination of circumstances which allows it to exist at all are so implausible that the Schistostega is rendered much more precious than gold. Goblins’ or otherwise. Not only does its presence depend on the coincidence of the cave’s angle to the sun, but if the hills on the western shore were any higher the sun would set before reaching the cave… Its life and ours exist only because of a myriad of synchronicities that bring us to this particular place at this particular moment. In return for such a gift, the only sane response is to glitter in reply.

Gathering Moss is a glittering read in its entirety. Complement it with Annie Dillard on the art of seeing and the two ways of looking.

Here’s the link to his article.

On aligning the things we make with basic human values for an enduring world.

BY MARIA POPOVA

“No one is fated or doomed to love anyone,” the philosopher-poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “the accidents happen.”

What is true of interpersonal love is also true of our labors of love — creative accidents are a mighty instrument of art, often steering entire trajectories of expression and endeavor in directions we could not have willed.

That is what the visionary ceramicist Edith Heath (May 24, 1911–December 27, 2005) explores in a previously unpublished lecture titled “The Creative Accident.”

Heath discovered art while studying to become a schoolteacher, then fell in love with the particular creative potential of clay. Largely self-taught, she spent WWII foraging materials from defunct clay pits closed during the war — brick clay from the Bay Area, talc from Southern California, fire clays from the Sierra Nevada foothills. In the final years of the war, she learned ceramic chemistry from an émigré physicist, then went on to revolutionize pottery with her alchemical approach to clay and glaze, becoming ceramicist and chemist, designer and inventor, idealist and entrepreneur, using the principles of science to place everyday beauty within reach of the working class. She lived nearly a century as an unstoppable creative force, touching millions of lives with her work that endures as the iconic Heath Ceramics.

At the heart of Heath’s creative practice was the element of fire, reminding her always of a time when “the Earth was a red-hot molten mass of chemicals and minerals,” primordial and uncontrollable. Seeing in fire a parallel of the creative force itself, Heath argues that at the center of art lies a kind of “acceptance of the accidental” that is counter to the basic human instinct for controlling chaos. The artist then emerges as a kind of shaman of the accidental, dancing between its acceptance and its control.

She writes:

Perhaps the artist has been trying to do both — accept the accident through finding meaning in it. And in finding meaning in it, it is no longer accidental and disquieting, but rather presents a state of equilibrium. This equilibrium manifests in the controlled accident of a work of art may be symbolic of all the controlled accidents that non-artists accept every day.

In sentiments epochs ahead of her time, Heath holds capitalism accountable for its tacit acceptance of practices that foment economic inequality and environmental collapse. While on the other edge of the landmass Rachel Carson was insisting that “the real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife,” Heath writes:

We accept the accidents of economics that necessitates (designing for obsolescence in order to maintain high employment and high standard of living). We accept the accident of over-production of food stuff in this country — setting a ceiling on what can be grown — while millions of people go hungry in other countries. We accept the accident that more natural resources are wasted in the United States than almost anywhere else in the world and proceed to waste them with no guilty conscience… We accept the accident that some people are born with dark skin, or are born to wealth of poverty, with high or low IQs.

By “accident,” of course, she means outcomes beyond the reach of our individual control — functions of a confluence of chance and choice on behalf of forces far larger than us, operating on time scales far beyond our individual lifetimes. She observes:

We can safely refer to these happenstances as accidents, for certainly no one would say they were “planned”. Certainly an error in judgment in diplomacy is not intentional. Planned obsolescence is intentional but it is nevertheless a negative solution to the unpredictability of economic forces. The farmer did not know he would be growing too much food. Our forefathers did not know this land would be filled with natural resources. Since nature bestowed them upon us, why shouldn’t we exploit them? Race, color, creed, intelligence and national pride too are accidents of heritage over which the individual had no control.

Heath was far ahead of her time in her understanding of cultural dynamics and civilizational urgencies. Observing that, historically, creative breakthroughs have come far more frequently from individuals than from groups, she presages that a great impending calamity — atomic destruction in her day, climate catastrophe in ours — has the power of fomenting extraordinary collective creativity:

Because we are teetering on the probability of the most terrible accident in history… it may force more individuals to become creative as a group. In other words, terrible accidents motivate group actions toward creative solution. Potential accident is not a good motivating force, just as capital punishment does not deter crime. Real accidents, however, do in time motivate a group.

An epoch before the term “sustainability” came to bear its ecological connotations, and long before the world awoke to the hazard of climate change, Heath — whose working ethos was to “use the Earth to save the Earth” — adds:

Design for obsolescence as well as depletion of natural resources are real accidents of history that do exist today, which are beginning to compel creative people to design for more basic human values than superficial “styling.” The designer sees in these two accidents of economy a new potential for genuine development in… our whole way of life around the world.

With the depletion of natural resources, we will begin to make and build things to last. Since they must last longer, they must… take on a timeless quality.

This timeless quality, she argues, must be cultivated in all creative works — “whether a painting, a house, a piece of music, a car, or a piece of pottery.” With an eye to her own field, she offers five pillars of timelessness that a maker must follow:

TRUTH — to materials, method, use. Materials not faked to look like something else. Respect material and let it state its unique esthetic… Method of production should not simulate or be imitative of another process — respect the handmade — respect the machine-made — each has its own beauty.

USE — does it function well? Does it please the senses as well as the mind?

SENSE OF EVOLUTION — does it reflect a concept of evolution? In other words, does it give one a sense of well-being because it has evolved through man’s search for new understanding of materials, processes, and a good way of life?

SPIRIT — does it make you feel snobbish or superior or does it excite and exalt you to the point where you want to share the experience with others? In other words, does it ignoble or demean or does it bring dignity and pleasure to you and your fellow-man?

PERSPECTIVE — does it recognize relevance, relationship? Does it exist harmoniously in relationship to other things? Is it too dominant, too weak, too trite, or does it function genuinely, lively, appropriately?

Couple “The Creative Accident” with artist Ann Hamilton’s lovely notion of “making not knowing,” then revisit the poetic physicist Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.

Special thanks to Sarah C. Rich at Heath Ceramics and Jennifer Volland at the UC Berkeley Environmental Design Archives for granting me access to Edith Heath’s unpublished manuscripts.

Here’s the link to this article.

“…and joy instead of will.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) was thirty-three when she left Cambridge for Santa Fe. She had just lived through a World War and a long period of personal turmoil that had syphoned her creative vitality — a kind of deadening she had not experienced before. Under the immense blue skies that had so enchanted the young Georgia O’Keeffe a generation earlier, she started coming back to life. Her white-washed room at the boarding house had mountain views, a rush of sunlight, and a police dog and “a very nice English teacher” for neighbors. As the sun rose over the mountains, she woke up each morning “simply on fire” with poetry — new poems she read to the English teacher, not yet knowing she was falling in love with her. Judy would become her great love, then her lifelong friend and the closest she ever had to family.

Among the constellation of Santa Fe poems composed during this creative renaissance is an especially beguiling reflection on the relationship between presence, solitude, and love, soon published in Sarton’s 1948 poetry collection The Lion and the Rose (public library) — her first in a decade — and read here for us by my longtime poetry co-invocator Amanda Palmer in her lovely oceanic voice:

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?visual=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F1445390686&show_artwork=true&maxheight=1000&maxwidth=680

MEDITATION IN SUNLIGHT
by May Sarton

In space in time I sit
Thousands of feet above
The sea and meditate
On solitude on love

Near all is brown and poor
Houses are made of earth
Sun opens every door
The city is a hearth

Far all is blue and strange
The sky looks down on snow
And meets the mountain-range
Where time is light not shadow

Time in the heart held still
Space as the household god
And joy instead of will
Knows love as solitude

Knows solitude as love
Knows time as light not shadow
Thousands of feet above
The sea where I am now

Complement with Sarton on the cure for despair, how to live openheartedly in a harsh world, and her stunning ode to solitude, then revisit Amanda’s soulful readings of Jane Kenyon’s meditation on life with and after depression, Elizabeth Bishop’s timeless consolation for loss, Ellen Bass’s immense and intimate poem of perspective and possibility, and Mary Oliver’s “When I Am Among the Trees.”

Here’s the link to this article.

“The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots?”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life,” Virginia Woolf wrote as she considered how our illusions keep us alive, shining a sidewise gleam on an elemental fact of human nature: We are touchingly prone to mistaking our models of reality for reality itself, mistaking the strength of our certainty for the strength of the evidence, thus moving through a dream of our own making that we call life. It can only be so — given how many parallel truths comprise any given situation, given how multifarious the data points packed into any single experience, given that this very moment “you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you,” we are simply not capable of processing the full scope of reality. Our minds cope by choosing fragments of it to the exclusion, and often to the erasure, of the rest.

But what we choose and how we choose it defines the measure of our sanity, and how we go about choosing our adaptive delusions over the maladaptive ones defines our fitness for life. That is what philosopher Amélie Rorty (May 20, 1932–September 18, 2020) explores in a marvelous 1994 paper in the Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, marvelously titled User-Friendly Self-Deception.

Recognizing that “many varieties of self-deception are ineradicable and useful,” Rorty writes:

We should not wish to do without the active, self-induced illusions that sustain us. Nor can we do without second order denials that they are illusions, the second order and regressive strategies that we self-deceptively believe rationalize our various self-deceptive activities. The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots? Are there forms of user-friendly self-deception that do not run the dangers that falsity, irrationality and manipulation are usually presumed to bring?

Self-deception, she notes, has various “cousins and clones” — among them “compartmentalization, adaptive denials, repressed conflicts and submerged aggressions, false consciousness, sublimation, wishful thinking, suspiciously systematic errors in self-reflection” — some of which are socially rewarded for their adaptive value in helping us attain our goals:

When we admire persistent and dedicated single-minded attention that systematically resists the distraction of fringe phenomena, we call it courage or purposeful resolution.

But as much as self-deception might animate our own inner lives, with our reflexive tendency to mistake self-righteousness for morality, we too readily indict with self-delusion anyone whose model of reality differs from ours:

The person who does not have our favoured reactions is open game for the charge of self-deception, if not of a more serious form of psychological abnormality.

One necessity of self-deception is the paradox of the self in time: We must each answer the question of what makes us and our childhood selves the “same” person despite a lifetime physical and psychological change, and we can only do so with a certain measure of self-deception, because, of course, in some essential sense we are not the same person — our personhood is pocked by inconstancy and inner contradiction, unstable across time. As Iris Murdoch reminds us, “the self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion” — the fundamental illusion upon which the structure of human life is built.

Rorty considers the psychological roots and mechanisms of self-deception:

Like deception, self-deception is a species of rhetorical persuasion; and like all forms of persuasion, it involves a complex, dynamic and co-operative process. Successful deceivers are acute rhetoricians, astute seducers who know how to co-opt the psychology of their subjects. They begin with minute and subtle interactions designed to establish trust, with a manner of approach, certain gestures and intonation patterns, intimations of directed and redirected attention.

With an eye to the social dimension of all deception, she adds:

Deception and self-deception are not merely detached conclusions of invalid arguments: they are interactive processes with a complex cognitive and affective aetiology.

[…]

The canny self-deceiver puts herself in situations where her deflected attention will be strongly supported by her fellows.

[…]

It is extremely difficult to sustain self-deception without a little help from our friends, often rendered by observant but tactful silence.

This very fact points at the best antidote to harmful self-deception:

Since we are highly susceptible to socially induced self-deception, the wisest practical course is to be very careful about the company we keep… Unfortunately self- deception is just the thing that prevents us from seeking its best therapy: it does not know when to expand, and when to limit its epistemological company. Fortunately, we have many other kinds of reasons for being astute about the company we keep. With luck, a canny self-deceiver’s other psychological and intellectual habits — a taste for astringency and a distrust of hypocrisy, for instance — can prevent the wild imperialistic tendencies of self-deception from becoming entrenched and ramified.

Much self-deception, Rorty observes, is not a matter of outright lying to oneself, but of selective attention and fragmentation of truth:

Self-deception need not involve false belief: just as the deceiver can attempt to produce a belief which is — as it happens — true, so too a self-deceiver can set herself to believe what is in fact true. A canny self-deceiver can focus on accurate but irrelevant observations as a way of denying a truth that is importantly relevant to her immediate projects.

This is something that stems from the psychological machinery of all deception, possible because “any experience is open to an indefinite number of true and even relatively salient descriptions”:

Clever deceivers rarely tell outright falsehoods. It’s too risky. The art of deception is closely related to the magician’s craft: it involves knowing how to draw attention to a harmless place, to deflect it away from the action. Deeply entrenched patterns of perceptual, emotional and cognitive dispositions serve as instruments of deception. A skilled deceiver is an illusionist who knows how to manipulate the normal patterns of what is salient to their audience. He places salient markers — something red, something anomalous, something desirable — in the visual field, to draw attention just where he wants it. The strategy of perceptual self-deception is identical: the trick is to place oneself where patterns of salience are likely to deflect attention away from what we do not wish to see.

But for all of its pitfalls, and for all the urgency of continually questioning when it becomes self-defeating, self-deception can be greatly beneficent in our endeavors of self-transformation and growth, offering assurance that bolsters our will and an antidote to the “generalized uncertainty about the worth of our projects.” Rorty writes:

By convincing themselves that a desired self-transformation is within relatively easy reach, canny self-improvers can use self-deception as an energizing instrument.

Self-deception is also necessary in propping up the precarious pillar of modern life in this century of selfing — identity:

We invent something we call our identity, resting our self-respect on our engaging in its projects, independently of any other measure of their merits.

But perhaps the most essential function of healthy self-deception is in allaying our ambivalence about projects and life-choices that bring us tremendous rewards, but also have tremendous personal costs, an accurate assessment of which might undermine our willingness to undertake them:

Without some species of self-deception, our dedications, our friendships, our work, our causes would collapse. In deciding to have children, we ignore the travails of parents, obliterating our otherwise keen awareness of the typical relations among parents and children; in devoting ourselves to writing philosophy, we conveniently forget how little philosophy we are willing to read; in the interest of sanity and joy, we sidestep our deep ambivalences about our kith and kin.

[…]

Disguising and submerging the ambivalence that is natural to most of our enterprises not only brings us the energy, verve, style and ease that successful action requires; it also helps to assure the social co-operation that is equally essential to our individual and collective projects. A good deal of the polite conversation of social life, — the public description of the joys of our social roles and functions (friend, mother, teacher, scholar) — channels and streams us to play our parts without the mess, confusion and upheaval that would occur if we openly expressed our natural and sensible ambivalence about these roles. It is virtually impossible to imagine any society that does not systematically and actively promote the self-deception of its members, particularly when the requirements of social continuity and cohesion are subtly at odds with one another and with the standard issue psychology of their members. Socially induced self-deception is an instrument in the preservation of social co-operation and cohesion.

Complement with Walter Lippmann’s superb century-old anatomy of deception and self-delusion, then revisit Rorty on what makes a person: the seven layers of identity, in literature and life.

Here’s the link to this article.

An eighteen-year-old prodigy’s song of praise for the eternal consolation of trees.

BY MARIA POPOVA

It’s a hard thing, achieving perspective — hard for the human animal, pinned as we each are to the dust-mote of spacetime we’ve been allotted, not one of us having chosen where or when to be born, not one of us — not even the most fortunate — destined to live for more than a blink of evolutionary time. It is no wonder, then, that our lens so easily contracts to a pinhole through which the fleeting frights and urgencies of the present stream in to fill the chamber of our complex consciousness with blinding totality.

Remembering that we only have approximately four thousand weeks helps. Taking the telescopic perspective helps. Trees, especially, help — for they remedy our loss of perspective as Earth’s own telescopes of time and mortality, each of them a perpetual death and yet potentially immortal, each a clockwork portal to the past, each “a little bit of the future,” as Wangari Maathai exulted in her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech a blink before she became compost for future forests.

Charles Babbage, while dreaming up the world’s first computer with Ada Lovelace, marveled at how tree rings encode information about the past — living logs as precise as digital data, as primal as the human heartbeat:

Every shower that falls, every change of temperature that occurs, and every wind that blows, leaves on the vegetable world the traces of its passage; slight, indeed, and imperceptible, perhaps, to us, but not the less permanently recorded in the depths of those woody fabrics.

It is also no wonder, then, that we see ourselves so readily in trees — not only in the easy (and therefore limited) anthropomorphic sense of Western fairy tales and Eastern folk myths that have accompanied our civilization, but in the deeper, more poetic sense that reveals us to ourselves as imaginative creatures animated by a restless yearning to reconcile the ephemeral and the eternal. This is the sense William Blake captured in his most beautiful letter:

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. As a man is, so he sees.

This is also the sense the young Harlem Renaissance poet Helene Johnson (July 7, 1906–July 7, 1995) captured a century and a half after Blake, in a spare and stunning poem written when she was only eighteen: “Trees at Night,” first published in 1925 — just as the high school dropout turned artist and activist Art Young’s beloved graphic series by the same title began appearing in the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and LIFE, most likely inspiring the young Johnson, whose precocious erudition and literary taste must have feasted on the era’s most popular magazines.Art by Art Young from his 1920s series Trees at Night. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.

Johnson’s poem originally appeared in the May edition of the National Urban League’s Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, when a year later, not yet twenty, she won First Honorable Mention in the journal’s literary contest, judged by James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost. “Trees at Night,” along with all of her surviving poems and a wealth of letters, was later included in the wonderful posthumous volume This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance (public library) by African American literature professor Verner D. Mitchell.

Although she published poetry for less than a decade — a common talent-corseting reality of marriage for women a mere century ago, radiating from the title of Johnson’s last published poem, at age twenty-nine: “Let Me Sing My Song” — she lived a long life, dying on her eighty-eighth birthday, having witnessed the triumph of the suffrage movement and the civilizational defeat of two World Wars, the horror of the Holocaust and the hard-won hope of Civil Rights, the discovery of the double helix and the retroviral genocide of AIDS, the dehumanizing agony of the atomic bomb and the first human footfall on the Moon. Hers was a true saeculum — that beautiful Etruscan word I learned from Rebecca Solnit, denoting the period of time since the birth of the oldest living elder in the community.

Naturally, it was Rebecca I invited to read “Trees at Night” at the 2022 Universe in Verse. (A free “retrostream” of the full show is available worldwide between 12PM EST on May 21 and 4PM EST on May 22). Being one of the most devoted climate thinkers and activists of our time, she prefaced her reading with a soaring meditation on trees as an antidote to the erasures of human history and a moral compass for our planetary future — the kind of extemporaneous prose poem that can sprout from the lushest minds, next to which Johnson’s lyric loveliness rises even more majestic:

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?visual=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F1272382819&show_artwork=true&maxheight=1000&maxwidth=680

TREES AT NIGHT
by Helene Johnson

Slim Sentinels
Stretching lacy arms
About a slumbrous moon;
Black quivering
Silhouettes,
Tremulous,
Stencilled on the petal
Of a bluebell;
Ink sputtered
On a robin’s breast;
The jagged rent
Of mountains
Reflected in a
Stilly sleeping lake;
Fragile pinnacles
Of fairy castles;
Torn webs of shadows;
And
Printed ’gainst the sky —
The trembling beauty
Of an urgent pine.

Complement with Ursula K. Le Guin’s love-poem to trees as a lens on life and death, then step into Rebecca’s inspiriting new project, Not Too Late — a welcoming portal into the climate movement for newcomers and an arsenal of reinvigoration “for people who are already engaged but weary.”

“You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much to happen…”

Here’s the link to this article.

BY MARIA POPOVA

The first English use of the word space to connote the cosmic expanse appears in line 650 of Book I of Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Space may produce new Worlds; whereof so rife.

On this world, space has produced “atoms with consciousness,” in the lovely phrase of the later poet Richard Feynman. Minds. A world rife with minds, as various as they are numerous.

Elsewhere in his seventeenth-century epic of philosophy in blank verse, Milton formulated the quintessence of human experience:

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

In all of this, a paradox: A mind as complex and highly organized ours can perceive the fact of other minds, even more different from our own than the bodies they govern — an awareness haunted by Iris Murdoch’s reminder that the tragic freedom of our experience is the recognition that “others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves.” And yet the human mind is governed by a single organizing principle — self-reference, known often by its other names: memory, language, love.

Because it is its own place, it can only perceive the rest of reality from that place: Our entire view of the world, including the recognition of otherness, is lensed through our own particular mind, ground into shape by its particular genetic inheritance, smudged by its particular life-experience. Everything we see — ourselves, each other, the universe itself — is focused into meaning by that lens.

Milton lived through a turning point in human thought — an era that cleared the inner lens into a discomposing glimpse of reality as Galileo turned the lens of his primitive telescope outward to dismantle our illusions of centrality, our puerile cosmic self-reference. By the time Milton visited Galileo, he was too old and blind to look through the astronomer’s telescope and marvel at its concrete revelations of other moons spinning around other worlds spinning around a shared star. But he saw the abstract truth beyond it: The universe is rife with otherness, every point of light a point of view.

An epoch of lens-clearing after Milton, as we discovered that the universe is wildly larger than we thought and that our own world is wild with other consciousnesses, Robert Frost (March 26, 1874–January 29, 1963) took up this subject with great subtlety and splendor in his poem “On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations.”

At the fifth annual Universe in Verse — which explored through the dual lens of science and poetry the ultimate question animating these atoms with consciousness: What is life? — Frost’s poem came alive in a lovely reading by cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz — director of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, writer of some uncommonly poetic books about how canine minds see the world, creator and host of the wonderful new podcast Off Leash. She prefaced her reading with a poignant reflection on the limits of consciousness lensed through a point of view:

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?visual=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F1282449085&show_artwork=true&maxheight=1000&maxwidth=680

ON LOOKING UP BY CHANCE AT THE CONSTELLATIONS
by Robert Frost

You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.
The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,
Nor strike out fire from each other nor crash out loud.
The planets seem to interfere in their curves —
But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may as well go patiently on with our life,
And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun
For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.
It is true the longest drout will end in rain,
The longest peace in China will end in strife.
Still it wouldn’t reward the watcher to stay awake
In hopes of seeing the calm of heaven break
On his particular time and personal sight.
That calm seems certainly safe to last to-night.

Complement with Rebecca Solnit’s splendid reading of and reflection on the century-old poem “Trees at Night” from the same show, then revisit this rare recording of JFK’s tribute to Robert Frost — which is at heart a manifesto for the power of art to clarify, sanctify, and defend truth.