We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb. Creatures who hope.

A generation after Maya Angelou held up a cosmic mirror to humanity with “A Brave and Startling Truth,” Pattiann Rogers — who writes with uncommon virtuosity about the intersection of the cosmic and the human, and whose poems have therefore been a frequent presence in The Universe in Verse — offers a poignant cosmogony of our self-creation in the stunning final poem of her book Flickering (public library).

HOMO SAPIENS: CREATING THEMSELVES
by Pattiann Rogers

I.

Formed in the black-light center of a star-circling
galaxy; formed in whirlpool images of froth
and flume and fulcrum; in the center image of herring
circling like pieces of silver swirling fast, a shoaling
circle of deception; in the whirlpool perfume of sex
in the deepest curve of a lily’s soft corolla. Created
within the images of the creator’s creation.

Born with the same grimacing wrench of a tree-covered
cliff split wide suddenly by lightning and opened
to thundering clouds of hail and rain.

Cured in the summer sun as if in a potter’s oven,
polished like a stone rolled by a river, emboldened
by the image of the expanse beyond earth’s horizon,
inside and outside a circumference in the image
of freedom.

Given the image of starlight clusters steadily silent
above a hillside-silence of fallen snow… let there be sleep.

II.

Inheriting from the earth’s scrambling minions,
images of thorn and bur, fang and claw, stealth,
deceit, poison, camouflage, blade, and blood…
let there be suffering, let there be survival.

Shaped by the image of the onset and unstoppable
devouring eclipse of the sun, the tempestuous, ecliptic
eating of the moon, the volcanic explosions of burning
rocks and fiery hail of ashes to death… let there be
terror and tears. Let there be pity.

Created in the image of fear inside a crawfish
skittering backward through a freshwater stream
with all eight appendages in perfect coordination,
both pincers held high, backing into safety beneath
a fallen leaf refuge… let there be home.

III.

Made in the image of the moon, where else
would the name of ivory rock craters shine
except in our eyes… let there be language.

Displayed in the image of the rotting seed
on the same stem with the swelling blossom…
let there be hope.

Homo sapiens creating themselves after the manner
and image of the creator’s ongoing creation — slowly,
eventual, alert and imagined, composing, dissembling,
until the right chord sounds from one brave strum
of the right strings reverberating, fading away
like evening… let there be pathos, let there be
compassion, forbearance, forgiveness. Let there be
weightless beauty.

Of earth and sky, Homo sapiens creating themselves,
following the mode and model of the creator’s creation,
particle by particle, quest by quest, witness by witness,
even though the unknown far away and the unknown
nearby be seen and not seen… let there be goodwill
and accounting, let there be praise resounding.

Complement with astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson’s ode to dark matter and the mystery of being, “Let There Always Be Light,” non-speaking autistic poet Hannah Emerson’s astonishing “Center of the Universe,” and Jane Hirshfield’s “To Be a Person,” then revisit Pattiann Rogers’s harmonic of the human and cosmic perspectives, read by David Byrne and illustrated by Maira Kalman.

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to his young correspondent half a century before Baldwin admonished that “loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.” How we meet that dangerous task may be a function of our fearlessness, but we only ever rise — or fall — to love’s responsibility in proportion to our wholeness, that most difficult of achievements for us fragile beings living in a world that constantly divides us into fragments of ourselves.
How to rediscover love from a place of wholeness, in a spirit of fearlessness, is what bell hooks (September 25, 1952–December 15, 2021) explores in her wonderful 2000 book All About Love (public library) — a field guide to “the practice of love in everyday life” and an impassioned manifesto for transforming our culture into one “where love’s sacred presence can be felt everywhere.”

bell hooks, 1960s

Greatly influenced by the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm — who observed in his landmark work on the art of loving that “there is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love” — hooks argues that we fumble and falter at love largely because we are unclear on what it actually means and what it asks of us. Looking back on her own life, she writes:

Had I been given a clear definition of love earlier in my life it would not have taken me so long to become a more loving person. Had I shared with others a common understanding of what it means to love it would have been easier to create love.

[…]

Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up. As we move toward our desired destination we chart the journey, creating a map. We need a map to guide us on our journey to love — starting with the place where we know what we mean when we speak of love.

Over the years, I have encountered some excellent definitions of love: For Iris Murdoch, it was “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real”; for Tom Stoppard, “the mask slipped from the face”; for Adrienne Rich, “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” And yet, as hooks observes, definitions are only the starting point — then comes the difficult task of putting our general theories of love into practice. Because our formative attachments shape how we love, this may often require unlearning damaging models and grieving the damage. Looking back on her own childhood, marked by a sudden and baffling expulsion from her parents’ adoration, hooks writes:

We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago… All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning — clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

But it was not until well into middle age, when her partner of fifteen years left her, that she came to consciously examine the meaning of love, personal and cultural. She captures the harrowing umbra of heartbreak:

My grief was a heavy, despairing sadness caused by parting from a companion of many years but, more important, it was a despair rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could not be found. And even if it were lurking somewhere, I might never know it in my lifetime. It had become hard for me to continue to believe in love’s promise when everywhere I turned the enchantment of power or the terror of fear overshadowed the will to love.

And yet, she observes, the astonishing thing about being human is that, even at our most brokenhearted, we are animated by an inextinguishable faith in love. With an eye to our culture, which often tells us that “lovelessness is more common than love,” she writes:

Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure… This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love’s promise… Our hope lies in the reality that so many of us continue to believe in love’s power. We believe it is important to know love. We believe it is important to search for love’s truths… To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice.

[…]

To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others… Commitment to truth telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love.

Art by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

Ultimately, hooks argues, the work of love is the work of the spirit — in our culture, and in ourselves:

A culture that is dead to love can only be resurrected by spiritual awakening… All awakening to love is spiritual awakening.

Her own spiritual awakening began at eighteen and still Gloria Jean Watkins. Studying to become a poet at Stanford, she met Gary Snyder, whose poetry was deeply influenced by his Zen practice. He invited her to the Ring of Bones Zendo for a May Day celebration. There, she met three American Buddhist nuns who left a great impression on her young mind. This was the beginning of her lifelong immersion in Buddhist contemplative practice, which in turn came to permeate her own work and worldview, including her understanding of love. Years before she began writing All About Love, she reflects in an interview:

If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender; I wouldn’t start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I’m a seeker on the path… a path about love.

[…]

If love is really the active practice — Buddhist, Christian, or Islamic mysticism — it requires the notion of being a lover, of being in love with the universe… To commit to love is fundamentally to commit to a life beyond dualism. That’s why love is so sacred in a culture of domination, because it simply begins to erode your dualisms: dualisms of black and white, male and female, right and wrong.

Couple with the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, whom hooks cites frequently throughout her work, on how to love, then revisit Roxane Gay on loving vs. being in love, poet Donald Hall on the secret to lasting love, and David Whyte’s stunning poem “The Truelove.”

The first English use of the word space to connote the cosmic expanse appears in line 650 of Book I of Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost: “Space may produce new Worlds,” he wrote, and grow rife with them.

In the centuries since Milton, who lived through the golden dawn of telescopic astronomy and traveled to Italy to look through Galileo’s telescope, our understanding of space has changed profoundly — it is no longer the ethereal blank of religious cosmogonies but a fabric of energy and matter laced with forces, a fabric the warp thread of which is time. This hammock of spacetime tells matter how to move, and matter pulled by gravity tells spacetime how to bend — such is the simplest summation of Einstein’s revolutionary theory of general relativity, out of which arose the mathematics of nature’s strangest and most enchanting creations: black holes and gravitational waves, wormholes and singularities.

These cosmic wonders come alive in The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves (public library) — a labor-of-love collaboration between artist Lia Halloran and physicist Kip Thorne, more than a decade in the making, rendering the science of spacetime in an epic poem of playful free verse and breathtaking art.

Art by Lia Halloran from The Warped Side of Our Universe

What began as a series of animated conversations between these intergenerational friends — long before Kip won the Nobel Prize for the detection of gravitational waves that marked a new golden age of listening to the universe after four centuries of looking at it, long before Lia endeavored on her subversive cyanotype celebration of astronomy — bloomed into an unexampled book that does for the science of space what Erasmus Darwin did for the science of Earth when he popularized a new branch of botany with his 1791 epic poem The Botanic Garden.

Art by Lia Halloran from The Warped Side of Our Universe

What emerges from these luscious pages is something in the spirit of mathematician Lillian Lieber’s free verse about science that so enchanted Einstein, yet entirely original — verses partway between Shel Silverstein and Interstellar (on which Kip served as chief scientific advisor), anchored in Lia’s blue dreamscapes of wonder.

Out of it arises a reminder that art — be it poetry or painting or music — is the best tool we have for translating the abstract language of reality, the language of mathematics, into the language of human life, the language of feeling that pulsates beneath reason.

Art by Lia Halloran from The Warped Side of Our Universe

The book begins with a perspectival reminder:

Our universe is varied and vast —
galaxies, planets, stars and moons
quasars, pulsars and magnetars
all made from atoms and molecules
just like you and me
and all that we hear and touch and see.

Our universe is also endowed
with a marvelous, shadowy side that is warped —
phenomena forged
from warped spacetime.

To tell the story of these phenomena — black holes and wormholes, cosmic strings and gravitational waves — is to tell the story of the human hunger for truth and the generations of humans who have devoted their lives to unraveling the mysteries of nature. Galileo, Stephen Hawking, and Kip himself make cameos as the story of spacetime unfolds in verse and image.

Art by Lia Halloran from The Warped Side of Our Universe

Underpinning these reckonings with the nature of reality is the subtle recognition that our theories are provisional and our knowledge a reliquary of self-revision. “So sayeth the quantum laws,” writes Kip in a verse about vacuum fluctuations, “if we have discerned them correctly.”

If, the great fulcrum of is.

Art by Lia Halloran from The Warped Side of Our Universe

Contemplating whether vacuum fluctuations could keep a wormhole open long enough to allow such a shortcut passage through spacetime — the pinnacle of our cultural fascination with time travel — a verse ends with an incantation of our destiny as creatures animated by the passion for knowledge and swaddled in mystery:

We don’t know.
We simply do not know.

In their wonderful Design Matters conversation with Debbie Millman, Lia and Kip delve into their respective unorthodox paths to art and science, the story of their collaboration, the power of drawing as a mode of understanding, and the importance of embracing the unknown as the common ground between doing science and making art — a testament to Nobel-winning poet Wisława Szymborska’s lovely observation that “whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,’” which is also the crucible of science.

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