Tag: Maria Popova

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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:

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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…”

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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:

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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.

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).