Imagine a world of constant wars and deadly plagues, a world without eyeglasses, bicycles, or sanitation. Imagine being a gifted child in that world, knowing you are born into a body that will never be granted the basic rights of citizenship in any country, into a mind that will never be allowed to expand in any institution of higher learning.
Dorothea Maria Graff (May 13, 1678–May 5, 1743) was born into such a world.
Red-crowned crane by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)
Through one of those wondrous rabbit holes that any passionate curiosity opens into the terra firma of culture, I discovered Graff’s strange and beautiful creatures in the course of my bird divinations project. Partway between encyclopedia and fairy tale, they rendered her one of the first fine artists to bring their brush to the young science of ornithology, more than a century ahead of Audubon and Elizabeth Gould.
At a time when natural history illustration depicted specimens in isolation, Graff painted living organisms in relationship with other living organisms — she painted ecosystems, doing for birds and reptiles what Marianne North would do for plants a generation later.
Parrot by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Alligator and snake by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)Portrait of a South African ecosystem by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)Frog by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)Reptiles by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)
Despite their singular style, Graff’s paintings, now preserved by the magnificent cathedral of culture that is the British Museum, were long attributed to her mother — the trailblazing etymological artist Maria Sibylla Merian, whose classic visual study of the insects of Suriname her daughter helped illustrate. (In this regard, Maria and Dorothea affirm in the history of art what Marie Curie and her Nobel-winning daughter Irene affirm in the history of science — that what a parent models and nourishes for and in a child is an infinitely more powerful portal of possibility than any formal system of education and cultural permission.)
Egret by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)Scarlet ibis by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)Bearded dragon and beetle by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)Iguana by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)
After her mother’s death in 1717, Graff went on to teach at the Russian Academy of Sciences and to work as a curator at Russia’s founding art museum — one of the first people in the world with a dual formal appointment in both art and science, animated by the stubborn recognition that these seemingly disparate lenses on reality, when combined, only magnify our understanding of it, that in the very act of combining them we come to know the world more intimately and therefore to love it more deeply.
Blue bird and monkey by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
When Dante wrote of “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars,” he was shining a sidewise gleam on the secret knowledge of the universe, the knowledge by which everything coheres. All love is an outstretched hand of curiosity reaching for knowledge — a tender acknowledgement of a reality that is not yourself and a lively interest in its interiority. Bertrand Russell captured this in his essential distinction between “love-knowledge” and “power-knowledge,” for it is only by means of love that we get to know anything deeply — a landscape, a person, the world — and it is love that beckons forth our own secret knowledge of what makes life worth living.
That is what poet Aracelis Girmay and her artist sister Ariana Fields explore in What Do You Know? (public library), inspired by the closing lines of Sharon Olds’s tender poem “Looking at Them Asleep.” (“When love comes to me and says / What do you know? I say This girl, this boy.”)
Page by page, love comes to the farmer and the seafarer, to the fruit bats and the honeybees, to the forest and the stars, asking each what they know, and their answers come simple and profound like a child’s question.
When love comes to the well and asks,
What do you know,
it says, I know thirst, I know abundance.
I know depth, I know darkness.
When love comes to the ash and asks,
What do you know,
the ash says, I know the secrets between the volcano and the sky.
It says, I know wandering,
and I know the language of fire.
When love comes to courage and asks,
What do you know,
courage says, I know speaking, even though I am afraid,
and I know the daily work of keeping on.
The constellations know “the story of distance and the language of light,” the rocks know “that change is possible, even if it takes a million years,” the land knows “the laughter of children who run below the birds” and “the joy of going on and on and on.”
What emerges is a glowing sense that love is not something we do but something we are, something the world is, something vaster than space and older than time.
One September dawn on the verge of a significant life change, sitting on my poet friend’s dock, I watched a great blue heron rise slow and prehistoric through the morning mist, carrying the sky on her back. In the years since, the heron has become the closest thing I have to what native traditions call a spirit animal. It has appeared at auspicious moments in my life, when I have most yearned for assurance. It became the first bird I worked with in my almanac of divinations. At times of harrowing uncertainty and longing for resolution, I have found in the long stillness of the hunting bird, waiting for the right moment to do the next right thing, a living divination — a great blue reminder that patience respects the possible.
It is naïve, of course, to believe that this immense and impartial universe is sending us, transient specks of stardust, personalized signs about how to live the cosmic accident of our lives. Still, it is as foolish to ask the meaning of a bird as it is to see it as a random assemblage of feather and bone. Reality lives somewhere between matter and meaning. One makes us, the other we make to bear our mortality and the confusions of being alive. Meaning arises from what we believe to be true, reality is the truth that endures whether or not we believe in it. That is the difference between signs and omens. Signs disrespect the nature of reality, while omens betoken our search for meaning, reverent of the majesty and mystery of the universe — they are a conversation between consciousness and reality in the poetic language of belief.
A bird is never a sign, but it can become an omen if our attention and intention entwine about it in that golden thread of personal significance and purpose that gives life meaning.
Jarod Anderson also turns to the great blue heron as a lens on our search for meaning in Something in the Woods Loves You (public library) — his poignant meditation on surviving the darkest recesses of human nature, the strange fusion of shame and sadness that gives depression its devastating power, by turning to the luminous and numinous in nature. Emerging from the pages is a lyrical love letter to how “imaginative empathy” heals and harmonizes our relationship to ourselves, to each other, to the wonder of being alive.
Reflecting on the difficulty of interpreting his own life and on the myriad symbologies of the great blue heron — among them an ancient myth in which the bird dusts the surface of the water with golden starlight to attract bluegill — Anderson writes:
The heron is exactly what the heron is to you in the moment you choose to give it meaning. It will be that meaning until you decide it means something else. That’s how meaning works. It’s a subjective act of interpretation.
You might get the impression that I’m saying herons are meaningless, but that’s not what I’m saying at all. When I see a heron and interpret its behavior as a reminder for me to slow down and think about what actually matters in my life, that is what that heron means. Meaning, like many crafts, happens in collaboration between maker and materials.
[…]
The heron allows me to build the meaning I need for the moment I need it. Making meaning in this way is like creating harmony with two voices… The trouble starts when we forget about our participation in the creation of harmony, of meaning. When we remove our agency in meaning-making, we start to think in absolutes.
Whenever we think in absolutes, we ossify. Our freedom always lies in our flexibility, and because concepts like meaning and identity are not fixed, because, as Anderson observes, they “require our intentional participation,” they are “mercifully flexible.” They take the shape of our beliefs about who we are and what we deserve, they abide by the messages we send ourselves through the omens we make of reality.
Watching the herons walking his local shoreline, feeling like they are sending him “an overt message” about the power of “quiet contemplation and self-determination,” Anderson writes:
The heron only represents self-determination when I need her to. That doesn’t diminish the heron’s power. It simply highlights my own.
There are objective facts in the world. Of course there are. But our concept of self, our significance, our sense of whether or not we deserve to take up space in the universe or experience joy and contentment — these are not questions of fact, they are questions of meaning.
For those of us who find consolation in the natural world, the sense of meaning has to do with contacting the numinous quality of sea and sky and songbird, of everything that makes this planet a world. You may call that contact wonder. You may call it magic. “If you don’t think herons are magic,” Anderson writes, “you need to broaden your definition of that word.”
Looking back on the bleak period when depression swept away the herons from the sky of his mind and voided the world of wonder, he reflects:
There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water’s surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron.
Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shallows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find that magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.
“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Whitman wrote in what may be the most elemental definition of solidarity — this tender recognition of our interdependence and fundamental kinship, deeper than sympathy, wider than love.
Half a century after Whitman’s atomic theory of belonging and half a century before Dr. King’s “inescapable network of mutuality,” the scientist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin (December 9, 1842– February 8, 1921) examined the meaning of solidarity in his visionary 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (public library) — the culmination of his pioneering studies of the cooperation networks of social insects and his outrage at the destructive power structures and power struggles of human society, for which he was eventually imprisoned. After a dramatic escape, Kropotkin spent four decades in exile across Western Europe and went on to influence generations of thinkers with this radical insistence on cooperation and solidarity, not the struggle for power, as the true engine of survival and flourishing.
Having fallen under Darwin’s spell as a teenager, Kropotkin came to see in evolutionary science an optimistic model for the elevation of human conscience — in the history of life on Earth, across which organisms have continually improved their biological adaptation for survival, he found assurance for a better future forged by our continual moral improvement.
Unable to obtain the scientific education he yearned for, the young Kropotkin took a post as an officer in Siberia (where Dostoyevsky was serving in a labor camp), then used his military credentials to join geological expeditions studying glaciation, all the while witnessing staggering corruption and abuses of power in local government while the peasants governed themselves through deep bonds of mutual trust that seemed purer, more primal, and closer to nature than any political power structure.
Challenging the anthropocentric view of other animals, Kropotkin considers the deepest driving force beneath the harmony and coherence of nature:
To reduce animal sociability to love and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its importance, just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole. It is not love to my neighbour — whom I often do not know at all — which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is also with animals. It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy — an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and humans in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and humans alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life.
Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience — be it only at the stage of an instinct — of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each person from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own.
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