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Side B: Coming home [transcript]

Depending who you’ll ask, the definition of ‘home’ will vary. Add ‘coming’ to it and the sea of possibilities will expand massively. Because what does it mean ‘coming home’? To what, who and where you are coming to? Is it a continuous place or a memory from the past? Does it travel with you or you are leaving it every time you wish to go adventuring?

The possibilities are endless.

#perspective #perspective podcast #ourperspective #coming home

[Transcript] Side A: Coming Home

I remember it used to happen to me while the teacher would be speaking in class, or just because i had seen something. Or rather, just coming across something I had always just looked at, without really seeing.

It doesn’t have to be hard. It might happen while you’re washing dishes, or on a train, or on the toilet. It loves public transportation, interrupting conversations, or sneaking on you just when you think you were going to fall asleep. It comes with no warning. But it might come with presentiment.

If you’re not there, neither is she. That’s for sure. She can only get to you when you are inexcusably, joyously, dangerously, unknowingly open. She likes finding you while you’re distracted, but if you’re out, blacked out, she won’t even know where to look for you.

It’s not so much a home-coming, as it is a home receiving: she’s the one coming to you. And when she does, just leave the fork on the table, excuse yourself with your friends, leave the fridge empty, the e-mail unwritten, the bill unpaid. Home comes to you because the universe for that day has decided to be translated into human language. Tomorrow, it’ll be bird song or ocean wave or the death of a star.

It doesn’t happen often nowadays. Actually, it happens almost never. Those who know what words sound like when they sound as if they were dictated by necessity know that these ones weren’t written while she was visiting me. And I wonder what one can do to summon her up to come and retrieve her translator from this black-out.

Only dancing is more powerful, the most human language. But who knows, some languages need patience to be relearned. Home needs to come to you before you can even know what home means and how to get back to her.

Side A: Coming Home

A new episode, Side A: Coming Home, is online!

[...] Home needs to come to you / before you can even know what home means [...]

You can always listen to new and old episodes here: Anchor: https://anchor.fm/ourperspective Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/43w8 Breaker: https://www.breaker.audio/perspective-4 RadioPublic: https://radiopublic.com/perspective-WzOoVN Google Podcast (for now just for Android users, sorry): https://www.google.com/podcasts… Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/70hEbxymAHYUhcFFJ8GoXX Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1388992218/perspective #perspectivepodcast #perspective #cominghome

There's nothing hidden in your head

For I'm the famous Sorthing Hat

By Gryffindor, the bravest were

Prized for beyond the rest

For Ravenclaw, the cleverest

Would always be the best

For Hufflepuff, had workers were

Most wortly of admission

And power-hungry Slytherin

Loved those of great ambition.

- Sorting Hat

#perspective #perspectivepodcast #identity

[Transcript] Side A: Identity

Cecelia Clegg and Joe Liechty defined sectarianism: belonging gone bad.

We say war erupted broke out started as if a war were a volcano or a disease or an engine.

Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina: that’s the one I knew the most about before. I was born the year this war, this conflict of identities (erupted broke out started) was wanted into being.

But what about the war that was made to start the year you were born? How can I be born the year all wars were started?

Pádraig Ó Tuama wrote a poem entitled ‘[the] north[ern] [of] ireland’ that goes like this:

‘It is both a dignity and a difficulty to live between these names,

perceiving politics in the syntax of the state.

And at the end of the day, the reality is that whether we change or whether we stay the same

these questions will remain.

Who are we to be with one another?

and

How are we to be with one another?

and

What to do with all those memories of all of those funerals?

and

What about those present whose past was blasted far beyond their future?

I wake. You wake. She wakes. He wakes. They wake.

We Wake and take this troubled beauty forward.’

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, no matter how few words you have to say what you want your rifle to say for you, remember what the poet said: every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Side A: Identity

A new episode, Side A: Identity, is online!

[...] sectarianism: / belonging gone bad. [...]

Side B: Ekphrasis [transcript]

There is a photograph I took, high in the sky

The only thing you can see is the clouds and the groud.

The water, the mountain

Everything is small

From the eyes of the bird

From the eyes up above

Where everything looks like

A monopoly board

Imagine picking up

The house from down below

You can’t see any human

The earth is empty now

A trick of cruel heart

A trick of cruel mind

The cloud is passing by

Careful of the staring eyes

They never know what happens

They only see the now

I sit here, trapped

Hours passing by.

Can’t change direction.

Can’t change the heart

Before you get there

Be sure of where to go

The final destination

Is where this road will end.

#ekphrasis #perspective #perspective podcast

[Transcript] Side A: Ekphrasis

The Black on Gray series was the last he painted before dying. It was 1969-1970.

They said it must be because of the moon landing. They said it must be death. They said it must be darkness. The loss of all meaning.

You would say it as it is, simple as bones: no more dreams of explicability, no more all-encompassing arrogance: you would paint the folding edges until infinity no more, you would tape the edges of the canvas – one centimeter is enough – to collapse the pictorial space, to demarcate the white border between our narrative of things and how things really are: the wider frame would be ours to make sense of no more.

You would say it as it is, simple as bones: no more underpainting of glue and pigment, no more illusions of pictorial depth, no more dousing in prefabricated truths. Only white gesso, only the accuracy of silence.

Our tragic destiny is that we die trying to find Antidotes to Fear of Death.

They said you did it out of spite, to reduce the gently floating shapes of your clouds of color, your veiled layers of luminous free-floating purity to this choked starkness.

And yet, you would keep on building up thin, translucent layers of warm, differently shaded blacks. You would keep on reaching for the historical sublime, trying to find the least possible words to say that between light and dark there are feathers that between space and substance there is only the soft comfort of decomposition and redisposition.

How much brushwork complexity do you need to say the elemental?

I see your Black on Gray series and I hear Rebecca Elson’s pencil scribbling: ‘No outer space, just space, The light of all the not yet stars Drifting like a bright mist, And all of us, and everything Already there But unconstrained by form.’

Side A: Ekphrasis

A new episode, Side A: Ekphrasis, is online!

[...] How much brushwork complexity do you need / to say the elemental? [...]

Side B: Halloween [transcript]

The forest is dark and frightening place and on the darkest of nights, witch's voice is coming from the depths of it, especially on the eve of the night of the saints. Nobody knew what creatures were hiding between the darkness of the trees. No one in their right mind would voluntarily walk into its mouth, knowing that would be the last time anyone would see them.

When Aline and Samuel looked into the darkness that was emanating from the depths of the woods they took a step back. They could hear the screams and roars. The shrill, wailing, inconsolable shriek of the woods had turned into the shattering, grieving howl of the torn world. What monsters could be making such noises? What was causing this sounds?

#perspective #transcript #halloween #perspective podcast

[Transcript] Side A: Halloween

Once upon a time,

in a valley surrounded by the darkest of forests and mountains as ancient as time itself, there lived a carpenter with his wife, who was a seamstress, and their twin children, Aline and Samuel. Under the shadow of an ancient abandoned castle standing on the crest of the hill, they lived in a modest but sturdy house made of stone and heavy wood and straw, a house with a chimney and two small windows framed by a wealth of burgeoning carnations, and a ceiling where many small folded paper creatures hung, fluttering around every time the breeze cared to play about. Oh, and there was also a slender black cat they liked to call Pabu.

It was autumn: the sky was grey most of the time except for a few glorious days of gold. The leaves of the trees in the village had darkened to a rusty brown, or brightened to a lemony yellow or a pumpkin’s orange. The stream running out of the forest and around the outskirts of the village gave plenty of water, for the rainy days had already started coming in, and on many an afternoon Aline and Sammy had spent their time playing in the house while their mother sewed and sang them the ancient songs of their people, and their father worked the wood and told them stories.

‘And so,’ the father continued, ‘the prince resolved to go to the Wind of the North, and ask him if he could carry him to the end of the world. The prince walked and walked and walked, and then found a horse and trotted and trotted and trotted. Until he found the palace of the Wind of the North, who howled and growled, but finally agreed to carry him to the end of the world. And so they took off and through the cold and the rain and the sleet and the hail, in a sharp and violent spurt, the furious Wind of the North carried our hero to his destination…’. ‘Father, why is the Wind of the North so angry? He was the one who agreed to do the prince a favor! Nobody forced him…’, inquired Aline. ‘Ah, my child,’ countered the father smiling softly, ‘the Wind of the North might be a little cantankerous, but he is not so wicked as we would like to believe… In fact, as disagreeable as he can be, he did agree to help the prince in the end. Don’t you think that it is possible, however, that the prince did not ask very nicely?’ ‘The prince didn’t even offer to do the Wind a favor in return…’, remarked the mother as she pulled a long thread out of the cloth she was sewing. The black cat Pabu yawned and stretched her back, and commented in her own incomprehensible but very wise way. ‘I bet the prince was too scared to do that!’, exclaimed Sammy, ‘What if the Wind of the North had asked him to kill somebody to pay for his service?’

And then, a thunder! The rain kept lashing outside and a lightning and another thunder flashed the room with a gasp of light. A deep, grumbling roar arose from the heart of the woods around them, and cracked the sky over them.

‘I think the Wind of the North would have gladly settled for something like a song’, suggested the mother, ‘something he could keep himself company with.’ ‘Do you still want to know if the prince will find the three magic apples for the wizard to break the spell?’, teased the father. ‘Of course!’, cried the children. And the story continued as the rain kept pouring on the rest of the world.

It was the eve of the day when all saints were to be celebrated and given peace. The minister, a thin and deadly pale old man, had gone around and knocked on every door of every house under the shadow of the abandoned castle during the whole week prior to this inauspicious day, to warn against the dangers lying ahead. ‘All the saints will be resting on this day,’ he reminded, ‘in preparation to receive their celebration the following day, so we will be at the mercy of all the demons and evil forces of this world, who will be scouring the earth to find any lost soul they can capture and steal away. Remember! Remember what happened last year, and the year before, and the year before that!’ As if anybody could forget.

That day, as the leaden clouds shifted over the castle and the village in somber shapes, since the father had to finish some woodwork at the house, and the mother had to go and hand her work to a client, the children followed her into the village. Over the background of such a gloomy day, the mother plucked two bright carnations from the windows’ vases and placed them one in each child’s buttonhole, and they were ready to leave.

‘Oh, m’lady! I was just about to knock!’ exclaimed the minister standing on the doormat as they opened the door, ‘Hello there, dear children! Going for a walk?’, he asked with a grin. ‘Good day Minister, is everything in place for the celebrations tomorrow?’, inquired humorously the father from inside the house. ‘Oh yes, oh yes… But…’, the minister’s eyes turned sullen and contrite, ‘For tonight… Have you hidden all your sharp utensils already? All blunt objects that could be used as weapons? Even your sewing tools, m’lady, please do not forget… I am aware that you know all too well what the consequences can be, and that it is insulting of me to pry… But we need to be cautious… You need to see in the village how we managed the well this year…’, entreated the minister. ‘We understand’, asserted the mother, and added softly, ‘You can count on us.’

The woods surrounding the village were as dark as ever. No sound of life could be heard, no birds chirping, no leaves rustling, no twigs breaking under the paws of foxes. Even the stream was silent. Only a hissing, low and desolate whisper started now to be audible, as it elbowed its way through the briers to the sky.

When they reached the village, the people looked all in a hurry. They went to the market to buy some supplies, and everywhere they went, people would point at them and comment under their breaths: ‘Poor children, to have lost a sister in such way…’, ‘Poor mother, to have lost a daughter like that…’, ‘It must be terrible for them, this time of year…’, ‘And the father, ah, to have lost a brother and a daughter at the same time…’.

‘Do you happen to have any king’s death berries?’, asked the mother to the berries’ woman. ‘Of course dear! Choose as many as you need. Is it for the evil spirits tonight? I bet if they had a drop of mortal blood in them these would finish them outright’, said the lady proudly. ‘I wish these berries would be enough…’ replied the mother, saddened. ‘Mother, why are they called king’s death berries?’ asked Sammy, the carnation on his chest as bright as the sun. ‘Why?! Because once, when the valley was still a rich and luxuriant kingdom, the king went into the woods, and these berries killed him!’ explained the berry lady, enflamed. ‘And he was the first of a long list of people to…’, but the lady fell silent. ‘Thank you m’lady, be safe tonight and see you tomorrow for the celebration’, said the mother smiling goodbye, as she took her children by the hands and left.

The sky had swiftly become a bleak shade of gray, overcast as it was with threatening clouds. The people seemed to have got even more busy and all hurried back home as quickly as they could. All around them, hanging outside the shops and the houses, were little black ribbons everywhere. To remember the killed, the missing, the fallen to the evil spirits. How could they forget? ‘We are cursed’, the children heard people say, ‘We are cursed’, repeated everywhere as the beats of their broken hearts. And then they saw it, the well… A metal grill had been nailed on top of it. ‘Just for today…’ said the minister, back from his tour of the village, as he saw the dismayed look on the mother’s face. ‘We saw what happened to poor Joe last year, pushed in the well by those frightening demons… We don’t want any of it to happen again…’ and he smiled his scrawny smile at the children amiably. ‘Yes, I understand Minister… You know how hard it is for us to…’ but the mother stopped midsentence, and she respectfully curtseyed as she was greeted by a plump man with white hair coming across her from the other end of the square. ‘Why if it isn’t the village’s best seamstress! With all her little cubs here! What lovely flowers you got there, how do you do?’, ‘Your grace’, said the minister as he bowed, ‘what an honor to have our governor among us at such an eventful time!’, ‘Ah Minister don’t bother bowing! I have come to see about the castle, and how you folks are handling things around here… You see, the Empress wants to move my quarters to the abandoned castle on the crest of the hill on the grounds that it is more stately, but I have given all I have to prevent this from happening. And you can obviously understand why, ha! ha! ha! After all, if neither the Empress herself, nor any of her ancestors has never wanted to live there, why should I be sent up there?’ the governor told them wittily. ‘Isn’t it a little chilly in there, Mr. Governor?’ asked the mother. ‘Ah, m’lady, you have no idea!’ rejoined the governor, but Aline and Sammy’s attention was suddenly captured by the sight of a stranger walking through the market…

As the clouds grew engorged with storm, a lady with enormous eyes under the hood of her cape seemed to absorb all the light the clouds hadn’t eaten up already and release it through her gaze to everything and everyone around her. ‘Is that a fairy?’ asked Aline to her brother, transfixed. ‘She sure looks like one!’ breathed Sammy, in awe. Perhaps the fairy lady had overheard these words, because she smiled tenderly and at the children, and lifted the hem of her cape to show them she had a small bright carnation in her buttonhole as well. ‘She must like carnations too, like Katie…’, whispered Aline. Oh what a sting Sammy felt in his heart as he heard that name called aloud, and he tried to send that sting away by squeezing his sister’s hand. The fairy lady, pulling her cape tightly around her, nodded at the children with a flower smile, and when Sammy released Aline’s hand, they both felt that something, something round and cold and smooth, had materialized magically between their hands. They carefully placed it on the palms of their hands and they realized it was a small and oddly luminous pebble. It had something engraved on it, and the more they held it and observed it and breathed on it, the more it glowed warmly. They looked up to share their astonishment with the fairy lady, but she had gone, vanished.

The sun had set and the sky had turned the color of coal. The restless spirits and the battling forces of the world had awakened to burn once again on this night, watching the living through their eyes of embers. All the lampposts had been lit by the lamplighter, and a veil of mist had fallen on the village, the castle, the forest, the stream, and the mountains. The moon and stars lay hidden by a thick shroud of clouds. Only one sound slithered through the roads and into the cracks of the rocks: a hissing, low and desolate whisper, feeding on the mist and swelling into a shrill, wailing, inconsolable shriek.

The carnations on the window of the little stone house by the shadow of the castle had curled themselves and tucked their tiny lights into their buds, and gathered closely together to give each other strength and courage to endure the darkest night of the year. Because true darkness is not the absence of light, for the sun will always rise again eventually, but a rapacious craving to devour light, to eat the sun.

That day, after he had finished his work, the carpenter had sat down in front of the window, and carved two tiny figures from a chunk of good birch wood. He had sat by the window, carving, while Pabu the cat would purr and brush up against his legs, and every once in a while he would look up at the carnations, and wish the sky could send some rain. So that, at least, his wouldn’t be the only tears falling down. When the seamstress and the two children came home, as they did every year on that day, they lit up the fire, they placed the carnations they wore that day inside a book to press them, and they hid every sharp or blunt object they had in the house in the water supply closet. They locked all doors and windows, and sang the ancient songs of their people to keep the evil spirits away, comfort the loved ones present around them, and remember the loved ones who were missing. ‘To uncle and sister’ breathed Aline nervously, solemnly, as she placed the candle of goodness on the mantelpiece next to the two wooden figures her father had carved that day. ‘And to all who died on this day because of the evil spirits’, added the father. Then, one after the other, each of them, as Pabu the cat laid quietly curled looking pensively at the fireplace, the father, the mother, and the two twins burned one king’s death berry each by the fire, to extinguish all poisonous thoughts and feelings inside their hearts.

Just as the last berry burned in the fire, a glow blazed from Sammy’s pocket. And as he tried to keep it hidden, the little fairy pebble suddenly started to float out of his pocket, until Sammy was forced to catch it and hold it in his hand not to let it float away. The glow from the magic pebble, however, gave the twins the courage to ask: ‘Mother, father… Why do all these people die on the eve of all saints’ day?’, timidly asked Aline. ‘And Katie… And uncle… Are they ever coming back? Or are they dead also?’ added Sammy with his cheeks burning. ‘Children…’ began saying the mother, but with tears in her eyes she felt her voice breaking and the only thing she could do was to go and hold her children in her arms, as the father joined her holding all of them together.

Then, a roar! And a noise of something tumbling and crashing down. The father dashed to the log storage room to make sure everything was alright but it was all on fire! The father and the mother rushed to the water supply closet to fill in the buckets and started throwing water on the fire, but it just couldn’t be smothered and they shouted: ‘Aline! Sammy! Go find some help! Go!’

And so the children took to their heels and ran out of the house on fire, out into the misty roads of the deserted, barricaded village. Out, alone, into the dark of the night on the day all evil spirits came back from hell to roam free on the earth.

With their hearts thumping and hammering in their heads and throats, Aline and Sammy ran to the only place they could think of: the well. They ran and Aline stumbled and Sammy helped her to get up again and as they stopped a moment to catch their breaths, they realized where they were, that they only had each other now, and that around them was the darkest darkness their fears could ever conjure up. Right there and then, when panic was about to thrust them into the pits of despair, the little magic pebble glowed like a star inside Sammy’s pocket. He took it out in his palm and exclaimed: ‘This! This will guide us through the darkness’, suddenly feeling strong again. ‘The well! Sammy the well!’ cried Aline, ‘they closed the well with a metal grill! What do we do?’ Aline took Sammy’s hands, and as soon as the pebble was held between both the children’s hands it blazed and threw out a beam of light. The beam pointed in the direction of the stream, of the forest. The forest so many never came back from. The forest that took away their sister, and their uncle.

The shrill, wailing, inconsolable shriek of the woods had turned into the shattering, grieving howl of the lacerated world. Aline and Sammy knew what had to be done. And so, holding the magic pebble pointing to their destination in both their hands, they stepped into the forest.

Side A: Halloween

A new episode, Side A: Halloween, is online!

[...] The woods surrounding the village were as dark as ever. No sound of life could be heard, no birds chirping, no leaves rustling, no twigs breaking under the paws of foxes. Even the stream was silent. Only a hissing, low and desolate whisper started now to be audible, as it elbowed its way through the briers to the sky. [...]

Side B: Seasons [transcript]

And so the time of foggy days and colourful leaves has come yet again. A time of eternal battle between joy and sorrow, melancholic time for endless reflections and constant wanderings. Time of restraining myself from buying yet another box of tea and the constant sound of boiling water.

For me, this time of year always traps me in between happiness and melancholy. This is the time of “I wish...” and “to be...” - always, always with a mug of tea in my hands. I am always amazed by the ability of my body and mind to adapt to and reflect the state of the weather outside. How I would wake up with a feeling of lost hours, and just wanting to hide from the world in the comfort of my favourite blanket. Only moments later I would realise that I woke up to the gloom and fog of the outside world.

#perspective_podcast #perspective podcast #perspective #seasons

[Transcript] Side A: Seasons

There was a tree in my backyard, a pine tree. I don’t know what it is about pine trees that attracts me so much. For me, they smell like summer; they remind me of places where the air is sweeter; perhaps I was a fox in another life and used to hide under them to protect myself from the blizzards or the heat.

There was a pine tree in my backyard once, just next to the pomegranate tree that just now is offering its fruits to the birds.

They say Persephone was picking flowers one day, on a field in the green and yellow island of Sicily, the land of the sun, of fertility. Suddenly, Hades, King of the Underworld, appeared on his chariot of death and raped and kidnapped Persephone, and took her with him to the Underworld as his bride. Her mother, Demeter, Goddess of the Harvest, unleashed her despair and fury over the world by making everything on the earth wilt and die. Fearing for the survival of the earthlings, Zeus, King of the Gods, decided to convince Hades to give Persephone back to her mother, and he forced Hades to agree on one condition: he could have Persephone for himself only as many months a year as many grains of pomegranate she would eat in the Underworld. Hades, however, did not tell Persephone about this bargain. Meanwhile, in the Underworld, the heartbroken, captive Persephone had refused to eat for many days, and began to feel starving and feeble. Hades offered her twelve grains of pomegranate; she accepted six of them. Thus framed, Persephone doomed herself to live in the Underworld as Queen for six of the twelve months of the year, and she would be free to go back to the earth, to her mother, for the remaining six months. Every year, this is why the seasons come and go: during the six months Persephone is in the Underworld, Demeter forbids everything from growing, while, as soon as Persephone is back on the earth, Demeter makes the world bloom again. They say that poppies first blossomed on the earth the first summer Persephone could see the sun again, as a passionate reminder that Hades stood forever waiting for her return in the Underworld.

If you still believe in this story, then Persephone must soon be bound to go back to the Underworld, judging from the color of the leaves. And from the pomegranates on the tree.

But perhaps, this story stays true even if you don’t believe in it.

One of my favorite poems is about this story. It was written by Louise Glück, and it is entitled ‘A Myth of Devotion’:

When Hades decided he loved this girl he built for her a duplicate of earth, everything the same, down to the meadow, but with a bed added.

Everything the same, including sunlight, because it would be hard on a young girl to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness.

Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night, first as the shadows of fluttering leaves. Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars. Let Persephone get used to it slowly. In the end, he thought, she'd find it comforting.

A replica of earth except there was love here. Doesn't everyone want love?

He waited many years, building a world, watching Persephone in the meadow. Persephone, a smeller, a taster. If you have one appetite, he thought, you have them all.

Doesn't everyone want to feel in the night the beloved body, compass, polestar, to hear the quiet breathing that says I am alive, that means also you are alive, because you hear me, you are here with me. And when one turns, the other turns—

That’s what he felt, the lord of darkness, looking at the world he had constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind that there’d be no more smelling here, certainly no more eating.

Guilt? Terror? The fear of love? These things he couldn’t imagine; no lover ever imagines them.

He dreams, he wonders what to call this place. First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden. In the end, he decides to name it Persephone’s Girlhood.

A soft light rising above the level meadow, behind the bed. He takes her in his arms. He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you

but he thinks this is a lie, so he says in the end you’re dead, nothing can hurt you which seems to him a more promising beginning, more true.

Life is the combinational, delicate dancing struggle of light, earth, and water. A single green vine shoot is able to grow through cement. Some animals have evolved to hibernate; some animals have evolved to migrate. Some trees lose their leaves; some trees keep them. The seasons change, pass, follow one another, in a flow that doesn’t really take everything they find on their way with them, because everything that is in the way of the seasons also kind of is the seasons actually. Life all flows with them, inexorable. The light doesn’t just refract or diffract, it is diffused and absorbed. The land will rest in winter; the fruits will fill with sunlight in the summer; the birds will build new nests in spring; the waters will quench the thirst of forests in the fall. As we circle around the star of our devotion, the leaves will burgeon and grow and swell with chlorophyll and be burned by the blinding light and find relief in returning to the ground. Nothing remains intact. Everything remains itself. Everything is real and what is real cannot die. Everything just keeps being everything, in all its countless forms and mutations.

There is something about evergreens that fills me with wonder and admiration. Although I should specify it’s a sense of wonder and admiration I feel for plants in general, not just evergreens nor just for trees. I am in awe by and admire their ability to be, despite everything. I admire the state of biological evolution they have reached that makes them so incredibly resilient to external forces of change. I admire how intelligent they are as life forms, how wisely they have used their time on this planet to learn how to adapt to it with mutual benefits.

We animals are all built to make movement possible. We have organs that are specialized in one thing, and one thing only, because of course if the whole of our organism were responsible for the whole of our biological functions it would take us too long to process everything we need to process, or at least, too long to be able to move and go and fetch food or run away from another animal that has come to fetch us as food. Imagine if we had to wait for every cell in our body to process sugar before being able to move. We have specialized cells for that. And a brain to control it all. So that in the meantime our muscles, hopefully helped by a generous dose of endorphins and hormones triggered mostly by fear, can target us to a safer place while our stomachs can concentrate on digesting the food we just ate.

Trees don’t have this kind of hierarchy: if you cut down a branch, or a root, or if you carve the trunk, it’s not as if you made a hole in one of our lungs, or cut through our stomachs. A tree is always itself: unless you really annihilate it, and you really need to make a sadistic effort to do that, it’ll find a way to grow back no matter how much you mutilate it. In this sense it is different from animals because while animals are individuals, that is, in Latin, in-dividuus, or non-divisible, trees are very much divisible and they’ll still be what they are. But most of all, they’ll still be.

There was a pine tree in my backyard, and once I made up a story about it being actually a prince who was turned into a tree by a witch to prevent him from marrying the princess. The witch had taken the princess away with her a long time before, but the Pine Prince continued to stand watch and wait for his princess to come back. I must have written it somewhere, the story I mean. Who knows where it is now.

I met him in my backyard everyday as I walked to the garage to take my bike and go to school. The Pine Prince would endure the fog, the heat, the cold, the snow, the rain. I remember the bark was crusted, and tears of honey-colored resin lay between the cracks. He was a little threadbare, perhaps because he didn’t have much space to grow…

They cut him down on the 7th of March 2011. I wrote two poems, that day and the day after, that I’ll try to translate here:

They had told me that everything dies (my eyes burnt for the cold dismembered dismembered in pieces before my eyes). But I didn’t think they’d dare rape the smell of the sea and of freedom ancient inside the coarse skin or the tender white secret (how many tears of resin have we wept together?). Not in spring, I didn’t think they’d dare, not in spring (one bud that closes its eyes puts a whole forest on mourning)… Something dies inside. It dies like the shadow of the sagging smoke of fireworks dies. It dies and where there used to be the mutilated shape here after my gaze, now only the sky is left only an emptiness of sky.

In memory of a dream

Any invention, even an entire world of poetry, is worth you staying here with me.

I don’t know what it was about that tree that made me love it so much. Perhaps he was the symbol of trees for me. Perhaps he embodied something I was still unable to phrase with precision, something Rainer Maria Rilke was able to put to words in a book I still didn’t know at the time but that has been a home for me ever since I read it a couple of years later, the Letters to a Young Poet. In Stephen Mitchell’s translation, Rilke writes: ‘if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.

In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!’

It is autumn now, and I wish I were as firm as a tree in my ability to be. I wish I knew how to be the way trees know. I wish I were as vertical, as resolute as them. I wish I were as horizontal, as molecular as them. I wish I knew how to be despite and through the seasons. I wish I weren’t indivisible. I wish I weren’t so brittle.

They say sorrow passes, and we remain. But I wish we didn’t always have to worry so much about our intactness, I wish I didn’t always have to be so afraid to be disintegrated.

I wish I could be more like the Pine Prince, or even better, I wish I could be a forest of Pine Princes. And seasons would be seasons again. And time would be time again. And I would be seasons too. And I would be time too.

Side A: Seasons

A new episode, Side A: Seasons, is online!

[...] The seasons change, pass, follow one another, in a flow that doesn’t really take everything they find on their way with them, because everything that is in the way of the seasons also kind of is the seasons actually. [...]

Side B: Infinity times infinity [transcription]

Sometimes, rarely, I get to have quiet and half-awake moments before I’m forced to start a day. On mornings like this, when the sun lazily looks through my window lighting up everything around, I like to get lost in the infinity of Earth.

To imagine many ways our home could be created, be extraordinary, is almost incomprehensible. To think that we could be far ahead or lost in the past. For our communication to be altered, our travels to be quicker, more efficient and our homes less permanent.

#perspective

[Transcript] Side A: Infinity Times Infinity

In their song entitled ‘Sun’, music band Sleeping At Last sing: “We are the dust of dust. We are the apple of God’s eye. We are infinite as the universe we hold inside. Infinity times infinity.”

In an interview to Krista Tippett for her ‘On Being’ podcast, physician and writer Rachel Naomi Remen tells a story her grandfather had told her when she was a child, the story of the first day of the world. “[T]his was my fourth birthday present, this story.” Remen recalls, “This is the story of the birthday of the world. In the beginning, there was only the holy darkness, the Ein Sof, the source of life. Then, in the course of history, at a moment in time, this world, the world of a thousand thousand things, emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light. And then, perhaps because this is a Jewish story, there was an accident. And the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke. And the wholeness in the world, the light of the world, was scattered into a thousand thousand fragments of light. And they fell into all events and all people, where they remain deeply hidden until this very day. Now, according to my grandfather, the whole human race is a response to this accident. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people; to lift it up and make it visible once again and, thereby, to restore the innate wholeness of the world. This is a very important story for our times — that we heal the world one heart at a time. This task is called “tikkun olam” in Hebrew, “restoring the world.”

Krista Tippett at this point of the interview asks Remen if there is “a connection between the story of the sparks and tikkun olam in Jewish tradition? Are they bound together?”

“They’re exactly the same.” Replies Remen, “Tikkun olam is the restoration of the world. And this is, of course, a collective task. It involves all people who have ever been born, all people presently alive, all people yet to be born. We are all healers of the world. And that story opens a sense of possibility. It’s not about healing the world by making a huge difference. It’s about healing the world that touches you, that’s around you.”

In the prelude to her book ‘Figuring’, Maria Popova writes: “All of it — the rings of Saturn and my father’s wedding band, the underbelly of the clouds pinked by the rising sun, Einstein’s brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass that made the jar and each idea Einstein ever had, the shepherdess singing in the Rila mountains of my native Bulgaria and each one of her sheep, every hair on Chance’s velveteen dog ears and Marianne Moore’s red braid and the whiskers of Montaigne’s cat, every translucent fingernail on my friend Amanda’s newborn son, every stone with which Virginia Woolf filled her coat pockets before wading into the River Ouse to drown, every copper atom composing the disc that carried arias aboard the first human-made object to enter interstellar space and every oak splinter of the floor-boards onto which Beethoven collapsed in the fit of fury that cost him his hearing, the wetness of every tear that has ever been wept over a grave and the yellow of the beak of every raven that has ever watched the weepers, every cell in Galileo’s fleshy finger and every molecule of gas and dust that made the moons of Jupiter to which it pointed, the Dipper of freckles constellating the olive firmament of a certain forearm I love and every axonal flutter of the tenderness with which I love her, all the facts and figments by which we are perpetually figuring and reconfiguring reality — it all banged into being 13.8 billion years ago from a single source, no louder than the opening note of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, no larger than the dot levitating over the small i, the I lowered from the pedestal of ego.

How can we know this and still succumb to the illusion of separateness, of otherness? This veneer must have been what the confluence of accidents and atoms known as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., saw through when he spoke of our “inescapable network of mutuality,” what Walt Whitman punctured when he wrote that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

One autumn morning, as I read a dead poet’s letters in my friend Wendy’s backyard in San Francisco, I glimpse a fragment of that atomic mutuality. Midsentence, my peripheral vision — that glory of instinct honed by millennia of evolution — pulls me toward a miraculous sight: a small, shimmering red leaf twirling in midair. It seems for a moment to be dancing its final descent. But no — it remains suspended there, six feet above ground, orbiting an invisible center by an invisible force. For an instant I can see how such imperceptible causalities could drive the human mind to superstition, could impel medieval villagers to seek explanation in magic and witchcraft. But then I step closer and notice a fine spider’s web glistening in the air above the leaf, conspiring with gravity in this spinning miracle.

Neither the spider has planned for the leaf nor the leaf for the spider — and yet there they are, an accidental pendulum propelled by the same forces that cradle the moons of Jupiter in orbit, animated into this ephemeral early-morning splendor by eternal cosmic laws impervious to beauty and indifferent to meaning, yet replete with both to the bewildered human consciousness beholding it.

We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding on to illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in sensical narratives. All the while, we mistake chance for choice, our labels and models of things for the things themselves, our records for our history. History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.

Some truths, like beauty, are best illuminated by the sidewise gleam of figuring, of meaning-making. In the course of our figuring, orbits intersect, often unbeknownst to the bodies they carry — intersections mappable only from the distance of decades or centuries. Facts crosshatch with other facts to shade in the nuances of a larger truth — not relativism, no, but the mightiest realism we have. We slice through the simultaneity by being everything at once: our first names and our last names, our loneliness and our society, our bold ambition and our blind hope, our unrequited and part-requited loves. Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of “biography” but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams. Lives interweave with other lives, and out of the tapestry arise hints at answers to questions that raze to the bone of life: What are the building blocks of character, of contentment, of lasting achievement? How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism? Does genius suffice for happiness, does distinction, does love? Two Nobel Prizes don’t seem to recompense the melancholy radiating from every photograph of the woman in the black laboratory dress. Is success a guarantee of fulfillment, or merely a promise as precarious as a marital vow? How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?

There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

So much of the beauty, so much of what propels our pursuit of truth, stems from the invisible connections — between ideas, between disciplines, between the denizens of a particular time and a particular place, between the interior world of each pioneer and the mark they leave on the cave walls of culture, between faint figures who pass each other in the nocturne before the torchlight of a revolution lights the new day, with little more than a half-nod of kinship and a match to change hands.”

We all come from nowhere, and from everywhere. But are we worthy of the infinity we contain and are?

In her illustrated book ‘Eating the Sun’, writer and illustrator Ella Frances Sanders writes about the sense of awe the infinity we are made of and surrounded by inspires. “A sense of wonder can find you in many forms,” Sanders writes, “sometimes loudly, sometimes as a whispering, sometimes even hiding inside other feelings — being in love, or unbalanced, or blue.

For me, it is looking at the night for so long that my eyes ache and I’m stuck seeing stars for hours afterwards, watching the way the ocean sways itself to sleep, or as the sky washes itself in colors for which I know I will never have the words — a world made from layers of rock and fossil and glittered imaginings that keeps tripping me up, demanding I pay attention to one leaf at a time, ensuring I can never pick up quite where I left off.”

Astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson published only one collection of poetry in her too brief lifetime, and it was entitled ‘A Responsibility to Awe’. Are we ever able to live up to that responsibility to awe, to the universe in its infinitely changing expressions?

Sanders goes on: “Depending on where you look, what you touch, you are changing all the time. The carbon inside you, accounting for about 18 percent of your being, could have existed in any number of creatures or natural disasters before finding you. That particular atom residing somewhere above your left eyebrow? It could well have been a smooth, riverbed pebble before deciding to call you home.

You see, you are not so soft after all; you are rock and wave and the peeling bark of trees, you are ladybirds and the smell of a garden after the rain. When you put your best foot forward, you are taking the north side of a mountain with you. […]

A lot of our time is spent trying to tie up loose ends, trying to shape disorder into something recognizably smooth, trying to escape the very limits that hold us close, happily ignoring rough edges and the inevitable. We separate ourselves out into past, present, and future, if only to show that we have changed, that we know better, that we have understood something inherent; if only to draw neat lines from start to finish without looking back.

The problem is that chaos is always only ever sitting just across the table, frequently glancing up from its newspaper, from its coffee cup filled with discolored and imploding stars. Because chaos too waits. Waits for you to notice it, for you to realize it’s the most dazzling thing you’ve ever seen, for all of your atoms to collectively shriek in belated recognition and stare, mouth open, at how exquisitely embedded it is in everything. Because we are not designed to be more orderly than anything else; seams have a tendency to come apart with time — you and the universe are the same in this way, which makes for a delicately overwhelming struggle.

So, then, if you can’t ever end things neatly, can’t ever put them back quite the way you found them, surely the alternative is to remain stubbornly carbonated with possibility, to never rest from your rotation. To keep assembling stories between us, stories about how everything was everything, about how much we loved.”

Tell me, can we really embrace the infinite facets of the same infinite oneness we all are?

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