A great tragedy of our time, this epoch of self-righteousness, is the zeal with which people would rather feel right than understand — the situation, the context, the motives and vulnerabilities behind the actions, the basic fact of the other.
Growling beneath it all is an aversion to our own imperfections — we would rather look away and toward the faults of others than fully step into our own shadow and embrace it with light. In so segregating our own nature, we abdicate our wholeness and cease being fully human.
How to rehumanize ourselves by owning our shadow is what Alan Watts (January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973) examines in some wonderful passages from Tao: The Watercourse Way (public library) — his final book, which he never fully finished before death took him one late-autumn day; it was posthumously published with the help of his friend Al Chung-liang Huang.
Alan Watts, early 1970s. (Photograph courtesy of Everett Collection)
Watts writes:
At the head of all virtues Confucius put not righteousness (i), but human-heartedness (jen), which is not so much benevolence, as often translated, but being fully and honestly human.
[…]
A true human is not a model of righteousness, a prig or a prude, but recognizes that some failings are as necessary to genuine human nature as salt to stew.
A generation before Parker Palmer urged in his magnificent commencement address that you “take everything that’s bright and beautiful in you and introduce it to the shadow side of yourself” so that “the shadow’s power is put in service of the good,” Watts adds:
Merely righteous people are impossible to live with because they have no humor, do not allow the true human nature to be, and are dangerously unconscious of their own shadows. Like all legalists and busybodies, they are trying to put the world on a Procrustean bed of linear regulations so that they are unable to make reasonable compromises.
[…]
Trust in human nature is acceptance of the good-and-bad of it, and it is hard to trust those who do not admit their own weakness.
Art by Andrea Dezsö from a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales.
(It is worth nothing that Tao: The Watercourse Way was itself a way of admitting, and remedying, a human weakness on the scale of society — a decade before Ursula K. Le Guin so brilliantly unsexed the universal pronoun, Watts becomes the first to propose, in a footnote, that the Confucian word jen, which is ungendered in Chinese but has traditionally been translated into English as “man-heartedness,” instead be translated as “human-heartedness” and that all instances of “man” as the universal pronoun be replaced with “human.”)
“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future.” A generation after her, Henry Miller placed at the heart of the art of living the fact that “on how one orients himself to the moment depends the failure or fruitfulness of it.”
We know this. We know that we are creatures of time, that the arrow of time pins us to our own finitude, that time is change and change is entropy and without entropy there would be no being. Still, the deepest part of us — the part that yearns for permanence against all reason — cannot accept living in this lending library for loss, cannot but be unsettled by each birthday, each Monday, each turn of seasons.
And yet inner peace — that crucible of happiness — is largely a matter of the peace we make with the passage of time.
That is what Pete Seeger knew when he adapted, nearly verbatim, a passage from the Hebrew Bible — Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 — into the classic 1959 song “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season).” And that is what Nina Simone, who thought deeply about time, knew when she sang her soul into Seeger’s song in what remains one of the most breathtaking covers of all time:
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to gain that which is to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time of love, and a time of hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
Once, Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) set out to write a memoir. But she found that “it felt too much like stripping in public,” so she abandoned it. Today, all of her autobiographical reflections, all of her overt politics, all of her creative credos come down to us solely through her interviews, now collected in Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (public library).
These conversations are also the reliquary of Butler’s hard-honed wisdom on the craft of writing, which she taught herself and mastered against the odds of her time and place to become one of the most abiding and beloved literary voices of the past century — part prophet, part poet of possibility.
Octavia Butler by Katy Horan from Literary Witches — an illustrated celebration of women writers who have enchanted and transformed our world.
In an interview given just as she was beginning what would become her iconic Parable of the Sower, she offers young writers the pillars of the craft:
The first, of course, is to read. It’s surprising how many people think they want to be writers but they don’t really like to read books… The second is to write, every day, whether you like it or not. Screw inspiration.
Forget about inspiration, because it’s more likely to be a reason not to write, as in, “I can’t write today because I’m not inspired.” I tell them I used to live next to my landlady and I told everybody she inspired me. And the most valuable characteristic any would-be writer can possibly have is persistence. Just keep at it, keep learning your craft and keep trying.
Forget about talent, whether or not you have any. Because it doesn’t really matter. I mean, I have a relative who is extremely gifted musically, but chooses not to play music for a living. It is her pleasure, but it is not her living. And it could have been. She’s gifted; she’s been doing it ever since she was a small child and everyone has always been impressed with her. On the other hand, I don’t feel that I have any particular literary talent at all. It was what I wanted to do, and I followed what I wanted to do, as opposed to getting a job doing something that would make more money, but it would make me miserable.
It was not easy for Butler to follow what she wanted to do. She did have to take terrible job after terrible job. She worked at a hospital laundry. She worked as a telemarketer. (“I have a good phone voice,” she says apologetically. “I am told I have a good phone presence, and I actually sold things to people. I’m very ashamed.”) But all along, she was writing and writing. Looking back on the dogged devotion of those early days, that vital time when the foundations of one’s craft and credo are laid down, she reflects:
I remember another writer and I corresponding, and he had dropped out. I said, “Why haven’t I seen more from you?” He said, “Well, I didn’t make anything on my first three books.” My comment was, “Who makes anything on their first three books?” I remember that the time I quit that laundry job, it was to go to a Worldcon in Phoenix… I decided I was going to try to live as frugally as possible, and at that time you really could live very frugally. My rent was one-hundred dollars a month. So if you were content not to drive, and if you were content to wear the same clothes that you’d been getting along on for a long time… and there were other ways of not spending lots of money. I didn’t eat potatoes for years after that. I decided that I was going to live off the writing, somehow.
[…]
No matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can’t possibly do this, somehow you do.
When an interviewer relays the apocryphal story of how Bram Stoker spent years producing mediocre writing without anyone’s notice until one day lightning struck him and out came Dracula, Butler immediately refutes this myth of divine inspiration with its dangerous intimation that excellence is the product of circumstance or chance. Having placed at the heart of her Parable of the Talents the question of creative drive, having framed it as a matter of “a sweet and powerful positive obsession,” she insists once again on the immense creative power of simply showing up for the work:
It’s one of the things that I try to keep young writers from thinking, that you have to wait, that it’s all luck, lightning will strike and then you’ll have a wonderful bestseller. So I think it’s like the old idea that fortune favors the prepared mind. If you’ve developed the habit of paying attention to the things that happen around you and to you, then, yeah, you’ll get hit by lightning.
In ten billion years, the Sun will run out of hydrogen and burn out, swallowing the inner planets of our Solar System into the abyss of its collapse as the outer planets drift farther and farther. In time, the cosmos itself will run out of energy and none will be left to succor life — the fact of it or the possibility of it — as the universe goes one expanding into the austere emptiness of pure spacetime. So will end the short line of life in the ledger of eternity. In the meantime, we are here on our improbable planet, living our improbable lives — perishable triumphs against the immense cosmic odds of nonexistence, haunted by our earthly existential loneliness nested into our cosmic loneliness. Is it any wonder that, since we first looked up at the night sky, we have been yearning to find what Whitman called “beings who walk other spheres,” searching for life on other worlds that tells us something about how to live on this one, something about the deepest meaning of life itself?
Reverencing the long arc of transmuting theory into truth, Johnson traces how we went from the illusory Martian “canals” of the early observers to the discovery of real water-lain sedimentary rocks by our space probes, how all the things we got wrong paved the way for the revelation of reality — a reminder, she observes, that “the truth can be a chimeric thing, the collapse of an abiding belief is always just one flight, one finding, one image, away.”
Across the centuries, this romance of reality is populated by some remarkable characters: We meet the naturalist and amateur astronomer who, convinced that Mars was an undiscovered wilderness and its canals were made of vegetation, strode into town in the middle of a World War on one of his two horses, Jupiter and Saturn, to cable his reports; the commodities broker turned adventurer who, after swimming the English Channel and climbing most of the world’s tallest mountains, grew bored of Earth and set out to observe Mars from a balloon, only to be swarmed in a savage thunderstorm, barely surviving his crash into the shark-infested Coral Sea; the woman who learned to grind telescope mirrors when she was ten, became the first in her family to go to college and the first in her high school to earn a doctorate, then transformed planetary cartography by devising an elaborate laser-based system for mapping the topography of Mars while rearing two small children.
Johnson’s own search for life on other worlds began by studying life in the most otherworldly regions of this one. Plumbing the Siberian permafrost for evidence of ancient bacteria, she finds herself holding cells twenty thousand times her own age. An epoch after Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry contemplated the desert and the meaning of life while stranded in the Sahara, she pitches a small yellow tent in the eerie expanse between Death Valley and the Mojave Desert, reading Blake and Dostoyevsky and West with the Night like sacred texts, probing them for clues about the meaning of it all, about the nature and mystery of life. She reflects:
All I wanted was to find some solid points, some method to triangulate, some way to pattern a sense of human understanding onto the vast physical world around me, a world marked by human absence. Soon, though, I began to realize the Granite Mountains weren’t as intensely empty as they seemed. When I’d first gazed into the Mojave, everything seemed muted. All the color had been drained, sipped away by the parched air. The plants were a whitish khaki green, like fistfuls of dried herbs. I had the urge to spit on them, thinking it was the least I could do, a small act of kindness. But after a while, my senses started to adjust. The sagebrush began to look like splashes, almost like raindrops hitting a lake. I started to see the life all around me — in the spine-waisted ants and blister beetles, even in the dark varnish of the desert rocks, a sheen potentially linked to microscopic ecosystems… I had a visceral sense of the world popping from two dimensions into three, of seeing a landscape in a way I’d never viewed it before.
It is this yearning to understand the fundaments of life that drives Johnson toward the mystery of Mars. Still in her twenties, she becomes part of the historic Opportunity mission and watches in awe as the rover beams back the first images of the immense Endurance Crater’s walls — an unprecedented glimpse of “layers that had been stacked like the pages of a closed book, one moment in time pressed close against the next,” hinting at the planet’s history and at the possible future of our own world. She recalls:
Ours were the first human eyes to peer into that mysterious abyss, and it was one of the most breathtaking things I’d ever seen. As I stared into the center of the crater, I felt like Alice in Wonderland falling through a rabbit hole. “What is this world?” I thought, there on the verge of Endurance, my eyes wide. “What is this piercingly wild place?” The giant cavity was laced with hummocks of sand. The most ethereal gossamer dunes filled the void at its center, unlike any dunes I’d ever seen. They looked like egg whites whipped into soft pinnacles. And enveloping the edges, there was undulating outcrop, cut with gorgeous striations, deeper than I was tall.
In between peering into fractures, studying chemical gradients, and looking for evidence of subterranean aquifers, the search is laced with existential questions — questions Voltaire took up epochs ago in his visionary parable Micromégas, from which Johnson draws inspiration; question Carl Sagan and Ray Bradbury contemplated in their own reckoning with Mars. The most disquieting of them is the question of what life looks like in the first place — perhaps Martian life is of substance so alien and scale so discrepant that we might not even recognize it; perhaps it is composed of an entirely new biochemistry, built upon an entirely different molecular foundation, which we have neither the tools nor the minds to discern.
Mars surface, various missions. (Available as a print.)
In a passage that echoes the sentiment at the heart of “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” — Whitman’s timeless gauntlet at the limits of scientific knowledge — Johnson considers our creaturely blind spots:
We have human brains within human skulls, and we understand little of what surrounds us. The limits of our perception and knowledge are palpable, especially at the extremes, like when we’re exploring space. There is so little data to tell us who we are and where we are going, why we are here, and why there is something rather than nothing. This is the affliction of being human in a time of science: We spend our lives struggling to understand, when often we will have done well, peering out through those narrow chinks, just to apprehend.
Still, we go on searching, go on trying to understand, because the search itself shines a sidewise gleam on the ultimate questions pulsating beneath our touchingly human lives. Johnson writes:
We are unique and bounded, and we may well be in decline, for we know that species come and go. We are a finite tribe in a temporary world, marching toward our end.
And what of life itself? Must it be finite as well? What if life is a consequence of energetic systems? What if the nothing-to-something has happened time and again and, because the chinks in our cavern are so small, we don’t know it? For me, this is what the search for life amounts to. It is not just the search for the other, or for companionship. Nor is it just the search for knowledge. It is the search for infinity, the search for evidence that our capacious universe might hold life elsewhere, in a different place or at a different time or in a different form.
Ultraviolet images of Mars by NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. (Available as a print.)
But perhaps loveliest of all is that tucked into her passionate search for life on another world is her passionate love letter to this one — a soulful reminder that while we are expending superhuman resources on searching for a mere microbe on Mars, we are living on a planet capable of trees and bioluminescence and Bach. It is on this world that she learns just how rare life is, and how possible. “Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can,” Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in one of her finest poems — a mirthful fact Johnson discovers while ascending the desolate summit of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano:
As the road climbed, we passed the tree line, then the last of the scrub and the last of the lichens, until we were above even the clouds. The landscape was gray and red and black in every direction; in places it even smoldered with a sheen of purple. There were shards and ash and cinder cones. It felt like a bruise, crystallized in the world. One day, when everyone was having lunch, I wandered over to check out the view from a distant ridge, where the solid lava gave way to pyroclasts and tephra. Without really noticing, I was kicking at the rocks as I stepped. I overturned a surprisingly large one with the toe of my boot, and as my eyes fell to my feet, I startled. Beneath the vaulted side of that adamantine black rock, a tiny fern grew, its defiant green tendrils trembling in the air. There in the midst of all that shattered silence was a tiny splash of life. I crouched down to see it better.
[…]
It was just so impossibly triumphant. I couldn’t pull myself away; I looked at it for so long that the others had to come find me. I showed it to them, but I didn’t have the words to explain its beauty, its significance. I couldn’t tell them that somehow, huddled under a rock, growing against the odds, that fern stood for all of us.
The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)
ABOUT
CONTACT
SUPPORT
SUBSCRIBE
Newsletter
RSS
CONNECT
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Tumblr