Time_Sensitive_Maria_Popova_on_the_Role_of_Chance_in_Shaping_Our_Lives

0:05All the greatest most enduring most eternal works of art have to do with the limits of our humanity, the limits of consciousness, the limits we keep colliding against just by the nature of our creaturely endowment.

0:56whose website braids together literature, science, philosophy, poetry, and art in beautiful, alchemical ways. Through her multifaceted work, Maria traverses centuries and approaches various ideas and thinkers throughout history, not as fixed in amber, but as living references in the expansive, ongoing project of learning and discovering what it means to be human.

1:19As Maria tells me on the episode, we are a quote, composite creation of so many things that predate us and that will post data too. Maria's latest book, Traversal, serves as both an intellectual journey and a meditation on time, mortality, chance, creativity, and human interconnectedness. Drawing together figures as varied as Mary Shelley and Walt Whitman, alongside other writers and poets, physicists and philosophers, She describes how art and science alike can help us navigate life's fundamental uncertainties. Now, nearly 20 years into the Marginilian, Maria continues to cultivate singular space on the internet, one devoted not so much to information, but to illumination. With her sight, she remains committed as ever to the essential work of learning how to live by paying closer attention to the mystery of being alive. Over the years, the Marginilian has become such a vital resource

2:17that it's now included in the Library of Congress's permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. On the episode, she contemplates several recurring themes that have animated her work for the past two decades, the importance of attention in an age of distraction, the significance of wonder and expanding consciousness, and the ways mortality sharpens our capacity for meaning, love, and creation. She also talks about the idea of spiritual ancestors Why today's AI debates are at their core, modern versions of age-old questions about the soul and human nature, and the role of chance in shaping our lives. Before we get into the episode, I'd first like to thank our season 13 presenting partner, Le Cole, School of Jewelry Arts, which is supported by the Maysan Van Cleef and our pells. With the mission of sharing the art and culture of jewelry with the general public,

3:12Le Coal offers everything from courses on art history and introductory jewelry making and gemology to in-person and online talks, from books and exhibitions to its podcast, Voice of Jewels. Founded in 2012, Le Coal operates from permanent campuses in Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Dubai, and hosts various traveling events around the world. With programming that revolves around three main themes, Savo Faire, the history of jewelry and the universe of gemstones, the coal is a verifiable goldmine when it comes to the art, craft, and scholarship of jewelry. Among the coal's various courses are a guide to Japanese arushi lacquer techniques, a study of gouache painting and high jewelry, and even a program titled from the chef to the master jeweler, a full day workshop involving a morning cooking class,

4:03a lunch and tasting of petisseries by Francois Peret, the pastry chef at the Ritz Paris. And in the afternoon, a lesson on jeweler's techniques. Kids courses for six to eleven-year-olds include from aspiring jeweler to little pastry chef and make your own treasure chest. And there are also offerings for teenagers to discover the world of gems or the art of designing jewels. You can learn more about Le Colt and its current and upcoming offerings at Le Colt van Cleef are pells.com.

4:33That's L-E-C-O-L-E-B-A-N-C-L-E-E-F-A-R-P-E-L-S.com. And now, here's my conversation with Maria. Hi, Maria. Welcome to Time Sensitive. Hello, so happy to be here. So, I wanted to start with something you write about time and inheritance in your new book, Traversal. You write...

5:07We are composite creations of our genetic and cultural inheritance shaped by the biological ancestors, chances, deltas, and shaped equally by the spiritual ancestors we have chosen for ourselves. I'm struck by this notion of spiritual ancestors, and so I wanted to just ask, could you talk a bit about that notion and also how you came to discover your own spiritual ancestors? Maybe share who your spiritual ancestors are or a few of them.

5:37Well, first of all, I think we all are shaped by conscious and unconscious chosen ancestors. We carry so much ideology. We don't even know. We carry, I mean, Descartes, the single most harmful man in the history of our species has tainted all of us with this body, mind, division and a million other things that we still 400 years later live with without knowing. So in the sense, he's a kind of negative.

6:03But I think also we kind of forage for guiding spirits and especially those of us who haven't really had that in our family of origin. I think we spend our lives trying to be taught how to live and we look for the people who can do it for us. I had to find my own. I came to the US alone at age 19 with so much hope and confusion and all kinds of things. And I came for the promise of the liberal arts education model, right, which by design, I suppose the teacher had to live, but instead I found myself in this industrialized factory model of minds where you're taught how to do standardized testing, not how to live.

6:51I didn't know where to look. I started going to the library at random, pulling out Aristotle and Susan Sontak, who I'd never heard of, and slowly started assembling this, my friend Alan Allen Lightman, his physicist, he calls it a retinue, which is, I guess, from his Buddhist practice, this pottery of people who helped me grow up. I love that, and I love also just...

7:17this notion that you explore a lot in your work which is this idea that humans are just modes of stardust as you put it and that character is just the vapor of chemistry and chance so i love that in a way the connective tissue of the ideas that you unfold the relationships you build your spiritual ancestors become a part of you through the reading through the engaging it's a different way of thinking about education, I think. Yeah, and I also think it's so counter-cultural yet important to keep deconditioning this clutch of the self. I mean, we live in the century, really, of the self. And it's just so tedious to be that self-involved. You know, there's actually we are a composite creation of so many things that will post data, that pre-data and it's boring, being so identified with our chance variables that happen to be

8:15us right now. There are two spiritual ancestors of yours in particular that I wanted to bring up here, both of whom play a major role in your new book Mary Shelley and Walt Whitman. So let's start with Shelley. In traversal, you describe Shelley as someone who quote wrote herself to life through poverty and repeated loss and upheaval. Do you think writing can alter a person's relationship to time and how do you think about Shelly's transforming a grief into maybe something more integrated. That's a very optimistic way of looking at what she did. Maybe, maybe. I think our perennial tragedy is living in time and not against it. That every time we try to live against time, it doesn't quite work and it's just more grief and more pain. I do know that writing necessarily

9:13changes your relationship to time, but perhaps because I was going to say it helps you befriend it, which could be a change if you are against time, you know. But, you know, for me and why I relate with her, I think there are people who discover that writing is just our best way of metabolizing our own lives, our inner lives, our loves, our losses, our confusions, our quickenings of mind just take shape best, most easily in writing. And I think that's what she did.

9:42And you use or reference again and again Frankenstein her novel and you describe it or position it as the unresolved intersection kind of of science morality. I would say ambition to an extent and even human nature. These are all questions that we keep revisiting. We're still revisiting always revisiting. Does this explain why Frankenstein's been such an enduring?

10:09piece of art and why do you think these ethical questions continue to persist so much across time like why does so much remain unresolved that she's exploring in the book all the greatest most enduring most eternal works of art have to do with the limits of our humanity the limits of consciousness the limits we keep colliding against just by the nature of our creaturely endowment frankenstein Raises very fundamental questions that had different shape and her time. That was the time when people were asking what differentiates organic and inorganic matter. So the vitalism debate, this notion of the vital spark, this thing that is irreducible that cannot be discovered by the anatomists that makes a creature a soul. And now we're asking very similar questions about AI, we just have different terminology. And the word soul is.

11:04deeply unfashionable right now, but if you actually peel back the layers beneath all the AI debate, it's really asking, not is it sentient? But can it feel, can it suffer, can it create art? These are questions about what used to be called soul. I imagine Frankenstein logic applied to AI. That's an interesting conversation. But of course, because, I mean, that is a large reason why I woven into traversal.

11:35which has a lot to do with these questions of how do we use science to discover truth without letting power hijack it for other purposes. Frankenstein is actually least appreciated for its most subtle, most profound question, which is what does it mean to be a parent, a creator of a new life? What is the responsibility that comes with making a life form? Human or not? All right, let's turn to Whitman.

12:02He was a poet who seemed to hold an unusual sense of temporal scale. My foothold is mortist, intended, and granite, and I know the amplitude of time. Exactly, yes. And while he also remaining, I would say radically attentive to the present moment, what do you think allowed him to move so fluidly between these two modes, the one of eternity and the other of immediacy or the ancient and the urgent?

12:30Well, I think he didn't hold time the way we do. He held it more in the kind of, you know, the difference between Kronos and Kairos. Particularly, Aboriginal cultures of Australia and New Zealand had a very different model of time that is very similar to how he looked at it, not linear, but a plane, a field, a locus of points. And when he wrote in Crossing Brooklyn Fairy, probably the greatest poem ever written, What is it then between us? A hundred years hence, two hundred years hence, what is it then between us? It's not time, it's something else because time is a plane that we kind of are positioned on but there isn't that much difference between what you call the present and what to him is his future and his present is our past but maybe it's all just one plane. Which also is sort of the dissolving of the ego.

13:21Yes. Although, I mean, a big part of why I was so fascinated by Whitman is that he really, I mean, there's this, at this point, trite line of his that everybody quotes, I contain multitudes. Do I contradict myself? Yes, I am vast. I contain multitudes. But he really owned these, we all live with these parts and the part making the promise, making the choice is not the part keeping or breaking the...

13:49promised, living with the consequence of the choice, who were so partitioned, but we don't own it the way he did. And what interested me about him is that on the one hand, he wrote so, I think, genuinely about waiting to be the uncombed grass of graves. Like he accepted death as this atomic reality. He was very influenced by this woman, Fanny Wright, who brought in the atomism of the ancient Greeks. But on the other hand, when he began approaching death, he spent Thousands of dollars he did not have on literally tons of granite to build this elaborate tomb to immortalize the ephemera of the body, right? And both were true for him, both were true. In traversal, you describe what men is searching for a kind of grand unified theory of being where even the present moment becomes as you put it just a second ago, an atom of eternity.

14:45Has your own relationship with time changed through engaging with men's work? I mean, you've spent a lot of time with his poetry and thinking about his writing. I think it's more the other way around. I gravitated toward him because his experience of time is consonant with mine or with how I would like mine to flow in my being. Which also connects to this interconnectedness idea. I think both your practice and his practice.

15:15were really about the interconnectedness, or are about the interconnectedness of all things across time. This kind of idea that there's unity in everything, and in the book you describe, and I want to quote here, because I love this part, a human as a quote, festival of particles and probabilities, a living question, a perishable miracle, composed of chemistry and culture, of passion and change.

15:41Sorry, passion and chance. Very important. Yeah, change is the underlying, but the role of chance is so underestimated again in this age of self, right? Yeah, tell me a little bit about that, how you think about chance, this role of chance in, also in your work and how you discover things. Oh, tremendous. I mean, first of all, we are each of us accidents of chance. Had one atom fall in one way or not another, early on in the big bang in the whole group goldberg machine of events had your one parent gone to bed with the other parent on a different night or a different minute of a different second you know so much chance how much how little choice we have in the body the brain the neurochemistry the era were born into and yet so much of identity trades in these variables that we did not choose i find that

16:38such a prison, it is such a prison that we live in on the scale of a civilization now. Yeah, the odds, just from a chemical level, if not a physical one as well, I mean just thinking about...

16:52Every choice each of our ancestors made that led to us being here and even were they choices for them to they forces of circumstance they adapted to that look from you know in the hindsight as choice I have an ancestor who I know about who participated in a duel and And it's just wild to think that I'm here because he survived this duel Freeman Dyson, the physicist, has this deeply moving story and his memoir about his father's best friend was engaged to his mother. But he was a very tall man. And in the trenches of World War I, he rose up and he got shot. So then the fiancé fell in love with the man who became his father. And he was made because of a, you know,

17:46biometric problem this other man had that had him killed. The odds. Well, I like what you note about time in chapter five of traversal, which is titled Time Takes the Space It Takes. You write the calendar like money, like countries is a figment of the collective imagination, imagined by a series of consensuses.

18:10The loom of the universe goes on weaving the fabric of spacetime in different to our metrics, our consensus and conflicts. It's beautiful. I mean... I mean, I don't know if it's beautiful, but it's definitely true. I think I haven't had enough physicists on the show. I need to have more physicists on the show. Please.

18:33You know, physicists, it's interesting. Particularly theoretical physicists are some of the most imaginative people you will ever meet because essentially they have to create little fiction models in their mind that they then unlike novelists test against reality. But because the imagination is so powerful of force, a lot of physicists are great novelists. Alan Lightman, his novels, oh my god. Makes a lot of sense. Well, and across your work, there's...

19:02which echoes the bar has stance of time as a substance I am made of. Time seems less like this neutral backdrop. And more like almost a form of identity. I don't know if we could call it that, but I was thinking about this, and I wanted to, I didn't even know how to frame this question, but it's something along the lines of if it is a form of identity as something that we become through memory, attention, Even transformation or change like I guess do you think of the self as fundamentally temporal are we time is time us That's such a profound. I'm sorry. I'm still stuck on time as a form of identity that is a profound paradigm because actually I mean if we think of Entropy as the measure of time Entropy is the reason time exists or time is the reason entropy exists Identity is a rebellion against entropy saying I

20:01Am, right? Not I was, I will have been all the tenses that denote the dissolution of self, which is mortality. Identity says, I am. So it's almost a denial of time. And yet it has to exist within time. So it's almost like this layer of fiction superimposed over The substrate of reality that is our temporal nature, which is change. I mean, what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of physiological, psychological, social, cultural change? Who is that? No, it's a genuine question. Do you know? I don't know. I don't know. And then it makes me even more fascinated when you think about the

20:55the body in this equation, the body as a sort of map of time, of who we're becoming, where we've been, hard to process all that. What does it do you think that first drew you to these writers and these scientists and thinkers who treat time, I guess not so much as an abstraction, but as something perhaps deeply personal or lived or even existential?

21:23I mean, I think we're all just trying to bear our mortality, and we give that struggle different forms, religion, poetry, and I think making of time a material rather than an enemy. I mean, that might be one measure of creativity, actually. The people who are most creative in a kind of objective sense, meaning they make things, they put things into the world that touch other people's lives, that affect transformation in other...

21:52interior lives. There are people who have used time in a certain way as the material for that work. Who comes to mind for you when you think about that? I mean, obviously Whitman. And first of all, poets in general, I mean, poetry is made of time. It's made of rhythm and it's made of transformation. A good poem has a turn. It starts one place, it has a turn. It leaves in a different place. And in a very short amount of time, you've undergone a transformation.

22:21So poets are the ultimate shamans of time. Maybe songwriters, too. I think about, I know you've referenced Nina Simone and time, for example. Yes, she has it. This is actually not her song. It's really one of the most existential songs ever made, but she performs it in a way that is her voice is made of time. I mean, made of time and eternity. I wanted to touch here on the title of your book, Traversal.

22:53What have you learned about yourself through this act or these acts, plural, I should say, of traversal, you know, moving through books, ideas, geographies? Well, this took seven years beginning to end and I did not know.

23:13Who was going to be in this book when I started? I knew maybe three of the dozen people. I didn't know where it was going to take me. I just knew I had to process my life. And about midway through my wonderful wonderful editor, Dan Frank, who edited my first book, who is the reason even me, I don't need to make books. You know, I like writing. I have other ways to write.

23:39But I made my first book figuring into a book because of him and working with him, having another mind, another consciousness, really kind of take you out of yourself, take you far beyond where you can go. And he was an extraordinary person. He was John Perter's editor, Renata Adler, many, many wonderful writers that I loved. I very much started traversal for the sake of having this conversation with him. And he Midway through got very sick, very suddenly, and died very suddenly. And I hoped to finish as a gift to him. I never even cared at this point about publishing.

24:19When he was going through chemo, he called it his medicine. He said, send me more of my medicine. So I was writing so fast to keep sending him pages. And then he died. And I was about 300 pages in and I was like, no, Dan, no book. That's it. I put it away. I was grief-stricken for two years. I just, I mean, every time I thought of it, I just couldn't. Yeah.

24:42And then eventually, my friend Jim, who's one of his authors, James Glick, who knows how to manipulate me, he said, what would Dan want? And then I got connected with my now wonderful editor, Eric Jinsky. I mean, I met with a number of people and I just needed a very strange, unusual person. The reward for me is the process. And so I ended up writing the remaining three.

25:09350 pages in a totally different era of my life in a totally different context who is this kind of Frankensteining of the book itself and it completely changed where it went because now these questions of life and death had a completely different meaning. Wow. What an experience. I mean, you feel this propelling force as you're reading the book for sure. I don't think the average reader or any reader would probably pick up on the the Frankenstein element of the book, other than the actual writing of Shelley's novel that you do. So there's so much that's invisible about the lives of writers. And this is partly why I immersed myself in the lives of these people of whom all we know, I mean, what a shame that all the world knows of Mary Shelley as the novel she wrote at age 18 and a half. And I mean, I do reference Frankenstein a fair amount, but I also make a real point of

26:09putting the full context of her life, her other work. What made that book possible and what that book made possible then for her life? So much is invisible that is the substance of the art.

26:43and host various traveling events around the world, with programming that revolves around three main themes, Sava Faire, the history of jewelry, and the universe of gemstones. In addition to its courses, lectures, publications, and other programming, Lakul also produces a podcast called Voice of Jewels, which draws on knowledge from its lecturers, researchers, and other experts to uncover the stories and secrets behind history's most fascinating jewels.

27:11You can learn more about Lake Cole and its current and upcoming offerings at Lake Cole Van Cleef Art Pels.com. That's Ellie, COLE, V-A-N-C-L-E-E-E-F-A-R-P-E-L-S.com. And now, back to the episode. You know, I mentioned Shelley and I mentioned Whitman both, because I viewed your book as a portrait of each of them. In a way, it links them across time.

27:49offers a way of reading each of their work that if you were reading a straight biography of them, you would never get. I think that's what's sort of fascinating is just to go back to the traversal title. I feel like it's traversing all of this terrain that I feel like as the reader, we really get to live in your mind a little bit. Can I ask I'm so curious because there are many people in this book on the loom that is many threads.

28:19I found most people do gravitate to Whitman and Shelley. What is it for you that these two and not the others? Yeah, I should tell the listeners here. I left out many, many voices. I mean, there's dozens of different people from across time, scientists, the other writers, other poets, other thinkers. I think it was...

28:45I think I've long had a sort of mental attachment, maybe a spiritual ancestral attachment to Whitman. And then Shelley, I've never read Frankenstein. When you two please read the 1831 edition, not the original. And I of course knew who Shelley was, but I didn't have much beyond that. So for me this It was a sort of introduction to her work in her world. And I found that the way that you write about her really, it kind of melts into the book. It like transfuses so much of her life into the lives of the others that you're writing about in a way that I kept thinking about her. I don't know why.

29:39And I guess the same is sort of true of Whitman, although I think with Whitman, you also kind of end the book on with Whitman, or there's a lot of Whitman toward the end. And so maybe that's why he was so much on my book. Yeah, so interesting. You know, I don't write biography, but I really absorb all I can of their lives. So for Mary Shelley, I mean, this is, we're talking 200 years worth of material. I read seven biographies.

30:04All four volumes of her surviving letters, the Claremont family, her sister's family's letters, and of course all of Percy's letters, such a partial glimpse of a person, even when you absorb all the survives of them, all you get is a little, little glimpse. And I love that in a way, how unknowable people are, the living and the dead. Start us.

30:28Start us, but also that is why we make art to reach across that abyss between one consciousness and another, which is always an abyss, even between lovers and parents and children. It is always an abyss. I think this is a good moment to turn to your upbringing, actually. And well, I just, you know, could you speak to the sort of genetic inheritance you got from your family as you see it? Like, because we've been talking about the sort of spiritual ancestry, but what about the I mean, in what sense genetics touches so much? Well, yeah, I guess we could go in a lot of different directions here. There's the fact of the actual environment you grew up in, but I guess we could get into your parents here. I know your paternal grandmother was a big reader. She still is, yeah. So I grew up in Bulgaria. I was born during communism. My parents were unacceptably young. So I was raised

31:27by largely by my two sets of grandparents, which meant my two grandmothers, who are polar opposites. One of them who was going to be 92 this year was until recently the only religious person I ever knew. She still prays, she believes in God, you know, the whole thing. And the other one is an engineer, atheist, heavy reader, whose library was my playground.

31:52I think there was something very interesting about being, I was constantly sent from one to the other. I had no continuity in my childhood. So I was shipped away, brought back, shipped away, brought back. And I went from wild, outgrown nature because my religious grandmother lives in the Bulgarian countryside and actually much of my childhood, she was an elementary school teacher stationed by the Communist government and extremely remote villages in the mountains.

32:20And I was like unattended. I ran the fields. I was chased by a wild boar. I tried to ride a turtle. I mean, you know, and then in the city was the opposite. My other grandmother is very, very anxious. We can blame her. She had bombs falling her when she was four years old, you know, captive. The measure of a person being their intellect.

32:45Completely the opposite. So I had the life of the body in the country and then the life of the mind in the city and unsure where the self is. That definitely answers what I Well in introversal you write of parents our parents may break our hearts, but they shape our spirits the contours rendered starkest in times of crisis when all we have are our primal reflexes and does that resonate for you? Is that I mean who wrote that sentence? Yeah, um You know my parents as all parents did the best with the cars they were dealt. That's it my Father by contemporary standard. I mean, he hardly speaks. He's very, very kind of shut in. Cerebral has weird knowledge about submarines from the 1970s. I mean, you know, very kind of classic that kind of person. And my mother was when I was growing up, very violent, very explosive.

33:47unsafe in many ways so between the two of them it was not not ideal in some ways but I think I think every artist art is their coping mechanism for whatever it is they survived or are living with and I can begrudge that and still have the life I have right because I have the life I have because of that well and maybe this is a reach but one of the things I found interesting to learn about you And your background is that you were a recreational bodybuilder. I mean, I competed in college briefly. Yeah. On the surface, it may seem so far from the world of the marginilian and what you do as a writer and reader today. But I think the way you work is so disciplined, so rigorous and really it's like this form of repetition. Do you see it through line there?

34:45That's definitely one. I mean, bodybuilding, I would not recommend. It's a very unhealthy sport. It is the broadcasting of self-restraint and discipline, performative discipline, bad idea, you know.

35:00But I will say, I started doing it because I had come from the 99% of Bulgaria to a school that was the 1% of America. I thought I had America down because of movies. And I was so not prepared for this level of privilege, this level of just I did not relate at all. I was working four jobs to pay my way through college and these kids were partying. And I went to the, there were different kinds of workshops to try different recreation or what is it called extracurricular things and the bodybuilding group were all the weirdos and in hindsight they were we are now called queer people you know this term didn't exist at the time but the marginal people right and I've always felt marginal to my time my place in Bulgaria here everywhere you know and it was something about you know being in a tiny group of people who also felt like they

35:57weren't quite supposed to be there. So the discipline was one aspect but very much this underlying spirit of marginal. That's a direct connect to marginalia. Yeah, I mean I renamed my site 15 years in because I realized looking back that a lot of what I write about are ideas from the margins of their time that ended up really kind of shaping the future and people who were Other enough by some variable that they gave themselves permission to go against the status quo, the marginal people who drove the world forward. Well, I feel like you just framed exactly what I wanted to ask next, which is the marginally, and I guess since 2021 called the marginally, and the first 15 years, it was brain picking.

36:48Yeah, I know. I know. It's terrible. I was 21. Come on. I mean, I loved, so in Bulgarian, we don't really have puns and wordplay. Very little, you know, but it's a then I was so thrilled about all these idioms. And like, pick my brain. What? I know. Oh, my God. It's terrible. 21, though. Who wants to be held to their aesthetic standards at age 21? Yeah. Well, I think, you know, time duration, these are things that you explore a lot.

37:18with the marginilian and now this fall it will turn 20 how are you thinking about two decades of this project how are you thinking about what you've learned and the information that you sort of gathered accrued linked I mean in a sense it hasn't changed for me I have changed but In relation to me, the process hasn't changed. It has just followed along with my change. It is how I metabolize my life. I'm still learning how to live and I'm doing it in writing. What do you think this work you do, which I would say is it's very much of the internet?

38:04but it's so much of it's removed from as well. Like, how do you think about this idea of like- I try not to. Cause like, we live in a world where information is just optimized. Everything's about, you know, speed rather than depth. Right. But, you know, I very early on decided I wasn't going to do things the way they're done. Not out of any kind of, I'm just going to be rebellious because I, as a person on the internet did not like much of the experience the internet had to offer including advertising so I was like why would I perpetrate on other people the thing that I very much hate so I have never had advertising on my site I have not really at all gotten seduced by the clickbait thing because you know what it is it's not about information it's about illumination like we read for illumination no

39:01Greater amount of information is going to help us become better humans. We know it all. More or less, the basic parameters of how to be. It's more the illumination. Where is that coming from? And as you say, we live in a world that has pragmatized.

39:18Every littlest thing, you know, the wonder of the universe has been reduced to the practical use of scientific discoveries. The symphony of feeling has been reduced to the whole music of self-help. I hope I didn't offend you when I said that you gather information, but I think what you do that I think so beautiful is you make information illumination.

39:43rather than just like present information. Or thank you, or maybe just simply share what has illuminated me in some way that I have learned, which is a process of integrating information into your existing framework of knowledge, but then this transmutation has to happen when there's more than being informed. You're transformed. You've described literature as an analog internet. It's a concept I love.

40:13I'm sure the listeners do too. And you view yourself very much as much a writer as a reader. Well, I never wanted to be a writer. I never thought I was a writer until I looked back and realized I had written tens of thousands of pages of writing. You know, you asked earlier about how I discover my spiritual ancestors. Every illusion, every footnote in a book is a hyperlink to an older text.

40:39So much of what I've discovered is because somebody made a passing mention and the footnote of a or the post script of a letter that got me interested in who that person was or what that book was and then I went I got it and then in it there was a reference to some other thing and I mean it's just This combination of chance and choice I find very fertile Did you have to be open to the chance events and then choose to pursue?

41:05the tentacle to stretch the tentacle to see what it's going to grab. Yeah, traversing. You've become an expert. I would argue. Maybe you don't agree, but I you might. I'm so curious where the sentence goes because I don't feel like I have an expertise in anything. Emerging poetry and science. Like because I think the way that you think about them is.

41:33Maybe not distinctive to you, but you do it in such a way that has really shaped, I think, how a lot of people from one field or the other come find each other. You've described both poetry and sciences instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it more deeply. I think that's what we feel when we engage with your work. And I was just wondering, was there an aha moment for you as you were coming up?

41:58Following your nose the the trail of interest in in these two fields the verse and the universe So I come from the world of science I did very intense mathematics for quite a while when I was quite young and Never quite got a proper education in literature Well into my 20s. I did not like poetry meaning I didn't understand it and like most people who are not literate in a form, I dismissed it. The way we tend to dismiss what we don't know how to use, we call it useless, right? And then across the aisle on the transatlantic flight, I met this wonderful woman whose name was Emily Levine and she was a comedian, performer, philosopher of science, extraordinary person. So across the aisle, across our

42:5250 years, half-century of age difference, we became very fast friends. In this liminal space in the airplane. Much to the discontentment of the entire coach cabin on the red eye. And then she was visiting one day. She lived in California, and we went to a little coffee shop in Chelsea, packed to Sunday, somehow we got a table, and she again started saying something rather about poetry, and I once again rolled my eyes.

43:18At which point Emily gripped the edge of the table rose to her full height of 4.2. and began reciting the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, that T.S. Eliot poem that has the line, Do I Dare to Disturb the Universe? And she calmly sat down and I looked around, people had put down their drinks and were applauding. I mean, this is New York, this does not happen. And I said, all right, maybe this stuff can disturb the universe a little bit. And then Emily took it upon herself to educate me. She started sending me a poem a day and she's someone very versed in...

43:51Science she read Latin. She you know, she's very erudite but very sensitive and so she educated me in poetry and then when she was dying we she also Running theme here people have saved my life dying But you know it anyway the point is Emily introduced me to poetry, but I do want to say something about the losing people in Mary Shelley a big reason why I wanted to Summon her back with us is that By the time Mary Shelley was 25, she had lost three children, the love of her life, her mother at birth, and her only biological sibling. Now, can you imagine that? We live in an age of competitive trauma. Yeah. I mean, we really do need some calibration there. And this woman, on complaining, made art that touched the centuries. And none of it was victim.

44:49So anyway, the point is losses happen. They are terrible. We survive. Yeah. Do something with it. Do something with it. And so Emily actually died on the day my first book figuring was published, which was dedicated to her. By that point, poetry had become very integrated with my life. And I started to see the ways in which It helps us live that is similar to science. This kind of unselfing right to use Irish Murdoch's wonderful term stepping out of ourselves into something larger that is the universe within the universe without this kind of conversation between the two and so I ended up doing this show for a number of years called the universe in verse that used poetry to bring people into the world of science and vice versa so it invite people

45:45were not usually poets, you know, actors, musicians to read a poem that I choose that has some element of science that I would tell talk the science. The, you know, Patty Smith would read Rebecca Elson poem about dark matter and that I would talk about Vera Rubin and discover it in confirmation of dark matter and how galaxies worked. And this was right after the first Trump election. So when the arts were being defunded, when alternative facts were happening. And I loved this portal into reality that both these instruments provide us with and that also help us bear all the uncertainty we're living with. Thank you for sharing that story. Hey everyone, taking another quick break here to tell you about our weekly newsletter.

46:36where I share behind the scenes look into each time sensitive episode, and where we also get into various things in the cultural sphere our team at the slowdown is paying attention to. You could sign up and join our thousands of other subscribers by going to slowdown.media slash newsletter. That's slowdown.media slash newsletter. And now back to the episode. Since we're on the subject of poetry, I also wanted to ask you about pottery.

47:15You started making pots as a daily practice. You described it as a coping mechanism for the confusions and cataclysm of living. And you've created what you've called earns for living. Could you just speak to pottery within the context of your work, your creative life? What does it mean to you? How does it work up? So I have a very compulsive nature. I am very regulated by a daily thing.

47:42It used to be my writing, it used to be the marginality. I would write every day and then it kind of shifted because things became longer, took more research, so I couldn't do a daily. And typically, when I am in a state of heartache, I especially need the daily regulator. So at some point a couple of years ago, I decided I walked into a studio off the street in Brooklyn. They had an open wheel and my friend and I walked in and we took the class. It was great.

48:12And then they were like, you can sign up for classes. We have a three-year wait list. And I was like, what? So then I found a friend who I knew does pottery to teach me. I started learning. And then I had a very big heartbreak and really struggled with this idea of the tension between holding on and letting go. Like, where is that dial and how to do both in a way, right? Hold on to life, hold on to the loveliness of what was lost, but let go of something that no longer is, right? I started, I don't know how these things happened, but I started making these earns for living that all say they're tiny, tiny little earns that all say, hold on, let go around on the perimeter. And I decided I was going to make one a day for 41 days. And on my 41st birthday, give them away to strangers.

49:10raffle them off. And that is what I did. It's been very moving to see. I wrote also about this tension between holding on and letting go. And I don't know if people responded more to the writing or to the earns, but it was very moving to see the response. I think that's something we all struggle with in many aspects of life. And you're still making pots. I now I make bowls with lichen and Cut up text from my books. Yeah. Really combining the writing, the poetry and the pottery. Yes. We've been kind of skirting around the importance of attention. And I think attention is something that ultimately is a core element of your work, if not what your work is really about. Paying attention, deep looking, wonder. You've written that

50:09The art of living is the art of knowing what to overlook So I'm curious in a culture that's monetizing distraction pretty much What do you decide deserves your attention? Like how do you decide what to overlook monetizing distraction by manipulating attention?

50:30So, it's interesting, the relationship, right? That our attention is now a currency and somebody else's pocket. And we're not quite aware of it, or at least don't act like we are aware of it. There should be such a higher level of indignation at how we're being manipulated. Ultimately, attention is all we have. It's the seed through which consciousness perceives reality.

50:52And because there is no experience of reality outside of consciousness, there is, of course, objective external reality where the laws of physics play out. But internally, our entire entire experience of reality is mediated by consciousness. And if attention is devolved through which experience comes in, then why are we much more vigilant over what we let in, you know, and how we guard that valve? I think also We can manipulate ourselves into taking in richer and richer elements of reality by how we place our attention. Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror. Look long enough at a great blue hair and or a ghost pipe or a constellation and you will learn more about yourself than anyone can ever tell you in a book. Which I feel like is just a mode of embracing.

51:50slowness, like accepting that we have it in our control to approach life in a more considered slow way rather than just agree to the speed at which we're forced to. I mean, I think there's lots of politics involved in talking about slowness too, but I think we can bring more inefficiency into our lives.

52:14Do you think about your practice as one of slowness? Do you think slowness brings its own kind of intelligence out of it? It's slowness, even a moral stance, these days. It's interesting. That is never a lens I have looked at it through, the pace. I am much more interested in scale, so I would say smallness. The cult of scale would live.

52:36Under of which productivity is a byproduct right the more faster more faster is actually a scale problem trying to scale the moment into eternity and it's losing game but but also the pressure of the internet for everything to always be getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and more reach and more this and that I think we're losing the the depth that comes with smallness that yeah Go on with that. Like I'm curious also I mean you have accrued and built a very large following an audience yourself at the same time I think the ideas that you Explore and tread into are are intimate There's an intimacy to your work

53:27They are intimate in the sense that they're universal. We are not so unique. You know, me processing my heartbreak in a little essay about holding on and letting go. Every person who's ever had their heartbroken will relate not because I'm a great writer, but because we are all living with the same handful of things ultimately beneath the shape and the manifestation and the guys and the costume. There's only a handful of things. And that is smallness. There's a small scale on which human problems play out.

53:56I mean, I love that something as big as the world or as big as the universe can feel so small through a particular lens. You've written that wonder is our best means of loving the world more deeply. Do you see wonder as a temporal practice? Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes wonder grows with contemplation, but sometimes it is sudden as lightning.

54:31The thing I think that's much more important about it is that if necessitates demands a lack of certainty, wonder can only happen when there isn't certainty. And that would make it such a counter-cultural practice, actually, because we live in an era of so much false certainty that there's very little room to be surprised and odd if you know it all. Right. Yeah, I love a few years ago I read.

55:01Dacker Keltner's book, which to me, it explores the science of awe basically, but I appreciated it as this thing like, well, of course, of course, we should be thinking about awe this way as something that the changes that like cosmic nature of our being. And I also think it's such an affirmation of our humanity. That is one.

55:30Aspect that AI will never be capable of because wonder presupposes an element of surprise an AI can never surprise itself if it's programmed to surprise itself It's already not surprising itself by executing the command to surprise and also very much in Dacker's line of research wonder is a full-body phenomenon like consciousness is a full-body phenomenon the dilation of blood vessels in the lungs that people experienced with a moment of awe, that is a creaturely experience that a disembodied intellect can never have. And I think it's so important to keep celebrating the parts that keep us human. Amen. We already did touch on death, but I wanted to bring it up again. I'm sorry. You often return to this idea that mortality sharpens meaning that

56:27What you call the portal of mortal loss opens up a different way or modality perhaps of seeing. Could you talk about how you've come to some of that through your own research, reading, writing? This trance of near-living that we often find ourselves in has to do with our disavowal of our creaturely mortal nature, this dissociation from our own mortality, which is hard to bear. I mean, who can blame us for having escape mechanisms, but I think a lot of life is wasted when we are not in touch with that, because actually it's out of the urgency, the sharpness of our mortality that we're compelled to do anything.

57:21Anything worth doing, whether it's art or love or discovering something that didn't exist before in the mind of the world, wouldn't matter if we were immortal. Yeah, I mean, it seems like the very people who are funding these mechanisms of distraction are the same ones who are trying to become immortal.

57:46Oh, you know, this is where historical perspective really helps because this is just our era's version of religious revival, right? The immortality of religion is now the singularity people and all of that. It's just as silly and it'll pass like all the other cults. Everything in your book.

58:15There are these two lines that I don't know maybe I'm thinking about home or notions of home or but They just stood out to me the most as I don't know I like I paused in my tracks reading them and and they really moved me so I wanted to just share them with the listeners and with you Sometimes we must go to the end of the world to the last horizon and passed it to find our way home Sometimes home is a horizon I mean, I don't want to interpret myself. I will say when Sylvia Plath was 17 and her first poem was published and her mother was fretting about what the world would make of it, Sylvia wrote to her and said, once the poem is made available, the right of interpretation belongs to the public. Well, I feel like we should end our conversation with poetry. I think...

59:21It makes sense, right? And there's a poem that you include in traversal. It's two stanzas. Well, several stanzas actually in the book, but I wanted to just maybe see if you would read two of the stanzas here. It's Whitman's poem, Who Learns My Lesson Complete from the original edition of Leaves of Grass. And I printed them out here so I can... Good Russell of Paper. Yes. It is no small matter.

59:53This round and delicious globe moving so exactly in its orbit, forever and ever, without one jolt, or the untruth of a single second. I do not think it was made in six days, nor in 10,000 years, nor 10 billion years, nor planned and built one thing after another as an architect plans and builds a house. I do not think 70 years is the time of a man or woman.

1:00:22North at 70 million years is the time of a man or woman. North at years will ever stop the existence of me or anyone else. Thank you, Maria. Thank you, Spencer. Thank you, Walt. Extra thanks to our season 13 presenting partner, Nicole, School of Jewelry Arts, which is supported by the Maison Van Cleef and our pals. A unique place for learning online and offline LeCole welcomes the general public to the world of jewelry through courses, talks, exhibitions, videos, books, and its voice of jewels podcasts. You can find out more about LeCole at LeColeVancleafRPels.com. That's Ellie, COLE, V-A-N-C-L-E-E-E-F-A-R-P-E-L-S.com. And thank you for listening. You can find more episodes of Time Sensitive on our website, time-sensitive.fm.

1:01:23or wherever you listen to podcasts. To keep up with our latest time-sensitive episodes and get behind-the-scenes updates, sign up for our newsletter at slowdown.media-newsletter. That's slowdown.media-newsletter. You can follow us on Instagram at slowdown.media. Our theme music was composed by Billy Martin. This episode was produced by Ramon Brosa, Olivia Almer, Mimi Hannon, Sam Platt, and Johnny Simon.