“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most beautiful letter. Walt Whitman found in trees a model of existential authenticity. Hermann Hesse saw them as the wisest of teachers. Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for her noble work of planting trees as resistance and empowerment.

But trees are much more than what they are to us, or for us, or in relation to us. They are relational miracles all their own, entangled in complex, symbiotic webs of interbeing, constantly communicating with one another through chemical signals dispatched along the fungal networks that live in their roots — an invisible, astonishing underworld only recently discovered, thanks to the work of Canadian forest ecologist Suzanne Simard.

In this lovely short animation from TED-Ed and animator Avi Ofer, Camille Defrenne — one of Simard’s doctoral students at the University of British Columbia, studying how the interaction and architecture of root systems relate to forest dynamics and climate change — synthesizes the fascinating, almost otherworldly findings of Simard’s lab:

Simard, whose research was foundational to German forester Peter Wohlleben’s wildly popular book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, discusses her work and the improbable path that led her to it in her wonderful full-length TED talk:

Yes, trees are the foundation of forests, but a forest is much more than what you see… Underground there is this other world — a world of infinite biological pathways that connect trees and allow them to communicate and allow the forest to behave as though it’s a single organism. It might remind you of a sort of intelligence.

Complement with a wondrous picture-book about the forest, Annie Dillard on how mangrove trees illuminate the human search for meaning, and biologist David Haskell on what a dozen of the world’s most unusual trees taught him about the art of relationship, then revisit three other lovely animations by Avi Ofer: Neil Gaiman’s existentialist dream (also involving trees) narrated by Amanda Palmer; Jane Goodall on her remarkable life-story; and philosopher Skye Clearly on why we love.

“What is art, / But life upon the larger scale, the higher / … Art’s life, — and where we live, we suffer and toil,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in her epoch-making 1856 epic novel in blank verse, Aurora Leigh — arguably the first far-reaching literary manifesto for women’s right to autonomy in art and life, and for the indivisibility of the two in any artist’s body of work.

More than a century and a half later, Amanda Palmer — an artist of uncommon courage in making the arena of toil and suffering a wellspring of art, a kind of punk philosopher and poet for our own era (and my dear friend) — articulates that indivisibility with her signature fusion of vulnerability and steampunk-spiked grit in the introduction to There Will Be No Intermission — the gorgeous self-published, audience-funded, vinyl-sized artbook companion to her record of the same title, featuring surreal, fairy-tale photographs by Kahn & Selesnick, song lyrics, and Palmer’s autobiographical essays exploring the rawest life-material of art: love, loss, abortion, mothering as a working artist, the moral and spiritual collapse of one’s homeland, what it means to really show up for a friend in need, how to find a sliver of sanity in the insanest, most insaning times.

With a nod to John Lennon’s famous words, Palmer writes in the introduction:

Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. And for an artist, art is what happens when you let your bizarre, unbidden, unpredictable life steer you into creating things that you weren’t expecting to make.

Art is what happens if you’re able to hold fast — with one angry, trembling hand — to your art-mirror, the one that reflects you, your trials, your thoughts, your audience, your insights, your attempts to try to figure out and express What It All Might Fucking Mean. In that art-mirror, all of the blurry, stinkingly-similar self-portraits you have ever drawn of yourself merge into one constantly-shifting image — you — and, as an artist, you gaze into it and alternate between being horrified and fascinated with this image as you stumble down the un-illuminated road of Planlessness.

In a sentiment evocative of that arresting line from Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Life While-You-Wait” — “…ill-prepared for the privilege of living…” — she adds:

In your other hand, you try to hang onto Real Life. You clutch a wailing baby and an overstuffed suitcase and a copy of The New York Times that you haven’t had time to read (because, dammit, you’re a Good Citizen and Must Be Informed) and a pot of burning rice and a cell phone that is buzzing with unbidden text messages: your friend is dying, your Facebook account has been hacked, your pregnancy must be terminated, your chickens have been slaughtered by coyotes in the night, your marriage is collapsing, your connecting flight has been cancelled, your ex just shot himself in the head, the right wing has read your stupid blog-poem about the Boston bomber and is emailing murder threats, the fetus you’re finally happy about hosting may or may not be deformed, and your mother is pissed you haven’t called in so long.

What, then, does the life-assailed artist do to go on making art, to go on living? She does in the private realm the selfsame thing she must do in public in order to call herself an artist, which Toni Morrison articulated exquisitely in her timeless meditation on the artist’s task in trying times: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear.” Inverting the direction of responsibility to the inner world, where all capacity for outward action invariably begins, Palmer writes:

You read the text messages in one hand while trying to hold your well-polished but increasingly heavy and irritating art-mirror in the other, with a growing sense of resentful detachment — as if the text messages are somebody else’s newsfeed, as if the art-mirror is a heavy curse that you never asked to carry in the first place.

And you keep running down the road. If you’re lucky, you don’t drop the mirror. Sometimes you look at the mirror and you’re like: Why the fuck am I carrying you when I have all this other shit to carry? And sometimes you drop the mirror in exhaustion and fall to your knees. And you drop the suitcase, and the child, and the phone, and the pot of burned rice, and you simply have a cry, knowing that you’re just too goddamn tired to do life, much less make any artful sense out of what’s happening.

Then you get up and start running again.

Complement this portion of There Will Be No Intermission, which contains many more raw-hearted meditations on art and life, with Courtney Martin and Wendy MacNaughton’s magnificent illustrated manifesto for creative resilience in hard times and E.E. Cummings on the courage to be yourself, then revisit Amanda Palmer’s haunting reading of Cummings’s “Humanity i love you” and “The Hubble Photographs” by Adrienne Rich — another artist of unassailable truth-telling bravery, another poet laureate of the tenacity of the human spirit.

When Einstein radicalized science with his general theory of relativity, the fulcrum of which shifted our understanding of reality more profoundly than anything since the Copernican reordering of the universe, he had made several daring leaps of the informed imagination to demonstrate that space and time are interwoven into a single entity — the foundational fabric of the universe — and that both are not static absolutes, as it was believed for millennia, but dynamical quantities responsive to the energy and matter in the universe.

But Einstein’s boldest leap remains obscured by his theory’s name. At a time when other scientists believed that the speed of light was variable, Einstein took it as a fixed limit of nature and made it the absolute non-negotiable around which all other variables and parameters enfolded. Only in doing so — against every common-sense intuition — was he able to arrive at the relative nature of space and time, from which followed other previously unfathomed revelations: that gravity is a force caused by spacetime, that the universe is expanding, that black holes exist, that time ends in a singularity. Relativity was thus built upon this one absolute — a supreme testament to the generative power of limits, of deliberate constraints as a catalyst for creative breakthrough, consonant with Kierkegaard’s insistence that “the more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.”

That is what the Canadian astronomer, poet, and tragic genius Rebecca Elson (January 2, 1960–May 19, 1999) celebrates in a spare, stunning poem titled “Explaining Relativity,” found in her sole poetry collection, A Responsibility to Awe (public library). Elson — who made major contributions to the understanding of galaxy formation, dark matter, and how stars are born, live, and die — died at only thirty-nine, leaving behind fifty-six scientific papers and this one slender, splendid book of poetry.

Rebecca Elson, 1987

At the third annual Universe in Verse, theoretical cosmologist and jazz saxophonist Stephon Alexander — who belongs to Elson’s rare species of genius with immense scientific talent paralleled by a commensurate talent in an art — brought the poem to life, with a lovely prefatory reflection on his own improbable path, from the black magic tradition of his Aruban high priestess grandmother to his dual calling as a scientist and an artist.

EXPLAINING RELATIVITY
by Rebecca Elson

Forget the clatter of ballistics,
The monologue of falling stones,
The sharp vectors
And the stiff numbered grids.

It’s so much more a thing of pliancy, persuasion,
Where space might cup itself around a planet
Like your palm around a stone,

Where you, yourself the planet,
Caught up in some geodesic dream,
Might wake to feel it enfold your weight
And know there is, in fact, no falling.

It is this, and the existence of limits.

Complement with Regina Spektor reading Elson’s “Theories of Everything,” then revisit other highlights from The Universe in Verse: U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith reading her ode to the Hubble Space Telescope, astrophysicist Janna Levin reading Maya Angelou’s cosmic clarion call to humanity, Amanda Palmer reading Neil Gaiman’s tribute to Rachel Carson, poet Marie Howe reading her stirring homage to Stephen Hawking, and Rosanne Cash reading Adrienne Rich’s tribute to Marie Curie.