Light & Noise
"I contain multitudes."
Originally published: February 11, 2021. Updated & added to: September 2024.
When I was young, family visited from Los Angeles. We stargazed. My younger cousin ran through a screen door—literally through the screen to get back inside. There were shooting stars; he was concerned they’d shoot at him. With LA’s light pollution he’d never seen stars like that.
Light pollution might seem the least of our worries. Microplastics, contaminated water, the Saltmarsh Sparrow’s survival, Ammodramus caudacutus.1
2024 will also be “the warmest humanity has measured.” David Wallace-Wells opens his book, The Uninhabitable Earth: “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” Less menacing forms of pollution—light, noise—change how we perceive the world.
Whitman’s line, “I contain multitudes.” The Stanford Daily says the line is:
a beautiful way of describing the complexity that is human nature—the fact that we don’t exist in dichotomies, that we’re all infinitely complicated compilations of many different and sometimes conflicting thoughts and beliefs.
Consider the context:
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Let’s put “I contain multitudes” in conversation with Robinson Jeffers. Multitudes are a common denominator. You contain multitudes, a snail does, a blade of grass.
Think pantheistically. Consider “I” part of something larger.
Of pantheistic feeling in his works, Jeffers wrote:
Another theme that has much engaged my verses is the expression of a religious feeling, that perhaps must be called pantheism…that the world, the universe, is one being, a single organism, one great life that includes all life and all things; and is so beautiful that it must be loved and reverenced; and in moments of mystical vision we identify ourselves with it.
Everything is part of “one being…that includes all life.” It contains us, we contain elements of it—multitudes. Some other lines from Whitman:
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.
I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots
The soul is clear and sweet because it contains parts of “all that is not my soul.” The speaker is “not contain’d between my hat and boots,” nor are the multitudes.
It’s also worth noting the temptation to read “I” as singular or human. Maybe “I” is “we.” We understand the world from a singular perspective. As for the voice being human:
The sharp-hoof’d moose of the north, the cat on the house-sill, the chickadee, the prairie-dog, The litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats, The brood of the turkey-hen and she with her half-spread wings, I see in them and myself the same old law.
Perhaps the speaker sees multitudes, “one great life that includes all life.” Here, “the same old law.”
If we don’t see something ourselves we imagine it from a human point of view, but maybe Whitman’s “I” is a moose or chickadee—voice of Jeffers’s organism.
Consider these scenarios. One: You ponder I contain multitudes walking through a bright, crowded city at night. Noise surrounds. Other pedestrians feel separate, each wrapped up in private concerns—life’s unrelenting minutiae. They’re in your way; you are in theirs. I contain multitudes.
Two: You’re lying alone on a hilltop. Silence except the breeze, a screech owl’s trill. The night is new moon dark; stars, clear. You feel small. Cassiopeia is bright. I contain multitudes. A different understanding than in the bright, crowded city.
Rather than feel separate—people in your way, you in theirs—you identify with stars. The universe’s single organism, “so beautiful that it must be loved and reverenced; and in moments of mystical vision we identify ourselves with it.” Hard to see ourselves as the center of the universe when the actual universe is right there. Reprieve from light and noise provides a balanced mindset with which to return to crowds and noise.
Rather than see others as in your way, stars help you remember they contain multitudes—as you do, as does everything. Components of “one great life that includes all life and all things.” Stars are beautiful, so are other people. They “must be loved and reverenced,” we should “identify ourselves” with them and their multitudes.
While multitudes are evidence of the complexities and contradictions we each contain, unique to us, they are also not unique to us. Each of us contains them.
Jeffers championed Inhumanism, “a shifting of emphasis from man to not-man.” If all we encounter is humanity or signs of it—a highway’s hum, never-dark sky—we forget there’s something else to emphasize. Before we embrace Jeffers’s shift, “man to not-man,” we must shift from self to not-self. The universality of stars facilitates both.
Stars are maximally public and intensely private. In Nicholson Baker’s A Box Of Matches, stars are described as “private needle holes of exactitude in the stygian diorama.”
How are stars private? A neighbor can look at the same needle holes of exactitude and believe they’re privately hers. The observation is private; insights gained, public and shared. Stars reinforce we’re part of a larger whole. Private observation helps bring perspective to public life. A separate pedestrian becomes a recognizable component of a shared single organism.
Thoreau, in Walden, expresses solitude.
I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.
He expresses universality in the same terms.
the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours…The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!
Edwin Way Teale, in A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm, writes about stars.
In the clearer air over the darkened fields, they seem to draw closer, to burn with greater intensity, to increase into swarming multitudes. No longer do city lights dim their brilliance.
Teale’s interest in stars is “more poetic than scientific.” My thesis is: if only people looked at the stars! Quixotic,2 more poetic than scientific. A voice in the back of my head tells me to grow up.
What better way to grow up—grow old, backward—than look at stars? Teale cites Fieldbook of the Stars.
When we scan the nocturnal skies we study ancient history. We do not see the stars as they are but as they were centuries on centuries ago.
The erasure of the night sky would leave us rudderless—in a more poetic than scientific sense. We don’t rely on stars for navigation, don’t rely on them for much. They retain their value by reminding us of shared multitudes.
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National Geographic, September 6, 2024: “scientists are merely trying to postpone [the Saltmarsh Sparrow’s] extinction…the species is doomed to vanish…as early as 2035 or 2050.” I want to revisit Saltmarsh Sparrows, hopefully after Saltmarsh Sparrow-specific birding that yields photographs. Saw one yesterday, no picture—the species was listed on eBird in one spot in the last seven days, hence birding there. I’ve visited some of that article’s photo locales, need to return—sparrows in mind.
Initially I’d included in my list of worries larger than light pollution that most of us will never see an Aleutian shield fern, Polystichum aleuticum. If light pollution is smaller potatoes—in comparison to Saltmarsh Sparrows, small potatoes to most—an endangered fern is very small potatoes. The fern “only grows at four locations on [Adak Island]…Nowhere else in the world.” It “may have never been very abundant…a ‘living fossil’ left over from the Pleistocene Epoch.” Populations “appear stable.”
“Quixote became an archetype, and the word quixotic, used to mean the impractical pursuit of idealistic goals, entered common usage.” Don Quixote is mad, but is it bad to be quixotic? “While [quixotic] is most often used to mean equally impractical and idealistic,” with negative connotations, “it also has the sense of romantic nobility…given to unrealistic schemes and great chivalry.”
Wendell Berry writes,
To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.
Are these mad times? Is it bad to be mad à la Quixote—idealistic, romantically noble? Cervantes wrote, “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness—and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
Excellent photo essay, James. Stars are something beyond my comprehension. Most of the places I have lived are simply filled with light pollution. I do see some of the more common constellations here in North America.
But the first time I remember being in complete Moonless darkness on a clear night was simply incredible. This was some years ago while I was out camping on the western coast of South Korea. That was a life-changing experience. I really had no words or thoughts to describe it. I simply stared in the night sky.
Beautiful night photography James. I remember when I moved back to New England from L.A. and moved to Eastport, ME first. The stars we just so amazing. My daughter had never seen stars like we saw up in Eastport. I still marvel every time I go up there. Thank you for filling the void of my not going up this summer and for this wonderful read!