#184 — The Conversational Nature of Reality
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Summary
David White is a poet and the author of 10 books of poetry, along with 4 books of prose. He holds a degree in marine zoology and has traveled very widely, and has as you ll hear a sensibility that is quite relevant to questions of awareness, the nature of the self, what it means to live an examined life, and other topics that are central to my concerns here. It really was a great pleasure to speak with him, and he has a wonderful voice. Here, I'm speaking with David White, about poetry, writing, and his life as a marine zoologist in the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador, where he has spent much of his adult life. I hope you enjoy this conversation, and that it enriches your life in some way. If you can t afford a subscription, there's an option at Samharris.org to request a free account and we'll grant 100 of those requests, no questions asked. You'll get access to access to the full Making Sense Podcast library, including all the episodes mentioned in the podcast, by becoming a member of the Making Sense Club. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. -Sam Harris This is a great place to be heard by people who can't make sense of the world, and as always I want you to be a good friend of the making sense community. -Sam harris . And if you d like access to full episodes of the podcast you'll need to subscribe to the Podcast, you'll get full access to it by using the premium version of the service, making sense of this podcast? -And so on and so on, etc., etc. - thank you for joining me, let me never want you can't be asked to be that by someone can hear the podcast by someone else can't do that? -A big thank you, I really want to be helping you make sense by me, I'll hear it so I'm making sense by you, right so I hear that so I can help you make it so that I know that you can be that right, right right so you can hear it like that I can do that, right I can say that I'm listening to it, I hear it, right not that you'll hear that I'll say that so you'll have it so much so I'll get it that you're not gonna hear that right?
Transcript
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welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing
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a free account and we grant 100 of those requests no questions asked okay no housekeeping today
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today i'm presenting a conversation originally recorded for the waking up app and while podcast
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subscribers already get access to those conversations through my website it seems to me that this episode
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might be of more general interest so i'm releasing it now on the main podcasting feed today i'm speaking
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with david white david is a poet and the author of 10 books of poetry along with four books of prose
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and he holds a degree in marine zoology and has traveled very widely and has as you'll hear a
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sensibility that is quite relevant to questions of awareness the nature of the self what it means to live
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an examined life and other topics that are central to my concerns here it really was a great pleasure
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to speak with him and he has a wonderful voice so now i bring you david white
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i am here with david white david thank you for joining me it's a pleasure so i recently discovered
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you i think i was i was actually at the ted conference where you spoke a couple years ago but
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i think i was not in your session and just heard echoes of of the effect you had on the rest of the
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crowd which was quite positive and then i subsequently saw that talk when it came online and i don't know
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saw something some another place where you were speaking and reading and now have have read
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one of your recent non-fiction books your prose books the three marriages which i want to talk about
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but you're you're primarily a poet and so i just to begin can you describe you know how you view your
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career as a writer and some of the other things you're doing because i know you're not just working
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as a writer you also work with organizations and you have an interesting way of interfacing with the
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world so tell me what you're up to yes i suppose there's two ways of looking at my way as a writer
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one is looking back on it and looking at the astonishing journey one is the frontier that i'm on now
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and i've always seen poetry intimately connected to good thinking there's a tendency to think that poetry is
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on the arts side and therefore you leave your strategic mind at the door but uh it's actually
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uh good poetry is very very practical in looking at the phenomenology of of the conversation of life
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in other words what happens along the way when you try to deepen that exchange and uh coleridge said no
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no poet begins in philosophy or they write very bad poetry and it's it's very true but uh he also then
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said but every poet becomes a philosopher interesting and so yes the practice of verbal acuity connected
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to listening and visual acuity starts to ready you for larger and larger understandings and i suppose
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the work of the poet is to invite create language that invites everyone else into that understanding at
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the same time and in a beautiful way actually not just a not just a quotidian mechanical way but in a
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a way that actually enriches you as you enter the experience you have a background in is it marine zoology
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i do indeed yeah i had a 10-year excursion into science sciences from when i was 17 to 27 or so and i worked
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as a guide in a naturalist guia naturalista in the ecuadorian national park system in galapagos and
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uh felt like i i actually i actually experienced all of my ambitions being fulfilled
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and left galapagos wondering what i would do for the rest of my life really and that's when the return
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to you could say that the states of attention that i experienced in galapagos also began my
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restarted my poetic career because i've written poetry since i was six or seven years old probably
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under the influence of my irish mother and then i wrote seriously through my teens until i was 17 or 18
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when my science has overwhelmed my time for writing and it was good to have that hiatus but when i was
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in galapagos i started to understand that there were five different levels of attention that i could
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identify of course there are many many more the tibetans have gradations of hundreds of them but
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but there were five that i could identify and they were i noticed that the deeper my level of
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attention for the world the more that my identity as a person actually changed and also deepened and
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and widened and you could say that uh i started to understand that uh that a person's identity didn't
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depend on their inherited beliefs and i've always felt actually that a person's beliefs are the least
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interesting thing about them actually yeah yeah would that most people realize that uh exactly yes and
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um that your identity actually depends more on how much your attention you're paying to things that
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are other and people that are other than you and of course you are in a discipline here of interviewing
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which is a real discipline of listening to to those that are other than you yeah i i've begun to say that
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really our true wealth is not even in the coin of time it really is its cash value is in what we do with
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our attention because we all know what it's like to guard our time and then to squander it by misusing
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our attention so really your your life becomes the substance of it moment to moment it becomes what
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you do with your attention and yes and with regard with regard to your uh your metaphors with time
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the great thing about the deeper and deeper states of attention lead you into the timeless yeah and the
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untrammeled because we have all this surface language around time you know that you can as if you
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that we will kill time as if that would be possible we as if we could make time as if that would be
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possible and um we have all kinds of language which actually don't doesn't bear examination when you
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apply it to time and so um i think one of the reasons poetry is so is so coming to the fore in the
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world of instagram and and the falling away of our previous structures is is its invitation into the
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timeless and the untrammeled you know we have so many children in the developed world who are
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bullied into their adulthood just by the way that we educate them and uh the uh the amount of
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coercion around learning and there's something about poetry that allows you to have your own language
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and to set and that sets you free do you have a background in meditation or any contemplative
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tradition like in buddhism you just mentioned tibetan buddhism so what's your background there in
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eastern or western spiritual traditions well my first background was spending an enormous amount of
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time time by myself out in the woods and fields and hills of yorkshire where i grew up in the north
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of england i had a kind of wordsworthy in childhood i had a very fierce education too in a kind of the
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last gasp of the old classical world classical teaching but i um we had marvelous countryside around
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where i grew and i spent a lot of time alone there and uh listening and watching and i was always
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entranced by landscapes so that was my first introduction and then i started when i was at
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university to get really interested in the more esoteric forms of meditation and i tried all kinds
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of things myself and when i think back it was it was uh quite droll what i was turning my mind to
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but then i discovered uh zen sitting and zen teachers and i i sat zen quite seriously for many years
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with uh with very serious teachers and so i i feel like that has stood me in good stead actually
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over the years even though i don't have a a zen teacher now i feel it like it's in my body
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somehow and what about psychedelics did you have a uh phase or in you are you in a phase now where you
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have uh used the um the pharmacological advantages of of uh did have a phase yes i did and i found them
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very very very helpful which did you take well i was in south america and uh so i uh had experiences
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with the various forms of mushrooms and then with uh with ecstasy and my first experience was one that
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was really really rejuvenating and that was with lsd when i was at university and i hadn't realized until
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i took it and had that experience that and it was just one experience actually towards the end of my
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time at university but i hadn't realized how much i'd been mourning my childhood and my childhood
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visions or vision i should say of the world and that experience on lsd really restored my
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the bridge between the young man i was becoming and the child that i had been and uh so that was
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really remarkable i'm very thankful to it so i've never i've never been a drug taker but every now and
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again i've had these threshold moments which have um which have deepened my experience whenever i have
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taken anything i've always just wanted to be alone actually yeah so i often find company quite
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distracting uh no matter how much fun you might be having yeah i always feel this incredible invitation
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to the underground to the you know to the to uh grounding it in my body and grounding it in
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understandings and insights and uh so i'll most often just take off by myself walking nice nice well
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and was that before you got into zen practice yes yeah and a couple of experiences after in parallel yes
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yeah well um yes it's i i know i know wherever you speak i did not have a wordsworthian childhood to
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be called back to but um still uh the vividness of uh the natural world is is available on the other
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side of um many of those compounds exactly yeah yeah so i actually let's start off with a poem
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i'd like you to read the bell and the blackbird because this is one of these poems where the
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connection between your work and paying careful attention to the world and you know the the
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subsequent changes in one's consciousness when one does that it's so obvious so maybe you could
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give us i will i'll recite it i have it in my memory actually and and uh just a little context for
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this uh the poem is called as you said it's called the bell and the blackbird and uh it's really
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the inherited understanding in the irish tradition or you could say the celtic tradition but particularly
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in the irish tradition that human beings are constantly choosing too early in the conversation
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that the strategic mind throws up these black and whites and binary questions because that's the
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only way it can approach things but almost always the way forward is actually holding them both
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together or the way between things and the image here is of a meme in the irish tradition of of which
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occurs again and again of a monk in the old irish church which had a tremendous relationship with the
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natural world a monk standing on the edge of a monastic precinct and hearing in the morning and
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hearing the bell of the chapel calling him to prayer and he says to himself that is the most beautiful
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sound in the whole wide world which is the call to silence to depth to another context beneath the
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context that you've established in the world and he's just about to turn towards the chapel when
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doesn't he hear from over the wall he hears the call of the blackbird from the fields and the woods
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and then he says to himself and that is also the most beautiful sound in the world and the lovely thing
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about the story in a very irish way is you're not told which way he goes because actually we don't get
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to choose if you think about it the first call is to a deeper understanding of ourselves you know
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should i play my should i rehearse more before i play my instrument in public if i'm a musician
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should i deepen my understanding should i educate myself more should i get a degree before i hold
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myself at the at the the job world and the other one is the call of the world just as you find it
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just as you hear it just as you see it and perhaps even more importantly just as it sees and hears you
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so this is the piece the bell and the blackbird the sound of a bell still reverberating
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the sound of a bell still reverberating or a blackbird a blackbird calling from a corner of the field
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asking you to wake into this life or inviting you deeper into the one that waits
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the sound of a bell still reverberating still reverberating or a blackbird a blackbird calling
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from a corner of the field asking you to wake into this life or inviting you deeper into the one
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that waits either way takes courage either way wants you to become nothing but that self that is
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no self at all wants you to walk to the place where you find you already know you'll have to give every
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last thing away the approach that is also the meeting itself without any meeting at all that radiance
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you have always carried with you as you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship
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nice nice i love your style of recitation i perhaps other poets do this and i haven't noticed or is this
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really your own um innovation but you you repeat lines in a way that it's kind of obvious when you
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hear it it's especially obvious when you see it on the page that these lines are not repeated in the
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written form of the poem itself but you know you kind of re-traverse your steps again and again you know
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and it has a kind of incantatory quality to it and it really just it demands that your poems really be
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recited by you i mean that's the form in which to consume them well if you think about it it's
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actually i mean it's it's it's it's seen as an innovation but it's actually a re-innovation because
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it's how poetry would have been recited in the old in the old traditions yeah and the chorus is was in
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the greek theater for instance was something that was that the gods had said and therefore it had to be
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repeated because it couldn't be understood fully the first time and i often say poetry is language
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against which you have no defenses so you have to actually say it in ways which against which there
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are no defenses if you hear a good marital argument you'll hear both sides repeating things usually
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three times yeah the poetry of anguish exactly in three different ways because the other person
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must hear it or more poignant more poignantly if you are bringing very bad news to another person
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of the loss of a loved one you will always be very careful about how you say it and you will say it
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three times in three different ways and you leave silence between the lines yeah and you will have this
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tremendous physical connection to the listening ear so that's the way that's the way poetry should be read
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actually and it's a great pity that it isn't in so many poetry readings because people turn up at a
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poetry reading perhaps for the first time and they hear something remarkable from the poet man or woman
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and before they know it the poets onto the next line when they haven't even they haven't even actually
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caught up with what they just heard yeah so many poetry readings can be actually quite violent to the
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listener so we need to treat the listener with a deep kind of respect give them some space
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yeah give them some silence you don't even know what you've written yourself so you need to hear it too
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you don't you don't understand fully the implications of what you've said and if and if you do it's not good
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poetry yeah it always leads to broader and wider emancipations of your understandings there are
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many lines i've recited for 20 years you know and then suddenly you're standing somewhere in a hall or a
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room or and you say my god i never understood that in 20 years of reciting it but there it is
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yeah so you are literally trying to overhear yourself say things you didn't know you knew
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that's the discipline of writing poetry so you you speak about what you call the conversational nature
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of reality in various places what what do you mean by that well it just seems very obvious to me
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whatever a human being desires for themselves will not come about exactly as they first imagined it
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or first laid it out in their minds equally whatever the world desires of you will not happen
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no matter how coercive that world is what always happens is the meeting between what you desire from
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your world and what the world desires of you it's this frontier where you overhear yourself and you
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overhear the world and that frontier is the only place where things are real that's the that to me is
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the is the conversational nature of reality and the discipline is to stay on that frontier as fully as you can
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does that relate in your mind to this this opposition you sketched in in the poem the the distinction
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between you know hearing the the summons of the bell and going in to work on yourself and and improve
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your craft and prepare rehearse yes and not yet to enter the world but yeah you know as opposed to
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actually trying your gifts such as they are in public and for better or worse yeah it's lovely relief
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actually to realize you don't get to choose you always have to rehearse you always have to deepen
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you always have to practice you always have to find the next level of generosity in your being or your
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soul and you must meet the world just as it finds you now too with whatever you've got right and i think
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once you actually follow that frontier conversation the conversation itself actually starts to deepen you
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and after a while you realize well actually i don't need to do the work i just need to be in that
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exchange in that meeting place in many ways that's the way my career has gone it's only a career in
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looking back it's a kind of uh frontier otherwise in which you just try to keep a kind of integrity
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and groundedness while keeping your eyes and your voice dedicated towards the horizon
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that you're going to or the horizon in another person that you're meeting
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yeah that that actually describes how i view my career as well and it really is a yes because i'm
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now spending most of my time doing things that i never envisioned doing and if you had told me
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yeah you know five or ten years ago that i would be spending my time in precisely this way i would
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not have believed you yes had you shown me the path into the future exactly it would have not only
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been unfamiliar to me it would have i would have had reasons why that could not be the yes yeah that's
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very well said yeah i always think a good work always leads you into world you could not have imagined
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for yourself you know i grew up from my irish and scottish and yorkshire sides with this kind of
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uh blood allergy to uh to all hierarchical powers um i come from long lines of irish scottish
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and rebels and yorkshire luddites and uh so you can imagine when i first went full-time as a poet and i
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had my first invitations into the corporate world my first reaction was to say no because my only
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my only understanding was that i would have to compromise myself and compromise my work
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and create some kind of propaganda that worked in parallel with whatever the organization wanted so
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so it was a powerful upsetting and subversive surprise to find that i didn't have to it would have
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been quite it would have been much more comforting to have found that i did need to compromise and
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therefore i could say no but i was actually led into the into a world that i i never imagined i would
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uh i would belong to yes well this seems like a nice point of segue to your book the three marriages
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and uh there's one i you should say what those three marriages are but i'd like to start with
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what you have observed to be the illusion of work-life balance yes because this this strikes
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me as a yeah an unusual and and very useful observation yeah it's another binary that just
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has us more stressed so i'm not only supposed to be this this incredible inspirational center of
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charismatic understanding in the workplace but when i come home i'm supposed to be this
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paragon of perfection as as a partner in a love relationship or as a parent you know in a family
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so it just has us working harder all the time so it's really interesting to think that we live and
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breathe actually between our different marriages and uh we have times where work is naturally the center
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of our life and other times where family has to come first yeah and knowing when those rhythms appear
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and disappear is is really part of being able to go through the doorway of happiness and satisfaction
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and understanding so the first marriage to my mind is is the one we normally talk about you know the
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jane austen horse and carriage marriage but in today's world that's also a love relationship with another
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person whatever gender or mid-gender you are so that's the first marriage is a love relationship
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with some with one other person and someone who you make yourself physically vulnerable with
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and that's what of course what sexual relations does is is undermine our sense of physical frontier
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that's why you have arguments with your intimate loved one that you don't have with anyone else in the world
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so that's the first marriage and uh the second marriage is is the marriage with your your metier with your
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vocation with your work and i i often think work must be a marriage because why would you have stayed so
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long in your work if it wasn't a marriage you must have you must have committed you must have made a promise
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to something that was greater than the knit and the grit and the difficulty of the everyday insanity
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of work you know just like a marriage at home or a committed relationship if you were to take any one
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day in your work life as the reason why you were in that work you'd lock yourself up in a padded room
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quite often and never come out you know but what keeps a marriage sane or a relationship sane
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or a work sane is the horizon to which we've dedicated ourselves
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that's what keeps the difficulty of keeping the conversation alive with another man or woman
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that's what keeps us alive in keeping the conversation the heartbreaking conversation with our work alive
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and then the third marriage is the marriage the relationship with that tricky movable frontier called
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yourself who like another person is constantly surprising you as to who it's becoming and what
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it wants from life yeah i always say you always meet the new you in the mirror in the form of a stranger
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stranger and you always turn away from that stranger to begin with just like you always turn away from
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the surprise that your partner seems to inflict on you when they suddenly want something completely
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different yeah well we have that same surprise with ourselves as we go through the different thresholds
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of our life you know through our mid-thirties through our mid-forties through our mid-fifties yeah
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and uh and you have to get to know the person you're becoming like you have to get to know
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