Why Do Women Watch True Crime? Why Do Men? A cranking of the subject's cloud.

Over on my Substack I’m talking about why amateur artists persist, I made some guesses, made a list. Please come visit! There’s another list I’ve been thinking about, well, I think in clouds but a list is a cloud from the side. 

There are a lot of reasons, but one that I don’t see mentioned is that on the subject of bodily safety, we have gone quite mad. We can’t stop looking, eyes estranged, heart akimbo.

True, I get tired of murder shows and for a while avoid them and instead look for white collar crimes, scams for thrills, and betrayals for a fix. Delish. But then I’ll migrate back to our more stabby offenders.  I look for cases where people are killed for something other than being someone’s girlfriend or wife or even for just being a woman. She can be killed as hated family member, I’ll allow that, but not any of the more common men-kill-women scenarios. 

So nu? Why do you think woman are the main audience for true crime, perhaps especially of the serial killer variety? Or why does anyone'? Maybe we enjoy seeing the caught criminal because we know that person screwed up their lives more than we did ours, whatever we feel badly off the mark about. I’m kind of joking?

Also, what about the men who watch true crime? Now do we think that they identify with the detectives? Surely all of us may watch to help solve the crime. All of us may watch to empathize with the victims and with the bereaved.

Okay, you’re doing great, stay out of the rain, watch the birds (some walk, some hop!), stay alive, keep your hope in a helium trope, and I shall return to encourage you again.

love,

Jennifer

Get Out of the Building! Holi and Palm Sunday

 Dear Bleaders,

I’ve got a substack! It’s a newsletter and for now it is all free, and I hope I can always keep some free. It’s JMH’s Substack jmh170.substack.com Please join me there! If you have a sub stack too, let us know in the comments.

So yeah, we’ve talked about how rituals and readings are a powerful combination inside religion, but they are in the rest of public life, too. Presidential inaugurations have come to include poetry, bringing a moment of reflection, an opportunity for collective focus and quiet. In the United States, the Pledge of Allegiance is recited every day at school to reinforce the idea of a purposeful and unified community. The pledge is an embodied creed: one stands for it, hand on heart. Then over the popping loudspeaker comes the national anthem and, as with so many rituals, our intentions are sealed with a song.

We may think of rituals as performed to appease an otherworldly rule, but rituals are always performed in the service of humans. They are a way of learning: they show us what time of year it is, what time of life. They direct us to enact our emotions, with dates in the calendar set up to hear music, fast, feast, swim, travel, and rest. 

Studies have supported the value of ritual along many measurements of health and flourishing. For example, researchers have found a reduction in anxiety through ritual. It isn’t only the repeated behaviors but the specialness of them, the fact that they are marked off as ritual. “Belief that a specific series of behaviors constitute a ritual is a critical ingredient to reduce anxiety and improve performance: engaging in behaviors described as a ‘ritual’ improved performance more than engaging in the same behaviors described as ‘random behaviors.’” 

[Emphasis mine. Alison Wood Brooks, Juliana Schroeder, Jane L. Risen, Francesca Gino, Adam D. Galinsky, Michael I. Norto.n, Maurice E. Schweitzer, “Don’t Stop Believing: Rituals Improve Performance by Decreasing Anxiety,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 137 (November 2016), 71–85.]

One can feel alienated from ritual because of a lack of belief, but it’s often based on a mistake. It’s throwing the human baby out with the supernatural bathwater. 

You can take part in all the rituals you want. Rituals from your childhood can be the most comforting and potent, whatever you believed then or now. You have the right to practice them for the poetry of the experience. Ditto rituals that came into your life through close family or other ties.

Regarding rituals that don’t belong to you, try the ones expressly open to outsiders. Accept invitations to rituals from friends. Keep your eyes open for advertisements for gatherings that are expressly public and open to all.

The Hindu festival of spring, Holi, is coming up next week and is a sublime example of an open holiday. Holi is the holiday where all involved toss colored powder on one another and it is fundamentally public and welcoming. In India everyone who is out and about is part of the party; the streets and parks are a Holi party. Tourism invites the world to India to take part. It’s also celebrated in parks and open spaces around the world and posters call it an open celebration of friendship and fun.

In New York City, there are several places to celebrate Holi. The photo above is from the Holi ad for @Tailgate NYC.  Advertisements for celebrations of Holi regularly include the phrase “All are welcome!” My little family has been three or four times and there has always been live music and dancing. They sell the organic color powder there and no longer let you bring your own, so the celebration is environmentally safe. Some have an entrance fee, some don’t, some serve alcohol and may be 21+ parties, all seem to sell snacks. 

You dress in all white so the colors show. 

You have encounters, see a person with only yellow on their white T-shirt and brighten them with blue; they may flinch, but then your eyes meet and you smile. We first attended because it seemed wonderful, but after a while I had two Nepali nieces and that sweet family connection made Holi that much more meaningful.

In the United States Holi is sometimes combined with Kite Day and the music is often billed as Bollywood. One recent ad says to bring the family and “fly handmade paper kites and splash vibrant organic colors on each other to spread love, peace and unity.”

For us, it can help get us out of the house.

Also, this Sunday is Palm Sunday. Christians around the world celebrate Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem. He’s arrived to bring his message to the Passover crowds. When I was a very small child I thought Jesus entered Jerusalem stepping on the soft, upturned hands of his remarkably dedicated followers. No. His way is softened by palm leaves. Today, many churches hand out palm leaves and have a procession, walking outside and waving one’s leaves. 

Again, big human message? It’s spring, leave the building. I can be a bit of an indoor cat, which is to say a books and art hermit, so I have to encourage myself on this point. Obvs, I’m not directing this advice at the already outdoors, but allow me to say, to remind myself if nothing else, that some of the darker feelings fly right into the sky when I walk out the door. It’s not slow like paint drying it’s like letting go of a helium balloon string. Gone.

We all take part in rituals of one sort or another, and some are deeply meaningful to us. Others are a lark we’d be sad to miss, a chance to wave a palm at someone. But rituals without inspiration can feel especially empty, even depressing.

Why not put some meaning back in? What if you had a poem for such moments, something that stitched a consistent element across your life? (Reading and rereading a poem can create an imaginary but felt space. It can be a space of beauty and peace. Or if the world had made you feel that the only truth is chaos and madness, it can be a space of art like that.)

When I started talking about this idea people encouraged me to map out what that might look like and that became The Wonder Paradox: Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life. The “wonder paradox” is that not only has matter evolved the capacity to think and feel, and on an infinitely complex level, but these thinking, feeling beings think that the world and they themselves are awesome, and feel that there is something amazing a going on. This is why we need poetry. Poetry is the way we find out more about the true yet wondrous world as experienced by people. Rereading poems has historically been part of meaningful ritual. So read yourself a poem. Here’s a beauty by Wislawa Szymborska, called “Under One Small Star”.

Under One Small Star

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity
My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.
Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologise for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologise to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,
you gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don’t pay me much attention.
Dignity please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.
Soul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then.
My apologies to everyone that I can’t be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.
I know that I won’t be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

Great right? She was amazing. Okay get some sunshine on your face, stay alive, and I shall return to encourage you, here and on substack.

Love,

Jennifer

How Green Are Your Holidays? St. Patrick's Day and the Ides of March

Dear Bleaders,

Spring holidays are beginning to begin, next up being St Patrick’s Day, and the Ides of March. One is a day of honoring Ireland, the old country, drink, and the cure of corned beef. One is just a reminder to watch your six. (What? Even Brutus is Brutal?)

I’ve written a little poem that is a list of features that a holiday can have. The idea is that each holiday has distinct traits, which I’m calling their cabinet of culture, containing all a holiday’s traditional doings, and none of the doctrines. 

Specific Holiday’s Cabinet

A singular drink, type of meal, kind of sweet,

particular music, special plant, featured beast,

decoration and light, way to greet,

style of dress, featured hue or two,

an outdoor crowd event,

a signature live show, a film, an avatar,

and a quick rebellion where the usually tame

are allowed to be hellions,

or the rich serve food to the poor.

So the cabinet of culture of St. Patrick’s might be

St. Patrick’s Day Cabinet

Guinness, corned beef,

“Danny Boy,” four leaf clover,

dress green, decorate green,

big parade, leprechauns, 

and raucous masses 

unruly in the streets. 

If the holiday is very old, it’s had time to stuff that cabinet. For instance, Christmas, Ramadan, and Passover all have overflowing cabinets, so that for each we’d have to choose from among several representative treats. Many of the details shift a great deal over time and across geography.

If I wanted to make the Ides of March into a holiday it would be a lot of work. Yet it has a lot going for it. It’s got a set date that is its name. It’s a story of betrayal, especially in Shakespeare’s hands. Historically, killing Caesar was meant to save democracy. We don’t really have a holiday honoring democracy and it might do us good to start one. But just naming a holiday doesn’t tell us how to celebrate it. 

To flesh it out we’d work to fill its cabinet of culture. We could wear toga-like shirts and dresses, and greet each other with, “I’ve got your back,” and “So have I yours.” We could eat an ancient Roman treat (or Caesar salad, keep it simple), and make it a day to rally or contribute to the cause of democracy with money or phone calls. People could wear toga-white. 

St. Patrick’s day is about the idea of Ireland, honoring the old country, and the parade. Looking at its cabinet of culture one sees that it’s missing some of the big features, there’s no set greeting, for instance. Yet it’s wonderful how it gets everyone to wear green. It’s such a delightful passive way to take part. It’s like the whole country doing the wave, quietly turning green for a day. In China, on New Year’s, one wears all red. 

People who feel like outsiders often refuse to play these broad-culture games. But what would happen if you had a poem for your each of the holidays that is important to you, so as to import personal meaning to the celebration? I’m a historian as well as a poet and I wrote a big book called, Doubt: A History, on religious doubt and unbelief, all over the world, throughout history. I was invited to give talks and the Q&A sessions often included intimate questions about death, church weddings, fights over baptism or no baptism. I found myself offering poems and telling someone full of guilt that what they were already doing was right and I showed them why I thought so. 

I believe that nonbelievers have the same right as anyone to engage with the religion in which they were raised—by their parents and by the culture around them. A lot of atheists feel guilty about partaking in a little religious ritual now and again. People feel it is an empty gesture. It is not an empty gesture. It’s taking part in the poetic sacred. It’s setting us up for a bigger awareness of the poetic beauty of life. Moments of transcendence, ordinary or astounding, need some ingredients. People should only do rituals they choose to do, in my book, but likewise people should be able to do rituals they want.

When I wrote this post on Sunday, the next paragraph took off in a slightly more personal direction, and by yesterday I felt compelled to share the following two paragraphs on Facebook and Instagram. They got a lot of love there, and now stick out even more to me. So I thought I’d give this little intro.

Life can be terrible but also wonderful, but also terrible. You thought you were okay but you walk into a room and friends rush over asking what’s wrong. You look so sad they make you sit down and they announce they’re getting you some water. But until you start sharing your terror with someone, it’s not going anywhere. Writing and talking about how good life is (the trees! the grass!) or how terrible it is (what happened to you) makes us happy, until we stop. The worry returns, the self-criticism returns, and you notice that no one ever brought that glass of water. A lot of us are feeling fear and grief these days and a poem can meet you where you are and keep you company, or make you happy. You can find a poem for grief in many collections on the subject, including Kevin Young’s terrific The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing. Each chapter in The Wonder Paradox talks about a chosen poem from ancient China to today’s Pakistan, and nearly every one (though it’s in a chapter dedicated to decisions, love, sleep, or…) can work for grief. A few chosen poems can change your life.

I’m frankly surprised you are all doing so well, because it seems like every other of you has lost someone dear. There is outrageous courage in living. Life is like a great novel with a terrible pacing problem. So much waiting and trying, so few moments of transformation. And when they come your body takes over and your brain is a passenger, a quiet fella, near the rear of the bus. He just missed his stop, spacing out, and will ride the circuit all the way around again. Even when we finally get behind the wheel again, so much traffic! Mostly the waiting and trying. Life is a musical but we all have our own “I want” song. And look at you, doing so much waiting and trying and singing. (Sing sing you lovely living thing.) Which is to say I’m thinking of you and I’m sorry for your loss.

Whether or not you are Irish, your family likely came here at some point, and missed the homeland, and garbled the memory of it. Whether the Ides of March could be a holiday for democracy, it might be a good idea to create one. The Ides have a solid date, an emotional story of betrayal, a historic event, a Shakespearian version, and a reasonable reason to celebrate democracy. 

If you are feeling unmoored, it might help to do some ritual, some small gesture at least, to take part in the dress up and the greetings and the food. It will surely help to find a poem to sit with. At the very least a poem takes you out of your own mind and into the mind of another. This too is meditation. Happy Spring, sing, and Happy Holidays.

Oscar Night! Pictures at an Inhibition

Dear Bleaders,

I used to worry about getting enough sleep to write, but then I heard a poet I love, James Tate (1943-2015), interviewed on Youtube, and when a voice asks him how he recharges his batteries, Tate says “I believe in part in writing out of exhaustion” and “I like to work sometimes when my batteries are very low.” 

Well okay then. It hadn’t occurred to me. I tried it out and I found that it was at least as true as the idea that I needed to be well rested and in my rightest mind. 

For a while now I have opened the door to my insomnia, let it call the shots. Someone had asked if maybe I just wasn’t getting enough exercise to be tired, and I thought Oh I’m not awake when I shouldn’t be, I’m just awake. “Right, I’ll sleep when I sleep.” Sometimes it’s mostly the struggle that tightens things up. Newly freed, I’m drinking coffee at all hours since I’m going to be awake anyway. I realize that eventually I’ll have to cut that from the curriculum. 

For now I like being up in part because I make things at night. Writing the last book took a lot of years and the eye gets tired of staring at black and white text, ants crossing a bleached desert of sheet. (Metaphors inside metaphors!) Nowadays I want color and pictures, I want to wrestle with the big what and the little whys in material, not only ideas.

What would I have said if the interviewer had asked me the question? How do I recharge my batteries? I suppose I’d say, “I don’t have batteries; no one does anymore, we all have chargers.” Because everything changes and the losses come at us with the speed with which we lose our Apple pencils. Slippery little bastards. 

The Oscars are Sunday and those of us who celebrate may consciously experience it as ritual. After all LA doesn’t have seasons so much, so it makes sense to have bright events to help people feel the year go by. That’s a big part of the staying power of all these holidays and annual cultural pops. They last because we need them. We need them to help us feel the year go by—to know where we are in time. If we feel a bit floating outside of time, we could stamp our feet to its beat by taking part in yearly rituals a bit more robustly.

In The Wonder Paradox I argue that we are poetic, unlikely beings not well matched to our emotional conditions, and we need help living poetically, following the rhythms of the day—week, year, lifetime —swinging from celebration to celebration to distract us from how mediocre any given day’s celebration may have been. Sometimes we’re the angle on top of the tree but other times nothing works our way, and sometimes everything goes perfectly but we still have a hard day. There’s a Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828) poem I think of here (translation Robert Hass).

New Years Day

Everything is in blossom!

I feel about average.

Keeping a ritual does not mean being actively happy while doing it nor that everything goes right. In any given year, many of us miss a lot of the rituals we enjoy. We didn’t get to the parade, didn’t kiss anyone at midnight, and no candy changed hands. In another way, the full Oscar ritual might include the prep, that is, having seen any of the movies. Or many. I have not. Why? I don’t know. They cost money to see and with all that I can watch that I’m already paying for, I don’t. I guess I could argue that it makes more sense to do the ritual in reverse this way, first finding out which films are most loved and making viewing choices from there. But it’s way more fun to watch them sashay around on their teeter-y feet when you know the material. Well, isn’t it always.

The Issa poem suggests that even when it all comes true, it’s still you, or me, it’s still our scuffed up old self that shows up for it. That is a warning about that day when it comes, yes. But it is also a word to those who are still yearning for that New Year’s Day when all is in blossom. Even if/when that faultless day comes, you might still “feel about average.” Therefore, it could be crucial that we learn to feel the good of whatever day we are in. BTW I was able to draft this whilst asleep on my seat, as it were, but I took myself a solid nap before for the polish. A matter of poetry rather than prose? Who knows.

What matters is that we recall that life is absurd and odds are you are above average. May your films win and may all your Apple pencils be found!

Stay well and I shall return to encourage you next week.

love,

Jennifer

Happy? A Quiz

Dear Bleaders,

I know I said I’d be blighting (blog writing) on Thursdays, and it’s a Tuesday, but today is the day all this blighting is about – the paperback publication of my latest book, with a new subtitle, The Wonder Paradox: Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life. It’s twenty essays on what we have lost with the loss of religion, and how poetry can amply fill those losses. Try two paragraphs from the finale of one on welcoming babies.

If the old ways seem awkward now, we’ll need to find new ways to celebrate—especially for when we are flabbergasted and baby-blasted by love and wonder, scared half-daffy, and clinically exhausted. We can’t believe we’ve done this. Or that we can give all that needs to be given. Yet, we can’t believe our luck so far, either, holding the tiny new being. All year long we see the light in the garden break fire against the greenery and stone, hope and spleen, and can’t believe the luck of it, to be so situated as to see the light like this, just as it is today. You deserve a moment to stop everything and celebrate it all.

In this crazy, mixed-up world, we are all snowplow babies. Then summer comes and the greenery displaces snow with the boundless intention of youth with something to prove. The garden is ephemeral, yet Brooklyn is perennial. Something between the garden and the light is Brooklyn. The garden is what is created by our strange, sustained astonishment, after all these years.

The book is not this lyrical all the time; still I have devoted all of my writing attention for eight years to each sentence in The Wonder Paradox. The book has all my jokes, all my ideas, all my perspective shifts for that span of nearly a decade.

I’m hoping hoppingly that something here grabbed you with enough of a bear hug from The Wonder Paradox for you to be propelled to go and get yourself a copy. Now in paper! Easier to carry around or flop into bed with! Here’s some more (slightly edited) from the book – a quiz!

How do your religious holidays work? Let’s start with a quick self-examination of the major religious holidays in your life. Note down at least one or two answers to these, if you can—it will help to have some answers inked in already when you come to the next part.

·       What holidays would you feel uncomfortable missing entirely?

·       What holidays do you personally work hardest on, in whatever way?

·       Are there holidays you dread?

·       Which holiday most delights you?

·       Are there holidays outside your tradition that you find attractive?

·       Which holidays do people in your life care about most?

Now consider that each holiday has distinct traits, which I’m calling their cabinet of culture, containing all a holiday’s traditional doings, and none of the doctrines. Think of the cache of treats and traits that appear on major holidays, in brief abundance, and then vanish for a year. Charting this in more detail brings lasting insight. To that end, I’ve worked out a template to organize the holiday features onto shelves.

Specific Holiday

A singular drink, type of meal, kind of sweet,

particular music, special plant, featured beast,

decoration and light, way to greet,

style of dress, featured hue or two,

an outdoor crowd event,

a signature live show, a film, an avatar,

and a quick rebellion where the usually tame

are allowed to be hellions,

or the rich serve food to the poor.

Not all religions have something for each cabinet compartment as I’ve just sketched them. Ancient holidays have had time to accrue traits, so the cabinet of such a holiday can be overflowing. Newer ones can be comparatively spare.

Here’s a cabinet limited to one example for each feature, based on my local experience.

Christmas Cabinet

Eggnog, baked ham, sugar cookies,

“White Christmas,” potted poinsettia, reindeer,

window candles, “Merry Christmas!”

dressy casual, green and red,

town-square tree lighting,

The Nutcracker Suite, It’s a Wonderful Life,

Santa, kids ripping open presents,

Donations to nonprofits soar.

Once you’ve jotted down a few cabinets for the holidays you listed above, take a look and see if the holidays you love have full cabinets, or mostly empty ones. What patterns do you see? Here are some questions you might ask yourself:

·       Does decoration and light tend to mean a lot in the holidays you like?

·       Do you love or dread the holidays for which you work the hardest?

·       What do your favorite holidays have in common?

·       Do you show up for your favorite holiday features, or often miss out on them?

·       Do you create the holiday features?

A map helps us see the land, and a graph helps us see ourselves. A holiday cabinet is a bit of both, but all yours, so you can reach in and add things, or take things away. Wouldn’t it be kind of amazing to have even one more click of clarity and power over how your year takes care of you? Do the people you love have this clarity and power? Do you? I don’t have all the clarity I want and even less power, but when I work on this I get a bit more insight, and it’s worth it. 

love,

Jennifer

You Likely Need Vitamin D and a Poem -- Putting the Spring in Spring Holidays

Dear Bleaders,

Bored? Listless at the grocery story? Pale and beyond yourself? Perhaps you need a holiday.

Do I mean the tanning and nothingness holiday of “vacation”? Sure - but not only that. What I’m talking about is religious and cultural holidays. If they don’t sound appealing—that’s what needs fixing.

Historically, human beings live from holiday to holiday. A few days after one kind of traditional cookie disappears for a year, there’s a new holiday coming and it’s time to bake its traditional foods. And whether or not you get hot for hotcakes, something likely lights your candle. One of the regular features is rereading a poem, or some kind of short beautiful, stirring text.

But today we’ve got some impoverished holidays. It’s not just that we don’t believe in the supernatural stories that may be associated with the holiday. It’s that each holiday used to mean something specific. It’s a loss.

So when a penance and forgiveness holiday comes around, give some thought to the grudges you are holding, and consider apologizing to anyone you may have harmed. If you are in need of assistance with these things, I’d consider doing what so many have done before you. Most common for forgiveness is fasting and washing/bathing. Do the ritual from the religion you grew up with, or one to which you feel a connection.

I wrote The Wonder Paradox to answer some of the persistent questions from the Q & A of my Doubt talks. One thing I discovered was that a lot of people who no longer believe in God or the supernatural still take part in religion—and a lot of them feel guilty about it. Whether it’s as small a matter as showing up to a Christmas party, or attending a church wedding, or as large as taking part in many church doings, or even being the priest. As a historian, it seemed clear to me that unbelievers have also inherited these religious traditions, and their engagement with it is just as valid as is that of a stone-cold believer.

Still, we have to give some real thought to what these holidays mean, and we have to ask ourselves what words we repeat as part of their ritual. If no text in the holiday leaves you carbonated or at least gently stirred, than add a poem. Find one of your favorite poems, or go looking for a spring poem, and make a point of reading it on the holiday.

We’ve got a bunch of holidays coming up in the next two months. There’s Ramadan, Easter, Passover, and Earth Day. These include subholidays and traditions of fasting, feasting on meats, gorging on candy, and eating odd symbolic items, such as bitter herbs dipped in salt water, or chocolate eggs and bunnies. There is not much to say about Earth Day, as it is a young holiday and doesn’t have a ton of traditions. It’s a perfect moment for a poem.

Not that it’s spring yet in NYC which is where I’m at. One day it’s warm, and you’re sprung and springy living sigh to sigh, next day it’s frigid again and your soul goes rigid and you’re wry and dry again.

For that sense of almost being said, almost seen, here’s a classic spring poem by the great Philip Larkin.

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread,

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too,

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Maybe in my next post I’ll say a bit about why this poem is such a classic, is so beloved. Here I’ll just say that the strange second line is all potential energy, conjuring the almost spring place we are in now. It’s peculiarity stops us. And what of “Their greenness is a kind of grief.”? The word green has so many meanings and all of them can break our hearts, innocence, growth, watching growth from afar. Knowing that innocence will meet with grief, we grieve.

Any thoughts? Have you got a poem or lines of literature that you think of in spring?

Oh and one last thing. We changed the subtitle of The Wonder Paradox. It was

The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives

which I loved but is a lot to say, with

The Wonder Paradox: Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life

which is shorter and somehow more to the point.

Of course a lot of holidays don’t go off the way we want them to and we can get the sads. Just remember there are a lot of people like you and we’re all boiling in the same cauldron, I’m sorry it gets so scorchy but there are so many of us that the water might lose its boil, if you see what I’m saying. It’s an anxious world out there and in here but when I try hard to believe in the inner lives of other people, and follow the circuit of the seasons, I survive. See you next Thursday.

love,

Jennifer

Dear Bleaders (blog readers),

When I went to write this blog post, the website offered me AI to write it! I said, “Okay, write a post in my voice talking about my term Poetic Atheism.” Except for the my voice part, it did very well. I mean, it doesn’t even take a stab at sounding me-like, but it has an appealing clarity. I don’t use phrases like “At its core” for example because it feels wooden, overused, though I realize such phrases can make readers feel comfortable. You can relax when many of the words are not load bearing. I’m just a bird of another feather.

Here’s what the AI wrote for me:

Poetic Atheism, a notion I invented, seeks to reconcile the mystery and wonder of existence without the reliance on supernatural beliefs. As an advocate of reason and poetry, I find solace in the marriage of these seemingly disparate realms.
At its core, Poetic Atheism invites us to embrace the beauty of the natural world, the richness of human emotions, and the complexity of our shared experiences without the need for divine intervention. It encourages us to marvel at the universe's grandeur, to find meaning in the fleeting moments of existence, and to cultivate a deep appreciation for the interconnectedness of all life forms.
In essence, Poetic Atheism invites us to be present in the world, to engage with the complexities of existence, and to find beauty and purpose in the everyday moments that define our lives. It is a celebration of the human experience, a tribute to the power of language and imagination, and a reminder of the enduring capacity of the human spirit to find meaning and inspiration in a world that is both vast and unknowable.
As we continue to explore the boundaries of knowledge and understanding, let us not forget the importance of poetry in shaping our perceptions of the world and our place within it. Let us embrace the tenets of Poetic Atheism as a pathway to greater self-awareness, empathy, and appreciation for the wonders of the natural world.

“Let us not forget the importance of…” I don’t think anyone talks like this anymore, let alone me.

When I wrote The Wonder Paradox I’d started with a proposal for a book called Poetic Atheism. I’d been giving talks on poetic atheism for years. The point was, at first, to explain to the atheist community that science was great but we also need poetry, and to explain to the poet minded that beliefs and unbeliefs matter, to many of us, even if it makes one feel crass or adolescent to speak of these things. It matters keenly to the meaning of life and to the separation of church and state.

When talking about my book, people ask me about my own religious identity and I never know what I’ll say. Most often I start with “Well, I’m a Poetic Atheist, and Jewish. I made up Poetic Atheism. It means an unbelief that turns to the arts for meaning.”

Sometimes I say that I’m a member of the Interfaithless, another term that I made up and decided to go with because it makes me laugh and because the important part is the “inter.” The Interfaithless should be aware of one another, though we may each be alone at a ceremony, each not believing in our own religions, we are joined together if we want to be. I also try “Poetic Realist” because all the others posit a god and then reject him. But the quickest way to be understood is to say I’m a poetic atheist.

From the start poetic atheism was unusual in its friendliness to religious ritual, but as time has advanced, the idea of living a poetic life, partly through poetic ritual, has become key.

The Consciousness Paradox is that the meat, your brain, thinks. The Wonder Paradox is that your brain finds this universe and itself so amazing. It is amazing. Sitting with that amazingness, the awesome, the sublime, is not easy on your own; poetry can help supply the trick of it. It can help us get out of our selves and into the mind of someone else, and we can stay there, quiet a while.

I’m inviting you to meet me back here every Thursday for a little thought balloon, so I thought I’d better explain myself a bit to anyone new. I’m suddenly blogging again because my book The Wonder Paradox is coming out in paperback on March 5 and preorders can really get the ball bouncing. But I expect to keep going for at least a year. We’ll see. I suddenly feel capable, writing-wise, and I kind of haven’t for a while, so this is all a roulette roll, but obvs, at the moment I think the engine is up and running and I can talk about a year. Anyway, I’ll be here next Thursday and I hope to see you.

love,

Jennifer

Share

Party with the Interfaithless

Dear Bleaders (blog readers),

When I went to write this blog post, the website offered me AI to write it! I said, “Okay, write a post in my voice talking about my term Poetic Atheism.” Except for the my voice part, it did very well. I mean, it doesn’t even take a stab at sounding me-like, but it has an appealing clarity. I don’t use phrases like “At its core” for example because it feels wooden, overused, though I realize such phrases can make readers feel comfortable. You can relax when many of the words are not load bearing. I’m just a bird of another feather.

Here’s what the AI wrote for me:

Poetic Atheism, a notion I invented, seeks to reconcile the mystery and wonder of existence without the reliance on supernatural beliefs. As an advocate of reason and poetry, I find solace in the marriage of these seemingly disparate realms.
At its core, Poetic Atheism invites us to embrace the beauty of the natural world, the richness of human emotions, and the complexity of our shared experiences without the need for divine intervention. It encourages us to marvel at the universe's grandeur, to find meaning in the fleeting moments of existence, and to cultivate a deep appreciation for the interconnectedness of all life forms.
In essence, Poetic Atheism invites us to be present in the world, to engage with the complexities of existence, and to find beauty and purpose in the everyday moments that define our lives. It is a celebration of the human experience, a tribute to the power of language and imagination, and a reminder of the enduring capacity of the human spirit to find meaning and inspiration in a world that is both vast and unknowable.
As we continue to explore the boundaries of knowledge and understanding, let us not forget the importance of poetry in shaping our perceptions of the world and our place within it. Let us embrace the tenets of Poetic Atheism as a pathway to greater self-awareness, empathy, and appreciation for the wonders of the natural world.

“Let us not forget the importance of…” I don’t think anyone talks like this anymore, let alone me.

When I wrote The Wonder Paradox I’d started with a proposal for a book called Poetic Atheism. I’d been giving talks on poetic atheism for years. The point was, at first, to explain to the atheist community that science was great but we also need poetry, and to explain to the poet minded that beliefs and unbeliefs matter, to many of us, even if it makes one feel crass or adolescent to speak of these things. It matters keenly to the meaning of life and to the separation of church and state.

When talking about my book, people ask me about my own religious identity and I never know what I’ll say. Most often I start with “Well, I’m a Poetic Atheist, and Jewish. I made up Poetic Atheism. It means an unbelief that turns to the arts for meaning.”

Sometimes I say that I’m a member of the Interfaithless, another term that I made up and decided to go with because it makes me laugh and because the important part is the “inter.” The Interfaithless should be aware of one another, though we may each be alone at a ceremony, each not believing in our own religions, we are joined together if we want to be. I also try “Poetic Realist” because all the others posit a god and then reject him. But the quickest way to be understood is to say I’m a poetic atheist.

From the start poetic atheism was unusual in its friendliness to religious ritual, but as time has advanced, the idea of living a poetic life, partly through poetic ritual, has become key.

The Consciousness Paradox is that the meat, your brain, thinks. The Wonder Paradox is that your brain finds this universe and itself so amazing. It is amazing. Sitting with that amazingness, the awesome, the sublime, is not easy on your own; poetry can help supply the trick of it. It can help us get out of our selves and into the mind of someone else, and we can stay there, quiet a while.

I’m inviting you to meet me back here every Thursday for a little thought balloon, so I thought I’d better explain myself a bit to anyone new. I’m suddenly blogging again because my book The Wonder Paradox is coming out in paperback on March 5 and preorders can really get the ball bouncing. But I expect to keep going for at least a year. We’ll see. I suddenly feel capable, writing-wise, and I kind of haven’t for a while, so this is all a roulette roll, but obvs, at the moment I think the engine is up and running and I can talk about a year. Anyway, I’ll be here next Thursday and I hope to see you.

love,

Jennifer

Love Potion - Happy Valentine's Day

Do things always work out in the end, for everyone? For the longest time we just don’t know. For the longest time it’s touch and go for all but the luckiest few. Things do not always work out in the end. As is true with the Capulet and her Montague. 

I think you should have access to a luck-in-love potion. I don’t usually even play with magic power, as I don’t believe in it enough to play, but love was an exception. I felt highly uncertain about love for much of my life. I was anxious to know how I was going to solve the problem of myself. Somewhere over all those varied years, I made a few love potions and rituals for myself and others. It was total play, but with the reasonable intent of changing how we felt.

I like to start from the mood of Shakespeare’s witchy spells. That means that without going so far as “eye of newt,” you conjure a weirdness. You want a for instance? Here’s one I’ve written just for you. It is a simple Love Please Come Again Potion*:

Into a small blue cup, mix a walnut shell’s worth of apple-cider vinegar with the amount of grape juice that would fill a hamster (I don’t mean satiate a hamster but fill the skin of one wherefrom the hamster had been removed). Add crumbs rubbed from the bottom of a slice of cake. Do not eat the cake. Add water until the cup fills above the rim. Say your love poem while carefully drinking this libation creation. Do not spill. When you have finished drinking, face east (if above the equator; if below, face north), and shake out the sillies. If you perform these acts with your whole heart, your love life will improve within forty-eight hours, or possibly longer, if it works at all.** Good luck.

[*If you’ve never been in love before, it’s the same potion but at the end you can eat the cake. **You can double the spell’s power if you take a shower and leave the house.]

The question of love poems to offer to people you are trying to seduce, ahem, people you have fallen in love with, is more complicated. Your beloved does not want a used love poem. There can be a poem that you share with many, ahem, friends, as long as you introduce it as a poem you have loved and shared for a long time. If you want to do something that makes a person feel that a poem is specific to him or her, I think you have to find a new poem. I know, I know. It’s all touch and go. So make a commitment to a poem and stay with it.

Literature can coax us through poetic experiences of love that are mighty instructive, and it is a curriculum hard to communicate in straightforward prose. It’s not just that people you trust will break your heart (they will); and that it doesn’t all work out for everyone (it doesn’t); and that when love does work out, it requires a remarkable degree of compromise (it does). It’s the degree to which we fail to understand the other person; the gulf of unknowing between us all. A love isn’t all about understanding. It’s about knowing and getting known anyway.

Two people don’t become one, brains don’t work that way, the motormouths that they are, they never stop inventing schemes of personal interest, and imaging the possibility of its own need for mistrust. Literature teaches us that everyone has such a chatty Cathy of a brain. They stream different kinds of chatter, very different sometimes, but here is what is always true: no one’s actions and thoughts match up neatly, whether it is because we are trying hard to be good, or because we are lying.

So it’s about getting to know and be known anyway. Let’s all go sit under the cherry trees in spring and tell each other our stories and let the petals grace us. The season of cherry-tree petals is a fast one, but it comes back every year.

Once again, all of the above is in the Love chapter in The Wonder Paradox, FSG, out in paperback March 5 with Picador. Happy Valentine’s Day!

love,

Jennifer

Bright Star - Let's walk through this iconic Keats love poem

It is hard to write a poem about romantic love that is both happy and any good. True love is fascinating from the inside, but frequently the experience looks a tad naive from the outside. When we are crazy about someone, and they are wild about us, we are true believers.

I can think of a few poems that center on that over-thrilled moment of new-love bliss. They solve the problem by being explicitly stuck in time. Sappho’s shivers of longing happen in the instant she is struck by hotness.

I think of the English Romantic poet John Keats as writing more about time than about love, but it came up a lot. His sonnet “Bright Star” is a best-loved love poem.

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

It is one sentence long and the volta, the change in argument, comes right in the middle, with a No. In the first half he says he wishes he could be Polaris, the bright star around which the whole sky seems to turn. He wants to timelessly watch Earth roll by. But No. Instead, he wants to stay forever with his head on his love’s breast, feeling it rise and fall with her breath. Presumably she’s asleep. He’s too excited to sleep. He decides that instead of the whole world as it ever changes, forever, he’d like just this breast, just this moment.

As with the other recent posts, all of the above is from the Love chapter in The Wonder Paradox, FSG, 2023, out in paper March 5.

Soon she'll be chasing... here's hoping

Love poetry is not at the center of contemporary poetry. One reason that love poetry makes many poets check for the exits is that we trust art that is about ambiguous feelings and romantic love poetry isn’t.

Much great love poetry, then, is partly about how difficult love is. Sappho is the great love poet of the ancient world; indeed, she is the great poet of the ancient world—she was called the greatest at the time. In one poem she is lovesick and prays for Aphrodite’s help. She imagines the love goddess appearing to say, of the longed for beloved,

if she’s escaping

Soon she’ll be chasing; if she’s refusing

your gifts, she shall give them.

Note the volatility. She is not wishing for love perfected, but for the vector of the chase to change direction. Let her chase me instead of me having to chase her. At the end of the poem, she wishes to be done with “this merciless craving,” and echoing Homer who lived a century before, she asks Aphrodite to be, once again, “my own helper in Battle.”

The above is from the love chapter of The Wonder Paradox: Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life, FSG, out in paper March 5, on sale now in hardback. Yes we changed the subtitle, I loved the old one but this is better. I’m posting on love on the run up to Valentine’s Day.

love,

Jennifer

Eight Paradoxes of Love, a Quiz

Why is romantic love so difficult? Perhaps it’s the paradoxes. I can’t solve them, but I can attempt to sketch them.

Why don’t you assign a rating, 0, 1, 2, or 3, for each of these, to indicate how much of an issue the particular love paradox is for you, personally.

1. The paradox of love is that it can be so intensely one-sided and can then switch sides.

2. The paradox of love is that it comes with strong feelings of “forever,” and yet, often after experiencing these feelings, we leave.

3. The paradox of love is that we want someone who fixes the wounds of youth, and yet we also fall for people who repeat those wounds and hence bring us to primordial passion.

4. The paradox of love is that it is so ethereal and generous and yet so deeply embodied and hungry; angelic and yet animal.

5. The paradox of love is that we know the ones we love, know them in a profound way, and yet we may lose the ability to see the way they appear to others.

6. The paradox of love is that it can be so fixated on a single person out of billions, even over a whole life, and yet for many people it happens with a few different people over a lifetime. 

7. The paradox of love is that when a romance is over, even when you want the affair to end, your body may choose to grieve it most grievously.

8. The historic paradox of love is that in the history before modern times most people either had their spouse chosen by their parents or had choice, but it was limited by class and religion. You were always limited to the people you might possibly meet on foot, by travel, or connection. Until now, the problem of love has never been an abundance of choice. The paradox is that scarcity was a problem for love, and as it turns out, so is abundance.

If your number is sixteen or higher you are an intuitive, philosophical being with high love prospects. If your number is between fifteen and ten you know how to play the game, but you are above it, a prince among men. If your number is nine to five you are bright as a new penny but might want to look around a bit more. Those in the four to zero camp should see their counselor immediately.

Joking. The point of the numbers you gave these are to get a good look at what you are thinking and feeling now, and importantly, to come back to these paradoxes in a while and see if your concerns change and how static or dynamic are your feelings about love.

All of the above is from the Love chapter in The Wonder Paradox, which will be out in paper on March 5, and is on sale now in hardcover.

B Mine

When you are looking for a love poem to offer or to savor yourself, don’t be troubled if you don’t agree with everything the poem says—or seems to be saying—about love. You can offer the whole poem but specify that it is the charm of a single apt phrase that made you share it.

The truth is, it’s better if the poem you share has parts that disturb you. Go ahead and pretend they don’t exist when you are giddy in love. The other parts of the poem will come in useful when a bad romance day hits us with its cricket bat of sadness.

By the same broken token, when choosing a poem for your own savoring, it is much better if the poem bothers you in spots. Those irritants change over time and remind you of your former selves in ways that are otherwise unlikely to happen. You can’t map a projection forward without charting a few plot points. Plot a few chart points.

All of the above is from The Wonder Paradox, the chapter on Love and choosing a single love poem as Your love poem. The paperback will be out on March 5, and the hardcover is on sale, nearly half off. Or try the audio! Running up to Valentine’s Day I intend to post on Love.

Thanks for reading.

—Jennifer

What is YOUR "I want" song?

Hi All!

It’s February, the time of the year that can stall even the most stalwart of engines. But the birds in Brooklyn today are loudening up the clouds with one of those hopeless song explosions they do now and again, with everybody chirping and nobody listening. To be alive today is to be chirping or not chirping, listening or not listening, it’s unusual to just “be” without reference to the interwebs one way or another. What are we all saying? What is the chirping about? Life is a musical but we are all playing the lead and we all have our own “I want” song. You know the idea that in musicals the lead roles each begin with an “I want” song – a song that tells us what we are looking for, what the stakes are, what’s stopping us.

It’s interesting to think about what an “I want” song does to a show, and to a life. In a show it drives the bus of the narrative. Once you’re on the bus, you pretty much know where you are going. The bus offers a lot, but it also limits. Once your identity is locked in an I want song about winning a football scholarship, it’s hard to see what else you might have sung about. Our dreams come from somewhere, surely innate personal taste accounts for some of it–the dull of tongue often aren’t chefs- but we can also assume that childhood influences both conscious and subconscious, are what defines what we want. It can be changed.

In life we sometimes get what we want, but often when change comes, we just get a new I want song. I’m sure I’m not alone in getting sick of the sound of my own chirping of wanting. I’d rather be the fake Wizard of Oz, handing out hearts to lovelorn animatronics, and explaining to young people the power of good shoes, etc, than to be one of Dorothy’s crew, all hungry for something they can describe in one word. Maybe it would take the pressure off our one top goal if we took on another. It feels like asking for a lot. If I want my art to be discovered, according to musical logic, I shouldn’t also desperately want to find my long lost sister. How to not get stuck on a bus? Ride two buses at once. Not possible in reality, but normal in the poetic. Which is where we are.

Anyway, I just felt like saying hello. The paperback of my new book, The Wonder Paradox, comes out March 5, so I’m intending to be writing here more often, mulling over ideas. The Wonder Paradox is made of clear writing and ideas but is also willing to start new thoughts, even if they are strange at first. 

If you read this, let me know where you are in the world? Do you have an “I want” song?

Bye for now!

Jennifer

Tonight! Virtual event with Maggie Smith - free 7pm-8pm ET

Tonight! Virtual event with Maggie Smith!

Hi I hope you can join us!

Maggie Smith’s new memoir You Could Make this Place Beautiful is an amazing book and I’m thrilled we’ll be talking about it and my new book The Wonder Paradox tonight at At Home with Literati! Live and virtual at 7pm tonight.

Matthew Zapruder and I Talk Wonder and Poetry

Matthew Zapruder and I talk about our new books on LITHUB! We wrote questions back and forth for a month or so. A really generative and fun conversation. His new book is Story of a Poem and there is a lot of overlap between our subjects. How do you say what you don’t know yet? How do we find out about who we are and what the world seems to be? Poets try. All artists perhaps try this way and that, throw away a lot, keep what feels true, and don’t always resolve the problem when opposing things feel true. Poets especially seem to move forward in this paradox-preserving way. Poets have ways of dismantling old metaphors that can rule the way we think about whole fields of knowledge and remembering to ask further questions of many varieties.

To the Best of Our Knowledge - Wonder

Finding sacred meaning through poetry. So glad to see how this turned out!

To The Best of Our Knowledge

Good Morning Edition

I’m on NPR’s The Morning Edition today for World Poetry Day! I spoke to them about these wonderful words by Rainer Maria Rilke from his book Letters to a Young Poet:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Well, they didn’t use that part, but I’ll leave it here for your enjoyment. In the Introduction to The Wonder Paradox I wrote about how this Rilke quote changed my life. Enjoy!

Otherppl Podcast

I’m so happy I got to be on Brad Listi’s otherppl podcast again! (I was on once before talking about my book Stay.) We had a great time talking about art and meaning, life and wonder. Let us know what you think!

The Grey Area on Vox

Sean Illing and I talk about Poetry as Religion and the poetics of life in general on his terrific podcast The Grey Area on Vox.

Poetry as Religion - The Grey Area