Who or what is ‘right’ in all the noise around coronavirus? How are we integrating…or how are we acquiescing to, the information around us? Is there an order in the chaos? What will our world look like next? What do the arts and humanities offer the health sciences in this time of great change, and vice-versa?
We’d like to welcome you to our first podcast for Sharing Air, transdisciplinary conversations to keep us connected where we reflect, we dig, we bridge and we reconstruct our story around health and our humanity in the face of isolation. I am your cohost, Andy Vosko, at Claremont Graduate University and I’m joined-
Lori Anne Ferrell, also at Claremont Graduate University, the dean of the School of Arts and Humanities.
I am associate provost and director of the Transdisciplinary Studies Program. Today’s show is going to be entitled To Air is Human. You’ll be hearing a lot about air in the upcoming podcasts because when we were talking about a theme for the show, we thought, “What better connects us than air?” and what ironically is the thing that we’re most afraid of right now, given that we’re all living in the distancing and isolated space from each other. What we want to do to talk about our relationship with air and our relationship with our human connection and our relationship with health is approach a lot of the topics that we’ve been leaving off into the ether of somebody else to think about rather than us.
We want to dig into them and we want to reframe them, so that we’re living comfortably next to them and incorporating them into our lives. This first show comes from our experiences of having to live with difficulty and complication and complexity and uncertainty. It reminded me of the song Que Sera Sera. I don’t know, Lori Anne, do you remember the Doris Day version of this?
Yes, that’s fine. When we be hearing-
It’s actually from an Alfred Hitchcock movie, right? I don’t remember.
I didn’t know it was from that.
It’s a suspenseful scary movie, a political thriller, and then, she sings this song in it, which is I think one of the really interesting ways of like, “What did you expect? We did not expect that song to be in that movie.”
I did not know it was from a thriller, but that makes it even more appropriate because it is this point at which you throw up your hands and you say with like a smile on your face and you’re full on June Cleaver moment of like, “Yeah, we can’t control things.” It’s really something that I’ve heard people say to me over and over throughout my life that I’ve always been a little annoyed with when people say it to me, but there’s also a lot of truth in it. I think that the apposition of that with something that’s thrilling is funny.
We’re about to do exactly the same thing. This morning, there was an interview with Dr. Sara Cody who’s the chief health officer at Santa Clara County. It’s a written interview in the New York Times, California edition. You could tell that the questions were getting more and more frantic with her like, “But can you tell us how long it will be? Can you tell us what we really need to do? Can you tell us that face mask can work? Can you tell us if we’ll be able to get back together in the fall?” Even the questions on the page felt to me like they were pelting her and they were increasingly frightened.
The final question from the from this person was, “So we can’t plan?” and her answer was, and I love this, “We just need to take a very deep breath.” I thought that is perfect for what we’re talking about today. Do the thing that you’re most afraid of. Right now, deep breaths actually can feel like a dangerous thing or a diagnostic test, but that’s the que sera aspect of it. How many of us living an adult life are comfortable saying, “I’m not sure if this is going to be true even tomorrow.”?
There’s now a CDC recommendation for taking a deep breath that I saw this morning, that it’s gone to this level of something that your mother told you or that your friends told you throughout you growing up, that you can take just a deep breath and it’ll be okay. It actually holds true, but now we need a more official version of that.
Right. We need a meditator in chief or something like that. It is usually part of a way of thinking about air as the thing which revives and makes us healthy. We’re actually afraid of shared air right now. We’re afraid for each other’s spaces and breathe which is what all this face mask stuff is all about. If breathing deeply is supposed to be calming, right now it is anything but, right? For a while, it was a test, wasn’t it? If you could take a deep breath for 10 seconds, it would mean you are well. Well, what if you’re having a panic attack? What if you’ve got allergies?
In other words, the notion of a deep breath as a cure all is being put to the test right now. I don’t believe I have been ordered as many times as I have in the last five years just to take a breath, right? There’s now podcasts about breathing. I guess, this is one of them. Sounds True is just another link to something about, with Tara Brach, about learning how to meditate and starts with your breath. Everything starts with the breath. Everything might start with a breath, but right now we’re afraid that everything’s going to end with the breath, which is one very, very succinct description of human existence.
Absolutely, it begins and ends with that breath. I think that the conversations we’re having around air and breathing are the things that are dominating everything related to our living in isolation from each other, of the ideas of quarantining and the ideas of where … We’ve seen this all this week, the conversation about masks, which brings up this other point of whether or not the air that we’re breathing outside. I see people walking by my windows sometimes who are nonchalant family of four, they’re all happily walking their dog together and clearly there’s a unit to them, even if they’re distanced a little bit.
Then, I also see people two minutes later wearing a full N95 mask with a face shield over them while they’re just going out for an afternoon stroll. There’s very different concepts of how one is interacting with this environment of what the air is looking like to them or what it’s feeling like and what kind of threat it poses. I think a lot of this comes from the uncertainty of what the air actually holds. It’s the space that’s both necessary and a possible threat at the same time because we don’t know. Our way of dealing with the uncertainty is scary. It’s better to be safe than sorry, I understand that, but it’s air. There’s a point at which we have to understand air as we need it. It’s a part of our lives.
When we don’t trust the air, then who are we as people? How do we cope with something like that? How do we hold on to the need to breathe and to protect ourselves?
Well, [crosstalk 00:07:26] we should be long used to the fact that we have a very, very complicated relationship with the air. When I first moved here, you couldn’t see the mountains behind my house in the summertime. I was very surprised. I moved here in late summer. I didn’t know that we actually had Mount Baldy until November. I think there’s a special kind of anxiety that underlays our relationship to the air here. We have air quality management. We’re the Land of Priuses. That part to me, it’s very hard to switch gears and now figure out that there’s a different quality to the air, a quality of almost that it’s heavier in a certain way, all the talk of air droplet, nuclei and how long they linger before they fall to the ground.
The sense of it feels very material in a way that we haven’t talked about smog for a while, but I want to get back to face masks because one of the things I think is interesting about face masks is that first they were completely off the table a few weeks ago in this long conversation about the fact that this was a disease that was transmitted by touch. You had to wash your hands which is a great thing to do. I’m not advocating that we stop, but it was all about hand washing and it was all about, “Forget masks. They’re kind of weird protection theater, control theater. We don’t do that. Make sure you wash your hands. Make sure you’ve got Purell.” That’s why we don’t have any Purell left in the stores.
Then, the face masks directly have gotten stronger and stronger and stronger until where we are right for all I know because things change so quickly. In the time it took for us to figure out how to actually run this podcast, they finally made an announcement that we all have to wear masks, but I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, Andy, but there’s a really misleading or confusing way in which they present this and I actually went through a bunch of stuff today because I was sure that in these frantic times, I was simply misreading.
The mask is to keep you from hurting other people, from you from breathing onto other people. That’s why for a while the mask directive was just about, “Just wear your mask if you don’t feel well. Wear your mask if you have a cough.” Now the presentation is “Wear your mask to protect yourself,” but that’s slightly inaccurate. You’re still protecting others with the mask. I think it’s interesting to ponder whether or not we’re saying it this way now because Americans may not be as concerned about protecting others as they might be about protecting themselves or this is just an interesting way of saying it.
Yesterday, this is where I get to tell a personal anecdote of which I have millions, I went to the store for the first time in three weeks. Andy knows my anxiety about going to the store. I wanted to go to Trader Joe’s but that was not possible because the line waiting to get in was too long. I went somewhere else and I don’t have a mask. I don’t own any paper masks. I’ve never worn one in my life since I was a nurse. That’s another story about my past we might get into. I have this bandana-type thing that I bought at Disneyland that’s covered with Mickey Mouse figures on it.
I wrapped it around my face to go into Sprouts, this healthy organic grocery store feeling like an idiot and also feeling like I could not breathe anymore because I had this thing over my face which was something that did remind me about the times when I was a nurse and couldn’t breathe anymore. I couldn’t stand being in protective gear for the same reason, feeling very choky. Plus, I felt not everybody in there had one on. I think there is something to saying either we’re all going to wear them or not because I felt like I looked like someone who had left the Magic Kingdom to go and hold up Sprouts. I walked with this thing over my face.
Other people were looking at me and I couldn’t tell if they were looking at me because they thought, “Are you sick? Is that Mickey Mouse? Lady, that just doesn’t work for you. It’s not a good fashion choice.” Whatever it was, the awkwardness of being in public with people and having part of my face covered, I’m afraid I’m going to go off the tangent and stop myself because right now what I’m thinking about is a huge argument about women wearing veils not too long ago because part of it being about public safety and being able to see their face, but you couldn’t see my face yesterday.
I went to Sprouts in a furtive and terrified way. I picked up some things and ran out of there like the devil himself was at my heels and felt like this was not a great outing for my first day with a face covering on.
It gets better by the way, I’ll tell you, for somebody when he does go grocery shopping does wear a mask or some kind of protective. I actually now have different things. I will wear certain patterns of scarf or bandana, when I feel like it’s low risk and I think it’s more of a fashion accessory which does happen throughout history when something starts off as being protective and turns into a social statement. I’m looking forward to when this becomes more of an aesthetic preference.
[inaudible 00:12:36] those who have masks on look like giant bird beaks [crosstalk 00:12:40]. That’s when we were wrong about how this particular disease would spread, right? So if you’re any child that remembers in any Western Civ class will remember that you were taught that everybody thought that the plague was borne by airborne molecules and so you were these weird masks and things, but actually it was rats. It was completely different. It was carried in a completely different way. Now, we actually have to readjust it until we find out it is. It’s not rats. It actually is the air.
Well, this is where I think the point of masks is so relevant and important to look at not just what we’re being told by CDC or the surgeon general or by any one person, but to really be looking this from different perspectives at the same time. I don’t know if in that era of the plague when they’re talking about whether or not it was airborne, there is a very long historical argument that had been going on whether or not disease was something that was spread “airborne” or if it was spread through contagion. It was actually like the germ theory of disease.
The airborne is the miasma theory of disease was that you had the clouds outside of putrid something or another that were causing disease. It was inorganic in nature and you needed to stay away from that. It makes sense to wear a face shield and an N95 mask outside if you have swamp gas outside that’s causing anything, but then there’s this term airborne that was medicalized around 100 years ago, not quite 100 years ago, but it was a while ago, so that they could discern airborne in a scientific sense to refer to the amount of size of aerosol droplet in the air or droplet, which has got its own definition of something that’s heavy enough to fall to the ground and stick on the surface.
When there were claims made of something being airborne or droplet based, there’s some doublespeak going on. There’s when you say it’s not airborne, part of what you’re saying is it’s not part of a swamp gas cloud. We don’t know much that’s actually swamp gas cloud that that’s going to spread it. There are things that are highly volatile and can be in the air, but by and large, we don’t know how this is spread when the droplets are small, how long they can stick around for in the air and there is some data on there and I can go back to some studies that people have looked on in Wuhan.
There are some studies when SARS was just SARS, not the COVID version that we’re dealing with now, a 19, but we have our historical prejudice and the need to dissociate contagion from miasma into our current understanding of what something means to be airborne. It’s very much coloring. I can see how we’re handling what a face mask is. Instead of being able to take in this whole story of this is an artifact of our understanding of what airborne means and the definition was taken away from us.
Our idea of airborne is actually our very colloquial version when the medicalized version that’s coming from another office is a much more medical version, that we’re speaking two different languages here that history has a really prominent point in. That’s been tough for us to contend with and we’re depending on other people to tell us what to listen to.
I think that that’s a really important point about who to listen to, which is another way of actually sharing the air or at least letting the air around your ears get ruffled up as much as anywhere else, but I think one of the things I wanted to say is this idea of miasma as well, and historically, it is also about the something which is obnoxious smell, right? It gets associated with neighborhoods and places that could be dirty or could be the sights of certain kinds of manufacturers that actually is more smelly. It reminds me that all these kinds of diseases or these concerns, I should say, like crises that rise up around the fear of public contagion also rise up around the fear of, say, poor neighborhoods or less well-maintained. Neighborhoods or less well-maintained people. The idea that this is a dirtiness out of control or overwhelming odor badly associated with a kind of mellow faction. I was actually thinking about this because one of the things I was in preparation for this podcast while you’ve been reading medical journals, I’ve been trying to remember my Latin.
I was thinking about the there’s a motto that gets cut into Renaissance knot gardens all the time. Trust me, I’m going somewhere that’s actually useful with this. It’s a famous motto. Often, you can also find it on armorials and it’s dum spiro spero. The popular meaning of that or if you’re going to be translating it in the most elegant way it would be, with life, there is hope, but spiro, S-P-I-R-O, it actually means with breath, there is hope and that also could mean if you were a bad translator of Latin like I was when I first started and still continue to be and you’re just looking up frantically in your Latin dictionary, it could mean, with a smell, there is hope, in other words.
Spiro can mean breath, it can mean smelling, and it or it can mean a kind of animation. That’s why I love … This word torn apart really was interesting to me to think about because the problem here is partly that we are concerned about the air, but we can’t see what’s in it, right? We have to smell it. As a friend of mine says, when she moved to Southern California, “I don’t trust any air I can’t see. It’s a good thing I live in Los Angeles,” but it is it. How do we imbue what’s something that’s supposed to be clear? How do we imbue it with an understanding of what it does and what it carries and what it means?
The notion of miasma to my mind in the past is all connected up to all the things in the dark and all the things that can come out of nowhere and frighten you that you don’t see coming on. Now, we know that there’s stuff in the air, right?
That idea of miasma, I’m so glad you put it in those terms, it describes the feeling that we have in times of real uncertainty, even though contagion might be the mechanism by which things spread. To discredit one and remove something like miasma from our thoughts of what the experience or the phenomenology of what we’re all living through is like, makes it difficult for us to contend and not let it seep back into our consciousness and integrate into how we’re interpreting contagion. I think that when we have this kind of confusion, when we’re having different sources of knowledge or the same source of knowledge telling us different things, depending on what day of the week it is, it’s really hard for us to know, especially in the specialized world, who to trust and what to do which speaks back to that press conference you were referring to this morning in Santa Clara County, where it was, “What should we do to?”
It almost sounds like someone trying to tread water unsuccessfully. After they’ve been thrown into the deep end, they’re just trying to find something to hold onto to be stabilizing. One of the things I think is really important to think about in times like now, that instability is actually a reality and a lot of the practices that have us focus on our breathing or having us focus on our breathing to become more comfortable in instability. It’s okay to be in an unstable place. That is a guarantee of being alive, that there are times that are unstable.
The want to control is quite strong, but then as was said that the virus is running the game right now of what its course is going to be, more than us having that kind of control. We have to take that that factoid into our consciousness at the same time. There was another article and I really like reading the Atlantic about this. There was one that came out on face masks this week. There was another one that came out that said, “Essentially, all models are supposed to be wrong,” and it referred back to the numbers that had been projected of the mortality rate and the infection rate of people in the UK from the National Health Service where the numbers, they were abysmal. There was millions of people were going to be afflicted and possibly die from this.
Then, the updated numbers were that it was orders of magnitude lower, like way lower. The title of the article is something along the lines of, “Models are supposed to be wrong.” They’re supposed to be. they’re supposed to give you the worst-case scenario and the best-case scenario and rarely does something happen in one of those two poles, so there’s supposed to be wrong, but given that there’s a worst-case and the best-case scenario for something, it’s our responsibility to understand how to interpret that data and integrate that truth into everything else that we know. To understand one possibility and another, it’s really hard.
Yes, I was going to say one of the things that what strikes me right now that you speak to besides the fact that yes, of course, you’re an Atlantic reader. You’re one of those East Coast kind of people, but away from that, I’m thinking about the fact that we get … One of the things that we want to pride ourselves on is this notion that we can trust science and we trust medicine, right? Right now, that’s actually one of the calls up, “Let us trust science in this. Let us test trust medicine in this.” It is extremely discombobulating to be reminded that science and models and doctors are also working to figure out something and they don’t know yet, okay?
That plays into what is often, I think, presented in very crude ways in media, things like that about either, “Do you trust science or do you not trust science?” They can be sometimes put together as a very sort of like science versus religion or science versus faith or science versus Godzilla. Whatever it is, I think, what we’re being asked right now to do is both trust science, trust medicine, but we’re trusting them to continue to work towards understanding and what we want from them and medicine is we want to be told the way things are now and we want it fixed.
I find it poignant, and here I speak as a, you know what I mean, as I would speak for us all, this is a humanist problem. It is poignant to realize that we are right now being assailed by something which we do not understand and which we have not yet been able to take the measure of. To poorly [inaudible 00:24:37] a virus, it has the measure of us right now. We don’t have the measure of it, which is like the basis for every science fiction movie ever. We asked these doctors. Poor old Anthony Fauci, every single day, he’s got to get up there and say something that’s both right and accurate, and often, he needs to be speaking in [inaudible 00:25:02]. We don’t know yet.
How do we actually reconcile? It brings back to a question because you’re going to answer these kind of questions so well, Andy, but how do we trust these institutions, I guess, we call them more? How can we trust scientists? How do we trust people who work in labs, researchers? How do we trust doctors when they can’t tell us what we think we need to hear right now? Well, we absolutely need to hear, which is, “We know what this is. We have a way to cure it.” It’s like the modern tragedy is that we actually now believe that these things can happen and we’re so disappointed or so terrified when they don’t work out.
My bias in this is that what we’re seeing here is an illustration of too much specialization without enough integration. I depend a lot and I’m thankful a lot. I’ll let you speak for this in your own experience, but I know that you have this varied background also. I was trained to some extent in the humanities. I was also trained to a larger extent in the biomedical sciences. When I am confronted with these things, I might still listen only to the surgeon general or to the CDC as my first line of defense, but I have a voice that comes inside of me that’s like, “Wait a minute. Something’s not sitting right. I’m capable of understanding data in a really rigorous way, this is how I was trained to do this, that I can incorporate both of these things into an understanding for myself.”
Teaching in medical education for a while along with teaching in liberal arts and understanding that integration has been something I’ve relied on quite a bit to give me peace of mind and feel like I’m making decisions for myself that I’m comfortable with. I’m totally curious on hearing how your experience, as you said, you were a nurse, you’re trained in the medical sciences, you also are a Shakespeare scholar, a historian. You understand histories of plagues. You have a lot of these different things. It always drives me nuts when people just call it lenses because lenses at an optometrist are things that you can flip on and flip off and they change, but they’re not things that are parametric in how you actually integrate them into yourself.
Something doesn’t just switch and then you compartmentalize that lens into something. There’s an integration point. I’m very curious in how you integrate the uncertainties and the different truths that have to coexist at the same time as being both a human problem and a nonhuman problem at the same time.
Wow. Well, that’s a small question, Andy, gosh.
Because you’re the integrator, right? Well, it’s funny. As I was listening to you, I was thinking that the first thing that you learn as a nurse, and it was a very long time ago that I was a nurse, is the limits of your own of your own abilities. People put a lot of trust in you and you can’t make the pain go away and you can’t change the diagnosis. Often, what you have to do or say is really, really literally hurtful. That was something that first we … I think, we took on a nursing education that that was … Our place was to be that human carrier between like the great all-knowing doctor, the medical doctor, and then we bridge the gap between that presence, right?
I did my training and I did my first work in university hospitals and it’s particularly clear there that this is a space where medical research goes on and the doctor is in many ways unapproachable. The nurses were actually supposed to humanize the experience. Humanizing experience turned out to always feel to me that we were the bearers of bad tidings and the holders of things that hurt, needles and other things, but the amazement to me over the years of getting around that was to realize that, believe it or not, doctors are human too. I think now doctors are humanized to a great extent. We have lots of doctors that are writing in forms that I find are intensely humanist and almost novelistic or literally novelistic and they’re really giving us an insight into something that I think we had left as a shadowy mystery that they really held some ways the mysteries of life and death.
I worked long enough on any floor of a hospital with any number of doctors, both bad and good, and I worked with almost entirely good ones and I never worked with any that were careless or dangerous, and yet, we made mistakes all the time and they often didn’t know. There was this extraordinary moment where I was actually with a neurosurgeon and said something, I don’t know what it was now, the kind of thing you say in the middle of the night when you retire like, “Oh, my gosh, what are we going to do next?”
He said, “Well, I always tell people,” this was this back in the ’80s, “I always tell people that being a neurologist or neurosurgeon means that you understand about 5% of what you’re working on in a given time. We just don’t know. Lori Anne, we just don’t know,” which in this particular setting was not comforting because we were really flailing to help somebody. I think what you asked is how one reconciles the very human nature of these endeavors. It’s not as if science is being performed by something called a scientist which is not a human being. Part of it is being able to work in both that the unknowing and then to watch out for the hubris after the knowing.
You can fix something and it doesn’t last and be a little bit like me or like my car mechanic or something. You can identify something and it can change shape. The very best doctors and the very best nurses, the very best people in the medical fields all together, I think actually have a sense of that protean aspect of dealing with the human condition, which is one of being born to eventually someday die and to be constantly presented with the mysteries of existence at a level that people expect you to be able to handle, not spiritually, but in some kind of material interventionist way.
I feel like I’m rambling a little bit here, but you’re asking about my nursing experience. They feel rambly to me because they were never definite, right? The only thing definite about being a nurse on a shift is that it starts at 7:00 and it ends at 3:00 or it starts at 3:00 and ends at 11:00, but the work doesn’t end. You basically just pass off to each other and everything is in flux. The final thing I’ll say that close this little ramble off would be, I found out very quickly on that I wanted to work the evening shift because the evening shift at least have a semblance of trying to put some people to bed.
The worst for me was a shift that ended in the middle of the afternoon. Well, that was actually absolutely the worst which was the shift that everybody … Everybody wants day shift, except I couldn’t stand it because at 3:00 in the afternoon, nothing had been fixed. People were still sick. The medicine hadn’t kicked in yet. We still didn’t have that order yet. We didn’t have the answers. This person was now going back down for emergency surgery. I couldn’t stand leaving the place in chaos. That’s actually basically nothing is resolved at the end of any shift at any hospital.
That state of resolution is only very, very gently achieved when someone gets to go home or we call somebody well, right? Right now, we’re saying, “Well, we don’t know if you get well. Will you be immune to the COVID-19? Can you be a carrier? How bad can it get?” We take refuge in truisms like, “Well, it’s only a danger for people over the age of 60,” which already terrifies me. I noticed now the news report is always like, “And that person was 19.” That’s really a terrifying fact, as if we ever knew that we could actually draw any boundaries around what this thing could do. When we finally can, it will mutate and it will become something else and we’ll have something else to work on. That sounded really gloomy.
It sounded a little gloomy, but I think there is more good in this than we’ve revealed so far. I think we’re going to work our way to getting to what some of those are. I think we’ve all gone through a series of emotions and we’re going to continue to go through a series of emotions living in these times of duress because it is stressful, admittedly. I have had breathing problems that have been associated with anxiety and panic that have come with it. I understand the importance of air. For somebody who claims to have an understanding of something, I’ve really also been at the whim of all of the factors that are external to me and I’ve not really had a lot of confidence at many points in this process.
I think that’s very normal. I’m now at a point where I’m more comfortable saying that. I think in those times I found there are things that bring me back to center. Some of them are taking a deep breath. Some of them are watching YouTube videos of people making ceramics because I find that very calming. Something I’ve found myself doing a lot lately is that whenever I’m on Netflix, I want to see if the top 10 things that people are watching are related to what’s going on in the world right now. At the earlier stages of this, they were all very terrible like Contagion, Pandemic, everything that sounds in the thriller kind of way of this being presented like the way people watch horror movies, I believe, to take the edge off the fear of the horror itself.
Then, you see some of these deeper movies like Platform, has recently been there which is a critique on capitalist systems that are also being magnified right now into the current state. I’ve been following much more medical history podcasts and books and journals. I’m very, very interested in all these things. I’m trying to intellectualize it for it to make more sense. I think everybody’s got their own system.
My friend Heather just told us the other day that she was watching White Christmas because that’s a movie that makes her feel better.
We all have, but then I came across a number of writings on the plague that have come out around now, Camus’ The Plague. That to me was really profound. There’s a really cool journal that also has a blog associated with it that’s called the Hedgehog. If you’ve ever heard me talk about the importance of Hedgehogs, they’re considered the generalists. There’s an essayist in there named John Rosenthal, who was writing on the relevance of Camus and the plague and now.
This is what really got me thinking about uncertainty. His description of the book was of the narrator’s role, he said, “He was a man who understood that even to be a normal person in normal times is a difficult proposition. How then to be so under the conditions of the plague, of exile, sudden deprivation, random suffering and even more random death? How do, humans all kinds of them, act under such conditions? And what are our responsibilities in a world seemingly forgotten by God to ourselves, to family to community?”
That to me is where I was starting to understand why I’m turning to literature and the arts and other things that I might have dismissed as distractions before, but really realizing that they help me understand my humanity more. It made me dig deeper into the idea of what it means to be around and contending with this. When the terms random that came up, random suffering and random death really, really resonated with me, they resonated with the idea of uncertainty for me and the feelings that I have.
It brought me back to a place that we look at in complex systems and in even transdisciplinary study of this concept of chaos, which like the idea of airborne has this disciplinary definition and then it has this colloquial definition. Colloquially, I would say we’re very much in chaos right now. I don’t know if you feel the same way, Lori Anne.
It’s interesting to think about what it is that we turn to and whether we can find ways to order, but when I was thinking about what we’ve talked about today and then you prompted me about Shakespeare and ignored that for a minute. I’m thinking about a couple of things that have been really helpful to me, they’re not as learned, but I think they work at a different level. Of course, I’m going to say poetry, but I’m going to start with Shakespeare because another thing I’ve done in a checkered past is that I took a six weeks, I worked with Theatricum Botanicum and learned Shakespeare acting. I decided that I couldn’t teach it if I didn’t understand what it’s like to try to do it. It’s a good thing I didn’t give up my day job, but I did take a series of pretty intense acting classes.
Actors have a really good relationship to text because they have to actually embody it. I realized that the actors that I was working with, people I have tremendous respect for now, had a very, very sincere explanation, a very deeply felt and a very, very intellectual approach to Shakespeare’s punctuation, full stops, commas and the like that you’d never teach this in a class on Shakespeare. They believe that the First Folio contained within it, the punctuation that was meant to reflect when an actor pause to take a breath or made a move.
When they first told me this, I said, “Well, that’s just malarkey,” because of course, I was bringing a different approach to Shakespeare onto the stage which will also explain why I am not a good actor. It works for them, but what they’re basically saying is that the theory of punctuation works, especially strongly in things like poetic work and things like the drama because they force you to stop and breathe. They force you to cut your line where you do for the effect that you need to make. One of the things that I’ve been doing because to stay sane in chaotic times and to remind myself that the world can still be measured is that there’s a daily …
There’s a Patrick Stewart’s Instagram page, he reads a Shakespeare sonnet every day and the man is a sheer pleasure to listen to how he reads. When you realize that, poetry possibly more than any other art form really requires the thought of breath to work. It requires the notion that’s why its lines do what they do. They often stop when you don’t expect them to. The punctuation makes every difference in the world. Watching him read sonnets, which is just terrific and I’m so sorry that I don’t think about that every day before this ever happens. That’s an optimistic look at what this has done.
Also, when you think about poetry differently, it made me realize that poetry is about controlling the breath in a way that makes sure that you get the most air possible, if that makes any sense. Can you let me read a poem? Is it… Do we have time?
You could do anything. Yeah, this is a conversation.
I was thinking about what poem works most for me when I’m thinking about control and when I’m thinking about measuredness. I’m thinking about how one gets through a line or a day or a thought. The one I came up with, this is one of my favorite poems in the world and I first looked at and thought this is not going to have anything to do with what we talked about, with what Andy and I talked about today, but I still want to read it because I think it absolutely does, because the way that that poetry helps to measure and make sense of the world is very oblique.
It is not an obvious relationship. It is in the working out of that space that you’ve figured out. This is actually one of my top 10 favorite poems. It’s modern. It’s by Heather McHugh. It’s called The Size of Spokane and I’ll start it now. “The baby isn’t cute. In fact, he’s a homely little pale and headlong stumbler. Still, he’s one of us, the human beings stuck on flight 295, Chicago to Spokane, and when he passes my seat twice at full tilt, this then that direction, I looked down from Lethal Weapon 3 to see just why. He’s running back and forth across a son blazed circle on the carpet. Something brilliant, fallen from a porthole. So it’s light amazing him. It’s only light.
Despite some three and one half hundred people, propped in rows for him to wonder at. It’s light he can’t get over. Light he can’t investigate enough. However many zones he runs across it, flickering himself. The umpteenth time I see him coming, I’ve had just about enough, but then he notices me noticing and stops, one fat hand on my armrest to inspect the oddities of me. Some people cannot hear. Some people cannot walk, but everyone was sunstruck once and set adrift. Have we forgotten how astonishing this is? So practiced all our senses, we cannot imagine them? Foreseen instead of seeing all the all there is? Each spectral port, each human eye is shot through with a hole and everything we know going in there, where it feeds a blaze.
In a flash, the baby’s old. Mel Gibson’s hundredth comeback seems less clever, all his chases and embraces narrow down while we fly on in our plane radiance of vehicle toward what cannot stay small forever.”
I think that is an awesome poem. I loved that I just closed my eyes and imagined that very, very clearly. It so does relate for me at least to this time that we’re living in of noticing all that there is to marvel at and be grateful for and the new landscapes that we’re seeing the world in. Even the sky is so much bluer right now. The trees are so much more rustly right now. There are so many amazing things to experience that that poem just helps remind me of that I really appreciated that Lori Anne. I thought that was beautiful.
First, I thought, well, you’re just going to have to make some dumb argument, “It’s about being in the air,” but I actually think especially with the way you didn’t even know you were setting it up since you didn’t know I was going to do that …
… because I didn’t get around [inaudible 00:45:10] poem. It’s a big surprise. It was a surprise for you, Andy. For years, the humanity of that poem to me is about us living in bodies that are the plain radiance of our vehicle, right? That’s the way I’ve always done the metaphoric study of that or thought about that, but there’s also these stops and starts in the poem that reminded me of the way one needs to use breath. If I don’t read that poem properly, I will actually run out of breath and miss a word I really need to hit on. In the end, what’s most extraordinary about it I think is that it is a description of human life amidst what we may see as chaos, but we simply are not always privileged to know everything going on. That is that final line about us flying on toward what cannot stay small forever, right?
At one level, it’s just a portion of how it feels to land from Chicago to Spokane. As you start moving into land, things get closer and closer and they get bigger and bigger and bigger. Our senses all get rather turned awry, but I now realized that, of course being Heather McHugh, she’s a genius, it’s about the fact that we are all moving headlong into what cannot stay small. That is one really extraordinary description of life. This thing is just getting bigger, right? We want to know when it’s going to end, but actually all we can do is just keep flying on in our little plane radiant vehicle, right?
I think that really ties into the chaos idea too because in a lot of ways when you’re the baby, life is much more chaotic. Your brain is much more chaotic. The connections that you’re using to make sense of the world are in stark contrast to the person watching Lethal Weapon 3, even in the mention of Mel Gibson’s hundredth comeback later on. You’ve got chaos against order and we’re striving all the time for order. We want to see another Mel Gibson comeback, and at the same time, that’s clearly not beautiful. It’s clearly not the transformative piece in this experience. It’s the person experiencing for the first time in an unknown, in an unpredictable way what it means to witness light and another human being witnessing them witnessing light.
I think that’s one of the big things that I’ve been trying to process is there are changes that happen with chaos. Chaos is always here in some form or another. That’s a truth that we try to willfully neglect. It’s always in the background, but in biology, it serves many important function. If we were in a very, very ordered space all the time, if our heart was so ordered, if our muscles were so ordered, if our neurons were so ordered, we could never adapt to a changing environment because we would only have one function and we’d only be doing one thing.
Having a chaotic background, which sometimes comes forth and really forces us to deal with what’s new, creates a complete transformation in the structure of our brain or in the functioning of our heart or the ability of us to incorporate something in the environment that is really different. I think that that poem, it sets it apart through age in a very similar way. The nascency is a more chaotic time and later in life is seemingly more ordered, but there’s this capacity for beauty to exist in this as well. We’re starting to see some things if we’re paying attention to the light that are opportunities for real transformation and that I find really exciting amidst all of the discomfort and isolation and disconnection that we could otherwise be feeling.
We’re seeing what it’s like. We’re recalling people we haven’t talked to in a very long time. My breath of fresh air is actually longer, even though I’m not particularly afraid of walking outside right now without a face shield on. My breath of fresh air outside, it’s bigger. I’m thinking of things that are starting to just jell a little differently in my mind and my experience, I’m grateful for that. That’s why I’m excited about chaos. I think that there’s something to this that is really worth embracing.
Oh, I think we should have a podcast called Excited By Chaos. Well, basically once one reads a poem, then one should actually just tip their hat and leave the room, but I think that it would be fun to talk about at length at some point the fact that what holds true for the human body and its adjustment to its environment is also true of what we might call the human history. History is full of examples of dreadful things leading to great change. Because I’m a historian, I can no longer say that’s a good change or bad change, but because one of the things that I work on a lot, for example like the Protestant Reformation, there’s a theory of religious reform that comes from the experience of the Black Death.
It’s a very, very persuasive thesis about what people end up doing, how their thoughts must change, how they must actually throw away old paradigms when those things no longer give comfort and they don’t provide enough flexibility to handle events out of people’s control. That’s interesting to think about because in the early modern period or in the medieval era, it takes a lot for people to feel completely out of control because there’s already I think a great mindset that there is not a lot of control to be had in the world, kings or autocrats, crops fail. There’s no a lot there to really depend on.
It takes something really big to shake it up, but in thinking through this, I would agree with you. I think it’s not a sin to say, I think, one of the really interesting things about being alive right like these extraordinary TikTok videos that I get or this [inaudible 00:51:25]. A student said this today in a town hall. He’s he said something like, “I’m amazed at watching the resilience of American humor, how people actually end up making funny songs,” we’re requiring so much whether we’re a practice like Heather McHugh, the poet, or whether we’re just us.
We were also trying to surprise and delight each other. We’re actually trying to make this a time where you don’t just notice the flowers or the air, although I appreciate what you just said, things do seem brighter in that way, more available to the senses, but also that we’re more aware of each other and that we actually realize that, I think, part of what we are just ludic people that like to amuse each other. This has brought out some really amazing moments of [inaudible 00:52:26] homespun creativity.
I don’t have much appreciation for that aspect of the internet until now. As you know personally because you’re my friend, you have received far too many videos and things from me lately and movies and stuff, that kind of thing I would never like. I would have never sent you something like a cat playing the piano. What do I care? Right now, I’m just thinking, “Wow, I can’t believe the whole family got together and did this great parody of Les Miserables, right? [crosstalk 00:52:55]
Which is quite funny. I did enjoy that one.
The boy with the pizza box at the end was the best. Think about that, from the sublime to the ridiculous, sublime being a word that I think doesn’t always have to be good, just sublime, just like it knocks you out like this is doing right now. The sublime, it’s not just that you go from the sublime to the ridiculous in a common arc. The sublime brings out the ridiculous, right? We have to. We have to break the tension or we make people laugh and laughter makes you have to take a big deep breath. It is an incredibly vulnerable thing to do.
All of these things are examples of sharing air. This is how we bond as humans. The air is this medium that we have that we share with each other and it can be direct or it can be indirect. It’s always there. It’s always constantly a need of ours, even in times of isolation and then we have this other irony to go along with it that we have a fear of this air because this is the thing that is carrying a possible disease with it. To be able to live in that discomforting space is a challenge, but it’s doable. When we do think through the things that are important, the things that are healthy for us, our capacity to critically think through the information we’re given and the ability to appreciate and to love and to show care for each other, it’s all part of the same recipe.
These things aren’t actually isolated from each other, even though we are isolated from each other. I think that is what I hope that I can take with me from this experience and keep thinking about, “What is it like for me to share air better tomorrow than I did today?” That would put me on a path that I think would really help me come out on the other side of somebody who’s had great gratitude for this period of time.
Oh, wow. Sharing air, what’s funny, you and I be like, “Let’s take this out. Let’s split it up to its meanings.” You and I have shared the airwaves today. We’re watching them on this screen which is amazing to me when I talk and I watch these little things bump up and down, but we haven’t really, right? I have been having the intense pleasure of talking with you and I know your voice. I know we’re both talking because I can see this and we have very different voice patterns, you can see as well, which is cool, which means that we are actually moving the air around us, but we’re in two separate places.
We’re both sharing the air and we’re not. I was listening to, there were … One of the 5000 interviews or 6 million op eds I read in the last five and a half hours, one of the doctors was saying, “Don’t you understand that every day in regular life, we basically just cover each other in each other’s breath, cover each other and each other’s spittle?” That’s just the way we work as human beings. We live sharing that, and instead, I’m sharing this with my screen and it will be really nice … I’m really looking forward to continuing doing these podcasts with you and bringing in people because I learn so much from you, Andy, every time, but one of the things that I can say is that at some point, it would be tremendous fun and it will be wonderful again to be actually sharing air, sitting across from each other at a table.
I very much look forward to that too, but I also argue from the physiological component that we still are indirectly. You have speakers that are vibrating in your ears that are actually moving the air so that you can hear me. This isn’t just sensory neural hearing. This is actually an acoustic kind of hearing. We’re not vibrating the temporal bone. You are getting air. You’re just getting it transduced through a bunch of other media. It’s not my air anymore. It’s just I’m affecting your air through the earphones. That was a very nerdy thing that I didn’t really have to say, but I felt it was-
That’s why I like you so much. I like those nerdy things. You reminded me that I’m not going to do it this week. I’m going to do it next week because it’ll be more appropriate, but you have to remind me to tell you a story I have as a person who was forced to go to an Easter service with my mother and what I saw when they did the children’s sermon. Just remind me of that.
Remind me that I’m going to tell you this. [inaudible 00:57:29] air, it’s absolutely perfect.
We will cover that next week. What else do we have coming up next week, Lori Anne?
Oh, my goodness. In between, I want everybody to get on to Patrick Stewart’s Instagram. I think he’s up to sonnet 15 today. Just for those of us who are Shakespeare nerds, he refused to read sonnet five because he said he had never understood it. If the Mighty Patrick Stewart doesn’t understand something, it makes me absolutely curious about sonnet five, so I’ve been reading it forever. Next week, we’re going to actually have Tammi Schneider, who is a professor of Hebrew Bible and Religion at Claremont Graduate University.
She has a lot of very interesting things to talk about in terms of the notion in Hebrew, the notion in the Old Testament, the notion in a book like Genesis of what breath means and life and what that might mean about spirit and what it might mean about relationships to The Divine, which is why I want to start this by telling my silly church story, but I would definitely say tune in because those of you that know Tammi already know that she is very good value on a podcast. If you don’t, you need to meet her on. She will provide a very lively presence. That’s what we’ll have for next week.
Great. As you made a recommendation, my recommendation is to follow the Twitter feed of a physicist named Yaneer Bar-Yam, who is a complex systems guy, who makes total sense of how complexity and uncertainty and chaos relate to our current situation and he’s very pragmatic about the way that we can all act in our best interest and what kind of measures should be taken to help us navigate this uncertain time. I found that he’s very articulate and he’s very easy to follow what he’s saying. I’m very much looking forward to our next show together and discussing on air, more about how we share and how this is affecting our relationships and how we can stay connected during this time.
I think we should throw out the first Sharing Air challenge which is that everybody who actually takes both of our recommendations writes us and tells us how you can connect this kind of theorist that Andy is talking about with Shakespeare as a sonneteer.
It can be done. It can be done. You can put these things together.
