Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Some Marvelous Experience, a podcast about friendship and art. You're in for a treat today because this is a special love and marriage edition of the show. And I'm going to be joined by two brilliant and hilarious scholars, Katie Cadu and Ross Lerner, who are coming on to discuss one of the greatest love stories ever told.
Speaker: Obviously, I mean Paradise Lost by John Milton. I should admit here at the beginning that before I spoke with Katie and Ross, I really hadn't thought of Paradise Lost in these terms. Indeed, when they told me that this was the artifact that they wanted to discuss, I tore at my office looking for my copy of Milton.
Speaker: I couldn't find it anywhere, so then I went home and I scoured my bookshelves there. No luck. I'd basically given up when I sat back down at my computer and suddenly noticed that my copy was right in front of my face. I had used it years ago as a kind of boost to raise my computer monitor up to eye level.
Speaker: My copy of the complete poems and major prose of John Milton, which I had purchased for a class in college, truly is a brick of a book. A plain, Bible-black cover with just the title embossed in gold on the spine.
Speaker: And honestly, that more or less describes the way that I thought about Paradise Lost. A stark and imposing monument. A colossal tome. No one could lift the damn thing. If you ask me what it was about, I would have probably quoted Milton's claim that it's his attempt to justify God's ways to man. Beyond that, I would have identified with Satan's claim, I myself am hell, which I've always thought of as such a relatable touch.
Speaker: Obviously, Paradise Lost is Satan's story, a narrative that has given us a glut of charismatic villains, beautiful monsters with compelling backstories. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven is the other line ingrained in my brain, the line I dream of shouting as I'm dragged kicking and screaming out of some contentious department meeting someday.
Speaker: Anyway, Paradise Lost is all of those things. But in the years that it's propped up my computer screen, I'd also managed to forget that past book one or two, most of the poem is really devoted to Adam and Eve's time together in Paradise, not to Lucifer's Rebellion.
Speaker: As Ross and Katie point out, Paradise Lost is actually a poem that we might think of as a kind of comedy, or really more specifically as a kind of rom-com or even sitcom.
Speaker: The story of the domestic squabbles of a husband and wife. A husband who's kind of a wife guy, but also maybe a schlub who realizes that he's married out of his league. It's a record of their tiffs about dinner parties and yard work.
Speaker: Most of all, it's a record of their ongoing conversation. One touchstone for their understanding of Paradise Lost is a deeply strange and wonderful book called Pursuits of Happiness by the philosopher Stanley Cavell.
Speaker: This is a book that's important to me, too. It's central, for instance, to the ideas about relatability that I try to figure out in my new book. But I hadn't really clocked the extent to which Cavell's vision of marriage, which he takes as a kind of model for people being together in the world in general, is inspired in part by Milton, who wrote an important tract in defense of divorce that also helped articulate our modern account of marriage as a form of companionship. Milton writes in that tract that, "...in God's intention, a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage."
Speaker: Adam and Eve's story, then, is among other things the story of an ongoing conversation. i think that there are two aspects of this conversation that Cavell might want us to understand.
Speaker: The first is that conversation is a kind of sharing. Here we are together in the garden, say. But it's specifically a kind of sharing that's constantly working out what it is that we share.
Speaker: What is this place? What are we doing here? For what it's worth, this project of sharing is also what criticism is for Cavell. He calls it companionship in knowing.
Speaker: It's the way we figure out what our own experience means by trying to share it with other people. And aesthetic experiences provide some of the best opportunities for this kind of companionship. That's part of why a 17th century poem can provide two people with a way to keep talking to one another.
Speaker: But the other thing about this project of conversation is that it's also a kind of continual labor. Happiness is hard work, in part because hard work is happiness, or at least it can be.
Speaker: Part of what makes paradise paradise in the first place is the fact that it's perfectible but not perfect. It's a project. We can make it better. That's Cavell's idea anyway.
Speaker: Milton's idea is that a paradise lost can in fact be regained, because the work it takes to get it back is the same work it takes to keep it in the first place. I guess I'm really just confessing that I was a terrible reader of Milton the last time that I did read him, which was honestly back in the lost paradise of my early 20s, when I myself was hell.
Speaker: But part of what I take from Ross and Katie's account of Milton's rom-com is a lesson about what it might take to learn to read as comedies the stories that we'd given up as tragedies.
Speaker: This isn't the only answer to that question, but one possibility might be that it really all depends on who you read it with. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Katie Cadu and Ross Lerner about Paradise Lost.
Speaker: Well, we almost didn't meet because the the first interaction that we had was Katie rejecting rejecting an application that I had submitted for an ACLA seminar that she was organizing at and NYU back in, I want to say, 2012, 2013.
Speaker: Very curt rejection. It was pretty brutal. Yeah. And so I was like, okay, that's that's probably not someone I'm ever going to really be in conversation with. um But then a couple years later, she applied for a panel that I was organizing, co-organizing at MLA in Vancouver, January 2015.
Speaker: And um through sheer generosity of spirit, I decided to nonetheless, despite our past, um take her application seriously. And even though my co-organizer wanted to reject it, I fought for her.
Speaker: and um So she wound up on the panel and um we had our panel um the first morning of MLA that year in Vancouver, 8 a.m., m And um she walked in and I was just immediately, first sight.
Speaker: um Thankfully, my advisor was in the audience and asked her very, very um hostile question hostile question. And so it gave me the opportunity to follow up with her by email afterwards to, you know, just check in, make sure she was doing okay and see if, you know, she wanted to get dinner to to process what had happened.
Speaker: Well, so Katie, do you remember that initial, his initial um application and your initial rejection of it? Yeah. I don't. And I actually searched my email and i could not find any record of it, probably because I deleted it. That's how faultless I was. Or he's making the whole thing up. too sure. So it was not appointed. It was not a pointed rejection. it was It just didn't even rise to the level of notice.
Speaker: It's like that Christina Rossetti, Sanae in Mona and Monada, when she's kind of like, I just can't remember when we first met. I know we're in love now, but I can't. It's just like that. Yeah.
Speaker: I think that's that's a ah powerful statement about the, yeah, I think the strength of the present that can, yeah, eradicate the past. Maybe, ah yeah, maybe we're too caught up on origin stories.
Speaker: But from there we um, you know, we're separated after that weekend in Vancouver. I was in Philadelphia finishing my PhD. Katie was in Berkeley finishing hers. And so, um, we, um, our courtship unfolded by mostly by email at first where we were exchanging passages from favorite texts, um, discussing them and, um, uh, kind of sharing recommendations for films and music and other things. And, um,
Speaker: So that's interesting. Was that, I mean, at that point, people would already be kind of often pursuing such communication over ah by texting, right? Or DMing. But you were like, it was definitely email. It was an epistolary courtship.
Speaker: Yeah, very much so. I think we... rarely talked by phone or text at that time until we started seeing each other more in person. when I would go to visit Berkeley and then and she would come to Philadelphia and then I wound up in LA for job. So she was closer. and And then it it switched more from the longer form emails to shorter form text and and talking on the phone. We were just looking at those initial emails to prepare for this, wondering if we had talked about Paradise Lost.
Speaker: And we didn't really, but they they really are cringe. Some of corny stuff in there. Yeah, it's really interesting. i sort of Part of me wonders if their romance via or courtship via email um ah is a kind of, does that still happen? This is really encouraging to me. i just think there's something really profound about asynchronous communication um ah that is, ah like it's I mean, obviously there's a whole different genre of being corny that you can engage in via instant messaging. um ah But the really cringe stuff, ah I think, necessitates some time and ah you know the possibility of elaborating that a letter or email makes possible.
Speaker: Yeah, we gave ourselves plenty of space because it really became almost ritualized. Like we would respond to each other every day at around the same time. And it was, yeah, there were a lot of Yeah. Yeah, one day I didn't get an email from him when I expected and I panicked. I was like, oh, it it's over. He doesn't doesn't like me anymore, but he'd been in a terrible car accident.
Speaker: I'm so relieved to hear that. did you have So have you printed these emails out? or Are you archiving them? like Or we when you lose your when you leave your institution? It's an email. It's all in personal accounts.
Speaker: Don't neglect your future archivist. if So it sounds like, you know, in a way that's ah a particularly kind of early modern um form of of courtship in a way, the the sort of writing of letters and the um the kind of drama of this particular kind of psychic projection and the the just the sort of pacing of it, of thinking of someone writing something to them, sharing something with them, and then having to wait to see if there's any response or not.
Speaker: or not Am I right that that's kind of a period appropriate mode? Well, I think what a lot of people are where it stuck doing in the period was writing sonnet sequences to women who never responded. so ah letters are certainly better because there's at least the expectation or hope of response.
Speaker: Whereas with sonnets, unless you're Edmund Spencer writing sonnets to a woman you would eventually marry, ah you generally didn't have as much luck as we did in our email exchange. and There's a lot of letter writing between friends. That's that's really important in the 16th, 17th centuries for sure. But yeah, I'm i'm trying to think if i if there are instances of like epistolary courtship that I know of from the period. I'm sure there are, but i i don't i don't actually think of it as a ah major kind of erotic, romantic mode of communication that in that moment. That's interesting. So really ah a more um typical mode is the scripting of sonnets with no, with no expectation of, or even desire for a conversation or response.
Speaker: Yeah. What's the line you like from Montaigne that he would never have written his essay is if he could have actually continued writing letters to his best friend who died. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so so much great literature that we have is because no one was responding to their letters.
Speaker: So they had to write sonnets or essays instead. So maybe there just are a lot of letters from the 16th century that no one saved because what was the point? Because you actually got the relationship you could dispose of all the preparatory matter.
Speaker: In the 20th century, Frank O'Hara famously, um in a text called Personism, makes the claim that his sort of major poetic breakthrough was the realization that he could just um stop writing a poem and pick up the phone and and call the person. Yeah.
Speaker: ah Which turns out to be like a really complicated statement because ah people sort of take it as an indication that O'Hara's poetry is really like talking to somebody on the phone. um ah But really what he's saying is, i choose not to call that person and instead writing the poem. And it does seem like there's like a connection between the creation of literature literature.
Speaker: not talking to people or not getting a response that there's, you know, um it's like there's ah a spectrum between um like reciprocal communication and on the one hand and and literature on the other.
Speaker: ah And if you have too much connectivity, you know, there's a way that literature just doesn't happen if you're actually having a conversation, um which maybe makes, yeah, the sort of instantaneous conversation. nature of texting, et cetera, or tweeting even, right? Like when you can immediately have ah a clever thought and get a response from a couple hundred people, um you know, why would you waste that on a poem?
Speaker: Yeah, i wonder if for O'Hara, that's kind of also knowingly a line that he's he's thinking about in response to this longer history. i mean, he was so engaged with with kind of Wyatt and the the kind of early modern Pacharkism. I wonder if he's kind of like updating that for his own his own moment, the kind of um ah assumed asymmetry between like how much you actually know and talk to a person and how much you can actually write about them. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that's really interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if that was something that he was explicitly explicitly thinking about. um But you've you've you've chosen Milton and not Spencer to talk about. And maybe you can tell us a little bit about why Paradise Lost is your marvelous experience.
Speaker: It's just a really good poem. You're going to go out on a limb. And I think what we both love about it is that it's a romantic comedy and a comedy of remarriage really in the, in the Covellian sense.
Speaker: And obviously like there's, there's, you know, so much great philosophy and theology and a theory of the cosmos in there. Satan's obviously an amazing character.
Speaker: But most people who really think that Satan is the most interesting thing about Paradise Lost don't get beyond book two or even book one. He kind of falls off after that. And for us, the poem really gets going in book four when we meet Adam and Eve.
Speaker: and when their love story begins. And it's just such a moving story of marriage. It's it's a comedy really in all kinds of senses. it's It's about low subject matter, about marriage, everyday life, work, eating, sex.
Speaker: And it's also kind of, especially in book five, there's a really funny exchange between Adam and Eve where they fight about how best to prepare for a dinner party that really feels straight out of modern-day sitcom.
Speaker: And then, of course, it's a comedy because it has a happy ending. They have a big falling out, they separate, they come back together, and they live happily ever after. missed that last part, but... yeah That's interesting because I think most people, as you say, like vision of the poem that exists for people who aren't really engaged with it is that it's this powerful invention of this profoundly charismatic satanic figure. And then the other, I think, kind of general sense people have about the poem is that it's about...
Speaker: justifying God's ways to man, that it's a, you know, a theological meditation. And most people would be surprised, I think, to hear it compared to a ah sitcom or to um a rom-com.
Speaker: And it is one of the most enjoyable things. about teaching it too, is that insofar as students have any expect, undergraduate students have any expectations um about it, it is all about kind of Satan and and the kind of holy, and it is wholly original kind of representation of of Satan um that is offered, especially in the first two books.
Speaker: And kind of helping them see how much more there is is, is just really, really satisfying. And I think the other reason we chose it is probably it's the, the I know for me, it's certainly the book I've probably spent the most time with in the classroom.
Speaker: And I think partly because of that, it's like become just a real touchstone for us when we're kind of talking or thinking. It's always sort of in the background. So that the relationship between ah Adam and Eve in the book and the um the version of the poem that positions Adam and Eve as figures engaged in this conversational relationship how much of that was Milton's own invention and how much of that is just that was the conventional understanding of Adam and Eve and their relationship. Again, I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear, you know, the poem described in these as offering anything like a sympathetic portrait of the two of them. When again, I think just the, the like kernel of the idea of that mini story is really fixated uh,
Speaker: um you know, Eve taking of the fall. ah And it sounds like there's also this really quotidian version of the poem that's just about domesticity in a way. i think it's Milton. I think one of his real innovations is to t ise the very real possibility that Eve is better than Adam. mean, there's there's lots of conflicting evidence. There's lots of different ways of looking at it. When Satan first sees Adam and Eve,
Speaker: He sees them as two would of equal figures. And then he looks closer and he's like, well, maybe they're not actually equal. You know, he's a little bit taller. He has a nicer forehead. Her hair is longer.
Speaker: I guess there are some differences between them. Right. He seems like he's made for God only and she for God in him. Then there are other times in the poem, like like Adam has no idea how to feed himself. right when when When Raphael comes to visit, the angel Raphael comes down to warn them ostensibly about Satan, that though they get very distracted with them some dinner party conversation.
Speaker: Adam is like, Eve, oh my God, oh oh we have company. It's our first guest. We have to really put out stops and and like, i don't know, like harvest all the fruit in the garden or whatever. And Eve is like, you moron. because It's not, we live in Eden. so we don't have to like harvest every single fruit from the trees. We can just harvest a few fruits and just serve those immediately. And don't worry, I'll take care of it.
Speaker: And then there's this beautiful description of her arranging salad ingredients and combining everything perfectly so the tastes complement each other rather than being, but rather than clashing with each other.
Speaker: and it's almost like how how Milton would describe his own poetic process. So he's all and again, just like the the fact that but he he takes Eve so seriously as a character who knows what she's doing.
Speaker: And also as as a creative figure and as one who really cares about freedom, as we see later, um makes makes her much more of a figure. I think more of a figure for Milton than than Satan is.
Speaker: Should i read that passage? That would be tremendous. Yeah. ah Part of what's funny about this is, what as Katie is is is saying, is that there's, um you know, Adam ah kind of hanging out while she prepares lunch and um the angel archangel shows up and Adam is kind of like, you know, hey, it's Tither Eve, you know, you have to go and get all the best stuff. and He's literally sunbathing as she's in the kitchen and making lunch.
Speaker: um And Eve kind of offers a corrective. She says, Adam's earth's atom, a small store will serve where store all seasons ripe for use hangs on the stock, save what frugal storing firmness gains to nourish and superfluous moist consumes. But I will haste, and from each bow and break, each plant and juiciest gourd will pluck such choice to entertain our angel guest as he beholding shall confess that here on earth God hath dispensed his bounties as in heaven. So she kind of offers this corrective, like, Adam, like, everything is so amazing in paradise. I don't really need to go to get the best stuff. And she's like, nonetheless, because you asked me, I will. and then we get this beautiful description of what she's...
Speaker: able to do as she goes out into um ah paradise and and gathers things and thinks about rearranging them and mixing them. So saying with dispatchful looks, in haste she turns, on hospitable thoughts intent, what choice to choose for delicacy best, what order so contrived as not to mix, tastes not well joined, inelegant, but bring taste after taste upheld with kindliest change.
Speaker: bestirs her then and from each tender stock whatever earth all bearing mother yields in India east or west or middle shore in Pontus or the Punic coast or where Alcinius reigned, fruit of all kinds in coat, rough or smooth rind or bearded husk or shell, she gathers tribute large and on the board heaps with unsparing hand.
Speaker: For drink the grape she crushes, inoffensive must, and meets with many a berry. And from sweet kernels pressed she tempers dulcet creams, nor these to hold wants her fit vessels pure, then screws the ground with rose and odors from the shrub, unfumed.
Speaker: Amazing. This exquisite skill she has in sort of tempering and and arranging and mixing the tastes and smells of of paradise um sits side by side with this kind of, you know, sitcom moment where she's like Adam rolling her eyes, but then also sort of, you know, and doing what he asks because she knows it will make him happy and it'll actually give her ah an opportunity to show her skill.
Speaker: It's also really funny because just like this also makes her so much like Milton that even as she's correcting Adam by saying, we don't have to harvest the garden because we can just harvest what we need for now. She also kind of corrects herself and is well, I guess it is true that I do sometimes harvest a little bit extra and I pickle it, I ferment it. like there There are some fruits that actually get better with storage. So those by frugal storing do gain ripeness. But anyway, the point is is, I'll do what you want, honey, whatever you say.
Speaker: Like she's really just doesn't have to like be so exacting about how things work in the kids. or Like she just wants Adam to know that she knows things and he doesn't. it's it I think that the thinking about it as a as a comedy of remarriage, which is um the philosopher Stanley Cavell's sort of genre that he invented to make sense of a set of screwball comedies from the 1930s, I guess. um Like part of what that interpretation highlights is, i think it's like a different way of thinking about how wordy the poem is. um Like those, um like the need to sort of both ah correct Adam, but then also like um the sort of inability not to then launch into this digression, creating all of these different like finer points.
Speaker: um like really connects the poem with and their relationship with with talk and conversation. and um you know, my sense is that it's sort of thinking about it that way makes their marriage about conversation, which then um like really, I think changes maybe the way we think about this extremely long poem, um which is just, you know, just hearing you read it. There's just it's such ornate language. It's so beautiful. But also it just keeps going on and on and on. Yeah. And that there's something really beautiful and utopian about it's going on and on and on, I think.
Speaker: Yeah. There's this T.S. Eliot kind of comment about Milton that we were just talking about earlier um that I think speaks a little bit to this. You know, Eliot hated Milton um for both political and and aesthetic reasons, um but was really kind of obsessed with him too. You know, he gives not one, but two lectures on Milton. um But he, one of the things that he really seemed to admire was the precisely that ongoingness of Milton, Milton's verse. And it's it's part of the way that Milton defines what's really important about his verse practice and his sort of infamous note on the verse that he adds to the beginning of of Paradise Lost. where he refers to sense being drawn out um from verse to verse, from line to line, as one of the defining characteristics of his his poetics. And this is how Eliot kind of paraphrases that.
Speaker: It is the period, the sentence, and still more the paragraph that is the unit of Milton's verse. An emphasis on the line structure is the minimum necessary to provide a counter pattern to the period structure. It is only in the period that the wavelength of Milton's verse is to be found.
Speaker: It is his ability to give a perfect and unique pattern to every paragraph such that the full beauty of the line is found in its context and his ability to work in larger musical units than any other poet.
Speaker: That is to me the most conclusive evidence of Milton's supreme mastery. And I think one of the things that I always really enjoy about reading him, but also teaching him, is how Milton is able to have that sort of what Eliot elsewhere describes as this almost like wave-like ongoingness. The poetry just keeps coming, but also has these what often feel like quite digestible and and relatable moments of of conversation. And it is... conversation, the concept that Milton turns to when he's defining um his his theory of marriage in his his divorce contract. Milton was one of the first to sort of develop these extensive arguments for why divorce should be um legal and and available for people. And um it's there that he really insists on the importance of of a concept of conversation for for marriage.
Speaker: Yeah, he says, um a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and the noblest end of marriage. A famous quote that Cabell, I think also quotes in his introduction to his book about comedies of remarriage.
Speaker: Let me ask a stupid question that just betrays my lack of knowledge about literary history. But, but given that it's ah such a narrative poem and so dialogic in so many ways that it has so many compelling characters and Like, was there, was it even feasible for him to have written it as a drama rather than as a, um, uh, as a, as a poem?
Speaker: mean, was it just clear that, that of course Milton would sit down and write this as a, you know, a big block of free verse or was is that a decision to decide to, to not write a play, but to write a, um, a poem?
Speaker: It was going to be a playwright, Adam in Paradise. Yeah. And then he decided, because he really wanted to write an epic poem. He wanted to write a great national epic. And then, you know, things got ah kind of kind of bad in England in the middle of the 17th century, you know, with the whole Civil War thing. And Milton got a little bit disillusioned with the idea of England and so decided to write his great epic as a version of the Bible.
Speaker: instead of a, of a national epic, but there's still obviously lots of, he's processing lot of his, his drama from the civil war in, in the poem, but he he changed the subject matter. But I do think he originally intended it to be a drama and then driving made it a drama. He originally planned it to be ah a tragedy called Adam and paradise. Yeah. He said, um and had different plans for an epic poem, then realized that this was the the epic he wanted.
Speaker: um But yeah, it's funny because later on, we think later on Milton will write a ah closet drama, Samson Agonistes, which is all dialogue. I mean, people keep coming to visit Samson, the fallen Hebrew judge to talk with him, but it's a lot less dialogic than this poem, yeah I would say. Yeah, that's an interesting word.
Speaker: But there's sort of a way in which the um the turn from drama to poetry is a little bit like the, um you know, writing um poems because you're not getting a response from your letters.
Speaker: ah You know, that there's this turning away from a direct connection with an audience, say, that's the sort of thing that you can work up on your own.
Speaker: um because you're not Because you're not actually having a conversation, you're able to write a poem about conversation, which is kind of interesting. Well, it is sort of true also your comment, Brian, to like the path of Milton's career. I mean, he's kind of stopped, you know, he has some like...
Speaker: early, very well-received kind of shorter verse, um most especially Lycidas, the pastoral ology that he wrote. And then he has a um a couple other, you know, shorter things that that, you know, specialists still read and teach, but um ah not many other people do. And then, you know, most of his writing um for a good couple decades is these sort of ah polemics that were meant for a very wide audience, you know, justifying registrate, theorizing Republican government, um ah his theory of the Reformation, etc. So he's writing for this, and and they're often explicitly dialogic, like, Salamese has said this about me, and he said, I should be blind because I have disobeyed the king. And here's what, ah you know, they're very kind of intrusive and aimed at particular people. um And when that kind of polemical public Milton is no longer a kind of available identity for him with the restoration, um when he's, you know, imprisoned, his books are burned and, um you know, barely survives, it's really then that he turns to it's the epic that he had wanted to do for so long. um So I think in a real sense, yeah, the kind of like inaccessibility of the public forum um is the condition for writing this epic. Yeah.
Speaker: Is there any last word that you, is there something about the poem that we haven't talked about that we need to talk about?
Speaker: i think what I like, well, there's so many things I like about Adventist relationship, especially how funny it is. um But I think what i really appreciate about it is how, how important labor is in the poem. So it's kind of, you know, kind of a common conception of Genesis that labor is a curse of the fall. that Adam and Eve were frolicking about in Eden until the fall and they were cursed with labor. But Milton is really insistent that Adam and Eve, i think I forget what the line is in Genesis, but God god creates Adam and Eve too to tend and keep the garden or dress and keep the garden, something like that.
Speaker: And Milton is really insistent on how that is a kind of labor, that the difference between pre-fall and post-fall is of degree, not of kind. but in In every way, actually, which is why Milton really does think that paradise can be regained. But the the idea that even paradise is not perfect, that it needs to be worked on ah in collaboration with others, is just a really beautiful idea of what...
Speaker: Yeah, a perfect world is one that is perfectible, that needs to be worked on, that any relationship is iteratively created and recreated every day rather than just being something that is given to you that you live in in ah in a static way.
Speaker: Yeah. And the the status of labor is also, so you know, one of their main topics of conversation and eventually a major point of of of tension and disagreement that kind of sets up for um first Eve's and then Adam's fall. um There's a real ambiguity in the poem about, you know, how important it is to keep up with the labor in the garden. um You know, Adam's the first one to introduce the possibility that they need to get to bed early so they can wake up early um and anxiously get enough work done um ah in in the garden.
Speaker: um And then there's another moment when when Adam just kind of describes labor as as pure other moments, when Adam describes the labor of the garden as pure pleasure. it's a light full tag. Yeah, delightful tasks, not irksome toil.
Speaker: um And that actually it doesn't matter if they get anything done. um They can you know take breaks and make out all they want. um There's no like labor required. It's just part of the pleasure of reforming the garden. And then other moments where it's a real sight of anxiety and um they it leads to their first kind of really substantive fight, actually. Yeah.
Speaker: That really corroborates the the sitcom reading of the book. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, one way to so to describe their fight that then precipitates Eve's fall is that Eve wants a break from Adam, um who's gotten kind of condescending toward her in um ah in the wake of Raphael's visit to the garden.
Speaker: And she wants some time apart. And the way she explains that is like, look, i'll get we'll get more done if we spend some time working on different parts of of paradise. um And that's when Adam really pushes the like, it doesn't matter if we get anything done. Like we can take all the breaks we want. Like this is just labor as part of our pleasure.
Speaker: um Stay with me. I need to watch you. And that makes her just want to get even a little bit more distance from him. And it is that distance that, you know, makes Satan zoom in on her in particular and and kind of go after her. so oh that's really interesting. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: All right, so the other um ah your other remit for this conversation was I've asked both of you, we've been talking about an aesthetic experience that you, in one way or another, share. And I've asked you also to come prepared to talk about an aesthetic experience that you do not share. um ah You can get some distance from one another. And so does one of you want first and tell us what your, the an aesthetic artifact that you think Um, the other person will not, uh, shine upon.
Speaker: okay. Well, uh, mine is a David Kodeberg movie, The Shrouds, not recently. which I think is such a great movie. It's so funny, so moving. It's about a guy who's like a David Cronenberg stand-in whose wife dies, and he creates this high-tech cemetery where you can watch your loved ones decay in real time with a camera, and that the data is encrypted for this technology, which he thinks is a really funny joke.
Speaker: And he also has this AI persona who's also voiced by the same character who plays his dead wife and also her sister. so it's about you know grief and mourning, not being able to move on. Delirious. it's It's very... Encryption. It's very funny. um But Ross has a real allergy to dead wife cinema.
Speaker: It's true. So um he i asked him to watch it with and he said, absolutely not. i don't I just don't like movies about dead wives. One of the most moving parts in Paradise Lost is when Eve tells...
Speaker: adam to to eat the fruit and she's like oh maybe don't like i don't know like i'm gonna die and i don't want you to die with me and he's like think if you're going like i gotta go with you you know if god should make another eve if i if i another rib afford like loss of you would never from my heart i just can't i can't have another wife you're it for me so i'm gonna die with you adam was a total wife guy Rush came up really well in this ah in this in this version. There's so many reasons not to like a k Cronenberg film. ah
Speaker: like The Dead Wife issue is a really um morally admirable one, I think. It's it's true. Katie tried to get me to watch it many times, and I just didn't. um but I think we were also apart at the time, and you know we do sometimes like watch the same films when we're apart and you know talk about them or... you know, the the co-authored book project on Spencer's Emerdy that you know about um ah started as a ah way to kind of like stay in content conversation about texts while we were apart when Katie was moving away from L.A. We emailed about that too. It's true. We emailed about that too.
Speaker: Do you feel like, so it's rare that I'll be like, no, I'm not going to watch this thing that you're watching and thinking about now. that I get that. Is there something about relating via um some kind of like shared text that is particularly, what is it about that experience that is sustaining, do you think?
Speaker: Well, I just love mediation in general. And so um i don't like talking about my feelings, but I like talking about texts. Yeah. about Eve's feelings.
Speaker: Yeah. It's nice have a third in our relationship, I guess. That's the, the, the Milton fruple. Yeah, it is. It is true that there are like, you know, certain lines or certain scenes, not just from this book, but especially from this book that we often refer to when we're like working through something, you know, personally or in our lives or something that they are kind of like,
Speaker: Yeah, touchstones for um mediating difficult experiences or feelings that we kind of root them through text in a way that I don't think is escapist for us. I think it just... um gives us something else to bring into the conversation. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's ah a profound um rationale for art in general is that it provides that, ah that mediation, which yeah, absolutely isn't escapist. It's just part of, um you know, it's a different medium the way that language is a medium. And it provides, I think in a lot of ways it provides a kind of way of giving shape and form to feelings that, know, maybe wouldn't even really be articulable more directly. It's like a good couples therapist. Yeah. Yeah. and And much, much less expensive. Yeah. All right, Ross, what's your artifact?
Speaker: Okay. So Katie came downstairs last night um and said, what is yours? And I said, Brian said, we couldn't share. and she goes, it's going to be a John Ashbery poem, isn't it? And I said, damn it. How did you know?
Speaker: Because Ashbery is one of the pe few um kind of poets I really admire and Katie doesn't. um And it it hasn't really caused real real tension, but it is like a continual surprise when it comes up again. So um I chose one actually, sorry, this is maybe cheating a little bit, one Ashbery poem that I thought would give us the best chance of of ah Katie not maybe liking it. It's kind of a limit phrase.
Speaker: Which is Some Trees. um I think of it as a particularly Miltonic poem, um ah partly because of its particularly interesting use of enjambments and Milton's kind of, you know, famous for prizing enjambment as ah as a central way of of thinking about the poem.
Speaker: practice poetry. um But also because it's it's just descriptions of trees interacting feels to me so in conversation with this passage that I know Katie loves from book seven, the Heptamron in Paradise Lost, the creation story, where you get these descriptions of of trees rising as in a dance and and interacting with each other.
Speaker: um So I think of Ashbery's Some Trees as like probably still an Ashbery poem that Katie's not going to like, but maybe one that she will have more patience with than lot of Ashbury poems. Are you going to read it?
Speaker: Should read it? Yeah, that'd be lovely. Yeah, yeah. Wow. These are amazing. Each joining a neighbor as though speech were still a performance, arranging by chance to meet as far this morning from the world as agreeing with it.
Speaker: You and I are suddenly what the trees try to tell us we are. That their merely being there means something. That soon we may touch, love, All right.
Speaker: What do you think, Katie?
Speaker: we are surrounded silence already filled with noises a canvas on which emerges a chorus of smiles a winter morning placed in a puzzling light and moving are days put on such reticence these accents seem their own defense right what do you think katie It's fine. It's no book seven of Paradise Lost, I'll tell that. Okay, that's fair.
Speaker: I'll quickly read the passage I'm thinking of. He scarce had said when the bare earth till then, desert and bare, unsightly, unadorned, brought forth the tender grass whose verter clad her universal face with pleasant green, then herbs of every leaf that sudden flowered, opening their various colors and made gay her bosom smelling sweet.
Speaker: Amazing.
Speaker: last rose as in a dance the stately trees and spread their branches hung with copious fruit or gemmed their blossoms amazing The thing about some trees that I've always ah wondered about is where that word comeliness comes from ah in the poem. It's like such a um left turn.
Speaker: Yeah. You have a theory. I do not know. Do you? No, I don't. I do think, though, thinking about it in relationship to what we've been talking about, that it's a poem that has an interesting relationship to conversation and to, um you know, ah conversation as a model of romantic partnership. Yeah. Because one, I think, component of the poem, which I often, I don't know, i think of it as being, at least in part, a love poem that's kind of grappling with the epistemology of the closet and with the specific difficulty of...
Speaker: expressing love that can't be directly articulated. and so I think part of the poem is about, um you know, trying to search for a mode of loving that doesn't need to be verbalized because verbalizing it is dangerous. Dangerous both because um of homophobia, but also because verbalizing love is always dangerous. But there's also that moment where it says soon we'll be able to touch, love, explain.
Speaker: Right. So that there's still a kind of horizon of um i don't know, explication ah that is, i think, of a kind of a queer futurity. Like that a moment will arrive when we'll be able not only to love one another, but also to explain one another. But maybe we can't do that right now.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, you're making me think that may is is, it's hard to read how tentative it is, right? Like, is it a real promise? Is it just a potential that don't realize? Yeah, that's something we may love, we may touch, love, explain.
Speaker: Yeah, that's great. All right, well, thank you both so much. This has been so um fun, and also I feel like i've learned I've learned a lot.
Speaker: Yeah, thanks for talking to us, Brian. thank you. This was fun.
