Popova stirs the embers

Everything in me is opening and moving, triggered by a visit to the Homer Bookstore just moments ago. They had The Sun and Tricycle magazines, and an amazing selection of fiction, essays, poetry. It stirred me to tears. It’s everything I want in my life, but I’m making beds and sweeping floors and scouring toilets. That’s okay, too, of course; it’s just unbalanced. It’s all practical work and none of the…. what is it? What should it be called? The deeper recesses? The hidden realms? The places I want to live, but I’d have to surface to breathe. No wait….maybe there’s TOO much oxygen in those places where poetry and art and spirit come alive, and I’d need to resurface to prevent oversaturation.

I had a dream once of teaching college English. Teaching poetry, literature. Opening minds. Being to some student what Dr. David Lavery was to me. He introduced me to ideas that lit the fire. The fire is mostly a memory as of late, but Maria Popova stirred the embers. 

 I heard her speak with Alan Lightman at The Porcupine Theater in Homer last week. I saw a flyer for the event at Two Sisters bakery/coffee shop in Homer. Amazing luck. I’ve been reading Popova’s newsletter, The Marginalian, for at least 15 years – back when it was called Brain Pickings. I would love to have spoken with her – mostly because I want to tell her about Katherine Larson’s poem “Love at Thirty-two Degrees,” because it fits so well with the theme of science and poetry. Oh! Maybe I can honor Popova with a blog post. Maybe this will be it. 

In preparation to hear them speak, I listened to numerous podcast interviews and two audiobooks: Lightman’s Einstein’s Dream and Popova’s Figuring. Lightman’s book reminded me of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I listened to the audio book while deep cleaning at the bed-and-breakfast where I’m working for the summer. I plan to read a physical copy soon, because it was so rich and poetic and deserves a slower read. 

I’m only halfway through Popova’s Figuring, but in an interview with Krista Tippett, Popova said a few things that I want to hold in my awareness: “I think a lot about this relationship between cynicism and hope. Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, and hope without critical thinking is naivete, and I try to live in this place between the two and try to build a life there, because finding fault and feeling hopeless about improving your situation produces resignation, of which cynicism is a symptom and against which it is this futile self-protection mechanism, but on the other hand, believing blindly that everything will work out just fine also produces a kind of resignation, because we have no motive to apply ourselves toward making things better, and I think in order to survive both as individuals and as a civilization, but especially in order to thrive, we need to bridge critical thinking with hope.” 

And in an interview on the podcast Where Shall We Meet, she described so beautifully what is true in my experience: “Whatever quickening is in me on any given day that makes it difficult to bear my life, I try to find some consolation, some guidance, some comfort… with writing…..Somewhere along the way I recognized that it is in writing that I best comprehend reality, that I best process my own mind and also what I don’t understand outside of it. Writing is a clarifying force for me.” 

Very grateful for Popova and her work, and since this is still a blog about poetry, I'm pleased I can share one of Popova’s poems: 

“Spell Against Indifference” 

The rain falls and falls 

cool, bottomless, and prehistoric 

falls like night – 

 not an ablution 

not a baptism 

just a small reason 

to remember

all we know of Heaven 

to remember 

we are still here 

with our love songs and our wars, 

our space telescopes and our table 

tennis. 

Here too 

in the wet grass 

half a shell 

of a robin’s egg 

shimmers 

blue as a newborn star 

fragile as a world.