Maria Popova has traced the connections between science and poetry, astronomy and love, nature and consciousness, all while building a body of work animated by wonder and rigor. She joins to discuss her new book the search for meaning in an indifferent universe, and what poetry, astronomy, love, and wonder can teach us about being alive.
Maria Popova is the creator of The Marginalian, where for two decades she has traced the connections between science and poetry, astronomy and love, nature and consciousness, all while building a body of work animated by wonder and rigor. She joins to discuss her new book Traversal, the search for meaning in an indifferent universe, and what poetry, astronomy, love, and wonder can teach us about being alive.
Maria Popova
I think the self is such a tedious place. We live in it and especially in our culture where people lead with identities and opinions, which are the most superficial, malleable, changeable, uninteresting parts of personhood. It’s very easy to become imprisoned in the self.
Curtis Fox
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Milman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, a wide ranging conversation with Maria Popova about science and poetry, about how to make meaning in an indifferent universe and about the value of dreaming.
Maria Popova
How incredible that evolution gave us a safe place to practice the possible.
Debbie Millman
Maria Popova is a writer and reader who was born and raised in Bulgaria during the final years of communism. At 19, she immigrated alone to the United States, worked multiple jobs while attending the University of Pennsylvania and began sending a weekly email to a handful of friends containing the most interesting things she had discovered that week. That email eventually became Brain Pickings, which became The Marginalian, one of the most beloved and enduring literary and philosophical projects on the internet. For two decades, Maria has devoted herself to tracing the connections between science and poetry, astronomy and love, nature and consciousness, all while building a body of work animated by wonder and rigor. She is the author of Figuring, Traversal, The Universe and Verse, and several beautiful children’s books. Threaded through all of her work is a sustained meditation on attention, wonder, and what it means to be fully alive.
Maria Popova, welcome back to Design Matters.
Maria Popova
How wonderful and strange to be back here some 15 years later.
Debbie Millman
Yes. Yes. Our first interview was back in 2012 and in that conversation we talked quite a bit about your origin story. So I want to encourage people to listen to that to hear all about how you first became you. But I still want to touch on some things about your early life that I didn’t ask you about earlier before we talk about all you’ve done since. Well,
Maria Popova
First of all, I should probably listen because we become in every retelling of who we are, right?
Debbie Millman
This is true. This is true. So our avid listeners can go back and compare. In our first conversation on Design Matters, you described creativity as combinatorial and I’ve talked about that many, many times on the show since with lots and lots of different people. The gathering and recombination of experiences, ideas and memories into something new. All these years later, I feel that this is not just a creative methodology for you. It feels more like a worldview.
Maria Popova
To the extent that the world is only rendered real in the mind, it is a mind view, meaning it is how I experience my own mind working. I think most of our minds work that way naturally. And when we are able to kind perceive the process, we call it creativity, this kind of aggregation combination that is creation.
Debbie Millman
You’ve written so beautifully about wonder throughout your work, but I’m curious about your earliest encounters with it. What first astonished you as a child?
Maria Popova
It’s interesting. Wonder is one of those things that is so elemental and so universal you might actually miss it. Meaning you might experience it but not know what it is. And I certainly didn’t have the word for it until only recently looking back on my life and seeing that common denominator. I don’t have many early childhood memories, but the ones that I do have all have an element of being very present in a moment in time, usually in the natural world and this feeling of a great peace and a great surprise at the same time. And to me, that is wonder.
Debbie Millman
I love that. I haven’t really thought about it in that way. Your website, Rain Pickings, the original name, began as a weekly email to seven or eight friends while you were working at a creative agency in Philadelphia. At the time, did it feel more like an act of generosity or self-education or survival?
Maria Popova
Well, it was a total act of hubris, actually.
Debbie Millman
I hadn’t considered that one.
Maria Popova
I mean, the shortest version is that I had come to the US sold on the promise of liberal arts education, which I thought was going to teach me how to live. And my family cobbled together the fortune, the great fortune of $800 that was supposed to last my sort of first year. And instead I got here and by the time I had bedsheets and textbooks, it was gone. So I ended up working
Debbie Millman
All these jobs. Nice bedsheets.
Maria Popova
Well, no, nice textbooks. I had just touched the military industrial complex of higher education. Yes. Yes, Matt.
And so I ended up instead finding myself in this factory for minds where you were tested on testing, meaning you were taught how to memorize and take tests, not how to live. So I kind of not knowing what to do, started scrapping together my own little morsels of meaning. I would go to the library or go to a talk in downtown Philly and whatever. And so then one of the jobs I was working to pay for this very unsatisfying education was at this little creative agency. And at the time, the guys, there were all these young idealists who had, the founder had run the first successful anti-smoking campaign in history and was kind of inspired to try to use the communication arts to do such things. And I had gone to the US to study communication because I lived through the fall of communism and I went from … We had the dictator on TV every night at 8:00 PM delivering one channel, obviously, delivering the propaganda, the message.
And overnight so- called democracy came and with it came advertising and I as a child thought, wait a minute, this is the same message. It’s just selling a different ideology. So I grew up and wanted to learn how to use the communication arts to move minds, but maybe for good and not for totalitarianism. So anyway, here I am in this agency and the guys are circulating around the office emails of what other cool creative stuff is coming out of other agencies. And I, at age 21, decide that I’m going to tell them how to do their job. And I’m like, guys, no.
Debbie Millman
So you and Maria even.
Maria Popova
I was just stubborn always, I guess. I mean, looking back, I think I’ve realized that every time I’ve been told these are the options on the table, I haven’t just said, “Oh, let me show you another option.” I’ve said, “Let me build you another table.” And so not by any kind of moral high ground, because I just didn’t like what was available. So I didn’t like what they were circulating. I said, “Actually, if you want to do something really creative, take things from different disciplines, not your own, neuroscience and medieval painting and street art and see what happens in the mind when these things converge.” So I said, “Let me send you three things I learned on my own in my own kind of meaning foraging this week. Every Friday I’ll send it. ” And then they were like, “Sure.” And then they started asking me to add, “Oh, can you add my dad?
Oh, can you add my girlfriend?” And I was like, “Guys, I have a full college course load and four jobs. I can’t administer an email.” And so I thought the most obvious thing to do would be to build a website. There were no blogs then and I took a night class. I saved for three weeks eating store brand tuna and outmeal, the most nutritious cheap food you could get. And I took a night class and I built the ugliest website in the world.
Debbie Millman
Oh, can we find that in the way back machine?
Maria Popova
Oh my God. You know what? I think there are images because there were static pages that there were no blogs. There were no databases. You would literally put up a bulletin on a court board, put up the weekly edition and then next Friday, take it down, put up the new one. So I think there are screenshots of it somewhere. Oh,
Debbie Millman
Wonderful.
Maria Popova
Oh no, terrible. Anyway, so that is how it started.
Debbie Millman
In the early internet era, much of online culture rewarded speed, hot takes, aggregation, brain pickings felt radically different even when I first started reading it, which was probably 2010, 2011, contemplative, literary, slower. Were you consciously resisting the velocity of the internet at the moment or was that just the way you approached it naturally?
Maria Popova
I mean, I think because I only ever wrote for me to process my own life, I mean, it was and is the record of what I’m thinking about reckoning with. It didn’t make sense. We don’t live internally on those timelines. We don’t. The inner life is not a hamster wheel and also partly I was putting it out into the world and I was very conscious of I as a person don’t enjoy clickbait and ads and snippet kind of shallow things. Why would I perpetrate that on other people if I’m making something in the world? Why not make the world I want to live in?
Debbie Millman
Your work is a refuge for people seeking depth and meaning online. And as the site eventually became more and more and more influential, you resisted all traditional models of monetization and growth. What have you been trying to protect in doing that?
Maria Popova
My faith in humanity.
Debbie Millman
In what way?
Maria Popova
Fundamentally, people are generous and people are hungry for meaning. And when we value something, we show it. I really believe that. We don’t need the middleman of advertising to turn us into data points and eyeballs in order to show someone else how much we value some kind of sellable commodity. I thought if it’s already reward enough for me to do this to read and to write and to try to learn how to live, I’m still learning how to live 20 years in. That’s why I write and I already have my reward. If other people find it valuable, then they should decide how much they value it and in what way. I should not enforce that or sell it. You can’t sell meaning.
Debbie Millman
After 15 years of publishing as brain pickings, you renamed the site to Marginalian. I was very happy. Marginalia is one of my favorite concepts and undertakings. Why had the original title stop feeling truthful for you?
Maria Popova
Oh, it’s so gross. It’s so gross. I
Debbie Millman
Mean, just as a PS, I can’t stand it when people ask if they can pick my brain.
Maria Popova
Can you imagine when people asked me if they could pick my brain?
Debbie Millman
They must be like, “It started that word.”
Maria Popova
No, you have to take into account the fact that in Bulgarian, we don’t really have wordplay and puns. It just doesn’t quite exist, this notion, this use of language. So when I came here, I was really excited about these kind of strange idioms and wordplay. And I will say also I studied multiple things in college in addition to communication arts. I also studied psychology and was very interested in neuroscience and I am not proud to say I was a kind of neo-Cartesian. I really thought the mind is all there is how we think is who we are and over the years as I befriended the life of feeling, the life of the body and it reflected in the writing, I came to see the first of all, it was not just a brain thing, this thing that this search for meaning, it can’t live just in the brain.
And also I was just disgusted with very cheap fun, but mostly I looked back at some point I think it was somebody had asked me after I’d written my first book figuring why I write about women in science or queer people and I had never thought about those categories. I realized that I have been very influenced, moved, inspired, interested in people who existed in the margins of their time and place by whatever variable. And because of that, because they were already other in some way, they had the kind of self-permission and freedom to think in ways others didn’t think to see what others didn’t want to look at and ended up coming up with the ideas that have moved this world forward, the so- called marginal people. And on top of that, I was writing about their lives and the kind of margins of the books I was reading.
It was just everything I write is my own marginality on this search for what it means to be alive.
Debbie Millman
You’re nearing your 20th anniversary of The Marginalian. You have never accepted any advertising. You only write what interests you and still 20 years in, you are one of the most visited sites on the web. What keeps you excited, motivated and inspired by doing this?
Maria Popova
I think perhaps the same three things that make it motivating to continue being alive, which is to learn something to help someone and to just feel it all.
Debbie Millman
You just mentioned your first book, Figuring, which was published in 2018. Initially, you were dismissive about ever writing a book and turned down the many offers that came your way and often stated, why would I want to write something that would have this shelf life of a banana? And thinking back on that statement, I find it interesting that when you did eventually write books and I’m talking about your library of work now, your books are explicitly anti-banana books. They’re sprawling, they’re archival, interdisciplinary works designed for longevity really rather than topicality. What changed your mind about writing a book?
Maria Popova
Well, I never changed my mind about writing the kind of book that I was being offered a lot. I mean, publishers were approaching me all the time with the very surely marketable idea of doing a kind of best of brain pickings or a compilation on a specific theme that I often write about. I mean, it could be anything, diaries of great writers, daily routines, I mean, whatever, very kind of superficial, self-helpy kind of thing. And those do have the shelf life of a banana. Books are just a vehicle for thought and feeling and ideas and the only thoughts and feelings and ideas worth putting into the world are the ones that have the shelf life of a shelf,
Debbie Millman
Right?
Maria Popova
And those are certainly the books I read and love. And I thought if I were to put in the time, I mean, these things take years to write these 600 page books that I ended up writing. If I were to put in the time, it should be for something I would enjoy as a reader, the kind of thing I want to exist
Debbie Millman
Figuring did both actually. It was exactly what you wanted to write, but it was also an instant New York Times bestseller. Did that surprise you? I know you don’t really think about things and measure them with those metrics, but it is an interesting conundrum. I think
Maria Popova
That says more about our culture than about the book. I think people were excited about the first book of the sight they read. I would be very interested how many of those people finished the book. My own mother recently informed me that she never finished figuring, there you have it, which was translated beautifully into Bulgarian.
Debbie Millman
Figuring is saturated with mortality, not just literal death, but the awareness of finitude is a condition of creativity, intimacy, and meaning making. And the book repeatedly returns to the brevity of human life against cosmic time. It includes the deaths of central figures, including Rachel Carlson, Kepler’s children, Emily Dickinson’s losses, extinction, disappearance, the tension between ambition and impermanence and the idea that love and creativity are meaningful precisely because life ends. Did writing figuring change your relationship to mortality?
Maria Popova
I think we spend our lives changing our relationship to mortality, trying to befriend it, right?
Debbie Millman
Yes.
Maria Popova
And we make art to try to bear it, to try to bear our mortality. If we were not mortal, we would not make art. We wouldn’t.
Debbie Millman
Why? Why do you think that? Because I would like to live forever and I know I’m not going to, but that doesn’t change my relationship to art making. Now later it’s changing. That’s true too. My urgency is changing as I get older and
Maria Popova
Older. Let me put it this way. I do think every artist’s art is their coping mechanism for their suffering, whatever that is, and for their joys too, but much of it to metabolize our suffering and most of our suffering is at bottom some sort of response to the fact that we’re immortal. Regret, heartache, loss, it’s all confrontation with the finitude and the irreversibility of life.
Debbie Millman
I thought you were going to say that it all had to do with love, not mortality. So it surprised me a little bit.
Maria Popova
Well, love is a coping mechanism for mortality as well, isn’t it?
Debbie Millman
I don’t know. I would say it was a coping mechanism. I would say maybe it’s the reward.
Maria Popova
Oh, that’s beautiful.
Debbie Millman
At least I’d like to think that. To me-
Maria Popova
But hold on.
Debbie Millman
Okay. Let’s do it. Let’s do it.
Maria Popova
So every love story is a tragic story.
Debbie Millman
How?
Maria Popova
Because every love ends with a loss either of the person or of their love, right? It ends with death or indifference or divorce or whatever, but it ends. There’s no eternal love because there is no eternity a lot at us. There isn’t. I mean, maybe it is the reward, more like the recompense than a reward.
Debbie Millman
When you’re writing your books, you do enormous amounts of research. And most recently you told me that when you were writing about Walt Whitman, you read seven biographies, all of his surviving notebooks and letters, countless accounts by his contemporary scattered across myriad books of memoirs of notable people. And you did this level of research for all of the figures and figuring and your most recent book, Traversal. How does this level of information inform what you write about?
Maria Popova
Well, I think if you’re going for illumination, which is of course the point of writing, you need the information to make that truthful and possible. But I also, I think it’s so dangerous. There’s such a responsibility in trying to represent another person who can no longer speak for themselves, from whom you’re separated by centuries and sensibilities and unimaginable cultural paradigms. We cannot imagine what it was like to live in Kepler’s Day, a time when Satan was more real to the average person than gravity. People lived to 40. There was no knowledge of genetics and hygiene and human rights. I mean, unimaginable world. This is just like a handful of things. And I don’t write biography, but I write highly biographically informed, I guess, portraits of the traits of those people that speak to me and that entwine with the traits of the other people in each of … These books are each a kind of tapestry with these different lives woven together to paint a larger picture of something else that’s not about the people.
And I do think the responsibility of the writer speaking for and about someone else cannot be overestimated.
Debbie Millman
Does living inside these minds for as long as you do impact your own consciousness?
Maria Popova
Oh, absolutely. I think we are all to some extent very porous and I think the more sensitive a person, the more absorbent they are of the tone and way of seeing and way of worlding that another mind has. And so for me, spending seven years with Mary Shelley and Whitman, they taught me how to see. They taught me how to feel, of course, of course. And then I miss them. I mean, the most tragic thing about these books for me is that when I’m done writing them, I mean, I’ve been living with these people daily, right? When I’m done writing them, I feel this tremendous absence and grief. It’s like a real person left.
Debbie Millman
I know how I’m impacted by doing research for a podcast and the weeks that I spend preparing, how that changes me, how that influences me. And in many ways, the research influences me more than even the conversations because I’m just able to take in everything that they’re saying and thinking without having the responsibility to respond or to figure out what I want to ask next. I can just, as you said, pour us and take it all in. I can’t imagine what living with characters for seven years does to you.
Maria Popova
Well, but it’s interesting because that’s a bit of a chicken or egg or a self-selection issue because I mean you do, you started Design Matters in order to learn how creative people orchestrate and govern their lives, right? So there is a kind of hunger to be modeled different ways of seeing, different ways of being, to be inspired. And so of course that will feed you even more than the conversation.
Debbie Millman
Yeah. I mean, I think that the one thing that does keep me going even when I’m feeling burnout or strain, stress, et cetera, is this endless fascination with how people create their lives, not just their art, but how they choose to live in the world. And I also feel like you do that a lot in your work, which is what keeps me coming back to reading it every day.
Maria Popova
But the comforting thing about the dead who are my subject,
Minor life. The living are not my forte. The comfort thing, greatly comforting thing about the dead is that it can choose your dead by virtue of their lives being foreclosed, meaning they can’t surprise you. They can’t suddenly turn out to be total assholes. With sufficient information and biographical records, we have a pretty good sense of who someone was in their life in the world and something about the finality of their life, the notion that you can have it down. I mean, you can never, of course, understand what it’s like to be anyone else. It’s so misleading, but there is a comfort to me to kind of know how their lives turned out.
Debbie Millman
But what do you do when you find contradictory information where one interpretation might fly in the face of another interpretation and you have to figure out what the actual truth is?
Maria Popova
Well, first of all, I don’t believe we can ever figure out what the truth of a person is. It’s often obscure to the person themselves, right? With biographies, I just always go to the primary source material. I mean, these biographers took it from somewhere, right? So I would go and find the surviving notebooks and diaries and letters, which are of course incomplete and also self-mythologizing. I mean, some people, a big part of why I chose some of the people in Traversal, particularly Whitman and Frederick Douglass, is that they were tremendous self-mythologizers. For all the good that they did, they also co-created their own myth, right? And that comes through even in the diaries and letters of people, but you go as close to the bone as you can as the death of the flesh allows.
Debbie Millman
You’ve also written several children’s books with unusually philosophical tones. The snail with the right heart is rooted in real scientific anomaly, but emotionally it’s about belonging and uniqueness and the coziest place on the moon feels deeply concerned with loneliness and tenderness. These books don’t simplify existential ideas so much as render them emotionally accessible. What do you think children understand about reality that adults often forget or miss entirely?
Maria Popova
That it continues to exist whether or not we believe in it. And this is partly why my move with the children’s books is that I read, I don’t intend to, but I read a lot of science and every once in a while I would come across a piece of science news that would strike me as this profound lens on something very intimate and emotional part of our kind of human inner universe. And then I would write a children’s book based on the scientific article or fact or whatever. And I do think there’s a kind of reverence for reality. I mean, children’s imagination is actually a response, a deep response to actuality and what can be made with the creative constraint of reality.
Debbie Millman
In as much as the snail with the right heart is about a scientific anomaly, it’s also a love story and I’m wondering if you can just share a little bit of the plot with our listeners in case they haven’t dipped into your children’s books yet.
Maria Popova
So some years ago, a retired researcher in the UK came upon a snail who shell coils in the opposite direction. The vast, vast, vast majority of snails coil clockwise. And he found in a pile of garbage how he noticed that’s another, it’s a little homily on the art of noticing, right? First of all, he saw the snail, saw that it coiled the other way and thought, hmm. So then he nailed the snail with some dirt and sustenance to a snail researcher.
Debbie Millman
I love that there are people that just research snails, by the way.
Maria Popova
Oh God, the lovely thing about science is that it is this refuge for this strangeness and the multiplicity of mines. I mean, the most wonderful thing about being human is how many minds there are. So anyway, one of those mines was studying snails and received the snail named Jeremy for some English politician who was on the left, I guess I’m not versed in British politics and said that the odds of this happening are about one in a million to one to a billion. It’s so rare they can’t even estimate how rare it is and it’s caused by a condition called citizen versus where the internal organs by a genetic variant that’s very rare, obviously, are flipped. So humans have this. I know someone who has his heart on the right side, he has citizen verses. But with snails, the tricky thing is that because of how they mate, please everybody go on YouTube and look up Sir David Attenborough snails.
I’ll just tell you that. And your life will be transformed. Your life will be transformed, but because of how they mate, it is a kind of puzzle piece. So their reproductive organs have to fit. And so if your organs are on the other side, you can only mate with a snail that’s on the other side also in verse. So then this world search began for another lefty snail and it was eventually found in Australia and snail mailed to Jeremy and then it’s a drama, then a drama ensues that will let people find out in the children’s book what happens, but it’s not what you expect.
Debbie Millman
And it is absolutely wonderful. Why are you drawn to writing for children at this stage in your life?
Maria Popova
I think great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise. I grew up with the Little Prince and Alice in Wonderland. They taught me how to think. They taught me how to feel. I still reread the little prince about once a year and every time It gives me something new and acutely relevant to something I’m grappling with that year. I think also it’s often in this simple language of children that we get to the deepest truths, that we’re embarrassed to think and talk about otherwise, and we cloak with all these convoluted theories and bells and whistles, but really it is a way to get to the elemental.
Debbie Millman
One of the things that I’ve really cherished watching you evolve as an artist is where your work goes next. And first you were writing on The Marginalian. Then you started writing books for adults, books for children. Now you’re writing poetry. Tell us about your relationship to poetry. I know initially you actually didn’t like poetry. You sort of curled your nose up at poetry. So tell us what changed for you. Oh,
Maria Popova
Absolutely. So I’m a refugee for mathematics. I grew up doing a lot of science and never, I guess, was properly educated in literature. And of course, the way we humans tend to have of dismissing what we don’t understand and Debbie’s raising her hand. And calling useless, what we don’t know how to use. I dismissed poetry. And then across the aisle on a transatlantic flight, across 50 years of age difference, I became very past friends, much to the discontent of the entire coach cabin with a lovely woman named Emily Levine who was a comedian, a philosopher of science, deeply aridite, deeply sensitive, funny as hell. And she took it upon herself to educate me in poetry. She started sending me a poem a day reciting poetry. With that
Debbie Millman
Magnificent voice she
Maria Popova
Had. Magnificent voice. In fact, I mean, you asked about figuring and mortality. Emily, a few years into our friendship, I really loved her so much. She was a kind of mother figure to me and friend and she became terminally ill and was actively dying while I was writing Figuring, which was dedicated to her. And in fact, she died the day it was published. I didn’t know because I had turned my phone off. I just didn’t want to deal with the book stuff. And when I turned it on close to midnight, I learned and it was … Yeah, I mean, I won’t belabor it anyway. But Emily is also the reason the universe and verse exists because as she was dying, we started going on these poetry retreats as you remember. Yes, I was part of one. Two. Yeah. And we would spend the weekend on the sort of promise of reading poetry, but really talking about the universe and Hannah Arendt and the singularity in ancient Greece, because Emily’s mind was so fractal and so combinatorial in the most beautiful, enchanting way.
And in the course of it, I started seeing how poetry and science are these side doors to the same reality, to befriending reality. And I started reading poetry, writing about poetry, and eventually studying with very good poets, Marie Howe and Ellen Bass, and eventually writing poetry.
Debbie Millman
I’m wondering if you would share one of your poems with us today and share a bit about how you came to writing it.
Maria Popova
So this is a poem that I wrote in the state of heartbreak, I thought. And it’s a little bit more tongue in cheek, begins a little more tongue in cheek than the rest of my poems, but I think it’s one we all need at some point in our life or the sentiment in it. This is called Corrective for a Broken Heart. Why all the threadbare drama, the stale catastrophism of calling it broken? It still beats, doesn’t it? Still trembles at the sight of fog flowing through the forest like a slow dance song. It was only dislocated, lost its locust for a while, popped out of the socket of good sense. There is no one to pick up the pieces because there are no pieces. Only the firm fastidious hand of time to slide it back into place. And after all, who can fault the wayward compass when the magnetic north pole is in constant motion drifting by 50 kilometers a year and reversing itself altogether every few centuries while every 26,000 years a different north star comes to shine its guiding light above all the confusion.
We are here to lose our way.
Debbie Millman
Thank you. Talk about, if you can, the different muse that might occur between writing poetry and writing essays or prose.
Maria Popova
My prose tends to be quite analytical, quite focused on thinking through something. Not always, but fundamentally it is a kind of thought process. And the poetry is more about feeling, befriending feeling.
Debbie Millman
How do you know when something wants to become poetry rather than an essay?
Maria Popova
Oh, I don’t. In fact, I plagiariz my poems all the time and put them into paragraphs of prose. And in fact, my wonderful editor Eric noted … So the prelude of my book Traversal, both of the big books have a prelie, the short chapter zero in the beginning that kind of in a very abstract way makes a promise of what’s to come, but it’s not biographical information on any of that. It’s very kind of abstract. And so I had poached a poem that I had written in a workshop with Marie Howe and Ellen Bass and literally erased the line breaks and put it as a paragraph in the prelead. And Eric in the editing manuscript had written in the margin, “You know, this could be a Poem.”
Debbie Millman
Your public project, The Universe in Verse, began in 2017 as a live event pairing poetry with science, but over time it seems to have evolved into a communal ritual of wonder. All of your events have immediately sold out large venues. Did you understand from the beginning that audiences were so hungry for that kind of collective meaning making from poetry and science?
Maria Popova
Oh, not at all. I thought no one would come. I just wanted to do it. I think part of it is the universe and verse was born in the wake of the first Trump election and many factors were present. First of all, it was the age of alternative facts
And science was being defunded, devalued. And I thought we need a way for people to befriend science that is welcoming and hospitable. And poetry also, the national endowment for the arts was being massively defunded, which is the main funding body for poets. Poets are the lowest paid artists in our world and the NEA was how a lot of their funding came from and that went away and I thought maybe there are others like me out there who curl their nose with poetry because they don’t understand it. They’re not literate in it. Maybe we can invite them in. And so the concept was to get people, friends who are creative people of other walks of life, musicians, actors, artists to come read poems that I choose and then I would talk some science behind the poems that have an element of science. So for example, Patty Smith reading a Rebecca Elson poem about Dark Matter and then I would talk about Vera Rubin and the discovery and the confirmation of Dark Matter, that kind of thing as a way of welcoming people both into art and science.
Every year I used the proceeds towards something that was threatened. So the first three or four years it was the Natural Resources Defense Council, then it was the Academy of American Poets. So this kind of active resistance and also active support of what was losing support.
Debbie Millman
One of the beautiful ideas at the center of the project is that science and poetry are not opposing disciplines, but complimentary ways of knowing the world. Do you think that modern culture artificially separated intellect from feeling or that they currently still do?
Maria Popova
I mean, I think Dekart is the most damaging man in the history of our species 400 years later.
Debbie Millman
I knew you were going to say that. Yes.
Maria Popova
I mean, because it’s the truth
Debbie Millman
That was a prompt.
Maria Popova
He has scarred us to the bone with this extraordinarily Western dualism of the mind being separate from the body and higher up somehow. It is so damaging. We spend our lives discovering over and over that it is not true. When we feel joy, it’s a full body experience. When we suffer, it’s a full body experience. When we create, it’s a full body experience. Everything, there’s no clear demarcation between thought and feeling. Feeling is an instrument of thinking. I really recommend Philosopher Martin Musbaum’s book, The Intelligence of Emotions. Yes.
Debbie Millman
Let’s talk about another one of your combinatorial creative endeavors, your box collection of divinations titled An Almanac of Birds. This is your first project wherein you’re both creating the art alongside writing poetry, yet another expanse of your body of work. Can you share how this project came to be?
Maria Popova
One November day I was walking through Brooklyn Bridge Park in the rain and I saw a night herance sleeping on a branch perched over the pond its head tucked into its chest and I thought, is it dreaming? Do birds dream? And I thought, surely you can Google that. Turns out you couldn’t. So I found myself on a three week rabbit hole in these obscure scientific journals, kind of alarmed to discover that we’ve only been studying the avian brain and sleep in the avian brain for about 20 years if that. And there’s only a handful of published FMRI and EEG studies of what happens when they sleep. And I was so surprised by what I found that I ended up writing about it. I wrote a piece for the New York Times about REM and the evolution of sleep. And the short version is basically they do dream, not only do they dream, but evolution invented REM, the dream rich REM state in the avian brain.
And when they sleep, so for example, pigeons during REM sleep areas of their brain associated with wing motor action and spatial navigation light up and songbirds, young songbirds who have to learn their repertoire while they sleep, you can map the activity of particular neurons to particular notes in the melody they were learning that day. So birds dream, they dream of flying and they dream of singing and they’re practicing their sleep. And I thought how incredible that evolution gave us a safe place to practice the possible. And so then after this immersion in the bird sleep world, birds started coming to my own dreams, which was very unusual because I tend to have hyper realistic dreams, mostly anxiety dreams about missing trains and things like that.
Debbie Millman
Teeth falling out so forth.
Maria Popova
So
Debbie Millman
Much fun.
Maria Popova
Oh God, I haven’t had that one yet, but now that you’ve planted the seed in my unconscious, I look forward to losing my teeth and my sleep.
Debbie Millman
That’s one of the most common anxiety dreams, missing finals, missing trains, missing planes. You are keep so
Maria Popova
Criminal. That’s so interesting.
Debbie Millman
Isn’t it? Well, there you go. Well,
Maria Popova
Never had in my large repertoire of anxiety dreams, the tooth has not appeared or disappeared for that matter.
But what did appear was a great blue heron carrying the sky on her back and a million sandhill cranes unspooling from the horizon becoming the milky way and a magpie speaking to me in my mother’s voice and I thought, what does it all mean? And meanwhile, I was discovering that a number of people in my life that I love and respect intellectually were using terror cards. Now I mentioned I come from the world of science. I have spent my life dismissing those types of things as anti-scientific, residual medievalism from that world Kepler lived in where Satan was more real than gravity. And then of course this tends to happen when I replaced contempt with curiosity, which we don’t do as often as we should. That’s
Debbie Millman
A show title from Contempt to Curiosity.
Maria Popova
Oh, that’s a good tombstone title.
Debbie Millman
Overhorse of her life.
Maria Popova
She went from contempt to curiosity and died. Anyway, I came to see that people need these languages of interpretation of our own experience because we were living with so much uncertainty. We’re so opaque to ourselves and we could use these aids, right?
Debbie Millman
But what allowed you to move from skepticism to curiosity?
Maria Popova
Because the people I loved, like my friend Tom, who’s the closest thing I have to a brother actually uses tarot. And I was like, Tom is not an idiot.
Debbie Millman
Yay, Tom.
Maria Popova
But you know, these are the judgments we make about people. We think people are idiots because they don’t see things the way we do and it’s so habitual we don’t even catch it. Anyway, I, of course, though being very stubborn and wanting the other table, wanting to build the new table, decided I was going to make a kind of anti-tarot deck of my own, of divinations from the birds because I was still thinking about what does it all mean, these birds coming to my dreams. And I would make 41 of these little decks and I would give them to friends for my 41st birthday. For my birthdays, I prefer giving presents to receiving. And so I started who knows why I have a long history of cutting up things and making new things out of them. For example, for you, I had once cut up a little golden book and made a poem.
I have cut out-
Debbie Millman
You also cut up the little graphic films that I was making and made a brand new one. That’s right. That was one of the very- I forgot about that. Listeners, just so you know, while we are best friends now, Marie and I were also a couple for five years. So that might be why you hear some of that sort of recognition and there are ways of dealing with each other.
Maria Popova
You should also know Debbie made these incredible films with hand-drawn typography and pencil, mostly pencil art based on movies that she was watching. I mean, I’m doing a very poor job of, what were they called?
Debbie Millman
Graphic movies, graphic films.
Maria Popova
Graphic look for them. They’re so moving. They’re so tender. Anyway, the point is with my long history of cutting up things, I like creative constraint, I like language. I woke up one day with a very clear mysterious idea in that combinatory way the mind has of putting things together, you don’t know how the new thing came of taking my favorite 19th century or mythological books. I love 19th century illustration, natural history, astronomy, or anthology, all of that. And so what I would do is every night I would look through one of these books and let a bird call out to me visually, the arts. And I was using obviously John James Audubon’s Birds of America, John and Elizabeth Gould’s Birds of Europe and other, but most of these two. Then I would read the ornithological description of that species in the book, in the same book and let the language percolate in my mind and go to sleep and see what the nocturnal unconscious would do in shuffling.
And then in the morning I would reread it and pull out words and phrases and rearrange them into this little coen or the divination from the bird. And it was always so surprising what came because it was my own mind making it, but somehow it surprised me. I mean, that’s a strange thing about consciousness that you can surprise yourself.
Debbie Millman
You described the birds as collaborators that they were writing you.
Maria Popova
Yes.
Debbie Millman
Have you increasingly come to trust the unconscious as a creative partner?
Maria Popova
I mean, it’s more that I’ve increasingly come to recognize how it’s always played such a huge part and then I have hubristically taken credit for it as the conscious decisions.
Debbie Millman
And you also write that anything you polish with attention becomes a mirror. And I’m wondering what has sustained attention taught you about yourself
Maria Popova
That the world beyond myself is far more interesting than the self. I mean, I say this playfully but also not I think our most rewarding experiences. You asked about wonder. Wonder is only possible in a moment of unselfing.
Debbie Millman
Talk about what that means. I
Maria Popova
Mean, it’s a term I’ve borrowed from Iris Murdoch who used it as a kind of aside and an essay about what nature and art do for us. She called them occasions for unselfing, where this illusory package of narrative and interpretation and memory that we call a self comes this bandit for a little moment and the world comes in the world, the otherness of the world and also the belonging with that otherness. I think the self is such a tedious place. We live in it and especially in our culture where people lead with identities and opinions, which are the most superficial, malleable, changeable, uninteresting parts of personhood. It’s very easy to become imprisoned in the self.
Debbie Millman
You have described the unconscious as possessing secret knowledge that the analytical mind cannot access. Does that have any connection to selfing or unselfing?
Maria Popova
I think what we call self is mostly the conscious self, the one doing the narrating of who we are and the unconscious self is who governs how we conduct ourselves a lot of the time without us realizing it.
Debbie Millman
How do you become more aware of those two storylines?
Maria Popova
Therapy. Therapy twice a week.
Debbie Millman
Let’s talk about your brand new book. Your brand new book is titled Traversal and it feels like the continuation or even culmination of many concerns that have threaded through your work for years astronomy, mortality, love, consciousness, and the search for meaning. And very early in the book, you suggest that humanity keeps asking many versions of the same essential question. What is life? What is death? What makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? And the answer may simply be love. When did love become for you not merely emotional, but cosmological?
Maria Popova
Wow. What a beautiful way to put it. I think the hardest thing about being alive is that we exist as accidents of chance and the universe does not hand us down meaning. There is no meaning. I mean, this is also about the divinations. It’s related. I don’t believe this impartial universe is giving us transient moats of stardust personalized instructions about how to live our tiny perishable lives. It doesn’t care, but I do believe in omens, which is the significance we confer upon the chance events of our lives. And this is part of our restless hunger for meaning, which is our own responsibility. Nobody and nothing will give us meaning. We have to make it. And I think love is an instrument for how to do that.
Debbie Millman
Talk to me a little bit more about what you just said about omens, because in many ways you are a scientist, a scientist of the mind and the idea that an omen falls into your reality in some ways feels very unlikely.
Maria Popova
But that’s the point though, that that’s the difference between signs and omens. Omens are internally generated. We are pattern recognizing animals. We have to make sense of what is happening to us. And the fact is much of what is happening to us is the product of randomness, but we need to create a pattern in order for it to make sense and we call that an omen. So for example, oh, a great blue heron appeared on my morning walk the day that I was going to make a cross country move. That great blue heron is fishing. It is hunting. It is there many times over the course of many days. I just happened to come upon it in that moment and I make of it an omen about the concerns of my own life and I think we need that. It’s not just some silly kind of byproduct of consciousness.
I think it is the crux of consciousness that we interpret and give story and give meaning.
Debbie Millman
Do they hold any credence, any real credence?
Maria Popova
I mean, that’s a question about reality. What is reality?
Curtis Fox
Right.
Maria Popova
That encounter holds no significance in the life of the heron. It has no bearing on the reality of this hunting bird, but if I choose for it to mean something to me, if I say, “Well, this is now a good omen and I’m making the right decision moving to the other side of the continent,” that changes my own orientation to my own life, which in turn changes how I inhabit this reality, the kind of reality I make because my intention is now different. My openness, my receptivity is different solely by an act of interpretation.
Debbie Millman
So how much scientific credence would you put into those omens?
Maria Popova
Zero, but I may still need them to live my life. That’s the point.
Debbie Millman
Yeah. I love the idea of seeing meaning in an encounter, however random it might be.
Maria Popova
And isn’t that what love is too?
Debbie Millman
Yeah.
Maria Popova
The meaning you confer upon a stranger.
Debbie Millman
One of the most striking things about traversal is the way you braid together astronomical discovery, romantic longing and existential uncertainty until they begin to feel like expressions of the same impulse. Did you come to think of the book as partly about the human hunger to locate ourselves literally as well as figuratively?
Maria Popova
Well, not consciously certainly, but now that you asked me this, I am realizing I am a person who has been dislocated since very early childhood. My early childhood was marked by me being sort of sent
Debbie Millman
Abandoned.
Maria Popova
Well, I don’t-
Debbie Millman
Interpretive.
Maria Popova
Interpretive. I don’t want to do the kind of competitive suffering we live in now, but I was sent, I was apart from my parents a lot. I was in many different places and then I by choice at 19 dislocated myself across the ocean and even now I live different parts of your very far away places. I do think place and personhood entwined in a meaningful way we become who and what we are. I mean, we’re animals who are still shaped by their habitat and we are different animals in different habitats. There is a kind of compass of searching for how to be by where to be.
Debbie Millman
Many of the figures in the book seem animated by a kind of impossible yearning to measure the heavens, transcend the self and understand or outwit time. Do you think curiosity is ultimately an expression of longing?
Maria Popova
Yes. I think it’s the bridge, our only bridge between the known and the unknown. And it is a ramshackle bridge because a lot may just be unknowable, but curiosity is this idealistic, optimistic orientation that the universe can be known even by creatures that are a function of it.
Debbie Millman
It’s interesting that you bring up optimism because again and again, in troversal, scientific discovery is accompanied by loneliness, obsession, exile, grief. Were you consciously exploring the emotional cost of devotion to knowledge?
Maria Popova
Very much so. I think it’s so important to understand the price at which knowledge is obtained and also the fact that the hunger for truth is always more powerful than all of these difficult and dark forces in us.
Debbie Millman
In many ways, similar to figuring, traversal feels haunted by mortality, but it also expands upon the ideas presented in figuring Traversal also explores extinction, as I mentioned, disappearance, historical erasure. Was the book also a way of reckoning with impermanence?
Maria Popova
Of course.
Debbie Millman
How do you think about impermanence now having written these two books so much about time and mortality?
Maria Popova
I think the desire for permanence or immortality, they’re all a function of this I think rather destructive desire to have it all, desire for everything. And I think the challenge of life, the task of life is to have enough.
Debbie Millman
I have one last question for you, Maria, and a request. First, the question. Across the universe and verse traversal, the marginalian and almanac of birds, you keep returning to two central themes, rescuing meaning from fragmentation and inspiring people to look and live more meaningfully. After everything you’ve read, written, lived and experienced, what do you believe most helps human beings remain fully open to one another and the world?
Maria Popova
More wonder, less certainty.
Debbie Millman
And now my request. Would you share one more poem with us please to close out the show?
Maria Popova
For you,
Debbie Millman
Anything. And when is the book of poems going to happen?
Maria Popova
Oh God. I’ve been such a closet poet for so long. It’s not a small deal to share this right now. Okay.
Debbie Millman
Hence my inclination to do this.
Maria Popova
I know. I know. All right. Well, this is one that kind of fits with your final couple of questions. This is called The Wildest Bet is the Winning Bet. You wouldn’t have bet on it the battered rock orbiting a star from the discount bin of the universe. Wouldn’t have guessed that it would bloom mitochondria and music, that it would mushroom mountains and minds and the hummingbird wing worrying a hundred times faster than your eye can blink and your eye that took 500 million years from trilabites to telescope and the unhurried orange lichen growing on the black boulder 200 times more slowly than the tectonic plates beneath are drifting apart and the marbled orca carrying her dead calf down the entire edge of the continent carrying the weight of consciousness and consciousness, how it windows this tenement of Breath and bone with wonder, how it hovers over everything gigantic and unnecessary, like music, like love.
Debbie Millman
Maria Popova. Thank you for making so much work that matters and thank you for joining me today on Design Leaders.
Maria Popova
Absolutely wonderful.
Debbie Millman
Maria’s most current book is titled Traversal and you can read more by Maria on her website, themarginalian.org. This is the 21st year we’ve been podcasting design matters and I’d like to thank you for listening and remember we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. Maria never liked that phrase, but I keep using it anyway. I’ve
Maria Popova
Come around.
Debbie Millman
I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Curtis Fox
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.
Debbie Millman
That was so much fun. I hope you liked it.
Maria Popova
You were intense.
