Over morning coffee, I read Science Daily, scanning the titles as if they were Tinder profiles. What do I desire today, I ask, because my appetite for the world is an erotic force that can be kindled by a word or phrase. “Cells collectively decide,” I read. What is decision if not a product of cognitive process? Then how can a cell have a cognitive process? Yet the cells are engaged in “a process of active perception.” They choose a leader, which becomes the “tip cell” that grows long finger-like protrusions to sense its way into the environment. I’m stunned by the pervasiveness of intelligence right down to the tip cells, the filopodia, of blood vessels in zebrafish embryos. That is the site of this research conducted at the Cellular Adaptive Behavior Laboratory at King’s College, London. This news story is science, but to me such findings feel like poetry. They open a field of contemplation that is not satisfied by empirical evidence. Hence my confusion, hence my inspiration.
Think of the cellular rearrangements that occurred in each of us for the zygotes that made us to sort themselves out into arms and legs, heart and brain, thought and feeling, memory and imagination. Think about the remarkable fact that I have a sense of self, though it is nothing more than the interplay of neurons—“100 billion wisps of jelly,” neurologist V. S. Ramachandran dubs the brain—that constitute my own intimate self.
Science generates new knowledge, its method based upon verifiable evidence. In the face of the urgency of our times and the erosion of evidence-based thinking, I’ve been increasingly engaged with how new relationships between science and art are emerging to fill the gap between fact and imagination, to tell stories of wonder and terror in the face of the sixth great extinction, to seek stories of being stupefied by cell and star formation, to discover stories of how the mind reaches for understanding across vast spans of the unknown and takes on challenges that seem intractable.
Science contributes to aesthetic experience. The universe becomes more beautiful after Galileo enhances our ability to see it with his telescope. The elephant is more beautiful after we understand that it experiences grief and communicates with low-frequency vocalizations across long distances. Aesthetic experience enhances science communication. It seems no accident that Picasso and Braque break up the picture plane just as physics begins to break physical reality down into smaller and stranger parts. And Andy Goldsworthy’s ephemeral landscape art brings the flow and fugitive quality of nature into aesthetic form. Aesthetic experience explores new language for bringing together ways of knowing; questions what we know and how we know it; confesses our failures and ignorance and quest for healing; educates our empathy; and works magpie-like to find the songs in science. Kim Stanley Robinson, our great science-savvy novelist, says that it is the role of the arts and humanities to aim science. How brazen for a poet to think about “aiming” science.
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I spent six months of my pandemic isolation slowly reading Anna Karenina. It was an experience so rich that some days I’d read three pages and stop, wanting to prolong my sojourn in Tolstoy’s mind. I made a long stop twenty pages from the end. Anna is gone, her passion resulting in such censure that she chooses death over a life of degradation. Vronsky’s attentions are already elsewhere, his passion drifting from hot to cold and on to the next hot thing—whether woman or war. Levin, the stand-in for Tolstoy, is portrayed as a man who lives intimate with the land and therefore understands deeper truths and reflects upon his contradictions. He cannot stop turning and turning again the thought of his existence as a mere bubble in time—fragile and beautiful—and soon to burst into nothing. He has lost his faith and yet what remains after God and Church are gone does not console. His mind rides the mobius strip of uncertainty that is the human condition. Levin had found comfort among the muzhiks who worked haying his land, but he knew he was not one of them—knew his authority over their lives, their work, meant even his keen interest in his apiary was provisional. All subject to his reliance on those who did not share his advantages. All subject to the bursting of the bubble that is life. How could one not ask: What am I? Why am I here? Why must I go? He knows most people do not dwell on this destabilizing truth, yet it is his nature—perhaps something deep in his cells that rises to consciousness and will not be denied. As profound and tragic as the love story is in the novel, it is Levin who stays with me, that contemplative man drawn to generative forces.
I have been an avid reader since childhood, and I have never ceased to be astonished at how ink on a page can conjure up a world and inner lives and a feeling for the age in which an author lives, no matter how remote from my own. How a book can suspend me in time, transport me in space, make me feel for the inner conflicts of characters who have never really existed and yet who serve as stand-ins for ourselves and our loved ones and our adversaries.
We are living in the age of science. It generates a wealth of new knowledge about how we came to be and upon what conditions our lives depend. How do we speak of the feelings and thought experiments that new findings in science induce in us, as when the filopodia of embryonic zebrafish cells appear to do just what my brain does as I pick my way down the blank page, sensing my way into a form? How do we speak of the technological marvel of the James Webb Space Telescope, the work of twenty thousand people in fourteen countries collaborating for over twenty years? How do we speak of the sublime beauty its infrared cameras bring to us from nearly the beginning of time? Is beauty a form of knowledge? The JWST is at once great science, great social experiment, and a workout for the distal imagination—what enables us to see beyond our little moment of self-interest.
So here I stand on the unclaimed territory where art and science are camping out to get to know each other. Call it a community of the curious, this unnamed and unmapped society to which I belong that crosses time and national boundaries in pursuing art, literature, and science as ways of knowing and facing up to the future.
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In my childhood, books brought me joy, new knowledge, corroboration of my fears, the redemptive power of love, and an introduction to astonishment. My books were not only literature: my mother’s original illustrated edition of The Wizard of Oz, Stuart Little, Pinocchio, and the remarkable feminist fable by Wanda Gag, Gone Is Gone. I also had pocket-sized guides to trees and wildflowers, editions that still grace my bookshelves. I am delighted to note that my copy of Trees You Want to Know is marked with my first attempts to write my name (pretty good except that the capital “N” is flipped backwards). I also had a children’s natural history encyclopedia, purchased on a family trip to the American Museum of Natural History, an experience that certainly shaped my religious feelings as a child growing up in a secular family. Religious in the sense of awe inspiring, feeling that I belonged to something mysterious that stirred in me a reverence. Dinosaurs, those monstrous and beautiful beings that stood at the evolutionary portal of my very existence, were among the childhood gods of my godless childhood. I spent hours in daydream gazing at their images on those pages. Literature included art and science for me. These were not disciplines but windows into the larger world.
As a poet and essayist, I’ve never lost that perspective. I find artistic kinship in the Paleolithic. For twenty thousand years our ancestors made cave paintings at Altamira. There are at least ten thousand years between different paintings in the cave, a palimpsest of deer, bison, horses, drawn in charcoal and colored in red ochre on the rock ceilings. To see them, you have to lie on the cave floor. To see them is to be floored by their magnificence. This art is not a brief entertainment by a small number of gifted individuals; it is a deeply embedded cultural practice that recurred over millennia. Art-making was central to human evolution. We have science to tell us this. The paintings have been dated using something called the uranium-thorium method, which determined that the oldest images were painted about thirty-six thousand years ago.
A thumb-sized lion-man chimera carved in mammoth ivory was unearthed from a cave in the Swabian Alps. It dates from about forty-two thousand years ago. It is polished smooth, as if from rubbing, as one would worry a stone held in the pocket. The craftsmanship is refined, precise, the lion standing upright with finely detailed head. The object would have required many hours of carving, an investment of time that speaks of its value to the maker. The lion figure telegraphs the deep human urge to be close to—unified with—the power and mystery of animals. This is the same period during which caves in southern Europe were being transformed into galleries lined with animal images: bison, horse, aurochs, deer, rhinoceros. The drawings were made on cave walls, deep in the earth, drawn by torchlight in the stony dark. The images had to be held in mind while the artist ventured into an underground chamber far from the realm where observations would have occurred. The wild gave rise to the aesthetic imagination.
The drawings represent accurate field observation. In Chauvet Cave, four stout horses lean into their forward motion, heads arched and bowed, as horses do when they run. Their manes are bristly and short, like those of Przewalski horses, most direct descendant of the horses the cave painters would have observed, a species distinct from and predating the domesticated horse. These paintings are not mere approximations of animal presence. They telegraph across thirty thousand years the sense of beauty and inspiriting force that a running herd of horses has on the human imagination. These works may represent a deep sense of belonging in the animal world. Or they may represent the longing that it might be so. Some thinkers (among them the poet Clayton Eshleman) believe the origin of art lies in a dawning awareness of human separation from the animal world and the desire to restore the sense of belonging through acts of creation. The human handprint blown with pigment onto the cave wall speaks of art’s longstanding need to bear the mark of self, the urge to participate in acts of creation: I am the maker.
Perception, attention, discernment of pattern and form, craft—these were the disciplines. The great biologist E. O. Wilson saw the roots of human creativity in the taming of fire. Wild lightning set the savannah on fire. Tamed lightning created the fire circle, around which stories were shared, faces turned toward the light and backs to the night. The stories created community, a shared sense of experience, memory, and purpose. Weakling Homo sapiens, a vulnerable prey animal among Africa’s apex predators, beginning its journey, through fire and story, creativity and community, to reverse that power dynamic, until Homo sapiens became Earth’s apex predator, and now faces the challenge of gentling itself in the wake of its destructive capabilities. What a journey.
As a natural history illustration the cave drawings are precise and accurate. As art are they as good as Remington’s cowboy horses? The question is moot. Art does not operate on the same paradigm of progress that is essential to science, the kind of progress that understands Copernicus is better than Ptolemy in comprehending Earth’s spatial relationship to the sun. Art and science stand in different relationship to history. Picasso is not better than Caravaggio, Alice Neal not better than Mary Cassatt. Each reflects the artist’s unique vision, unrepeatable, within a cultural moment. Both are true.
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When Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt traveled on his five-year expedition to Latin America at the turn of the nineteenth century, he returned with a vision of “the unity of nature.”
He depicted this in his three-by-five-foot “Naturgemälde,” or “painting of nature,” an intricately detailed “microcosm on one page” of his observations after climbing Ecuador’s Chimborazo volcano. It shows a cross-section of the terrain with plants distributed by altitude. To either side are panels detailing temperature, gravity, humidity, blueness of sky. He wrote: “I thought that if my Naturgemälde were capable of suggesting unexpected analogies to those who study its details, it would be capable of speaking to the imagination and providing the pleasure that comes from contemplating a beneficial as well as majestic nature.” Thus, science and aesthetics come together as an ecology of mind in the origins of earth-systems consciousness.
He understood that descriptions of nature affect us depending upon the needs of our feelings. For the contemplative sort, the darkness of forests, the roar of plummeting water, lead to that place of mystery in us that makes life go deep. For the morose, the same scene may lead to a panic at the nearness of the abyss. And for the observer who has gone numb, emotions sequestered into a cavernous mental keep, nature’s magnificence may be merely one more ho-hum moment in a flattened sense of time.
For Humboldt art and science were not separate disciplines—one for knowing and one for feeling—but simply the way his organism experienced the world. He had the patience and discipline to catalog flora and fauna. He had the imaginative capacity to see pattern in natural forms and the irrepressible life force in their profusion. He saw analogues of these observations in his own mind, as it grappled with comprehending the whole of nature. Was he seeking the laws of nature? No. He was seeking the unity of nature and mind, data and imagination, science and aesthetics.
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The earliest great work of literature is the Epic of Gilgamesh, coming out of ancient Mesopotamia around 2100 bce. It’s a hero’s journey, filled with war and revenge and fear of death and the hero’s abiding friendship with Enkidu the Wildman. One of the most compelling moments in literature focuses on Enkidu, “a hairy-bodied” figure, who embodies the natural world in its undomesticated state. His beauty is legend—“the hair on his head like the grain fields of the goddess.” He roams with the herds, grazes with the gazelles, and drinks from rivers with the beasts. He is an eco-terrorist, breaking traps humans set to catch animals. When the gods seek a companion for Gilgamesh, the warrior King of Uruk, they set their sights on Enkidu, thinking only the wild man has strength to match that of the king:
Create his double and let the two contend.
Let stormy heart contend with stormy heart
that peace may come to Uruk once again.
The wily gods employ a woman, a subversive to the dominant paradigm, to seduce Enkidu away from communion with the animals and into alliance with the king. The animals recognize Enkidu’s betrayal, and those creatures with whom he used to visit the watering places now flee from him. But it is the image of the man who visits the watering places with the animals, “whose hearts delight, as his delights, in water,” that stays with me. It is a vision of the biotic community in which the human world has not yet differentiated itself from nature. And that moment of loss, when one sees the price Enkidu must pay for becoming sidekick to the king, the price the civilized world pays for its separation from nature, is a gut punch. It marks a major turning point in human history. The animals no longer welcome us as members of their community. The Wildman has betrayed his origins as kin among the peaceable beasts. A Wildman no longer, Enkidu becomes entangled in humanity’s endless violence and the shared grief of mortality.
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The earliest science is the indigenous knowledge gleaned from local and durational observation of the environment, studying the behavior of prey animals and experimenting with food and medicinal crops. I’m thinking of science as a means to gather data about the material world based on a conjecture (what we might call a hypothesis), to draw conclusions from that data, to discern a pattern in the data from which one can learn things necessary to the survival of one’s community. By this definition I might claim that all sentient creatures are scientists. Their knowledge of their environment advances over the generations, and they apply that knowledge in order to adapt to changing circumstances. Do they make conjectures? They live their conjectures in their bodies. For all of the brilliant advances of our human science in this late capitalist age, we lean precipitously toward planetary peril, our knowledge poorly applied when profit and politics take precedence over survival. Reading the natural world is essential to all beings. We misread the text if we fail to serve our own survival.
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I am no adherent to C. P. Snow’s tired argument of “the intellectual life of the whole of western society being split into two polar groups,” literary intellectuals at one pole and scientists at the other. I would not turn to a poet to develop a vaccine for a deadly virus or to devise methods of geoengineering to reduce the atmospheric carbon that imperils the future of life on Earth. I would not hire a sculptor to build the optical instruments sent into orbit in the L2 zone around the sun to pursue the next chapter in the biography of the universe. But I would call on the poet and sculptor to reflect on matters of meaning and value, to explore the psychological, emotional, and moral consequences of such quests for knowledge.
In my 1998 essay “Poetry and Science: A View from the Divide” I explored how both artist and scientist are misrepresented by reductive stereotypes. “Scientists are seekers of fact; poets are revelers in sensation . . . Scientists are the cold-hearted dissectors of all that is beautiful; poets are the lunatic heirs to pagan forces. We are made to embody the mythic split in Western civilization between the head and the heart. But none of this divided thinking rings true to my experience. I have always been struck by a fundamental similarity between the poet and scientist: both are seeking a language for the unknown.”
When I wrote that essay, I was vexed about how few artists seemed to find inspiration in science and how postmodernism, in its critique of structures of power, often contributed to the denigration of science and objective truth. If science was the voice of the dominant white Western culture, then it was not the voice of marginalized people, people not valued by history. And if science was the voice of fact-based authority, then anti-authoritarians could topple it with “alternative facts.” Both the left and right seemed bent on destabilizing science, when twenty-first-century challenges require superb science literacy. I wanted to have science’s back—comical, I know, considering the relative positions of authority held by poet and scientist in our society.
The distrust of science is hardly a new political stance. Science’s destabilizing effect on the psyche got Galileo into big trouble for challenging the orthodoxy of his day. John Donne, who published “An Anatomy of the World” in 1611, one year after Galileo’s first accounts of work with the telescope appeared, registered the metaphysical consequences for him of the new knowledge placing Earth as a mere outlier to the sun and stars as ten times more numerous. No sense of wonder in the expanding universe for poor John Donne.
The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world’s spent,
When in the planets, and the firmament
They seek so many new . . .
’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone . . .
Mary Shelley brought Prometheus out of antiquity in writing Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, the first science fiction novel, a cautionary tale about the unforeseen negative consequences of scientific experimentation.
But what’s going on today with science denialism seems very different from the ways Donne or Shelley reflected upon the meanings of new knowledge. A good deal of the mistrust in science today has to do with a basic misunderstanding of how science works. Science is not about immutable facts, but about the very mutable state of human knowledge. Some new knowledge that comes from science holds its ground. Earth revolves around the sun. Bacteria and viruses can cause disease. Oxygen is required to sustain human life. But some new knowledge topples under further questioning: no masks for the vaccinated. Oops. We learn that the vaccinated can have enough coronavirus in nasal passages to transmit to others. Better mask up. It’s that “we learn” that is at the heart of science even more so than “we know.” But for many in the general public—especially those who hope to dismantle structures of power—such a change in policy undermines their confidence in science. Science becomes just one more power trip out to suppress their freedom. And then there is the willful ignorance and organized action that places political or financial gain over our collective well-being in denying science. Social media fuel the wildfire of misinformation, leading, as astronomer Christopher Impey writes, “to ‘bubbles’ of people who fall prey to hazards like climate change denial, vaccine hesitancy, along with an uncritical belief in UFOs and various supernatural phenomena.”
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Something new is happening that I find inspiring and exciting: ways of seeing and artmaking that dissolve the border between art and science. When my first poetry book, Science and Other Poems, came out in 1994, after winning the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, I was an oddball for taking inspiration from science. The book opened with a poem inspired by my high school science fair. There was a long poem inspired by spending a night at an astronomical observation on Mt. Lemmon. Another contemplating how physics makes the very tangible material upon which I might apply paint dissolve into hyperactive, particulate mystery. Poems were supposed to deal with love and death, not euglena and neutrinos. But in my sense that poetry must love the particularity of our daily lives, I was drawn to the way science hunkered down with such passionate focus on the particular, and I found that both euglena and neutrinos could take me down the paths of love and death. Now artistic work that draws upon science is everywhere. It seems that climate urgency, viral contagion, crashing biodiversity, and injustice are demanding muses.
Many transdisciplinary projects are grounded in compelling landscapes, bringing artists and writers together with scientists to forage in the range of field biology. The Antarctic Writers and Artists Program is one of the oldest, begun in the 1970s by the National Science Foundation. More recently the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research sites, including the Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon, have launched collaborations with artists, writers, and philosophers. Dramatic landscapes can draw out of us an imperative to respond with creative acts. Magnificent landscapes drew the nineteenth-century “luminous” painters to respond in their art, and such places stir the contemporary artistic imagination. What’s different in the early twenty-first century is the sense of limitation. We no longer journey to document a flourishing world of undiscovered wonders. We now journey, in the manner of Douglas Adams, in a “last chance to see” the wonders of an imperiled and diminishing natural world. And to plead for a new caretaking of the planet. Many climate scientists feel the limits of their skills in communicating impactful stories about their research—stories that engage people in thinking creatively about taking on the challenges of the Anthropocene, rather than sinking into the despair that comes from hearing more data about the diminishment of life on our planet and apocalyptic visions of Western civilization. Artists and writers bring fresh eyes and vocabulary to these sites, reveling in the data of the senses and the spirit of invention that is nature’s way.
Meaningful collaboration across disciplines goes beyond merely listing some science facts to accompany a work of art or popping up an illustrative painting in the middle of a science museum. At their foundation, these projects involve storytelling and art-making that humanize science and make it relevant to people’s lives. They convey the complex and often contradictory feelings that planetary peril stirs up. At their best, in the face of diminishment and ruin, they surprise us with new ways of seeing and singing. They move us by touching the existential reality of the unity of all life on Earth. They may even challenge our ideas about what constitutes human knowledge and which organisms are capable of wisdom.
Since 1938, the Kent Island Scientific Research Station in Atlantic Canada’s Bay of Fundy has been a site for study of fog, savannah sparrows, Leach’s storm petrels, pollinators, and other matters of ecological interest. The fog studies were conducted by Robert Cunningham, cloud physicist based at MIT. He slept in a shack named Fog Heaven built in a grassy meadow on the mile-long spit of rock, grass, and spruce. The shack was about the size of an outhouse and populated with a prodigious crop of spiders, as I learned one summer when I had the privilege of sleeping there. Cunningham gathered fog, tiny vial by tiny vial, for over sixty years. His work helped determine that effluent from factories in the U.S. Midwest was falling as acid rain in the Northeastern U.S. and Canada Maritimes—work that helped lead to the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1970.
For five consecutive summers I brought creative writing students to visit Kent Island’s research sites. No one lives there other than seasonal research teams, so visiting is always a leap into stillness and beauty. One afternoon stands out for me. We met the savannah sparrow team gathering data from hatchlings hidden in tall meadow grass. Scrawny little featherless beings with huge eyes and gray, nearly translucent skin. Each bird was cupped in the researcher’s hand, weighed, measured; blood sample eased into a pipette then dropped onto filter paper; data entered in field notebook. All orderly and precise. Bird after bird, the grids on the page filled up. Bands clamped onto bird ankles for future monitoring to help researchers understand the breeding and migration behaviors of the birds. It’s remarkable they survive at all. Gulls cruise over the meadow, ready and willing to grab a fresh snack. And climate change will bring more and more habitat change, change coming so rapidly that creatures cannot adapt quickly enough to survive. It’s not a minute too late to get to know the imperiled ones. At best, we may draw sufficient attention to the wounding impact of our actions upon the natural world to take protective action; at worst, we may document creaturely lives that will not exist for those who come after us to witness.
As important as the data may be in the getting-to-know process, it was experience that won the day for me and for my students. The researcher was a lanky, long-haired grad student from Guelph University. Anyone working for several months at an off-grid research station takes on the scruffy look of a weed patch. Let the summer breeze tend your seed-strewn hair. Let the earth muddy your pores. Let the tee shirt bear the sweat of many days in sun and fog. Head leaning and bent low over the hatchling in his hand, this student of nature grew close to its beak, such tenderness flooding his face that the only word for his aura could be love. This part of his experience would never make it into a scientific paper, but a poet in our midst nailed it in a poem titled “Ode to a Bird Bander’s Face.” Such is the beauty derived from sensory data. I long for stories of doing science in which the emotional richness of the experience is given a vocabulary to speak.
I’ve also had the opportunity to work alongside researchers at the Long-Term Ecological Research site at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest. My intent has been to celebrate the pleasure in discovery experienced by those doing science, to find images that convey the emotional experience of encountering beauty and mystery in the quest for knowledge. Essays and poems from these site visits have appeared in several of my essay and poetry books, including Rope, Stairway to Heaven, Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit, and most recently A Woven World. I’ve also worked with zoos to complement their interpretive materials with poetry installations—projects inspired by conservation biologist George Schaller’s counsel that “an appeal for conservation must reach the heart, not just the mind.” And I’ve contributed to Scientific American’s new monthly poetry feature titled “Meter,” curated by science writer Dava Sobel. These efforts seem entry level to me, considering the more spectacular experiments popping up in the artistic landscape.
Taxidermy features prominently in the work of Kate Clark. Her work takes the craft beyond representing a dead animal as if in a living state. Rather, she brings the chimera back as an artistic form spanning from the Paleolithic to the Anthropocene in her interspecies figures. Her kudu, a sculpture incorporating parts of a taxidermied antelope, morphs human face on animal body, so that a wild browser becomes a contemplative human gazing at the museum visitor from an animal body. The human gaze flipped. Her zebra looks out from a Black man’s face with a thready mohawk stitching the ridge of his skull. His head inclines as if in gentle approach, and one can only want to lean in for the encounter. Tlingit sculptor Nicholas Galanin’s Inert Wolf, animal body flattened and splayed on the floor for a rug, head intact and lifted, telegraphs an animal force that will not be repressed despite being beaten down—an image of unspeakable beauty and sadness.
Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno’s Free the Air: how to hear the universe in a spider/web, exhibited at the Shed in New York City in 2022, was described in the New York Times as an “an intersection of sculpture, ecology, and futuristic experimentation.” He built a giant spiderweb with steel cables, inviting the viewer “to become a spider.” A person can lie in the web and feel its strength, imagining the spider’s glee to see prey pinioned in its trap. Take that, Thomas Nagel, who contended that we cannot understand the umwelt of another creature. In the studio, Saraceno collaborates with spiders and their webs in creating new designs. He has also worked with MIT engineer Markus Buehler to compose music derived from a mathematical model of spiderweb scans, the work performed on a virtual harp. One can see and hear the structural changes happening in the web, and it is structure that led Buehler to this work, as spider silk is as strong as steel but built of proteins, which are weakly bonded. How to understand and learn from this material? Art, music, engineering, science, and spiders seem to be having quite a party figuring this out. The New York Times writes that “Leonardo da Vinci designed flying machines; Michelangelo was an architect; Bernini staged a spectacle in which water flooded a theater. Saraceno is trying to revive the idea that the realm of artists is not the museum or the gallery but the world itself.”
Celia Vasquez Yui works in the indigenous tradition of her Shipibo people from the Peruvian Amazon, among whom all the great artists are women, many of them healers. She has brought “more than fifty animal ambassadors” to New York City, patterns marking their surface to represent sonic vibrations of their animality. Her work includes, writes Andrea K. Scott in the New York Times, “a two-hour recording of an ayahuasca ceremony performed in the Amazon by a group of ancestral healers, in which the patient being administered to is nature herself.”
And the patient needs our care. I believe art is a form of care. A means of establishing intimacy with nature and holding ourselves accountable for the trashing of the wellspring of life that has made us. “Mother Earth,” we say, while destroying her. Art can be a stitching-up of wounds. Some cannot be healed. All will leave a scar. But the intention of paying attention, naming the damage, cleansing and binding the wound, seeking intimacy through imaginative acts with a natural world we have abandoned and abused, this is the project of our time, the obligation that comes with naming the new geologic era the Anthropocene.
