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- [00:01]
Nomi Fry
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. This is Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Nomi Fry.
- [00:32]
Vincent Cunningham
I'm Vincent Cunningham.
- [00:34]
Alex Schwartz
And I'm Alex Schwartz. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. My friends. Hello.
- [00:42]
Nomi Fry
Hello.
- [00:42]
Vincent Cunningham
Hey.
- [00:43]
Alex Schwartz
Hello. How are you guys?
- [00:44]
Vincent Cunningham
Good.
- [00:44]
Nomi Fry
I mean, I've been better.
- [00:47]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah. It's hard times right now. A lot of us in the world are grieving. There are wars going on. There are assassinations that have recently happened. We see news about very traumatic and stressful deportations every day. So I think that many of us share this feeling that the world is changing very fast and for the worse and we don't have any control. So what I want to ask you guys just to start, to what extent do you guys turn to art in times like these to help make sense of these feelings?
- [01:25]
Nomi Fry
I don't know if I turn to art to make sense particularly of these feelings. Like, it's not like I would necessarily reach for, say, war and peace to see how people have gotten through war. You know what I mean? Like, it doesn't need to be a kind of one to one relationship. But I do think there is a comfort in thinking about the world being able to produce beauty or to produce meaning when things feel chaotic. And I will note too, that I decided to get off social media a couple days ago because it seemed to me the exact opposite of kind of like going to art. And I love social media. No shade. But I think in times like these, where everything feels so crazy and horrible, things are happening every second, for me, it's better to go to the kind of like, works that try to deal with things from a perspective.
- [02:31]
Alex Schwartz
Not an immediate reaction.
- [02:32]
Nomi Fry
Not an immediate reaction, exactly.
- [02:34]
Alex Schwartz
Vincent, how about you?
- [02:37]
Vincent Cunningham
Similarly to what Naomi said, I don't choose artworks to go to necessarily because of the times, whether they be personal or political. But I do tend to read things in light of what's going on. You know that my way of ingesting whatever it is that I'm reading, looking at, listening to, has this, like, interpretive cast where what is outside has no choice but to come into that process.
- [03:03]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah, yeah. That it's colored by the Reality. Yeah. And I think that's how we look at all art, whether things are good or bad or it's going to be colored by what we bring to it and what's going on. And that brings me to something that we're gonna talk about today, which is a new book called Things in Nature Merely Grow. It's by the writer Yiyun Li, who has written many books, fiction and nonfiction, and many of them that deal with grief and with grieving. And this book in particular goes right to the heart of the subject, because Things in Nature Merely Grow is a memoir that is dedicated to Yi Yan's son James, who died by suicide in 2024. And I think we should say just at the top, that this is in addition to an earlier book that Yi Yanli wrote called Where Reasons End, that was written in the months after her first son, Vincent, died, also by suicide in 2017. So just in the spirit of what art can do in times like these, I'm really glad and actually relieved to be talking about this, this book with you guys today, because grief is. Grief is a profoundly isolating experience. It cuts you off, if you're in mourning, from the lost person. It cuts you off from people around you, but it also really cuts you off from yourself. There's a before and an after person you were and a person you are now. And it's a point of division in a life. And so the big question I have for us today is what can or what should art that deals with grief directly offer to the rest of us? Should it try to be a source of consolation or companionship? Or is it enough just to offer a frank accounting of grief, one of the hardest parts of being alive? So that's today on critics at Large, why we turn grief into art. Okay, so we're going to start with this book, Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yin Lee. Let's just get right into it, guys. Does anyone want to give a quick synopsis of what this book is about?
- [05:05]
Nomi Fry
Yeah, I can try. So, Alex, as you said, Yiun Li dedicates this book to her son James, who died last year of suicide when he was 19, like a freshman in college. And this follows the earlier death of her son Vincent in 2017, also of suicide. And, you know, obviously, we are all parents around this table. You don't have to be a parent, I think, to understand that this is the probably the worst thing that can ever happen to a person also, not just to lose a child, to lose both your children. And Lee talks about Greek tragedy You know, it's as this sort of like a life in extremity. You know, this limit case of, like, how do you deal with life when the absolute worst happens? And what is the role of grief in such a life? Is there even a place for grief? And she has some doubts, interesting doubts in this book about what grief might mean. And so trying to work through that in the book is, I think, her goal.
- [06:27]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah, yeah.
- [06:29]
Vincent Cunningham
All of that is so true. And it also seems that if I had to describe the book, I would. If I had to, I do. I am being paid to describe it.
- [06:40]
Alex Schwartz
And more than that, I'm asking you to.
- [06:41]
Vincent Cunningham
And my friend has asked me to. So now I have to. I would describe it as a work of criticism that is precisely about the gulf between feelings and facts and about. I was trying to find the word. And I think the word for what the subject of the book is is precisely like articulation. Something happens, and there is a gulf, an abyss, between the fact of it and one's ability to sort of ferry that fact into the world of words and communicability. One of the refrains of the book is like, there's no easy way to say this, which is what the police officer first said to her, first with one son and then with the other. There's no easy way to say this becomes not only like this refrain in the book, but also kind of its ethos. The repetition of what happened becomes a kind of philosophy. Her son James, to whom this book is chiefly addressed, was a kind of philosopher. And yes, that does sort of produce itself as an abyss, as a kind of stasis, a kind of hovering. But it's also, I think, in its way, really generous. She says, hey, if you want to hear euphemism, if you want words that are a solace, this is not for you. But by being doggedly interested in trying to reach down to facts, I think there is a kind of a really generous thing about that. I mean, for that reason, I did really appreciate this book.
- [08:12]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean, Vincent, you keep using this word abyss, and I think it's worth us pointing out that it is a word that Yiyeon Li uses and keeps returning to. She says, I am in an abyss. If an abyss is where I shall be for the rest of my life. The abyss is my habitat. One should not waste energy fighting one's habitat. I have only this abyss, which is. Which is my life. And you point something else out that really, really strikes me about this book, which is it is a work of philosophy, I think. And I think the philosophical problem is how to put into words an experience that is absolutely beyond words. You know, Yihan writes a lot in this book about how easy writing is, which when I read it I was like, really? Is it that easy? She teaches writing at Princeton and she talks about how her students sometimes say, oh, I can't describe this, I can't do it, it's so hard. And she says, living is hard, writing is. But writing about living is complicated. And that's what she's here to do. She's here as a kind of messenger, I think, to describe one of the farthest points of human experience and to just illuminate it for the sake of doing that, for the sake of using language to explain it. And I did read in one sitting and I felt deeply entered into communication with it. And you know, I'm so grateful for. For that, which is a perverse word to use. I'm not grateful that these things happened, but I'm grateful that the language stretched across to find me. And I think this book is like in that way sublime, that words fail and fail and fail, but still they do something.
- [09:49]
Nomi Fry
Yeah, it reminded me at various points I kind of, you know, I jotted some notes in the margins so on, as I often do in a couple points I wrote like, I can't go on, I'll go on. I kept being reminded of this sort of like modernist principle which emerged partly in the wake of like the big wars. You know, it's like, what do you do when reality defies comprehension? Language is broken. And it was a book that was difficult for me to read. Not difficult because it's short, it's like a quote unquote easy read, but it describes an experience that I would honestly prefer to turn away from because it's just so painful to consider. And I think you said generous, Vinson. I think it's true because I can't imagine how anyone could after experience this kind of thing immediately, as she has, as Ian Lee has done, sit down and begin to write. She wrote it in a couple months, I believe, after the death of James. And that in itself is extraordinary and almost like even if she didn't intend it, she certainly didn't intend it as a kind of a self help book. Quite the opposite in fact, I think. But it is an extraordinary thing and a rare thing.
- [11:19]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah, I think so too. I had the weirdest reaction, I have to say, when I finished this book. I thought, this is a book I will be reading and Rereading in my life.
- [11:29]
Vincent Cunningham
Interesting.
- [11:30]
Alex Schwartz
So much of this book is about trying to describe the undescribable.
- [11:32]
Nomi Fry
Yeah.
- [11:33]
Alex Schwartz
Like, that's what the title is about. Things in nature merely grow. Life happens, life develops and life ends. There's a lot about flowers. She's a very ardent gardener. And actually, like, there is this line in this book, she says, the fact is, there's no word for this state I found myself in in which lucidity and opacity are one and the same. And so I think that was really my experience of reading the book of a kind of lightning flash of illumination, but also not being totally sure of what I'd seen. And maybe that explains why I felt, oh, I will return to this to try to make sense of this again.
- [12:05]
Vincent Cunningham
Yeah, I love what you just said about lucidity and opacity because in a way, it's again, a work of criticism about narrative structures. And one of the deep things about this book is that it's like, to me, it's like a praise of clear speech. One of her friends, after James dies, says to her, you worked so hard to help James find a place in life, but he didn't want to be here. It's this very direct speech. And she has ex friends who try to cover her in euphemisms and talk about, well, God gave you Vincent. He doesn't want to be here anymore, all this fuzz and those people she's not with. And so she's also offering a friendship, even as the practice of clear speech. She says, not many people would have had the moral strength to say that to me. And those words reverberate in her mind over and over.
- [12:54]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah, we're talking so much about language, and Yihan is such a precise user of language. And I think it's very relevant that she came to the United States from China. She was in her 20s. She's someone for whom English is a second language. When people write in their second languages, when these, like, geniuses come to us and just are able to play and work and use another language, and often one that I think like not to put words in the mouth of Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, but often people choose other languages because they feel that they're giving them a means of expression, whether it's by alienation or whether it's by familiarity, you find something that wasn't available to you before, or in the extremity of being detached from your mother tongue, you find access to something else.
- [13:44]
Nomi Fry
But then shout out me.
- [13:45]
Alex Schwartz
Shout out you. Shout Out Nomi Fry, even daily life in her second life.
- [13:49]
Nomi Fry
I mean, not to compare myself to these geniuses, but it's true. I mean, it's an interesting experience to write in your second language.
- [13:54]
Alex Schwartz
You know what? You do it so naturally that it didn't even occur to me.
- [13:58]
Nomi Fry
But it is easier for me to write in English and always has been. I'm interested in what you're saying because I do think that's kind of like a key thing in this book. Her ability to kind of, like, play with language and kind of, like realize meanings of words that might be transparent, perhaps, to kind of a native speaker and writer.
- [14:17]
Alex Schwartz
Exactly. Like you have to, you know, go back to the root. And in this case, what I wanted to ask you guys about was about the word grief. And particularly, I think that Yiyun is in a bit of a revolt against the word grief, and I want to know if you think that that's justified or not. She said in an interview that she looks up the etymology of words often, which, frankly, is something that I think a native speaker often forgets to do. And this is a good reminder that words come from somewhere. And she notes that the word grief derives from burden. And so she rejects that because she says, my children. This is in an interview she did with the Guardian. She says, my children were not my burden. My sadness is not my burden. And in the book itself, she takes a stand against grief. And because I've been reading out loud so much to us, I'm just gonna do it again.
- [15:01]
Vincent Cunningham
Let's do it.
- [15:01]
Alex Schwartz
I'm just doing it again. I love to go to the text, please.
- [15:04]
Nomi Fry
You often have to go to the text. Often.
- [15:05]
Alex Schwartz
You must. All right, so this is what she says. And this, among other reasons, is why I am against the word grief, which in contemporary culture seems to indicate a process that has an end point. The sooner you get there, the sooner you prove yourself to be a good sport at living, and the less awkward people around you will feel. Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone. How lonely the dead would feel if the living were to stand up from death's shadow, clap their hands, dust their pants, and say to themselves and to the world, I am done with my grieving. From this point on, it's life as usual, business as usual. Does that definition of grief ring true to you guys?
- [15:52]
Vincent Cunningham
Yes. The way that grief is commonly used in our culture, even though people say things like, it's always with you, da, da, da, Generally, it is described as this process, or it is kind of spoken about as a process that does have another side, even if it's not a sort of cleanly defined one. So I took her point there. I have less of a problem with the word than she does, but I do think that her distancing herself from the word is like a genre distinction because she is not writing a grief memoir. It is not a memoir of these happenings and her way of dealing with them necessarily. It is a presentation of these, again, facts as a way to put pressure on a series of questions and challenges and demands that she's making, both of life and of death.
- [16:41]
Nomi Fry
That's how she sees it.
- [16:42]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah. I think that the other thing she's pushing against is the idea of the stages of grief, the Kubler Ross stages of grief, which is the idea that there are five stages of grief. You go through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And I think that, like, the Kubler Ross idea is something that can be really helpful and helping, is okay to have a sense that this will not be an eternity. This will not always feel the same. It will feel different. But also, it is a narrative, as you keep saying, Vincent. It's its own narrative structure that there are five chapters to this book, and when you get to the end, you've reached acceptance, which seems like a really good thing, and you two will be sitting beneath the lotus tree, and all will be well, or at least you'll be at peace. And Yiyun is saying, no, I absolutely reject that. And I reject, like, being pushed through this sense of feeling as if I'm at the car wash and I'm just like, yeah, can't get off the ride. But by the end, I'll be squeaky clean and all will be well again.
- [17:43]
Nomi Fry
The way she writes about tragedy resists everything we're taught in our culture. I think it's interesting because on the one hand, in some ways, to the kind of untrained eye, we might think that the way Lee behaves, as she describes it, at least in this book, in the wake of her son's deaths, is the kind of, like, model citizen way to deal with tragedy. It's like, get back to work, you know, like, yeah, no, I'm not gonna miss my class teaching my students. I'm not gonna not make dinner. I'm not gonna let my garden fall into disrepair because this horrible thing just happened. But she makes this distinction in the writing where she says, no, no, don't get it wrong. It's the fact that I'M like up and at em immediately doesn't mean that I'm dusting off this death and going on my merry way. That grief is over. Grief, or whatever you want to call it, will never be over. And there is something about that that I found very clear eyed, like the concurrent realization that if you are choosing to go on living after, you know, this horrible thing that has happened to you, then you will be in the abyss forever. And yet you also, in kind of like a parallel timeline, as quickly as possible, you need to return to the things that allow you to live life, even if it's a life. You know, I know I said earlier that going to art to learn about how to deal with stuff that's going on in the world directly in a kind of like one to one relationship is not something I necessarily do. But now that so many terrible things are happening and kind of like worry and despair grip us and yet we must go on living. We must take our kid to school, we must cook dinner, we must prepare for the podcast that we co host. We must write because we have deadlines. We must call our parents and make sure they're okay. You know, these things continue side by side, you know, and it is a lesson.
- [20:14]
Alex Schwartz
In a minute. Art about grief can take as many forms and offer as many perspectives as there are artists. This is critics at Large from the New Yorker. Hi, I'm Susan Glaser.
- [20:33]
Nomi Fry
I'm Jane Mayer.
- [20:33]
Alex Schwartz
And I'm Evan Osnos. And we host the Washington Roundtable from the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast.
- [20:39]
Nomi Fry
For me, this is the water cooler. This is a wonderful chance to sit down with two of the smartest colleagues in the country and, you know, just kind of compare notes. Now that's so true because first of all, we are actually friends in real life. But I can't wait till Fridays to hear what you guys think. Everybody sees the headlines, but you guys fill in the gaps.
- [21:02]
Alex Schwartz
I also think, though, occasionally we get somebody to come on, and I'm always smarter for it. If you get a great historian who can tell you about a presidential election 50, 60 years ago, often it can help you understand about what's happening today.
- [21:13]
Nomi Fry
So if you're looking for weekly insights into what's going on inside the Beltway.
- [21:19]
Alex Schwartz
Please join us every Friday on the.
- [21:21]
Nomi Fry
Washington Roundtable, part of the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast.
- [21:29]
Susan Glaser
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- [22:46]
Alex Schwartz
We've been talking about the new book Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yin Lee. And I want to do what we love to do, which is to go wide and consider some other works that talk about grief in interesting ways. Who wants to start? I really am so curious what you guys want to discuss here.
- [23:03]
Vincent Cunningham
Certainly my mind goes to the Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, which chronicles the year after her husband, John Gregory Dunn passed and also during which her daughter Quintana Rue, fell sick and ended up dying a year later. And it starts by narrating the death of Dunn and sort of being in the house and all of the sort of the immediacy of the chaos, but also the kind of mental stillness of that moment and moves forward, proceeds as to my mind, more of a sort of chronicle of events.
- [23:40]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah, that book was absolutely huge. I mean it was huge. It came out in 2005. Anyone can fact check me, but I'm just going from my memory, no, it's 12,000. I'm getting nods in the studio. It was 2005. That book was. It was very, very big. And I think one reason for it, I think it's such a worthy comparison in its own way to things in nature merely grow. Because it is also trying for it is also in Didion's famous style, that famous clear and exacting style which can reveal so much and also talk about lucidity and opacity, hide so much depending on what the writer wants to shine A light on. It's also trying to. Like, as you say, Vincent, put down an order of events simply for sanity's sake, like to be grounded in reality. Because the whole point of the title, and in some ways the point of the book, is about the difficulty, the impossibility of accepting this loss. And I think the struggle in language to present something that is impossible to grasp very clearly is at the heart of what makes this book really beautiful and gives it a lot of pathos.
- [24:47]
Nomi Fry
I wonder what I would think about this book right now. I remember reading it when it came out. I remember being entirely unmoved by the Year of Magical Thinking.
- [24:57]
Alex Schwartz
Interesting.
- [24:58]
Nomi Fry
But again, this was 20 years ago. Maybe I would feel differently now, but it. Somehow, that famous Didion style didn't work for me in that context. I weirdly didn't believe her.
- [25:14]
Alex Schwartz
I remember.
- [25:14]
Vincent Cunningham
Sorry, believe her in her accounting of events or in the tone, the tenor of her. The poise.
- [25:23]
Nomi Fry
The poise annoyed me. I remember. But this was 20 years ago. And I will say one thing I like when people talk about grief, I guess when people try to depict the experience in their art, is the notion of mixed feelings, which is obviously not the case with the Yiyeon Lee book. I don't think there can be any mixed feelings when your child dies, God forbid. But I think it's very interesting to think about being kind of like grieving, but ambivalent.
- [26:05]
Alex Schwartz
Like a little bit happy someone died.
- [26:08]
Nomi Fry
Yeah. Or knowing that person wasn't necessarily a saint or your relationship with them wasn't necessarily untroubled.
- [26:17]
Alex Schwartz
So do you have an example, like, what is.
- [26:18]
Nomi Fry
Yeah, I have a couple of examples I would think about. It's interesting thinking about Didion, because recently there's this memoir that came out by Molly Zhang fast called how to Lose youe Mother. And it's not about death, it's about a kind of death in life. It's about her mother. Erika Zhang, the famous feminist novelist wrote Fear of Flying and how she is. And over recent years, she has progressively been losing her mind. So she is still living and yet not really with us, you know, and actually she talks about Didion and how Didion was always like her mother. Erika Zhang was like a kind of like the quote, unquote stupid version of Didion. You know, she was kind of like the less. The less august, you know, kind of like Woman of Letters. She was more popular. And likewise, this memoir is kind of like more jokey and less like a big work of art. It's kind of more of a. But It's. I liked it because it's kind of like, okay, my mom was a terrible mom, basically, is what she says. And now I. I'm stuck having to take care of her. I love her. I was obsessed with her, you know, she was my idol my entire life. But I also recognized her as deeply, deeply flawed. And now I'm stuck with this, like, essential vegetable, you know, having to sort of like, deal with it and also having my husband be sick at the same time. And, you know, life is kind of like hard and complicated. And I'm grieving, but I'm also mad. And I'm. You know, there's a litany of other kind of feelings about what is happening, which I like, you know, I mean, the kind of like, existence of so called ugly feelings in a realm that is supposed to be kind of like sacred and holy. It comes from the gut. It seems like another work of art about grief that I was thinking about. That is, I think, a great work of art. But that similarly is about a complicated person who brings up a variety of feelings. From the people left behind is Songs for Drella, the Lou Reed and John cale album from 1990, which deals with the death of Andy Warhol. And it's a kind of tribute to his life and death. And Reid and Kael's relationship with Andy Warhol was very difficult. He was a difficult person. They were difficult people, especially Lou Reed. He kind of fostered them when they were in the Velvet Underground. He was the band's first manager. He, like, produced, quote, unquote, their first album, designed the COVID And they grew up with him in the Factory. And they were like constantly fighting. They, like, hated each other, you know, in a lot of ways. But also, he was incredibly important to them. And so in Songs for Drella, if you youngsters don't know it, I really encourage you to listen to it.
- [29:24]
Alex Schwartz
I don't know it. I feel shamed.
- [29:27]
Nomi Fry
It's so good. So it's like a dozen songs. It's like a series of songs that are basically the biography of Warhol. Like, he was a nobody. He came to New York, he got famous, he befriended Capote, you know, all of the things we know about Warhol and then about his relationship with them and his relationship with the Velvets and then how people accuse them of, like, using people and ruining people's lives for kind of fun and profit. And then it ends with the kind of like Lou Reed singing the song, hello, It's Me, and it's about saying goodbye to him.
- [30:01]
Alex Schwartz
They really hated you now all that's changed. But I have some resentments that can never be unmade. You hit me where it hurts. And I didn't laugh. Your diaries are not a worthy epitaph. Yeah, Nomi, listening to that. I get what you're saying. You want a tonal mix of it. You don't want works about loss to somehow come in with a Vaseline lens and to be like, oh, look, everything was beautiful. Let's, you know, put someone up on a pedestal. Let's. Let's pretend that reality wasn't reality. You like the complex human nature in there. And I think that's worthy and true. Because otherwise the person being grieved is not a person at all. There is no, like, humanity there. There's just a kind of false image of humanity.
- [30:55]
Nomi Fry
Yeah, Yeah.
- [30:56]
Alex Schwartz
I also like a tonal mix a little bit. I mean, I can go in all different kinds of directions. But it is occurring to me that there has been a recent series of comedy specials about grief, which is so interesting to me. And I'm curious what you guys think about this. Like, just off the top of my head, Marc Maron did one about the sudden death of his partner called From Bleak to Dark. I just watched Sarah Silverman's new special called Postmortem, about a period in her life in the last year or two when her dad and her stepmom died within days of each other. And she and her sisters were in, like, these caregiving positions. There's Rachel Bloom's death. Let me do my special, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I interviewed Rachel Bloom about this last year, and that special is interesting because it's about friendship, which is also what this, like, Andy Warhol song is about. It's about losing a friend. In Rachel Bloom's case, she lost her writing partner and close friend, Adam Schlesinger. They'd worked together on her TV show Crazy Ex Girlfriend. They were working on other projects. And he was one of the first casualties of. In that early March period. And she also gave birth at around that time. So a lot of craziness was going on in her life. And she makes it. Really. Not all of it, but some part of it. She makes very, very funny.
- [32:14]
Nomi Fry
It is a comedy special.
- [32:15]
Alex Schwartz
It is a comedy special. And I think she uses humor, as do all of these comedians. Cause they are comedians, as a way of coping, but also because that's their lens on the world. And sometimes things all happen at once. Sometimes things are terrible and something else is funny. And it's a bizarre mix. And so there are a lot of parts of death. Let me do my special that I really recommend. I mean, just watch it. It's one hour. I think many people will enjoy it. And it's also dealing with not experience of a child's death, but because she gave birth in March 2020amidst all this chaos, and her daughter had various issues when she was born about fear, about the kind of fear of death that comes with being a parent. Vincent, I actually remember us talking about this right after you had your daughter, just being like, can I keep this thing alive? Like, what is this?
- [33:04]
Vincent Cunningham
Last night, I was putting my hand on her chest to make sure I do this every 30 minutes. Is this thing still on?
- [33:10]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah. What's the deal here? And so what Rachel Bloom does in her special is to weave these ideas, to use humor to speak to something that is so scary and, like, cliche calls it unimaginable. But here we are imagining it all the time.
- [33:26]
Nomi Fry
When you sleep, it's so sweet. You slumber with grace. And when I can't see your chest rise, I scream in your face, hey, wake up. Be alive.
- [33:43]
Alex Schwartz
And what I loved about seeing the show and the special was that you feel. And is the point of this stuff to make you feel less alone? I don't know. I don't think so necessarily, but that's surely the point of some stuff. So, like seeing Rachel Bloom cradle a flashlight, pretending it's her infant daughter, and singing the song Please don't die to it, you're like, ah, it's not just me. We can speak some of these fears in this very funny way. After another break. What are we seeking from our Greek texts? And how does that change depending on what's going on in the world? This is Critics at Large from The New Yorker. 100 years of looking closer at the things that shape your world, from new beginnings to ends, and all the in between things, too. And the more everything around you is changing, the more you want to stop and see things clearly. New Day, New insights. New Yorker.
- [35:01]
Vincent Cunningham
Subscribe@newyorker.com for a dollar a week, plus get a free tote B.
- [35:13]
Alex Schwartz
So we've been exploring different ways that artists approach grief and make it into material or use it to inform their work. And it really brings me back to one of the first grief texts that I really remember encountering. Like, I know there were earlier ones. Like, I'm sure there was a Berenstain Bear. There was a Little House on the Prairie. Fine, but I'm talking about a Victorian poem by Lord Alfred tennyson Alfred Lord Tennyson.
- [35:47]
Nomi Fry
Alfred Lord Tennyson.
- [35:48]
Alex Schwartz
Never understood it. Still don't understand it.
- [35:51]
Nomi Fry
Have no idea how this happened. And yet we forge ahead.
- [35:54]
Alex Schwartz
Wish I understood why that, comma was where it is. And listeners, if you know, write to us@themailewyorker.com in subject line Critics, Tennyson, comma, I would like to understand it at last. But I did read Tennyson in high school in a Victorian poetry class. Shout out Susan Sagor. And the poem we focused on, or that I remember us focusing on quite a bit, was Tennyson's poem In Memoriam. Ahh. Which was written for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Yes, Arthur Henry Hallam. Arthur Henry Hallam, who died when he was 22. This is the poem, by the way, that contains the lines, tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And what Tennyson did was he spent 17 years working on this very long poem in memoriam, a tiny chunk of which I had to memorize, which I think is great. We should all have to memorize more poetry. But a chunk of it I didn't have to memorize. I was reading over, and I thought, aha. This is really getting at some of my questions for our conversation. So I just want to read this little piece of this stanza from a section of the poem to you. Tennyson writes, I. I sometimes hold it half a sin to put in words the grief I feel for words like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within. But for the unquiet heart and brain a use in measured language lies the sad mechanic exercise like dull narcotics, numbing pain in words like weeds I'll wrap me o' er like coarsest clothes against the cold. But that large grief which these enfold is given an outline and no more. What I love about this and what I find very moving about this passage is Tennyson is writing this very long poem to try to convey his love for his friend, his experience of sorrow and grief. And he's saying, and this is towards the top of the poem, about how he doesn't think his poem can do what he wants it to do, how words, as Yin Lee says, fall short. And that makes me want to ask you guys, what do you think the point of depicting grief in art is? If words are gonna fall short, if depiction is gonna fall short, then why do we do it? What can we hope to get from it?
- [38:08]
Nomi Fry
I mean, I think this is a question that's true of art in general. What's the Point. Why do we try to depict life? Why do we try to depict ideas? Why do we try to depict relationships between people? I think it's a mixed bag, you know, for the artist it is in some ways a selfish proposition. Probably selfish, not in any bad way, but just a self directed proposition, let's say writing or composing or painting or whatever it is, in order to come to terms with an experience. But I think in art in general, in most art, there has to be a desire to connect, you know, there has to be a desire to somehow ameliorate or explicate or at least articulate the experience the person is going through, for the person to receive it, for like a missive to pass between these two people, even if it seems impossible.
- [39:14]
Vincent Cunningham
Yeah. For me, art is the place and not just tonally, but in its making. The way that subject matter rubs up against sort of clangs in its encounter with form. It is a place that can admit multiple meanings, multiple feelings, simultaneity. What I like about the Tennyson poem is that four beat rhythm, the iambic tetrameter, the da dum da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum da dum. Like it is kind of an enactment of things in nature. Merely grow. Like it sounds like life just keeps on going on and then you have to do the stuff and da da da da da da da. Even as it tries to carve out this logic of beginnings and finalities and all of the strange off rhythms of life, the poem just keeps on going on. And then it hits you. Da da da. You know, so like in some way, lyric poetry is the best place to look for why we would come to art to do this, which is that even in formal qualities and how they encase our subject matter, the particularities of our experience, just that meeting form and life is a kind of a way of revealing things. And it's not just like, here, let me tell you what happened, but the relaying itself, the putting it into form is a way lessons, even if they're not meant just they appear, they show up. There is a kind of faith that, like, if I try to relay this and I try to do it within the confines of form, something will emerge. That to me is the reason.
- [40:55]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah, and form is such an interesting question because, like, the human form has only one conclusion. And yet it hits us differently every time when we talk about formal. We're all such, like, there's so many things you can say about grief in art. And we've only, like, barely touched on music, which, of course, can give feeling like nothing else can to just the emotions without words, which I think is sometimes hugely needed. Like, just release. Just release through emotion, through music. And I think, like, if I were to say what I think, some writing about grief or depiction of it can do so many different things. It can try to conjure someone back up. It can be magical thinking. It can be a testament, but also it can just transmit experience. And that itself can be cathartic for the artist, perhaps for the readers, but it's a point of connection. And, like, you know, when we were thinking about this episode, I just kept thinking about one of the great 20th century art projects, which is the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
- [41:54]
Nomi Fry
Yes, absolutely.
- [41:55]
Alex Schwartz
You know, the AIDS Memorial Quilt was first imagined in 1985 by Cleve Jones. And actually, when I was reading about it, I'd forgotten this. You know, we've just dealt with these horrible assassinations in Minnesota. And when I was reading about it, I was reminded that Jones had organized this candlelight vigil to honor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone of San Francisco after their assassinations in 1978. And the AIDS Memorial Quilt, you know, ended up being this project in which people could bear witness, could make a memorial for others who had died from aids. They could make panels of what would become this enormous quilt. And when it was first shown, it was in 1987, and it was displayed on the national mall in Washington, D.C. and, you know, obviously, it's a political symbol. Hello. It's a huge quilt saying to the government, what the hell are you doing? People are dying. Where is our solution? Where are our leaders? A question that has only grown more relevant, but it's so beautiful to me. I don't know if this moves you guys in the same way. It moves me so much because it's so personal, because it's not one person's testament to the whole grandeur of their experience, which is important. There's a place for that. We love that stuff. We live for that stuff. Let's be real. But it's about the collective. It's about saying we are sharing this. We are stitching ourselves together. This matters. People matter. Life matters. Their deaths matter. And it still matters.
- [43:31]
Nomi Fry
Yeah. Alex, this reminds me. I was at the beginning of the episode, I spoke out against social media vis a vis art. But I have to say, there is this account on Instagram that I follow that I absolutely love. It's called Dates Memorial, and it's people bearing witness. It's. Each post is an account of a person who has died of aids written by someone who was close to this person. And it's so incredibly touching because it's these stories, you know, of like, random quote unquote people. These were not most unfamous people. Unfamous people. I mean, very occasionally there is someone who is more notable, sure, but. But it's mostly just like, you know, like there was one recently that was so moving. It was a woman who wrote about her sister who was mentally challenged in some way and was always kind of bullied, made fun of. She became a drug addict, a prostitute, and ended up becoming sick with, you know, hiv, AIDS and dying. And so this is a very complicated. And made life very complicated for her family. And yet it's. She was a person and this was her story. And just having this testament to her life having been lived, it's just so incredibly, so incredibly touching.
- [45:13]
Vincent Cunningham
And what this all makes me think of, too, is that we are kind of asking the why, right? Why? Why do. And there is a difference, I think, but still a kind of intimacy between one kind of mourning or one kind of expression of grief that is private, even though you are kind of bearing witness to or talking about the death of someone that maybe the writer knows but you, the reader, don't know. But this is often put to the test in cases of public or political grief. And how do you add those stories up into one expression that can contain what we all felt in public? I really like this poem. It's called G9. It's by the poet Mark Dlugos, and it's about his time living in an A's ward. He's dying and he's telling these little stories about his friends in it. Again, formally right. It's a longish poem with very short lines, as if, like, you know, shortness of breath, not enough time to tell the story. And he's been telling all these anecdotes, and he says, when I pass, who'll remember? Who will care about these joys and wonders? I'm haunted by that more than by the faces of the dead and dying. He's having this intensely personal experience. But he knows that all of these deaths, all of these deaths in the middle of the crisis adds up to a library of these losses, these stories going and going and going away. And it seems to me, I don't know about you guys, but it does seem to me that now is another of those times. Even though it's maybe not one great monolith like aids. We talk about war, we talk about hunger. We talk about all the things that happen in our world now. I do feel a struggle to commensurate what happens. Nomi, you talked about social media and it seems to me that some of the impulse of social media, whether it is by video or it is trying to say no, no, no, this is being recorded. But I think part of the art making impulse is yes, but recording is not enough that we need to apply the pressures of thought, the pressures of feeling right to turn all that recording into some kind of revelation.
- [47:50]
Alex Schwartz
This has been Critics at Large this week's episode was produced by Michelle o' Brien with help from Danielle Hewitt. Alex Barish is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Conde Nast's head of Global audio is Chris Bannon. Alexis Quadrato composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from Jake Loomis with mixing by Mike Kutchman. You can find every episode of Critics at large@newyorker.com Critics.
- [48:24]
Nomi Fry
Foreign I'm David Remnick, host of the New Yorker Radio Hour. There's nothing like finding a story you can really sink into that lets you tune out the noise and focus on what matters in print or here on the podcast. The New Yorker brings you thoughtfulness and depth and even humor that you can't find anywhere else. So please join me every week for the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts from PRX.