02 - A Magic Trick

Magic is sometimes said to be the only honest profession - the magician promises to deceive you, and then they do. But we love these slights of hand and fantastic illusions, even when we know we’re being fooled, because there is a joy in having our minds set off balance. They shake up our expectations of the way the world works and think differently about what’s possible. In this episode, Emily Kagan-Trenchard pulls apart a magic trick to show us how it’s done.

Transcript

Jay:

Hi friends. I'm Jay Erickson, one of the hosts of Wild Talk. And I want to thank you for listening. We will be releasing longer form interviews about once a month. In between, we're going to publish some musings, audio collage, and remixes we are calling, "Wild Talk Shorts." Here's fellow Wild Talker, Emily Kagan-Trenchard with the first of these episodes entitled Magic Trick.

Emily:

I want to show you something, a magic trick, and how it works. It's the kind of trick that even after you know what's going on, you still feel it working its magic on you. You don't need anything fancy to do this trick. Well, I mean, you need to have a brain that likes to run itself on this hamster wheel of anxiety and self doubt, but I think we all have one of those these days, so check.

And the way that this trick works is by temporarily kicking the brain off of that hamster wheel. Maybe let's start by just talking a little bit about what is that mechanism? What is that thing in the brain that keeps us worrying and fretting all of the time? We talked to Dr. Julie Holland, who is a psychiatrist and a neuropharmacologist and she actually was the one who explained this concept to us while we were talking with her on her property in Upstate New York.

Julie:

One of the things that keeps people anxious or depressed is that they start to ruminate and rethink and think and think and rethink and reassess. How am I? Am I safe? What's going to happen tomorrow? Will I be safe tomorrow? What happened yesterday? Did I make myself unsafe by what I did yesterday?

And it's just this constant sort of self absorbed inventory and the neural circuitry that underlies this kind of ruminative thinking is called the default mode network.

Emily:

That default mode network is actually the thing that this magic trick can hack.

Julie:

There's all sorts of things that can quiet the default mode network that can, as I like to say, get your head out of your ass. They can get you to be less self-absorbed and more feeling like you're part of something bigger than just you. There's more things to worry about the just you and how you're looking to your friends. Flow, meditation, psychedelics, there's all sorts of things that just sort of get your mind off yourself basically.

Emily:

One of my favorite ways to quiet the default mode network, and I think one of the most surprising to people who don't know how the trick works is poetry. Before the pandemic, I never had non-poetry friends ask me regularly to give them poems to read. But one week into the lockdown this past spring, I just had requests coming from everywhere, from friends and neighbors and family. Pretty much anybody who knew that I really liked poetry, but didn't have an easier obvious way to start to connect to it.

And I think that for them as well as for me, their default mode network was just on overdrive and they weren't able to go to all those places that they normally went to to get it to just shut up for a minute. You couldn't go to bars, you couldn't go to a concert. The Netflix and bourbon was really only going to take you so far, and it didn't really give much back in return.

But the poetry actually, doesn't just like shut up the default mode network. It actually can leave you a little better off on the other side. And that's the interesting thing to me, how a poem does that job. How can a poem tell the default mode network to sit down and shut up even while still acknowledging how hard and uncertain everything is?

A poem that worked really well for explaining how this trick works is Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. It's a hugely popular poem. It's very, very famous by poetry standards, which I know not saying a whole lot, but poetry standards. And even though this piece was published back in 1986, it really feels like it was made for this moment. This poem has kind of just been in the ether lately and when Jay and I went hiking with lawyer and activist, Chloe Cockburn, she actually sat down and read this poem for us.

Chloe:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Emily:

The magic trick of this poem starts right from the very first line. Your brain has been told since it was old enough to be misbehaving to be good. And here comes Mary Oliver, just flipping the table saying, "No, you do not have to be good." You do not have to beat yourself up for every failure. Every way your life is not exactly the way it's supposed to be. She's giving us this kind of shove to the chest, set you off balance and that setting you off balance is what allows the next part of this trick to work.

Because then she goes on to say that there's only one thing, one thing you need to do instead of striving to be perfect or replaying your most epic fails, and self-flagellating for all of your shortcomings. And her answer is this. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. That's it. That's the answer.

And it's an answer that isn't for you, like the you that shows up on Instagram and Twitter. The you that's trying to lose a few pounds or finally finished the novel you've been working on. It's for the soft animal of your body. The one that's small and vulnerable in the face of the elements. And this is the trick that knocking our egos off balance and reminding us of just how clumsy and vulnerable we really are. That's the way that we're getting our default mode networks to chill out for a minute, so that there's room to hear anything else that this poem was trying to say. Here's Dr. Holland again.

Julie:

When you're out in the woods and you are among the trees and the grass and the sky, and you start to sort of remember, I am an animal in the woods and there's other animals in the woods, and there's other woods around the planet, and there are other planets in the solar system, and there's other solar systems in the universe.

And you can start to get a sense of awe that there are things bigger than you, and that you're part of something bigger than you. And when you're in that place of awe, your default mode network is quieted.

Emily:

By giving the solution to the problem of all this worry and all this anxiety over to the soft and vulnerable animal parts of ourselves. Mary Oliver does with words, what a mountain or a river can do with a feeling of awe or psychedelics and meditation can do for the chemistry of our brains.

By the end of the poem, Mary Oliver calls us back. She calls us back, having shoved our brains off the hamster wheel of self-doubt. And when she speaks to us again, she doesn't sugar coat it. She doesn't promise that everything's going to be okay. She offers us just this world that is endlessly cycling, that's harsh and exciting, and a world that's far older and more powerful than our egos.

That's really the magic in this poetry. That's the trick. It's that shove off balance, and then the answers to questions you didn't even know you were asking. And then this vulnerability that the poet has that disarms us and disassembles us as we read it. And it all helps that default mode network lay off and not rev back up with the same cruelty and dread next time around.

When people ask me for poems, this is what they're looking for. A piece of comfort, this pocket size, but unsparing magic. This handful of truth that hasn't been polished and sanitized and turned into some tiny pithy platitude. We're hungry for writing that takes a swing at the indescribable. Something that even if it pins down just one small moment into words, it makes all of the other craziness feel a little bit more manageable, just a little bit more knowable and ultimately less lonely. Because if nothing else, there's at least one other person who's been there.

I wanted to leave you with one more example of this magic trick in action. See if you can spot how this one's done. It's by Adrie Kusserow. And in this poem, Adri is echoing Mary Oliver's Wild Geese, but updating it for our current coronavirus experience. She calls it Mary Oliver for Corona Times.

You do not have to become totally Zen,

You do not have to use this isolation to make your marriage better,

your body slimmer, your children more creative.

You do not have to “maximize its benefits”

By using this time to work even more,

write the bestselling Corona Diaries,

Or preach the gospel of ZOOM.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body unlearn

everything capitalism has taught you,

(That you are nothing if not productive,

That consumption equals happiness,

That the most important unit is the single self.

That you are at your best when you resemble an efficient machine).

Tell me about your fictions, the ones you’ve been sold,

the ones you sheepishly sell others,

and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world as we know it is crumbling.

Meanwhile the virus is moving over the hills,

suburbs, cities, farms and trailer parks.

Meanwhile The News barks at you, harsh and addicting,

Until the push of the remote leaves a dead quiet behind,

a loneliness that hums as the heart anchors.

Meanwhile a new paradigm is composing itself in our minds,

Could birth at any moment if we clear some space

From the same tired hegemonies.

Remember, you are allowed to be still as the white birch,

Stunned by what you see,

Uselessly shedding your coils of paper skins

Because it gives you something to do.

Meanwhile, on top of everything else you are facing,

Do not let capitalism coopt this moment,

laying its whistles and train tracks across your weary heart.

Even if your life looks nothing like the Sabbath,

Your stress boa-constricting your chest.

Know that your antsy kids, your terror, your shifting moods,

Your need for a drink have every right to be here,

And are no less sacred than a yoga class.

Whoever you are, no matter how broken,

the world still has a place for you, calls to you over and over

announcing your place as legit, as forgiven,

even if you fail and fail and fail again.

remind yourself over and over,

all the swells and storms that run through your long tired body

all have their place here, now in this world.

It is your birthright to be held

deeply, warmly in the family of things,

not one cell left in the cold.

Jay:

Thanks for listening to the Wild Talk Podcast. Find out more and subscribe at wildtalkpodcast.com. See you out there.