Poetry as religion

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0:01:27 Human beings have always chased after
0:01:30 what we might call transcendence.
0:01:38 We’re searching for some higher meaning,
0:01:41 a way to connect with something beyond ourselves.
0:01:47 Things like truth and beauty and yes, even the divine.
0:01:58 For much of our history, religion, for better or worse,
0:02:01 has been the locus of so much of this seeking.
0:02:05 But the world, certainly the Western world,
0:02:07 is becoming less religious.
0:02:15 For a lot of humanist types,
0:02:17 this has been something like a tragedy.
0:02:22 The decline of religion meant that the language
0:02:25 of spirituality also faded away
0:02:28 because these things were bound up with each other.
0:02:31 And a consequence of this has been a loss
0:02:33 of the sense of the sacred in human life.
0:02:38 But does it have to be that way?
0:02:41 Can we still speak of the sacred
0:02:43 in our modern secular world?
0:02:47 And if we can, what does that look like?
0:02:52 I’m Sean Elling and this is The Grey Area.
0:03:05 My guest today is Jennifer Michael Hecht.
0:03:07 She’s a poet and historian,
0:03:10 which are two titles you don’t often see next to each other.
0:03:14 But as we’ll talk about, she sees a lot of overlap
0:03:16 between these disciplines.
0:03:19 She’s written original poetry
0:03:22 and has chronicled the histories of weighty ideas
0:03:25 like doubt, the soul, and suicide.
0:03:29 Jennifer’s book is called The Wonder Paradox,
0:03:31 embracing the weirdness of existence
0:03:33 and the poetry of our lives.
0:03:36 In it, she tries to give new life
0:03:39 to many things associated with religion,
0:03:42 like prayer and ritual and sanctity.
0:03:46 But instead, she grounds them in the non-religious world,
0:03:47 the secular world.
0:03:52 Jennifer’s readers have pegged her as an atheist
0:03:55 and they’re not exactly wrong.
0:03:59 But as she explained to me, it’s a bit more complicated.
0:04:10 – I came to this book already,
0:04:13 a sort of minor famous atheist.
0:04:17 I had written a book called Doubt, A History,
0:04:18 A History of Religious Doubt and Atheism
0:04:22 all over the world throughout time, which came out in 2003.
0:04:26 And I started to be invited all over the place
0:04:29 to groups I didn’t know existed to talk about atheism.
0:04:33 What was so fascinating about writing a history of atheism
0:04:35 was that the people who were atheists
0:04:36 didn’t just say, I’m an atheist.
0:04:38 They came up with other ways of living,
0:04:41 other ways of understanding what life is for
0:04:43 and what meaning is.
0:04:45 So I was already sort of on that track
0:04:48 that I was talking about philosophical and historical
0:04:51 things, but with an emotional component.
0:04:55 And my audiences really gave rise to this new book
0:04:59 by being sort of fascinated by the fact
0:05:00 that there could be an atheist
0:05:03 who was not rejecting ritual
0:05:06 and who was not rejecting what I’ve come to call
0:05:07 the poetry of life.
0:05:11 But yeah, with this book, I’m really mostly saying to people,
0:05:14 go ahead and do the rituals you’re already doing.
0:05:16 We can be the interfaithless,
0:05:17 which I made up sort of as a joke,
0:05:21 but I couldn’t throw out because we believe in the inter.
0:05:23 We believe in the connection between us.
0:05:26 And we can all do some of the rituals that we feel like
0:05:28 because we grew up with them.
0:05:31 But I would say to add a poem
0:05:36 because you need that moment of sort of graceful,
0:05:41 introspection, a moment to just be quiet if nothing else,
0:05:44 to just give them the tiniest bit more meaning
0:05:46 by thinking about it that way.
0:05:48 – I definitely want to get into all that,
0:05:50 but can I ask a little bit more about you?
0:05:51 – Yeah, sure.
0:05:53 – I’m very fascinated by your background.
0:05:56 You’re both a historian, as you were just describing.
0:05:58 And you’re also a poet.
0:05:58 How does that happen?
0:06:03 I don’t often see historian and poet in the same bio.
0:06:05 – I suppose there’s a bunch of ways to tell the story,
0:06:08 but the main thing is that my father
0:06:11 as a first generation college goer
0:06:15 somewhat bumbled into a PhD in physics
0:06:18 and really just suggesting that his three children
0:06:20 also become professors.
0:06:21 So I went to Columbia,
0:06:24 they kept saying they were gonna hire a cultural historian.
0:06:27 I was gonna study sort of the history of poetry.
0:06:28 I didn’t know anything.
0:06:30 I was a child and it just seemed like a more rigorous
0:06:34 or engaged or sort of total way of studying literature
0:06:37 by studying the history that it hangs on.
0:06:40 And I fell in with the historians of science
0:06:41 when I went to Columbia.
0:06:44 So yeah, I became a cultural historian
0:06:46 with a specialty in the history of science
0:06:48 and then migrated over more to the history of science,
0:06:52 which is a kind of poetry of itself.
0:06:54 Rather than a body of knowledge,
0:06:57 the history of science is somewhat about
0:07:01 searching for metaphors that can help you to understand
0:07:04 why science is so different in different periods of time.
0:07:07 And to kind of, when you can begin
0:07:09 to get a gut sense of that,
0:07:11 you can start to dismantle some of the nonsense
0:07:14 from the truth because some of it’s just cultural
0:07:16 and it’s gonna fall away.
0:07:19 You know, we are in a very strange situation
0:07:22 just as being conscious meat.
0:07:22 – Oh yeah.
0:07:23 – Just that’s weird.
0:07:27 Now throw in mortality and ambition.
0:07:29 Oh great, I’ve got both ambition and mortality.
0:07:32 So I wanna do great things and I’m gonna die
0:07:34 and I don’t know when.
0:07:37 The whole thing is a mess of paradoxes.
0:07:40 I mean, there’s so many paradoxes
0:07:43 that have grown up evolutionarily
0:07:45 between the human experience
0:07:47 and the environment and situation that we’re in.
0:07:50 And that’s what poetry is.
0:07:53 – So your dad is an atheist physicist.
0:07:55 Your mom was pretty religious.
0:07:56 – Correct.
0:07:59 – Was that a source of tension in your house?
0:08:02 – Yeah, it was a source of tension in the house
0:08:04 but I would say there was enough
0:08:06 of all sorts of things going on.
0:08:08 I’m not sure it was primary
0:08:13 ’cause my dad did sort of let my mom run the kids thing.
0:08:18 But I believed until I had a moment when I was 12 years old
0:08:21 and had one of those moments that I talked to people
0:08:23 and read memoirs, lots of people have a moment
0:08:28 in adolescence where because of a certain slant of light,
0:08:29 a certain shimmering moment,
0:08:33 a certain fall of crystal along your eyesight
0:08:38 and you suddenly notice that you’ve taken an awful lot
0:08:40 for granted, that you could be a being anywhere,
0:08:44 any place with all sorts of different concerns.
0:08:46 And the fact that you were born into this family,
0:08:49 this house, this country is all so arbitrary.
0:08:52 And I suppose because my father was already an atheist,
0:08:56 it was a little bit easier perhaps for a 12 year old
0:08:59 to get all the way to, I don’t believe any of this.
0:09:00 And it was painful.
0:09:03 And I tell the story in the introduction of the book.
0:09:06 I was in a junior high school library
0:09:08 standing in front of a poetry shelf
0:09:10 expecting no help whatsoever.
0:09:12 But at least I look back and say,
0:09:13 well, I knew where to go, right?
0:09:17 And I opened up this book that was explicitly poetry
0:09:19 for depressed teenagers.
0:09:22 And I was not moved by anything
0:09:25 and out wafted this little piece of paper,
0:09:29 a little glossy piece of paper excised from some magazine
0:09:33 or something with vigorous use of a blue ballpoint pen.
0:09:37 And it was this paragraph by Raina Maria Rilke
0:09:40 that says to live the questions.
0:09:43 Live the questions now as if they are books
0:09:45 written in some foreign tongue
0:09:47 that you do not now understand.
0:09:50 You could not now be given the answers to the questions.
0:09:53 You have to live them to understand.
0:09:55 And then if you just live the questions
0:09:56 and forget about the answers,
0:10:01 you may some distant day live your way into the answers.
0:10:06 And this, this cured me so profoundly
0:10:09 because it was the company,
0:10:12 the friendship of being reached across time,
0:10:14 but also just the idea,
0:10:17 oh, you can live the questions.
0:10:18 And love them, right?
0:10:19 Learn to love them.
0:10:22 Love the questions and let them be who you are.
0:10:25 Not the emptiness of the non-answer.
0:10:27 And then you find yourself.
0:10:30 Sometimes perspective can change
0:10:33 and your brain can explode.
0:10:34 I fell in love with that.
0:10:36 I wanted that.
0:10:38 And poetry is where I go for that.
0:10:43 – This new book of yours is so damn interesting.
0:10:45 How would you describe this book
0:10:48 and what you’re trying to do with it?
0:10:50 – The Wonder Paradox,
0:10:54 it’s all about if you don’t have God,
0:10:57 what else do you lose when you lose religion?
0:11:00 And the interesting thing is we come in the United States
0:11:04 from such a Protestant Christian perspective,
0:11:08 even an American Protestant Christian perspective.
0:11:10 So that when I say, what do we lose?
0:11:13 The first thing we might think is the afterlife
0:11:17 or someone to ask for favors when we’re in real trouble
0:11:21 or someone to believe has a morality explanation
0:11:23 for all this suffering, right?
0:11:24 Those are some big things.
0:11:28 Well, not all religions have those things.
0:11:31 Most religions do not have an afterlife.
0:11:34 And you know, Jews don’t make a very big deal of heaven.
0:11:35 And that was my background.
0:11:37 But the idea that we would live on
0:11:40 in some kind of positive way
0:11:42 was definitely part of what I believed.
0:11:46 So the book is really about each of these losses,
0:11:49 but I don’t only go to Christianity to say,
0:11:51 well, what did we used to get?
0:11:54 I really wanted to present people with a reminder
0:11:57 of the different ways that human beings have figured out
0:11:59 to make ourselves feel better.
0:12:03 So many of them have ended up in the bowl we call religion.
0:12:05 And I’m saying we can’t lose all this stuff.
0:12:10 – Yeah, I grew up in the deep South,
0:12:12 very Christian culture.
0:12:16 My family was Catholic, but not in any serious way.
0:12:19 The Catholicism never stuck.
0:12:22 For me, I immediately found it suspect
0:12:26 and drifted into atheism quite naturally.
0:12:26 – Fascinating.
0:12:28 – But as I’ve gotten older,
0:12:32 I have come to think of religion differently,
0:12:34 certainly God differently.
0:12:36 I guess I’m an agnostic at the moment.
0:12:38 I’m still not a fan of organized religion.
0:12:43 And I still think the church is an all too human institution.
0:12:45 But like you, I see so much more in religion
0:12:48 than dogmas and the holy books.
0:12:50 And I appreciate how seriously you take it
0:12:54 because I think it deserves to be taken seriously.
0:12:55 – Sure.
0:12:58 I mean, we organize our emotional lives,
0:13:01 which are very complicated and we don’t know,
0:13:03 I mean, we know the smallest portion of what’s going on
0:13:05 in terms of our social interactions
0:13:08 and how as a group we’re held together.
0:13:11 I always use the metaphor in my mind of meerkats
0:13:13 and how if you just took one into a lab
0:13:16 and started doing experiments on it,
0:13:18 you would not know much about what you would know
0:13:21 if you put a camera on the whole colony.
0:13:24 And I think we think of ourselves as individuals
0:13:28 in a way that is, I don’t think we have a clue
0:13:30 how much we’re holding each other together.
0:13:32 I think it’s much more like meerkats, you know?
0:13:36 And we also have the benefit of a tremendous amount
0:13:40 of language and it’s still hard to reach each other.
0:13:42 But most of this stuff, especially, I suppose,
0:13:45 in the capitalist country has to get shunted off
0:13:48 into a special place and that special place
0:13:50 has been called religion.
0:13:52 And I guess I’m asking people what happens
0:13:57 if we call our special place in that sense, poetry,
0:14:00 joining it with real poetry, poems, short-lined things,
0:14:05 but also just thinking poetically about love and art
0:14:09 and meaning because I don’t see how, look,
0:14:14 if you believe in a God and you place meaning in this God
0:14:18 and then don’t ask many more questions, yes,
0:14:19 if you then lose God, you lose meaning
0:14:21 and you’re in trouble.
0:14:25 But it’s not at all what most religions do.
0:14:28 Most religions don’t have a fella upstairs
0:14:30 who holds all meaning.
0:14:32 You know, justice we have a problem with,
0:14:34 but meaning really, we have more than enough.
0:14:36 The feeling of meaning is sufficient
0:14:40 to the definition of meaning, it is.
0:14:40 – Yeah.
0:14:44 Well, this new book is very much about how religion
0:14:48 has traditionally carved out these spaces in our lives
0:14:51 for reflection and transcendence and connection.
0:14:55 And religion just doesn’t have the kind of purchase
0:14:57 on our lives that it once did.
0:15:01 And that means we have to think harder and more
0:15:06 about creating these spaces in a secular world.
0:15:07 But I do wanna ask if you think
0:15:11 we have really lost something when we moved into,
0:15:13 I don’t wanna say a post-religious world
0:15:15 because we’ll never live in a post-religious world,
0:15:17 but a world in which religion has receded
0:15:20 as a dominant guiding force in our lives.
0:15:22 – And you’re asking if we’ve lost something?
0:15:24 – Yeah, if you think we really have lost something
0:15:26 that is not retrievable.
0:15:30 No, I think that we have everything we started with,
0:15:33 we just don’t notice, I really do.
0:15:36 I can’t imagine what God could have taken with him
0:15:38 since he wasn’t here.
0:15:40 We always found what life is
0:15:44 and what makes it worth living by getting together
0:15:46 by community, ritual, meditation,
0:15:49 by times alone, thinking deeply.
0:15:52 And again, I’ll say that in a sort of capitalist country,
0:15:55 we define anything that’s doing that stuff as religion,
0:15:57 especially when we don’t know the language
0:15:59 of the people we’re talking about,
0:16:01 we just define it as religion.
0:16:05 And as a historian, I see these reverberating
0:16:08 all over society through history,
0:16:10 say the idea of liturgy.
0:16:13 That word doesn’t start in Christianity,
0:16:16 the word starts in ancient Greece,
0:16:19 and it was about the social celebrations
0:16:22 that large landowners were responsible
0:16:25 for putting on on a yearly basis.
0:16:28 So liturgy starts outside the church,
0:16:31 then comes to the church and it can come out again.
0:16:36 And to some degree, it’s a matter of almost self-respect.
0:16:39 – The great power of religion
0:16:42 has always been more social than personal, in my opinion.
0:16:45 I don’t think we need religion to know how to be good.
0:16:47 That has always been the stupidest,
0:16:49 the absolute stupidest critique of atheism.
0:16:50 – I’m with you on that.
0:16:53 But the power of religion
0:16:57 to not just provide a shared moral order,
0:17:00 but also the physical spaces to come together
0:17:01 and affirm those beliefs,
0:17:04 like a secular liberal world
0:17:06 in which the individual is sovereign,
0:17:09 where the individual is left to her own lights.
0:17:11 – Yes, I will agree with you right away
0:17:13 that as long as there’s some kind of continuum
0:17:16 between community and individualism,
0:17:19 if I’m gonna choose individualism, which I am,
0:17:21 so the question is then,
0:17:24 do I lose some of that good feeling of community?
0:17:25 Yes.
0:17:27 But what I’m suggesting is that
0:17:29 without much change in behavior,
0:17:33 we can notice that those of us who don’t believe in God
0:17:36 or don’t believe in a certain kind of God,
0:17:39 we do all sorts of different things for our,
0:17:41 well, what the religious would call soul,
0:17:43 but what I would call an emotional
0:17:48 and intellectually fulfilling life, we go to museums.
0:17:52 Those museums are temples of reflection.
0:17:56 We send our kids to school and in many cases,
0:17:58 they put their hands on their hearts
0:18:03 and they say a chant about how we’re all together
0:18:06 and then a song plays and they sing along to some degree.
0:18:11 We have many places in society where we have figured out
0:18:14 that people feel good when they say something together,
0:18:17 especially when they say something positive together
0:18:18 and they try together.
0:18:20 And when something terrible happens,
0:18:23 we know to come together to grieve.
0:18:25 I live in New York City.
0:18:27 You can sort of always figure out
0:18:28 where people might be mourning.
0:18:31 If something really sad is happening, someone has died,
0:18:34 you can go to certain landmarks
0:18:36 and expect there’ll be other people grieving there.
0:18:38 When Lou Reed died, there was a grand piano
0:18:40 in Washington Square Park
0:18:42 and someone was playing Perfect Day.
0:18:44 I didn’t know that was gonna happen, I just walked there.
0:18:47 And what I’m saying is that in the cities,
0:18:52 it’s a very human-based, art-based kind of way
0:18:56 that we make our lives sacred,
0:18:59 communally sacred and privately sacred.
0:19:00 When you live more in the country,
0:19:04 you have access to a whole different kind of temple, right?
0:19:06 Which in many ways works better.
0:19:09 I mean, the shock of sickness and death
0:19:11 that happens in the city
0:19:13 because you just think everything’s supposed to work.
0:19:16 But in this country, you see death is work.
0:19:17 Death is how this thing works.
0:19:19 This thing is just the life-death machine
0:19:23 and you don’t get as shocked and as appalled.
0:19:26 What do religions that don’t have an afterlife do about death?
0:19:29 They look in another direction.
0:19:33 They concentrate their attention in another direction.
0:19:34 I know I have an awful lot to say,
0:19:37 but I really felt that I was reading
0:19:39 what people were already doing
0:19:43 and seeing it as more profound than they seemed to see it was.
0:19:45 And I wanted to show,
0:19:47 no, this is amazing.
0:19:48 Take the assist.
0:19:49 Let that into your heart.
0:19:52 And if other people are passing around a poem,
0:19:54 that doesn’t mean, oh, that’s a cliche, that’s cheap.
0:19:56 No, that means that’s cultural liturgy.
0:19:58 Grab on and hold on.
0:20:00 And this can give you some peace.
0:20:03 (upbeat music)
0:20:12 – So what’s the power of religious rituals?
0:20:14 Is it the tradition?
0:20:15 Is it the symbolism?
0:20:18 Or is it really the belief in God?
0:20:20 I’ll ask Jennifer after a quick break.
0:20:23 (upbeat music)
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0:24:01 you’re in. Shopify.com/box. Again, I grew up in the South and I moved back here a few years ago.
0:24:08 And I know people who don’t read the Bible, who don’t take any of it seriously, who don’t even go
0:24:15 to church, but they still feel compelled to participate in these symbolic rituals like
0:24:20 communion or getting your child baptized or whatever. I guess I have mixed feelings about it,
0:24:25 but I also get it. And it sounds like a lot of other people, you included, also get it. And
0:24:29 that’s the part of religion we have to take seriously if we’re going to think about what
0:24:38 secular equivalents might look like. Right. I think my own practice is relatively minimal.
0:24:44 I like to check in with the holidays. My husband was raised Catholic and we sort of decided in
0:24:50 the beginning we were raising the children Jewish. Really, we just sort of do the holidays. And for
0:24:54 me, it’s very light. I’m not saying, oh, because I believe in ritual, I’m going to go sit in a
0:25:00 pew for hours. I don’t. I don’t want to. But many people do. And maybe at some point in my life,
0:25:08 I will want to. My point is really that when you start to be able to take a little of the
0:25:18 political heat out of this question, you realize that there are things that one rejects in a kind
0:25:24 of state of fear. Right. I don’t want to give a credit to the religious. I don’t want them
0:25:30 to have a point because I said that this aspect of religion might be okay. Well,
0:25:35 what if we can move away from that a little? I mean, I’m glad there are hard line nail-spitting
0:25:41 atheists out there. I don’t want them all to be me, but there could be one me. The story I tell in
0:25:48 the introduction of the book, which was really what set me out on this, my very first doubt talk,
0:25:53 a very pregnant couple came up to me at the signing and I was expecting a question on history or
0:26:00 philosophy, which was mostly what I talked about. But I also made it clear what I think. And so they
0:26:06 came up and they wanted to have a brisk. They knew the baby was going to be a boy. Since then,
0:26:12 I’ve had many people ask me the baptism question too. And what they’re asking is, may I, you know,
0:26:19 they asked me, can we do this? Would it be a betrayal of our parents’ faith to do this? Would
0:26:24 it be a hypocritical act? And also would it be a breaking of faith with our true beliefs,
0:26:30 which are atheism? But I could tell they wanted to have the party. So I said, Mazel tov, have the
0:26:36 party. Have the damn party. But then as they were walking away, they were almost at the door,
0:26:41 and I shout out, but add some Whitman. You know, when they turn around and look at me,
0:26:46 and so I tell them this Whitman line, there’s a part in Leaves of Grass where he actually writes
0:26:54 the word “question.” Oh, me, so much myself, despising so much, you know, and talking about how
0:26:59 life is so hard and we’re all toiling and working in the pain and the hypocrisy and the lying.
0:27:07 What is it all? Is there any point in it? And then he writes the word “answer.” And the answer is
0:27:15 that you exist, that we exist and identity. I love that and identity. It’s not just that we exist,
0:27:20 but identity, what an extraordinary thing to be part of, to be accidentally part of.
0:27:26 And then he says that the powerful play may go on, and you may contribute a verse.
0:27:33 It’s two lines. I had to give it a little context, right? But I’m shouting at a cross of room. Other
0:27:38 people are waiting in line, and they turn around in the whole room, and I feel that room, that room
0:27:45 needed those words. And I later really thought about that, that I had been to many ceremonies
0:27:53 in my life. And if a priest says over two people, “I love, God is going to keep you together,”
0:27:57 I’m sitting out there thinking, “Jesus, I hope something else is going to be,” because they
0:28:01 don’t believe in God and I know it. The point I just want to make is I’ve been to ceremonies where
0:28:08 someone adds a poem and suddenly the room changes and everybody feels okay about death or birth or
0:28:14 marriage. Well, let me ask you about how poetry does that. Yeah. Look, human beings have a deep
0:28:20 desire for transcendence, for meaning, for some connection to something beyond ourselves. And the
0:28:26 question is, do we need to look to the supernatural for any of these things? And the answer to that,
0:28:34 for you and for me, is clearly no. So what is it about great poetry or great art and literature
0:28:43 that allows us to connect with these deep human needs? Well, one answer is they speak directly
0:28:48 to it. They talk about death and life and birth. And the truth is, in our normal conversation,
0:28:54 we don’t talk about these things very much. All of art is where we engage in these questions
0:29:02 without necessarily having the supernatural. But poetry is one where it’s condensed speech.
0:29:08 It’s very much like prayer. And I mean that in terms of the prayers that have been around so long
0:29:13 that they stayed because they’re beautiful or fun to say. You know, prayers change with every
0:29:19 generation, every 100 years or so. Religions change all the time. It’s those little pieces of
0:29:26 speech that we call poetry that can kind of slot into where we might have called religious meditation
0:29:34 or prayer. This is really a tiny recipe. They mention the infinitesimal and the gigantic in
0:29:42 terms of size and time. Just those two things are enough to rattle the human mind. Just noticing
0:29:48 that parrots live longer than us can rattle the human mind. Wait, parrots live longer than us?
0:29:52 I think so, yeah, I think. Or in any case, there are birds that live 130 years.
0:29:59 Okay. I don’t know how I feel about that. I know. It’s disturbing. It seems odd if anything could
0:30:04 manage to keep going. But there are turtles that are hundreds of years old. Why the turtle and why
0:30:11 not I? It’s a reasonable question. Why indeed? You know, there’s that line. And I’m so sorry,
0:30:16 I don’t even remember who wrote it or who said it. But it’s something to the effect of the success
0:30:21 of poetry depends on the failure of language. Oh, that’s good, yeah. I love what that’s getting
0:30:24 at or what I think it’s getting at. And I’ll tell you what I think it’s getting at. You,
0:30:29 the poet, will tell me what it’s actually getting at. I think the point there is that
0:30:34 conventional speech, it can only say so much. But poetry plays a different game with language.
0:30:39 It uses language to point beyond language to try to say what’s actually not sayable,
0:30:45 because we don’t have the words for it. And in that way, it touches something beyond what’s
0:30:53 comprehensible. Right. I mean, poetry has certain tricks that it uses. One aspect of a trick, say,
0:31:00 is the fact that we can read sense in a single line and also the sentence that the line is part of.
0:31:08 Poets are doing that, thinking about what their individual lines mean and how they mean if you
0:31:15 read them as a grammatical sentence. That means that you can say several different things at once,
0:31:20 each of your lines making certain kinds of claims, while the sentence that includes them
0:31:26 is making a different kind of claim. Why is that so important? Because of the ambivalence of the
0:31:34 human experience. We almost never feel only one way. We also almost never feel that other people’s
0:31:41 words fully contain our experience. And so when words attempt to contain our experience,
0:31:50 but include some strangeness, some spaces in understanding, we, the reader, bring that part.
0:31:57 I think that’s true of all art. But yeah, with poetry in particular, it has to get up and talk.
0:32:02 Right. You can sit in a lab and make beings all day long, these little poems you make,
0:32:07 but one of them every once in a while stands up and says hello, to be or not to be. It doesn’t
0:32:12 fall apart. We’re never going to forget to be or not to be. It’s too good. I don’t know how that
0:32:18 works. But sometimes you put words together and they are stuck forever. And most of the time,
0:32:26 we babble away and nothing sticks. But when poetry sticks, it sticks forever. And there’s
0:32:32 something very special about language that can hold together like that even across time.
0:32:37 I wish I could stick together words like that. I’ve tried to write poetry and I can’t do it.
0:32:43 There’s just, my mind cannot help but go back into that sort of logical mode where it’s trying to
0:32:47 make sense of things. It’s trying to order things in such a way. And it’s just not the
0:32:52 poetical mindset, right? I’m resigned to just enjoying other people.
0:32:59 You can think a little bit in terms of wit, people who are charming and witty and make jokes.
0:33:03 What are they doing in their minds? They’re kind of, I always think of it as a sort of a tumbler.
0:33:07 Somebody said something. Is there something funny around that? I just tumble it around,
0:33:11 look for it. Yeah, that or nope, nothing, keep moving. Somebody else said something funny,
0:33:17 keep moving. That little tumble, tumble, tumble. That’s the action of poetry for me. I sit,
0:33:21 I wait for something true to come out of my mouth, which can be forever, just anything that
0:33:27 doesn’t feel like a blatant falsehood. And I go from there and you come up with nothing a lot of
0:33:32 the time. But every once in a while, you come up with something that lives. What I’ve suggested for
0:33:40 people with this book is you should pick out 12 occasions in your life, either holidays or human
0:33:47 needs, pick out the poem in advance, put it in a booklet, and you can go to it. You’ll then know
0:33:52 that if somebody dies, you have a poem for that. I believe that people who read a great deal of
0:34:00 poetry already have this in their heads. And I ask people to take those 12 poems from world poetry
0:34:07 if they can. If we all take from that, A, it’s a cultural bond. It makes us stretch outside
0:34:13 race, gender, class, time. It obliterates all of that. It gets right to somebody else’s heart,
0:34:18 but it also makes it so that we might choose poems that match. And if you and I turn out to
0:34:24 have the same poem for grief, it’s going to be a bond. What I’m trying to do is imagine a world
0:34:30 where we do have a prayer book, but it’s each our own, but we don’t have to write it. It’s
0:34:34 already there. The great poetry is already there. The great rituals are already there. We just
0:34:39 snap them together. What’s your favorite ritual in your life? What do you find yourself turning
0:34:44 to the most? And does poetry play a part in that? Or is it something altogether different?
0:34:48 I mean, you seem to have an appreciation for what rituals do for us. So I assume
0:34:53 ritual is a part of your life as well. And I’m just asking, what’s your kind of go-to ritual?
0:34:58 Well, like I said, I do enjoy taking part of the rituals that everybody else is doing.
0:35:02 I mean, one way to answer a question is Halloween is my favorite holiday. I’ve always
0:35:08 loved dressing up my kids. We all put a lot into it. We decorate the house. My husband puts the,
0:35:11 you know, we happen to live in a neighborhood that likes Halloween. We’re in Brooklyn in a
0:35:15 neighborhood that does Halloween a lot. There are neighborhoods that do Christmas. And
0:35:20 I’ve definitely gotten in a car with somebody who wanted to go look at the lights. And I enjoy that
0:35:27 a lot. We light the menorah all the way through. Hanukkah is not the most important of Jewish
0:35:33 holidays, but we like that feeling of being in the holidays with the rest of the country,
0:35:37 the rest of the world, really. I like New Year’s because the whole world celebrates it.
0:35:45 So for me, personally, if I look out the back windows in my apartment, there’s trees
0:35:53 and a little yard. And I feed the birds because I like the cardinals and the blue jays.
0:35:59 So I like watching the birds. And I do read poetry or recite poetry in my mind. And looking
0:36:04 out the front, I get to watch people walk by. There’s something about people watching. It
0:36:09 doesn’t do it for everyone, but for a lot of people, it’s a real entertainment and a real
0:36:14 meditation. Where I live, they’re not dressed up in crazy costumes, but there’s certainly going
0:36:18 to be interesting things happening going by. I’m on a side street in Brooklyn.
0:36:22 And if you look out the window for a little, you know, five minutes, you see some interesting
0:36:40 humanity. We’re going to take one last short break. But when we come back, I’ll ask Jennifer
0:36:49 if there are still reasons to pray if you’re not a believer.
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0:39:07 Do you ever pray? Do I pray?
0:39:18 Yeah, ever. Let’s see. I’m gonna say no. I really have no sense of up
0:39:25 at all and there’s nobody up there. Yeah, but okay, I’m glad you said that because I do pray
0:39:29 sometimes. I started doing that not too long ago and it’s not because I think there’s someone
0:39:33 listening. Right, right. It’s not that. Okay, then I do that. I talk out loud.
0:39:37 It’s almost like a meditation. Yes. And this is what I’ve come to appreciate about prayer
0:39:44 as a practice. I’ll just, I try to sit down and I just quietly say to myself sometimes
0:39:51 allow the things I’m grateful for in my life, my family, my health, that I have rewarding
0:39:58 work on and on and on. And it’s just a space for me to just affirm these things and it doesn’t
0:40:03 require any deity. No one has to be listening on the other end of the line for that to be useful.
0:40:06 And that’s how I came to think a little bit differently about prayer.
0:40:10 But I am curious. You said that you think in terms of agnosticism now,
0:40:17 you have a sense that, first let me say, I think that there’s a gray area.
0:40:24 Nice. I think there’s a gray area where poetic people have a choice of saying,
0:40:31 I believe in God and all I think of as God is love. I cannot tell you how many religious people
0:40:35 have told me that they believe in nothing supernatural, but they like the idea that
0:40:43 God is love and for them, they believe in God. And they can see that I believe the same things
0:40:49 they do, but I don’t care to use that language because I think it’s important to be precise.
0:40:56 And the word God has no precise meaning. So if God is love, then I believe in love,
0:41:00 but I don’t want to use that crazy other word, which means every single thing in the world
0:41:05 and nothing. But I really think it’s important to think this thing through. We’re alive for a
0:41:10 short amount of time. I always say, look, if we were the only things on the planet, I would say,
0:41:16 I don’t know what consciousness is. I have no reason to guess whether it comes from some divine
0:41:22 thing, whether it exists afterwards. But there are ants and there are wallabies and there are so
0:41:29 many conscious creatures on this planet. And if I look at an ant, does an ant have a consciousness?
0:41:37 Yeah. Do I think that it needed a divine one or that it will exist afterwards? Ridiculous.
0:41:45 So I just can’t help thinking of anything else as a kind of unnecessary delusion.
0:41:50 We got used to a strange religion that liked the idea of a guy who listens.
0:41:55 And I think that the abyss is just having stared at heaven too long. It’s just an
0:42:00 after effect. It’s a hangover. Wait, so what were you going to ask me? Were you going to ask
0:42:05 why I’m an agnostic? I did ask you if you were an agnostic and you said that you prayed. Tell me
0:42:11 more. Why am I identified as an agnostic? I don’t think that has anything to do with prayer. The
0:42:17 prayer is really just a practice. The agnostic part, I don’t want to go too much into it. I’ll
0:42:23 just put it this way. I’ve had some experiences later in life that have made me a little more
0:42:30 alive to the strangeness of the world. Yes, sure. And so I guess I’m a little more uncertain
0:42:34 about what’s possible. Sure. Or maybe more awakened to the possibility of possibility,
0:42:39 if that makes any sense. I just don’t know. I am fairly confident that if there is such a thing as
0:42:44 God, I don’t have any faith in one of my fellow mammals as some kind of exclusive vehicle for
0:42:51 communicating what that God wants me to do or who I should be naked with or whatever, right?
0:42:59 But also farther, if God is in charge of morality, I call bullshit. How can I stand in front of this
0:43:05 great being and be satisfied that babies suffer and die for nothing? I find it offensive, the idea
0:43:11 that some being could reconcile all this suffering. I find it ridiculous and offensive. I’m not saying
0:43:17 that you said it, but I’m saying that we have to think through what we’re saying. And again,
0:43:24 I’ll say that I feel like I’m more describing what I see as happening now than prescribing anything.
0:43:36 But what I see is a whole bunch of human beings making moves towards a non-supernatural kind of
0:43:43 poetic way of being that I don’t think helps us to call a non-supernatural religion, especially
0:43:49 because I’m saying, you know, don’t change anything. All these people already do these little holidays
0:43:57 that they like to do, but they don’t remember that if you believe in a real religion that’s alive,
0:44:07 then on the day that, well, say, we’re in Lent right now, okay? If you truly believe in Catholicism,
0:44:15 you have a way of cleaning yourself and starting new that is connected to all your other beliefs.
0:44:22 And that’s all I’m trying to say is that a lot of us have ways where we’ve already figured out how
0:44:27 to reach for the poetic, how to be grateful, how to have those moments. And I’m just saying, hey,
0:44:33 doesn’t it look like we actually have something here? Maybe if we think about it like that and
0:44:38 remember that probably the most important part is community, probably the most important part
0:44:44 is remembering the humanity of other people, then we might survive, you know? You and I are perfectly
0:44:49 aligned on all of that. And isn’t it funny that like some of the titles that we use, the title
0:44:55 sounds like we might have different beliefs, but then you dig down, consciousness is so strange.
0:45:01 I always say consciousness is weirder than virgin birth by far. Virgin birth, come on,
0:45:06 you got a couple of cells reproducing on their own, they manage it without a sperm once, big deal.
0:45:16 But the meat thinks and wrote all of the symphonies, what, out of nothing, out of slime? So we live in
0:45:23 an absolutely ridiculous situation, absurd and poetic, and we pretend it isn’t all the time.
0:45:28 And art and poetry is just dipping our heads into noticing, yes, this is bizarre.
0:45:33 No, look, I’m a Camus scholar, so I’m here for embracing the absurdity.
0:45:40 I wanted to ask you what your favorite poem is, and I’m told by my trusted producer or colleague
0:45:43 that you came prepared with a poem that you might read for us.
0:45:48 Absolutely. I mean, yeah, I have a lot of favorites and they’re always coming to me.
0:45:55 Here’s a pretty short poem, and it’s one of the most famous Spanish language poems,
0:46:00 I’m reading an English translation, it’s known all over the world, and it’s by Antonio Machado.
0:46:10 Traveler, there is no road. Traveler, your footprints are the only road and nothing else.
0:46:20 Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking. As you walk, you make the road,
0:46:27 and turning to look back, you see a path that will never be traveled again.
0:46:33 Traveler, there is no path, only a foam trail on the sea.
0:46:38 I don’t want to ruin that poem by, oh, were you still reading?
0:46:44 No, I just, I remember someone said once that the silence after a Bach piece is also by Bach.
0:46:49 I would love that. I’m like, yeah, the silence after the Machado poems also by Machado.
0:46:52 So I leave a little quiet. No, I was just going to say, I was sitting
0:46:56 with that listening. I don’t want to ruin it by asking you to explain it.
0:46:59 No, I don’t mind. I believe in explaining poems. Yeah.
0:47:02 Well then, how does that one land for you? What’s going on there?
0:47:07 Well, I think that so many people love it because of the word traveler.
0:47:13 Traveler is always at the beginning of sentences in this poem, so it’s at the beginning of lines,
0:47:18 it’s always capitalized. It’s always like, we’re talking to you. I’ll tell you that I happen to
0:47:22 believe the poets are, especially when they sound like they’re bossing you around or telling you
0:47:26 what’s true. They’re talking to themselves. They’re just trying to remember something they
0:47:30 figured out, which once you have that in your head, sometimes it lowers one’s resistance
0:47:35 when you realize this person’s just trying to remember. And I talked to you before about line
0:47:42 breaks. He’ll say, you know, look back and you’ll see a path, line break, that never can be traveled
0:47:47 again. I mean, there is no path. And that’s what he does throughout it. He gives you a little bit
0:47:55 of a sense that you have left footprints. There is a little bit of foam after a boat travels.
0:48:05 It’s not like we make no dent. I also like to say that poetry, unlike prose, doesn’t end on truth.
0:48:09 It’ll throw some truth up and then have a turn that tries something else and then try a different
0:48:14 kind of truth. It doesn’t mean that whatever they land on is what they’re absolutely, you know,
0:48:20 whatever is suggested that isn’t negated entirely is in there. And so he is saying we are travelers.
0:48:29 And he is saying that our sense that we’re supposed to be going in certain ways is illusory.
0:48:35 There is no path, which means there is no other path. You’re not doing it wrong.
0:48:42 As a matter of fact, your experience is the universe. As far as you’re concerned,
0:48:48 the universe cohere around your consciousness as you were born. And as you experience the world,
0:48:57 your life is the path. Can anyone else follow you? Yes and no. The suggestion of footsteps,
0:49:03 the suggestion of the wake of the sea. But what’s the largest thing that reaches us?
0:49:09 Even bigger than the footsteps or the wake of the sea is the poem. The poem, which made it through
0:49:18 decades and decades and decades and at least one language to get to me, to shift my perspective.
0:49:25 The first thing that you learn from poems always is the reminder that there’s another human being
0:49:30 out there, that there’s another heart beating out there trying to say something true. And then
0:49:37 whatever it is that they say, which in this case is, you know, relax, whatever you’re doing is right
0:49:42 in this particular universe. Have you ever read Bertrand Russell’s
0:49:48 A Free Band’s Worship? I have read a great deal of Bertrand Russell. I couldn’t put my finger on
0:49:55 whether I’ve read that one. It’s maybe my favorite piece of writing, period. Yeah. You inspired me to
0:50:01 read it last night and I did. And there’s a passage that I remember how it hit me the first time I
0:50:05 read it and I read it again last night and it almost makes me teary-eyed. Can I read it to you?
0:50:12 Please. All right, here we go. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight,
0:50:20 seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them,
0:50:27 in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path,
0:50:34 to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection.
0:50:41 Let us not weigh, in grudging scales, their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their needs,
0:50:47 of their sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses that make the misery of their lives.
0:50:55 Let us remember that they are fellow-suffers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy as
0:51:02 ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when they’re good and they’re evil, have become eternal
0:51:08 by the immortality of the past. Be it ours to feel that where they suffered, where they failed,
0:51:15 no deed of ours was the cause. But wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts,
0:51:21 we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.
0:51:28 Now, that’s not quite poetry, but it is.
0:51:34 Yeah, it is. It’s gorgeous. I find such comfort and inspiration in it every time I read it.
0:51:38 There’s no false salvation. There’s no retreat into illusion. It’s just an acknowledgement
0:51:44 that the world rolls on without any thought or concern for a particular mammal on an unimportant
0:51:50 rock in a remote solar system. But there’s so much poetry in the acceptance of all that and in
0:51:57 this call to solidarity and love. And this may be a morbid thing to say, but I’ve had the thought
0:52:02 more than once that if anyone was going to read anything at my funeral, I want it to be that.
0:52:13 Yeah, I love it. I suppose that it is close to poetry, but that what might make it not
0:52:24 what poetry is, is that it faces joy so strongly. Because in real life, it’s so very hard to be
0:52:30 kind even for what, 20, 25 minutes? I mean, it is hard. Don’t get me wrong. We all screw up.
0:52:37 I just like texts that include that this is the goal and it’s basically impossible. Like,
0:52:44 I want that acknowledged that having the goal of being kind and recognizing the humanity of other
0:52:52 people is the whole ball of acts, the whole thing. As a matter of fact, along with Levinas,
0:52:57 I don’t know if you’ve read him. Oh, yeah. I’m not sure we exist outside of relation.
0:53:02 I’m a very solitary person, but I understand all that solitude as in relation with all the
0:53:10 words I’ve read and all the people I’ve known to perhaps a profound level, to perhaps a level
0:53:16 where there is no thinking or being outside of relation. So, I mean, this is where I allow
0:53:23 myself to sound slightly what I wouldn’t call your description of agnosticism a dip into woo,
0:53:29 nor would I describe what I’m trying to say here a dip into woo, but others might, which is
0:53:35 just looking at what we’ve learned about the brain and what we’ve learned about the forest
0:53:41 and the fungus and the mother trees. It is abundantly clear that we don’t know what’s going
0:53:48 on here. What’s amazing is that unlike the meerkats and the forest with the fungus,
0:53:53 not only are we connected in ways we can’t imagine, but we’re also connected in this way,
0:53:59 this really unbelievably straightforward way where we move our mouths and actually hear each other.
0:54:08 It’s unbelievable that we have so much that makes us one, and yet we feel so separate,
0:54:12 but nothing feels as good as helping other people. It’s so hard to get ourselves to do,
0:54:18 but everything you just read, the point is when you need help, go help somebody else.
0:54:21 When you need existential help, go help someone else with their existential help,
0:54:24 and you perk right up. I don’t know how it works, but you perk right up.
0:54:29 In the end, what would you say is the greatest reward of a life filled with poetry? I don’t
0:54:33 want to say benefit because I don’t want to reduce poetry to that kind of economic calculus,
0:54:37 but apart from just the beauty of great literature and great poetry, what do you
0:54:40 hope people can most gain from engagement with it?
0:54:48 I guess a kind of freedom. I think when you’re not trying to believe something you don’t believe
0:54:56 or trying to hide from a very scary dark thought, you get to live a bigger life and be less scared,
0:55:00 be able to connect to people and do the things you want to do to be a whole human being.
0:55:06 So many people are either trying to block out the idea that the world’s about to end,
0:55:13 which it really isn’t. It’s about to go through some terrible stuff, but it’s not about to end,
0:55:18 and we’re overselling that. You cannot have a retirement plan that is the apocalypse.
0:55:23 The apocalypse is not going to be there and destroy everything. You are going to have to figure it out,
0:55:28 and the sun is not going to expand and eat the earth in billions of years or too much to think of.
0:55:34 It’s as good as not happening. The world is permanent. It’s here, and you’re part of it,
0:55:41 and you can take part in it. If you can bear just dropping all the things you think are holding you
0:55:48 up, you’ll notice you don’t fall. We’re holding each other up. It doesn’t mean nothing. What it means
0:55:55 is bigger than you. We make our own meaning to a degree. Mostly we join the meaning of the people
0:56:02 around us, and we figure that out. And it’s a much more rewarding kind of life. I think it’s
0:56:07 even harder to believe something you don’t believe because you think you need to believe it.
0:56:12 So either the people who are blocking out the abyss or the people who have put up a fake floor
0:56:17 over the abyss, I think they’re both going to feel a whole lot better if they just walk away
0:56:23 from the abyss. It’s not there. It’s an after effect. A lot of this stuff is an after effect
0:56:29 of the fact that we’re living in a time of profound change with religion. But individually,
0:56:34 I think we’re doing a great job. It just takes a little recontextualizing. That’s really it.
0:56:41 We’re already doing it. Just a little more intention leads to, in my personal experience,
0:56:47 emotional freedom. The book is called The Wonder Paradox, embracing the weirdness of
0:56:54 existence and the poetry of our lives. Jennifer, this was an absolute joy. Thanks for being here.
0:57:06 Thank you. I loved it. I really enjoyed it so much. Thanks.
0:57:17 I know you hear me say this a lot, but I really loved this conversation.
0:57:25 I’m not exactly a believer, but I have a deep appreciation for these sorts of questions,
0:57:30 and I wish other secular-minded people took them more seriously, like Jennifer does.
0:57:35 But let me know what you think. Drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
0:57:40 And if you appreciated this episode, share it with the aspiring poets in your life.
0:57:48 This episode was originally produced by Eric Janikis and A.M. Hall, and it was engineered by
0:57:55 Patrick Boyd. The Gray Area is edited by Jorge Just, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:58:02 New episodes drop Mondays, listen, and subscribe. This show is part of VOX. Support VOX’s
0:58:13 journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
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