We bear the heavy burden of a complex consciousness that makes us creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb, apes who came down from the trees to kiss the ground with our prayers and scar it with our tranches, to discover mitochondria and mathematics, to invent love and war. Our dual capacity for creation and destruction is the price we pay for our own complexity. We live with it and die by it and make poems and paintings and psalms to transform the constant tension between the two into meaning, into something of beauty and substance that outlasts the dust of power — these are the shoreless seeds and stardust that survive us.

In a world teetering on the event horizon of its third global war, Italian artist Alessandro Sanna set out to paint to life his favorite poems from the time of the first. It all began with a single poem — a splendid addition to the small, surprising canon of stone poems for trusting time — written in the sweltering trenches of the third summer of WWI:

I AM A CREATURE
by Giuseppe Ungaretti
translated from Italian by Geoffrey Brock

Like this stone
on San Michele
this cold
this hard
this arid
this impervious
this utterly
spiritless
like this stone
is my
unseen grief

We pay down
death
by living

But as Sanna tried to paint the work of his favorite wartime poets, he found himself unable to shake off the mental images of all that ruin, the emotional atmosphere of all that grief. In the author’s note to what became Old as Stone, Hard as Rock: of Humans and War (public library) — his extraordinary wordless reckoning with humanity and war — he echoes artist Ann Hamilton’s moving manifesto “Making Not Knowing” and writes:

I could already feel my hands thinking along other lines… I have always put my faith in my hands — in their manner of working, and in how they seek to capture the best gesture with which to solve the challenge of depicting a sky, a mountain, or a wind-tossed sea. Hands think differently from our minds; hands are more daring and audacious. When hands work, they are strangely farsighted and free of preconceptions, constantly opening scenes, erasing them, starting over from scratch — as if they never work from a plan.

When his hands parted the mind’s curtain of preconception and dilated the aperture of the present, he began seeing the bigger picture stretching like a tapestry all the way back to the dawn of our species, to the birth of our lust for domination, and all the way forward to a placid universe that survives us.

In consonance with Rachel Carson’s parting insistence that humanity has reached a point where it must “prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself,” Sanna writes:

Ever since the dawn of time, the stars sparkling in the sky have looked down upon us with indifference, as we strain in the age-old, tormented contest to dominate all things that can be named. For glimpsed from that distance, the Earth is no more than a luminous, watery pearl that appears just as immutable as immovable stone.

There are echoes in these words of Auden’s timeless poem “The More Loving One,” with its “stars that do not give a damn,” with its central antidote to the human impulse for destruction and domination in the simple, immense vow: “Let the more loving one be me.”

With the feeling-tone of an epic myth and the chill of a mirror held up to reality, the story begins with a single stone that rolls down from the cloud-crowned top of a mountain into a valley where two humans, each wanting to possess it, invent the first weapon: want. The men become clans that become armies that set out to defeat each other, to conquer the elements, to own the other animals, with fists that become sticks that become bows that become guns that become the mushroom cloud.

All the while, the Sun and the Moon and the stars look on indifferent, watching us forget what Dante called the love that moves them, watching us turn this improbable world, this one and only heaven we will ever know, into a living hell.

What emerges from Sanna’s pages is a bittersweet yet hopeful meditation on the choices that stand between our predilections and our possibilities, intimating that peace is not only possible, not only our moral imperative, but our creaturely inheritance from star and stone; that perhaps we are here simply to learn how to be more loving creatures.

Couple Old as Stone, Hard as Rock with Einstein and Freud’s little-known correspondence about war and human nature, then revisit Sanna’s magnificent alternative origin story of humanity.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books