Transcript for Episode 37
Elise:
My guests today are Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger and Corey Sparks. Kerilyn is assistant professor of English and the director of The Great Conversation program at Gordon College. She specializes in medieval literature, particularly medieval mystics, and the connections between language and experience, between metaphor and materiality. She's published on the Pearl Poet and Julian of Norwich, and most recently reflected on the Lenten practices of fasting and denial for Christianity today. Along with the Dean of Spiritual and Religious Life at Middlebury College, she has led a months-long interfaith dialogue group titled "Courageous Pluralism."
Corey is assistant professor of English at California State University at Chico, where he teaches courses on medieval literature, literary theory, poetry, and the digital humanities. His work, as you can tell, is wide ranging, from investigations of the medieval prison, the lyric tradition, medieval imagery of birds, all the way to digital pedagogy. He's published articles on these topics, and you can read his poetry in the journal Writing from the Backcountry. Currently, he's wrapping up production of a digital sonnet game. Kerilyn and Corey, thanks for being here.
Kerilyn:
Thanks for having us.
Corey:
Thanks, Elise.
Elise:
I have to begin by saying that, unlike the other guests that I have interviewed on this podcast, I know you both. I know you both well. We've known each other for over ten years now, and you're my two dearest friends. And I wanted you to be here today to have an extended conversation about friendship, as practice, as spiritual discipline, as something that grounds our academic work and our thinking, because our own friendship has really, I think, grounded our lives as teachers, as scholars, and as people for so many years now. And we are going to have that kind of conversation, but I wanted to begin by having you talk with me, again, and with anyone listening about how we first met, how we first became friends, and what are some of our earlier memories of one another. And lest anyone think this is too narcissistic, there will be a point to this. [laughter] So, what's your earliest memory of me?
Corey:
Can I go first?
Elise:
Please.
Corey:
So, I want to say that my earliest memory of you, Elise, is from our Piers Plowman course. And, at the end of that course, we all were presenting our final papers. And it was in this seminar room. We're all sitting around this giant table, and you were sitting at the end of it. And so, it got to be your turn and it was, like, this declamation. This, like, Athena-from-Zeus's-head kind of performance that, like, I was in awe of and that was quite intimidating. This was like our—if I remember—this is our first semester in the program together. And so, that was my earliest memory.
Elise:
Oh, thanks, Corey. The check's in the mail. [laughter] I appreciate that. I really did not know that that's what you were going to say. So, I am really humbled by that. I did not realize that that was your first memory of me.
And Kerilyn, what would you like to say? And it doesn't have to be of me. I feel like I was making a joke and then it kind of backfired on me there. So, any memory will do, Kerilyn.
Kerilyn:
[laughter] Well, I, I do want to say that, that this idea, that the comparison to Athena springing fully formed from Zeus's head is how Corey and I have talked about your ideas for a good number of years now. That when Elise has an idea, it sort of comes out fully formed and ready to go.
But actually, I was thinking about this, preparing for this interview. I was thinking back to our, sort of, first experiences getting to know one another. And actually, the very first memory I have of Elise is…I'm a little bit ashamed of it and I will share it. So, I came from a master's program—Corey did too, actually; we already had master's degrees when we arrived at Indiana. And we were in one of the “get to know you” orientation sorts of things. And Elise and I were chatting and talking about what we were interested in, and Elise, you said something about late medieval religion or early modern religion. And I did that kind of obnoxious thing where, you know, coming right off of an MA thesis on hagiography, I said, “Oh, so do you know the work of so-and-so?” I don't even remember who I said. And you said, “No,” graciously, but I went home that night and I thought, I, I was ashamed of myself because it's that kind of name dropping and, like, of course, you know, and, like, establishing that you're familiar with the field and is somebody else familiar with the field. And I was really frustrated that the sort of first gesture I had made towards someone was that kind of, you know, that show-offy, “I know something. Do you know it too?” And so, I really regretted that. That's actually the first conversation I can remember having with you. Thank goodness it's gotten better from there.
Elise:
Yeah, it definitely has. But, do you know, that's my first memory of you in the sense that I remember meeting you at the meet and greet, Kerilyn, but I don't remember that conversation at all.
Kerilyn:
Thank, thank goodness!
Elise:
It stuck...Right. And that's, kind of, the grace of our memories, but also, I think, part of the grace of friendship, too. Before I chime in, do you want to add anything about one another?
Kerilyn:
Corey and I used to walk. We, we went from Latin to—was it Piers Plowman?—together. Do you remember this?
Corey:
Only vaguely.
Elise:
I remember standing with Corey outside the classroom. Piers Plowman was very formative for us, clearly. We were all in there together, struggling through this poem. But I remember standing outside with Corey, while you finished your cigarette. Corey doesn't smoke anymore, but that was what I remember. Like, just talking with you out there, and it, it calmed me. And maybe I was getting, like, the secondary smoke and it was helping me, too. But I remember being so nervous going into that seminar because it was our first year, first semester of grad school.
Kerilyn:
One of the first things I do remember about Corey, the first time I had everybody over to my house, we were playing games, board games, and I stopped to clean up. And, in order that I could keep playing the game, Corey would, like, run over from the couch to where I was doing dishes and, like, show me my cards so that I could pick and keep playing. It was just this act of kindness to allow me to continue to be part of the group.
Corey:
And to continue our Piers Plowman course memories, while I remember the mode of Elise's presentation, I remember the content of Kerilyn's paper because it was on Hawkin. Right? Hopefully I'm remembering this correctly, now that I've declared that I remember.
Kerilyn:
Yes. Hawkin, the active man.
Corey:
Right. And, and his splattered coat and this, sort of, the problem and promise of the messiness of the mixed life. This place that's not the active life; it's not the contemplative life, but the trouble of trying to go back and forth. Piers Plowman is all about, like, the trouble and the problem of, like, trying to be in the world. And I remember that about your paper.
Kerilyn:
Good memory.
Elise:
Can I pick up on that? The mixed life? I think, you know, part of the reason why I wanted us to travel down memory lane together, and also to begin this episode this way, is because—I didn't know that that's where this was going to go—but that's a really apt expression for how our friendship really developed, in this mixed life between this very intense, very serious pursuit of, for us, the PhD in, in your cases, medieval literature, in mine, Renaissance. We were in so many classes together, but also just living our human lives, playing board games together, celebrating holidays together. Corey and I didn't have a car our first year there in Bloomington. And so, that's also really foundational in my memory, being in a backseat with Corey a lot of times, getting carted around between places, being chauffeured by whoever got the short end of the stick and was driving us around town at that time. And, these were all very formative experiences. And, in many ways, what I kind of want us to come back to is friendship as formation. And so much of our lives, different elements of them, involve this formation process. And, of course, formation is the word often used amongst Christians for the Christian life.
So, we'll come back to that, maybe more particularly, but I want to segue into what I think was maybe one of the most formative things for us in grad school. And that was when we started this theory and religion reading group. And, to give listeners a bit of background, when we started grad school in the fall of 2007, scholarship in English, and in the humanities more generally, was making what was referred to as a “turn to religion.” And that meant a lot of things, but in the crudest articulation, it meant that religion as discourse was available in some new ways, using theories, like all that's under the umbrella of postmodernism, post-structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, to think about religion and to incorporate those theoretical constructs with religion into the study of literature, cultural history, etc. And the three of us are really theory heads when it comes down to it. We love theory. And we were really excited by both this turn to religion and the ways that it was showing up in theory, because we loved the theory, and we also felt, along with a few of our other friends from the department, that as Christians, as people who had grown up in the Christian church and churches and had our own variety of religious experience, we had something to say back to the theory.
So, I'm wondering if each of you might say something about that group. And I have a two-pronged question here. Firstly, kind of structurally, academically, how the thinking that we did together in that group informs larger ideas about the way that we study and the ways that theory does have a place in the Christian life and can have a place in the Christian life. The other prong is the more personal one. How did those meetings—I think they were every Friday or every other Friday—how did those shape us personally and as friends? So, let's start with that first one, the kind of structural, intellectual one, and whoever would like to chime in first, go for it.
Kerilyn:
That's the harder one. The easier one is the relational.
Elise:
It is the harder one.
Corey:
That's tough.
Kerilyn:
When I, we, we were reading Slavoj Žižek. We read The Puppet and the Dwarf. We read Alain Badiou's—what's the title of that? his book on Paul? I can't remember...
Elise:
St. Paul: Foundation of Universalism.
Kerilyn:
“Foundation of Universalism.” What a title! Did we read Agamben? We certainly went on to talk about Agamben. And then there was that book on the neighbor that was so influential, that Žižek was on, right? It was coauthored. So, just to sort of situate, you know, if some people are wondering what we were actually reading.
Oh, Milbank! We read something by John, the English theologian.
Elise:
Mm-hmm.
Corey:
Social...Social Theory and Theology.
Elise:
Yup.
Kerilyn:
And Milbank and Žižek coauthored a book, too. I don't think we re—did we read that one? The Monstrosity of Christ. We might’ve read—Corey and I might’ve read that in the summer.
Elise:
I think we did read it. I have it. And I think I wouldn't have it if we hadn't read it together, to be honest.
Kerilyn:
I think those conversations were so—thinking about formative experiences—that was so formative for me intellectually, because it really did represent a true exchange between theology traditionally construed and understood and theory. And so, finding a place to tackle those works. Right? So, the thinking that was coming out was putting those two things in dialogue. But finding a place to continue to work over that conversation where it felt like, like I said, both the theology and the theory were sort of full participants in the dialogue. And both positions—I'm not sure that's quite the word I want—but both, both sets of ideas, both ways of understanding, were sort of interrogated, but also allowed to speak for themselves. Which is really what dialogue is, right? That somebody shows up to the table fully able to speak for themselves, but also then bringing whatever that self is into, into exchange with the other selves at the table.
And so, I think that was what was so exciting to me. I hadn't quite found spaces to have that conversation before. And, again, coming in with just two years of a master's, coming out of a Christian college, I'd sort of been on different sides of the conversation but hadn't quite seen the dialogue emerging. So, both engaging with the thinkers and then doing the work of discussing together was a place where it all seemed to be taken seriously in a way that I appreciated and was grateful for.
Elise:
Corey, do you want to add anything?
Corey:
Yeah. As, as Kerilyn was speaking, I was thinking about the ways in which that group—I hope this doesn't too much slip over to the personal, rather than the disciplinary side of things—but it, it strikes me that what we had was a community. And there’s this idea in pedagogy about a community of learners and that’s how we actually learn is, is through an engaged community in which discussion, in which conversation, in which dialogue can happen. And for me, that group, in addition to allowing space to, like, think through really complicated texts, a really complicated nexus of ideas that’s taking up several strands of Western philosophical and theological font. You know, we, we had a community that could do that. And it reinforced for me the ways in which thinking about those things must needs happen with other people. I feel like we were very lucky in that our graduate cohort and our program were full of very generous people and kind people. And sometimes you will hear horror stories about the competitive nature of graduate school and people being really cutthroat and stuff like that. And, perhaps I had blinders on this, but I never saw that kind of thing happening in our program as a whole. But, in particular, our theory and religion reading group was like the distillation of that kind of dynamic, where you got to enjoy talking with people about interesting things.
Elise:
Yeah, and I...
Kerilyn:
Elise, do you want to answer that question? Maybe that's what you were going to go on to do.
Elise:
Yeah, well, I was going to add my own thoughts to it. I learned how to read theory with all of you. And it was in that working out, as Corey said, of really complex texts and not being afraid of them or intimidated by them. Also, I think because I had this knowledge of the texts, the people that they were referring to as they were using religious discourse or theological discourse or history, it gave me a foothold and a purchase on some things that otherwise I, I might feel alienated from or that were so difficult to read that it just was painful, sometimes, as much as I loved reading the theory. I think what both theory, the practice of a faith life, and then having them come together gives me—gave me then, gives me now—is kind of a structural wonder that is exciting and that propels me into the intellectual work. And I know, amongst some Christian communities, there's real critique against cultural theory, particularly postmodernism or some of the Marxist traditions. And I think we’ve all found those traditions to be extremely enlightening and helpful in a variety of ways. So, that gave me both a language that I could use, but also activated a language that I had, that I could then bring to my scholarship in a particular way.
And, moving us to the second prong of that question about what it did for us personally, I can lead us off here because we had these meetings at my apartment. And maybe that was because I didn't have the car, and so everyone just thought, “Just go to her so we don't have to drive her.” I don’t know. But, at that time in my life, I was not really accustomed to hosting people. So, the event of these meetings was a really big deal for me. It allowed me to be hospitable. It allowed me to be generous in a way that I wanted to be but felt like I didn't either know how to be or didn't have the resources to be. So, for myself, I shopped at the regular grocery store, but I remember for these meetings, I would go to the co-op and I would buy all the organic stuff. I, the vegetable chips and juice, I don't know why I was buying juice, but I do remember that. I also remember making muffins and also making them from the box mix. I was not making them from scratch at that time. And all of that was, again, something I wasn't accustomed to. So, it melded for me what I wanted to be personally—a person of generous and hospitable spirit that was able to manifest my love and my care for other people and be welcoming. And it yoked it forever to individual people and to the reading. It made all of those things come together in a very unique way. So, for me, that was the personal formation that that group gave.
Corey, do you want to add onto the communal aspect that you were speaking of earlier, or maybe something totally different? Wherever you want to go with it.
Corey:
No, I like this idea of hospitality, hospitable. I think that was a significant aspect to me to, sort of, continue with the thinking of, like, the idea of community. Community is, perhaps too often, deployed in really amorphas ways. But, when I say community, here, it really does identify really particular people. And I think that, when people use the word community, I think it’s best when that’s what they mean. It’s like they’re pointing toward, gesturing toward, particular people. And that the ideas in the texts we're reading were not disconnected from lived experience. You used the word event, and I can never forget... So, so one day we're reading, I think it was Badiou, and I got up to get some juice, I think, or a muffin. And I stubbed my toe so hard on, I think, the coffee table, and I think I cried out something like, “An event has befallen me!” Now I’m going to start laughing. So, and thus prompted this, sort of, ridiculous, then, discussion about: could Badiou’s event be embodied in this moment of stubbing my toe in the middle of this reading group? Yeah.
Kerilyn:
I feel like I remember that as a productive discussion where we, we better understood what counted as an event. [laughter] Also, wasn't that coffee table like a monstrosity?
Elise:
It was. My grandma found it for me at St. Vincent DePaul before I moved. And it was like, “I found you a free coffee table for your new apartment.” And it was a monstrosity. It was from the seventies. It was really long and very dense, let's say. Corey really hurt himself. And I should also say to anyone listening, I kind of told Corey and Kerilyn beforehand, “Don't make any extraneous sounds. That’s not good for the audio.” So, while Corey is telling this story, Kerilyn and I are laughing so hard, but trying to stifle it. And so, we couldn't breathe, but that's kind of what happened too, right? Like this, like, laughter, intense pain, and this, like, moment of knowledge. I don't know. It really did all come together. Thank you for sharing that, Corey.
Kerilyn, do you have, you—there's no topping that moment—but do you have...
Kerilyn:
No. Well, and I don't really. The, everything that's been said about community and about thinking together about the communal production of knowledge, not as opposed to individual, but that knowledge production is a shared activity, a relational activity. I mean, I just echo all of that. And when I look back from my perspective, now, what I think I can see in my own life is that I don't actually have a lot of confidence in my ability on my own as a thinker, but I have immense amounts of confidence that when I work with other people that very real knowledge and understanding can be produced or arrived at or gained. Those are all very consumerist terms, right—“arrived at” or “produced”—but that—generated, maybe that's the verb I want. So, I think that, unknowingly, my, you know, like, twenty-two-, twenty-three-year-old self was, sort of, somewhat frightened by graduate school and looking around and saying, “But if I do it with people, we can figure it out together.”
Elise:
And, just to step back, we’ve been using our experiences here as the specific grounding for the conversation, but everything we're talking about is obviously applicable to any group that anyone listening might be involved in. The reality that your community is particular people in particular bodies that are vulnerable to laughter and joy and vulnerable to pain. And the recognition of those particularities in the people around you generates love, care, concern, and knowledge that a relational way of life, which is really what we’re talking about here, is formative—to come back to that word. It does shape us in a variety of ways.
Obviously, our experience was shaped within graduate school, within the academic world. That's where we all still find ourselves. And I wonder, do you think that academic life, higher education, grad school, where we are right now as teachers at our various institutions, is it at all analogous to a kind of spiritual discipline? I think we can agree, it's certainly a disciplining process, going through graduate school and being involved in this life, as so many institutional forms of life are. They are disciplining. And that doesn't have to be negative. I’m not giving that a negative connotation, necessarily. I mean it in the sense that it shapes our desires and our routines and our habits. I guess what I’m wondering is, is there the spiritual analog to it?
Kerilyn:
I think it’s hard for me to think about spiritual formation apart from other types of formation. It’s hard because of my personal ways of understanding. I can’t speak personally about this and not speak theologically. So, maybe I’ll go. And then, Corey, I’m happy to have you—either of you—push me or take a different tack.
But, when I think about my understanding of the human person, desire is really central, absolutely central. Dante says desire is the only foot the soul walks on, which I take to mean that desire is the only way that change happens. Movement, any sort of meaningful movement, like, “Desire is the engine of the car,” one of my theologian colleagues here at Gordon says. So, I take desire as absolutely central, but then I also take desires as interconnected. I don't like breaking off, you know, sort of, physical desires from intellectual desires from emotional desires. I think they're all, sort of, interwoven. Which is why, when we talk about spiritual formation, to me, it is absolutely essential to talk about what you do with your body, right? What do you put in your mouth? Do you, like, move around your physical space? All these kinds of things. To me, there is a sort of seamlessness. And so, when I think about formation, I do think we're talking about disciplining desires. What are they oriented towards? How do they carry you along?
I think one of the interesting things about graduate school, when I thought about the formative value of graduate school, I mean, I think there are so many good disciplines I acquired in graduate school. I think the thing that I questioned the most is the understood goal. To what good are you oriented in graduate school? And I think that I have had to grapple with that a lot since leaving graduate study. And I’m one of the fortunate souls who got a full-time job. I go up for tenure this summer. I’m at an institution that I enjoy, where I feel like I’m a valued member of the community. And that, that alone is, is sort of rare. And I still struggled with, you know, like, to what goods have I been oriented? What am I pursuing here? I think that the academy is having a lot of conversations about that across the board. And I, I see many more graduate students, now, very actively asking if the thing we’re oriented to is just. If the goal of the university is justice for all. You know, the activism of so many graduate students is really oriented towards greater justice. And so, I think that’s something maybe that is more prominent now as a live question in graduate study than it was when we were there. So, I’ve meandered around a little bit. I'll throw the ball to one of you two now.
Corey:
Well, I don’t know how well this develops Kerilyn’s really great point. One of the things I was thinking about while you were talking about desire—and this does connect to justice—is, is thinking about my work on medieval prisons and my dissertation project and the ways in which essential to that project was thinking about representations of and configurations of the will and what it means to will something in Middle English literary texts produced in relation to carceral spaces. And, one of the things that struck me at the time and that continues to strike me, and that I don't think I have worked out well, other than to say, that this concern about the will, this concern about willing, has to do with the ways in which willing, willingness, being willful involves not only the thing that you take up, the thing that you choose, but also the thing that befalls you. And I think that this idea of discipline, this idea of formation is wrapped up with that fulcrum. Your point, Kerilyn, about the state of academia today, the state of higher education, the state of graduate programs, and the serious questions about job market—what do we do in response to, sort of, the collapse of higher ed positions? Speaking as another person who has the rare luck to have gotten a tenure-track job, I think that question of justice is one that’s trying to address this question of, “What are factors under our control that are addressable, and what seems to be outside of our control? And is, is there something we can actually do to address these things?”
Elise:
This might be a good moment to move us to talk about some of our current work together. I'm thinking, particularly, of some recent readings that we’ve been doing on the saints Francis de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal, because I think that some of the concerns that we’ve just been discussing are things that we've noticed in their writing. So, we can unpack it a little bit. And, for some context, both Francis de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal lived at the tail end of the sixteenth century and then into the seventeenth century. And so, they are canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. They were prominent figures in what is sometimes known as the Counter-Reformation. So, rather than using that term, I think of them as just simply Reformation saints. They were in the milieu of Europe as it was moving away from Catholicism and between various forms of Protestant belief. And Francis de Sales is primarily known as the great writer of letters. And in fact, he formed his own order, and he was the spiritual director for Jeanne de Chantal, and she formed her own order and community. And the correspondence between the two of them is voluminous, instructive, and beautiful. It’s obvious that they loved one another deeply, cared about one another deeply, cared about one another’s souls eternally. And so, their letters have been collected, as well as Francis de Sales’s letters with other spiritual directees. And, in addition to being this prolific letter writer, he wrote the treatise Introduction to the Devout Life, which many people may know. And he’s really known for a gentle spirituality, a spirituality of being kind to yourself and kind to other people, being patient and waiting to see what God will reveal to you. “All in God’s good time,” I think, is a phrase that comes up a lot in his letters. And that gets encapsulated for him in this term—and here we go again with my pronunciation—douceur: kindness, gentleness, sweetness, fondness, tenderness. And the three of us have been thinking about Francis de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal both as letter writers, this epistolary tradition, what it means for them to communicate as friends. And we've also been kneading that term douceur. What does that mean, and can we carry that term forward? Not just individually in our own lives and not just amongst ourselves as friends, but can we carry it forward into this moment in a broader community? So, I want to and have asked both of you to just begin to unpack some of these thoughts, some of this writing that the three of us have done, either on douceur, if you'd like to speak about it, or what you see as, kind of, being at stake or most important in, kind of, delving into Salesian spirituality. And whoever would like to start can go ahead and jump in.
Kerilyn:
I think we were drawn to these letters, as Elise said, because of the epistolary nature and because Jeanne and Francis were so seldom together, or like, oh, they were almost never together. They were almost always apart. So, on the one hand, initially, Francis had this enormous impact on—can we just anglicize it and say, Jean? I feel like we’ll stumble less. So, Francis had this huge impact on her. But then, in their letters, it becomes clear that their friendship means so much to him as well, and that her care and concern for him, in his mixed life, right—as a bishop he’s living the mixed life—that that meant the world to him. And so, I think we were really attracted by that.
And I think the thing that we saw in the treatment of douceur was the tenderness of their affection and their commitment to one another. But also, they use the language of detachment, right? The vocabulary of detachment. So, there’s this kind of immense love and care and concern, but also this, a sort of release. And, and the tenderness and the concern is not sacrificed because of the detachment, because of the letting go, because of the ways in which they allow one another to, sort of, move through the world—to be obedient to callings that they didn’t have control over, weren’t even that involved in, right. The, the callings that they were both pursuing.
So, that coexistence of the detachment and the release, and yet, the care and the concern, the nurturing of the care and the concern, was something that really, really drew us. And I think it felt like a way to understand what we have been for one another since we've graduated. And we live different, in different parts of the country. And we very seldom see one another. We are very seldom together. The three of us haven’t been together in years. But the way in which we still remain, I think, sort of, vitally supportive of one another and generative conversation partners for one another.
Corey:
I think you’ve both used the word a couple of times now that I am most attached to in our discussions of Francis and Jean’s letters and spirituality, and that’s "tenderness." I think, for a variety of reasons, but I think the douceur is difficult to translate, right? And you could go in a lot of different directions, including, like, sweetness and the ways in which something like that signifies, as it seems very different in English than tenderness.
But I think tenderness gets at—Elise, you used, you used the word vulnerability—and that what we see, sort of, enacted or mediated through these letters is, like, a co-vulnerability. One of the things that has really interested me—in the letters in particular, in our, sort of, larger thinking about friendship, friendship across distance—is the applicability to, the contrast with, the ways in which we live our lives these days through, like, social media, and the ways in which, especially COVID-19 pandemic, how we have to live our lives, like, separated in so many ways. And I think that Francis and Jean’s letters provide this really compelling model—not to merely mimic—but a really compelling model as, like, a starting place to really think about, like, how to think about practice. How is it that one enacts one’s friendships? How is it that one is vulnerable in one’s attachments? I mean, one of my interests is not merely in these letters as providing, like, the answer to the problems of social media or something like that. I mean, lots of people have thought about, you know, social media’s, sort of, issues with things like political polarization. But rather, there’s this way in which Francis and Jean give us a model that comes at this from a completely different angle, almost. And it’s a difficult angle. I mean, this idea of tenderness—to be vulnerable. One of the big discussions in academia that we mentioned, one of the big discussions about social media is that not everybody is vulnerable to the same extent. And there’s this trickiness to asking people to be vulnerable, in that not everyone is vulnerable. People are vulnerable to different extents. And I think that’s why this idea of tenderness—and Kerilyn mentioned detachment—and that this is all based in friendship in particular. That there’s a relationality there that must found this kind of thing.
Elise:
Picking up on your last point, Corey, a relationality that founds this kind of vulnerability and tenderness, the way that the three of us write as we work on these projects, we have a shared Google doc and we add, and we kind of put things there. And, as I was reviewing it, it was exactly this point that—I think it was you, Kerilyn, in our documents said—you asked the question, “This kind of tenderness, this douceur, does it presuppose a relationship?” I might feel for someone when I read about it online, but this kind of care, this kind of tenderness needs to be relational, where I’m not asking of someone to be vulnerable to me or before me. And I’m not expecting to be asked to be vulnerable to or for someone else. I am being asked to be vulnerable with someone else in a setting that is already structured by love and by care. And by this tenderness, which, as I think we’ve been articulating, is a really capacious concept. It’s a really material concept, as well.
And part of what we have been thinking through and struggling with, we started really working on these letters and our thinking of them last summer during the Black Lives Matter protest. And we’re really wondering, does this language work here? Is this language adequate in precisely the ways that you are pointing toward, Corey? Because not all bodies are vulnerable in the same way. We are three white people and we don't have the same vulnerabilities. And so, what are we asking? What are we, kind of, calling for? But part of what we were, I think, realizing is if there is a way to kind of take what we are learning from these letters, it’s that they had the materiality of their letter, but that letter—in the way that all objects do—it, kind of, gives off this, like, radioactive half-life that contains the person who wrote it. And so, it’s hard to get away from the body, even in distance or even at a distance, I should say. Does that make sense? Does that make sense or ring true with the, with the two of you?
Kerilyn:
Well, I’m thinking that the object containing the presence of the person, the absent presence of the person with whom it’s associated, who sent it, that’s also a nice link to another shared project we did, which was that we circulated these postcards and we added layers each time. So, there was an initial round where we each chose a card, wrote something on it, sent it—we circulated them. I don’t even remember the order, but, like, I sent one to Corey, Corey sent one to Elise, Elise sent one to me. And then we, we added a layer. So then, I had this postcard with something on it and I added a layer, and then it went to the next person. But there was that presence that was sort of lingering with the object, but then it was layered. And that was a way in which, I think, the dualism evaporated. The dualism between the object and the intellect, between the person and the mind or the object and the mind was really evaporating because the choices that we each made shaped how we understood the significance of what we were receiving. But that was also being received in the context of shared history. So that things we did were meaningful because of what we had experienced in the life we had shared together.
Elise:
I'm glad you brought up that project, Kerilyn, because I did want to talk about it as well. We’ll have a link in the show notes. This was, as Kerilyn said, a postcard project that was sponsored by an organization called the Mina Loy Project: Navigating the Avant-garde. And Mina Loy is a designer, an entrepreneur from the very late nineteenth century, early twentieth century. And this postcard project was something that they did called postcards en dehors grand flash mob. And “en dehors” is a ballet term that means to turn from the outside. You kind of move your leg to the outside instead of to the inside. And so, it was a way of, like, how can we, like, get at the margins of things and bring them in with the sweep of the leg, to kind of complete the ballet metaphor. And they asked for people to create postcards as artifacts. We were the only group that did a collaborative project. And again, I will link in the show notes so you can see our work. You can see what these postcards looked like. And I have mine, here, in front of me. And in the ones that I sent out, the one I sent to Kerilyn I put on there, I think it was a Renaissance emblem of the pearl, since Kerilyn works on the Pearl Poet and the medieval poem Pearl. And so, it’s the shell with the pearl in the center. And then, I kind of did this collage. I cut out from fashion magazines pearl jewelry, and then wrote something crazy on the back about, well, I started with the ways that pearls have become consumerist objects and ended up by wondering if God gives us the gift of death, which is a pearl. That tells you all you need to know. But The Gift of Death was, of course, a text that we read in graduate school by Derrida. So, I was also making a joke, believe it or not. And so, Kerilyn wrote on it. And then, Corey put a piece of transparency paper over it, and then he printed on the transparency paper in alternating squares images from the Pearl manuscript with Joanna Newsome, my spiritual soul sister. And please, God, hear my prayer. Let Joanna Newsome hear this episode and hear this moment, because she has a great album called Divers and the title song from that album, I think—and I think I forced the two of you to think —is another version of the Pearl poem. So, that’s just kind of a glimpse of these projects, but it was a way to try to concretize, materialize all of these ephemeral words that we’ve been talking about: community, friendship, douceur, this spiritual formation.
And before I go on, Corey, I want to let you jump in about the project because this was a project that you found. You found the call for these postcards, and you really encouraged us to do it.
Corey:
One other thing that I thought of was so much, as Elise pointed us toward, sort of, the content of some of the cards was images, but it was also a lot of texts. And the text was by and large poems that others had written that we then messed around with. And, on one of the cards that I have, Kerilyn—I think it was Kerilyn—created a, essentially a found poem from the various texts that were circulating on these cards.
We should talk more about poetry and we’ve been having these, sort of, evolutions of our thinking about friendship and objects and textuality. And we’ve been working with this epistolary literature. But it’s also all very lyrical in how we have engaged with this idea of friendship across distance. And I would say even tenderness. That there’s a lyricism to, just, the idea of tenderness that, I think, we’re still working at.
Kerilyn:
We should definitely talk about poetry and lyricism. I also was just thinking, when we were talking about the circulation of these postcards, too, that there is something, for us, something vital and important has been that there are three of us, that this is a friendship between three individuals and not two. And the way we even circulated the postcards, if there was just two of us, we would have just swapped postcards. But the way that just one more friend has, sort of, actually created this beautiful possibility. And, obviously, when you're talking about friendship, there is a limitation on intimacy and vulnerability and friendship if the group gets too large. But I do think it’s been really important for us that the triangulation of the three of us, of our thinking, of our shared living. And that reminds me, something C. S. Lewis says in The Four Loves, when he’s talking about friends, he says, you know, if you lose from a group one friend, you don’t just lose that friend. You lose the way in which they gave you the other friend. So, thinking about the three of us, you know, if—not that this would ever happen—but, if we had some kind of fallout and we didn’t talk to Elise anymore, not only would I lose Elise, but I would lose the parts of Corey that I only see because Elise, sort of, brings them out or because they happen in conversation between the two of you. And I get to, then, sort of partake in that, as well. We were able to circulate the postcards among the three of us because there were three and not just two, but there’s also a relational truth, sort of a fullness there that we see.
Elise:
And that idea of friendship giving you yourself. I mean, certainly in my own life, I have seen this so often that I see the best version of myself, or I am able to kind of reconcile with myself, because of the way that you see me, because of the way that you give me back myself in friendship. And I hope that I do the same for the two of you and for all of my friends. And that’s such a gift.
And that goes all the way back to Cicero in his letter on friendship. That’s one of the things that he thinks friendship can do is give you back, like, reflect the image back. Friendship is a very imagistic language, a very reflective mode, but not the kind of enclosed reflection where you’re just in a hall of mirrors. That's narcissism. But it’s the kind of reflection that, yeah, opens up. And to go back to both of your desire to talk about lyricism, I think that that fits most comfortably under what has really been our big project since about 2015 or so—2015, 2016—that we are calling Translatio Amicorum: the translation of friendship. And, of course, that Latin word for friendship comes from the root for love. It’s been our attempt to think about mediation, translation as a mediating form. And that’s something that I am certainly deeply committed to.
And translation, for those who may not know, started off in a very bodily sense. We speak of it, now, as moving something, a text usually, from one language to another. But the original form of translation had to do with moving a body. Scripturally, it’s used in a few instances when someone is translated to heaven, i.e., taken up to heaven body and soul. But it was also used to designate when a body was exhumed and moved. Usually, a bishop’s body or the body of someone who was being sainted and, kind of, taken to a place where it could be venerated, where it would have a kind of power and influence. And so, that act of translation was corporeal. And that's how we get “corpus”—those texts. And it was also an act of authorizing power for the person who did the translating. We downplay translators today so much. We don’t think of them on the equal footing as the author. And even if we go back to those, those times when translation meant moving a body, the person who gave the green light, to put it kind of vulgarly, to move the body and to receive it, to have it there at their particular abbey, that person, the translator, was also granted a fair amount of authority in that moment.
So, there’s not really a question here. It’s just more, what have we been doing for the last five to six years with this big project that we’ve been working on? What have we been trying to get at? What does the translation of our friendship mean?
Kerilyn:
It’s ineffable. We can’t speak of it. We can only speak of it in its absence.
Elise:
Well, actually, I think that is true. That, actually, yes. I will stop because, Corey, I know you want to say something, but I actually think that is hitting the nail on the head. So go ahead, Corey.
Corey:
One of the things that we might think about that’s been carrying through this Translatio Amicorum project, that has to do with objects and mediation and relationality and this move to the epistolary form, but, also, thinking about lyricism, and to bring tenderness back into it, too, is modes of address. And I bring this up because I’ve been rereading Robert Hass’s Little Book on Form, which is ironically titled ’cause it’s not little at all. And he makes this point about ode and about elegy and about the ways in which these quote unquote genres aren’t genres or are maybe modes. And, I can’t remember if he uses this exact word, but the way he talks about them makes me think of address, of public address. It’s a very rhetorical way of approaching these lyric genres. And I think one of the things we’ve been trying to get at is what are forms of address? What are locations for thinking about address to each other, specifically in terms of friendship, but then, what are the ways that address resonates outward from that? Thinking back toward comments earlier, I think, Elise, you were saying this about the ways that Francis and Jean’s letters were physical, embodied material in the moment but also, then, carry onward. So, I think that’s one of the ways that all of those things are kind of wrapped up together. And, if you'll bear with me, there’s a poem that I’d like to read that, I think, speaks to this in certain ways and speaks to, actually, some of the things we were talking about, about concerns about vulnerability, especially with this issue of tenderness and being vulnerable to things, but also being vulnerable with things. And so, this is Ross Gay’s poem, “Ode to the Flute”:
A man sings
by opening his
mouth a man
sings by opening
his lungs by
turning himself into air
a flute can
be made of a man
nothing is explained
[a] flute lays
on its side
and prays a wind
might enter it
and make of it
at least
a small final song
There are so many things happening with that, that poem, things about music, things about inspiration. We might point to things like pneuma—the wind, the Holy Spirit. But we might also think about, “I can't breathe” and the need for air. And Ross Gay is an amazing poet, and he means all of those things together. And I turned to this, not because our project addresses the exact same things as what this poem is talking about, but that we are trying to get at what is this tenderness about? How are we able to speak about being vulnerable with each other?
Elise:
I think so much of our…well, let me back up first and say thank you, again, for reading the poem, Corey, because I think that that encapsulates so much of what we’ve been trying to articulate. And again, to re-underline Kerilyn's point, I think we were all deeply changed—we are being changed—by one another. We’re being converted by one another. And just as Christ said, “I call you my friends, now. I’ve told you everything.” What does that mean? There’s no way to articulate what that kind of intimacy means. I think it’s very hard for the three of us to put into language what it has meant to be friends. And so, what we’re trying to do, to use the language of the poem, is to lay down and let breath come into us. And whether that be the Holy Spirit and one another. As you said about the poem, it’s all together; they are working together and entangled. And the project—you know, we have this very product-driven language. We’re calling it a project, but it’s really forms of expression that we, kind of, hit upon at various times under this big umbrella. And there is no project—long live the project—you know, it’s always that thing that doesn’t exist that’s getting away from us, that we’re trying to reconstruct looking back on it, I think, in some ways. I mean, I’m speaking very elegiacally of the two of you, which makes me feel very strange, but I do think that that mode is appropriate. We have a lot of time spent together, but we’re not going to ever get that time back again. And thank God we do still have our relationship. But when you’re in that deep, you also see all the things that you lost, too.
Kerilyn:
But we’re also, then, in the realm that is, in fact, the absence that has revealed both what was there and gives something to us. When we all lived in Bloomington, Indiana, and saw each other on a weekly basis and sat in a coffee shop and wrote our dissertation chapters together, we, in a way, couldn’t name that thing, we couldn’t even see it. So, it’s the absence that has made the presence knowable. But it’s also invited a new form of being together, being with one another. Being apart has invited a new way of being with one another that we could not have had when we all lived in the same place. And I’m thinking, one of the things we do regularly now is that we text one another poems. And sometimes we talk about them. Sometimes we have really lovely conversations over chat. Sometimes we just send them. I mean, there’s so many things to think over here. Right? The lyric poem is always about trying to capture some ineffability, something that cannot be named. So, there’s a homology there, a structural similarity between, maybe, our understanding of our friendship as translated and what lyric poetry does, which is maybe why we share so often. But I’m also thinking about, when we share poems, we circulate them, it arrives in a new way for each of us. And, of course, when we text them to one another they’re taken out of whatever their original publication context was, whether it’s a collection...
Elise:
Well, I think that lyric is concerned with memorialization, always, in the sense that memory calls things to mind that aren’t present, whether they are gone or lost, or whether they’re just not in front of you at the moment. And then it allows you, formally, to play with time, which is something that as humans we can’t really do. We can’t mess around with time. It’s kind of got a hold of us. It befalls us, to bring back a word that Corey brought up before. And maybe, we can think about this, kind of the final part of our conversation here. And I’d like to read a couple of things, too. And these are brief, but it is involving this idea of memorialization and friendship.
So, I mentioned Cicero a moment ago. He has this text De Amicitia (On Friendship) and it’s kind of seen in the Western world as, sort of, one of those foundational texts that, sort of, sets the stage for a lot that came afterward. And, I have to say, a lot of bad things that came afterward, too, because for Cicero, the only people that could be friends were two men of the same class, i.e., upper class. So, men and women could not be friends; women and women could not be friends; enslaved people could not be friends; children could not be friends; and any permutation of that. And not only were there limitations on who could be friends, there were two forms of friendship. There was this ideal, pure form of deep connective friendship. And then there was the ordinary friendship where there was use—you got something from someone else. And there could be pleasure there, there could be a good relationship, but that wasn’t, as Cicero put it, a true friendship.
But the other thing about this document is that it’s in the form of a dialogue that Cicero learned from his teacher. And his teacher got it from this man Laelius, who was speaking about his friend Scipio, who was now dead. And so, the text itself, this foundational document, is about what do I do with the fact that I miss my friend? How does my friendship still persist even though this person isn’t here anymore? And this is how, this is how De Amicitia ends:
“If my recollection and memory of these things had died with him, I could not now by any means endure the loss of a man so very near and dear to me. But those experiences with him are not dead. Rather, they are nourished and made more vivid by my reflection and memory. And even if I were utterly deprived of the power to recall them, yet my age would of itself afford me great relief, for I cannot have much longer time to bear this bereavement. Besides, every trial which is of brief duration ought to be endurable, even if it be severe.”
Good stoic there at the end. But, also, what I have here is my memory. My reflection is the friendship. It keeps him alive. And what else have I got? And I really quickly want to pair that with the end of Augustine's Confessions and the chapter on memory. They’re laughing at me, but I think there is a connection here. So, he’s trying. Yes.
Corey:
Really quick. Not at, with.
Elise:
[laughter] Thank you. Exactly. Never has that cliche actually been more apt than at this moment. I appreciate it.
So, Augustine is at the end and the Confessions here, wondering, literally, what he's been doing this whole time. And how is it that he’s found God in remembering his past? And he says, “How widely I have ranged through my memory seeking you, Lord. And I have not found you outside it. For I have discovered nothing about you that I did not remember from the time I learned to know you.” Skipping ahead a bit. “But whereabouts in my memory do you dwell, Lord? In which part of it do you abide? What kind of couch have you fashioned for your repose? What manner of temple have you built yourself there?” Skipping ahead again. “Just as you are not any corporeal image nor any of the emotions that belong to a living person, such as we experience when we are joyful or sad, when we desire or fear something, when we remember or forget or anything similar. So neither are you the mind itself. You are the Lord and God of the mind. And though all these things are subject to change, you abide unchangeably above them all. And yet you have deigned to dwell in my memory from the first day that I learned to know you. What am I doing, inquiring which place in it is your place? As though there were really places there. Most certain it is that you do dwell in it because I have been remembering you since I first learned to know you. And there I find you when I remember you.”
I think I find you when I remember you. We have a lot of history together, but we have a lot of memories, which I cannot help but think will exist eternally. I’m crying, so I need one of you to jump in.
Kerilyn:
I think this gets back to something I was not saying very well about how the experience itself isn’t meaningful. Right? It’s just happening. I mean, I experience thousands of things every day that I don’t remember. And because I don’t remember them, they’re not meaningful. But the things I remember take on meaning for good or for ill.
One of the things, you know, that happens in friend...in any relationship is that you share the memory. It’s not just me talking about what happened or working back over what happened. It’s the shared laughter of Elise’s coffee table and understanding Badiou’s event when Corey stubbed his toe that makes that meaningful. And I’m even thinking, just, of another biblical touchstone, right? When Mary cherishes these things up in her heart, right? It’s the care for the memory, the sort of nurturing. This can go horribly wrong. An individual can hold something the wrong way, can work over it obsessively or painfully. I suppose this is even a way of understanding trauma, right? That, that you remember the experience, that you can’t escape from the horror of the thing that happened, although that’s involuntary. But there’s a willingness to maintain together the memories.
Corey:
To go back to the very beginning of our chat and Elise asking us to return to our memories, and the ways in which there’s this fascinating way that, like, we have shared memories. We remember similar events, things that happen. But there’s also things that one of us will remember that the other one will not remember. And then, part of that is also wrapped up with our friendship and, sort of, the subterranean marks left, that I may not consciously remember a particular moment. Or even, like, I don’t remember standing with Elise smoking, specifically. Although I smoked a lot of cigarettes that first year. But there’s this, like, indelibility to that experience that informs our attachment. That’s located, not just in one of us, but among us. And I think that’s the really enjoyable thing about so much of this.
Elise:
It’s actually wonderful to exist in the mind of another with douceur, with tenderness. That you both—and everyone that I’ve loved, everyone that you’ve loved—is in your mind, literally; it’s in your cognitive structure. And it is also an image that you can call to mind. It’s no wonder we’ve been talking about this kind of imagination for centuries because it is so full of wonder. It is complicated. It is beautiful. It is multifaceted. And again, it’s that reflective language of friendship where I get to get me back in your image in my mind. Just as you get to get yourself back with my image in your mind. There’s a lot of reflexiveness there that isn’t self-contained, that somehow goes in and goes out at the same time.
Kerilyn:
Well, I think it’s that passage that you read from the Confessions. It’s what I think of as vintage Augustine. How can I talk about the thing? Right? And it’s this, but it’s not that. He gives you a metaphor and then reminds you, it is a metaphor, by the way, right? Like, is it this? No, it’s not that. How is it this? How could it be that? And he does that in the opening, in Book One, when he's talking about God. But, here, he’s doing it to talk about memory. And I’m thinking about all the ways in which there is something shared that doesn’t reside in any one of us. And it’s very hard to talk about. Is it this? Well, no, it's not quite that. What about this? Well, that doesn’t fully work either, although it kind of works. And on the one hand, yeah, we can say it resides in the cognitive structures of our brain, but there’s also something mysterious, something spiritual. And I don’t mean that in a way that would oppose it to the material, but that we hold together. We cultivate together. And I love what you said, Elise, about it being wonderful to be held with douceur. And I’m thinking that that’s built on the vulnerability and honestness—and honesty—of shared life, because I know that in being held with douceur, cared for by the two of you, I don’t have the anxiety of having something to live up to. That doesn’t produce a sort of anxiety that you think something of me more than what I am and I have to maintain that. It’s not that. But it’s also a kind of love and care that accepts the vulnerability and the frailty and the failures and the limitedness, but maintains it with tenderness, with sweetness.
Elise:
I think that what we hope, when we are not wracked with doubts or confusion, is that we’re held in the mind of God in a memory full of douceur, of total tenderness. That we are not being asked to live up to something. We’re just being gazed upon in love, even with the memory of all of our pasts. Present, fully present. That that’s the gift of God’s love that gets manifest in friendship in a variety of ways.
Corey, did you want to add anything before I bring us home here in this episode?
Corey:
Nope. Just my appreciation for getting to have this conversation.
Elise:
Thank you, Corey. Thank you, Kerilyn. And, for all of you listening, thank you so much for always listening and always tuning in. Thanks for being present for this conversation between myself and my friends. And I hope that it provides a kind of sustenance and a kind of deep reflection for you with your friendships and your relationships, but also a reimagining of what a kind of tenderness in our world might look like.
Thanks very much. Love you both.
Kerilyn:
Thank you.
Corey:
Thank you.