Figuring

by Maria Popova

According to the version of the Greek legend Hosmer chose, the beautiful Medusa was raped by the sea god Poseidon—a crime committed in the temple of Athena, for which the goddess of wisdom decided to dispense punishment. But in a subtle reminder that the writers of these myths were men, the jealous Athena, rather than punishing the rapist, punished Medusa for having attracted Poseidon’s attention—she transformed the lovely maiden into a gorgon so hideous that men turned to stone at the sight of her. In an era when statutory rape was almost impossible to prosecute in Hosmer’s homeland, where wives had no legal right to refuse sex to their husbands and legions of white men were raping black women with complete legal and societal impunity, her depiction of Medusa was a bold and prescient choice commenting on the gruesome deficiencies of a justice system that had failed to protect women since antiquity and a society in which victim-blaming has endured to the present day. Medusa was a popular subject with the great masters, but she was customarily rendered in her monstrous form following Athena’s punishment. Hosmer chose to capture the moment of transfiguration—her bust, completed in 1854, depicts a proud and beautiful woman just as her hair is beginning to turn into serpents. She cast Medusa’s hair from a real snake captured in the wilderness outside Rome. But she didn’t have the heart to kill the serpent, so she anesthetized it with chloroform, made a cast by keeping it in pl...

Hosmer had begun working on a sculpture of Beatrice Cenci—a young sixteenth-century woman, whose devastating story and the mythology that enveloped it had become an icon for antiauthoritarian Italians, fomenting the ideas of the Roman revolution. Beatrice’s father, a violent and depraved nobleman, had raped her repeatedly. When the papal authorities to whom she reported the crimes did nothing to protect her and to serve punishment, Beatrice took her salvation into her own hands. Together with her brother and stepmother, she hired two assassins to murder the abuser. They attempted to poison him, but the poison failed to kill. Beatrice saw no other recourse than to complete the task herself, which she did either by driving a spike through the rapist’s eye or by bludgeoning him with a hammer—the stories vary. (Did Hosmer see analogs to the chisel and mallet she wielded daily in these tools of vengeance?) Only then did the papal authorities leap to punishment—they executed Beatrice in 1599, beheading her with a small ax in a public spectacle after extended torture. Margaret Fuller, upon visiting the prison cell where Beatrice was tortured, observed two years before Hosmer arrived in Rome: “There is, undoubtedly, foundation for the story of a curse laid on Eve.”

“While any one is base, none can be entirely free and noble,” Margaret Fuller had written in Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

Those marginalized for one aspect of their nature are bound to have sympathies with those marginalized for another, but no marginalized group moves to the center solely by its own efforts—such is the paradox of power. It takes a gravitational pull by those kindred to the cause who are already in relative positions of power or privilege.

“Truth is such a rare thing it is delightful to tell it,”

Dickinson

In words and dashes dealt like breaths, like blades, like bullets, she would limn the terror of abandonment in a short verse, the otherworldliness of a total solar eclipse in two perfect stanzas, the soaring fragility of hope in a single line, meticulously calibrating the gravitational pull of her words to keep the reader suspended along the event horizon of meaning, perpetually circling but never fully falling into the depths of her truth.

On Dickinson

“We are the only poets,” Emily told Susan, “and everyone else is prose.”

Emily Dickinson to Susan Gilbert

Susan was science personified, capitalized—she would haunt Dickinson’s poems for decades to come as “Science.” Throughout their lifelong relationship, Dickinson would punctuate her stormy devotion with sunny wit. In one of her “letter-poems,” as Susan called the missives that read like poems and the poems that conveyed concrete messages, she writes: Dear Susie—I send you a little air— The “Music of the Spheres” The concept of the “Music of the Spheres” is attributed to Pythagoras, but Dickinson is likely teasing Susan—a mathematician—with a joke about the “Pythagorean maxim” Herman Melville posited in the recently published Moby-Dick: “Avoid eating beans, which cause flatulence.” I am not above delighting in the fact that one of humanity’s greatest poets was not above making a fart joke to her beloved. What is love, after all, if not an affectionate acceptance of the lover’s full spectrum of being, the silly along with the solemn?

We never know we go—when we are going We jest and shut the door— Fate following behind us bolts it And we accost no more.

Dickinson

Some loves lodge themselves in the tissue of being like mercury, pervading every synapse and sinew to remain there, sometimes dormant, sometimes tortuously restive, with a half-life that exceeds a lifetime.

This, after all, was a woman who at only nineteen confidently mocked her brother for saying that her philosophic meditations were incomprehensible and that she should write in simpler style: “I’ll be a little ninny—a little pussy catty, a little Red Riding Hood, I’ll wear a Bee in my Bonnet, and a Rose bud in my hair.” She didn’t hesitate to poke fun at his patriarchal condescension: “Permit me to tie your shoe, to run like a dog behind you. I can bark, see here! Bow wow!” She would grow out of her teenage sarcasm but would retain the willful defense of her sensibility, consistently refusing suggested simplifications of her poems with the same quiet confidence in her style of thought and expression. After her death, her longtime editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson would bow at the self-possession with which she had upheld her peculiar style and resisted his edits over the decades: “After all, when a thought takes one’s breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.”

Having read Aurora Leigh religiously, Dickinson may well have taken for a tenet Barrett Browning’s assertion that “the worthiest poets have remained uncrowned till death has bleached their foreheads to the bone.”

Success—is counted sweetest By those who ne’er succeed— To Comprehend a Nectar— Requires sorest need—

Dickinson

Fame is a bee. It has a song— It has a sting— Ah, too, it has a wing.

Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death— He kindly stopped for me—

Dickinson

It sounded as if the streets were running— And then—the streets stood still— Eclipse was all we could see at the Window And Awe—was all we could feel. By and by—the boldest stole out of his Covert To see if Time was there— Nature was in her Opal Apron— Mixing fresher Air.

Dickinson On an eclipse

The stated mission of the Golden Record was to serve as a message from humanity to some other civilization that might surmount the towering improbability of finding it adrift amid the cosmic infinitude and having the necessary technology and consciousness to decode its contents. Eclipsing this sweetly naïve aspiration is the unstated aim of the project, an endeavor far more poetic than scientific—to mirror what is best and truest of humanity back to us, at a moment when we seemed to have forgotten that we share this small, improbable planet. Sagan considered the Golden Record proof of our being “a species endowed with hope and perseverance, at least a little intelligence, substantial generosity and a palpable zest to make contact with the cosmos”—proof that, at the zenith of the Cold War, humanity needed far more than did any hypothetical extraterrestrial civilization. “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours,” says President Jimmy Carter on the scratchy recording.

“Some thoughts are fashioned like a bell,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning had written in Aurora Leigh, “to ring once being touched.”

The day Carl Sagan died, the Voyager was sailing somewhere past Neptune, toward the boundary of interstellar space, beyond which lay the open cosmic sea of the unknown. Thirty-five Augusts after the launch, Voyager 1 began crossing the wide, ruffled edge of the Solar System, still carrying what now lived up to Carl and Annie’s vision of a truly interstellar record—a record they believed “intentionally expresses a kind of cosmic loneliness.”

Carl Sagan made one other monumental contribution to our civilizational canon in the course of the Voyager mission, the primary purpose of which had been not as poetic vehicle for the Golden Record but as scientific probe to explore and document the outermost planets of the solar system. Among the 105 kilograms of scientific instruments aboard these twin poems of aluminum and electricity was a camera, bound for interstellar space less than a century and a half after Talbot’s crude attempts to capture light and shadow. As the Voyagers sailed away from Earth at 35,000 miles an hour, they took spectacular technicolor images of the outer planets—the first-ever complete portrait of our cosmic neighborhood. They saw for the first time, in rapturous detail, the Jovian moons Galileo had glimpsed as faint spots and named after Roman deities nearly four centuries earlier. They saw Uranus, the color of Margaret Fuller’s eyes, its aquamarine so arresting and thoroughly unexpected that it extracted audible gasps from the imaging team on the ground. They saw what no human imagination had fathomed before: Navigation engineer Linda Morabito, glancing back over the shoulder of the spacecraft to take one final photograph of Jupiter, was stunned by the sight of an enormous umbrella-shaped plume emerging from behind its moon Io. In an instant, she was seized by the certainty that she was seeing the first known evidence of active volcanism on a world other than Earth—a Vesuvius four hundred mi...

The artist’s part is both to be and do, Transfixing with a special, central power The flat experience of the common man, And turning outward, with a sudden wrench, Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing He feels the inmost: never felt the less Because he sings it.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern…the whole world is a work of art…Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

Virginia Woolf

“If thou art a writer, write as if thy time were short, for it is indeed short, at the longest.”

Thoreau

Frederick Douglass had insisted that “the dead fact is nothing without the living expression”—that it is “truth but truth disrobed of its sublimity and glory: a kind of frozen truth, destitute of motion itself and incapable of exciting emotion in others.” Douglass believed that the writer “who speaks to the feelings, who enters the soul’s deepest meditations, holding the mirror up to nature…will be sure of an audience.”

I am awkward, sour, saturnine, lumpish, pedantic, & thoroughly disagreeable & oppressive to the people around me. Yet if I am born to write a few good sentences or verses, these shall endure & my disgraces utterly perish out of memory.

Emerson

How his words must have honeyed her soul:

The dawn of every love seems haloed by the sense—the beautiful illusion—of fatedness, as the lovers discover in elated disbelief the staggering number of things they have had in common since long before they met: the favorite poem, the esoteric obsession, the freckle on the same spot of the same thigh. They seem to have lived two strands of the same life, long ago unwreathed by some cruel chance and only just now entwined into wholeness. They seem to be thinking the same thoughts. This sense pervaded Rachel and Dorothy’s intensely deepening attachment. “Darling,” Rachel wrote, “I wonder if I’ll ever get used to the fact that you think my thoughts before I’ve expressed them?” They came to refer to the serendipities and astonishing coincidences twining their parallel lives as “stardust”—synchronicity,

William Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence”: To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.

The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth—soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilize them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research. Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.

Rachel Carson 1953

It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within.

Rachel Carson

It had begun, of course, long before that, for every beginning is an arbitrary point stabbed into the continuum that binds all events and all ages.

The Milky Way constellated the clear winter sky with its almost shocking splendor—that primordial river of stars Walt Whitman had celebrated as “some superhuman symphony, some ode of universal vagueness, disdaining syllable and sound—a flashing glance of Deity, address’d to the soul.”

Today our whole earth has become only another shore from which we look out across the dark ocean of space, uncertain what we shall find when we sail out among the stars. […] The stream of time moves forward and mankind moves with it. Your generation must come to terms with the environment. You must face realities instead of taking refuge in ignorance and evasion of truth. Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity. You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery—not of nature, but of itself. Therein lies our hope and our destiny.

Rachel Carson commencement speech

Velsicol, another major pesticide manufacturer, threatened Houghton Mifflin directly, promising litigation if they didn’t stop the publication of Silent Spring or publish it only without any negative mention of their products. They went as far as to claim that criticism of pesticides was part of a Communist conspiracy. A man from California echoed these accusations in a letter to The New Yorker, then added in complete seriousness: “We can live without birds and animals, but, as the current market slump shows, we cannot live without business.”

Even Peanuts celebrated Carson. In one comic strip, Lucy excitedly shows off her new baseball bat to Charlie Brown, who asks whose name is on it: “Mickey Mantle? Willie Mays?” “It must be a girl’s bat,” says Lucy. “It says ‘Rachel Carson.’ ” In another, Lucy quotes geological facts from Carson’s books to an exasperated Schroeder: “Rachel Carson! Rachel Carson! You’re always talking about Rachel Carson!” Lucy fires back: “We girls need our heroines!” Having received more congratulatory calls from friends after the Peanuts nod than after her National Book Award, Carson joked: “I’ve found that true immortality seems to rest in being included in a comic strip.”

“Between every two pine trees,” John Muir had written in the margin of his copy of Emerson’s essays, “there is a door leading to a new way of life.”

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” Muir had written.

The differences I sense in this particular instant of time that is mine are but the differences of a moment, determined by our place in the stream of time and in the long rhythms of the sea. Once this rocky coast beneath me was a plain of sand; then the sea rose and found a new shore line. And again in some shadowy future the surf will have ground these rocks to sand and will have returned the coast to its earlier state. And so in my mind’s eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality—earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.

Rachel Carson

My hopes were heaven-high, They are fulfilled in you. I am the pool of gold When sunset burns and dies— You are my deepening skies; Give me your stars to hold.

A poem i need to look up

On a clear blue morning in early May, Dorothy drove to the tip of Southport Island with the other half of Rachel’s ashes beside her. She walked to the spot where they had watched the monarchs and took a breath before scattering into the high tide the stardust that had once constellated into a beloved soul. As the ashes drifted into the ocean, she threw behind them a white hyacinth.

Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, every poem and statue and symphony we’ve ever known—an entropic spectacle insentient to questions of blame and mercy, devoid of why. In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the “heavenly breezes” Kepler had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a symphonic civilization that long ago made love and war and mathematics on a distant blue dot. But until that day comes, nothing once created ever fully leaves us. Seeds are planted and come abloom generations, centuries, civilizations later, migrating across coteries and countries and continents. Meanwhile, people live and people die—in peace as war rages on, in poverty and disrepute as latent fame awaits, with much that never meets its more, in shipwrecked love. I will die. You will die. The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us. What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.