Poetry Against Despair with Christian Wiman

Finding moments of wonder

0:00Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.

0:03I'm Anne Strangehamps. And I'm Steve Paulson. It can be hard to find moments of wonder when we're bombarded by the noise of everyday life. News of war and political scandal, climate fears, AI anxieties. We all walk around worrying about the world all the time and having it shoved in our face. But the only antidote to that is to preserve your own consciousness first. It's like on airplanes, when those things come down, you've got to put your own mask on first or you're no good to anybody else. This is the poet Christian Wyman.

0:35So I think being attentive to those moments of wonder and awe when the world is annihilated and yourself is annihilated, those are the first steps toward changing the world, actually. Christian Wyman believes in the transformative power of everyday experiences of wonder. Small observations like a particular slant of light, a bird feather at your feet, a bit of tree bark. He's the former editor of Poetry Magazine and acclaimed poet, the author of seven poetry books and several essay collections,

1:06including Zero at the Bone, 50 Entries Against Despair. And part of what makes his practice of wonder so remarkable is that he's had a lot of experience resisting despair. 20 years ago, Christian Wyman was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma, and he was given just a few years to live. He's come close to dying several times, but he's still here and more productive than ever. He also has a new poetry collection titled The Dance. I know you admire him a lot as a writer, but also as a thinker.

1:36Yeah, he has a really nuanced way of thinking about all kinds of things, and especially when it comes to questions of religious faith. He actually teaches at the Yale Divinity School, although he has a pretty complicated take on God, and all of this makes its way into his poems. He has this heady mix of mystical reverie and spiritual uncertainty, so he's always probing and asking these deep questions about how we find meaning in our lives. That's part of what draws you, right? The way he grapples with despair?

2:07I think you know that a bit of existential angst goes a long way for me. I mean, Christian talks about finding joy in suffering, and given all his medical struggles, he knows this territory intimately. There's also a paradox at the center of how he thinks about his poetry. He craves direct experience of the world, those moments of awe and wonder, but he sees language, including the poems he writes, as one step away from this experience. So he's constantly working through these contradictions, this push-pull within his life and his work.

2:38Okay, let's listen.

Reading the poem The Dance

2:40Chris, I would love to have you start with a short poem from your new collection, The Dance. Could you read, I Was Where the First Leaf Stirred? Sure. I was where the first leaf stirred.

2:56China's sky, November's neural trees, clear, clairvoyant morning, alert, alive in dawn's indivisible reality, a gift, a warning. A frosted hosta, a black trunk burled like a half-melted candle, leaf fall in a locked embodiment of swirl, a cosmic stillness over all,

3:30evaporates at the thought of God, implicates in the vice of mind, leaf stir, lone bird, was it there, pecking the hard sod, alone, apart, on the other side of shine. Okay, so I wanted to start there with something short because I'm so curious about your creative process. Here you are writing about trees in November,

4:03the leaves have fallen. I love that phrase, neural trees. You refer to the frosted hosta, the bird pecking into the ground, and then the poem opens up into a cosmic stillness overall, evaporates at the thought of God. So I have this picture. I'm picturing you out on a walk on a late November day. You're sort of looking, you know, intently at the trees and the plants around you, and then boom, you have this existential rush sensing the cosmos

4:33and where God fits or does not fit into this whole picture. Is that anything like what actually happens for you?

4:43Well, it happens in recollection. I often don't know that I've had a moment until the moment occurs to me through language. So it's not as if I have a moment and realize and think, oh, I've got to write about this. That's not what happens. It's the language that unearths the moment and shows me what I wasn't able to feel, or I would put it a little differently, what I felt too deeply to need a meaning. And this poem is about one of those moments where the reality of the world is indivisible, dawns indivisible realities.

5:14But then it evaporates as soon as you give the name God to it. And then you're on the other side of that shine. You're back in consciousness. What we know of is consciousness. There are moments in our lives, I think, when we're freed from that. But mostly we live on the other side of shine. Yeah. So it's those moments of shine that you are looking for? Yeah. Well, I think that is an earnest or a pledge or a testament or something of God. I think those moments are an experience of God.

5:44But as soon as we start naming God, God, we've taken a step away. In those moments, you don't need the name. You don't need words like faith or anything like that. You just have it. And yet, the whole point of being a poet, putting this into words, into language, is you are naming things. But is that process then one step away from the direct experience? It is. But the mystery of poetry is that somehow that direct experience that you had is recoverable within the poem.

6:19I mean, language is always a fallen thing. It's always a step away. But there is something in the music of the language that can, I believe, can actually get to that essence of that experience. But it's more in the music. It's in things other than the denotative sense of the words. In the music of the language, which I get. I mean, that's sort of what poetry is all about. But it's almost like you're saying, you know, don't just read it for the meaning. Read it for, I don't know, the way it sounds.

6:49Or can you sort of explain the difference there? Yeah, I would say read it first of all for the way it sounds. And then second of all for the meaning. I mean, I often don't know what a poem means when I first read it. And I'm just hearing the sounds, hearing how it works and fits together. And then afterwards I go deeper in and begin to figure it out. But there remains an essence of, essence of something that you can't be critical about. You can't explicate. You can't say something outside of the poem that exhausts the poem. I think that's the music of the poem,

7:19the formal energy of the poem. And you don't need to be an expert in this at all. It's just like listening to music. It goes straight into your bloodstream. And I think poetry is, its nearest kin is music. It's much further away from like the novel. Poetry in the novels seem to have very little to do with each other. But poetry in music seem to have a lot to do with each other.

Defining awe and wonder

7:39So clearly experiences of awe and wonder are very important to you. I mean, they're all through your poems. And this is actually one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you because this podcast that we do is called Wonder Cabinet. And what I have discovered is that experiences of awe and wonder are quite complex. And they vary from one person to the next. So how do you think about these two experiences, these two words, awe and wonder? Well, I've given a lot of thought to them. I think I got somebody wrote me the other day

8:12and praised me for my skeptical stance toward faith. And I did not take that as a compliment because I think skepticism comes so readily to people like me and the whole intellectual culture of our time. And it's faith that comes with great difficulty. And I take those moments of wonder and awe to be moments of faith, even if you don't have to use that word. I don't care if you use that word. But they're complex because C.S. Lewis said that a moment of joy makes us homesick

8:42for a home we didn't realize we had. Richard Wilbur has this beautiful poem called Hamlin Brook where he describes the brook all the way down. And it's this meticulous bit of description where he's just seeing everything so clearly and making music out of it. And then at the end, he says, joy's trick is to supply dry lips with what can cool and slake, leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache nothing can satisfy.

9:10Wow. So joy is in some way completely fulfilling and yet there's a shadow of absence in it. It asks something of us afterward. It asks, what are you going to do with this moment of joy? And it can call you to the world. Jürgen Moltmann said that compassion is the other side of a living joy. It can call you to change your own life or it can call you to simply integrate those moments into your own life. And that's what happened to me. That's why I consider myself a person of faith is because I had moments in my life

9:40that they were asking something of me. Well, you have this passage, this wonderful passage in your earlier book, Zero at the Bone, where you say the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute and perhaps even annihilating awe. And then you go on to quote the Jewish theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel, who said, I pray for wonders instead of happiness. And I'm assuming you're in his camp too, that you would choose wonders over happiness. Yeah, yeah, I would.

10:12I mean, I think of happiness as being a temporal phenomenon. It's something that you experience in a linear way, like your life can be happy. Certain things can make you happy. Whereas joy cuts in vertically and comes from somewhere else. And it can illuminate a life of happiness. It can make you realize that you're happy. But it can also make you realize that you're unhappy. But it's going to... Wait, joy can make you realize you're unhappy? Yeah, if you have a moment of joy and then you're on the other side of it, you think, well,

10:43it should cast a light on the rest of your life. And suddenly you look and you think, oh, what's going on here? I mean, at the end of Rilke's great poem, Archaic Torso of Apollo, he describes that statue. And then the last slide is, you must change your life. That's what the statue is telling him. That's what his experience is telling him. And so that you can have a moment of absolute rapture that leaves you bereft. Because then you realize, oh, the rest of your life has no joy, is lacking joy. I mean, it's the discrepancy between the experiences.

11:14Or you just don't know what to do with it. Yeah, it can be some great fire that shows the firelessness of the rest of your life. But, you know, there's great hope in that because you've had this moment where you see life can be different. I can be different. I mean, Heschel, the theologian you were talking about, he said that those moments of wonder are the criteria for every religion, for every faith. They are made of those moments. And if they're not made of those moments, then they're not real. And he also said that faith is mostly being faithful

11:45to the times when you had faith. So that in that moment, you're aware of this unity, dawns indivisible realities, like that poem says. And so on the other side of it, you have to ask yourself, well, how do I remain faithful to that? So in that quote that I just read, there's that phrase, annihilating awe. What does that mean to you? Well, I think it annihilates yourself. All that you think of as yourself, your ambitions and your worries

12:16and all of that. A moment of awe frees you from all of that. And it annihilates your social concerns for a minute. All of the worries that you have about the way you fit into society, that the world is going to hell, all that. That too gets eased. That's what compassion is, the other side of living joy. Then on the other side, you ought to ask yourself, well, okay, now what? What do I do? Well, annihilating, I mean, it has a, I don't know if negative is the right connotation, but a destructive connotation.

12:47I mean, annihilating, I mean, what, annihilating yourself? Is that kind of what you're talking about? Well, I think it annihilates the self. For an instant, yes. And reveals the soul. I think it annihilates concerns that are not the souls for an instant. You have to have the self. You come back to yourself and then you got to deal with them. But for a minute, yes, I think those are annihilated. What do you see as the connection between awe and poetry? Well, poetry for me

13:18is made up of those moments. I mean, I wouldn't be a religious person if I hadn't, I wasn't a religious person for 20 years, but if I hadn't had poems that kept showing me these things in my life that I hadn't realized or, and also just giving me the sensation of them happening again in the poems and not knowing what to do with that. I mean, that writing the poem was joyful, but after the poem, I always felt completely deflated and my poems were often dark.

13:48So for a long time, I think I was living in a state of not being able to admit joy, not being able to let yourself feel it. This is before you became a religious person? I mean, I know that you grew up in an evangelical family in West Texas, but then you've, you've talked about or you've written about how you became in what you've described as an ambivalent atheist, contemptuous of Christianity. And then you came back. Are you describing sort of that period when you were writing poetry, but there wasn't joy in the poetry

14:20that you were writing? There was joy, but joy was simply in the joy of making. I mean, there's always joy in making something, even when you're, even when it's a work of art that's expressing torment. Simply putting the pen to the paper is to rouse yourself from despair, even if you're going to express despair. But for too long, I was, I had a vision of the world that was dark and the poems I wrote came out of that. And so my, my, the joy that I had was completely self-contained in a way because it was just the joy of creation,

14:53my own creation and not capital C creation that began to shift as things in my life shifted and I didn't become religious until I was thinking, what, what am I supposed to do? You know, what, what am I supposed to be seeing? So I want to ask a bit about your, your personal history because I'm guessing that anyone who has a passing familiarity with you knows two things about you. You nearly died of cancer and this threat of dying continues to hover over you and you are a devotional poet.

15:26I mean, you've been described as the most important Christian writer in America now and I'm wondering how closely those two parts of your life are linked.

15:37Uh, not so closely. I've had cancer for 20 years and I've had 13 last-ditch treatments. So you get a little used to it. Thirteen times when you nearly died? No, only three times that I nearly died but I've had 13 times that the cancer was out of control and they were, they were treating it but only three times was it, did it look like I was done. Wow. Can you just, just, I think this is useful for us, can you sort of give a brief summary of your medical history

16:08just because I think that will take us to where we are today.

Living with a cancer diagnosis

16:12So, what, 20 years ago you got this, you know, terrible diagnosis and then what happened after that? Yeah, I got it on my birthday actually. the morning of my 39th birthday. Wow, what a birthday present. Yeah. And I had only been married for seven months with the love of my life and yeah, I was quite bad and that prognosis was not good at the time. They gave me five years at most. But then, you're lucky to get,

16:42if you're going to get cancer, you want a blood cancer. Not always, I've known so many people who've died but there's a lot of research in blood cancers and I have benefited from the last 20 years of research which is getting shut off now. One thing after another came up that was brand new when I needed it. Experimental therapies. Experimental therapies, yeah. And I responded to all of them and sometimes not very long. I would only get like six months or something but I responded

17:12to every single treatment that I was given which is very rare. But that's 20 years of living with that. And I'm assuming during this process I mean lots of rounds of chemotherapy and you had a bone marrow transplant. Yeah, two if you count the clinical trial I had recently which is called CAR T-cell therapy where they take your T-cells out and re-engineer them, re-engineer the DNA and put them back in. So yeah, I've had a couple of those. That's rough business.

17:43Are you in remission now? Yeah, I'm very healthy at the moment. I mean this therapy has been around so few years that no one knows what's going to happen. In fact, I was the first person with my disease in this country to get it, I was told. So no one knows what's happened but it's worked better than anything I've had. I haven't had this level of remission in the 20 years. So given this history, given how close you've come to dying, how do you think about dying? I mean does this

18:13scare you? Not much. No, I mean it terrifies me for my family. There's a lot of grief involved but that's all where it's directed. I don't feel, like when I first got diagnosed I felt an animal fear. It's just like you can hardly move. You just want to run but there's nowhere to run. It's really a horrible feeling and it lasts a long time but you live with something that's long, go through that much, it goes away. This last time I was, you know, I'd had no fear.

18:43Really? Wow. Of my own death, yeah. You have a poem where you reflect on some of this and it's called Before the Bone Marrow Transplant. Can you read that? Sure. So this poem was written at Christmas in 2022 but I begin the poem by saying it is Christmas 2023 so what I'm doing is imagining the next year and so, you know, I'm about to have this bone marrow transplant. It seemed like I'd probably die this time but everybody thought so, I thought so.

19:15Except for maybe my doctors. They seem to always think that you can take it. I'm glad you have those kinds of doctors. She wants some hope there. This is Before the Bone Marrow Transplant

Reading Before the Bone Marrow Transplant

19:27and it has epigraph Christmas 2022. It is Christmas 2023. I am me sitting up in my studio looking over these notes. An early snow for atmosphere floats clear spare through the bare limbs of the oak tree lightly and precisely redefining its guise.

19:54The silence is such as makes one realize silence never is. This hum the mystics call eternity.

20:05Behind me a vast trench of suffering lies in both senses. Reality I have endured and assimilated as I can extracting from pain a keener means to see and strict formulation that says for all the beauty there is for all this quick of limb and eyes merged and made available to mind it is suffering that makes

20:35it shine.

20:38Soon my wife will stir sunlight because I see it cherishing her as she emerges from sheets and begins to dress. My children will wake to what they think is godless joy texting me to come down to Christmas now now and I will think back to Christmas as a boy and how amid much suffering for a time all was instant and bright surprise.

21:09This will be done. Poem prayer peace peace of being the tiny and entire story of the passionate transitory in which our lives are hung I and my undominion descending to be among.

21:30Wow. So you really thought you weren't going to make it through this bone marrow transplant? It seemed unlikely. I mean, given that I was the first person with my disease to have it, I barely got into the trial. I got kicked out of it twice. I was on my last legs. I had lost 30 pounds. I don't really have 30 pounds to lose. And I couldn't really walk. So I was in bad shape. You have that line, it is suffering that makes

22:00it shine. What do you mean by that? Well, before that it says, behind me a vast trench of suffering lies. So it lies there, but it also lies, tells a lie. And the first one is that it's enabled me to extract from pain a keyner means to see. This is what I'm imagining a year later. I've gone through all this pain and okay, now I have different eyes to see the world with. But then the other lie or the

22:32thing that's lying there is it's only suffering that makes it possible. It's only suffering that brings forth the beauty of the world. And the poem splits the difference. I mean, it makes both readings possible. You can read that is in fact the case. It is suffering that makes the world shine. Or you can read that it's a lie, that in fact, no, there are other things that make the world shine. You don't need suffering for that. Why would you need suffering to make it shine in the first place? Take that one reading of it. Suffering does make the world shine, or it can.

23:02In my experience and in the experience of a lot of writers that I love, there is some great truth in suffering if you can remain awake enough to perceive it. Both in the moment of suffering and in the way it scours your life clear of lesser things. So it's stripping you down to the essentials. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to say that you need suffering in order to perceive the depth of existence, but there is something in suffering that can enable you

23:33to perceive the depth of existence if you're lucky enough to survive. Is there joy in the suffering? There can be great joy in suffering, not happiness. Happiness gets obliterated, but there can be great joy. When I was young, when my kids were young, they were little, and I first got diagnosed when they were like four, five, six, seven, you know, sometimes they'd come into my hospital rooms and they would be just so

24:04fascinated. They thought it was a hotel room, and they would be so fascinated by the equipment, and they would draw on the chalkboard, the nurse's chalk board, and they were experiencing joy. They didn't understand what was going on, and it was joyful for my wife and me too. Joy fraught with darkness, of course, but it was still incredibly joyful. Because it brought you all together? Yeah. Do you think that was where the joy came from? I mean, there was just so much love, you know. Of course, it was painful.

24:34I mean, joy can be painful, but it can certainly come in the midst of suffering. So thinking about that poem you just read, and this is true, I think, with so many of your poems, there are these fleeting moments, you know, like watching your kids on a Christmas morning, and then you were contemplating eternity. And it seems like you're always sort of bringing those two things together, sort of the ephemeral of daily life with your philosophical reflections about God and meaning. And I'm

25:05wondering, do you see that as sort of your project of bringing together, I guess, what I would call the prosaic and the sacred? I wouldn't have. I mean, I've never had a project writing poems, although I think you can. William Wordsworth, who's a poet, probably my favorite poet, he said of his, of lyrical ballads, which really changed English poetry, that every single poem in that book had a purpose. And that's inimical to modern writers. They think that you shouldn't have a purpose when you set out to make art or

25:35it becomes didactic. You don't agree with that, I take it? Well, I did agree with it for years, and I'm so trained by the modernists that it's still embedded in my consciousness. But I love Wordsworth, and I love him most of all for what he's able to say about experience. He renders experience beautifully, but what you really remember in Wordsworth are these moments when he steps back and he tells you what it means. He gives you these beautiful formulations that locate it in a

26:05context of philosophy or theology or whatever he's talking about. And those are just so beautiful. I think a lot of poetry has given up on trying to speak in those general terms. And part of what I wanted to do in this book, although again, it's kind of retroactive, I realized I wanted to do it in this book, is to be able to make those general statements. Do you think a lot of modern poets have given up on that because it seems too pretentious to be talking about? Yeah, too pretentious, and you can't speak in general terms. You can only speak

26:37about your own experience or the experience of your identity group, so these kinds of statements are suspect. And they are suspect. They should be suspect. But still, I think you have to risk them. So you obviously, you write a lot about God. You write about your faith. It is worth mentioning that you teach in the Yale Divinity School. So obviously, these ideas, these issues hit close to home for you. And one of your other poems, you have this line, the poem is, the eye, which looks

27:08like it's set in a monastery, and there is a monk who describes the narrator's faith as mostly his faith in art. Is that you? Do you experience your spiritual faith mostly through art? Not anymore, but for an awfully long time, that's all it was. I do still find art probably the most powerful way that I have a sense of the divine. And not just my own, either, other people's art.

27:36So more than, say, prayer, for instance. I mean, it would be through art that you really have those experiences of the divine? Yeah. I used to really resist the notion that poetry was prayer, that there was a very separate line between them, but I've become less suspicious of it now. It's a cliche in contemporary poetry that everybody says poetry is prayer, but they don't really believe in prayer. prayer, and that's why they say that. It's sort of like a substitution for religion. I mean, these are sort of the secular

28:07poets, but they want to say that what they're doing is sacred in its own way, without actually using religious language. Right. But I think God probably gives people different ways to pray, and poetry seems to be mine, or writing seems to be mine. I mean, I was very surprised. Marilyn Robinson told me that she didn't pray, and she thought of all of her writing as her prayer. I mean, if she can think that way, I can do it. It ain't what you can, right, yeah.

28:39You have said that you are ambivalent about religion, and you've also said that you consider faith more a provocation than a comfort. Can you talk about that? Yeah, I have a hard time at churches. I mean, I've tried so many churches, and I go for a while, and then I just get frustrated, and I told my wife the other day, I'm a Christian as long as I don't go to church.

29:08Does it complicate things for you to be teaching in the Yale Divinity School? Yeah, somewhat. Sometimes. Although, Yale Divinity School is a pretty liberal place. Yeah, but I don't, I mean, I'm pretty quick to say I don't consider myself a good model. I don't think you could build a church around me. I feel like the failure's mine. I do have my complaints about institutional Christianity, but there are enough churches out there where I should be able to find one. It's something about me.

29:39I can only see myself at the edges looking in. Okay, hold that thought for a moment. After the break, we'll be back to talk about the connection between poetry and science, and why Christian is fascinated by recent discoveries in neuroscience and physics. Hi, it's Anne. I am so glad you're joining us. We have some amazing guests lined up for the weeks ahead, and

30:09I'm really excited about them. And here's a tip. Maybe you know this already, but if you follow Wonder Cabinet on Apple Podcasts, those new episodes will show up automatically, like a little weekly gift in your podcast feed. I hope you like it. This is Wonder Cabinet. I'm Steve Paulson talking with Christian Wyman, whose new poetry collection is called The Dance.

Consciousness and the natural world

30:39So I want to ask you about something else you wrote recently. You had this great essay in Harper's Magazine. It had the subtitle, Is Consciousness God? I don't know if you came up with that or your editor did, but it touched on a number of things that we've already been talking about. And you also tell this story about your daughter, Eliza, when she was quite little, who you said she had this uncanny ability to see things in the natural world, sort of little details that pass the rest of you by. And you quote Wordsworth about seeing into the

31:09life of things. Can you describe what she would do? Yeah, we called her our little mystic. And it was a little freakish because she just had this eye that was uncanny. She would see things that nobody else would see. You know, a bird way up in the tree, completely obscured, not making a sound. And she would stop and be riveted by it. All kinds of things. It happened all the time. It wasn't something that was rare. It happened. And we used to love to, for one of us, we'd try to get her to go on a walk

31:40with us in the morning, in the early morning, if she woke up. Because she would see all these things. It was like having this little machine that suddenly lit the world up, you know? It's like Dorothy Wordsworth going out with William in Coleridge. She would see stuff that they didn't see, but then they would write about it. Yeah, exactly. We had an old house in Tennessee, and recently we found these pictures that Eliza had made when she was seven or so, and one is of just a tree that any

32:11kid would draw, and the next one is a tree that has leaves and stuff, but the branches in the trunk are filled with these runic symbols. They look like they're almost letters, but they're not, but they just look like symbols. And then in the final one, the tree is filled with language, and the language spills down to the trunk, and in the trunk it becomes legible words, and it says, standing in the stream, I've never felt so loved. There's a river or stream that runs right by the

32:41house, and that's just extraordinary to see that kind of consciousness working out in a seven-year-old.

32:50I assume you've talked about this with her. I mean, did it go away? I mean, how did she think about all of this? She still has an amazing eye, and she's an artist. She has a great talent and a vision as an artist, but she's pretty secretive about it. She still sees things that we don't see, but it's gone, that kind of merging that used to happen. She's too well defended for that now. It doesn't happen at all. She does remember, however. She remembers lots of those moments and what

33:20it felt like. She's reluctant to say it has anything at all to do with God, but gosh, it just seemed to my wife and me, it just seemed so obvious. What do you think it takes to see into the life of things? It takes a kind of attentiveness that's very readily available in childhood. I think we probably all are able to see into the life of things early on in our lives, and then it gets, I think Wordsworth is right about that, and then it gets blunted

33:51by everything we've learned and turning the world into symbols, turning it into language and numbers and categories. Into abstractions. Yeah. what it takes is somehow learning to recover that part of yourself that is part of the world. You know, it's different for everybody. I mean, for me, it's been through poetry, but for another person, it could be through birdwatching. It could be basically anything that you brought full attention to. Simone Weil has that idea that any absolutely

34:22unmixed attention is prayer. I mean, you could argue with that. You can have attention that's pretty malign, like a torturer. Probably pretty focused. Yeah. But still, it's useful if you think of most everything we do is mixed attention. And how do you get to unmixed attention? It takes discipline, especially now. Yeah. So I want to go back to that essay you wrote in Harper's, because there's a lot about debates

34:52about consciousness, the nature of consciousness, which is a very thriving. There's a whole industry about this. And it's totally mysterious. No one has an explanation for where consciousness comes from. And there are people who say that, philosophers and scientists who say consciousness is this fundamental force of nature, universal, everywhere, which is totally different than the standard neuroscience model. It's generated by the brain. you seem to be very interested in these scientific theories about

35:23consciousness. And I'm wondering sort of where that comes from for you as a poet and also as someone who is interested in mystical experience. Well, poetry is where it came from. That's what led me to begin thinking about consciousness. And I thought I had the idea. This is like a lot of my life that I thought I had this idea that it's the center of that essay. And then I began reading more deeply and like everything else, realized that you know, there aren't really that many new ideas. But it would be Wordsworth again, who I think I probably first got

35:54it from because he talks about something that you have to create and have perceive. So it's this fusion of perception and reception that defines consciousness. And some of the modern theories about quantum physics seem to bear that out. I mean, this idea that observing a particle actually changes the way that particle behaves. It's sort of like observation creates reality. Yeah. Even the very existence of the particle is in question.

36:24There's, you know, Marcelo Gleiser, the physicist, says that it may be that the word exist is too strong to use for an electron. He's saying no one's ever seen one and it doesn't exist in the way that the world around us exists. It seems to be in a state of probability as far as we can tell. I always think, well, if the word exists can be too strong for a particle, it might be too weak a word for something else. Maybe the idea of God that we have, the whole question of does God

36:55exist makes no sense because we don't know what exist means. We don't know what it would mean to be more than existence. We don't know what it means to be less than existence, like a particle. So we're stuck with our human framing, which more and more we're learning doesn't match reality. It only matches the part of reality susceptible to our measurements. See, I'm very sympathetic to the idea that consciousness is not something that's

37:25an emergent property of the brain, but that it is something that we share with the rest of reality. And the mind acts more as a filter than it does as a projector. The Aldous Huxley theory of consciousness. Yeah. So that question, does God exist? It sounds like maybe that's not a central question for you. It's really not. No, most of these theological questions I find a little tedious because I often feel like the language, it's exactly like science. The language we're using doesn't show us

37:57anything. It's worse than science. It doesn't show us anything about the true reality of what it purports to describe. And so we're sort of playing in a sandbox when we're in this huge desert. So yeah, the question of the existence of God is not the one that I spend a lot of time on. You spend much time thinking about AI and whether AI might be conscious or become conscious at some point. I spend a lot of time thinking about AI. I think it will look conscious, but I do not believe that it can become conscious.

38:28No, I think there's something distinctly organic in consciousness. I mean, it's so striking that AI, I mean, the large language models that we know of, I mean, it is language. It's about words. You know, that's your medium, words. So, but I guess the question is, is there any reference to reality or is it just self-referential? You know, it's just going down the rabbit hall of what has been fed into the computer program. There's definitely a reference to reality as we perceive it day by day.

38:59But the problem is that all of these major jumps in any field are made by people who leap beyond that. I forget who it was. I think it was Niels Bohr who said that, you know, any great leap of science begins as a leap of faith. You're not simply following the rules of what's there. That somehow somebody has to make a huge leap and the way a poem gets written or something, a painting gets made. And Einstein, as I say in that essay,

39:29credited all of his great discoveries to music. So that's the part that I think that I just don't believe that AI will be able to do that. But, you know, these people working on AI know a lot more about it than I do. But just from what I believe about consciousness, it doesn't seem to me possible. Yeah. There's one last poem I'd love to have you read. And it's actually the last one in your new collection. It's called Balm. Could you read that? Well, this was written, I hadn't been

40:00able to write anything for a while. And I had an exchange with an old friend, Kevin Young. He's a wonderful poet. He and I have known each other for 35 years, I guess. And he was talking about writing. And he just had this one throwaway sentence, the poems are a balm. Because at the time, he was head of the African-American Museum, the Smithsonian African-American Museum. And so he had this big job, but he was still writing, and he said the poems are a balm. I went to bed that

40:31night and woke up in the morning with that line in my head, and I

Reading the final poem Balm

40:35wrote this poem. It's called Balm, and it has an epigraph from one of Kevin's poems, The Heart It Hoards. The poems are a balm, the poet said, whose ear endured besides the natural atrophy of any unearned gift, history, mastery, and all the mosquito demons of email and oil changes, underlings and overlords,

41:06afternoons of disappointment and self-taste too heavy and humid to move. Amid it all, the poet wrote, meaning loves, meaning deaths, meaning the lack of meaning, infiltrating even heart and horde, love and death. The poems are a balm, meaning in ancient days a substance fragrant,

41:37resinous, effective for a time against decay.

41:45That is wonderful, and what a great closing poem for your collection. I have one final question, and I'm hoping you were game for this. We were talking about wonder earlier, mentioned that we have this podcast called Wonder Cabinet, and one idea that we are playing with is what an imaginary cabinet of wonders would look like today, in the 21st

Building a modern wonder cabinet

42:08century. If you could put anything in this imaginary wonder cabinet, could be an object, a concept, an experience, a thought experiment, what would you put in your wonder cabinet? Oh, gosh. You know what is just leaping into my mind is, I don't know how this is going to fit in your wonder cabinet, but the sculptor, Lee Bontique, who's dead now, she started out making these works that were these huge

42:40things made out of military materials, and it was in the 60s and 70s and they're terrifying looking things and they all have a hole in them and they often have teeth and they're scary and then she goes through all kinds of other stages in her development and at the end of her, near the end of her life, she made these mobiles that hang from the ceiling and they're like little wonder cabinets because they're made of feathers and wires and all kinds of things that she's just collected. They're big and they hang

43:11down from the ceiling and they have a hole in them. Everyone has the hole and it's as if that earlier hole of suffering has been lifted into a hole of joy. It's become a space of singing rather than of mourning in that early work. And I remember it stayed with me so ineluctably. It was when my wife and I first met and we went into that exhibit and both of us cried seeing them because it was just so stunning. So if I could have something in the wonder cabinet, it would be

43:41one of those mobiles. They just seemed to be so beautiful. Okay, I might have to go see one of these. Where does one see this? She has something in the Museum of Modern Art, although I think they only have the early work. I saw it in Chicago, but it was a traveling exhibition. You can't see it online. You can't get a sense of it at all. She had an interesting career because she was very much a part of those expressionist artists in New York,

44:12but left. She didn't like the scene and she moved to Pennsylvania and spent the rest of her life there. She just left the art scene and moved where she could have this big barn to do her work. She just vanished for a number of years, but then late in her life she had these huge retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and in Chicago. I don't know where they hang now, but it's worth a trip. Oh, yeah. This has been such a pleasure talking with you. Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. That's Christian Wyman.

44:43His latest poetry collection is called The Dance. He's also the co-author with Miroslav Wolf of the new book Glimmerings, Letters on Faith between a poet and a theologian. And there's another book I'd highly recommend, his essay collection, Zero at the Bone, 50 Entries Against Despair. Wonder Cabinet comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin, and Versher, Vermont. Thanks, as always, to our audio engineer, Steve Gotcher, and our digital producer, Mark Rickers. I'm Anne Strain-Champs. And I'm Steve Paulson.

45:13We'd love to hear from you. Send questions or comments to us at wondercabinetproductions.com and sign up for the newsletter while you're there. Be well. See you next time.