"The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n," Milton wrote centuries before modern science came to illuminate how the mind renders reality — the mind, this sole lens we have on what the world is and what we are. The quality of our mind, then — the clarity of it, the composure of it — shapes the quality of our lives. Viktor Frankl knew this when he observed amid the most unimaginable of circumstances — the barbed-wire inside of a concentration camp — that "everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances." That choice, that attitude, is what we call mindset, and it is as trainable as a muscle, as teachable as piano.
How to cultivate a mind that faces the gauntlet of living without making of it a hell is what Alain de Botton, philosopher of poetic pragmatism, explores in A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life (public library).
Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)
Recognizing that the mind is at bottom an attention machine — and, as cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz observed in her exquisite experiment in widening the lens, "attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator [that] asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that" — De Botton writes:
A mind in a healthy state is, in the background, continually performing a near-miraculous set of maneuvers that underpin our moods of clear-sightedness and purpose… A healthy mind is an editing mind, an organ that manages to sieve, from thousands of stray, dramatic, disconcerting, or horrifying thoughts, those particular ideas and sensations that actively need to be entertained in order for us to direct our lives effectively.
A mind at its best, De Botton argues, is equally capable of self-compassion and of what Iris Murdoch so wonderfully termed unselfing. He writes:
A well-functioning mind recognizes the futility and cruelty of constantly finding fault with its own nature… [It] can quieten its own buzzing preoccupations in order, at times, to focus on the world beyond itself.
Undergirding his formulation of a healthy mind is the intimation that cynicism is the unhealthiest of mindsets and the surest pathway to despair:
A healthy mind knows how to hope; it identifies and then hangs on tenaciously to a few reasons to keep going. Grounds for despair, anger, and sadness are, of course, all around. But the healthy mind knows how to bracket negativity in the name of endurance. It clings to evidence of what is still good and kind. It remembers to appreciate; it can — despite everything — still look forward to a hot bath, some dried fruit or dark chocolate, a chat with a friend, or a satisfying day of work. It refuses to let itself be silenced by all the many sensible arguments in favor of rage and despondency.
Complement with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on the relationship between the body and the mind and psychologist Carol Dweck's pioneering framework of the two basic mindsets that shape our lives (and how to cultivate the far more fruitful one), then revisit Alain de Botton on what emotional maturity really means and the importance of breakdowns.
Biking back to my rented cottage from CERN one autumn evening, having descended into the underworld of matter for a visit to the world's largest high-energy particle collider, a sight stopped me up short on the shore of Lake Geneva: In the orange sky over the orange water, myriad particles were swarming in unison without colliding. Except they were not particles — they were birds. Thousands of them. A murmuration of starlings — swarm intelligence at its most majestic, emergence incarnate, a living reminder that the universe is "nothing but a vast, self-organizing, complex system, the emergent properties of which are… everything."
The majesty and mystery of murmurations come alive with uncommon beauty in We Are Starlings: Inside the Mesmerizing Magic of a Murmuration (public library) by writers Donna Jo Napoli and Robert Furrow, illustrated by artist Marc Martin, who also brought us the wondrous A Stone Is a Story.
As a murmuration of starlings takes flight against a breathtaking watercolor sky, the story is told from the perspective of the birds — an antidote to our anthropocentric view of the natural world, which Rachel Carson pioneered nearly a century ago with her revolutionary writings about the sea.
Soft yet striking, the illustrations play masterfully with our sense of scale — we zoom out and out from closeups of the flock to the full sweep of the murmuration, then back to the scale of the feathered particle that is the individual bird.
A four-page gatefold wings the book with a sense of the astonishing grandeur of these small, fragile creatures constellating something immense and powerful, greater than the sum of its parts — one of the living wonders of this Earth.
Couple We Are Starlings with the lovely animated poem "Murmuration," then revisit other kindred illustrated celebrations of the natural world: The Forest, Dawn, What Is a River, and The Blue Hour.
Every single thing we make, even the smallest, we make with the whole of who we are and what we have lived — with every impression and every memory, every love and every loss, consciously and unconsciously constellated into the creative act. A song encodes its maker's entire history of feeling. An equation cannot describe why an apple falls without its maker's entire understanding of how the universe works. The poetry of personhood — which we might call soul — is the raw material for all creative work. To hear its voice requires a delicate harmonizing of what we consciously know and what we unconsciously are — a syncopation of intellect and intuition.
Thinking about this in the context of Virginia Woolf's meditation on how to hear your soul and Nick Cave's insistence on the creative power of trusting yourself, I was reminded of some wonderful passages I had saved from various interviews Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936–February 13, 2010) gave over the course of her long and luminous life.
Lucille Clifton, 1995. (Photograph: Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images)
A century after the polymathic Nobel laureate Henri Bergson considered the interplay of intuition and the intellect in the creative work of science, Clifton takes up the question as related to art in a Rattle magazine interview from the winter of 2002, reflecting on where a poem comes from:
You can murder poems, I mean, I've done it, when you start thinking too hard in your own way and you start intellectualizing, because I think a poem has to come from intellect and intuition. If you get too much intuition you have sentimentality, which is not good, and with too much intellect, it has a whole lot of stuff that nobody knows nor cares. But a poem, it's about a whole human and speaks to the whole human and it has to come from a whole human, so you involve all of yourself.
In the final years of her life, in another interview, Clifton revisits the subject of this integrated totality of being and how to hear its voice:
A human is not sections, is not parts. Stanley Kunitz says that poetry is the story of what it means to be human in this place, at this time… If something wants to be said — the poem — the poem knows that I will accept it… You allow it in yourself. You allow it to do its work in you.
Poetry can be so healing precisely because it springs from that deepest place of reckoning with what it means to be human — the place we seek with the intellect but touch with the intuition. And down there in the depths, we don't much differ from one another, sharing the same basic longings, the same basic fears. Clifton reflects:
Poetry can heal. Because it comes from a heart, it can speak to another heart.
[…]
Somebody asked me why is it that I want to heal the world. I want to heal Lucille Clifton! And fortunately, I am very human just like all the other ones, all the other humans.
With an eye to what it means to be a poet, she adds a sentiment equally true of any creative endeavor:
I didn't graduate from college, which isn't necessary to be a poet. It is only necessary to be interested in humans and to be in touch with yourself as a human.
Complement with Clifton's classic "won't you celebrate with me" — a living testament to this poetry of personhood turned art — and her spare, stunning ode to the common ground of being, then revisit Wendell Berry on how to be a poet and a complete human being and Anne Gilchrist — Whitman's most beloved friend — on inner wholeness and the key to a flourishing soul.
