Here’s the link to this article.

“The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide,” Albert Camus wrote in one of the most provocative opening sentences in all of literature, unspooling into one of the most daring works of philosophy. “Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards.”

Camus was both very right and very wrong, the way only a great mind can be, because the fundamentals of philosophy come after, not before, the fundamentals of physics.

By the time we can even begin answering for ourselves the question of whether or not is worth living, myriad things have been answered for us by the fundamental forces that have conspired into the confluence of chance that is our self. None of us choose the bodies or brains or neurochemistries we are born with, the time and place we are deposited into, the parents we are raised by, the culture we are cultured in. Any sense of choice we might have is already saturated with these chance inheritances and is therefore, as James Baldwin so astutely observed, part illusion and part vanity.

And yet live we must, with the cards we have been dealt, daily answering Camus’s question with our pre-answered fundaments of chaos and chance.

On those days when we are so life-weary, so defeated by the chance-circumstance of our situation, so tempted to answer in the negative, the smallest gesture of kindness can be nothing less than a lifeline. That is what Gwendolyn Brooks (June 7, 1917–December 3, 2000) realized over breakfast at a hotel one day in her late sixties, when the young waiter met her simple bright “Good morning!” with a gasp on the verge of tears: “Oh, thank you, thank you!”

She wondered what he must be living through, if so early in life and so early in the day he was already so heavy with despair, so grateful for the salvation of a simple smile from a stranger. (One such smile had saved Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s life half a century earlier.)

Out of that compassionate wonderment came Brooks’s lifeline of a poem “To the Young Who Want to Die,” which appeared in her 1987 collection The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (public library), dedicated to the students of the Gwendolyn Brooks Junior High School, published by the imprint she had founded and named after her father, the janitor of a music company.

At the 2022 Universe in Verse, themed What Is Life?, Roxane Gay brought the poem to life, prefaced with a poignant personal reflection on the poem in the context of the devastating loss of her brother:

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TO THE YOUNG WHO WANT TO DIE
by Gwendolyn Brooks

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April.
You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.

You need not die today.
Stay here — through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

Complement with Galway Kinnell’s kindred poem “Wait,” composed to keep a young friend from taking his own life, then revisit Gwendolyn Brooks on the vivifying power of books and Audre Lorde, in a wonderful anthology edited by Roxane Gay, on poetry as an instrument of change and courage.

Here’s the link to this article.

“Nowhere is the joy of existence so apparent as in music… Intelligent life-forms have created a multitude of sounds that express their exhilaration at being alive.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“Matter delights in music, and became Bach,” Ronald Johnson wrote in his stunning 1980 prose poem about music and the mind. This may be why music so moves and rearranges and harmonizes us, why in it we become most fully ourselves — “atoms with consciousness,” axons with feeling. When music courses through us, we are reminded that the mind and the body are one, and that the body — like music, like feeling, like the universe itself — is made of matter and time. It may even be that music is the language of time, mathematics its alphabet; that Margaret Fuller was right when she insisted two centuries ago that “all truth is comprised in music and mathematics”; that, as the cosmologist and jazz saxophonist Stephon Alexander observed in our own century, “it is less about music being scientific and more about the universe being musical.”

That is what the poetic physicist Alan Lightman explores with great subtlety and splendor throughout his conceptual masterpiece Mr g: A Novel About the Creation (public library), which reads like one long prose poem and which also gave us the transcendent science of what actually happens when you die.

Through his protagonist — the young creator Mr. g, bored and unsure of himself (“unlimited possibilities bring unlimited indecision”) as he spins a baby universe out of the Void while his aunt and uncle watch on with approving, critical, and sage pronouncements — Alan envisions the realities, as theorized by our current science, of how the universe began, punctuating them with fundaments of our humanity, none more elemental than the soul-resonance of music:

Then there was music. The Void had always vibrated with the music of my thoughts, but before the existence of time the totality of sounds occurred simultaneously, as if a thousand thousand notes were played all at once. Now we could hear one note following another, cascades of sound, arpeggios and glissades. We could hear melodies. We could hear rhythms and metrical phrases gathering up time in lovely folds of sound. Duples and triples and offbeat syncopations. As we moved through the Void [we] were transfixed by the most exquisite sounds, the tender and melodic and rapturous oscillations of the Void.

As Mr. g proceeds with his rapturous experiment, most of the music he makes follows a Pythagorean scale, because “chords based on these scales were pleasing to hear,” but he also tinkers with asymmetrical and nonharmonic ratios, which “also produced beautiful music as long as two different notes were not sounded together.” (These, of course, are allusions to the Western and non-Western music traditions.) He writes:

In every place and in every moment, we were wrapped and engulfed in music. At times, the music poured forth in fierce heaving swells. At other times, it advanced in the softest little steps, delicate as a fleeting veil in the Void. Music clung to our beings as parcels of emptiness had in the past. Music went inside us. I had created music, but now music created; it lifted and remade and formed a completeness of being.

In consonance with philosopher Susanne Langer’s lovely formulation of music as “our myth of the inner life,” he adds:

Nowhere is the joy of existence so apparent as in music… Intelligent life-forms have created a multitude of sounds that express their exhilaration at being alive.

At the 2022 Universe in Verse, I invited Alan — a passionate pianist himself — to reflect on the personal and universal power of music and its abiding relationship to physics before reading an excerpt from Robert Johnson’s epic poem:

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When I sit down at the piano, I enter two different realms: one conscious and one unconscious. The conscious realm is one in which I think about the notes I’m going to play, and the timing and the rhythm and the intensity; and the unconscious is when I just let go and float with the sound. Music is an expression both of the orderly discipline of science and the unfettered flight of the human spirit.

Complement with violinist Natalie Hodges on the poetic science of feeling in sound and composer Caroline Shaw’s transcendent musical inspiriting of classic poetry, then revisit Alan Lightman on time and the antidote to our existential anxiety.

Here’s the link to this article.

“Our foot’s in the door.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

They were the first to colonize the Earth. They will inherit it long after we are gone as a species. And when we go as individuals, it is they who return our borrowed stardust to the universe, feasting on our mortal flesh to turn it into oak and blackbird, grass and grasshopper. Fungi are the mightiest kingdom of life, and the least understood by our science, and the most everlasting. Without them, this planet would not be a world. Like everything vast and various, they shimmer with metaphors for life itself.Mushrooms from “Atlas des Champignons Comestibles et Vénéneux,” 1891. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy)

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932–February 11, 1963) was twenty-seven and pregnant with her first child, a daughter, when she wrested from mushrooms one — more than one — of the most enchanting metaphors in the history of the imagination.

In the setting summer in 1959, Plath and her complicated husband, Ted Hughes, arrived at Yaddo — the gilded artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York — and took up separate residences a five-minute walk apart. She had her first room of her own — a sunny third-floor studio in one of the larger houses, with a heavy wooden writing table and a hospital-green portable Swiss typewriter. Perched at her window, she watched the thicket of pines and listened to the birds. “I have never in my life felt so peaceful and as if I can read and think and write for about 7 hours a day,” she wrote to her mother.

But it was a season of dejection: One of America’s oldest and largest publishers had just rejected her poetry manuscript, another rejected her first children’s book — a story about living free from the world’s estimation — and her depression was back after a pleasantly distracting summer road trip.

She sorrowed in her journal:

Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness… Caught between the hope and promise of my work… and the hopeless gap between that promise, and the real world of other peoples poems and stories and novels.

In the evenings, Ted and some of the other residents engaged in antiscientific entertainment — astrology charts and ouija boards. She participated without enthusiasm, perhaps because she had been spending her days devotedly studying German — the language of rationalism and the Golden Age of Science, of Kant and Humboldt. By early November, she was seized with total creative block:

Paralysis again. How I waste my days. I feel a terrific blocking and chilling go through me like anesthesia… If I can’t build up pleasures in myself: seeing and learning about painting, old civilizations, birds, trees, flowers, French, German… To give myself respect, I should study botany, birds and trees: get little booklets and learn them, walk out in the world.

Walk out she did. The woods around Yaddo were damp and rife with mushrooms. Mushrooms were in the lavish food served at the colony. Mushrooms crept onto her mind.

And then, in that way that noticing has of revivifying the deadened spirit, she started to come alive, as if assured by nature that life — like fungi, like art — persists against all odds.

Within a week, the outside world was also looking up — one of her stories was accepted in London Magazine. She wrote in her journal:

My optimism rises. No longer do I ask the impossible. I am happy with smaller things, and perhaps that is a sign, a clue… Every day is a renewed prayer that the god exists, that he will visit with increased force and clarity.

It was a conflicted clarity. She had a series of restless nights full of tortured dreams about her mother, about “old shames and guilts.” She and Ted were about to move to London — a prospect that had filled her with anxiety, like all major change does, but now she began feeling an “odd elation” at the thought of turning a new leaf.

On a windy mid-November day of grey but balmy weather, she took a walk with Ted under the open sky and the bare trees, listening to the last leaves rustle in the wind, watching a scarecrow in a cornfield wave its hollow arms, noticing the blackbird on the branch, the fox prints and deer tracks in the sandy trail, the blue-purple hills and the green underbed of the lakes, the mole hills and tunnels webbing the grassland. Something began stirring — some restive creative vitality that needed an outlet. She recorded:

Wrote an exercise on mushrooms yesterday which Ted likes. And I do too. My absolute lack of judgment when I’ve written something: whether it’s trash or genius.

That exercise became her poem “Mushrooms” — a quietly mischievous work of genius, paying homage to the indomitable nature of the creative spirit. By the following summer, it was on the pages of Harper’s, marking a bold departure from Plath’s previous work.

It is both a hope and a heartache to consider that, today, mushroom species from the genus Psilocybe are being used in clinical trials to effectively allay treatment-resistant depression — a breakthrough she never lived to see that might have saved her life.

At the fifth annual Universe in Verse, held in a young redwood forest strewn with fungi, composer and cellist Zoë Keating brought Plath’s poem to life with a poignant prefatory meditation on its central metaphor for the creative spirit, accompanied here by the exquisite “Optimist” from her record Into the Trees, which has scored more of my own writing hours over the past decade than any other music.

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MUSHROOMS
by Sylvia Plath

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.

Complement with Meryl Streep reading Plath’s “Morning Song” and Plath herself reading her poem “The Disquieting Muses,” then savor other highlights from The Universe in Verse, including Patti Smith reading a poem about dark matter (with music by Zoë Keating), Roxane Gay reading Gwendolyn Brooks’s lifeline to the dispirited, and a musical serenade to the ecology of Emily Dickinson.

Here’s the link to this article.

“Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

This is the final installment in the nine-part animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. See the rest here.

THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN VERSE: CHAPTER NINE

Here we are, each of us a portable festival of wonder, standing on this rocky body born by brutality, formed from the debris that first swarmed the Sun 4.5 billion years ago and pulverized each other in a gauntlet of violent collisions, eventually forging the Moon and the Earth.

Here we are, now standing on it, on this improbable planet bred of violence, which grew up to be a world capable of trees and tenderness. A conscious world. A world shaped by physics and animated by art, by poetry, by music and mathematics — the different languages we have developed to listen to reality and speak it back to ourselves.

Here we are, voicing in these different our fundamental wonderment: What is all this? This byproduct of reality we call life: not probable, not even necessary, and yet it is all we know, because it is all we are, and it is with the whole of what we are that we reckon with reality, that we long to fathom it — from the scale of gluons to the scale of galaxies, from the mystery of the cell to the mystery of the soul.

Every once in a while — perhaps once or twice a century, if we are lucky — atoms shed by dying stars constellate into a living mind so shimmering, so uncommonly gifted in multiple fathoming-languages, that poems and paintings, elegies and equations, theorems and songs spring from it with equal ardor and equal beauty. Rebecca Elson was one. Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918–February 15, 1988) was another — a Nobel-winning physicist, a philosopher, an artist, composer of the world’s most lyrical footnote and most bittersweet love letter, who saw no boundary between knowledge and mystery, between our different modes of fathoming reality and serenading the wonder of the universe that made us.

In the autumn of 1955, a decade before he won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work on quantum electrodynamics, Feynman took the podium at the National Academy of Sciences to contemplate the value of science. Midway through his characteristically eloquent and intellectually elegant lecture, addressing the country’s most orthodox audience of academic scientists, he burst into what can best be described as a splendid prose-poem about the mystery and wonder of life, inspired by a reflective moment he spent alone on the edge of the sea, where Rachel Carson too found the meaning of life. It later became the epilogue to Feynman’s final collection of autobiographical reflections, What Do You Care What Other People Think? (public library), published the year of his death.

In this ninth and final installment of the animated Universe in Verse, legendary cellist and Silkroad founder Yo-Yo Ma — one of the most boundlessly curious and wonder-smitten minds I know, who knew Feynman and shares with him a passionate appreciation of science as the native poetry of reality — brings this prose-poem to life in a soulful, symphonic reading with a side of Bach, animated by artist and designer Kelli Anderson (who previously animated Jane Hirshfield’s poem “Optimism” at the second annual Universe in Verse in 2018 and Amanda Palmer’s reading of “Hubble Photographs: After Sappho” by Adrienne Rich at the third live show in 2019).

Radiating from it all — from Feynman’s words, from Yo-Yo’s music, from Kelli’s animation — is what Feynman himself once told Yo-Yo: “Nature has the greatest imagination of all.”

[UNTITLED ODE TO THE WONDER OF LIFE]
by Richard Feynman

I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves… mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business… trillions apart… yet forming white surf in unison.

Ages on ages… before any eyes could see… year after year… thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what?… on a dead planet, with no life to entertain.

Never at rest… tortured by energy… wasted prodigiously by the sun… poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves… and a new dance starts.

Growing in size and complexity… living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea… wonders at wondering… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe.

Previously in the series: Chapter 1 (the evolution of life and the birth of ecology, with Joan As Police Woman and Emily Dickinson); Chapter 2 (Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and the human hunger to know the cosmos, with Tracy K. Smith); Chapter 3 (trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell and the poetry of the cosmic perspective, with David Byrne and Pattiann Rogers); Chapter 4 (dark matter and the mystery of our mortal stardust, with Patti Smith and Rebecca Elson); Chapter 5 (a singularity-ode to our primeval bond with nature and each other, starring Toshi Reagon and Marissa Davis); Chapter 6 (Emmy Noether, symmetry, and the conservation of energy, with Amanda Palmer and Edna St. Vincent Millay); Chapter 7 (the science of entropy and the art of alternative endings, with Janna Levin and W.H. Auden); Chapter 8 (nonhuman consciousness and the wonder of octopus intelligence, with Sy Montgomery and Marilyn Nelson).

Here’s the link to this article.

“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

This is the seventh of nine installments in the animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. See the previous installments here.

THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN VERSE: CHAPTER SEVEN

In 1865 — a year before the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology, the year Emily Dickinson composed her stunning pre-ecological poem about how life-forms come into being — the German physicist Rudolf Clausius coined the word entropy to describe the undoing of being. The thermodynamic collapse of physical systems into increasing levels of disorder and uncertainty. The dissolution of cohesion along the arrow of time. Inescapable. Irreversible. Perpetually inclining us toward, in poet Mary Ruefle’s perfect phrase, “the end of time, which is also the end of poetry (and wheat and evil and insects and love).” Perpetually ensuring, in poet Edna St. Vincent Millay’s perfect phrase, that “lovers and thinkers” become “one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.”

This transformation of order into disorder, of constancy into discontinuity, is how we register change and tell one moment from the next. Without entropy, the universe would be a vast eternal stillness — a frozen fixity in which never and forever are one. Without entropy, there would be no time — at least not for us, creatures of time.

Clausius built on the Greek word for transformation, tropē, because he believed that leaning on ancient languages to name new scientific concepts made them available to all living tongues, belonging to all people for all time. It pleased him, too, that entropy looked like energy — its twin in the making and unmaking of the universe. Energy, the giver of life. Entropy, the taker away. The frayer of every cell that animates our bodies with being. The extinguisher of every star that unlooses its thermal energy into the cold sublime of spacetime as it runs out of fuel, warming up the orbiting planets with its dying breath. We are only alive because our Sun is burning out. Without entropy, there would be no us.

The child of a physicist, W.H. Auden (February 21, 1907–September 29, 1973) had no illusion about the entropic nature of reality — a science-lensed lucidity he wove into his poetic search for truth, for meaning, for a way to live with our human fragility, with our twin capacities for terror and tenderness inside an impartial universe he knew to be impervious to our plans and pleas. The child of two world wars, he had no illusion about how our humanity comes unwoven by its own pull but is also the enchanted loom that makes life worth living.

Just as Auden was reaching the peak of his poetic powers, the world’s deadliest war broke out, brutal and incomprehensible. It may be that art is simply what we call our most constructive coping mechanism for the incomprehension of life and mortality, and so Auden coped through his art. He looked at the stars and saw “ironic points of light” above a world “defenseless under the night”; he looked at himself and saw a creature “composed like them of Eros and of dust, beleaguered by the same negation and despair.”

“September 1, 1939” became a generation’s life-raft for “the waves of anger and fear” subsuming the unexamined certainties of yore, splashing awake the “euphoric dream” of a final and permanent triumph over evil. But the war went on, and in the protracted post-traumatic reckoning with its aftermath — this gasping ellipsis in the narrative of humanity — Auden revised his understanding of the world, of life, of our human imperative, and so he revised his poem.

In what may be the single most poignant one-word alteration in the history of our species, he changed the final line of the penultimate stanza to reflect his war-annealed recognition that entropy dominates all. The original version read: “We must love one another or die” — an impassioned plea for compassion as a moral imperative, the withholding of which assures the destruction of life. But the plea had gone unanswered and eighty million lives had gone unsaved. Auden came to feel that his reach for poetic truth had been rendered “a damned lie,” later lamenting that however our ideals and idealisms may play out, “we must die anyway.”

A decade of disquiet after the end of the war, he changed the line to read: “We must love one another and die.”Liminal Days. (Available as a print.)

But there was a private reckoning beneath the public one — this, after all, is the history of humanity, of our science and our art. Auden was working out the world in the arena where we so often wrestle with the vastest, austerest, most abstract and universal questions about how reality works — the fleshy, feeling concreteness of personal love.

In the summer of 1939, just before the world came unworlded, Auden met the young aspiring poet Chester Kallman and fell in love, fell hard, fell dizzily into the strangeness of spending “the eleven happiest weeks” of his life amid a world haunted by death. Over the next two years, as the war peaked, this passionate love became a lifeline of sanity and survival. But Auden, already well into his thirties, kept longing for a stable and continuous relationship of mutual fidelity — the closest thing to a marriage their epoch allowed — and Kallman, barely twenty, kept wounding him with the scattered and discontinuous affections of self-discovery.

Throughout the cycles of heartache, Auden refused to withdraw his love — a stubborn and devoted love, opposing the forces of dissolution and disorder, outlasting the fraying of passion and the abrasions of romantic disappointment, until it buoyed their bond over to the other side of the tumult, to the stable shore of lifelong friendship.

For the remainder of his life, Auden summered with Kallman in Europe. They spent twenty New York winters as roommates in a second-floor apartment at 77 St. Marks Place in the East Village, later marked with a stone plaque emblazoned with lines from Auden’s ode to the foolish, fierce devotion that had prevailed over the lazy entropy of romantic passion to salvage from its wreckage the lasting friendship, the mutual cherishment and understanding that had bound them together in the first place.

“The More Loving One” — the second verse of which became the epigraph of Figuring, and which appears in Auden’s indispensable Collected Poems (public library) — is a poem both profoundly personal and profoundly universal, radiating a reminder that no matter the heartbreak, no matter the entropic undoing of everything we love and are, we are survivors. It is at once a childish fantasy chalked on the blackboard of consciousness — we do not, after all, survive ourselves — and a blazing manifesto for being, for the measure of maturity, for the only adequate attitude with which to go on living with the incremental loss that is life itself.

In this seventh installment of the animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse (which returns as a live show next week), “The More Loving One” comes alive in a reading by astrophysicist, author, and OG Universe in Verse collaborator Janna Levin (who has previous inspirited many a splendid poem), animated by Taiwanese artist and filmmaker Liang-Hsin Huang, and winged with original music by Canadian double bassist, composer, and nature-celebrator Garth Stevenson.

THE MORE LOVING ONE
by W.H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Previously in the series: Chapter 1 (the evolution of life and the birth of ecology, with Joan As Police Woman and Emily Dickinson); Chapter 2 (Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and the human hunger to know the cosmos, with Tracy K. Smith); Chapter 3 (trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell and the poetry of the cosmic perspective, with David Byrne and Pattiann Rogers); Chapter 4 (dark matter and the mystery of our mortal stardust, with Patti Smith and Rebecca Elson); Chapter 5 (a singularity-ode to our primeval bond with nature and each other, starring Toshi Reagon and Marissa Davis); Chapter 6 (Emmy Noether, symmetry, and the conservation of energy, with Amanda Palmer and Edna St. Vincent Millay).

Here’s the link to this article.

A song of praise for life and “the smallest possible once before once.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

This is the fifth of nine installments in the animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. See the rest here.

THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN VERSE: CHAPTER FIVE

Whenever I am down, I think of the gladiolus.

Whenever I ache with self-referential humanity — that evolutionary miracle of complex consciousness that endows us with the capacity for reflection and rumination at the root of all sorrow — I think of the gladiolus and its primal scream of color and its two-hundred-million-year triumph, governed by insentient forces stretching back to the Big Bang that bloomed a something out of the unimaginable nothingness.

I think of the gladiolus with its mohawk of blossoms — one-sided, bisexual, belonging to nature’s nonbinary citizenry: the “perfect flowers” — most of its 300 known species native to Africa, to which we too are native. A fierce beauty named after the Latin word for sword, known sometimes as “sword lily,” linking it to the flower for which my mother was named. A blade of blossoms pollinated by tiny wasps and long-tongued bees and hawk-moths, and then by self-conscious sapiens with opposable thumbs — a chainlink of humans holding hands across the epochs from Mendel to the young Puerto Rican woman at the Manhattan flower market, those generations of horticulturalists who hybridized and cultivated the small iridescent blossoms of the wild flower to make the towering blooms of solid red and white and yellow in my Bulgarian grandmother’s garden, on my Bulgarian grandfather’s coffin.

I think of the gladiolus, with which we share 98% of our DNA — that delicate arrangement of atoms forged long ago when all of them, yours and mine and the sword lily’s, banged into being 13.8 billion years ago from a single source, no larger than the dot levitating over the small i, the I lowered from the pedestal of ego.

The young poet Marissa Davis celebrates the atomic spirituality in this chainlink of kinship between us and everything alive in “Singularity (after Marie Howe)” — a poem inspired by “Singularity (after Stephen Hawking),” which the gifted and golden-souled Marie Howe composed for and premiered at the second annual Universe in Verse in 2018, commemorating the recently stardust-surrendered scientist who revolutionized our understanding of the universe by illuminating what happens to a dying star as it collapses to form a singularity — the tiny point of zero radius, infinite density, and infinite curvature of spacetime at the bottom of a black hole, kindred to the Big Bang singularity at the bottom of the Beginning — that original seed from which the universe bloomed.

Marie’s “Singularity” — which was transformed into a breathtaking animated film for the lockdown livestream of the 2020 show, a film that inspired this experimental literary-animated “season” of The Universe in Verse in the interlude between live gatherings — radiated across our Pale Blue Dot, eventually reaching Marissa to spark her own “Singularity” — an exquisite ode to our primeval bond with one another and the rest of nature.

For this fifth installment in the interlude series, in an homage to the intergenerational chainlink of inspiration from which all art is born, here is Marissa’s “Singularity” animated into vibrant aliveness by English artist Lottie Kingslake and set to song by the cosmic life-force that is Toshi Reagon.

SINGULARITY
              (after Marie Howe)
by Marissa Davis

in the wordless beginning
iguana & myrrh
magma & reef              ghost moth
& the cordyceps tickling its nerves
& cedar & archipelago & anemone
dodo bird & cardinal waiting for its red
ocean salt & crude oil              now black
muck now most naïve fumbling plankton
every egg clutched in the copycat soft
of me unwomaned unraced
unsexed              as the ecstatic prokaryote
that would rage my uncle’s blood
or the bacterium that will widow
your eldest daughter’s eldest son
my uncle, her son              our mammoth sun
& her uncountable siblings              & dust mite & peat
apatosaurus & nile river
& maple green & nude & chill-blushed &
yeasty keratined bug-gutted i & you
spleen & femur seven-year refreshed
seven-year shedding & taking & being this dust
& my children & your children
& their children & the children
of the black bears & gladiolus & pink florida grapefruit
here not allied but the same              perpetual breath
held fast to each other as each other’s own skin
cold-dormant & rotting & birthing & being born
in the olympus              of the smallest
possible once before once

Previously on The Universe in Verse: Chapter 1 (the evolution of life and the birth of ecology, with Joan As Police Woman and Emily Dickinson); Chapter 2 (Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and the human hunger to know the cosmos, with Tracy K. Smith); Chapter 3 (trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell and the poetry of the cosmic perspective, with David Byrne and Pattiann Rogers); Chapter 4 (dark matter and the mystery of our mortal stardust, with Patti Smith and Rebecca Elson).