Two hundred and two years after Walt Whitman's birth, I traveled to the granite emblem of his life and death. Standing sentinel across from the tomb's entrance are two towering trees — something the poet, who likened his most beloved friend to a tree, would have appreciated. Saplings when the tomb was built, their granite-colored bark is now scarred with the names of generations of passing teenagers — human saplings already aware of their transience, already afflicted with that touching and terrible impulse to memorialize ourselves by any means.
The tomb itself — once considered grand, grandiose even: an extravagance of self-memorialization for which the poet laureate of earthy humility was indicted with self-contradiction — looks sad and small, hardly larger than my grandparents' outhouse in the rural Bulgaria of my childhood, its onetime granite grandeur dwarfed by America's ever-inflating size standards in the epochs since Whitman's death. But the trees still rise, mighty yet modest, their splendor undiminished by time, as majestic now as they would have been had chance dropped their seeds on this selfsame patch of Pangea two hundred million years ago.
Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach by Hasui Kawase, 1931. (Available as a print.)
This aspect of trees — "the sense of steadfast continuity a tree can represent" — is what Rebecca Solnit celebrates in a sidewise trail of her lush book Orwell's Roses. After visiting six majestic eucalyptus trees with a friend — living local legends, with deep roots in global history — she reflects:
There's an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.
Art from Trees at Night by Art Young, 1926. (Available as a print.)
In consonance with the central poetic image in Ursula K. Le Guin's love-poem to trees, Solnit considers the saeculum of these particular trees, planted in San Francisco by Mary Ellen Pleasant — an Underground Railroad heroine and pioneering civil rights activist, born into slavery in the early years of the 19th century:
She had died more than a hundred years before that day we stood under her eucalyptus trees, which felt as though they were the living witnesses of a past otherwise beyond our reach. They had outlived the wooden mansion in which some of the dramas of her life had played out. They were so broad they had buckled the sidewalk, and they reached up higher than most of the buildings around them. Their peeling gray and tan bark spiraled around their trunks, their sickle-shaped leaves lay scattered on the sidewalk, and the wind murmured in their crowns. The trees made the past seem within reach in a way nothing else could: here were living things that had been planted and tended by a living being who was gone, but the trees that had been alive in her lifetime were in ours and might be after we were gone. They changed the shape of time.
Paradoxically, this portal trees open up into time beyond the reach of our individual lifetimes is precisely what also makes them portals to aliveness, grounding us all the more fully in our chance-granted temporality. With an eye to this bidirectional illumination, Solnit adds:
The trees were reminders of both our own ephemerality and their endurance long beyond ours, and in their uprightness they stood in the landscape like guardians and witnesses.
Art by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. (Available as a print.)
We have always, of course, looked to trees to mirror us back to ourselves; to become, as Hermann Hesse believed and asked of them, our greatest teachers.
They tell us something, as Dylan Thomas knew, about the wonder of being human.
As masters of improvisation and iteration serenading the dream of immortality, they model for us what poet Jane Hirshfield has called the "blind optimism" that makes life possible amid the ceaseless storm of negation — something Solnit captures with her own exquisite poetic precision:
Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it the way they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.
Thoughts of Trees and Time. (Available as a print.)
Complement with Katherine May on how the science of trees illuminates the psychology of self-renewal and Robert Macfarlane on what trees teach us about the secret of lasting love, then revisit Italian artist and futurist Bruno Munari's vintage existentialist tree-drawing exercise and these delightful, subversive vintage photographs of German women in trees.
This is the second of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse — a celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry, in collaboration with On Being. Here is Chapter 1.
THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN VERSE: CHAPTER TWO |
Henrietta Swan Leavitt
In 1908, Henrietta Swan Leavitt — one of the women known as the Harvard Computers, who changed our understanding of the universe long before they could vote — was analyzing photographic plates at the Harvard Observatory, singlehandedly measuring and cataloguing more than 2,000 variable stars — stars that pulsate like lighthouse beacons — when she began noticing a consistent correlation between their brightness and their blinking pattern. That correlation would allow astronomers to measure their distance for the first time, furnishing the yardstick of the cosmos.
Glass plate of Andromeda from the archives of the "Harvard Computers." (Photograph: Maria Popova)
Meanwhile, a teenage boy in the Midwest was repressing his childhood love of astronomy and beginning his legal studies to fulfill his dying father's demand for an ordinary, reputable life. Upon his father's death, Edwin Hubble would unleash his passion for the stars into formal study and lean on Leavitt's data to upend millennia of cosmic parochialism, demonstrating two revolutionary facts about the universe: that it is vastly bigger than we thought, and that it is growing bigger by the blink.
Art by Deborah Marcero from The Boy Whose Head Was Filled with Stars: A Life of Edwin Hubble by Isabelle Marinov
One October evening in 1923, perched at the foot of the world's most powerful telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in California, Hubble took a 45-minute exposure of Andromeda, which was then thought to be one of many spiral nebulae in the Milky Way. The notion of a galaxy — a gravitationally bound swirl of stars and interstellar gas, dust and dark matter — did not exist as such. The Milky Way — a name coined by Chaucer — was commonly considered an "island universe" of stars, beyond the edge of which lay cold dark nothingness.
When Hubble looked at the photograph the next morning and compared it to previous ones, he (I like to imagine) furrowed his brow, then with a gasp of revelation he (this we know for a fact) crossed out the marking N on the plate, scribbled the letters V A R beneath it, and could not help adding an exclamation point.
Edwin Hubble's 1923 glass plate of Andromeda. (Photograph: Carnegie Observatories)
Hubble had realized that a tiny fleck in Andromeda, previously mistaken for a nova, could not possibly be a nova, given its blinking pattern across the different photographs. It was a variable star — which, given Henrietta Leavitt's discovery, could only be so if the tiny fleck was very far away, farther than the edge of the Milky Way.
Andromeda was not a nebula in our own galaxy but a separate galaxy, out there in the cold dark nothingness.
Suddenly, the universe was a garden blooming with galaxies, with ours but a single bloom.
That same year, in another country suspended between two World Wars, another young scientist named Hermann Oberth was polishing the final physics on a daring idea: to subvert a deadly military technology with roots in medieval China and rocket-launch an enormous telescope into Earth orbit — closer to the stars, bypassing the atmosphere that occludes our terrestrial instruments.
It would take two generations of scientists to make that telescope a reality — a shimmering poem of metal, physics, and perseverance, bearing Hubble's name.
The Hubble Space Telescope. (Photograph: NASA)
But when the Hubble Space Telescope finally launched 1990, hungry to capture the most intimate images of the cosmos humanity had yet seen, humanity had crept into the instrument's exquisite precision — its main mirror had been ground into the wrong spherical shape, warping its colossal eye.
Up the coast from Mount Wilson Observatory, a teenage girl watched her father — who had worked on the Hubble as one of NASA's first black engineers — come home brokenhearted. He didn't know that his observant daughter would become Poet Laureate of his country and would come to commemorate him in the tenderest tribute an artist-daughter has ever made for a scientist-father. That tribute — the splendid poetry collection Life on Mars (public library) — earned Tracy K. Smith the Pulitzer Prize the year the Hubble's corrected optics captured the revolutionary Ultra Deep Field image of the observable universe, revealing what neither Henrietta Leavitt nor Edwin Hubble could have imagined — that there isn't just one other galaxy besides our own, or just a handful more, but at least 100 billion, each containing at least 100 billion stars.
MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF STARS (PART 5)
by Tracy K. Smith
When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.
He'd read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Raegan years,
When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled
To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.
His face lit up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise
As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.
We learned new words for things. The decade changed.
The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is —
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.
Every poet is a miniaturist of meaning, building cathedrals of beauty and truth with the smallest particles of language. It is with a poet's mindset that Brazilian graphic artist and animation director Daniel Bruson approached his contribution to The Universe in Verse. (Special thanks to On Being creative director Erin Colasacco for bringing Daniel into the project and for working with him and with composer Gautam Srikishan on making this symphonic cinepoem come alive.)
After I relayed to Daniel why I had chosen this particular poem (which Tracy read at the inaugural Universe in Verse in 2017) to illustrate the larger story of our search for cosmic truth — a search both made possible and made imperfect by our humanity — he grasped the nested layers of meaning with uncommon sensitivity, mirroring back his interpretation:
The Hubble tries to see or make sense of the Universe, the father tries to understand the Hubble, the daughter tries to make sense of the father, the decade, the world, and the poet tries to put this whole into perspective. All these efforts have to face problems of scale or distortion: something too big or small, too close or too distant, too dark or too familiar. Not to mention the original problem with the Hubble mirror.
This cascade of distortion sparked the idea "to use optics as a metaphor, to seek for these imperfect, unresolved and elusive, but also suggestive and alive images."
Daniel set about creating his deliberately blurry cosmic animations frame by frame, painting each tiny detail onto a glass plate with nail polish, oil paint, glitter, acrylic, and other materials he mixed, scrubbed, smudged, and swirled with brushes and cotton swabs beneath the lens of a camera capturing the process of creation and destruction.
He magnified the optical enchantment by filming the vignettes through upside-down drinking glasses of various shapes and thicknesses.
In a crowning feat of ingenuity — itself a miniature masterpiece of engineering and composition — he built a tiny model of the Hubble out of cardboard, paper, and aluminum foil, dismantled it frame by frame, filmed the destruction, then reversed the footage to create the building effect. (I am reminded here of Bertrand Russell's astute observation, made shortly after Edwin Hubble took his historic glass plate of Andromeda, that "construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power, but construction is more difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more satisfaction to the person who can achieve it" — a truth as true of the universe itself, with its elemental triumph of something over nothing, as it is of the human endeavor to know it by building optical prosthesis of our curiosity.)
Something about Daniel's process — the exquisite craftsmanship, the passionate patience, the tiny scale on which he made such beauty and grandeur of feeling — calls to mind Emily Dickinson and her miniature cherrywood writing desk, on the seventeen square inches of which she conjured up such cosmoses of truth, among them the poem illustrating Chapter One of this series.
We are self-contradictory creatures moving through a discontinuous world, glimpsing only fragments of reality. The hallmark of our species, the cost of living inside a consciousness so elaborate yet so self-limited, is that we know all this and yet we hunger for cohesion, for continuity, for pattern.
We call that hunger meaning.
We call it sensemaking.
We call it storytelling.
It is the great human implement that renders the world comprehensible to us and renders us comprehensible to ourselves. Its function is our shared inheritance; its form is the crucible of our difference: "Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives — we are each of us unique," the sage and sensitive neurologist Oliver Sacks observed as he considered the building blocks of personhood.
How that difference enriches our inner cohesion is what Barry Lopez (January 6, 1945–December 25, 2020) explores in the introduction to his enchanting essay collection About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (public library).
Barry Lopez. (Photograph via the Barry Lopez Estate.)
Recounting how Cather and Faulkner and Hemingway awakened in him the reverence for story as a "powerful and clarifying human invention" when he was just learning to be a person in the world, Lopez writes:
I frequently met scholars and other insightful people from outside white, orthodox, middle-class culture. I didn't consider that these people spoke a truth no one else possessed; but, listening to them, I saw the inadequacy of my education. It lacked any suggestion that these voices were necessary, that they were relevant… In the years after those first encounters with senior Native American men, itinerant Asian poets, black jazz musicians, and translators, I deliberately began to seek the company of people outside my own narrow cultural bounds. I was drawn especially to men and women who had not dissociated themselves from the passionate and spiritual realms of life, people for whom mystery was not a challenge to intelligence but a bosom.
In the human-nature counterpart to the evolutionary fact that diversity is nature's wellspring of beauty and resilience, he adds:
The effect of these encounters was… an understanding that my voice, steeped in Jung, Dante, Heisenberg, Melville, and Merton, was not the only voice. My truth was not the one truth. My tongue did not compose a pinnacle language. These other voices were as indispensable to our survival as variations in our DNA.
Art by Mouni Feddag from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. (Available as a print, benefitting the New York public library system.)
Paradoxically, a diversity of perspectives gives our own humanity back to us, fortified and clarified. For however different the voices may be from each other, they all seek to express, to possess, to render real the same elemental truths and longings that pulsate beneath our human experience. Looking back on his early training in anthropological research and his immersion in various cultures over the course of his creative life, Lopez observes:
In all human societies there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make a measure of the sacred part of one's life… The most dependable way to preserve these possibilities is to be reminded of them in stories. Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and association, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.
Art by Dorothy Lathrop, for Walter de la Mare's fairy-poems for children, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
This, of course, is what Chinua Achebe was affirming in his reflection on how storytelling helps us survive history's rough patches, and Susan Sontag was affirming in her reflection on how storytelling transmutes factual knowledge into wisdom, and what Ursula K. Le Guin captured with her characteristic clarity when she observed that "storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want."
This, too, is what Lopez places at the center of his gift to the world.
Looking back on his life — that narrative continuity stretching between the small boy in California obsessed with raising pigeons and the grown man who came to travel to Antarctica and the Galapagos, to make a body of work writing about Arctic seabirds and giant tortoises as a lens on the meaning of our human lives, and to make of this a body of work — he writes:
If I were asked what I want to accomplish as a writer, I would say it's to contribute to a literature of hope. With my given metaphors, rooted in a childhood spent outdoors in California and which take much of their language from Jesuit classrooms in New York City, I want to help create a body of stories in which men and women can discover trustworthy patterns.
Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader.
Complement this meta-fragment of Lopez's trustworthy and life-broadening About This Life with George Saunders on the key to great storytelling and Anton Chekhov's six rules for a riveting story, then revisit the ever-insightful and underappreciated Rebecca West on storytelling as a tool for survival.
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