How, figuring out that even the universe is dying, will we bear our lives?
Most readily, via friendship, via connection, via co-creating the world we need to dwell in for the transient time now we have collectively on this lonely, excellent planet.
The seventh annual Universe in Verse — a many-hearted labor of affection, celebrating the marvel of actuality via science and poetry — occasioned a joyous collaboration with Australian musician and author Nick Cave and Brazilian artist and filmmaker Daniel Bruson on an animated poem reckoning with this central query of being alive.
BUT WE HAD MUSIC
by Maria PopovaProper this minute
throughout time zones and opinions individuals are
planning
making meals
making guarantees and poemswhereas
on the middle of our galaxy
a black gap with the mass of 4 billion suns
screams its open-mouth kiss
of oblivion.Sometime it’s going to swallow
Euclid’s postulates and the Goldberg Variations,
swallow calculus and Leaves of Grass.I do know this.
And nonetheless
when the constellation of starlings
sparkles throughout the night sky,
it’s sufficientto face right here
for an irrevocable minute
agape with marvel.It’s eternity.
At 7PM EST on April 7, tune into the livestream of the 2024 Universe in Verse, celebrating the science and marvel of eclipses, to listen to Nick inform the ecliptic story of marrying the love of his life, alongside a constellation of different dazzling people bringing to life the science of gravity and relativity, tides and black holes, the formation of the Moon and the chemistry of the Solar, via poems and tales that assist us meet actuality by itself phrases and broaden the phrases on which we meet ourselves and one another.
Couple with Daniel Bruson’s breathtaking animation of former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy Okay. Smith’s poem “My God, It’s Stuffed with Stars” from a earlier season of The Universe in Verse, then revisit Nick Cave on the artwork of rising older and the antidote to our existential helplessness.
