Prediction is the sharpest tool the human animal has devised — the chisel with which we sculpted survival out of chance, the fulcrum by which we lifted civilization out of survival. Among the greatest gifts of the imagination, that crowning curio of consciousness, is our ability to alchemize hindsight into foresight, to chart the most probable course of the future by drawing on our experience of the past. And yet, like the tragic flaw of the Greek hero, our great strength is also our great vulnerability. It is salutary to remember how often our predictions have been wrong, how again and again they have withheld entire regions of reality from us as we have continually mistaken the known for the knowable, our ways of knowing for the path to truth.
The shape of the Earth.
The organizing principle of the Solar System.
The bat.
Art by Tove Jansson from her Moomins series. (Brooklyn Public Library)
If we fed what we know about mammalian anatomy and the physics of avian flight into a predictive algorithm, it would fail to produce a flying mammal. In theory, which is how we model reality in the mind, bats should not exist. And yet every evening, all over the world, winged improbabilities scribble across the gloaming sky their stenography of the possible.
Metabolism is what makes all life possible and the metabolic engine of animals hinges on breathing — hemoglobin carries oxygen from the lungs throughout the bloodstream, where it reacts with sugar from food to produce energy. Our mammalian lungs resemble a bagpipe that inflates with each inhale of oxygen and deflates with each exhale of carbon dioxide. Birds have an entirely different respiratory system — air sacs acting as bellows move oxygen through the pipe-like lungs during both inhalation and exhalation. This unidirectional air flow allows birds to fly across great distances at high altitudes where the oxygen concentration is low.
Bats have mammalian lungs. They should not be able to fly. And yet they do, their flight more metabolically efficient than that of hummingbirds. Ranging in size from the lightest known mammal — the tiny Craseonycteris thonglongyai, weighing a mere 2 grams — to the Asian flying fox with its 2-meter wingspan, they have adapted to extreme environments thanks to their virtuosic oxygen and carbon dioxide regulation.
A study of Chile’s eight species of bats found that they have a respiratory area sixfold that of other mammals and lung volumes 72% greater. Their heart — the transport system for oxygen in the blood — is larger than that of any other mammal relative to body size. At rest, their breathing rate is similar to ours. But as soon as they take flight, it increases up to seventeen-fold, reaching as many as 400 breaths per minute synchronized with their wing beat frequency to minimizing energy expenditure by combining muscle contractions. These almost supernatural lungs are sheathed in a blood-gas barrier much thinner than that of other animals, allowing oxygen to enter the bloodstream rapidly, disposing of carbon dioxide just as rapidly.
Javan slit-faced bat (Nycteris javanica) and reddish-brown lip bat (Noctilis rufus) from Natural History and Illustrations of Mammals by Heinrich Rudolf Schinz, 1824. (Available as a print and a postcard.)
This respiratory and cardiovascular ingenuity allows bats to conserve energy during cold periods, not paying the metabolic cost of generating body heat that other mammals would — they are among Earth’s few true hibernators, capable of dropping their heartbeat sixteen-fold and their temperature to that of the cave walls that encastle them in their kingdom of darkness.
Greater false vampire bat (Megaderma lyra) from Natural History and Illustrations of Mammals by Heinrich Rudolf Schinz, 1824. (Available as a print and a postcard.)
These astonishing adaptations are the sum total of myriad small defiances of prediction — chances taken on the improbable and the untested, wild guesses at the shape of the possible — without which bats would not exist. But they do, and we need them. We need bats — “swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together,” D.H. Lawrence called them — for the same reason we need apricots and lichen and the great blue heron: to remind us that the universe could have remained one homogenous sea of matter swimming in light, for nothing in the laws of physics demands that the world be beautiful or could predict the dazzling diversity of forms that makes it so. The bat is just as defiant of prediction as the Big Bang — small winged evidence that the possible is always vaster than the probable and the imagination of life is always greater than that of the living.
I once asked ChatGPT to write a poem about a total solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a dozen couplets of cliches that touched nothing, changed nothing in me. The AI had the whole of the English language at its disposal — a lexicon surely manyfold the poet’s — and yet Whitman could conjure up cosmoses of feeling with a single line, could sculpt from the commonest words an image so dazzlingly original it stops you up short, spins you around, leaves the path of your thought transformed.
An AI may never be able to write a great poem — a truly original poem — because a poem is made not of language but of experience, and the defining aspect of human experience is the constant collision between our wishes and reality, the sharp violation of our expectations, the demolition of our plans.
Suffering is the price we pay for a consciousness capable of love and the loss of love, of hope and the devastation of hope. Because suffering, like consciousness itself, is a full-body phenomenon — glands secreting fear, nerves conducting loneliness, neurotransmitters recoiling with regret — a disembodied pseudo-consciousness is fundamentally incapable of suffering and that transmutation of suffering into meaning we call art: An algorithm will never know anything beyond the execution of its programmed plan; it is fundamentally spared the failure of its aims because failure can never be the successful execution of the command to fail.
We create — poems and paintings, stories and songs — to find a language for the bewilderment of being alive, the failure of it, the fulness of it, and to have lived fully is not to have spared yourself.
Falling Star by Witold Pruszkowski, 1884. (Available as a print.)
In his exquisite reckoning with what makes life worth living, Nobel laureate Elias Canetti captures this in a diary entry from the late spring of 1942. Under the headline “very necessary qualifications for a good Persian storyteller,” he copies out a passage from an unidentified book he is reading:
In addition to having read all the known books on love and heroism, the teller of stories must have suffered greatly for love, have lost his beloved, drunk much good wine, wept with many in their sorrow, have looked often upon death and have learned much about birds and beasts. He must also be able to change himself into a beggar or a caliph in the twinkling of an eye.
A generation before Canetti, the philosopher-poet Rainer Maria Rilke articulated the same essential condition for creativity in his only novel, reflecting on what it takes to compose a great poem, but speaking to what it takes to create anything of beauty and substance, anything drawn from one life to touch another:
For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one has long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars — and it is not yet enough if one may think of all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.
One of the most important things to have learned in life is that choosing joy in a world rife with reasons for despair is a countercultural act of courage and resistance, choosing it not despite the abounding sorrow we barely survive but because of it, because joy — like music, like love — is one of those entirely unnecessary miracles of consciousness that give meaning to survival with its bright allegiance to the most alive part of us.
“We’ve all had too much sorrow — now is the time for joy,” Nick Cave sings in one of my favorite songs, and yet in a world trembling with fear and cynicism (which is the most cowardly species of fear), joy — the choice of it, the right to it — is in need of constant defense.
I know none mightier or more delightful than the one Mario Benedetti (September 14, 1920–May 17, 2009) mounts in his poem “Defensa de la alegría” (“A Defense of Joy”), read here by the polymathic Chilean primatologist Isabel Behncke (who introduced me to this benediction of a poem) followed by my English translation and reading to the sound of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 4 in E-flat Major.
DEFENSA DE LA ALEGRÍA Mario Benedetti
Defender la alegría como una trinchera
defenderla del escándalo y la rutina
de la miseria y los miserables
de las ausencias transitorias
y las definitivas
defender la alegría como un principio
defenderla del pasmo y las pesadillas
de los neutrales y de los neutrones
de las dulces infamias
y los graves diagnósticos
defender la alegría como una bandera
defenderla del rayo y la melancolía
de los ingenuos y de los canallas
de la retórica y los paros cardiacos
de las endemias y las academias
defender la alegría como un destino
defenderla del fuego y de los bomberos
de los suicidas y los homicidas
de las vacaciones y del agobio
de la obligación de estar alegres
defender la alegría como una certeza
defenderla del óxido y la roña
de la famosa pátina del tiempo
del relente y del oportunismo
de los proxenetas de la risa
defender la alegría como un derecho
defenderla de dios y del invierno
de las mayúsculas y de la muerte
de los apellidos y las lástimas
del azar
y también de la alegría.
A DEFENSE OF JOY by Mario Benedetti translated by Maria Popova
Defend joy like a trench
defend it from scandal and routine
from misery and misers
from truancies passing
and permanent
defend joy as a principle
defend it from bewilderments and bad dreams
from the neutral and the neutron
from sweet infamies
and grave diagnoses
defend joy like a flag
defend it from lightning and melancholy
from the fools and the frauds
from rhetoric and ruptures of the heart
from the endemic and the academic
defend joy as a destiny
defend it from fire and firefighters
from suicides and homicides
from vacations and ruts
from the obligation to be joyful
defend joy as a certainty
defend it from rust and smut
from the famous patina of time
from dew and exploitation
by the pimps of laughter
defend joy as a right
defend it from God and winter
from uppercase and the casket
from surnames and the pity
of chance
and of joy too.
“One must be a seer, make oneself a seer,” Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.” As more and more of our senses are being amputated by the blade of our image-centric culture, reducing the vast and delicate sensorium of human experience — moss on a rock, a salty summer evening at the ocean’s edge, a lover’s kiss — to a purely visual representation on a two-dimensional screen, it matters all the more that we train our vision to see beyond the veneer of the visible.
It is hardly surprising, given the co-evolution of vision and consciousness, that how we look at the world — what we choose to bring into consciousness — shapes what we see, which in turn shapes the world we make in the image of our vision. This is why we call visionaries the people who see sides and paths others do not, who catch in the prism of their consciousness the light of the world invisible to the rest and cast it back magnified, more luminous, iridescent with possibility.
The pioneering modernist poet H.D. (September 10, 1886–September 27, 1961) was such a person, and one who saw deeply into the nature of the prism itself, who located the seer’s vision not in the mind but in what she called the “over-mind.”
H.D.
Born in Pennsylvania as Hilda Doolittle, the daughter of an astronomer who liked to say that “his one girl was worth all his five boys put together,” she grew up watching her father magnify stars through his telescope and her grandfather — a marine biologist — magnify cells under his microscope. Here were layers of reality, bright and dazzling, beyond what was visible to the eye, lavishing with wonder those who have the right instruments. Such an experience at so formative an age can’t but reveal the mind itself as an instrument for gaging reality, its lens polished by our experience, its focus the making and unmaking of our lives, and all of it, all of it, not above the body but of it. H.D. would devote her life to undoing the damage Descartes has done to our cultural mythos, insisting instead on the synthesis of body and mind, of spirituality and sexuality, of love and reason.
In 1919, catatonic with grief in the aftermath of a miscarriage and a world war that had slain both her father and her brother, having barely survived the Spanish Flu herself, H.D. took refuge on the Scilly Islands on her way to Greece with her newborn baby and the woman who would become her partner for the remainder of her life — the novelist, poet, and magazine editor Bryher. There amid the lapping blue waves and lush subtropical gardens of a natural world so breathtaking it seems almost supernatural, enveloped in her lover’s intellectual kinship and passionate devotion, she started coming back to life. And, as such resuscitations of élan vital tend to do, some inner veil lifted one day to leave her feeling a profound participancy in the streaming life of the universe. At the center of it was a revelation about the nature of vision, which H.D. recorded in a series of shamanic diary fragments published long after her death as Notes on Thought and Vision (public library).
She identifies three “states or manifestations of life” — the body, the mind, and the “over-mind,” bearing echoes of Emerson’s notion of the “Oversoul,” that faculty for contacting what the transcendentalists’ hero Goethe called “the All.” The highest achievement of human development, she observes, is “equilibrium, balance, growth of the three at once” — a brain without embodiment is “a disease comparable to cancerous growth or tumor” (what a prophetic indictment of AI), a body without a mind is “an empty fibrous bundle of glands,” and an over-mind without the other two is madness. A healthy body, therefore, is not a conglomeration of certain parts, abilities, and attributes, but a harmonious integration with the mind, just as a healthy mind is not a checklist of cognitive capacities but a harmonious integration with the body, and out of these twin harmonies arises the vision of the over-mind.
Swimming in the cerulean womb of the world, she finds a metaphor — or a metaphor finds her — for the essence of the over-mind:
That over-mind seems a cap, like water, transparent, fluid yet with definite body, contained in a definite space. It is like a closed sea-plant, jellyfish, or anemone.
Into that over-mind, thoughts pass and are visible like fish swimming under clear water.
The over-mind is the superorganism of the psyche, pulsating with “super-feelings”:
These feelings extend out and about us; as the long, floating tentacles of the jellyfish reach out and about him. They are not of different material, extraneous, as the physical arms and legs are extraneous to the gray matter of the directing brain. The super-feelers are part of the super-mind, as the jellyfish feelers are the jellyfish itself, elongated in fine threads.
Vision is of two kinds — vision of the womb and vision of the brain. In vision of the brain, the region of consciousness is above and about the head; when the centre of consciousness shifts and the jellyfish is in the body… we have vision of the womb or love-vision.
The majority of dream and of ordinary vision is of the womb.
The brain and the womb are both centers of consciousness, equally important.
Lamenting that the creative culture of her time was already suffering from the debilitating brain bias that only metastasized in our own era, she shines an optimistic gleam into the future:
I believe there are artists coming in the next generation, some of whom will have the secret of using their over-minds.
But nothing feeds the over-mind more, nothing reveals it and anneals it more, than love. The world deepens and broadens and begins to shimmer when we are in love precisely because the experience embodies us and enminds us at the same time, touching the total person with its light. Surely drawing on her experience of falling in love with Bryher, which had come unbidden like a rainbow after a summer storm, H.D. considers how this happens:
We begin with sympathy of thought.
The minds of the two lovers merge, interact in sympathy of thought.
The brain, inflamed and excited by this interchange of ideas, takes on its character of over-mind, becomes… a jellyfish, placed over and about the brain.
The love-region is excited by the appearance or beauty of the loved one, its energy not dissipated in physical relation, takes on its character of mind, becomes this womb-brain or love-brain… a jellyfish in the body.
The love-brain and over-brain are both capable of thought. This thought is vision… The over-mind is like a lens of an opera-glass. When we are able to use this over-mind lens, the whole world of vision is open to us… The love-mind and the over-mind are two lenses. When these lenses are properly adjusted, focused, they bring the world of vision into consciousness. The two work separately, perceive separately, yet make one picture.
My sign-posts are not yours, but if I blaze my own trail, it may help to give you confidence and urge you to get out of the murky, dead, old, thousand-times explored old world, the dead world of overworked emotions and thoughts.
But the world of the great creative artists is never dead.
All it takes to recreate the old stale world, she insists, are just a few creative kindreds who entwine their vision:
Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought, could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of dead, murky thought.
Two or three people gathered together in the name of truth, beauty, over-mind consciousness could bring the whole force of this power back into the world.
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