Transcript for Episode 24

Ryan:

I'm here with Elise Ryan, my cohost, and I've been listening to Elise's episodes over the past couple of months. And every time I listened, I'm just like, oh man, I want to have a conversation with Elise! And, you know, you and I have been having these fleeting conversations where we're like, oh, we really need to talk about that sometime. And so we've got this list of things, list of postponed conversations, and now we're, now we get to actually talk about them.

Elise:

Yeah, I'm really excited. I feel similarly, Ryan. I want to have conversations, and I think that's the best outcome of this pandemic, at this moment, is wanting to say more to someone or say something back. So I'm really looking forward to today's talk.

Ryan:

Yeah, me too. Where do you want to start?

Elise:

Oh, good question. Well, what are you reading lately? That's where we started all of this months ago. We talked about what we were reading. So why not just begin there? What's kind of keeping you attuned?

Ryan:

That's true. I'm reading an amazing Chinese science fiction trilogy by an author, Cixin Liu. I'm gonna butcher the name. But it was, it's blurbed by Barack Obama. So it must be good, right?

And it's really, I had this very eerie experience coming back. I was driving back from a camping trip with my kids this past weekend. And it's a kind of apocalyptic novel. The encounter with, the first encounter of humanity with aliens is just—they aren't friendly aliens. And so I'm now in the third volume. And one of the big issues is that there seems to be some force sending meteorites into spaceships and destroying things.

And it was just, I mean, the title of the second volume is The Dark Forest. And it just is getting sort of dark and enclosed. The more they expand into space, the more enclosed everything feels, the options are closing down, which is kind of how, you know, proceeding into 2020 has felt for me. And at that moment, when it was talking about these meteorites, I saw, you know, driving 80 miles an hour, I saw the brightest, I think it was a meteorite, that I've ever seen before. It must've been very low atmosphere. It's trail was like something, you know, felt like that big, like if I put my fingers on the windshield, like it would've been like an inch across. And it went the entire length of the sky that, the visible sky, and at the end, it exploded. There was an explosion and it burst, it looked like it burst into pieces. which made me think, oh my gosh, is this is a missile being shot down or something? But I didn't see anything about it in the news the next day. Although there were other stories in the news going on, this is when, this was when the election results were still up in the air.

So that is my kind of, it seems like everything I've been reading very, has been sort of absorbing this mood of 2020. There's also pandemics in this book.

Elise:

Yeah, I have my own weird story to share about reading the signs of the times and everything becoming darker and more claustrophobic. So, and this also relates to what I'm reading now, too. Or rereading as the case may be. The morning after the election, I woke up to the sound of an owl hooting, which I have never heard before at my house, since moving into this house in 2017. And I was out of bed at 4:00 AM like a lightning bolt, trying to find this owl, looking out the window, trying to find it, as if I could. Obviously I did not, but I'm hearing it hooting and the moon was waning, but it was still mostly full, and it was casting these beautiful moonshadows on the backyard. And what I could see was not this owl, but several doe, bedded down in the backyard. So I was just thinking, what does any of this mean? How do I, how do I read these signs? And I was talking with a friend of mine, asking her what she thought. And she said, it means nothing. It just happened, which I am sure is the right answer. But she also said, but you do remind me of that line in Benjamin, Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library” about the owl of Minerva. So I went back and I'm rereading this essay, and he does have that great line about “the owl of Minerva only flies at night, and it's only in extinction when the meaning of a collection becomes known and understood.”

So what does any of this mean? A meteorite that you saw explode? An owl, apparently, I think hooting, I'm pretty sure I wasn't dreaming? Benjamin—this is, I think the start of this conversation, Ryan, is all anybody needs to say about 2020 and where our minds are at this moment.

Ryan:

That is so good. I love that you got to hear an owl. And so the owl of Minerva, the muse of history, right?

Elise:

Yeah.

Ryan:

Or no, the Cleo is the—

Elise:

Cleo is a muse of history.

Ryan:

Minerva is, in this case, what?

Elise:

Well, I think, yeah, I mean, I think in this case, it is a kind of way of thinking about death and knowledge and kind of the sign that goes forth from a body of knowledge that is presumed to be extinct, as he says. I mean, he's kind of talking about, as he's, the title of the essay is “Unpacking My Library,” and immediately a few sentences past the reference to the owl of Minerva, he talks about what happens to him when he looks at his books and what he sees, what he thinks about, is not necessarily the content of the books, but the images and the memories that are associated with those books. So his ideas about collecting and collectors have a lot to do with what I tend to think of kind of as a hologram relationship: there is the experience, the knowledge, and then the reflection upon it, and the way that that reflection intersects with memory and with affect. And, you know, by the end, he said that he has now built this dwelling place and the only job for the collector now is to disappear into it and to become extinct himself.

That collection is really concerned with heirs. So I think that the owl of Minerva is always in flight and always disappearing. It's the dark sign that we have to discern—I guess all of this is getting me back to the thoughts about discernment that I've been trying to have lately, but not making a whole lot of progress on.

Ryan:

Oh, interesting. I, so just, you know, just to clarify for our listeners, Minerva is the goddess of wisdom, but also associated with the God with according to Wikipedia with war, art, schools, and commerce. but I think in Benjamin's essay it’s definitely wisdom, right? Like you don't, like, you can be reading the books, and you're not, like—the wisdom isn't happening while you're reading the books. It's something that comes later. And so, yeah. So how, what have you been thinking about discernment?

Elise:

Well, really, I'm trying to parse out some thoughts that I have been having about self-reflection, self reflexivity, and discernment. And self, being honest with oneself. Because for me, these are also tied up in questions of idolatry, which I think is something that I recognize in my own self, my tendency to idolize particular people or ideas. And then that attachment that I have to them leads to a blindness. So how do I form meaningful attachments? But I'm constantly excavating the desires that are embedded in those attachments. And by being honest with myself—and is there a difference between a language of discernment and a language of being self-reflective?

And for me, self reflexivity is relational. We're in relationship with ourselves, but discernment seems to me to be a working out of truth in conversation. So there is a kind of outward movement in discernment that I'm not catching in self-reflection, or at least–I'm speaking for myself, right now, and trying to work some things out that maybe I can extrapolate to a larger idea about the difference between these two processes. But for right now, I'm just talking about myself. So the movement out, especially in this pandemic, and how are we going to engage, how are we going to communicate, seems to be the question on everyone's mind right now. And we're getting a variety of answers. And in some case, no answer, there is no communication possible.

And I'd like to believe that's not true, but sometimes I fall into that trap myself. So that's why I'm thinking about discernment and self-reflection.

Ryan:

Yeah. I think one of the big challenges to living through times of anxiety is that I think the reason these times are filled with anxiety is because we don't know what they mean. So there's no, you know, and that's where, you know, the owl Minerva flies by night. It's not until after it's all over that we know what it means. And one of the things that I've been writing, that I shared with you, was an effort to think about how apocalyptic times are given significance. And so that's kind of why I've been reading scifi, and the thing that got me going on this was that I watched Christopher Nolan's new movie, Tenet.

And this was, this was supposed to be the movie that saved the movie theaters in the midst of COVID. I'm not sure it was successful, but one of my favorite movies is Inception by Christopher Nolan. And it involves sort of these time traveling, traveling within kinds of themes, and Tenet does too I didn't really like Tenet, but the concept, to me, just really stuck with me, and it's that, fundamentally, that time is palindromic. So the title Tenet is a palindrome. The beginning is the same as the end, and the middle is the middle. And so things actually ended up revolving around the middle. And if beginning and the end are the same, then the one thing that's unique is the middle. And so what, it struck me that, in this movie that imagines that time is reversible, that we can actually sort of move through time backwards, not like travel back in time, but actually move backwards through time that is actually falling forward. One of the things that got to me about that is that that would provide the opportunity to make meaning about, meaning of the muddle that is the middle. And so how do we, you know, by imagining some kind of apocalyptic end, are we then able to make meaning of what's in between? And I think that fiction is a great way to explore that, and, particularly now, fictions about pandemics.

Elise:

That's all really fascinating. And my mind went in a lot of different directions. So to keep with your idea here, I'm going to try to walk it back in time and go back to the middle of what you were saying, because that idea of the center portion being what's fundamentally unknowable, kind of reinventing itself, changing, perhaps, kind of with each, with each refresh, with each click, is the part that is different.

That seems really relevant to me in a lot of different fronts right now. I mean, I know I've been thinking a lot about error and how we make mistakes and the way that our brain perceptually responds to mistakes. And it seems to me, like, we only recognize them belatedly, in a lot of cases. I mean, we might touch a flame and realize we made a mistake in that moment, when we're in pain, but kind of these world ordering mistakes, we don't always understand them in the moment and we have to reflect back on them. And of course we associate error with mistaken processes, but of course it comes from the root that means to wander. And so that idea of wandering around, but also believing that error can be apocalyptic in the sense that it is both world-ending and revelatory, I think is very meaningful.

And I think that that is something that you're kind of getting at with the idea of scifi, that imagining an apocalypticism is actually really fruitful for an understanding of present, that an imagined future gives us something that we otherwise have no access to. We have no access to the present. What could that even mean, to understand the present moment? We can only do it through these imaginative casts ahead and behind. So that's one thing. I'm also just thinking about temporal lags. You and I are talking over Zoom right now, and our lives are structured by Zoom at this particular moment, I think for many of us. So there's a way in which questions about digital life and our life with technology are also very much concerned with temporality and spatiality. And there's no physical distance that you and I can measure here. And so even our meaning across this format and the instantaneousness, that we believe we're getting an immediate image of you or the immediate sound in my headphones, is mediated, firstly, and I think most importantly, but then also there are lags, literal lags, glitches, but there are lags and our temporal understanding. And maybe this is all a really convoluted way of saying why things like “hot takes” aren't very useful in our current moment, that there needs to be a time of a working out of ideas.

And for myself, I see something kind of strange in our invocations of timeliness and relevance, that in order to review a book or a movie, that's got to get out right away. And we associate a kind of timeliness with presentism that I think is not very useful to us in this moment. And relevance with something more like relatability, which I think is a concept that we could do less with.

Ryan:

Yeah, I think a very concrete example of making the effort to think about the present from the future is, Beatrice Institute co-sponsored a webinar called “Flourishing in the Wake of COVID-19,” which is still available on our YouTube channel for those who are interested. And it was organized by Beatrice Institute faculty fellow Grant Martsolf, who is in Pitt school of Nursing and is an expert in health and public policy. And he brought together some epidemiological researchers who have been focusing, during the pandemic, not on direct effects of COVID, but on the on the sort of knock-on effects. And so, you know, what does mass unemployment, what do we know from history are the repercussions of mass unemployment and, you know, how can we look at the data that we have for depression and despair that's updated every month and see how that's changing? And, you know, one of my big takeaways from that is that we just don't understand the extent and the depth of this pandemic, and we won't until well in the future. But there are ways to try to make meaning of it, even as we're inside it.

Elise:

And our meeting will ultimately be part of the fragments that come together to show a hole at some point in the future. I think that that's—I like your reference, and I liked that it also involves flourishing, that partly not knowing doesn't have to be, doesn't have to bring us to a position of fear or doesn’t have to be a position of weakness, but is actually just simply a condition of reality. And it's making me think, actually, of another issue that I know you and I wanted to talk about. We both are fans of Marilynne Robinson, and we're both really impressed by a recent conversation she did on as Ezra Klein’s podcast. And she had a quote there that I'm thinking of. Her metaphysics…

Ryan:

And just to pause there, Marilynne Robinson is the American novelist, she's still living, still very actively writing, who has written a series of beautiful Christian novels that center around the family of a pastor in Iowa in the middle of the 20th century.

Elise:

Yeah. Thank you. And she's also written a lot of essays on democracy and on the humanities. So there's a whole world of her thinking that is deep and rich for anyone listening, who hasn't yet discovered Marilynne Robinson’s writing.

Ryan:

Where would you suggest, would you suggest starting with Gilead or—

Elise:

I would, yeah. I found my way to Robinson through her fiction. So I guess I'm biased in that way, but yeah, the Gilead books, which there is the novel Gilead, and then there are other books, Lila and now her recent novel Jack, and then the other one, Home. Yes. That all center around this community of Gilead in Iowa and families and relationships. That to me is a really excellent place to start.

Ryan:

But so go ahead with what you were the quote from Marilynne Robinson's interview.

Elise:

She was talking about her—Ezra Klein asked her about her view of metaphysics. And she said that she refused to reduce it to the anomalous fragment of reality. And I loved that, because you know, her point was that this—if physics has shown us anything, it is that our, physics and I will also say that cognitive psychology and perceptual psychology, have shown us anything it's that we are inhabiting a world that is far vaster than we can really even imagine and that it is really just our imaginations that give us the best grasp on it. Not even the science; the science kind of tells us that. And maybe that's another way to loop back around to scifi and fiction. But her point, as I understand it, was that anything that sort of grounds itself on what is only and totally available in the real or in reality, which I think she means by that as some kind of present moment, is not going to capture everything. And I mean, I think even phenomenological ways of thinking show us this. The way that our reality affords us meaning, we are always interpreting it and responding affectively, intellectually, interpretatively on objects, on our environment and surroundings, but those are always conditioned by things beyond the environment itself. So.

Ryan:

And Ezra Klein, you know, he had trouble wrapping his head around that response, because he's, you know, Ezra Klein is the founder, one of the co-founders of Vox Media, and the mission of Vox Media, besides being a propaganda machine for the progressive left, is to explain politics and, or just to explain, to explain anything. And Ezra Klein is an amazingly cogent explainer of complex phenomena, but he's fundamentally a technocrat, and all problems, no matter how seemingly intractable, if we just approach them with adequate knowledge and complexity and creativity, we can solve them. And so I think he was really, but he wants to, he's getting to this point in his life, you can tell, he's turning to interviewing novelists and poets, and he's getting to this point in his life where he's like, I think there's something more, and Marilynne Robinson, like, really pushed him.

Elise:

Yeah, I think she did. And I'll just say I love his podcast. I have read Vox for a long time and I think I would encourage anyone listening to go to listen to this interview, but he also has a list of some of his best interviews. And they are varied. They are real conversations. And yeah, I think that he is fundamentally interested in understanding and in explanatory force. But aren't we all, I mean, I have kind of, you know, we're both in the business of interpretation, and I think that drive, and this is what I always come back to, is, like, what is the desire driving me toward meaning making? How do I understand what I want when I say I want to interpret this text or this person's words or this movie that I watched? That to me is an interesting question. What does it mean—and this is something I say to my students a lot—what is embedded in our desire to be able to say, “Alexa, play X” or “Siri, show me this”? What does it mean for us to want to tell something to do an action for us? What does it mean that we gave these AI, what would I even call them, bots, female names? I'm not the first person to ask these questions, but I want to think about that. And I think that what is embedded in Marilynne Robinson’s idea about this anomalous fragment of reality is that it also leaves out complex desires that we can't always account for, I think, and that structure our lives in ways that we're not always able to recognize, or maybe not always able to fess up to. Affect is another really important organizing category in my own thinking, so I wonder about that a lot too.

Ryan:

Can we talk about Heroes of the Fourth Turning?

Elise:

Let's do it. Let's do it. Where do you want to go with that?

Ryan:

Well, okay. So Heroes of the Fourth Turning, would you, would you want to introduce it?

Elise:

Sure. It is a play by a Will Arbery, and it premiered in New York city, in a major theater, in New York City, and it centers around four characters. A fifth character comes in the very end of the play. It takes place over one night in Wyoming. And these four people are early to mid twenties. They are all alumni of a small Catholic, conservative Catholic college and they're coming together to celebrate their mentor, who's recently made head of this school. And while they are there, they hash out their ideas about the contemporary political climate, their own conservatism, what their education from a Catholic, conservative intellectual tradition has given them, has wrought in their lives. Their own foibles come out in a variety of ways. And this play was exceedingly well-reviewed, by really the mainstream New York theater critics, the New York times, the New Yorker, Timeout New York, all gave this five-star reviews. The play itself is nominated for a Pulitzer. This was not a one-off. Will Arbery is a very is a very lauded playwright. This isn't a play that just appealed to a very small fragment of the population. This isn't a play that really only reached out to conservative Catholics. It has had a really wide audience and that's part of what people are surprised by, I think, by the kind of intellectual rigor, but also the performative possibilities for this worldview, which isn't something that you see on the stage very often. And I think, disappointingly, and maybe this is where you can correct me, I have not really seen any substantive article from a Christian perspective about this play. I've seen a lot of it from, you know, mainstream news outlets, as I said, reviews, but I haven't really seen much in the other direction, but I could be wrong. I haven't looked in a while. So that's the premise of this play. Is there anything you want to add to that?

Ryan:

Yeah, I mean, just in terms of like the kind of ideological grounding of the play. Arbery could have chosen to put a character in there who represents his New York audience, right? There could have been, you know, a parent who is appalled by the, you know, what they would see as the sexism of traditional Catholicism and so on and give voice to that. But he didn't, he intentionally did not insert the kind of mainstream liberal character. And so it really, I think a lot of Catholics watched this play and just thought, wow, like here's someone taking us seriously for the first time, that we've seen, and really digging into the theological, the historical, the cultural foundations of a conservative Catholic lifestyle, and particularly of, at least a good proportion of the characters are advocates of, you know, what's called the Benedict option, that in this state of advanced secularism, the best thing for faithful Christians to do is to retreat from public engagement, into small communities where they can live faithfully and kind of carry on the faith across generations until it becomes possible again, to engage the public. Sort of like, Saint Benedict created these monasteries that sort of kept culture going across the tumultuous times after the collapse of the Roman empire, in the fifth century up until sort of a stable political order later in the middle ages. And so that's represented positively, I think.

Elise:

Yeah. And I think, so this is, this is interesting. I think this is where we'll have a good conversation. I have nothing but praise for the play. I think it was brilliantly written. I do think it manifested. And I think that the form, theater, is important here. I think that the theatrical form and the performance of that particular identity, which is not seen or well understood, was excellent, and giving it voice and allowing it to exist in both positive and negative ways, as a real human experience, was truly excellent. And I should say too, that you and I both saw this over Zoom. We did not see this in the theater. At least I don't think you did. Okay. So we both were able to see this as Zoom performance that happened over the summer. I know that the play is now available, the text, is now available. So I think many more people will be reading the play.

Ryan:

And then there was another Zoom performance just in October. And so that makes me think that there will be more Zoom performances in the future that people can catch.

Elise:

Oh, great. Okay. I did not know that. Well, I was going to add on there that, so I mentioned about affective responses and kind of structures of feeling and that being really important to my own way of thinking. And what I personally got out of that show was a validation for, frankly, some bad experiences with fellow Catholics in my life. And I want to say that, and before I go any farther, I want to say that I am not, this is not an attempt to denigrate or to take down other people's points of view. I'm articulating my own response to it and what I think the play allows for.

So, what I mean by that is the play evidenced a kind of argumentative structure that I have encountered in very few places, but one of them is amongst conservative Catholics, that tends to rely on a very formal mode of argument and a rhetorical reliance upon rhetorical means and methods, and that doesn't always allow for a kind of emotional response, or the emotional response is then deemed to not be in a proper order, and so it has to be reordered to the argument. And when I've been in these positions myself, I've often felt knocked back on my heels. I suddenly get confused about where we are, even, what is the topic of conversation, and in a few particular examples to my own life, deeply shamed and deeply hurt.

And so when I saw the play, what I saw in, one thing that I saw, was a kind of visceral response to an argumentative style and to a form of citation and to a form of intellectual sparring, which there's nothing wrong with that, but that does have a physical effect—or at least it's had a physical effect on me. And so I thought, oh, that does exist, or, that wasn't just to me, or, there is this whole realm of feeling. And I felt like that was, that was the backside to the play, in a way; if the ideas are the front side, the backside to me was what happens when you are in that environment, engage in this kind of argumentative intellectual sparring, and you don't feel like you have a way to talk back to that, or the way that you do have isn't acknowledged as a valid form of argumentation. So I loved the play, and that was one big reason for it. And I, you know, I don't—I have felt more isolated from the audience that that play represented than I have felt to be a part of it, even though some of the people I've known the longest in my life have been a part of that, the group that was represented in the play. And again, this is not an us-versus-them. It's just saying my own position mattered in my reading of the play.

Ryan:

Yeah. Did the character, Emily, who is the daughter of the new college president and she is, she suffers from some kind of severe, you know, life, chronic illness. Did she represent for you the position of someone who feels shut down by the kind of classical-rhetorical approach to things?

Elise:

Yes. Definitely. I think that she, at least my reading of her character is that that is part of her position in the play, that she is kind of representing another—and to give our listeners some context, she's a character that works a clinic for women, trying to discourage them from getting abortions. But in that process is—comes face to face with the complicated questions that women face in the world, and especially women of color face, and the ending of the play... I guess I won't give any spoilers here, but I'm still wondering about the end of the play. I mean, the play, I think…

Ryan:

I think for the sake of conversation, we should just spoil it.

Elise:

Okay. Okay. Well then know if you're listening that we are going to spoil it here, so…

Ryan:

I mean, because you can just skip over if you, if you really don't want to know how to play ends, you can just skip over the next, you know, five minutes.

Elise:

Right. So well at the end of the play, Emily has this moment of reckoning, I suppose, within herself, this moment of apocalyptic revelation, where she unveils the depths of her own physical pain, but also feelings of anger and resentment that she has long carried, and she funnels it through an experience that she had with a woman at this women's clinic. And it is a woman of color, and she begins to ventriloquize that woman. So she goes back and forth and speaks both as herself, but also as this woman. It's almost like a scene of possession, like this woman has possessed her in a particular way.

Ryan:

Or yeah, or I guess I would say more like a medium, like a seance situation, like where she is becoming a medium for this other person. Yeah.

Elise:

Yeah. Okay. I like that because, I mean, that to me gives a different reading, which I think is helpful, because if she is a medium, then, and she is speaking to an audience that would otherwise not hear this woman's voice, there's a form of advocacy there that I understand, because I think the other big issue that the play really gets into is questions of race and why is race still so difficult in particular faith communities. And it's not just conservative Catholicism. Why is it still something that people will not acknowledge and will not kind of ask serious questions about? And I think the play just sort of leaves us with, like, why won't we talk about this?

So to go back to your question of me, did I see myself in her to a certain extent? Yes. Although I am still trying to work out what I think that character represents or means. And is this kind of white woman ventriloquizing a Black woman's pain appropriate right now. So I'm still working through that.

Ryan:

So here's, here's my understanding of the two major readings of the end of the play that I've come across, and tell me if, you know, these map onto what you've heard or read or thought. So one is that Emily is being developed as a kind of saintly figure in this play. And her sanctity is in part distinguished because of the fact that she both understands the dialectical, theological approach to reality and morality that some of the other characters stand for, and she not only understands it, but she takes it seriously. She takes the, she takes these discursive, dialectic, dialectical claims to, or the claim of the Catholic church that there is, part of the Catholic church's authority is invested in these, you know, discursive, dialectical formations, like, you know, Thomas Aquinas, there's something about the clarity of that logic that is irreducible. And if you throw that away, you can't have the rest of the faith, right? And so she seems to take that seriously, but at the same time, she recognizes the importance of feeling. And so she's kind of, intellectually, she seems able to inhabit, both the sort of romantic theology, kind of John Paul the second, and the rationalistic theology. But, you know, really, her own mode seems to be more on the romantic side of things. And then when we get to this climax of the play, when she ventriloquizes this other figure, it is the sort of utmost expression of her sanctity, because it shows that she is actually able to empty herself of herself and like Jesus, you know, canonically emptying himself, be fully available to a human being who's completely, you know, in many ways different from her. So that's the one reading.

And then the other reading is that Emily is torn apart by this conflict in herself between, you know, traditional, rationalistic dogma and her feelings. And that, that conflict ultimately results in the revealing that what many people had interpreted as being kind of mystical aspects of Emily's life are actually psychological phenomenon and she is ultimately hysterical. And in this ventriloquism scene, she is experiencing a hysterical episode that is leading her to cross very important identitarian boundaries and to claim to speak and think on behalf of somebody for whom she has no right to think or speak. And so what we see there then is the corrupting influence of this traditional Catholicism, that it drives people who can truly think and feel, it drives them crazy. Yeah. What do you think of those two?

Elise:

Well, the part of me that that does want to like get into is, like, isn't there a third option, but I find myself—so I hadn't read these two interpretations. So, as I'm listening to you, it is hard for me to come down on the side of the saintly interpretation. It is tough for me to land there. Do I think she's hysterical? No, but do I think the play is asking us to take seriously psychological manifestations of physical pain. Like her embodiment clearly matters in this play, and her…

Ryan:

The major symptom of her illness is chronic pain.

Elise:

Exactly. Yes. And so that—and I think her own position as an embodied woman matters. I mean the other character, the other female character in the play, Theresa, I think it matters for her too. So I don't want to say that it's only true for this character, Emily. So I do follow that idea about a kind of psychological manifestation. You know, I think maybe I'm, I'll just say this. I think I'm really close—I'm kind of close to this. So it's hard for me right now to extricate my own experiences and do that work of interpretation where we started this conversation, because there was a period in my life, and I'll just share this for whoever might want to hear it, where I did think I was crazy, like I was, and I was told by a person that I was hysterical, and it came down in precisely these ways, this kind of argument. And it, it left, I mean, you don't get over that very easily. And it left a big mark in my life. It's a line in the sand in my life. And so, you know, you said that the second reading is that this traditional Catholicism just drives people crazy, I don't think that's true, but I have felt the truth of it in my life. And so that might be all I can say about it, because I'm realizing that it, as affective our conversation here, of course, I've known that there's so much that I personally have been working out and working through over the years.

And my own Catholicism, it is my imaginative purchase on the world. And I say that in faith, I'm not saying that, you know, it's, I'm not using imagination in a kind of a vague way. But it's always, it's always the thing I am in relationship and intention with, and that's meaningful for me. That's not a capitulation. But I think my reading of this play is so super saturated with my own frustrations, with my own experience, with my own pain, that it's difficult for me at this point to extricate my experience from it. And I'll add one more thing. I also don't think it's always necessary to do that. I don't think that good criticism is devoid of the personal, in fact, I think it's often motivated by the personal, it's just a matter of how do I find the language to translate my experiences into a reading of the play. Maybe I haven't fully done that yet.

Ryan:

Yeah. You know, so what's interesting to me is that the latter interpretation I have seen come mostly from people who, you know, traditional Catholics, and the former interpretation, you know, that she is a saint, I think, well, I haven't seen that in writing and I'm not, I'm not sure I would want to associate that with sort of a secular audience, but I can see it as a potentially a secular reading. But when I watched the play, I was actually, I watched it at Wyoming Catholic College, which is kind of the fictionalized basis of this play, with people who are a part of that community. And they too experienced it intensely personally. I mean, as you might imagine. But, you know, I think regardless of interpretation, I think this is the kind of play that no matter where you are, and I think even, I don't think you need to be Catholic to be intensely engaged by this play. You know, I'm a Catholic convert and I know evangelicalism and mainline Protestantism very well from the inside. And I think that it's gonna, I think it's, it's kind of like there's positions in that play that are so close to anybody who is trying to practice the Christian faith in the contemporary world, that you're going to have like a personal response. And that's one of the brilliant things about it.

Elise:

I would completely agree with that. And I second what you said that this isn't, it may be a play about Catholics, but I don't think, I mean, the reception it's received thus far proves that it's not for only that audience. And I think you're right. It did present a way of thinking about, again, I keep coming back to this, performing, what it means to live in the world as a person of faith, and the contradictions that you bump up against, and the ways that you are trying to always ascertain what it is you believe and the bedrocks that you fall back on. And I think it's not incidental that this is a conversation amongst friends. The situation of the play is a conversation amongst friends, people who share a history, people who went through things together, people who made mistakes together. I mean, that's the kind of, we can leave that one as an unspoiled element for people that there, that there are other revelations that the night brings. And you know, it's not, it is a very visceral representation of what it means to try to be faithful when the mandate is be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect and go and sell everything that you have and give to the poor. When those are your mandates, the bar is set very high, to put it, to understate it.

Ryan:

Maybe that's a great transition to A Hidden Life. Terrence Malick's most recent movie where the hero, the main character, Franz Jaggerstatter, historical figure, he takes up that challenge and lays down his entire life in order to resist the Nazis. And so this is a true story, or based on a true story. And we both saw it. And I think I, yeah, I think I immediately, because we we've talked about Terrence Malick before, and I think I immediately texted you and said, have you seen it? What do you think of it?

Elise:

Yeah. Do you want me to start again? Because I feel like I'm going to get on another, like crabby track and I don't know…

Ryan:

Well, I mean, could I just say something about Terrence Malick first?

Elise:

Please. Yes.

Ryan:

Terrence Malick should be my favorite director in many ways. The made my favorite movie of all time, Tree of Life. He also made what I think is the best war movie, The Thin [Red] Line, that I found just absolutely stunning.

And he is clearly just unremittingly engaged with reality—reality understood as the disclosure of truth, beauty, and goodness, from the heart of being itself. And that's all that he really cares about. I mean, it seems to me, and how did, and I guess the moments when those, when reality becomes real, it discloses itself to us. But he's not, he doesn't belong to any actual faith tradition. He belongs to one that that is kind of imaginary and, I mean, it has a historical tradition, but you know, American transcendentalism. So he describes himself as an American transcendentalist, in the, you know, in the tradition of Emerson. And so, for a while I thought that didn't really matter, and that he was just kind of making an intellectual historical mistake, category mistake, when he in thinking about himself or describing himself. But then watching some other movies, I began to see, like, there's just, there's like this sentimentalism that comes through sometimes. And that just becomes a little too saccharin for me. And I haven't, I don't have like a direct right of interpretation between like Emerson and sentimentalism. But there's something there that always makes me like back up a little bit from him and makes him not my favorite director.

And so, well, and so then we come to this Catholic movie, he actually makes a Catholic movie. I mean, it was about a Catholic, a blessed, blessed Franz Jaggerstatter. And so that to me is like, oh, wow, well maybe something's changing.

Elise:

Okay. Well, I was nodding vociferously on your claims about a sentimentalism, because Terrence Malick clearly has a visual language that is beautiful. And I mean, he works with great cinematographers who have a real way of capturing things from, literally from the ground up, these sweeping lyrical shots, but also positioned at strange angles that are, like, coming in like the angles of light. And he seems to be very interested in refraction, and I really find all of that beautiful.

Ryan:

And the audio style, the style of audio editing, where he sort of created this, the style of voiceover narration that kind of is not just a one-off, but interacts with intradiegetic audio. So extradiegetic audio interacting with intradiadiegetic audio, meaning characters speaking in the scene, and then characters voicing over in the scene, is really powerful. And he's been doing it since early on. And if he does it to amazing effect in this movie,

Elise:

Yeah, I mean, I also, the voiceover is intriguing to me and I see Malick, and maybe I should just say too, that I also feel like maybe Malick should mean more to me than he does. I am a part of that party that was not engaged by Tree of Life. I'm sorry. There are people who I know, dear friends of mine who are probably listening to this and they just shake their head or something worse. But that did nothing for me. But leaving that aside for the moment. I see Malick as kind of an inheritor of a filmmaker that I do love and have a semi-idolatrous relationship too. And that's Tarkovsky, and the kind of granular attention to detail and the revelation of reality that you spoke about with Malick, I see in Tarkovsky, but also in Tarkovsky, the overlay of voiceover is really important. And I think his working out of it is stronger to me than Malick's, but be that as it may. So yeah, Terrence Malick, isn't my filmmaker either, even though I appreciate the way that he makes film. So did you find A Hidden Life sentimental? Because that is actually one of my critiques of it.

Ryan:

I did. I got to the end of the movie and I thought, why did this guy resist the Nazis?

Elise:

Exactly.

Ryan:

Is it just because like, he had some kind of infusion of clarity and truth that nobody else did in his village? And why was he so special? I was like, there's gotta be more to it. And I immediately, I went on Amazon. I was like, surely there's a book about this guy. And it turns out that the book about this guy is a thick collection of his letters that he was writing to his wife and to his bishops, back and forth exchanges about this. And they are intensely intellectual. His conscience was being formed in a very strong and detailed way, from well before the Nazi occupation, and yes, that's where it came from. It's like, yeah, he didn't just have an infusion. Like the guy was reading everything he could get his hands on. Not only theology and ethics, but all of the political happenings, I mean, he subscribed to the newspaper and read it cover to cover. Everday.

Elise:

Yes, I think we're on the same page about this. When I said I was going to be crabby earlier, it may be made it seem like we were going to be on divergent poles, but we're really not. I found the same thing in my reaction. At the end of the film was, did I need three to three and a half hours to have an ubermensch? Like the very thing that he was supposed to be fighting against this kind of superlative view of a particular race of people seem to have been transferred onto him, that he was somehow this, as you put it, specially-infused person that kind of was like the Incredible Hulk, that just bulked up in the moment, and then, you know, he alone resisted the Nazis. And for the life of me, I couldn't understand why so many Christians and why so many Catholics in particular just found this to be a great Catholic film or a great representation of a Catholic figure of resisting the Nazis. Because the only explanation I have for it is that there must be a way in which the actual biography, the actual letters are being read onto a film that cannot support the reality of their lives.

And I don't know about you, but there was a scene when he is, he has been called in to a kind of trial scenario and they're giving him basically an opportunity to recant and to say, okay, you may not believe any of this, but just say that you do, otherwise, you're going to be killed. And your wife and your children are going to suffer for this as well. And there is a lawyer representing the Nazis. And he seems to be of this mindset. Like, yeah, I don't really like these guys either, but look, I'm just getting along with them here. And he says, are you alone wise? Okay. So this is a Nazi saying this. That's what of course Thomas Moore said to Martin Luther. And when I, when I saw that, I laughed out loud in this really serious moment in this film, I laughed aloud. I thought, oh, now we have devolved to where we're kind of in some weird, ironic hall of mirrors, where I'm supposed to think who, what is going on with Thomas Moore's quote here, and that led to madness.

Ryan:

Do you remember what was Jaggerstatter’s response to that?

Elise:

I believe it was silence, but to be honest with you, I don't recall. And I watched that film over the summer as well, and I have not returned to it nor do I think that I will.

Ryan:

Yeah, no, I'm fairly sure it was silence because that's how he responds to everything. And it could be, I mean, you know, it could be that historically I didn't look into this aspect of it, but it could be that historically he did, you know, keep Christ-like silence during the trial scenes. But that silence is, Malick takes it to be carried through the rest of his life. And one of the interesting things that I discovered was that even though some of the voiceover is drawn from the text of his letters to his wife, most of it is not. So we're not even getting, like, even to the voiceovers, we're not even getting the voice of Franz Jaggerstatter.

Elise:

Right. It does. And the problem, an additional problem with that for me is that it makes a voice disembodied from a situation where resistance, again we come back to this idea, is an embodied practice. Like to actually say no was an act of the will and an act of the body that required moral, ethical, intellectual, and physical strengths.

And I think that, you know, you had mentioned that the primary writing about the Jaggerstatters is their letters, and I also think that his wife was not well portrayed in this film at all, and, unfortunately, in my view, became a representation that's just fodder for the kind of wasting-wife-away-at-home who has to, you know, deal with the ostracization that her community foists upon her when Franz is taken away and when he makes his stand. But her strength, her intellectual development, that all got washed away in this film, which to me was the final strike, I guess.

Ryan:

Yeah. And that idea of intellectual development, I think, is so important, because one of the, you know, I would say that the, you know, when his, you know, cause goes up to be made a saint, I think one of the great, maybe the defining feature of his sanctity, especially sort of in the modern world, you know, to be a modern saint, is not that he resisted the Nazis, but that he was transformed by the renewal of his mind. He led a kind of classic dissolute youth. He had a child out of wedlock. He sort of bounced around from various jobs. He was not, you know, this isn't someone who sort of grew up pious and wanting to be a priest. And it was only sort of when the politics of the outside world, starting to press upon him, that he really got serious, right, about life and did so all the way. Like he went all the way. And he was transformed and his wife was too in those conversations that they had back and forth, coming around to his difficult position.

Elise:

And I think this is a good mirror for the difference between the hard work of emotional honesty and affective response that we've been talking about and an easy sentimentalism. I mean, sentimentalism manufactures a feeling, it's a feeling for the sake of feeling. You know, we sometimes read, recently, in a lot of pieces about a kind of intellectual hand-wringing—it's that handwringing, that kind of excessive feeling for the sake of feeling, but actual emotional engagement is tied with our intellectual life, and it is difficult in ways that our lives are difficult. And it requires, I think, I'm very interested in form generally. And that's why I think that Heroes of the Fourth Turning works so well, because it's a play. I don't think it would work as well as a short story, but I also think that in some ways Malick's visual language is fundamentally unsuited formally to the kinds of biographical questions that he seemingly wanted to tackle in this film.

Ryan:

Yeah, I agree. I absolutely agree. Well…

Elise:

Where do we go from here?

Ryan:

How about a recommendation of something that you, besides, I guess we have recommended Heroes of the Fourth Turning, is there…

Elise:

Yeah, I would certainly still recommend that. I think, let's see… Over the last year, I've done a lot of reading in nature writing, and that is really influenced my thinking a lot, and in terms of worldliness relationship to other creatures, but also I think that nature writing does something formally that happens in different genres, but nature writing does it especially well, and that is, unites a sense of fact and study and science alongside a sense of wonder and joy and a kind of resplendent appreciation for the world around us. And I would like to recover more of that union and that entanglement of an approach to truth that is both informed by fact and wonder. So I would recommend to people, Barry Lopez's book Arctic Dreams, which is, along with Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us, those would probably be the two best pieces of nature writing that I've read. They're extraordinary. So those are two recommendations I would have for folks right now. What about you?

Ryan:

Well, you know, I, sticking with the kind of scifi kick that I've been on, I really was drawn into the HBO, well, not originally HBO series, originally Norwegian series called Beforeigners. And the concept of the series is that in the second largest city of Norway, people from the past start floating up in the harbor, and they are essentially immigrants to the present, and they come from various eras. There's a large, stone-age contingent, there's a larger Viking-age contingent, and there's a large Victorian contingent. And they're stuck. Like they can't go back. Nobody knows how they got there. They don't remember how they got there. And in some ways it replicates the refugee crisis in Europe, where especially the Scandinavian countries have been very welcoming to especially Syrian refugees, but at the same time, like there's a major cultural clash. It's hard to know what to do with them. And then, I think, I'm not sure how the politics plays out, but I know that there are large movements politically to say, look, we're being taken over by these immigrants. Our culture is going to be, you know, is going to be overwhelmed by immigration if we don't put an end to it.

And so, but the most interesting thing to me is that the present is being colonized by the past and the past might actually win. And all of the achievements of modernity are, the mirror is held up to them and they're put to the test, and, you know, liberal democracy is, it turns out not to be incredibly attractive to stone-age people. You know, tolerance turns out not to be a principal that the stone-age people are willing to, or Viking-age people are willing to embrace. And it's a really, you know, this, my main academic project is called Genealogies of Modernity. And if, you know, if our project could have put together, a TV series to kind of be a sandbox or a lab to test out theories of how we became modern, what modernity means, and what is its relationship to the past—this is the series that would have done it.

Elise:

Nice. Thank you. How can we access that?

Ryan:

Well, I think, unfortunately you have to have an HBO subscription and it is a very short series. It's just six episodes. And when I heard about it, I was like, I gotta watch this. and so I got, like, a seven day free trial and binged it.

Elise:

Exactly. That's right. Yes. The free trial. How many of those have I started during this pandemic? So, yeah.

Ryan:

Well, Elise, it's so wonderful to have these conversations with you finally.

Elise:

I know it is. I'm really grateful for it, Ryan, and we didn't even get into anything about Zoom fatigue or our phenomenological response to Zoom or worship over zoom. So maybe we'll have to do this again.

Ryan:

Yeah. And the fact that we enjoyed this conversation so much, just, I think, goes to show that Zoom isn't all bad.

Elise:

That's right. That's right. This episode brought to you by Zoom.

Ryan:

It's not so bad.

Elise:

Thanks, Ryan. Very much.

Ryan:

Thank you, Elise.