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Feb. 6, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:43
633 Creative Writing

Listener questions on magic typing

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well, it's Steph. It is the Tuesday, 7th, 8th of February 2007, and I'm not going to go on with the topic we were talking about previously.
Why, that's just no fun at all.
In fact, instead, I'm going to go on to something that's just a little bit more fun for me, and I think we've covered the other topic before just fine about how We end up with the magic genes and the magic word and the magic guns.
I think we've gone through that fairly extensively.
So let me know if it remains baffling and we can perhaps do another one.
But for them, mateys, I thought that I would respond to a series of questions that a listener asked me about a poet.
And I know that poetry is considered to be A bit fruity, a bit obtuse, a bit effet, shall we say.
Even the word effet is in fact a bit effet.
But I think that poetry, if done right, is a very, very important discipline.
It's a very powerful way of communicating ideas and of communicating a unity between emotion and thought.
For me, at least, the best poetry works that way, that there's passion and there's also reflection and reason and so on.
And, so, Death Be Not Proud by John Donne, which you may or may not know, ends with the lines, spoiler!
It ends with the lines that, you know, after you die, thou too death shalt die, right?
So the idea is that when you die, you move up to heaven, John Donne was religious, of course, 17th century poet, naturally, so that we fear death, and death is all-powerful, but then when we die and we ascend to heaven, Death is vanquished.
Death itself dies and we live on forever.
And it's, you know, it's a nice poem, beautifully written, and so on.
The only problem is that it's completely false.
So that's something that is, I think, fairly important to poetry.
I mean, to me, the reason that poetry has degraded over the 20th century to the point where you get, well, let's not even, get crazy people like Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes Who, when they met, she bit him on the cheek.
I mean, she was that deranged.
And she committed suicide, and he was, of course, rankled by depression and a real playboy.
Never has a poet so completely been defined by a nice head of hair and a big jaw.
And then he was unfaithful to his wife, and then his wife killed herself and their children, and then the mistress that he left his wife for also killed herself and their children, and just a complete, morbid, psychotic mess.
Anyway, there's lots of things that we can talk about with the lives of artists, but...
There is not a lot of, I think, integrity and virtue in the lives of modern artists.
That's sort of my blanket nonsensical statement for what it's worth.
But I think that the best poems are those which unite feeling and thought.
And I've never been able to achieve exactly what I want.
I can't achieve the startlingness of language that people consider to be the mark of a great poet.
I don't think that I ever will.
But I think what I can achieve is some unity of thought and feeling that is true.
And the startlingness of language where words are arranged in such a way that they evoke a very powerful sensual reaction.
One I remember from a poem I read when I was younger.
The bladed air. Air that's so cold it's like a sword.
The bladed air. That's very nice.
And there's dozens of others, but I won't bore you with all of them.
Actually, hundreds of others come to think of it.
But I, sort of in my own way, have been laboring on this sort of unity of thought and feeling as a poet, and when I say as a poet, I mean as a sheer and mere hobbyist.
I do my best, but I see sort of what's missing in the poems, and what I see that's there is a boiled-down, rational perspective.
That's sort of the way that I try to work with it.
And the reason that poetry has become, for me at least, such a degraded art, you don't get the Alexander Popes in the 20th century.
Alexander Pope was a rather twisted little munchkin who was a fairly horrible man, but wrote some absolutely glorious poetry.
He wrote a poem on man that's just great, and perhaps I'll read it at some point.
I believe it's in the public domain at this point.
In endless error hurls the glory, jest, and riddle of the world.
Yeah, no, just a wonderful series of stanzas.
And poets do the best, or gain the most traction.
I think this is true of all artists.
The poets gain the most traction when they appeal to people's bigotries.
So, when in the...
I'm going to make this a whole thing on poetry, because that's a whole other thing, but the fact that philosophy has disintegrated in the 20th century to a series of concept-destroying, barely-reasoned, anti-life, anti-mind rants...
If I may say so. I'm not expecting you to believe that.
That's just my particular perspective.
Or into a series of Hugh Padgham-style notes to myself, insights in the Nietzschean manner, where you get these wonderful glimmers of signposts to truth, but nothing that ever coheres into a map.
Here's a postcard.
You know, go make a map.
And nobody ever makes the map, but people are certainly entranced by the glittering postcards, and that is where I think philosophy has gotten to, and as a result, Poetry has fragmented into obtuseness or sentimentality.
And those particular approaches, it's what happens when people are not rational.
They become obtuse or domineering or obscure or evocative without any payoff, right?
Nothing but teasing. Or they become...
And there's a certain edge of that which becomes repulsive.
Think of the NEA grant type arts, right?
The Piss Christ and all this kind of stuff.
The crucifix hung in a bucket of urine, and the meat dress, or a woman wore a dress made out of meat, and stuff like that, right?
Stuff that's just, it's insane, right?
This is like deranged people.
So, that is what happens when people don't reason.
When people don't reason, they have to find substitutes.
When people don't reason, they have to find substitutes.
And I would say that most of the history of thought, most of the history of psychology, and a good chunk of the history of philosophy is all about describing without knowing the substitutes that human beings come up with for a lack of capacity to think critically.
And just about everything that you read or see or whatever in society is...
Confessions, once you learn how to see them, they're confessions of what it's like to live without thinking critically but not wanting to know that you don't know how to think critically.
There's this woman who did, I can't remember her name, she created the character Pat on Saturday Night Live.
And she is doing this Life Without God.
I can't even remember the title.
Oh my God, what a terrible reference.
Living Without God.
And she says, after...
I mean, she goes through all of the twists and turns of a human being without reason who is trying to find some coherence, right?
Which is sort of impossible. It's like praying to understand the nature of matter rather than, say, bringing meals before some breakfast.
But she talks about, and I won't go into the whole thing, but she goes through all of these things, God is love, God is nature, God is this, God is that, and then she goes into Deepak Chopra land, where he talks about how quantum physics has proved that God is whatever, who knows, right?
And then she takes a course in quantum physics, and she realizes that Deepak Chopra, as she puts it, is completely full of shit, right?
Which is, of course, exactly what you'd expect.
And... Fortunately, though, in the course on quantum physics, quantum mechanics, she gets exposed to the scientific method, to thinking critically with reason and the supremacy of physical evidence.
And that is a real eye-opener for her.
And this is, of course, what most people experience in their lives.
We're not taught how to think critically.
We're taught how to dissect plants.
We're taught how to sing the national anthem.
We're taught how to play soccer.
We're taught how to do math.
We're taught some nonsensical, disjointed propaganda about history.
We're taught an enormous amount of useless things.
We're taught how to vacuum. We're taught how to wash dishes.
We're taught how to barbecue.
But we're not taught how to think, right?
Everybody has all the time in the world.
Society as a whole has all the time in the world to teach us all the useless things that can be conceived of.
But the one thing that it never quite sees its way fit to finding the time to do is to teach us how to think critically.
And the reason for that, my friends, should by this point be completely obvious.
They do not teach us to think critically because the first people we would criticize would be the teachers.
Which is really what this podcast series is to a large degree all about.
So, in poetry there's been a real fragmentation and a loss of respect for poetry.
Because poetry has become merely ornamental.
Because philosophy is not teaching people how to think critically, how to think logically.
Then people become disconnected from reality in the conceptual way.
In the perceptual way, we're still driving cars, we still fill out our taxes, we grab a ballpoint pen rather than our cat's paw to write our signature or something.
So, perceptually, we live in reality.
Conceptually, we are in a complete fog.
And a reactive fog.
A negative fog.
An anti-rationality fog.
A biting fog, if I might put it so poetically.
Hey, that seems to work. And so, because there's no connection between concepts and reality, people live in a world where abstractions are merely ornamental, utilitarian in a pleasure-based sense, or utilitarian in some efficiency-based sense, but they're fundamentally ornamental.
And because concepts, due to the lack of connection to reality through the anti-rationality and anti-empiricism, anti-scientific method approach of modern philosophy, because concepts have become pretty much ornamental, then this is by the by, this is another reason why people say to you, what are you getting so worked up about?
It's like getting angry over whether Royal Dalton is better than some other damn China figurines that you have to spend your life dusting.
Why are you getting so upset?
That's why it looks crazy to get passionate about something like ethics or freedom or independence, other than in a purely sort of manipulative and rhetorical kind of way.
Presidents could do it, citizens cannot, apparently.
So... There's a fundamental lack of seriousness and lack of belief in the importance of concepts.
They are ornamental in the way that a recipe is ornamental because it's just one of many recipes and your favorite recipe has nothing to do with anyone else likes and so on.
And saying that there's one recipe, there's just one recipe that everybody should eat is considered to be, would be crazy, right?
And so when you say there's just one ethics that everyone should live by, you also sound crazy because...
Concepts have become personalized and so have become ornamentalized.
They're just there for, you know, funsie manipulation, and it's, you know, spice to taste, right?
That's everybody's ethics these days.
Salt to taste, whatever you feel like, you know.
We all recognize that no salt may not be as good, except if you're on a bad, salt-restricted diet, and that too much salt is bad, but other than that, salt to taste.
And so, for me, poetry, which is the union in its best sense of thought and feeling, of reason and feeling, is broken, is broken, has been turned into a bauble, an ornament, a brooch, a glittering nothing, without even the utility of diamonds of being converted to something that can cut glass or being used in an industrial context.
And so poetry has washed away along with philosophy, right?
Who do we have on talk radio is opinionated people, the people who hold up a distorted funhouse increasing mirror, a prism, a laser-like focusing of all of the random bigotries in the world into one core ideology.
The people that we have talking to people about ideas are pundits, are specialists, which always seems to mean somebody who's had some experience Working in government with these particular areas that are being discussed.
We have celebrities.
We have Sean Penn giving his opinion about this, that, and the other.
We have Michael Moore.
We have all of these people.
And they are good orators, many of them.
They are passionate people.
And they have not subjected themselves to the rigor of philosophy, in my view.
They don't work from first principles.
They just go in and wherever they find, sort of in a parasitical manner, right?
Wherever they find a warm patch of damp bigotry, they release their spores, right?
And so you get the bigotry on the left, you get the bigotry on the right, and it's all just the purest nonsense in the world with the caveat that nobody gets challenged.
Nobody gets challenged. And this is why I think this conversation is so magnificent, is that people are genuinely getting challenged in a way that's positive, in a way that I hope is never humiliating to them.
Or at least not to their true self, if I can put that caveat in.
But here we have traction.
Here we have change. Here we have growth.
Because we're working from first principles.
So it's not personal. And because the ideas that we believe in are not ornamental.
I mean, this is my problem with libertarians and with statists and all these sorts of people, or even anarchists who still hang out with a bad family, is that that's all just ornamental, right?
If you think that freedom is about the government, then freedom becomes ornamental, which is why it distorts the personality so much and why it's so fundamentally humiliating to talk about the freedom of citizens while you yourself are enslaved to God or family or whatever.
So here, because thoughts are connected and are designed to be connected, though not imagined to be connected, designed to be connected from the greatest abstracts, truth and justice and virtue and integrity and rationality and so on, All the way down to who you're going to have brunch with on Sunday.
That's sort of what we try to do, is to de-ornamentalize the concepts, to make them your servants rather than very abstract masters.
That's sort of the idea.
They can get you out of brunch with the mom you don't like, right?
That's sort of the idea behind these concepts, that they're going to have some traction in the real world, in your life, and you don't end up being a slave to freedom in the hopes that somehow, a few generations from now, people will be free.
It's not particularly going to be a freeing situation, and of course it hasn't worked throughout all of human history, which is why we need a different approach.
So a couple of questions about this poem, or writing technique in general.
Was this poem written out of a process of prior conscious deliberation?
No. This poem was written because a friend of mine's father had died, and it's actually a woman, and I offered to write something for his funeral, and I ended up being unable to attend it because I was on a business trip, and it didn't cancel because I was shallow.
And, or shallower, let's say.
So no, I offered to write the poem.
I was in a poetry writing mode at this point, and so I thought it would be a fitting topic.
I asked her some questions about his life, and he was a construction worker, and then became a construction foreman and built all these homes and so on.
So no, it's not prior conscious deliberation, and I certainly didn't have the thesis that I described a few podcasts ago.
I did not have this thesis down.
So, then the next question is, do you always employ that process when you write poetry, or do you see any value in letting the words flow?
Absolutely, letting the words flow is very, very important.
A poem is a boiled-down set of decades-long thought, for me at least.
That's really the great ideal of poetry.
It's a meal in pill form.
Actually, it's almost a meal in atomic form.
It's ten years of beating in a pill form.
So it's heavily boiled down.
So letting the words flow is very, very important.
But it's very much like being an athlete.
When you go out to win Wimbledon, You are not thinking, overanalyzing your shots.
You're supposed to go out and let your game flow.
But why is it that you're able to let your game flow?
Well, you're able to let your game flow because you've been practicing for 20 years.
So there's a great bit in On Writing where Stephen King talks about his wife's poetry.
And there was this thing in the 60s.
It's like, there's no mountain.
Then there is a mountain.
Then there's, like, no mountain again, man.
And that was really considered to be how poetry works.
You know, bang, you get this eruption and then you're done.
And that's certainly not how it's worked for me.
I find that I'm only really getting into writing poetry about every five to seven years or so.
Five to seven years in general in life, I will not write any poetry.
Why? Because I'm still thinking.
So I imagine that a couple of years from now, I'll be able to write poetry about what we're talking about here.
But it takes that long for me, at least, To synthesize it down into compact metaphors and sort of boiled down statements and so on.
So, yeah, letting the words flow is very important, but letting the words flow is not the goal.
Letting the words flow is the end.
The goal is to take your images at night in your dreams seriously, to take your instincts seriously, and to think, to think, to think, to think, to think, to think, to think.
And when all of that occurs, and there's something that moves you that you want to write about, then sure, let the words flow, but that's not what you can aim at.
You don't say, well, I don't need to practice because I'm going to go to Wimbledon and let my game just flow.
No, you don't aim at letting your game flow at Wimbledon.
The end of all of your practice and all of your prior deliberations is that you can let the words flow in a poem, but it's not what I would aim at.
Do you tend to write your poems in a single sitting, or do you work in them in pieces?
I tend to write my poems in a single sitting, but I'm more than happy to tweak them.
But I'm also very afraid of tweaking them, because I do view that the generative power of my unconscious, or if everyone's unconscious, in creating metaphors is extraordinarily...
It's very, very powerful.
It's a very powerful process or capacity.
So when a poem comes out in a single setting, Then I am certainly happy to tweak it once I sort of analyze and understand the poem and I don't sit there and plot out, here's what I'm going to write, that doesn't work at all.
I'm generally concerned about...
A radical change because I assume, I assume that there's a reason that the words are on the page, right?
I mean, I assume there's some reason that, you know, in the same way that you don't try and rearrange your dreams at night when you analyze them, you just take them as is.
But in this case, it's a little bit different because this is direct communication to others.
So there are certain ways, certain things that are clear to you that aren't clear to others that I think are worth spending some time elucidating a bit more clearly.
But I try not to change any sort of basic content.
Do you brainstorm or fish for poetry ideas, or do they tend to strike you out of the blue?
No, I don't brainstorm or fish for poetry ideas.
I've never found that to be of use.
When something moves me and what happens is I'll just be walking along the street or sitting somewhere or whatever, and an idea for a poem will come.
And I had one recently about the state as a monster, but it hasn't struck me hard enough that I know it's worth working on yet.
So no, they don't exactly strike me out of the blue in that they always tend to be related to what I'm working on conceptually, but it's not the case that they just, you know, the poem erupts full written and so on and I never have to change it.
Your poetry, from the samples provided thus far anyway, seems to have more of an essay-like quality to it.
What do you think of poetry that is more impressionistic or sketch style, say 15 lines or less?
Well, I think it's fine.
I think it's just fine.
I think that some food is a main course and some food is dessert.
And of course, just because I dislike that poetry is only ornamentation, doesn't mean that I dislike poetry as ornamentation.
I wouldn't want to live on a diet of carrot cake, but I like carrot cake, right?
So, that to me, I think it's wonderful and I think it's great.
It's a great exercise. But I don't think that it is something that a poet...
It's sort of like warm-up, it's practice, it scales.
There's nothing wrong with it, and if it's pretty enough, then send it out, right?
Like that Alfred Lott Tennyson poem about the eagle.
It's a wonderful picture, but...
Or tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forest of the night.
It's lovely. What immortal hander I could frame thy fearful symmetry.
I think it's nice, it's pretty, it's wonderful, but oftentimes it doesn't add up to much.
I think in terms of showing the feats of human imagination, it's great.
But I think that it's warm-up stuff, and I think the real meat in poetry is in the main course, which is the thought and emotion put together.
So, you seem to use metaphor more for illustration and sample rather than storytelling.
Is this intentional or just something that felt more natural to you?
Well, I'm not trying to tell a story in my poems.
If I was trying to tell a story, then I would write a story.
So, I'm not trying to tell a story.
I'm trying to sequence images that add up to some kind of wisdom, I think.
You can't... I mean, where syllogisms are possible, then, by all means, let's write a syllogism and let's reason things out.
But how can I communicate to you that death should be close enough To make you live, but not so close that you're paralyzed.
I mean, what conceivable syllogism could I put forward that would convince you of that?
Well, it's not possible to do that.
I think it's a chunk of wisdom that I found helpful to live with death, but not for death, right?
Or as I wrote once, in terms of keeping death at a slighter distance, I wrote, I am not afraid of death.
Where I am, death is not.
Where death is, I will not be.
We shall never meet.
And, of course, that's true.
So, how can I syllogistically convince you, you know, that at what distance to keep death from your thoughts in order not to waste your life through thinking you'll live forever, nor to waste your life by being constantly terrified of dying?
Well, there's no syllogism that's going to make that occur or make that happen.
So, when it comes to passing along a kind of wisdom that is not syllogistic, which is not knowledge-based, but is a little bit more experiential, and a little bit more letting a pendulum settle within your own soul from two extremes, then I can't do that in a syllogistical fashion.
I think that it would, for me, be artificial and a one-note story to do it as a story, and that's why I use a sequence of metaphors.
That I attempt, I mean, the poem's real attempt is to evoke a kind of tenderness or a grief that is informing or informative, but is not paralyzing.
Right? So if the poem was about despair only, then it would be paralyzing.
And if the poem was about nothing but, ours is not the reason why ours is but to do and die, mad, insane, subjugated courage in the face of the barking orders of idiots, or something like that, then it would be It's falsely courageous, right? It would be arrogant.
I fear not to death.
It's like, no, come on, we all don't want to die, right?
I mean, most of us anyway.
So, yeah, it is an illustration of a kind of wisdom, right?
It's a kind of wisdom that I'm trying to communicate and that can't be communicated in a syllogistical fashion.
So what is the trigger for you that would transform, say, a budding essay on Marxist Stalin suddenly into a poem?
Well, it's a metaphor.
Whatever it is, there's a metaphor.
Sting once wrote, the great and eloquent lyrical poet Sting, once wrote about They Dance Alone, which was off the Nothing Like the Sun album about 400 years ago.
That he wanted to write about Pinochet and the slaughters and the genocides that were going on in South America, but he did not have a good metaphor.
You can't just write a song that says, it's bad what's going on in South America.
Unless you're a rapper. But, actually I shouldn't say, some of that stuff's the most lyrically imaginative stuff around, in my view, but...
But he said, I didn't have a metaphor.
And once he found that the only way of protesting that these women had for their husbands or sons who'd been taken away and killed in the gulags was they danced at the funeral as if they were dancing with someone, but they danced alone.
And that's a metaphor that...
He could work with and he could create a sort of theme around and so on.
And I think that's good stuff myself.
I mean, you need a metaphor, whatever it's going to be.
Stalin bad is not a metaphor and communism doesn't work from a fundamental inability to reallocate resources based on price.
It's tough to rhyme with. So yeah, when I get a central metaphor, that does a little bit rise like a kraken from the ocean.
When I do get a central metaphor, then I can work it.
So for this poem, did I interview my friend for this poem, or were some of the direct impressions of the father figuring the poem drawn from my own experiences, too?
Well, no, none of the father stuff was drawn from my own experiences.
I'd actually never watched anybody, well, by the time I'd written this poem, which was about...
Six or seven years ago.
I had never watched anybody die, and I had no direct experience of death.
I'd seen a body when I was a kid once in a car crash, but that's it, right?
Not exactly the most personalized of these kinds of situations.
So I had no direct experience of death.
I never knew my father in any real way.
He's still alive, but, you know, as if that matters, really.
So I didn't have any particular...
I didn't have any particular kinds of images of my own father or any sort of father figure that I knew of.
You could sort of say that it had something to do with the death of God, but since that occurred for me when I was 12 or 13, that's not likely that that sort of hung around that long to be that rich a metaphor.
That would indicate unresolved emotions regarding God.
So, no, the only thing I asked about was, you know, he was married, and he worked in construction, and so on, and that's why I threw some of the stuff in.
But I didn't want an interview to make it a poem about her father, because that would not be wisdom, right?
That would just be knowledge passing, you know?
He was tall, he was hairy.
You know, that's not going to be enough, right?
So I didn't really interview her.
I just asked her a couple of questions.
So I didn't sort of make him a doctor or whatever, but I wanted to keep that kind of stuff as minimalistic as possible so that it would be more universal, right?
The more you make it specific to an individual, blah, blah, blah, you know, right?
So the other question is, how do you keep your own experience from mingling with what you were trying to do for your friend?
Well, and of course that's an excellent question.
You don't want to say, like, I'll write a poem about your father for your father's funeral, and then write, oh, daddy of mine, thou didst leave me in South Africa when I was two, or something like that.
That is not going to be a particularly valuable thing to do for someone else.
But the poem really wasn't for her.
If I'd written the poem for her, it would have been more personalized, more specialized.
The poem is always for the audience, right?
So the poem is for the audience.
Now, the poem itself was written specifically for the audience of a couple of hundred at this gentleman's funeral.
And so from that standpoint, that's who I was talking to.
So I couldn't make things very specific.
I was talking to everyone, not even about their own fathers, but about their own lives.
And once you recognize how much is going to be lost when we die, right?
I mean, the matter retains, as the poem talks about.
The matter stays, but the meaning, which is the most important part of what makes us human, right?
I mean, a rock shares atoms with us, right?
And a plant shares living atoms or cells with us.
And yet, none of those, when they die, you don't lose all of the capacities, all of the meanings, all of the histories, all of the thoughts, all of the...
Whatever goes on in your mind that is lost.
The matter remains, but the meaning and the history is lost.
And that is something that's very important to understand, right?
Because your life is relatively short.
It's long enough that you've got a plan, but it's short enough that you shouldn't waste too much time.
So, the audience was everyone who lives, right?
Fundamentally, the audience is everyone who lives and who thinks and who feels, right?
If all you do is think, then this poem won't mean that much to you.
And if all you're looking for is ornamentation, the poem is going to scold you.
I'm not saying this is true of you, of course, from the questioner, but The poem is going to scold you because you're looking for ornamentation and you are getting something that's much deeper, right?
And I would like to say more powerful, not because the poem is innately so wonderfully powerful, but because at least the thoughts that are expressed in the poem, however well or badly you think they're expressed, the thoughts that are expressed in the poem are deep and powerful.
And that doesn't necessarily mean the poem translates into that.
I think it does, but I'm not going to sort of make a case for the quality of the poem, because that's not what these questions are about, and it's actually kind of irrelevant, right?
The poem is what it is. But the thoughts themselves are deep, insofar as we are beings who accumulate meaning knowing that it's going to be wiped.
We are beings who accumulate meaning knowing that it's going to be wiped.
And it's going to be absolutely, completely, and totally wiped.
I mean, for me, even all these podcasts that are left, you know, like stepping stones across a stormy ocean, these are going to be left, but everything in me that generates these podcasts, that generates these ideas, that communicates them, is all going to go, right? The atoms that are at the root of all of this creation in some incomprehensible manner are going to remain, but...
I myself, as a being, as a soul, as a consciousness, as a mind, is going to completely and totally vanish, never to return.
There will be nothing but ending all over the place.
And yet, I wish to accumulate meaning and I wish to communicate passionately about the truth, though I know that my time here is short and my ending is permanent.
And everybody who's not, you know, functionally retarded has that as a thought at some point or another, that that is, you know, why am I doing all of this?
And we do get these flashes of perspective.
We say, why am I doing all this?
Why? Why am I worried?
And that can be liberating, right?
Why am I worried? Why am I worried?
What really bad things could happen relative to, you know, when I'm dead?
And of course, that is what a lot of old people say.
I wish I'd lived less in fear.
And that, of course, has a lot to do with the choices that I'm working through at the moment about doing this more permanently.
So... We are all aware of these things, but often it's very dizzying and can be quite nauseating to look at our own mortality in this sense and to really grasp that we're going to die.
And to use that as a spur to meaning rather than as a paralytic to meaning is a real challenge.
And I think that a lot of the depression in the world, a lot of the sadness in the world, a lot of the abuse in the world comes from a denial of sort of these basic facts of organic life.
And The Denial of Death is a book that's well worth reading if you get a chance.
And that's why I say in the poem, death is not stalking but approaching.
It's not a hunter but it's coming.
It's not a hunter.
It's not trying to bring you down.
It's not stalking. Like when you're being stalked, Then you feel fear, right?
When you're being stalked by some crazy fan or if you're a deer in the woods and some hunter is closing in on you, you feel fear.
And so if you think that death is stalking you, then that's too close to death, right?
Then that's going to overpower your pleasure in living and your desire to create meaning.
Or as Alan Parson, I think I quoted this once before, but it's something that really struck me in a song.
It says, how can you be so sure?
How can you be so sure?
How can you know what the earth will endure?
How can you be so sure that the wonders you've made in your life will be seen by the millions you follow to visit the side of your dream?
Yeah, that's the line, and that struck me many, many years ago.
It's from Pyramid. It's a 25-year-old album, but a very good album, by the way.
I'm one of the few anti-mystical songs in rock.
And the Mayan panoramas on my pyramid pajamas haven't helped my little problem.
It's a great line.
So... The audience is not her, and it's obviously not her father, and it's not the memory of his father, but it's the future of everyone who's listening.
That sort of the audience is the future self, right?
I mean, I can't talk to the present self because the present self is constantly dying, right?
Or as Richard Dawkins talks about, whatever happened to you 20 years ago, there's no one...
There are no cells, no atoms that were there, right?
I mean, whatever happened to me when I was 20, due to blind natural renewal, there are no atoms or almost no atoms left in my body that were there 20 years ago, which is pretty freaky, but well worth pondering.
So, it's not the present self that I'm talking to.
It's the future self that I'm talking to.
I'm trying to...
Sometimes it's important to live backwards, right?
To look on your deathbed, to imagine your deathbed, and to look backward and say, what will I be happy about having done?
Right? And this is something that's used quite a bit in trying to get people to appreciate and understand how short and how valuable time is.
You know, when people say, well, on your deathbed, you wouldn't...
You don't say to yourself, gee, I wish I'd spent more time at the office or whatever.
And, of course, some people do, right?
They die poor and alone, and I wish I had worked hard or whatever, right?
But... You don't...
It's the same thing I talked about once before with this woman who was retiring, who was throwing out all of the papers from her career 20, 30 years back, and, you know, oh, here's the presentation or the newsletter or the memo or the...
Article that I had to stay and write and miss my son's birthday party, right?
Now I still have the resentment of my son, but it doesn't mean anything, right, to have written this memo and it all gets thrown out and shredded, and that's a very important thing, right, to remember that what seems important right now doesn't really end up being as important as you may think about it, except in terms of things like virtue and ethics and so on, so... So I think that's an important thing.
To look forward into the future and to live your life retrospectively or retroactively, I think, is a very powerful thing to do.
And that's part of the whole Living Richly thing that I talked about in, I think, my very first video.
That life is not a metronome, right?
It doesn't go on forever, right?
It winds down, and what are you going to do with the time that you have left, right?
What are you going to do? And no matter how young you are, you still have only a small amount of time left.
Because a lot of the greatest things in life take quite a bit of preparation, right?
So it's not like when you're 80 you say, hey, I'm going to be a doctor, right?
I mean, or whatever you're going to be.
A lot of things in life take quite a good deal of preparation.
And so if I hadn't decided to be, well, I shouldn't say, oh, what a decision it was.
That's a complete nonsense. If philosophy hadn't decided to make me its bitch when I was 16, then I wouldn't be talking about this too long.
25 years, you know, to prepare for this conversation.
So no matter how young you are, you have less time than you think, right?
Because some of the things in life that are richest and most rewarding take a long time, right?
So... My audience is the future selves of the listeners, right?
I'm trying to, you know, like a bat, right?
I'm trying to set off a pit so that it goes forward into the future, travels back, and you get a view of yourself, as you are now, from your deathbed so that you can make decisions about where you want to go to make that deathbed something that is a satisfying conclusion rather than an embittered ending.
So, the poem is sonar to the deathbed and back.
I can't go beyond the deathbed because there's nothing to listen, right?
Because, well, I'm afraid of what happens after I die.
But, of course, we weren't afraid of what was happening during the Middle Ages before we were born.
So, once we're dead, is it dying or death that bothers you, right?
It's always the central question. The dying is tough, and, of course, pain management is fairly advanced, but governments are definitely making that harder and harder.
So the dying part is certainly the least difficult part that we have to deal with compared to any other time in history and compared to most places around the world.
You don't want to be dying of cancer in Bangladesh and you're poor.
It'd be agony, right? So, yeah, the poem really, at least what it is that I'm trying to do, is I'm trying to bounce...
A sound into the future so that it can come back and so that you can get a sense of the span of time between now and, you know, the final time that an ambulance comes for you, right?
As I said before, every time I drive past an ambulance, an ambulance drives past me, it'd be like, yeah, one day I'm in there and I'm not coming back.
One day I'm in there and that's it.
And I may know it and I may not.
So, the poem is sonar going into the future, or radar going into the future, hitting your deathbed and coming back so that you can see that it's a finite space, so that you can fill it with things that are wonderful.
And by wonderful, I also mean terrifying, right?
Because we are also social beings who are scared of conflict.
And those who aren't scared of conflict tend to be rather anti-social beings.
But anyway, let's not get into that complicatedness now.
But I think it's very important to send an echo into the future to realize that you're going to die and to come back and say, well, okay, I'm 40.
I'm probably going to live to 90.
Maybe I'll live to 60. Maybe I'll live to 41.
I don't know. But I think that based on my family history and the care and take care of my health and so on, I've probably got a good chunk of years.
I'm probably not half done yet.
And, of course, the first 20 years were a complete wash.
So, the poem is sonar, and certainly that's what I'm trying to get a hold of, right?
And that's why the poem ends with the triumvirate, right?
That's why the poem ends with, once I understand what I have lost in my father, then I can understand what I'm going to lose, and then I can understand what others will lose in me, right?
So we go from empathy to the other, to the single other, and this, of course, is the growth of psychological empathy anyway, We go from empathy towards a single other, my father, to empathy towards the self.
And through that, empathy towards all others.
And that doesn't mean sympathy, as we've talked about before.
And that's the psychological progress, of course, of the development of empathy as an infant, right?
We have to have empathy.
We receive empathy, right?
And then we have an empathetic relationship with our primary caregiver, rather usually.
And through that, we develop empathy for ourselves.
And through that, we develop empathy for all other people, right?
And that's the progress.
So that's sort of why...
And again, did I sort of sit down and say, okay, well, I got this self, got the other, got the empathy, and draw all these lines on a graph paper?
No. But once the dream is down, you can tweak these meanings.
I used to be a portrait, like a sketch person, and I always found it very difficult to do the sketch.
It would take forever. But what I really loved doing was, when it was done, looking at the whole thing and making this bit a little darker, making this bit a little lighter, sort of evening out the highlights and making it more aesthetically pleasing all around.
And That was a really enjoyable process for me because the major difficult work was done and now it's just a matter of touch-up.
And that part I've always enjoyed with poems, right?
So once you get the general idea, then you can say, well...
Is there a word that could work better?
How does this work if I pretend that I've never read it before?
What fits and what doesn't?
And is there a word that could be stronger here or more vivid?
But you're not really munging up the poem as a whole.
You're not changing anything fundamental.
It's touch-up. So anyway, that's the process for me, at least, of Of working on a poem.
I hope that this is helpful.
I know that we do have some writers out there, and I think that if you get a chance, I would really think about what it is that you're trying to achieve with the poetry.
Poetry and poems do have to be pretty to some degree, I think, but they do have to, I think, at their best, they do have to unite a thought and feeling And passion, imagery, imagisticness.
It's the full-tailed boogie soul infliction, right?
To me, that's a poem at its most fundamental.
It's got feelings, thoughts, intuition, passion, and all of the things, all of the apparatus that help us, or at least are trying to help us along the path to truth.
So I hope that that helps and makes some sense out of what it is, at least, that I'm trying to do.
And I hope that if you are interested in writing Poems, then I hope that that helps.
It certainly has been the case for me that I've never really had much luck or taken much pleasure in short stories because you can't unite, for me at least, thought and feeling in short stories very effectively.
But in a sort of very comprehensive way, that for me requires either a poem or a novel.
Things very short or things rather long.
Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to your donations.
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