To make anything — a photograph, a theorem, a poem — is to toss a handful of wildflower seeds into the wind, knowing neither the type of soil they will land in, nor the location of the landscape, nor the type of flowers that will bloom. Sometimes, oftentimes, the seeds come abloom generations or civilizations later, in minds many disciplines or cultures or experiences apart. (For, lest we forget, all that survives of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.)

In the spring of 2018, shortly after Stephen Hawking returned his borrowed stardust to the cosmos, poet Marie Howe composed a poem inspired by his life’s work, a stunning poem about our cosmic inter-belonging, for the second Universe in Verse — the annual celebration of science through poetry I host at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. She titled it “Singularity (after Stephen Hawking)” and premiered it before a rapt audience of a thousand people suspended in wonder. The bit-blown wind then carried it to thousands more online. It has since came alive anew in a consummate animated short film savored by tens of thousands more.

In the spring of 2020, Howe’s poem planted its seed in the fertile mind of the young Kentucky-born, Brooklyn-based poet Marissa Davis and came abloom in a stunning poem of her own, which she titled “Singularity (after Marie Howe)” and premiered in poem-a-day — the lifeline of a newsletter by the Academy of American Poets.

I was so taken with the sweep and splendor of Davis’s quiet cataclysm of a poem that I invited her to read it for Brain Pickings, which she kindly did — a lovely voice that surprised and invigorated me with its audible youth, only amplifying the poem’s atmosphere of possibility and its wondrous, defiant commitment neither to look away from a broken reality nor to cease cherishing this astonishing world in its brokenness.

SINGULARITY
by Marissa Davis
              (after Marie Howe)

in the wordless beginning
iguana & myrrh
magma & reef              ghost moth
& the cordyceps tickling its nerves
& cedar & archipelago & anemone
dodo bird & cardinal waiting for its red
ocean salt & crude oil              now black
muck now most naïve fumbling plankton
every egg clutched in the copycat soft
of me unwomaned unraced
unsexed              as the ecstatic prokaryote
that would rage my uncle’s blood
or the bacterium that will widow
your eldest daughter’s eldest son
my uncle, her son              our mammoth sun
& her uncountable siblings              & dust mite & peat
apatosaurus & nile river
& maple green & nude & chill-blushed &
yeasty keratined bug-gutted i & you
spleen & femur seven-year refreshed
seven-year shedding & taking & being this dust
& my children & your children
& their children & the children
of the black bears & gladiolus & pink florida grapefruit
here not allied but the same              perpetual breath
held fast to each other as each other’s own skin
cold-dormant & rotting & birthing & being born
in the olympus              of the smallest
possible once before once

Relish more of Davis’s poetry in her chapbook My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak and join me in supporting the life-giving work of the Academy of American Poets, offering stage and succor to young poets like Davis, then revisit the splendid seed that inspired this miraculous blossom.

“Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills,” Leo Tolstoy wrote to Mahatma Gandhi in the stirring correspondence that would unspool over four decades until Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. By then, Gandhi had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times, including days before his death. That year, the Nobel Committee awarded all other disciplines except the Peace Prize, for which they found “no suitable living candidate.”

On December 10, 1948 — the day of the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm — the United Nations General Assembly gathered in Paris to adopt the most visionary, idealistic, and poetic document ever composed: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A pioneering effort to standardize the raising of conscience, kindness, and reason above self-interest and the hunger for power, it was the culmination of two years of systematic refinement by a global drafting committee of eight men from five continents, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11, 1884–November 7, 1962), with her floral dresses and her “spine as stiff as the steel girder of a skyscraper.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (Library of Congress)

Roosevelt’s nomination as a U.N. delegate had had to pass through the United States Senate for approval, where she suspected certain conservative Senators would disapprove — “because of my attitude toward social problems,” she later reflected, “and especially youth problems.” But her nomination was heartily approved — only one Senator voted against her, citing her troublesome devotion to racial equality.

Eleanor Roosevelt arriving at the opening of the Washington labor canteen. (Library of Congress)

Shortly before her U.N. nomination and shortly after the end of WWII, Roosevelt — another indefensible blind spot in the Nobel Commission’s dispensation of the Peace Prize — had lost her husband. In the thick of her bereavement, she wrote in her daybook:

When you have lived for a long time in close contact with the loss and grief which today pervades the world, any personal sorrow seems to be lost in the general sadness of humanity.

She coped by pouring her indefatigable energy into drafting this buoyant document aimed at protecting human beings from the sorrows they inflict upon one another. Later, she would look back on her life with the unwavering conviction that “in the long run there is no more liberating, no more exhilarating experience than to determine one’s position, state it bravely, and then act boldly.” Now, she was tasked with creating the blueprint for bold action toward justice, contoured with bravely stated words.

She insisted that the document be adopted as a declaration rather than as a treaty, hoping this would confer upon it the inspiriting power to do for the world what the Declaration of Independence had done for her homeland. And so it did: Despite the abiding challenge of our species — the unhandsome fact that there is no universal utopia and that all utopias are built on someone’s subjugation-bent back — the document that emerged became a beacon of justice for generations to come, founded upon the conviction that a “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” radiating Maya Angelou’s stunning lyric insistence that “we are the possible, we are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world.”

Eleanor Roosevelt with the English text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1949. (FDR Presidential Library & Museum)

Translated into more than 500 languages, making it the world’s most translated document, the UDHR went on to shape myriad national and international laws, inspire the constitutions of various newborn countries, and furnish the legal definitions of “fundamental freedoms” and “human rights.” Buried into the language of the document is also a landmark unsexing of man as the universal pronoun (though it would take many more decades to seep into culture) — the trailblazing Indian activist, writer, and feminist Hansa Jivraj Mehta suggested replacing “all men are equal” with “all are equal.”

Today, as we come to see ourselves as Angelou saw us — creatures “whose hands can strike with such abandon that in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness” — some of the articles in the declaration read both as chilling indictments of where we have fallen short and as a defiantly aspirational blueprint for where we can and must go as we rise to our highest human potential.

Article 3: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 5: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Two generations after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, composer Max Richter honors its legacy and reimagines its spirit for a world more diverse and equitable than even the document’s idealistic creators imagined. (I have noted elsewhere that even the farthest seers can’t bend their gaze beyond their era’s horizon of possibility; but the horizon shifts with each incremental revolution as the human mind peers outward to take in nature, then turns inward to question its own givens.)

In a stunning piece titled “All Human Beings,” part of his record Voices — a soulful sonic landscape of thought and feeling, powerfully transportive yet grounding, a decade in the making — Richter builds a sonic bower of piano, violin, soprano, and choir around a 1949 recording of Eleanor Roosevelt reading the UDHR. It begins with Roosevelt’s voice, then passes the generational and cultural baton to Kiki Layne, who continues reading in English before morphing into a crowdsourced choral reading in multiple languages by human beings all over the world.

Max Richter (Photograph: Mike Terry)

Richter reflects on the project:

I like the idea of a piece of music as a place to think, and it is clear we all have some thinking to do at the moment. We live in a hugely challenging time and, looking around at the world we have made, it’s easy to feel hopeless or angry. But, just as the problems we face are of our own making, so their solutions are within our reach, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is something that offers us a way forward. Although it isn’t a perfect document, the declaration does represent an inspiring vision for the possibility of better and kinder world.

Breathing another layer of life into Richter’s masterpiece is this cinematic adaptation by artist Yulia Mahr:

Complement with a timeless, increasingly timely vision for how to heal an ailing and divided world from the Russell-Einstein Manifesto — another visionary document composed seven years after the UDHR — then revisit Richter’s previous masterpiece, Three Worlds, bringing Virginia Woolf’s most beloved works to sonic life.

“Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the great Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote in her tiny, tremendous masterpiece The Living Mountain. A couple of mountain ranges south, a century and a half earlier, the great Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21, 1772–July 25, 1834) captured the power of that interpenetration in a stunning letter, later included in The Complete Essays, Lectures & Letters of S. T. Coleridge (public library).

The letter, composed three days before his twenty-eighth birthday, begins with a terrifying, transcendent encounter with the grandeur of nature and ends with a humbling encounter with human nature — with the grandeur of the human spirit, its the capacity for dignity and generosity no matter one’s material circumstances.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Nearly a century before the young Van Gogh contemplated the enchantment of storms in nature and human nature while living in poverty in the Hague, the young Coleridge writes to his closest friend from the English Lake District on October 18, 1800:

Our mountains northward end in the mountain Carrock — one huge, steep, enormous bulk of stones, desolately variegated with the heath plant; at its foot runs the river Calder, and a narrow vale between it and the mountain Bowscale, so narrow, that in its greatest width it is not more than a furlong. But that narrow vale is so green, so beautiful, there are moods in which a man might weep to look at it. On this mountain Carrock, at the summit of which are the remains of a vast Druid circle of stones, I was wandering, when a thick cloud came on, and wrapped me in such darkness that I could not see ten yards before me, and with the cloud a storm of wind and hail, the like of which I had never before seen and felt. At the very summit is a cone of stones, built by the shepherds, and called the Carrock Man. Such cones are on the tops of almost all our mountains, and they are all called men. At the bottom of the Carrock Man I seated myself for shelter, but the wind became so fearful and tyrannous, that I was apprehensive some of the stones might topple down upon me, so I groped my way farther down and came to three rocks, placed on this wise ¹ / ₃ \ ² each one supported by the other like a child’s house of cards, and in the hollow and screen which they made I sate for a long while sheltered, as if I had been in my own study in which I am now writing: there I sate with a total feeling worshipping the power and “eternal link” of energy.

Double rainbow from Les phénomènes de la physique, 1868. Available as a print and face mask.

In a passage evocative of Oliver Sacks’s near-death experience in a Norwegian fjord, Coleridge recounts nature’s sudden turn of temper — a turn from terror to transcendence, which then leads him to an unexpected encounter with the most transcendent qualities of human nature:

The darkness vanished as by enchantment; far off, far, far off to the south, the mountains of Glaramara and Great Gable and their family appeared distinct, in deepest, sablest blue. I rose, and behind me was a rainbow bright as the brightest. I descended by the side of a torrent, and passed, or rather crawled (for I was forced to descend on all fours), by many a naked waterfall, till, fatigued and hungry (and with a finger almost broken, and which remains swelled to the size of two fingers), I reached the narrow vale, and the single house nestled in ash and sycamores. I entered to claim the universal hospitality of this country; but instead of the life and comfort usual in these lonely houses, I saw dirt, and every appearance of misery — a pale woman sitting by a peat fire. I asked her for bread and milk, and she sent a small child to fetch it, but did not rise herself. I eat very heartily of the black, sour bread, and drank a bowl of milk, and asked her to permit me to pay her. “Nay,” says she, “we are not so scant as that — you are right welcome.”