The fifth annual Universe in Verse — a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry, which I began in 2017 as part celebration of life and part protest against the assault on science, nature, and reality in the era of “alternative facts” and vanishing environmental protections — took place at UC Santa Cruz on April 16, exploring the largest question we live with: What is life? (The original show announcement and description are below.)
Quite apart from the technical and financial challenge of broadcasting live from the redwoods, a typical livestream of a California evening event would have excluded most of the waking world. Instead, here is a global “retrostream” — a time-shifted weekend-wide broadcast to welcome all the world’s time-zones, freely available from 12PM EST on Saturday, May 21 until 4PM EST on Sunday, May 22, to be enjoyed in viewing parties or parallel solitudes, in fragments or in a single-sitting feast.
While you watch, something to consider: As a society, we have ceased thinking about how cultural matter appears before us — we take it for granted that we will be informed, entertained, perhaps even enchanted, with nothing required of us in kind. We call this cultural matter by the slur under which Silicon Valley has commodified it: “content” — something to fill the empty the screen, of the empty life, insentient to the human endeavor behind it, the myriad invisible labors and sacrifices, collaborations and lonelinesses that make anything of beauty and substance come to life.
Please know: The Universe in Verse has been a colossal endeavor, to which a constellation of gifted and generous humans have donated their time and talent — resources diverted from primary lives and livelihoods — to offer this collaborative gift of perspective and tenderness. (This recording itself was a gasp of an expense.) If you find yourself come a little more alive while you watch it, if it deposits you back into your life a little broader of mind and fuller of heart, please honor the immense labor behind the love by making a donation to offset the cost and cheer the spirit.
THE UNIVERSE IN VERSE 2022: WHAT IS LIFE? |
To be human is to live suspended between the scale of gluons and the scale of galaxies, yearning to fathom our place in the universe. That we exist at all — on this uncommon rocky world, just the right distance from its common star, adrift in a galaxy amid hundreds of billions of galaxies, each sparkling with hundreds of billions of stars, each orbited by numberless possible worlds — is already miracle enough. A bright gift of chance amid the cold dark sublime of pure spacetime. A triumphal something against the staggering cosmic odds of nothingness.
Stationed here on this one and only home planet, we have opposed our thumbs to build microscopes and telescopes, pressing our curiosity against the eyepiece, bending our complex consciousness around what we see, longing to peer a little more deeply into the mystery of life with the mystery of us.
For the fifth annual Universe in Verse, I joined forces with my astronomer friend and three–time alumna Natalie Batalha (who led NASA’s Kepler and its triumphant discovery of more than 4,000 potential cradles for life beyond Earth, and now heads an inspired astrobiology initiative as her work on the search for life continues at UC Santa Cruz) to explore this longing through a kaleidoscope of vantage points.
In a majestic outdoor amphitheater built into a former quarry in the redwoods, we gathered to celebrate the marvel and mystery of life, from the creaturely to the cosmic, with stories from the history of science and our search for truth, illustrated with poems spanning centuries of human thought and feeling — poems about entropy and evolution, about trees and mushrooms, about consciousness and dark matter, about the birth of flowers and the death of stars — composed by a constellation of extraordinary humans, from Emily Dickinson to Gwendolyn Brooks, and performed by a constellation of extraordinary humans: writers Rebecca Solnit and Roxane Gay, musicians Zoë Keating and Joan As Police Woman, artist and Design Matters creator Debbie Millman, artist and DrawTogether creator Wendy MacNaughton, poet Diane Ackerman, cosmologist and jazz saxophonist Stephon Alexander, cognitive scientist, writer, and Dog Cognition Lab director Alexandra Horowitz, physicist and writer Alan Lightman, and On Being creator Krista Tippett (my largehearted collaborator in the Universe in Verse animated interlude season below, who long ago kindled my friendship with Natalie). All proceeds from the show were split halfway between a new scholarship at UCSC, honoring the life and legacy of astronomer and search-for-life pioneer Frank Drake, and The Nature Conservancy, whose tireless work stewards and protects the broadest community of life across our own irreplaceable world.
Honoring the annual tradition, I have collaborated with artist Andrea Lauer (who also designed the jumpsuit I wear onstage) on an embroidered collectible patch reflecting this year’s Universe in Verse theme, “What Is Life?”
This limited edition of 500 patches is available only during the retrostream — just like the regular patches are only available at the live show — on a first-come-first-served basis, with all proceeds benefitting The Nature Conservancy.
Hello <<Name>>! Each spring since 2017, I have been pouring my whole heart and hundreds of hours into a labor-of-love side project celebrating in a different form two things at the core of 
