The Marginalian
The Marginalian

How to Love the World More: Artist and Poet Rachel Hébert’s Breathtaking Catalogue of Gratitudes

By Maria Popova

Here we are, living these lives bright and perishable as a poppy, hard and shimmering as obsidian. We know that they are entirely improbable, that we bless that bright improbability with each flash of gratitude for it all, that if we pay attention closely and generously enough we are always repaid in gladness, that it is the handle of the door to the world. And yet over and over we choose to live in the cage of complaint, too preoccupied with how the will of life betrayed our wishes, the wanting monster always growling in the other corner of the cage.

Imagine parting the bars and stepping out. Imagine waking up with a rush of gladness at everything we were never promised but got anyway — trees and music, clouds and consciousness, the cobalt eye of the scallop, the golden fan of the gingko, the alabaster chandelier of the ghost pipe.

In our age of competitive prostration, this is a headstand hard to hold for long. But it is trainable. It is possible to become strong enough to be tender, it is.

Artist and poet Rachel Hébert offers a bright patch of training ground in The Book of Thanks: A Catalogue of Gratitudes — one of the most miraculous books I have ever encountered, trembling with tenacious tenderness for the bewilderment of being alive.

Radiating from the pages is an invitation, extended in paintings and poems, to open “the sunlit fort of your attention” and let the world rush in, in all its minute and majestic loveliness: stalactites and Spanish moss, spiderwebs and skylights, snow and the call of the snowy owl, the heart’s capacity for “an urgent, flashing, interrupting kind of love.”

What emerges is prayerful (“more cellos, touch, and rain, please”) and singing with praise (“roots gripping, canyon carved, spine woven of baleen a thousand years old”) — a manual for how to live in gratitude (“what is working wants your praise”) and a theological statement (“there is nothing you must do to belong”).

A taste:

What do we say to longing?

If you have sat in the chill
of early morning bleakness

and watched as the deep blue
sighed and blushed, touched

by the warm curve of dawn
and pinker than pink then

apricot soft and spreading its
glow, you know. You know.

How
— in this dim parade of brutality —
might all be well?

But if we trouble it with light,
train our sights on
the rebellious good,

and work
to make it
truer.

Beneath the face
of the water,
wonder.

In dark woods,
a gate.

In the chapter
called lostness,
a friend.

All the help
we could not
yet see.

It cannot be always comfortable.
So love the thousand knives as they enter
and see your shape still sitting.

See that you too belong to paws
of soft silent hungers, to thirst-tangled
roots, to silver-spun constellations.

Know you’re no sicker than the rest of us.
The big secret is this: No one else can brave you.
Messy, yes. And marvelous.

What is more than we see
in this world we’re pressed into,
its blistered barking noise?

For what we build, speak, and ruin —
our efforts, our angers.

For music.

For wings.

BP

Midnight Motorbike: A Lullaby of Wonder for the Sleepless, Inspired by the Whimsy of South India

By Maria Popova

Midnight Motorbike: A Lullaby of Wonder for the Sleepless, Inspired by the Whimsy of South India

You know that moment late into the night when the body, famished for rest, is kidnapped from the land of sleep by a mind aflame with rumination, paging through the ledger of regrets — the message you shouldn’t have sent, the hand you should have raised, the kindness you withheld — until the temperature of the self rises to an untenable degree. These are the 4A.M. reckonings James Baldwin wrote of, those plaintive inner cries for “reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error.”

Such fevers of selfing are only ever cooled by turning the mind outward, worldward, wonderward. But the lullaby of unselfing doesn’t come to us easily — often, we need someone wiser, someone more awake to wonder, to whisk us into a chariot of perspective and gallop us out of ourselves, toward what Willa Cather knew to be the secret of happiness — being “dissolved into something complete and great,” which, “when it comes… comes as naturally as sleep.”

In Midnight Motorbike (public library), writer Maureen Shay Tajsar and artist Ishita Jain tell the story of a little girl too hot to sleep through the Indian night that “stretches its dark arms beyond the banyan tree grove and the red earth canyon, all the way to the big indigo ocean,” and her Amma, who whisks the child away on the back of her motorcycle in her shimmering sari to tour the bright variousness of the world — the snake eyes and bougainvillea flashing in the headlights, the wet kiss of the painted elephant, the dance of planets and comets across the starry sky, the enchanted loom at the silk shop, the old man braiding jasmine blossoms, the silent temples full of stone monkeys praying under golden crowns — until the tired girl is blanketed in wonder and drifts to sleep.

Pulsating beneath the story, told in lyrical words and vibrant illustrations textured with feeling, is the universal yearning for something that holds, a cradle of time we can rest into.

On our motorbike tonight, feet in the wind, we reach the edge of the world. There, Amma tells me, the belly of the moon will be waiting for us, just as it has been waiting all the rainy seasons of forever.

[…]

“Goodbye, day,” I breathe into the dark, and the moon holds us until tomorrow.

This elemental dialogue between loneliness and forever animated Tajsar’s own youth. She writes in the author’s note:

When I was nineteen, my mother moved to rural Tamil Nadu, South India, and I spent the next several years of summers with her, on her motorbike, zooming in and out of adventures. Every autumn when it was time to say goodbye, she wrapped me in a garland of jasmine and I started the hours-long, all-night taxi drive through banyan groves back to Chennai Airport and back to my university life in Ireland. During those melancholy rides, I was comforted by the busyness of the Tamil night that flashed by; somehow knowing that the night was full of activity and gathering made me feel less lonely. The dark swirled around me like a mother’s embrace, and I longed for the forever of it all, and was grateful for everything. And the moon was always there, hanging low over the Bay of Bengal, silently accompanying me on my journey.

Couple Midnight Motorbike with The Night Life of Trees — a whimsical portal into Indian folklore illustrated by indigenous artists — then revisit Maurice Sendak’s cure for insomnia.

BP

How to Fix Breakdowns in Communication

By Maria Popova

How to Fix Breakdowns in Communication

Two people meet, discover an uncommon electricity flowing between them, exhilarate each other into forgetting the abyss that always gapes between one consciousness and another, until one day they realize they are having profoundly different experiences of the same situation and find themselves suddenly hanging from the precipice of the abyss with one hand, sparring over the reality of the situation with the other.

What to do?

In 1951, as the Cold War was menacing the world with mutually assured destruction, the pioneering psychologist Carl R. Rogers (January 8, 1902–February 4, 1987) addressed the Centennial Conference on Communications at Northwestern University with a revelation of a talk plainly titled “Communication: Its Blocking and Its Facilitation,” later included in his classic On Becoming a Person (public library) — an inquiry into the crux of mutual misunderstanding and the remedy for it, as applicable to love as it is to war, revealing the same psychological forces coursing beneath the bloodiest conflict between groups and the subtlest discord in our intimate relationships.

Art by Paloma Valdivia for The Book of Questions by Pablo Neruda

Many people, Rogers observes, turn to therapy because communication within themselves has broken down and, consequently, their communication with others has suffered — parts of them have been evicted from awareness and padlocked in the attic of the unconscious, no longer able to communicate with “the managing part,” seeding a silent tension that bleeds into all close relationships. (There is a particularly damning flavor of self-righteousness in which we presume to see clearly the internal fissures of the other, flag them and indict them, all the while dissociating from the part of us that knows how awful it is to be on the receiving end of such judgments. These are the regrets we live with, the sharp-fanged shame that bites into the bone of 4 A.M.)

All the while, we cling to our own frames of reference as the banisters to secure our shaky cohesion. This, Rogers observes — this “tendency to react to any emotionally meaningful statement by forming an evaluation of it from our own point of view” — is the single most bruising barrier to communication. He writes:

The major barrier to mutual interpersonal communication is our very natural tendency to judge, to evaluate, to approve or disapprove, the statement of the other person, or the other group… Although the tendency to make evaluations is common in almost all interchange of language, it is very much heightened in those situations where feelings and emotions are deeply involved. So the stronger our feelings the more likely it is that there will be no mutual element in the communication… Each [is] making a judgment, an evaluation, from his* own frame of reference.

In consonance with the Buddhist strategy for repairing a relationship, he contours the alternative:

Real communication occurs, and this evaluative tendency is avoided, when we listen with understanding. What does this mean? It means to see the expressed idea and attitude from the other person’s point of view, to sense how it feels to him, to achieve his frame of reference in regard to the thing he is talking about.

Stated so briefly, this may sound absurdly simple, but it is not.

At the heart of the shift is what Rogers terms “empathic understanding — understanding with a person, not about him.”

To grasp the difference from the inside, he proposes a “little laboratory experiment”:

The next time you get into an argument with your wife, or your friend, or with a small group of friends, just stop the discussion for a moment and for an experiment, institute this rule. “Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker’s satisfaction” … This would mean… that before presenting your own point of view, it would be necessary for you to really achieve the other speaker’s frame of reference — to understand his thoughts and feelings so well that you could summarize them for him. Sounds simple… but if you try it you will discover it is one of the most difficult things you have ever tried to do. However, once you have been able to see the other’s point of view, your own comments will have to be drastically revised. You will also find the emotion going out of the discussion, the differences being reduced, and those differences which remain being of a rational and understandable sort.

Available as a print and stationery card. More bird divinations and the story behind them here.

Having ranked an undefensive attitude first among the three elements of the good life, Rogers adds:

This procedure can deal with the insincerities, the defensive exaggerations, the lies, the “false fronts” which characterize almost every failure in communication. These defensive distortions drop away with astonishing speed as people find that the only intent is to understand, not judge.

The most assuring part of his method is the insistence that “it can be initiated by one party, without waiting for the other to be ready” — a single hand held out from the edge may be enough to keep both from perishing in the abyss. And yet it takes tremendous courage to do that, because it demands tremendous vulnerability. Rogers writes:

If you really understand another person in this way, if you are willing to enter his private world and see the way life appears to him, without any attempt to make evaluative judgments, you run the risk of being changed yourself. You might see it his way, you might find yourself influenced in your attitudes or your personality. This risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face.

An abyss will always gape between us. But if we belay down the cliffs of judgment into understanding, we may indeed find ourselves transformed by the descent; we may find that at the bottom of it is simply love.

BP

Against the Cartesian Myth of Work/Life Balance: André Gregory’s Extraordinary Letter to Richard Avedon about the Nature of Creativity

By Maria Popova

Half a millennium into our recovery from the civilizational wound Descartes inflicted by severing the body and the mind, we are bleeding with a Cartesian cleft of our own making — the damaging divide between life and work. The notion of a “workaholic,” often worn as a badge on the lapel of the modern ego, presupposes someone who makes work the central axis of life at the expense of living. The very question of “work/life balance,” inherited from the industrial model of labor, asks us to live in parts — a portion of the person doing the working, another doing the living. But culture is not made the way cars are made. We create — anything that is not mechanical, that is not a commodity, that touches anyone else in a meaningful way — with everything we are: every experience we have ever had, every book we have ever read and every place we have ever walked, every elation and every shattering. The simplest poem pouring from the poet’s pen, the smallest wooden spoon taking shape in the carpenter’s hand, is the work of a lifetime.

André Gregory

On the cusp of turning seventy, as his lifelong friend Richard Avedon was dying, legendary theater director André Gregory took up drawing to his own surprise and found himself returned “to some very early state, a time before loneliness, abandonment, and fear” — that lovely feeling of breaking the template of oneself, leaving the comfort zone of competency on which reputations are built, and venturing into the vivifying firstness of something new. Such seemingly unproductive pastimes, Gregory realized, feed the life that is the raw material for the work, though we never know what will sprout from each lived seed.

Shortly after Avedon’s death, Gregory wrote to his friend the letter he “always intended to write but never did,” addressing their divergent views on life and work — the “one deep source of disagreement and friction” in their profound friendship. (Everyone who has lost a loved one knows that the conversations continue, knows what Hemingway knew: that “no one you love is ever dead.”)

In what might be the mightiest defense of the creative spirit since William Blake’s, Gregory writes:

Let’s face it — artists are always working, though they may not seem as if they are. They are like plants growing in winter. You can’t see the fruit, but it is taking root below the earth.

Art by Balint Zsako from Bunny & Tree

In a passage evocative of Kurt Vonnegut’s magnificent poem-parable about the Shelter Island billionaire and the measure of enough, Gregory holds up a mirror to his departed friend — one from which every living person who wouldn’t know who they are without what to do averts their eyes:

You owned that exquisite house in Montauk, one of the loveliest I have seen anywhere, on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. You designed it yourself. But you almost never went there. Did you yearn for another kind of life? Yes, you had friends—almost all driven and workaholic artists—but never a community. You saw each of us alone. In those lovely rooms of yours, over superb dinners, the talk would always be of work, work, and work.

Each time you stopped, you would descend into a depression, believing that you had hit a wall and lost the ability to work, that you would never work again.

The contrast Gregory paints is a miniature manifesto for the fundamental indivisibility of the self and the combinatorial nature of creativity:

You chose work. I have chosen the life. The work and the life.

At least I have done so in the last 30 years. Doesn’t the work on the self inform the Work? When we inch closer to ourselves, to who we originally were, who we’re meant to be, doesn’t that serve the work, doesn’t it connect us more deeply to others? Isn’t there value in spreading laughter, love, and compassion to the people around us? … The work changes the life, and the life changes the work.

Couple with Benedictine monk and philosopher David Steindl-Rast on the relationship between play and purposeful work, then revisit Lewis Hyde’s classic meditation on work vs. labor and how to sustain the creative spirit.

HT Letters Live

BP

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