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Retired since 2012.
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When reality fissures along the fault line of our expectations and the unwelcome happens — a death, an abandonment, a promise broken, a kindness withheld — we tend to cope in one of two ways: We question our own sanity, assuming the outside world coherent and our response a form of madness; or we assume ourselves sane and accuse the external — the other person, the situation, the world — of madness. Both are stories we tell ourselves about what is true, how things are, and how things should be. Like all storytelling, both are works of the imagination.
It always takes imagination to understand what is real, for in the human sphere reality is a collaborative condition. It takes imagination to understand what it is like to be anybody else, what the other’s reality might be in the situation we share, and it takes imagination to consider what may live in our blind spots.
G.K. Chesterton (May 29, 1874–June 14, 1936), who thought deeply and originally about the meaning of life, frames these two storytelling responses to reality and the problem of sanity as the fairy tale and the novel. In a fragment from his essay collection Tremendous Trifles (public library | free ebook), he writes:
Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is — what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is — what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.
But while it always takes imagination to understand what is real, it also takes imagination to see beyond the models of reality handed down to us by the world as we know it. (“Everything is in an attitude of mind,” Chesterton conceded.) Perhaps there is a third way beyond this dualism, one that recognizes consciousness as something beyond sanity and madness, one in which being a hero of one’s own life is not a battle between reality and sanity, between self and other, but a matter of peaceful accord with the cosmos, a cosmos capable of consciousness.
Perhaps that is the way of the poem. Perhaps the best way to face reality — especially when it betrays our hopes and expectations — is by being a living poem. “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” Whitman wrote in his timeless advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life, “and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” A poem is not a captive of narrative, has no need for resolution, is not a message but an opening. A poem makes its own meaning.
Complement with Nobel-winning poet Wisława Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear, then revisit Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Maripedia is an online database of hundreds of print patterns that Marimekko has used in their products since the 1940s. You can browse by decade, designer, or style…or you can search by image. That’s right, just upload an image of the pattern on your pillowcase or dress and it’ll tell you who designed it and when.
Also, just take a look at these patterns:
Endless design and color palette inspiration. (via @presentcorrect.bsky.social)
Tags: color · design · Marimekko
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“It is incredible that such an act can take place in our country.” — Donald Trump, writing on Truth Social after an attempt on his life, 7/13/24
It is a sad time in American history, folks. A crazed gunman attempted to assassinate me, Donald Trump, in an act of hatred and violence that sits in stark contrast with the political era of hatred and violence I have single-handedly created.
As a politician who’s built his entire appeal around saying deeply hateful things about anyone who opposes me, the deep-seated hatred we saw on display last Saturday evening is truly unimaginable. As a person who’s wished abhorrent violence upon reporters, protesters, political adversaries, shoplifters, and people who I just don’t like, the abhorrent violence of this weekend’s rally is difficult to comprehend.
At my public rallies, I’ve always done my best to rile up disaffected voters with needlessly violent rhetoric. So, imagine my shock when a disaffected voter showed up at one of my public rallies and committed a needless act of violence. Clearly, the temperature in this country has gotten way too high, which comes as a complete surprise to me, someone who has deliberately turned up the temperature for easy media coverage, meager political gains, and often just for fun.
Make no mistake, America, I do not want to live in a country where leaders regularly face death threats. That’s why I’ve spent nearly ten years helping to create a world where my supporters regularly send death threats to any Republican who criticizes me, call for my former running mate to be lynched, and storm the Capitol with the intention of kidnapping senators.
It’s just so sad to see violent political plots become downplayed and even legitimized, especially after I downplayed and legitimized the violent political plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. It’s simply heartbreaking to see that all the time and energy you’ve put into refusing to denounce hate groups who engage in voter intimidation and violence on your behalf has resulted in more widespread voter intimidation and violence.
Assassination attempts like the one that happened to me need to be firmly condemned and treated with complete seriousness by both sides of the political aisle. Just like when I half-heartedly condemned with complete unseriousness the assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi after publicly mocking her about it in the middle of a rant about Democrats turning our cities into war-torn hellholes.
At this critical moment, my fellow Americans, we must come together and trust in our democracy—the same democracy I’ve repeatedly claimed is an illegitimate sham you shouldn’t trust and very recently tried to violently overthrow. We must stand united with the same Democrats I’ve tirelessly portrayed as corrupt, subhuman boogeymen actively trying to turn our country into a crime-ridden dystopia. And we must never tolerate the kinds of violence that I openly glorify on social media and have credibly been the direct cause of at least fifty-four times.
Because, at the end of the day, America is not about shooting at a presidential candidate. America is about being a presidential candidate and saying you could probably shoot people with absolutely zero consequences.
Clouds drift ephemeral across the dome of this world, carrying eternity — condensing molecules that animated the first breath of life, coursing with electric charges that will power the last thought.
To me, a cloud will always be a spell against indifference — a little bloom of wonder to remind us that everything changes yet everything holds.
Two centuries after the amateur meteorologist Luke Howard classified the clouds with Goethe’s aid and two generations after Rachel Carson composed her lyrical serenade to the science of the sky, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of Cloud Appreciation Society (of which I am a pin-wearing member), and artist William Grill bring us Cloudspotting for Beginners (public library) — an illustrated field guide to the science and splendor of the sky, and an ode to the human longing for pattern, for order, for an organizing principle that gives coherence to the chaos of life.
It can be hard to give an artistic interpretation of something so naturally beguiling, so replete with raw wonder, but under Grill’s color pencil, clouds take on an even more whimsical quality, gentle as a child’s song, unhurried as a daydream.
With the plain-worded playfulness of a children’s book and the concise authority of an encyclopedia, the book covers the ten main cloud types — from the rough-hewn patchwork of Stratocumulus, commonest because it forms over the oceans that cover most of our planet’s surface, to Cirrocumulus, the rarest cloud of all and the most ephemeral.
Beyond the main ten, there is the subgroup of special cloud types, from the aerial waves of Undulatus to the spaceship of Lenticularis.
Among them is a touching triumph of citizen science — Asperitas, a cloud species identified and named by members of the Cloud Appreciation Society in 2009 and, with Pretor-Pinney’s advocacy, officially affirmed by the World Meteorological Organization in 2017.
Opening beyond the cloud types is a cabinet of atmospheric curiosities — cloud iridescence, sundogs (which inspired Hilma af Klint), glories (which were central to the discovery of cosmic rays), clouds on other planets, thunder and lightning on our own, crepuscular rays.
Pretor-Pinney details one of the great dramas of this world, which Coleridge saw as a singular portal to the soul:
Inside a storm cloud, the ice crystals bump into one another as they are blown around by violent air currents. Each time hail and ice crystals collide, the larger pieces of ice pick up negative electric charge from smaller ones, which instead become positively charged. This electric charge is like the one you feel when you rub a balloon.
The larger, heavier pieces of ice fall through the cloud’s rising air currents toward its base while the smaller, lighter ice crystals are wafted up toward the top. This is how separate parts of the Cumulonimbus become negatively and positively charged. Eventually, a massive current of electricity in the form of a lightning bolt can shoot through the sky to even out the charge again. Each bolt makes the air much hotter than the surface of the Sun, causing it to expand explosively, which we hear as the crash and boom of thunder.
Like all processes and phenomena of nature, clouds are rife with metaphors for human life. (Coleridge himself used to frequent London’s science lectures, including Luke Howard’s, hunting for metaphors to backbone his poems.) With an eye to the astonishing fact that the average Cumulus weighs as much as eighty elephants, Pretor-Pinney considers how a cloud, composed of myriad small particles known as cloudlets, stays afloat: “A cloud stays up because it’s not one big thing but a group of tiny, tiny things,” he writes, which strikes me as an apt metaphor for how diversity and multiplicity ensure the buoyancy of any society.
Couple Cloudspotting for Beginners with 19th-century Norwegian artist Kund Baade’s haunting cloudscapes, then revisit poet Mark Strand’s love letter to the clouds and the story of how they got their names.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Can Kovacs come out to play? Can Kovacs come out to play? Can he? Can he, please? Can he? Please! Can he?
Irritating, right?
Well…………not so far.
I’ve heard it said that Conan Doyle got truly fed up with people asking him to bring back Sherlock Holmes. Don’t know if it’s true, apocryphal, or somewhere in between. All I can say is that if it is true, he must have had way more fans and way more success than I yet do (and been considerably grumpier too). I get asked about another Kovacs book quite regularly, but all I take from it is the implied compliment of work well done. I mean, if my local gelateria made a shit flavour gelato, it seems unlikely they’d have a queue of people asking them when they were going to make some more. (Personally, I’m always checking in with them about the Amarena Cherry). You make something and people keep asking you to make more, you have to figure you did something right somewhere.
That said, your chances of getting any more Kovacs are about the same as me giving up Amarena Cherry gelato. Barring some emergency health issue, sorry guys, just don’t see it happening.
What’s triggered this? Well, someone (called Neil) asked under a previous post, and the way they phrased it was, I think, quite interesting.
Is there any chance, Neil asked, you will finish Kovacs’ story with a 4th book?
Here’s the thing. I have always felt that the Kovacs arc was finished with Woken Furies.
Altered Carbon sees Kovacs pretty much static in terms of character. What changes is his set of relationships with the other characters – he moves from detached and cynical to a weary kind of understanding, which enables him to do – approximately – the right thing by each person as he sees it. Broken Angels takes him a step lower. It’s a book about nothing but survival. Even the few moral judgements he makes in Altered Carbon are abandoned in favour of an understanding that everyone in this situation, himself included, is culpable, and all you can hope for is to dodge the Fates, make it out alive, plus maybe carry a couple of chosen companions out with you. In sheer moral terms, Angels marks a textbook example of Hollywood End of Act 2 nadir.
Woken Furies finds Kovacs at that same nadir still – all he has is his Envoy conditioning and an implacable lust for vengeance. The book takes him from that lowest ebb to a confrontation with arguably his own worst enemy, himself, which he wins. Furies leaves Kovacs with the closest thing he’s ever going to have to peace – a Cause, a reason to live, and something approaching Hope. That’s where I always intended to leave him.
I mean, sure, you could tell further stories about the man – he’s still alive, after all, pretty near indestructible with it, in fact! – but what would they be?
Story of the new Quellist revolution? I know that a lot of people expected me to deliver some kind of neat homily to Guevara-esque political change, in which Kovacs and the Quellists cast down the First Families , take Harlan’s World for their own, and a beautiful new day dawns for Quellist (read Socialist) Humanity.
But anyone who’s read my stuff with attention will know I don’t believe in that kind of thing – and reflecting this, neither does Kovacs or, really , even Quell herself! Quellcrist Falconer is an intensely conflicted individual. She barely had faith in her own political movement first time around, and is now carrying a huge weight of guilt for the way things turned out last time. There’s no doubt at the end of Woken Furies that the Quellists will fight. But whether they have any hope of achieving their aims, or whether the cure will be worse than the disease is anybody’s guess. Kovacs is, in any case, only aboard on the basis of It’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive, let’s see how this goes, and even then his motives are at best ambiguous, with a strong admixture of the personal.
It is, of course, a truism that revolutions tend to deliver as many problems as they solve, and they habitually consume their own. That doesn’t make them bad stories, of course, there is all of human life in such a story. I suppose I could write a cast-of-thousands epic revolutionary space opera along those lines – or rather, someone like Kim Stanley Robinson or Kevin J Anderson could. But I’ve never been drawn to stories at that scale. The Kovacs books were each deeply intimate and deliberately small scale noir in tone – the story of one man, and a handful of involved secondary characters, dealing with the shit that societal structure throws their way. Even if I were to ever write a fourth book, it would have to somehow devolve back to that level, and wouldn’t be any kind of “completion” exercise.
Worse still, I have the horrible suspicion that such a book would be doomed to disappoint. It’s been twenty years since I wrote Woken Furies. A lot has changed in the interim, for me, for my readers, for the whole planet. Going back would feel almost like trying to steal something from my twenty years younger self – at best a kind of Tie-in Fiction effort, at worst, simple plagiarism. And readers are incredibly sensitive to such currents in writing – I think they would likely detect that discomfort in the work straight off and react accordingly. Any effort to ape the original books would be seen as recycled comfort zone product (goddamn it, even Thin Air got accused of that, and it wasn’t even in the Kovacs universe!), and any attempt to take the franchise somewhere genuinely different likely wouldn’t scratch the same itch, in me or in the readership.
Like the cliche says – you take the bucket to the well one too many times…….
I mean – while we’re on cliches – Never Say Never Again, right?
But for now that bucket is staying right up on the shelf. I’ll see you all at the well, right enough, but while my receptacles may have some clear similarities in design, they will not be that one.
The post Not Taking the Bucket to the Well again is a Revolutionary Act appeared first on Richard K. Morgan.
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