The Marginalian
The Marginalian

HOLD ON LET GO: Urns for Living and the Art of Trusting Time

By Maria Popova

Ceramics came into my life the way the bird divinations had a year earlier — suddenly, mysteriously, as a coping mechanism for the confusions and cataclysms of living. I was reeling from a shattering collision with one of life’s most banal and brutal truths — that broken people break people — and I needed to make, to do the work of unbreaking, in order to feel whole again; I needed something to anchor me to the ongoingness of being alive, to the plasticity of being necessary for turning trauma into self-transcendence.

A daily creative practice is a consecration of the indestructible in us and a technology for trusting time. Overcome by the need to make something breakable that nonetheless holds, I started taking weekly pottery lessons with the most wonderful teacher. Every day I sat at the wheel on my own for hours, centering and looking for my center. The skin on the edge of my palms grew raw. My nails cracked, fell off. I started dreaming in clay.

One morning, I awoke possessed by the urge to make small symbolic vessels for burying what no longer serves that needs to be left behind (beliefs, projections, habits of being), but also for safekeeping what is most worth holding on to, nurturing, fighting for — in a relationship, in a vocation, in the soul.

I called them urns for living.

Somehow, they didn’t feel different from my primary writing practice — all creative work springs from the same source: to comprehend our human experience, to give shape to our suffering and our joy, to find our way to each other and back to ourselves in this wilderness we live in beneath the canopy of one hundred trillion synapses capable of sorrow and of song.

I made an urn a day. I used everything from century-old typesetter’s letters to children’s stamp sets to impress on each of them the words HOLD ON LET GO in a closed loop along the perimeter — a reminder that our necessary losses anneal who we are, that what we keep of our shatterings composes the mosaic of our lives, that the process is ever ongoing.

Each urn is a different shape and color. Some have a ghostly great blue heron — the closest thing I have to a spirit animal — lurking in the glaze. Some are emblazoned with TRUST TIME. Some cracked, some broke, most had a mind of their own about glazing orthogonal to the vector of my intent. All are numbered sequentially with the day count. All are imperfect, uneven, and entirely their own thing — like the people I love the most.

I decided to make them for forty-one days, then start giving them away on my forty-first birthday (which is today) to people who have made my life more livable — some to pillars of my private world, and the rest to you: Support from readers makes my life literally livable by putting food on my table and books on my shelves, yes, but also contributes to what makes it worth living — without a constellation of kindred spirits, without the sense that one is not alone in one’s values and enthusiasms, there is only the maddening soliloquy of our infinite loneliness in conversation with itself.

To account for the merciful fact that I am a human and not a factory — there are only 41 urns — and to avoid the rude privilege-mongering of auctions, I will let the impartial hand of chance distribute them: To enter the raffle, make a donation by August 5 in any amount that is right for you, but end it with the decimal .41, whether it is $1.41 or $1,000.41. (This will help me separate the urn raffle from the regular donations.) Let us favor morality over mathematics — no manipulation of probability by making multiple entries: just one per person, so we may remember that we are all equals as children of chance.

As to the outcome of my experiment in trusting time: Sometime around day 30, I realized that beneath the surface of my awareness something tectonic had begun shifting in me, rearranging my emotional landscape. My surrender to the process — of making and of grief, that eternal equation of holding on to oneself while letting go of one’s loss — had changed me, changed the room in my heart filled with clay into a chamber full of song.

Suddenly, in rushed the world with all its wonder, everything I had stopped seeing or ceased being able to imagine — fireflies, lichen, love.

In letting go, I had discovered the thing most worth holding on to: the knowledge that the imagination of life is always greater than that of the living.

BP

The Paradox of Knowing Who You Are and What You Want: Cristina Campo on Fairy Tales, Time, and the Meaning of Maturity

By Maria Popova

The Paradox of Knowing Who You Are and What You Want: Cristina Campo on Fairy Tales, Time, and the Meaning of Maturity

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a plasticity of being that allows us to navigate uncertainty, given that uncertainty is the pulse-beat of our lives, fairy tales are not — as J.R.R. Tolkien so passionately insisted — only for children. They are more than fantasy, more than fiction, shimmering with a surreality so saturated that it becomes a mirror for what is realest in us, what we are often yet to see. They enchant us with their strangeness because we are largely strangers to ourselves, ambivalent in our yearning for transformation, for redemption, for homecoming, restless in our longing to unmask the face of love and unglove the hand of mercy. They ask us to believe in magic and reward our trust with truth.

Art by Maurice Sendak for a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales

Fairy tales are above all in service of life’s most difficult, most unfinishable task — knowing who we are and what we want. Their most revelatory function is to remind us that, because we know ourselves only incompletely, we don’t always know what we are looking for until we find it, often by way of getting lost, or until it finds us, often in a guise we don’t immediately recognize as the very thing we long for.

That is what Italian writer Cristina Campo (April 29, 1923–January 10, 1977) explores in her excellent posthumous essay collection The Unforgivable: And Other Writings (public library).

Observing that many fairy tales “end like a ring right where they began,” she writes:

In a fairy tale, there are no roads. You start out walking, as if in a straight line, and eventually that line reveals itself to be a labyrinth, a perfect circle, a spiral, or even a star — or a motionless point the soul never leaves, even as body and mind take what appears to be an arduous journey. You seldom know where you are traveling, or even what you are traveling toward, for you cannot know, in reality, what the water ballerina, or the singing apple, or the fortune-telling bird may be. Or the word to conjure with: the abstract, culminating word that is stronger than any certainty.

One of Kay Nielsen’s stunning 1914 illustrations for Scandinavian fairy tales. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Through these routeless convolutions, we map the terra incognita of your own interior world. In a passage evocative of the Chinese notion of wu-wei — “trying not to try” — Campo considers the paradox of self-discovery:

Since the thing you start out looking for cannot and must not have a face, how can you recognize the means to reach it until you’ve reached it? How can the destination ever be anything but an apparent destination?

[…]

No one arrives at the enlightenment he sets out to seek. It will come to him in its own sweet time. Thus the destination walks side by side with the traveler… Or it hovers behind him… In truth, the traveler has always had it within him and is only moving toward the motionless center of his life: the antrum near the spring, the cave — where childhood and death, in one another’s arms, confide the secret they share. The idea of travel, effort, and patience is paradoxical, yes, but it is also exact. For in this paradox, we stumble on the intersection of eternity and time.

It is hardly surprising that, in their central project of loosening the clutch of certainties we call a self, fairy tales blur the ordinary experience of time — time, after all, is the substance we are made of.

Another of One of Kay Nielsen’s Scandinavian fairy tales illustrations. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

In a passage brimming with the musicality Maurice Sendak considered the key to great storytelling, Campo — the daughter of a musician and a composer — writes:

The geometry of time and space is abolished as if by magic. You walk for hours in a circle, or conversely, you reach the edge of the infinite in a few quick steps. It isn’t our state of heightened vigilance that casts a spell on the world around us; it is a much more recondite correspondence between discovering and letting ourselves be discovered — between giving shape and taking shape. Everything already was, but today it truly is. Today any peasant, pointing in any direction, will sound like a gnome or a fairy, will gesture at the path you nearly took a thousand times without suspecting it. The path that leads to four indescribably white springs suspended on the hillside, protected, for a hundred paces or a thousand miles, by fields of tall fragrant grasses; or to the royal tomb hidden by the Etruscans in a cave now covered with brambles, out of which white hounds and a man the size of an ifrit, carrying a shotgun, emerge; or down below the ridge secretly lighted by the sun, at a bend in the riverbank so deep it casts the whole hanging tangle of pink roots into shadow. Velvet water that looks motionless and yet moves. Water that runs off into the beyond without flowing, so that it would be enough just to follow it, for that beyond which is always forbidden, always intimated in our dreams, is transpiring here and now.

I am thinking now of Hannah Arendt’s magnificent meditation on love: “Fearlessness is what love seeks,” she wrote. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.” Perhaps this is why love is the central axis of most fairy tales, why love in real life has a certain dreamlike quality, why both love and dreams are ways of getting to know the stranger in us. “In each of us there is another whom we do not know,” Carl Jung wrote, “[who] speaks to us in dreams.”

One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrett’s 1929 illustrations for French fairy tales. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

There is the same dreamlike quality and the same capacity for revelation in the state we enter once a fairy tale ejects us from time and thrusts into nowness. Campo paints the dreamscape we enter:

Quick glances direct our steps, hands point beyond the thresholds. Behind windowpanes so clear they blind us move the figures of the ones we loved, the ones we’ve lost, who, behold, stand up from the piano bench or arrange fruit on a table. It all unfolds like a scroll from a mouth known yet unknown, a dark and luminous sentence, an irrefutable commentary set down between past and future.

In being both a portal between the known and the unknown and a still point between past and future, fairy tales help us discern our own nature by guiding us toward the deepest truths of who we are and helping us apply them to the mystery of being alive — a nonlinear process the fruits of which we call maturity. Campo writes:

Maturity is not the result of persuasion, much less an intellectual epiphany. It is a sudden, I would almost like to say biological, collapse. It is a point that must be reached by all the senses at once if truth is going to be turned into nature.

Complement with Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear and Anaïs Nin on the meaning of maturity, then revisit the greatest illustrations from 200 years of Brothers Grimm fairy tales.

BP

Kiss: Ellen Bass’s Stunning Ode to the Courage of Tenderness as an Antidote to Helplessness

By Maria Popova

Kiss: Ellen Bass’s Stunning Ode to the Courage of Tenderness as an Antidote to Helplessness

There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance — the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation — are these little acts of mercy, of tenderness, the small clear voice rising over the cacophony of the quarrelsome, over the complaint choir of the cynics, to insist again and again that the world is beautiful and full of kindness.

It makes all the difference in a day, in a life, to hear that voice, all the more to be that voice. It is our evolutionary inheritance — we are the story of survival of the tenderest, the living proof that tenderness may be the ultimate fitness for being alive.

I know no better homily on this fundament of our humanity than Ellen Bass’s poem “Kiss” from her altogether soul-salving collection Indigo (public library).

KISS
by Ellen Bass

When Lynne saw the lizard floating
in her mother-in-law’s swimming pool,
she jumped in. And when it wasn’t
breathing, its body limp as a baby
drunk on milk, she laid it on her palm
and pressed one fingertip to its silky breast
with just about the force you need
to test the ripeness of a peach, only quicker,
a brisk little push with a bit of spring in it.
Then she knelt, dripping wet in her Doc Martens
and camo T-shirt with the neck ripped out,
and bent her face to the lizard’s face,
her big plush lips to the small stiff jaw
that she’d pried apart with her opposable thumb,
and she blew a tiny puff into the lizard’s lungs.
The sun glared against the turquoise water.
What did it matter if she saved one lizard?
One lizard more or less in the world?
But she bestowed the kiss of life,
again and again, until
the lizard’s wrinkled lids peeled back,
its muscles roused its own first breath
and she set it on the hot cement
where it rested a moment
before darting off.

Couple with Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk on storytelling and the art of tenderness, then revisit Ellen’s magnificent poems “Any Common Desolation” and “How to Apologize.”

BP

A Plasticity of Being: What a Rare Bird of Prey Reveals about the Deepest Meaning of Intelligence

By Maria Popova

A Plasticity of Being: What a Rare Bird of Prey Reveals about the Deepest Meaning of Intelligence

“True teachers are called into being by the contradictions generated by civilization,” the poet Gary Snyder reflected in his reckoning with the real work of life. “We need them.”

We have always needed them because we need each other, because we have always been each other’s teachers. Ever since one human being watched another rub wood and flint into fire, we have taught each other how to use our hands and how to use our minds, how to wield our tools at the world and our theories of living at the predicament of being alive. Social learning — this jungle gym for training the plasticity of being we call adaptation — may be the lever by which we lifted ourselves up from the flatland of survival to the mountain of civilization, the key that liberated us from the prison of our destiny as predators to become poets.

And yet social learning is not unique to the human animal, not even to the so-called higher animals. (“Never say higher or lower,” Darwin argued in the margin of a book he was reading. “Say more complicated.”) It may even be most interesting — because it reveals reaches of reality alien to us — in minds that are most unlike ours.

Few minds are more other than that of the caracara — the planet’s southernmost bird of prey and one of the rarest, about as few of them alive as there are giant pandas.

1775 watercolor of a caracara by Georg Forster from James Cook’s second voyage under 2025 images of the Triffid and Lagoon nebulae from the Vera Rubin Observatory. Available as a print and a greeting card.

Jonathan Meiburg investigates and celebrates these “disarmingly conscious” animals in his wonderful book A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey (public library), largely inspired by the legacy of William Henry Hudson and written with kindred literary splendor. He writes:

Unless you live south of the Rio Grande, chances are you’ve never even heard of caracaras. But if you try to imagine ten separate attempts to build a crow on a falcon chassis, with results falling somewhere between elegant, menacing, and whimsical, you wouldn’t be far off. A few species are drab and inconspicuous, but most are boldly patterned in black and white, with red or yellow skin on their faces and legs. Some are nearly as small as magpies; others are as large as ravens. All have broad wings, hooked beaks, and an alert, curious expression, and they live in every part of their supremely varied continent, from the arid peaks of the Andes to the steaming forests of the Amazon basin.

Their most striking qualities, however, are their minds. Unlike most birds of prey, caracaras are social and curious, and they feed with gusto on foods other predators disdain… In the high Andes, a species whose feathers adorned the heads of Inca emperors has been seen working in teams to uncover lizards and insects by flipping heavy rocks, and the crested caracaras who unnerved Darwin in Patagonia are said to spread wildfires by dropping burning sticks in dry grass, and feasting on the ensuing stream of refugees.

[…]

[Caracaras] have surprising and important stories to tell us: about the history of life, about the hidden worlds of their grand and mysterious continent, about how evolution can fashion a mind like ours from different materials. They might even offer us some advice about surviving in a world primed for an upheaval.

What the caracaras offer us above all is an invitation to rethink our understanding of intelligence, the self-referential ways in which we define it, the disembodied mathematical modalities against which we measure our definition.

Among the three extant species of caracaras — striated, crested, and chimango — the chimangos (Milvago chimango) astonish with their feats of what we readily recognize as intelligence (like the use of memory in the service of planning and the use of tools in the service of executing plans) and what is more subtly so (like the capacity for deep play and the capacity for boredom). Reflecting on his encounter with two especially intelligent chimangos and their human companions, Meiburg draws on the science of how cells become selves to consider the surprising understanding between them despite the divergent development of our two kinds of brains:

As you grew inside your mother’s womb, drawing nutrients through your umbilical cord, your folded neocortex grew from the lower surface of your fetal forebrain. Tina’s equivalent structure, a smooth bulb called a pallium, grew from the upper surface of hers, as she slowly absorbed the yolk of her hard-shelled egg. But though the structures of the neocortex and the pallium are distinct, their functions are alike: Geoff and Tina, like Hudson and Polly, could understand each other because their parallel journeys had led them to the same place.

The interesting question, the irresistible question, is why markers of intelligence like curiosity and innovation can clearly develop independently in different lineages, yet have not developed in every branch of the tree of life — why can’t mayflies solve mazes and snails perpetrate revenge? Meiburg argues that social learning, and the plasticity of being it implies, may be the key:

One factor that seems especially important in the evolution of what we call intelligence is a habitat in which the distribution, type, and availability of food is inherently unpredictable. Any animal that finds itself in this situation can’t afford to rely on pure routine or rote behaviors; it needs to be observant and curious enough to find new sources of food, even if it’s never seen them before.

[…]

This is where social learning is especially helpful. If you can learn from the example of your peers, you can reap the benefits of their successes and failures in your own lifetime, without waiting for natural selection to do its slow work on your gene pool. But keeping track of so many details — the individual personalities and relationships of other members of your social group, the locations of many different food sources, and the places you might have hidden food to eat later — requires a larger, more flexible brain. It’s also the kind of life that you’d expect to favor generalists over specialists. Indeed, nearly all the animals we regard as intelligent — baboons, crows, raccoons, caracaras, humans — are big-brained social generalists that thrive in unpredictable environments.

This, indeed, may be what makes an intelligent creature in the deepest sense — a teachable generalist capable of teaching, a social animal endowed with the behavioral plasticity and “negative capability” necessary for embracing the inherent uncertainty of this brief embodiment.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.

Couple with the story of how nature developed dream — another technology for practicing the possible — in the avian brain and the fascinating science of how owls see with sound, then consider how the new science of plant intelligence is challenging our notions of what makes a mind.

BP

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