My first great culture shock upon arriving in America was that concrete playgrounds, basketball courts, and tiny triangles of grass between busy streets all bore plaques that called them “parks.” Where I came from, a park was a place of birdsong and rustling leaves, a place to ramble, to get lost in, to dream in; a patch of wonder in the middle of the city; a pocket wilderness. It was in a park that I took my first steps, had my first kiss, wondered for the first time why we are alive.
The park — the proper park — as a place of contemplation, illumination, and discovery comes alive with great soulfulness in We Go to the Park (public library) — the product of an unusual collaboration between Swedish author and playwright Sara Stridsberg and Italian artist Beatrice Alemagna.
At the dawn of the pandemic, amid the maddening captivity of lockdown and the tempest of uncertainty, Alemagna entered a kind of trance of painting — an outpouring of color and feeling channeling her hopes and fears, dreams and remembrances. (Every artist’s art is their coping mechanism — we make what we make to save ourselves, to stay sane, to find the slender cord of grace between us and the world.)
When Stridsberg received a selection of these impressionistic unstoried images, she was moved to respond with her own art. Her spare, lyrical words gave the pictures coherence, making of them something uncommonly lovely: part story, part poem, part prayer.
Some say we come from the stars,
that we’re made of stardust,
that we once swirled into the world
from nowhere.
We don’t know.
So we go to the park.
Though spoken by children playing in the park, the collective pronoun seems to expand in widening circles as the vignettes unfurl until it becomes the voice of humanity, making the park — this “land beyond” — a miniature of our restless search for meaning, an antidote to the ordinary world where “everything is so big there’s no room for it inside of us.”
There amid the thousand-year-old trees that “stretch their branches toward the sky like old hands,” we encounter minute creatures and enormous flowers as big as heads, “birdlike old ladies on benches” and a girl “in a yellow raincoat with wild hair, who smells like lightning and isn’t scared of anything”; we encounter ourselves in all our yearning, all our incompleteness.
Sometimes it feels as if all of life
is made up of longing.
A dizzying lack of someone
to swing and swoosh beside.
When Stridsberg writes that “there are no rules in the universe” — a universe we know to be governed by immutable laws precise as clockwork — she seems to be intimating that there are no rules for how to be human, for how to make meaning. (There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.) There are only invitations — to be present with the wind that feels like “the breath of a dragon,” with the tiny ants, with the exquisite fragility of life and the size of time.
In just a second,
everything we love might be gone.
There are many things we mistake for love — infatuation, admiration, need — but there is no error of the heart graver than making another our higher power. This may seem inevitable — because to love is always to see the divine in each other, because all love is a yearning for the sacred, within us and between us. And yet the moment we cast the other as our savior, our redeemer, the arbiter of our significance, we have ceased loving — for we have ceased seeing the living human being.
The Heart of the Rose by Elihu Vedder, 1891. (Available as a print.)
The tragic part, the touching part, the strangely assuring part is that we have been doing this since consciousness — that synaptic hammock of yearning — first crowned the human animal. We have suffered in the same way across cultures and civilizations, and have transmuted that singular, commonplace suffering into some of our most enduring works of art. (“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin observed in his finest interview, “but then you read.”)
Centuries ago, John Donne (1572–1631) channeled the complex interplay between eros and the divine, the confusion of it and the transcendence of it, in the most eternal of his Holy Sonnets. Composed in his late thirties and published shortly after his death, it is read here by nineteen-year-old artist and poetry-lover Rose Hanzlik to the sound of Bach’s Goldberg Variations:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Somewhere along the way of life, we learn that love means very different things to different people, and yet all personal love is but a fractal of a larger universal love. Some call it God. I call it wonder. Dante called it “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.”
Because the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness and consciousness the crowning achievement of the universe, because the mystery of the universe will always exceed the reach of the consciousness forged by that mystery, love in the largest sense is a matter of active surrender (to borrow Jeanette Winterson’s perfect term for the paradox of art) to the mystery.
It may be that we are only here to learn how to love.
The paleontologist, philosopher of science, and poet Loren Eiseley (September 3, 1907–July 9, 1977) channels this idea with uncommon loveliness and lucidity in one of the essays found in his superb 1969 collection The Unexpected Universe (public library).
Writing at the dawn of the space age, when the human animal with its “restless inner eye” first reached for the stars, Eiseley observes:
The venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without… That inward world… can be more volatile and mobile, more terrible and impoverished, yet withal more ennobling in its self-consciousness, than the universe that gave it birth.
Picking up Dante’s thread, Eiseley offers a sweeping meditation on what ennobles our small stardusted lives, beginning with the story of a seemingly mundane accident that thrusts him, as sudden shocks to the system can often do, toward transcendence.
Walking to his office afternoon, deep in thought while working on a book, Eiseley trips on a street drain, crashes violently onto the curb, and finds himself facedown on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood. In the delirium of disorientation and pain, he looks at the vermillion liquid in the sunshine and suddenly sees life itself, suddenly feels all the tenderness one feels for the miracle of life whenever one is fully feeling. And then, with that wonderful capacity we humans have, he surprises himself:
Confusedly, painfully, indifferent to running feet and the anxious cries of witnesses about me, I lifted a wet hand out of this welter and murmured in compassionate concern, “Oh, don’t go. I’m sorry, I’ve done for you.”
The words were not addressed to the crowd gathering about me. They were inside and spoken to no one but a part of myself. I was quite sane, only it was an oddly detached sanity, for I was addressing blood cells, phagocytes, platelets, all the crawling, living, independent wonder that had been part of me and now, through my folly and lack of care, were dying like beached fish on the hot pavement. A great wave of passionate contrition, even of adoration, swept through my mind, a sensation of love on a cosmic scale, for mark that this experience was, in its way, as vast a catastrophe as would be that of a galaxy consciously suffering through the loss of its solar systems.
I was made up of millions of these tiny creatures, their toil, their sacrifices, as they hurried to seal and repair the rent fabric of this vast being whom they had unknowingly, but in love, compounded. And I, for the first time in my mortal existence, did not see these creatures as odd objects under the microscope. Instead, an echo of the force that moved them came up from the deep well of my being and flooded through the shaken circuits of my brain. I was they — their galaxy, their creation. For the first time, I loved them consciously, even as I was plucked up and away by willing hands. It seemed to me then, and does now in retrospect, that I had caused to the universe I inhabited as many deaths as the explosion of a supernova in the cosmos.
It is often like this, in some small sudden experience, that we awaken to reality in all its immensity and complexity. Eiseley’s blood-lensed realization is elemental and profound: We are not the sum total of the tiny constituent parts that compose us — we are only ever-shifting and regenerating parts operating under the illusion of a sum we call a self. Any such awareness — whether we attain it through science or art or another spiritual practice — is an act of unselfing, to borrow Iris Murdoch’s perfect term. And every act of unselfing is an act of love — it is how we contact, how we channel, “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.” It is the self — the prison of it, the illusion of it — that keeps us trapped in lives of less-than-love. But a self is a story, which means we can always change the story to change, to dismantle, to be set free from the self — and it might not even require a bloody face.
Observing that while other animals live out their lives by obeying their nature, the human animal has the freedom to define and redefine its own humanity, Eiseley considers both the gift and the danger of our malleable and impressionable self-definition. A decade before James Baldwin admonished in his superb conversation with Margaret Mead that “you’ve got to tell the world how to treat you [because] if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble,” and half a century before Maya Angelou wrote in her staggering poem to the cosmos that “we are neither devils nor divines,” Eiseley reminds us of something fundamental that we so easily forget, so easily abdicate, in these times of social imaging and performative selfing:
To the degree that we let others project upon us erroneous or unbalanced conceptions of our natures, we may unconsciously reshape our own image to less pleasing forms. It is one thing to be “realistic,” as many are fond of saying, about human nature. It is another thing entirely to let that consideration set limits to our spiritual aspirations or to precipitate us into cynicism and despair. We are protean in many things, and stand between extremes. There is still great room for the observation of John Donne, made over three centuries ago, however, that “no man doth refine and exalt Nature to the heighth it would beare.”
With that great countercultural courage of defying cynicism, Eiseley insists that it was the humans who nourished the highest in their nature by means of love, who lived with such exquisite tenderness for life in all of its expressions, that propelled our species from the caves to the cathedrals, from savagery to sonnets. (A particularly countercultural point, given he is writing in the middle of the Cold War — an ideology of hate, like all war, under which humans on both sides are taught that those on the other are devils, that power and not peace is the pinnacle of our humanity.) Drawing on his singular access to deep time as a scientist who studies fossils long predating Homo sapiens, he considers what made us human — what keeps us human:
A great wealth of intellectual diversity, and consequent selective mating, based upon mutual attraction, would emerge from the dark storehouse of nature. The cruel and the gentle would sit at the same fireside, dreaming already in the Stone Age the different dreams they dream today.
[…]
Some of them, a mere handful in any generation perhaps, loved — they loved the animals about them, the song of the wind, the soft voices of women. On the flat surfaces of cave walls the three dimensions of the outside world took animal shape and form. Here — not with the ax, not with the bow — man* fumbled at the door of his true kingdom. Here, hidden in times of trouble behind silent brows, against the man with the flint, waited St. Francis of the birds — the lovers, the men who are still forced to walk warily among their kind.
Millions of years later, Eiseley finds himself one of the lovers as he befriends a large old seagull, grey as himself. Day after day, he sits on an old whiskey crate half-buried in the sand at the edge of the ocean — that crucible of life, that ultimate lens on its meaning — and watches the gull. “I came to look for this bird,” he recounts, “as though we shared some sane, enormously simple secret amidst a little shingle of hard stones and broken beach.” And then, one day, the gull is gone.
With an eye to what remains — which is what always remains when something or someone we love leaves — Eiseley writes:
Here, I thought, is where I shall abide my ending, in the mind at least. Here where the sea grinds coral and bone alike to pebbles, and the crabs come in the night for the recent dead. Here where everything is transmuted and transmutes, but all is living or about to live.
It was here that I came to know the final phase of love in the mind of man — the phase beyond the evolutionists’ meager concentration upon survival. Here I no longer cared about survival — I merely loved. And the love was meaningless, as the harsh Victorian Darwinists would have understood it or even, equally, those harsh modern materialists… I felt, sitting in that desolate spot upon my whiskey crate, a love without issue, tenuous, almost disembodied. It was a love for an old gull, for wild dogs playing in the surf, for a hermit crab in an abandoned shell. It was a love that had been growing through the unthinking demands of childhood, through the pains and rapture of adult desire. Now it was breaking free, at last, of my worn body, still containing but passing beyond those other loves.
Here, in this scientist’s farewell to life, we find an echo of Dante and of Larkin’s timeless insistence that “what will survive of us is love,” we find the first truth of life, which is also its final truth. (This too is why we, fallible and vulnerable to the bone, ought to love anyway.)
“I hear bravuras of birds… I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,” Walt Whitman exulted in his ode to the “puzzle of puzzles” we call Being. How puzzling indeed, and how miraculous, that of the cold silence of spacetime voice emerged, in all its warm loveliness — this vibrating interaction of energy and matter, this oscillating displacement of particles, that can give rise to a mother’s lullaby and the nightingale’s song and Nina Simone, that can praise and blame and slay with silence. To me, voice is an unequaled portal to the soul and the supreme pheromone. When I miss someone, it is their voice I miss the most.
For eons, we could capture the likeness of a person far in space or time, but not their voice: all the portraits of kings and queens staring down from palace walls, all the marble thinkers and the nudes descending staircases, all the photographs of lovers and children, all the mute millennia of them. Voice was life incarnate, impossible to immortalize. Then we harnessed electricity, dreamt up the phonograph and the telephone, began translating these ephemeral oscillations through the air into electrical waveforms to be transmitted and recorded. You could suddenly hear the nightingale across the globe, you could hear the voice of the dead.
And then voice became something you could see.
Margaret Watts Hughes. (Portrait by S. Harris courtesy of Merthyr Tydfil Leisure Trust)
Margaret Watts Hughes (February 12, 1842–October 29, 1907) was already one of the most beloved singers of her time before she became an inventor. Jenny Lind — the most celebrated vocalist of the 19th century, who inspired Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Nightingale” by breaking his heart — considered her one of her only two spiritual sisters in music, alongside Clara Schumann.
On the cusp of forty, Margaret invented a device to test and train her vocal powers — a membrane stretched over the mouth of a receiver attached to a megaphone-shaped tube, into which she would sing. To render her voice visible, she would place various powders atop the rubber diaphragm and watch the vibrations scatter the particles, much like cosmic rays scatter subatomic particles in a cloud chamber. She experimented with different designs: various tube shapes, fine silk and soft rubber for the membrane, sand, lycopodium powder, and flower seeds for the medium.
She called her device eidophone, from the Greek eidō (“to see”) and phōnḗ (“voice, sound”), and became the first woman to present a scientific instrument of her own invention at the Royal Society.
Margaret Watts Hughes and her eidophone. (St. Louis Post Dispatch, 1908.)
But the eidophone gave her a far greater reward — a glimpse into another dimension of reality.
One day in 1885, Margaret noticed something astonishing — as she sang into the eidophone modulating her pitch, the seeds she had placed atop the membrane “resolved themselves into a perfect geometrical figure.” Experimenting with her voice, she discovered that particular tones produced particular geometries — shapes that “alter in pattern or in position with each change of pitch… and increase in complexity of pattern as the pitch rises.”
She sang entire songs into the eidophone, capturing the imprint of each note.
A new visual language for sound came abloom — forms partway between Feynman diagrams and Haeckel’s radiolaria.
And then she began to wonder what would happen if she placed a small heap of wet color paste instead of powder at the center of the diaphragm and covered it with a glass plate, singing different sustained notes into the eidophone.
She held her long steady pitch, then watched wonder-smitten as modulations of intensity pushed the pigment outward into petals and pulled it back concentrically toward the center, each sound forming a different shape. She sang daisies and roses, she sang ferns and trees, she sang strange serpents of otherworldly beauty. The same tone formations produced the same flowers each time — daisies and primroses were easy to sing, pansies difficult — revealing the secret garden inside the voice.
She called these forms Voice-Figures and came to think of them as echoes of the voice of God, hoping they would serve in some small way “the revelation of yet another link in the great chain of the organised universe.”
In the final years of her life, looking back on her experiments, Margaret reflected:
Passing from one stage to another of these inquiries, question after question has presented itself to me, until I have continually felt myself standing before mystery, in great part hidden, although some glimpses seemed revealed.
Born to working-class parents, the daughter of a cemetery supervisor, Margaret began giving music lessons to homeless children in the basement of her house. Overcome with tenderness for them, she felt she had to do more and used the income from her music career to found several orphanages in North London. Upon her death, the Times eulogized “the penetrating sweetness of her voice, both in speech and in song, her glowing faith, and her great magnetic power [that] had an extraordinary effect on the roughest and most unpromising children.”
When the novelist Emilie Barrington visited one of the orphanages, she was moved to see that instead of curtains or blinds, the windows were shaded with Margaret’s bright voice-figures, which appeared as something out of a dream, out of Alice in Wonderland — “strange, beautiful things,” she marveled, “suggesting objects in Nature, but which are certainly neither exact repetitions nor imitations of anything in Nature.”
While elsewhere in London Florence Nightingale was writing about the healing power of beauty, Margaret Watts Hughes seems to have understood that the colorful voice-figures were more than decoration in the lives of these abandoned children, that inside each person, even the loneliest, dwells a secret garden of delight waiting to bloom under the warm rays of tenderness, that perhaps voice only exists to give tenderness a vessel.
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