“Whatever inspiration is,” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her superb Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” And yet, with our reflex for teleological thinking — that childish grab at “I know!” — we habitually cut ourselves off from the mystery that houses the most creative, and therefore the most vulnerable and alive, part of our own souls, forgetting what Carl Sagan’s ghost so poetically reminds us: that “the universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.”
Nothing restores our porousness and receptivity to that richness more readily than music — the backdoor of consciousness, through which something transcendent slips past all of our reasoned reservations, all of our guardedness and confusion, at once releasing us from the solitary confinement of the self and restoring us to ourselves, reminding us that we are always half-opaque to ourselves and this opacity shimmers with possibility.
One of William Blake’s paintings for The Book of Job, 1806. (Available as a print.)
These questions — the power of music, the power of porousness — animate Nick Cave, whom I see as a kind of sculptor of the spirit, turning the raw materials of life — a life that has not been easy — into something of transcendent beauty.
In Faith, Hope and Carnage (public library) — his long and luscious conversation with Seán O’Hagan — he considers how music parts the veil between the known world and the mystery of being:
I think music, out of all that we can do, at least artistically, is the great indicator that something else is going on, something unexplained, because it allows us to experience genuine moments of transcendence.
[…]
I think there is more going on than we can see or understand, and we need to find a way to lean into the mystery of things — the impossibility of things — and recognise the evident value in doing that, and summon the courage it requires to not always shrink back into the known mind.
In a passage evocative of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s contour of the edges of consciousness, he considers that “impossible” place where transcendence lives — “a semi-conscious place, a twilight place, a distracted place, a place of surrender” — the place where his dead son also lives, and the life-deep sorrow of the loss, and the portal to beauty the loss unlatched in his creative spirit:
There is another place that can be summoned through practice that is not the imagination, but more a secondary positioning of your mind with regard to spiritual matters… It is a kind of liminal state of awareness, before dreaming, before imagining, that is connected to the spirit itself. It is an “impossible realm” where glimpses of the preternatural essence of things find their voice. Arthur lives there. Inside that space, it feels a relief to trust in certain glimpses of something else, something other, something beyond.
One of Arthur Rackham’s rare 1917 illustrations for the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. (Available as a print.)
That otherness, that beyondness, is what we commonly call mystery — the realm of experience inaccessible to our analytical minds, unaccountable by reason, and yet a stratum of reality we touch beyond doubt in those rare transcendent moments, as palpable as a lover’s hand, as alive as prayer.
Nick reflects on the supreme portal our species has devised for accessing that realm:
Of all things, music can lift us closer to the sacred.
[…]
[Music] has the ability to lead us, if only temporarily, into a sacred realm. Music plays into the yearning many of us instinctively have — you know, the God-shaped hole. It is the art form that can most effectively fill that hole, because it makes us feel less alone, existentially. It makes us feel spiritually connected. Some music can even lead us to a place where a fundamental spiritual shift of consciousness can happen. At best, it can conjure a sacred space.
In that sacred space, we get to see the world more whole — not artificially, not as a pretty delusion, but with greater fidelity to the deeper reality. He weighs the robust salvation to be found in that space:
The luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful.
But because there are no absolutes in beauty, everything we experience as beautiful is a projection of something we long for — a fragmentary fulfillment of our existential longing, or what C.S. Lewis called “the thing itself.” Every artist makes what they make out of the raw material of longing, conscious of it in varying degrees, codified in various forms. Nick considers his:
All my songs are written from a place of spiritual yearning, because that is the place that I permanently inhabit. To me, personally, this place feels charged, creative and full of potential.
[…]
Songs have the capacity to be revealing, acutely so. There is much they can teach us about ourselves. They are little dangerous bombs of truth.
Altarpiece by the Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint, 1907. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Self-revelation is the most vulnerable-making thing of which human beings are capable, and yet in that vulnerability we find our deepest freedom. Echoing Bob Dylan’s insistence that “you must be vulnerable to be sensitive to reality,” he adds:
My experience of creating music and writing songs is finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You’re being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. There’s certainly a vulnerability to that, and an incredible freedom… To be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. In that place we can feel extraordinarily alive and receptive to all sorts of things, creatively and spiritually… It is a nuanced place that feels both dangerous and teeming with potential. It is the place where the big shifts can happen. The more time you spend there, the less worried you become of how you will be perceived or judged, and that is ultimately where the freedom is.
Faith, Hope and Carnage is a joy in its wide-roaming entirety. Complement these fragments with the poetic physicist and pianist Alan Lightman on music as a language for the exhilaration of being alive and other superb writers, from Whitman and Woolf to Kurt Vonnegut and Oliver Sacks, on the singular power of music, then revisit Nick Cave on songwriting, the remedy for despair, and art as an instrument of self-forgiveness.
A century before Emily Dickinson wrote that “to be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Erasmus Darwin (December 12, 1731–18 April 18, 1802) — Charles’s grandfather and his great influence on evolutionary ideas — set out “to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science, and to lead her votaries from the looser analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones, which form the ratiocination of philosophy.”
Having spent seven years translating Linnaeus’s groundbreaking classification system from Latin into English, coining several common English names for flowers in the process, Darwin was especially thrilled by the new science of the sexual reproduction of plants. In 1791, he published one of the world’s first popular science books — the book-length poem The Botanic Garden, which endeavored to introduce Linnaeus’s sexual system to the common reader.
Auriculas from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
In the second half of the book, titled The Loves of Plants, Darwin celebrated the lushest part of the living world through the lens of romance and sex, slicing through the era’s corseted propriety with the intimation that human sexuality is just another part of Nature, as beautiful and valid as a flower.
Animating the book is the insistence that all living things are interlinked in a chain of being; it was in a long footnote to The Loves of Plants that he outlined the rudiments of evolutionary theory, which his grandson went on to develop in On the Origin of Species.
Predictably, having made science scintillating and orthogonal to theological dogma, The Botanic Garden became a bestseller deemed too explicit for unwed women to read.
Large-flowering sensitive plant (Mimosa grandiflora) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
In addition to being a “natural philosopher” (the term for “scientist” before the word was coined for Mary Somerville), inventor, and ardent advocate for women’s education and the abolition of slavery, Erasmus Darwin was celebrated as a supreme English poet before the rise of Coleridge and Wordsworth. A quarter millennium before The Universe in Verse, he channeled its animating spirit, seeing in poetry a powerful portal of feeling into the life of the mind — a portal through which scientific ideas otherwise intimidating or alienating may enter freely, into a temperament of receptivity.
Tulips from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Darwin devoted his life to illuminating how nature works, meeting reality on its own terms and making of those terms a thing of beauty. These ideas came abloom anew in The Temple of Nature — his final and finest poem. He died before he could see its life in the world — it was published a year after his death and went on to influence generations of scientists, poets, naturalists, and philosophers.
Among them was the English physician and botanical writer Robert John Thornton (1768–1837). Between 1807 and 1812, Thornton published The Temple of Flora — a lavishly illustrated, poetry-laced effort to popularize Linnaeus’s sexual system, heavily influenced by The Botanic Garden and The Temple of Nature.
Stapelias from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Perhaps because Thornton was not a poet and his attempts at verse were a poor imitation of Darwin’s, the book was not a popular success — the 800 copies printed nearly bankrupted him. But the illustrations from it — scrumptious color engravings of some of Earth’s most magnificent flowers, based on paintings by the eminent artist Philip Reinagle — endure as some of the most breathtaking botanical art of all time.
Night-blooming cereus (Cactus grandiflorus) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Quadrangular passionflower (Passiflora quadrangularis) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Winged passionflower (Passiflora alata) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Nodding renealmia (Renealmia nutans) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Common blue passionflower (Passiflora cerulea) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Blue Egyptian water-lily (Nymphaea caerulea) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.).
Sacred Egyptian bean (Nymphaea nelumbo) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Indian reed (Canna indica) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
American cowslip (Meadia) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Yellow pitcher-plant (Sarracenia flava) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Pontic rhododendron from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Narrow-leaved kalmia (Kalmia augustifolia) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
American aloe (Agave americana) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Chinese limodoron (Limodoron tankervilleae) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Bird of Paradise (Strelitzia reginae) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Artichoke silver-tree (Protea cynaroides) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Carnations from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Superb lily (Lilium superbum) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Hyacinths from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Roses from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Snow-drop and crocus from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Persian cyclamen from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Dragon arum (Arum dracunculus) from The Temple of Flora. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Complement with the stunning botanical paintings of the artist and poet Clarissa Munger Badger, who inspired Emily Dickinson, then savor the science of “perfect flowers” — the botanical term for nonbinary plants — with a side of Emily Dickinson. (All roads in nature lead back to Emily.)
To take the vaster perspective of time and space is always an act of resistance to seeing the present as islanded in time — the depiction menacing us from TV screens and news headlines. But it is also a deeply disorienting experience, for it plunges us into the immensity of being, asking us to learn to swim in the stream of time — or else we sink into our isolated smallness, and drown.
How to swim in the stream of time without drowning is what the great poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan (February 24, 1925–November 14, 2021) explores throughout her entire body of work, but nowhere more passionately than in her slender, splendid 1993 book Paris, When It’s Naked (public library).
Born and raised in Lebanon, Adnan found her artistic voice in America, at the foot of Mount Tamalpais, then fell in love with the artist Simone Fattal and spent the latter part of her century-long life with her love in Paris, where she had earned her degree in philosophy half a lifetime earlier.
Etel Adnan as a student, 1950s
As Notre-Dame reminds her of Aleppo’s Citadel from her Arab childhood and the Seine transports her to her time on the Neva in Russia, she considers the comforting proximity to river and cathedral, the way it both locates and dislocates the now:
They are there, protecting our meanderings. You don’t fear hunger, in such places, neither fear poverty of the spirit. Close, again, to water and stone, near the symbols of ancient European unity and Arab History, I can dismiss the present as a passage. The trouble, though, is that I don’t know where I come from, and even less, where I’m heading for.
Tectonic Time by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)
And yet we only ever find ourselves by getting lost — in time, in space, in being and belonging. Walking the embankments of the Seine, she writes:
I sense the hands that built this open canyon through which the city’s blood runs to the ocean. Such beauty enslaves more than any conquest. The definition of the soul is made of these places where you feel that the world came into being so that they could exist. That’s what we are: beings made through the contact of water with stone, of a chilly sunset with pure geometry. My hands touch the remnants of the day’s warmth on cobblestones, walls, moorings. In this moment no boats are going up or downstream. Three elements concur here: the river, the walls, and me. I will sit here. My thinking will reach low fire, my various desires will vanish. Now I am water, and the wall’s surface, and then I am a flow, and a line, and further on I become many, or one, of the dimensions of Being, maybe the basic molecule of Time. Here. It’s always here. It’s only through this ultimate solitude reached by the very fact of living, that one can find the kind of peace that makes tangible the accumulated absurdities that constitute everyone’s personal truth.
Couple this fragment of Paris, When It’s Naked with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on time and the antidote to our existential anxiety, then revisit Adnan on how to live and how to die, the sea and the soul, and the relationship between the self and the universe.
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