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This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. Amanda Knox spent nearly four years in prison for a murder she did not commit. When she was exonerated, she made an unusual decision to befriend the prosecutor who argued for her guilt. Maybe he could help her make sense of her case. I spent years thinking about it and trying to understand it until I realized that I could just ask.
Listen to this interview on the Fresh Air podcast. This is The Pulse, stories about the people and places at the heart of health and science. I'm Maiken Scott. Did you ever read Moby Dick, all 135 chapters of it? A lot of people have to read it in school. Call me Ishmael.
Some years ago, never mind how long precisely, having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp drizzly November in my soul,
Whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses. And bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet. And especially whenever my high pose gets such an upper hand. The tale of Captain Ahab's obsession with a white whale is a classic. The book is used to teach all kinds of literary techniques, like changing the narrative voice. And who could count the tortured high school papers that have been written about it?
Precisely for that reason, Sarah Hart had no interest in Moby Dick, even though she loves literature and she's an avid reader. It was one of those books that was on the, I must do, must do this. It felt like homework, you know, and I rebelled against that a little bit. But then years later, somebody mentioned to her that there was a lot of math in Moby Dick. Sarah is a mathematician, so that piqued her interest.
I thought, hmm, maybe I will have a go at this book. And I was so delighted when I did to find that, one, it's a great read, but two, there are mathematical references just peppered through it. You can see that he really loves mathematics. The author, Herman Melville, refers to complicated mathematical principles in the book, and different characters have different relationships to the subject. There's Stubb. He's the second mate. He...
is responsible for some of the navigational calculations, but he has this kind of awe, even perhaps fear of mathematics, and he views some of the methods that he's learnt and been taught as
as kind of coming out of some magical realm. Or Ishmael, the main narrator for much of the book. He's a crew member on Captain Ahab's ship. He's super interested in mathematics. He's so interested in the data. He actually gets information about the measurements and statistics of whales tattooed on his body because he didn't have anywhere else to write them down.
Reading Moby Dick helped Sarah realize that math plays a much bigger role in literature than we might assume. There is mathematics behind a lot of these works that we don't necessarily see. And really what's going on is that...
Mathematics is the best language we really know to describe and understand structure and pattern and symmetry. And these things are all present in writing. There are popular numbers like three wishes or seven dwarfs in fairy tales. Authors use math as symbolism. And we can also see math in the way a poem flows or the counting of syllables in a haiku. ♪
Those are all structures. They're all constraints that actually poets impose upon themselves really as a spur to creativity. So they don't prevent you being creative. They help you to be more creative. And that's something that as a mathematician, you know, I see that structure and it speaks to me. You know, it sings. This is really lovely, the way these things are put together. But we, you know, as human beings, we love rhythm and pattern and symmetry. And those things are part of us.
And so, you know, it comes out in our creative forms, whether that's art or music or literature.
We usually think of art and science as existing in different spheres. But science and the natural world often serve as an inspiration and framework for art. On this episode, we'll take a look at that relationship. First, math and literature. Then we'll explore how music imitates and draws on nature. We'll also meet an artist whose installations and sculptures are based on ecology. ♪
To get started, let's stick with Sarah Hart. She is a professor of mathematics at Birkbeck College, which is part of the University of London. Her new book is called Once Upon a Prime, The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature. She
She makes the case that math is key to appreciating literature on a new level. But first, you have to challenge a basic assumption that a lot of people hold, that math is boring, that it's a set of rules and formulas, something we use to calculate our taxes or the square footage of a room.
I would really love people who perhaps may have thought of themselves as, oh, you know, I'm not a science person, I'm not a math person, I'm an arts person. Well, you know, you are a math person as well. I think that's, it's just, you perhaps may not have seen it yet. And I would just really love to show people
that math is not anything to be scared of and we can find it in everything we love. Everywhere there's beauty, there is mathematics. I can see the patterns in poetry and writers being very systematic about getting those rhythms and patterns right. I never thought about it showing up in literature.
Do you feel like authors do this deliberately or is this a way we write because it sounds good to us? So that's a great question. I think there's a bit of both of those things. I think there's a natural sense of rhythm that you might have, you know, in great writing. The structure of the sentences is naturally going to have rhythm.
mathematical structure to it, but there are definitely authors that do it deliberately. So, for example, one book I really love that came out about 10 years ago is The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. And this was a sensation. It's got everything in terms of plot. It's a story of a gold rush town. There's murder, there's intrigue, there's love, betrayal, there's opium, there's stolen gold. It's all happening. And the narrative is
is an exploration, a discussion about the relationship between chance and fate in our lives, how much we have control over our lives or whether things are just happening and we're caught up in the currents of life. And to sort of illustrate that theme, she has various astrological themes that are running through the book. So there are characters associated to astrological signs. There are these 12 characters. But she also has a mathematical structure that she uses in the book.
and it's to do with the lengths of the chapters. Every chapter is exactly half the length of the one before it. So you get this kind of decreasing, decreasing gradually of the chapter lengths.
The book has 12 chapters, and each has half the amount of words than the previous chapter, which Sarah says is a unique structure. The pace is picking up in the novel as the chapter lengths keep decreasing and decreasing. And for Sarah's math mind, this intentional pattern quickly turned into an equation that begged to be solved. You can actually work out...
mathematically how long the whole book is in terms of the length of the very final shortest chapter. And the reason I mention this is because that number in terms of the length of the last chapter turns out to be, and we do a bit of a mathematical calculation, 2 to the power 12, take away 1, multiplied by the length of the last chapter.
So two to the power of 12 is an important clue in calculating the length of the book, if you're so inclined. And then there is another hint. Remember I mentioned some stolen gold? The amount of gold that is stolen, she tells us in the book, it's 4,096 pounds. And if you are mathematically minded, you will know immediately, you'll recognize that 4,096 is exactly two to the power of 12. So she has given us that number.
clear look, she's put that stolen gold, it's in the structure of the book, it's absolutely fantastic and to me that instantly says, okay, she knows exactly what's happening, she's chosen this structure, she knows exactly how long that means the book's going to have to be and she's given us that lovely little clue in the book.
for us to realize that. So this is what I mean about, you know, knowing that little bit of mathematics really just gives you that lovely treat when you're reading that book. You're seeing what's going on and you're like, aha, that's where it is. That's where that gold is. So I love it. That just gave me an extra level of enjoyment of that book when I realized what was going on. Now, you know, somebody could say, well, this is some kind of gimmick, you know, every chapter is half the size of the one before.
But you are suggesting this really like tickles our brain in a different way and makes the whole experience more, I guess, three dimensional somehow. Yeah, absolutely. And that for me is what makes the difference between a good use of mathematics and a less good one. You could think of different ways to get, you know, the number 12. That wouldn't work as well.
You know, you could have every 12th word has no vowels. I don't know. Something you could do that, the length of words or something. The reason this works so well is because it ties in beautifully, both with the themes around astrology in the book, but also it gives you that feeling
feeling in the book of this sort of spiraling inwards and the chapters doing that they're kind of wrapping around a central core of the the deep heart of the book and the very final chapter which is just a conversation between two main characters it's very very short and
This, this halving really gives you a beautiful structure to the book that I think we do feel we do even if we don't overtly spot it helps. It's nice if we know what it is. And that's what you know, I hope some of the things I say in my book are explaining and giving you that kind of background towards some of these structures.
But I think we do feel, we feel what's happening. We feel the quickening of the pace as we read through the book. The tension is mounting. The gears are tightening around these characters. And that structure enforces and enhances that. So it's not a randomly chosen thing. In your research for the book, did you find a lot of
of authors, of writers, of these people who we consider literary greats talking about math, talking about how they use math in their writing? My favorite example of this is George Eliot. So she was a, you know, 19th century novelist and
And she absolutely loved mathematics. And she kept notebooks where she would write interesting little bits of mathematics that she'd found out. And she went to lectures about geometry in her spare time. She wrote to her friends that she just really enjoyed doing mathematics as a almost as a solace. You know, it consoled her when she was stressed at times of difficult moments in her life.
She wrote to a friend and said, here's my recipe, right, for relaxing. So I play the piano, I read Voltaire, I take a walk, and I just do just a lovely little bit of mathematics every day. It was soothing for her, you know, that the beautiful structure and the kind of timeless truth and beauty of mathematics consoled her and made her feel calmer. And actually that comes out in her books too. So she's got in Adam Bede, which is her first novel,
Adam Bede is a carpenter and his father dies and he's, you know, having a difficult time of it. And he says, I've got to carry on. You know, the square of four is 16. That's still going to be true when you're sad and when you're happy. And so he's saying, you know, the truth, the timelessness of mathematics is always there. That's a consolation for him. So, yeah, in her writing there, there is lots and lots of mathematical references. And, you know, it's really clear that she she loved mathematics and it just comes out.
You talk about some numbers in the book that often play a prominent role in stories. I'm thinking about the number three and you get three wishes in the fairy tale. Often the number seven has special property and it's like the seventh son. Again, in the fairy tales, it's often the seventh swan or the seventh whatever dwarf. Yeah.
Yes, that's right. I was just like, are they dwarves? Yes, they are. Okay, I should know my fairy tales better. But you
You know, so talk about those numbers, what they mean and how those special properties are reflected in these timeless stories. Yeah, so if you think about, you know, the fairy tales and the folk tales that you grew up with, you often will find particular numbers cropping up over and over again, like three. I think three is perhaps in narrative, it's probably the most important number for me because...
Three occurs not just as a three wishes and three billy goats gruff and, you know, Goldilocks and the three bears, but it's also part of how narratives are put together. I mean, you can think of the three-act play, and if you have sets of books, it's most often a trilogy. But actually, if we think about what the number three does, for me, a good way of thinking about it is it's the smallest number of
points that you can have that actually gives you a shape so if you start off if you see just a point a blob and think about a story as well suppose there are three princes going on a quest and in always in a fairy tale the first two princes will fail because you know they don't help the old beggar woman or they you know then they're not kind or not brave enough and then the youngest one will somehow manage to succeed in the quest so if you imagine just telling this story the
The first prince does the thing, and imagine you just drop a little point. Here's your first data point. You don't really know anything. You haven't got very much information. Okay, fine. It's just an isolated event. Then the second prince comes along. He also fails, right? So now you've got a pattern. You can say, aha, I know what happens. Somebody tries this, and they fail. And if you imagine geometrically, you've got a second point now to work with. You can join those and make a line, and then you've got a line that predicts where you're going to go.
Now, but you're just moving along a boring old line. Now the magic happens when the third point comes into play. Geometrically speaking, oh my goodness, we've gone up a dimension, we've made a shape. Three points can make a triangle for you. And in narrative, you thought you know where you were going, but then somehow it's subverted. So the third prince in our story will be the one who does help the old beggar woman. Oh, and she was a beautiful princess in disguise or, you know, an enchantress and she showers him with gold and everything's great.
in our geometrical scenario, we've got a shape. We've got a higher dimensional thing. It suddenly exists in reality. It's not just a boring old line. And so this connection there, I think, is really powerful between narratives that work, a bit of repetition, and then suddenly it's subverted. And that's a surprise. And this is, you know, a really...
key structural thing about so many fairy tales and folk tales that I think is really why things come in threes. Because the first two things give you a prediction.
Now, when I'm writing and I do a lot of writing for work, I don't find myself thinking about math ever. But I know when a sentence sounds right, you know, and I usually since I'm writing for speaking, I sort of like talk in my head as I'm writing and I can hear the sentences out loud.
And there is something that I'm looking for, but I've never consciously thought about what that is. So do you think we kind of instinctively put these patterns into our writing, even if we're not thinking about math? I think so. I mean, you know, I don't want to over-egg the pudding, I think. But I think really we do have an innate feeling for, especially I think rhythmic patterns, right?
the, you know, the classic iambic pentameter of Shakespeare doesn't come completely randomly. That's a natural rhythm that we that we fall into, which our speech can sometimes get. And when you want to emphasize something, if you feel like a sentence is particularly nicely put together, you'll often find it has got a certain rhythm to it and a certain balance. So, you know, if you have a
tiny sentence with two clauses and one of them is very small and one of them is very long, that can feel unbalanced. And perhaps our natural instinct is balance, perhaps some symmetry. We like a few patterns. If you want some emphasis, you know, political speechwriters,
They always say things are coming in threes, right? You know, read my lips, no new taxes. You see that so often as a rhetorical trick to list things in threes. So I think we do have these sort of innate appreciation of pattern and symmetry and structure, even if we're not doing it on purpose. I think that does come out. And if you think, you know, what's the first sound we hear, right?
It's our mother's heartbeat. That's an iambic pentameter, if ever there was one. And I think those rhythms of speech, they can give us confidence in what's being said. They can make things just feel right. There's a sort of satisfaction that we feel, which I think has underlying pattern and structure to it.
As you were talking, I was thinking about artwork like paintings or even beautiful statues or architecture where we're often looking for the kind of geometric patterns or we're looking for a certain mean that we can calculate that balances the space. So it sounds like it's a similar thing but for words. Right.
I think you're absolutely right there, yes. So when we're looking at things visually, we can sense harmony, visual harmony. We see it, we appreciate it. You know, we don't have to be out there measuring the angles or anything. We can see it. And in kind of the regularity of patterns, there's actually scientific evidence that says we have this bias towards symmetry and pattern in what we see. And there's kind of two reasons for that, but...
One is called the perceptual bias view, which is that it's actually literally easier on the eye to look at something that has a lot of symmetry. And it's because our brain has less processing to do. It spots a pattern and then it can sort of say, you know, dot, dot, dot sort of thing. It can kind of fill in the rest of the picture without us having to do as much hard work over it. So it genuinely is easier on the eye to look at a lovely symmetrical picture.
than an asymmetrical one. So I think that's very interesting. And, you know, you're right. It's the same thing with words. I think we really have... Our brains just enjoy balanced, structured work. Not too structured, because that's boring, but with just that nice bit of structure in it, it makes our brains happy. You describe in the book how...
You felt this joy at numbers as a child even, and you were so proud to figure out certain relationships between numbers and how they multiplied. And I think a lot of us somehow...
we lose that joy of the numbers and numbers get relegated, math gets relegated into the realm of finances or doing tedious chores that we would rather have a calculator to. So talk a bit about that joy of the numbers and of math and how we could maybe rediscover that. Yeah, so I think this is, oh, it's such a tragedy that
mathematics has been sort of put into this place in many of our lives and many of our minds of, oh, I've got to do my budget, I've got to balance the books, you know, that the only time you interact with numbers is those stressful tax return type situations where, you know, there's no fun and joy in that. But that's calculation. For me, numbers are
are not about mere calculation. That would be like saying, you know, art is just technical drawing or writing is just about spelling. You know, it's useful to be able to do those things, but that isn't what makes literature. Being good at spelling is...
almost irrelevant to being good at writing. I mean, you know, it's helpful, but you can get a machine to do it. Mathematics is the same thing. I'm not actually that great at mental arithmetic. You know, don't fire me from the mathematician's academy. If we're in a big group and we go to a restaurant and everyone turns to me and says, you're the mathematician...
Can you work out one thirteenth of the bill? You know, I'm not happy to be doing that. For me, what numbers do and what mathematics is really about...
It's about patterns. And that was what my earliest joyful experiences were before I even knew that that's what what mathematics might mean. Just play with some patterns. Actually, my daughter during lockdown, when suddenly all the children were at home. So we we had mummy's maths hour with my with my younger daughter every day. And we had such great fun. We were folding paper.
We were drawing patterns. We were playing, can you guess the next thing? I'll give you a few drawings and can you predict what the next one's going to be? We played with counting different coins and making patterns with them. We did secret codes. We were doing the whole thing and it was just so much fun. And I feel that's what mathematics can be, the joy of understanding.
of patterns and I just wish we could all experience that a little bit more and be able to actually relax and enjoy it because I think another issue is you get to a point where you think you feel like you're going to be tested you feel like someone will say yes but what's 15 squared and if you don't know you know you've done it wrong I want to take away that anxiety I think we should just play and have fun
Sarah Hart is a professor of mathematics at Birkbeck College, which is part of the University of London. Her new book is Once Upon a Prime, the wondrous connection between mathematics and literature. Coming up, how composers draw on the natural world for inspiration. There is a piece where he literally imitates birds, and it's so charming. That's still ahead on The Pulse.
This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about the intersection of art, science, and the natural world. Pianist Rachel Franklin loves all kinds of music. Classical music, jazz, but there's one piece that holds a special place in her heart. It's called The Lark Ascending, composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams. There's something about that piece. The Lark Ascending is extraordinarily special.
as a piece of music, and you can just float up there with the violin being the lark, and it gives you a vision of the world, whatever vision you want. The music was inspired by a poem of the same name by George Meredith, which describes a lark soaring high in the sky. He rises and begins to round. He drops the silver chain of sound, of many lengths without a break, in chirp, whistle, slur, and shake.
You know, the lark circles and sings and chirrups high, high above the fields and the land. And the music that Vaughan Williams creates, he casts the solo violin as the lark and the orchestra is the land. And it's...
You get this sort of extraordinary sense of the relationship of the lark and the land, but also the vast distances and the way that the lark has a vision of this ancient land. It's one of the loveliest pieces of the natural world I think that's ever been written. The violin has to play very, very high and very, very sweetly. And sometimes the notes are very long and suspended and sometimes they kind of chirrup at you.
We as listeners, we float around with the violin and we get that vision. We get that vision of whatever fields we want a vision of, really. Rachel says there's so much music that draws a connection to nature and she teaches a course called Music Inspired by the Natural World. She gives lectures on the topic, most recently at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Certain composers really
just loved, for instance, the sounds of birds, which makes sense because that's the creature that really does create some of the most blissful and astonishingly varied sounds. So, I mean, there was a Czech composer, Antonín Dvorák, and he really soaked himself in birdsong and
There was a French composer, Messiaen, who created an entire musical alphabet out of birdsong. And earlier composers, even composers like Beethoven, they imitated birdsong. I think it creates a sort of a sense of bliss. Maybe let's start with Dvorak. How did he incorporate birdsong into his music?
Well, he imitated it. There is a piece, there's a few pieces, but the one that I like to talk about is one of his string quartets. It's called the American String Quartet because he actually, he was inspired by being in America. He was living in America, being a music director in New York for a music academy. And every summer Dvořák went out to a place in Iowa called Spillville, where there were many, many Czech folks and that's where they spent their summers.
And he would listen to birds all the time. And sometimes they drove him nuts because they'd wake him up early in the morning. But there are specific places in the American string quartet where he literally imitates birds. And it's so charming to...
And we think he imitated one specific type of bird. Which one? I think it was a bird called the red-eyed vireo. And some people agree with me. But it's a charming movement and it's right there in the violin writing. It's really quite funny, but it's beautiful as well. VIRGINIA
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So there is one way of bringing birdsong into your music, which is to literally transcribe what you're hearing and then incorporating that into the music. But many composers also hint at the natural world in terms of just creating music that then is reminiscent of a bird ascending or a butterfly fluttering its wings. How do they achieve that?
You know, it's very clever because, you know, centuries ago, composers sort of tried to do it by literally imitating it. And now, as we move more into the 19th century, it became more allegorical because, I mean, the natural world is a metaphor for our inner life as well. That's how we see it. And when we go out in the natural world, we are deeply influencing our inner world.
And we're attempting in transcendent ways to sort of fuse with our experience.
And so composers didn't necessarily literally imitate them, creatures. They would find ways to create watery swirls and on the piano runs and glittery sounds and in the orchestra waves. You know, if they were depicting sunrises, they would find ways to have the orchestra swell. There's a lot of different ways you can do it.
you know, even Vivaldi, a Baroque composer, you know, contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach, you know, he duplucked
plucked violins for rain and things like that. A lot of it is in our minds in some ways. I mean, if you don't give the piece a name, we might not actually know it's that particular part of the natural world we're listening to. But one thing we will know is that it brings us whatever the composer wants.
wants us to feel so if the composer is going to write a storm a thunderstorm with great claps of sound in his orchestra you know then we will whether we know it's the thunderstorm or not it will be surging and it will be disturbing and it may be dissonant and if the composer wants to write about a beautiful calm sea we'll know about it even if he hasn't told us it's a beautiful calm sea
You talk about, in your lecture, you talked about a piece by the composer Grieg, and he has a piece about butterfly wings, and you kind of describe how he creates the sound of a butterfly fluttering its wings. He creates a sort of an alternating piano sound. Bum, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum. ♪
And it's rhythmically, I mean, if you look at a butterfly, their wings don't literally, they're not even, are they? It goes up and down and up and down a little bit, particularly when the butterfly has settled. And so he wrote a piece literally called Papillon or Butterfly, Schmetterling. The piano itself...
creates, by alternating notes, creates the look, the imagined look of butterfly wings as they beat back and forwards. It seems to require a deep observation of nature, though, not just being out in nature, but actually, like, really settling into the experience and paying attention. These guys didn't have headphones.
You know, they weren't jogging with earbuds. They were absolutely completely immersed in their environment. One interesting example is Beethoven, who, you know, as he grew older and older, became more and more deaf, but wrote one of his most powerful pieces of music that invokes a natural world, the Pastoral Symphony, which is the symphony number six. I mean, he wrote that when he was almost completely deaf.
So by that time, Beethoven had already, his senses had absorbed what nature had to offer and what it felt like. Possibly his senses as he walked, and Beethoven did a lot of hiking, and he hiked every day he could hike, particularly in the summer. Even if he couldn't hear those birds anymore, he could feel the wind on his face and he could see the way that
creatures floated across his vision and I think he sort of, he would enter a transcendent state, an altered state and access as it were through a portal I think, access memories and feelings and how he related them to those sounds and those feelings even if he couldn't always hear the sounds anymore. Music
But if the piece of music can take you in some way into the writer's natural world, then it's a portal for you. It's a portal for us. And it sounds almost like this two-way street where...
These composers went into nature for inspiration to be transported into some kind of different state and then they can translate that experience into music which then allows other people to be transported into that place. For me, music is a completely immersive experience.
And, you know, if I can walk with Beethoven, literally, if he can take me on his hikes out in the countryside while he's playing, he's, you know, I'm listening to his pastoral symphony, then that's how I connect with him. I think it fuses in some transcendental place. When you're out in nature, it sounds like you're a pretty avid observer of nature yourself, especially birds. So what do you look for when you're out there?
For me, I mean, I'm not a fanatical hiker. I don't have all the gear. But I think I'm looking for multiple textures, actually. I'm looking for sound textures. I'm looking to see textures of trees and bark and leaves. I'm looking texture-wise to see how the sky appears.
through the branches and the leaves if I'm in a forested area. If I'm in a field area, I look for the way that the wind blows across maybe reeds or wheat. I think all those things and the way that the wind might blow past my ears. And also, can I hear birds even if I can't see them? I mean, sometimes you can't see birds like larks. Larks you can barely see because they're so high.
but you can hear them. And how did that sound? How does that sound texture with the sound of the wind? I look for textures. I asked Rachel if she has a favorite contemporary piece of music that speaks to the natural world. And she mentioned choral composer Eric Whitaker. He's the guy that puts together thousands of singers.
and has them on the screen and they kind of meld into images and they are sending their recordings from wherever they're living, you know. It's a sort of... He really pioneered the virtual choir...
And he wrote a piece some years ago based on the images that came out of the Hubble telescope of the deep field. And Eric Whittaker's Deep Field is just one of the most astonishing pieces of music that I've sort of experienced ever. And what about it makes it so magical? How does it map reality?
The kind of like tingling feeling we get when we see anything related to space. There is this sense of eternity, the sense of knowing but also not knowing. How does it map that onto the music? How does any music create a sense of vastness and distance? I think that's a very interesting question. I think the choral effects, the way he spaces the voices out,
It's absolutely amazing. I think that the orchestra is very large and also the sounds are sort of very big and suspended and the mixture of the orchestral sounds and the choral sounds together, they sound sometimes like gas clouds. That's pianist and lecturer Rachel Franklin. She teaches a course called Music Inspired by the Natural World.
Coming up, an artist wants her work to speak to an important issue. Everywhere we went, the riverbeds, there were dry riverbeds. They remind me of like the stones were like the dinosaur bones you would find in a desert. And the stones were absolutely gorgeous, but carved by water, but everything was baking in the sun.
So she decided to create a giant installation, a cast of a dry riverbed. That's next on The Pulse. This message comes from Grammarly. From emails to reports and project proposals, it's hard to meet the demands of today's competing priorities without some help.
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This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about the intersection of art, science, and the natural world.
Betsy Damon is an internationally recognized artist with a career that has spanned decades and continents. Early on in her career, she found herself drawn to water, not just as an element, but as a vital resource that is under attack from pollution and climate change. And she decided to use her art as a vehicle to engage people around water scarcity and to demonstrate solutions.
Nicole Curry talked to Betsy about her long career and the meaning behind her work. My conversation with Betsy Damon didn't feel like a typical interview. Instead, it reminded me of a moment when everyone gathers around an elder to listen to their many stories and adventures.
She told me about the first time she noticed water in a new way. It was 1983. She was on a big road trip with her children. They traveled from Yellowstone National Park to the Grand Canyon. Well, we were traveling across the United States camping. It was gorgeous. And you could camp in so many places and in so many ways.
But everywhere we went, the riverbeds, there were dry riverbeds. And you remind me of like the stones were like the dinosaur bones you would find in a desert. And the stones were absolutely gorgeous, but carved by water. But everything was baking in the sun. Betsy was curious about what she saw. I have to say, I just set out to know water.
So I decided to expose people to rivers by casting a dry riverbed in handmade paper. Betsy and a team of artists got a grant to make a cast of a dry riverbed in Utah. Casting is sort of like that paper mache project you did in grade school, the one where you place wet, mashed up paper into a hollow object.
It dries and voila, you have a hard structure in the shape of the void. Betsy applied this technique to the riverbed. I was just trying to capture the kind of the energy or the shadow of the water that had carved the rocks and carved the river that was no longer there.
Here's how they did it. We collected various plants that we could make into pulp. And then you bring it back, reconstitute it so that it's very liquidy and you can pour it over the rocks. She described it like an assembly line.
One person was mixing the pulp, somebody else was pouring the mixture into the riverbed, and another was patting it dry to make sure the mixture took form. They worked eight, sometimes ten hours a day. And our connection to it became very, really deep. We developed this intimate relationship with the whole site and with the riverbed.
And the day that I had looked up at the sky, I'd been on the riverbed for like 10 hours just with the whole situation. And I looked up and there was the Milky Way and it looked just like the riverbed. And I went, oh, my gosh. And the next day I learned that the indigenous tribes there call the Milky Way the River of Stones. So that I was just, you know, I was on my way.
The team finished the project in a month. The cast was 250 feet long in the end, so huge it had to be displayed in sections. And it revealed what Betsy had hoped for, the energy of the river. Splotches of red and blue mineral pigments covered the cast. This showed how erosion changed the surface of the rock.
There was also dust, grass, and bits of stone stuck in the molding. This showed what materials had collected in the empty riverbed.
Betsy named the project A Memory of Clean Water. Her art piece started conversations and jump-started her career as an eco-artist. Betsy started to go to water conferences. She studied the subject and attended community conversations about the topic. She learned how climate change, water pollution, and bottled water impacted natural resources and
Betsy even heard conversations about a global water crisis, a phrase used to describe a lack of safe water supply.
That's when she decided to try to demonstrate solutions in her artwork. She founded Keepers of the Waters. It's an organization that helps communities restore their local natural water systems. One project required them to clean a pond in Minnesota and then, in an artistic way, show how it became polluted in the first place. I wanted to demonstrate how the chemicals that you put on
farms poison the water. And when I first went out there, the doctors knew which chemicals were being used by the cancers that showed up. Betsy wanted to tell the farmers how much the chemicals from their farm had affected the pond. But you weren't allowed to mention that because you might insult somebody whose family were farmers. And so instead of actually addressing issues like that, which have now become very extreme,
You are always told to cover it up. Don't talk about it. She was frustrated. I was going to quit my work with water. I was going to quit. Betsy left the pond project in Minnesota feeling dejected. She was no longer interested in creating any other water-based installations. It seemed to be the end.
Until Betsy accidentally dipped her toes back into the subject. In 1989, she was in China with her son, and a stranger told her about an old, run-down water bottling company called God Water. She had to go check it out. When I drank that water, my entire body came alive. Just went alive. Well, haven't you ever felt like a thrill in your body? Like maybe when you jump into cold water, I don't know.
But this is like interior, like every cell in my body was humming when I drank that water. And questions began flowing into her mind. Does water quality matter? Why does it matter? And how does water create life? Something magical had happened. And at that moment, she remembers saying to herself. Water is the sole source of the living system. Take it away and we don't have it.
So how do you bring people into that consciousness? And I went, I can't give up my work. I can't give up my commitment. It's only natural that water led Betsy back to her work. For the next 20 years, she created public work all over the world, places like Tibet and China. And like she always wanted, her projects called attention to the lack of clean water and viable solutions.
Her most significant project to date is an ecological park in China. The public park diverts polluted water from two nearby rivers into a filtration system, which creates clean drinking water. Participants can even see the filtration in action and drink the water. She named it the Living Water Garden. Betsy has collected her life's learnings about water in a new book.
It's called Water Talks. And her dear friend and famous biologist Jane Goodall wrote the foreword. But before I ended my conversation with Betsy, I had to ask her an important question. She had spent more than three decades warning people about the water crisis. Yet water scarcity is still a concern for many people.
I wanted to know what she thought about the future. And did she have any hope? I'm somewhat confident that we'll, even though we're in an emergency, that we will, in the next five years, be full force together, really united.
But I also know that the banks and the rich people are buying up the water around the world and that rich people think they can isolate themselves from this catastrophe just by owning a lot of land. Well, you can't. You can't. In fact, you know, you'll go down with the ship. So embrace all and embrace all life. And then let's do this together. That's my final word.
That story was reported by Nicole Curry. That's our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia, made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the Sutherland family, and the Commonwealth Fund. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts.
Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu, Liz Tong, and Grant Hill. Marcus Biddle is our health equity fellow. Charlie Kyer is our engineer. Our producers are Nicole Curry and Lindsay Lazarski. I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening.
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