“Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted,” Elizabeth Gilbert reflected in the wake of losing the love of her life. “Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.”

Like love, grief swells into an entire inner universe that comes to color the whole of the outside world. Like love — that rapturous raw material for most of the songs and poems and paintings our species has produced — grief lives itself through the grieving and can’t but speak its truth. Unlike love, our culture meets the voice of grief with an alloy of disquiet and denial. We want to make the sadness go away, to lift the sorrowing heart out of its sorrow immediately. Often, we mistake for personal failure our inability to salve another’s grief or mistake for their failure the inability to snap out of it on the timeline of our wishes.

Art by Jacqueline Chwast from I Like You by Sandol Stoddard — a vintage serenade to friendship.

When psychotherapist Megan Devine — creator of the excellent resource Refuge in Grief and author of its portable counterpart, It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand (public library) — watched her young, healthy partner drown, the sudden and senseless loss suspended her world. As it slowly regained the motive force of life, she set out to redirect her professional experience of studying emotional intelligence and resilience toward better understanding the confounding, all-consuming process of grief — the process by which, as Abraham Lincoln wrote in his immensely insightful letter of consolation to a bereaved friend, the agony of loss is slowly transmuted into “a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before”; a transmutation in which skillful loving support can make a world of difference — support very different from what we instinctively imagine helps.

Art by Valerio Vidali from The Shadow Elephant by Nadine Robert — a subtle meditation on what it actually takes to unblue our sorrows.

In studying how people navigate intense grief — the loss of loved ones to violent crime, suicide, disaster, infant death, and other abrupt catastrophic traumas — Devine arrived at an arresting insight. Again and again, she observed that our most intuitive impulses about helping those whose suffering we yearn to allay — by cheering them up, by reorienting them toward the lighthouses in their lives amid the darkness — tend to only deepen their helpless anguish and broaden the abyss between us and them. And so she began to wonder what does salve the immense sorrow we encounter in the world and experience in our own lives.

This is what she learned:

Complement with a soulful animated short film about depression and what it takes to recover the light of being, an uncommon children’s book about that nonjudgmental place of permission for sadness where all healing begins, and Nick Cave on living with loss and the central paradox of grief as a portal to aliveness.

“My one reader, you reading this book, who are you?” Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913–February 12, 1980) asks with the large forthright eyes of her words in one of the most beautiful and penetrating books ever written on any subject. “What is your face like, your hands holding the pages, the child forsaken in you, who now looks through your eyes at mine?”

It is the summer of 1949. Her life is still only thirty-six years long but thirty thousand years wise. She has lived through two World Wars, has shared a small ship with fivefold the number of refugee bodies the vessel can hold, has been arrested for placing her own solid and unapologetic body on the right side of what is yet to be celebrated and capitalized as Civil Rights, has stood amid the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and traveled home to tell their story, has staggered the world with her debut poetry collection at only twenty-two and followed it with a thoroughly unexpected sidewise triumph of vision in her staggering more-than-biography of one of the most influential and misunderstood scientists who ever lived.

But it is this book, The Life of Poetry (public library), that is and would remain her elemental statement of belief — a humanistic document for the epochs, a reliquary of rapture, a blueprint for resistance to the thousand desultory derogations by which living can desecrate life.

Muriel Rukeyser

Rukeyser writes in the introduction:

In times of crisis, we summon up our strength.

Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.

In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for our selves. We call up, with all the strength of summoning we have, our fullness. And then we turn; for it is a turning that we have prepared; and act. The time of the turning may be very long. It may hardly exist.

However slow or subtle the turning, the fulcrum by which we turn is love. “In time of struggle,” Rukeyser tells us, “all people think about love” — never more so than amid uncertainty, when the familiar terrain grows foreign and uneven, when the very ground beneath our feet fails to hold steady:

In this moment when we face horizons and conflicts wider than ever before, we want our resources, the ways of strength. We look again to the human wish, its faiths, the means by which the imagination leads us to surpass ourselves.

If there is a feeling that something has been lost, it may be because much has not yet been used, much is still to be found and begun.

Art by Ofra Amit from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print.

We have struggled to find this untapped potential, Rukeyser argues, because our standard modes of intellectual probing sidestep the life of feeling, which poetry — “this other kind of knowledge and love” — alone can access and allay:

Now, when it is hard to hold for a moment the giant clusters of event and meaning that every day appear, it is time to remember [poetry], which has forever been a way of reaching complexes of emotion and relationship, the attitude that is like the attitude of science and the other arts today, but with significant and beautiful distinctness from these — the attitude that perhaps might equip our imaginations to deal with our lives — the attitude of poetry.

A generation before Audre Lorde placed at the heart of poetry the courage to feel, from which all power and all change spring, Rukeyser distills the essence of poetry as “an approach to the truth of feeling,” insisting upon its clarifying and cohesionary power:

However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.

As we wade from the chaos without to the cohesion within, this is what we move through and move toward:

The images of personal love and freedom, controlled as water is controlled, as the flight of planes is controlled. The images of relationship… the music of the images of relationship.

Experience taken into the body, breathed in, so that reality is the completion of experience, and poetry is what is produced. And life is what is produced.

In the final pages of the book, Rukeyser returns to what is left as the bedrock of our strength when all falls apart and away:

As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive.

[…]

All the poems of our lives are not yet made.

We hear them crying to us, the wounds, the young and the unborn — we will define that peace, we will live to fight its birth, to build these meanings, to sing these songs.

Complement this fragment of Rukeyser’s uncommonly vitalizing The Life of Poetry with Maya Angelou’s poetic consolation for our crises and our contradictions, then revisit Rukeyser on the deepest wellspring of our aliveness.

We live our lives by tidal forces — vast oceanic waves of change and chance sweeping us together, stranding us apart, washing over us with their all-subsuming totality of feeling, only to retreat and then begin anew before we have fully regained our breath and our footing. What buoys us is the awareness that, however distant and desolate the shore might appear, however dark and cold the waters of the night, there are other bodies swimming these waves, others so different yet so kindred — life itself swimming itself alive, as it did long ago in the primordial oceans that gave us feet and lungs and consciousness to live by. James Baldwin hinted at this in one of his least known and most beautiful meditations: “The sea rises, the light fails… The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”

Water might well be the supreme meaning-making element of poets and poets may well be the original water nymphs — poets in the broadest Baldwinian sense of artists in any medium, makers of various life-rafts, who surface the deepest truth about us and mirror it back to us in their art.

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

With his deep-seeing poetic consciousness shaped by the spare solemn beaches of his native Long Island, Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) always retained a profound relationship to the water, to its symbolism and its actuality. Throughout his poetry, he celebrated the ocean as the “old mother” of life. He cherished winter beaches as pastures for creativity. He imagined the living wonders of “the world below the brine” long before Rachel Carson invited the human imagination into the living reality of the marine world for the very first time, a world then more mysterious than the Moon. His daily ferry commute across New York’s slender tidal estuary became one of the profoundest and most penetrating poems ever composed.

It was in the solitude of the beach and the solitude of the night that Whitman felt most connected to the life of this world and the life of the universe — a transcendent sense of interleaving, which he reverenced in his poem “On the Beach Alone at Night.” At an intimate edition of The Universe in Verse I hosted for his bicentennial, the poem came alive in a singsong benediction of a reading by musician extraordinaire, Baldwin-champion, and poet of song and spirit Meshell Ndegeocello, accompanied by cellist Dave Eggar and guitarist Chris Bruce, inside a deconsecrated white chapel Whitman passed countless times on the Brooklyn ferry, newly transformed into a living artwork and sanctuary for contemplation by Governors Island artist-in-residence Shantell Martin. Words from this poem fomented the mission manifesto of the endeavor to build New York City’s first public observatory, just across the water from the chapel.

ON THE BEACH ALONE AT NIGHT
by Walt Whitman

On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.
A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

Join me in supporting Governors Island’s wonderful public programming, green space, and other pastures for creativity with a donation and savor another highlight of this Whitman-themed miniature Universe in Verse on the island — poet Sarah Kay bridging Whitman’s astronomy with the astronaut’s lament — then revisit Whitman himself on what makes life worth living, what makes a great person, actionable optimism as a force of resistance, and how to keep criticism from sinking your soul.

Vintage Science Face Masks Benefiting the Nature Conservancy