“I hear bravuras of birds… I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,” Walt Whitman exulted in his ode to the “puzzle of puzzles” we call Being. How puzzling indeed, and how miraculous, that of the cold silence of spacetime voice emerged, in all its warm loveliness — this vibrating interaction of energy and matter, this oscillating displacement of particles, that can give rise to a mother’s lullaby and the nightingale’s song and Nina Simone, that can praise and blame and slay with silence. To me, voice is an unequaled portal to the soul and the supreme pheromone. When I miss someone, it is their voice I miss the most.

For eons, we could capture the likeness of a person far in space or time, but not their voice: all the portraits of kings and queens staring down from palace walls, all the marble thinkers and the nudes descending staircases, all the photographs of lovers and children, all the mute millennia of them. Voice was life incarnate, impossible to immortalize. Then we harnessed electricity, dreamt up the phonograph and the telephone, began translating these ephemeral oscillations through the air into electrical waveforms to be transmitted and recorded. You could suddenly hear the nightingale across the globe, you could hear the voice of the dead.

And then voice became something you could see.

Margaret Watts Hughes. (Portrait by S. Harris courtesy of Merthyr Tydfil Leisure Trust)

Margaret Watts Hughes (February 12, 1842–October 29, 1907) was already one of the most beloved singers of her time before she became an inventor. Jenny Lind — the most celebrated vocalist of the 19th century, who inspired Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Nightingale” by breaking his heart — considered her one of her only two spiritual sisters in music, alongside Clara Schumann.

On the cusp of forty, Margaret invented a device to test and train her vocal powers — a membrane stretched over the mouth of a receiver attached to a megaphone-shaped tube, into which she would sing. To render her voice visible, she would place various powders atop the rubber diaphragm and watch the vibrations scatter the particles, much like cosmic rays scatter subatomic particles in a cloud chamber. She experimented with different designs: various tube shapes, fine silk and soft rubber for the membrane, sand, lycopodium powder, and flower seeds for the medium.

She called her device eidophone, from the Greek eidō (“to see”) and phōnḗ (“voice, sound”), and became the first woman to present a scientific instrument of her own invention at the Royal Society.

Margaret Watts Hughes and her eidophone. (St. Louis Post Dispatch, 1908.)

But the eidophone gave her a far greater reward — a glimpse into another dimension of reality.

One day in 1885, Margaret noticed something astonishing — as she sang into the eidophone modulating her pitch, the seeds she had placed atop the membrane “resolved themselves into a perfect geometrical figure.” Experimenting with her voice, she discovered that particular tones produced particular geometries — shapes that “alter in pattern or in position with each change of pitch… and increase in complexity of pattern as the pitch rises.”

She sang entire songs into the eidophone, capturing the imprint of each note.

A new visual language for sound came abloom — forms partway between Feynman diagrams and Haeckel’s radiolaria.

And then she began to wonder what would happen if she placed a small heap of wet color paste instead of powder at the center of the diaphragm and covered it with a glass plate, singing different sustained notes into the eidophone.

She held her long steady pitch, then watched wonder-smitten as modulations of intensity pushed the pigment outward into petals and pulled it back concentrically toward the center, each sound forming a different shape. She sang daisies and roses, she sang ferns and trees, she sang strange serpents of otherworldly beauty. The same tone formations produced the same flowers each time — daisies and primroses were easy to sing, pansies difficult — revealing the secret garden inside the voice.

She called these forms Voice-Figures and came to think of them as echoes of the voice of God, hoping they would serve in some small way “the revelation of yet another link in the great chain of the organised universe.”

Long considered lost, they have been rediscovered and now endure in the collection of Cyfarthfa Castle Museum & Art Gallery in Wales.

In the final years of her life, looking back on her experiments, Margaret reflected:

Passing from one stage to another of these inquiries, question after question has presented itself to me, until I have continually felt myself standing before mystery, in great part hidden, although some glimpses seemed revealed.

Born to working-class parents, the daughter of a cemetery supervisor, Margaret began giving music lessons to homeless children in the basement of her house. Overcome with tenderness for them, she felt she had to do more and used the income from her music career to found several orphanages in North London. Upon her death, the Times eulogized “the penetrating sweetness of her voice, both in speech and in song, her glowing faith, and her great magnetic power [that] had an extraordinary effect on the roughest and most unpromising children.”

When the novelist Emilie Barrington visited one of the orphanages, she was moved to see that instead of curtains or blinds, the windows were shaded with Margaret’s bright voice-figures, which appeared as something out of a dream, out of Alice in Wonderland — “strange, beautiful things,” she marveled, “suggesting objects in Nature, but which are certainly neither exact repetitions nor imitations of anything in Nature.”

While elsewhere in London Florence Nightingale was writing about the healing power of beauty, Margaret Watts Hughes seems to have understood that the colorful voice-figures were more than decoration in the lives of these abandoned children, that inside each person, even the loneliest, dwells a secret garden of delight waiting to bloom under the warm rays of tenderness, that perhaps voice only exists to give tenderness a vessel.

Couple with these visualizations of consciousness by Margaret Watts Hughes’s contemporary Benjamin Betts (one of which became the cover of Figuring) and pioneering photographer Berenice Abbott’s visualizations of scientific phenomena, then revisit Hannah Fries’s poem “Let the Last Thing Be Song” — a tender love letter to the voice.

HT Public Domain Review via Sophie Blackall

One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock too fast not to break. We lurch into loving, only to discover again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to understand people — and “understanding is love’s other name.” Even without intentional deception, people will surprise you, will shock you, will hurt you — not out of malice, but out of the incompleteness of their own self-knowledge, which continually leads them to surprise themselves. More often than not, when someone breaks a promise, it is because they believed themselves to be the kind of person who could keep it and found themselves to be a person who could not. If we live long enough and honestly enough, we will all find ourselves in that position eventually, for in the lifelong project of understanding ourselves, we are all reluctant visitors to the dusky and desolate haunts of our own nature, where shadows we do not want to meet dwell. But in any human association that has earned the right use the word love, we must be in relationship with both the light and the shadow in ourselves and each other. All authentic relationship is therefore a matter of clear sight — of seeing through the shining pane of the other’s self-concealment and removing the mirror of our own projections.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Audubon Society.)

Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999) explores this central perplexity of human life with her characteristic intellectual agility and emotional virtuosity in one of the essays found in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (public library) — one of my all-time favorite books, which also gave us Murdoch on what love really means, the myth of closure, and the key to great storytelling. She writes:

People are so very secretive. Sometimes it is said, “Those characters and that novel are purely fantastic — nobody in real life is like that.” But people in real life are very, very odd, as soon as one gets to know them at all well, and they conceal this fact because they are frightened of appearing eccentric or shocking… What are other people really like? What goes on inside their minds? What goes on inside their houses?

It is, of course, impossible to ever fully know what it is like to be someone else — this is the cost of consciousness, singular and secretive as it is; impossible, too, to fully convey to another what it is like to be you. The dream of perfectly clear vision is indeed just a dream. But we can always see a little more clearly in order to love a little more purely.

Iris Murdoch

Paradoxically, while our illusions about ourselves and others are the work of fantasy, seeing clearly is the work of the imagination — of the willingness to investigate imaginatively what lives behind the masks people wear, what hides in our own blind spots. Murdoch writes:

Imagination, as opposed to fantasy, is the ability to see the other thing, what one might call, to use those old-fashioned words, nature, reality, the world… Imagination is a kind of freedom, a renewed ability to perceive and express the truth.

In another essay from the book, Murdoch considers the existential jolt of discovering how poorly we know ourselves, for we are always divided between our will and our personality, the conscious and the unconscious. Whenever we face the abyss between the two, we are overcome with an uneasy feeling the existentialists called Angst. Defining it as the “fright which the conscious will feels when it apprehends the strength and direction of the personality which is not under its immediate control,” Murdoch locates Angst in any experience where we feel the discrepancy between our ideals and our personality. She writes:

Extreme Angst, in the popular modern form, is a disease or addiction of those who are passionately convinced that personality resides solely in the conscious omnipotent will.

In a sense, Angst — which often manifests as anxiety, to use a presently fashionable term — is the loss of faith in the omnipotence of the rational will, the discovery that much of our conduct is governed by unconscious tendrils of our personality impervious to our conscious ideals. This makes the project of change far more complex and durational than we would like it to be.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

Murdoch writes:

The place of choice is certainly a different one if we think in terms of a world which is compulsively present to the will, and the discernment and exploration of which is a slow business. Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able suddenly to alter ourselves since we cannot suddenly alter what we can see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by. In a way, explicit choice seems now less important: less decisive (since much of the “decision” lies elsewhere) and less obviously something to be “cultivated.” If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at… Will continually influences belief, for better or worse, and is ideally able to influence it through a sustained attention to reality.

This is so because pure attention reveals the fundamental necessity of our lives, and where there is necessity there is no need for choice — there is only what Murdoch calls “obedience to reality,” which is always “an exercise of love.” Such attention — “patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation” — shapes what we believe to be possible and, when coupled with the conscious will, shapes our lives. It is only through obedience to reality that we can ever see clearly enough — ourselves or another — to be in loving relationship, by discovering, in Murdoch’s lovely words, “the real which is the proper object of love.”

Couple this fragment of the altogether superb Existentialists and Mystics with Adam Phillips on the paradoxes of changing, then revisit Iris Murdoch on how attention unmasks the universe and how to see more clearly.

“Every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life,” William Blake wrote in an era when science first began raising questions with spiritual undertones:

What is life?

Where does it begin and end?

What makes it alive?

But in the epochs since, having discovered muons and mitochondria, having discerned the elementary building blocks of matter and the synaptic infrastructure of the mind, we — “atoms with consciousness,” in physicist Richard Feynman’s poetic words — seem to be haunted all the more urgently by the question of what makes life sacred and worthy of living.

The Ukrainian Jewish writer Vasily Grossman (November 29, 1905–September 14, 1964), who had spent a thousand days as a correspondent on the frontlines of humanity’s unholiest war and composed some of the earliest eyewitness accounts of Nazi extermination camps, takes up these urgent and eternal questions in his 1959 novel Life and Fate (public library) — the story of a visionary physicist named Viktor and his search for meaning amid the radical mathematics of reality.

A generation after the mathematical prodigy William James Sidis bent Einstein’s equations into a provocative model of what distinguishes inanimate matter from life, Viktor’s colleague taunts him with a daring definition of life:

There is a boundary limiting the infinity of the universe — life itself. This boundary’s nothing to do with Einstein’s curvature of space; it lies in the opposition between life and inanimate matter… Life can be defined as freedom. Life is freedom. Freedom is the fundamental principle of life. That is the boundary — between freedom and slavery, between inanimate matter and life.

Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Viktor shudders at the notion. (So did James Baldwin, who wrestled with the illusion of choice and concluded “nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”) When the other physicist prophecies that in the coming century — the century in which we are living out our lives — “the abyss of time and space will be overcome” as science unravels the mystery of energy and matter to solve “the creation of life itself” and thus liberates humanity from its mortal destiny, Viktor pushes back against this escapist fantasy with the full force of the human struggle:

On this very day the Germans are slaughtering Jewish children and old women… And we ourselves have endured 1937 and the horrors of collectivization — famine, cannibalism and the deportation of millions of unfortunate peasants… You say life is freedom. Is that what people in the camps think? What if the life expanding through the universe should use its power to create a slavery still more terrible than your slavery of inanimate matter? Do you think this man of the future will surpass Christ in his goodness? That’s the real question. How will the power of this omnipresent and omniscient being benefit the world if he is still endowed with our own fatuous self-assurance and animal egotism? Our class egotism, our race egotism, our State egotism and our personal egotism? What if he transforms the whole world into a galactic concentration camp? What I want to know is — do you believe in the evolution of kindness, morality, mercy?

In the end, Grossman intimates, these are the elementary particles of life — the building blocks of its significance and sanctity. Given the miracle of how a cold cosmos kindled consciousness, given the everlasting wonder of what happens when we die, given the luckiness of death, it seems that each life is a reliquary of itself — that we exist only to discover that what makes the interlude between inanimacy and death alive with meaning is love, no matter the names we give it: kindness, friendship, forgiveness.

Available as a print

Grossman writes:

When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom. Consciousness first weakens and then disappears. The life-processes — respiration, the metabolism, the circulation — continue for some time, but an irrevocable move has been made towards slavery; consciousness, the flame of freedom, has died out.

The stars have disappeared from the night sky; the Milky Way has vanished; the sun has gone out; Venus, Mars and Jupiter have been extinguished; millions of leaves have died; the wind and the oceans have faded away; flowers have lost their colour and fragrance; bread has vanished; water has vanished; even the air itself, the sometimes cool, sometimes sultry air, has vanished. The universe inside a person has ceased to exist. This universe is astonishingly similar to the universe that exists outside people. It is astonishingly similar to the universes still reflected within the skulls of millions of living people. But still more astonishing is the fact that this universe had something in it that distinguished the sound of its ocean, the smell of its flowers, the rustle of its leaves, the hues of its granite and the sadness of its autumn fields both from those of every other universe that exists and ever has existed within people, and from those of the universe that exists eternally outside people. What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.

This, of course, is also the fundamental constitution of love — it is the singularity of a person, the dear particularity unexampled in all of space and time, that we love. That is why the loss of love feels like a death — when the universe between two people who have loved each other ceases to exist, a part of each soul also dies, a part of each consciousness ceases to reflect the universe and is extinguished.

But there, amid the desolate haunts of eternity, we discover that the only shelter is the naked now — the only place where we have any freedom at all, including freedom from fear. Hannah Arendt knew this when she observed in her timeless reckoning with love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss that “fearlessness is what love seeks” and “such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future,” which makes “the only valid tense” of love the present — the only place where life is truly alive, and holy.

THE UNIVERSE IN VERSE BOOK