By Alison Hawthorne Deming
Jennifer Michael Hecht and I met for conversation at the AWP conference in New York City last month amidst the din of 8,000 writers. The interview that follows was spurred on by that meeting and conducted by a subsequent email exchange. During her visit to Tucson in March, she will give three lectures as the Templeton Fellow for the Astrobiology and the Sacred Project, now in its fourth year at the University of Arizona.
Hecht received a PhD in the history of science from Columbia University. She teaches at the New School in New York City and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is the author of two books of poetry, The Next Ancient World (winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award of the Poetry Society of America, Tupelo Press, 2001) and Funny (winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). She is also author of Doubt: A History (Harper Collins, 2003), The End of the Soul (Columbia University Press, 2003), and The Happiness Myth (Harper Collins 2007). Learn more about her work at jennifermichaelhecht.com.
Alison Hawthorne Deming: I love the idea of "the arts of sudden knowledge" that you describe--poetry, painting, Zen, jokes. When did you become interested in the joke as a source of poetry and how did you go about doing your research for the book Funny?
Jennifer Michael Hecht: Funny came into being pretty organically. I was writing a kind of a loose poem and the lines of a joke got written into it. It struck me that the joke could easily be read as serious, even portentous. Jokes are fun by definition, and I was having fun investigating them. Research was tough. The Friar’s Club has a massive joke anthology, I looked on the internet, and bought old joke books, even books of jokes for kids. I decided to include no dirty jokes, though I may some day write that book. There’s something beautiful about a clean old joke. I almost always rewrote the joke from head to toe. I’d find a joke I liked, and I’d live with it for a while, then I’d try to tell the joke and imagine the world around the people in the joke. Many are melancholy poems, but you get a laugh, too. I should say, what I did with the jokes was more autobiography than fiction.
I’m glad you like the idea of the arts of sudden knowledge. Some kinds of knowledge you learn from books, in steady progress, other kinds of knowing happen through surprise or pressure, in bursts.
Alison: In your first collection The Next Ancient World there are poems that feel like highly compressed essays--for example, "Two at a Time" and "Please Answer All Three of the Following Essay Questions." There's a juxtaposition of time frames, a really active sense of reflective mind. So here it seems you're asking the poem--or the poem is asking you--to take on complexity in the way philosophy does. Can you say something about the connection between poetry and philosophy for you?
Jennifer: This is just what I think about. My childhood was boring and lonely and time just sat there. Time goes by slowly in childhood even if you are busy. I started playing mental games with myself and poems like the two you mentioned are expressions of those games, asking strange questions about reality. Philosophy is about how we can know the world. I don’t read much about philosophy, I just read great philosophy, as poetry. I happen to think, given the nature of the world and knowledge, the best way to talk about the world and knowledge is in poetry. No rules, baby. You can just head straight where you are going. I read, as poetry, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Marcus Aurelius, Hume, Nietzsche, Spinoza.
Alison: Poets take all kinds of interesting day jobs--barrister, barista, banker, pie baker--to support their art. You took on philosophy. How did you make that decision?
Jennifer: Yeah, not sensible. Should we call it an unreasonable devotion to reason? I thought professor was a reasonable job for a poet, and I wanted to know about the world so I went for history–-history of science. As a writer I found people in history who I wanted to spend time with and they were generally not scientists or novelists, but philosophers or poets. I was in a history department for almost fifteen years but now I teach one course a year at the New School (it’s called Philosophy and Poets) and I write. I hope to entertain with my books, and also to share the things I have learned studying history that have most helped me to understand our present world. In some ways my work is all self-help for extremely smart people.
I like your list, barrister, barista, banker, pie baker. I like how barista is so close to a lawyer when you call her a barrister, and how the qualifier “pie” for baker highlights that a banker, only one “n” away, has no pie, for all his charts.
Alison: Your book Doubt makes an exuberant romp from Zeus to Heisenberg, extolling doubt as an intellectual and moral force that frees people from dogma. It's a wonderful antidote to the polarizing conversations that pit believers against nonbelievers. When we spoke in NYC you said that by the time you finished the book, you'd come somewhat closer to the belief camp. How did your thinking about doubt/belief change over the course of the project?
Jennifer: When I started researching Doubt I thought that people who believed in God were making a silly error. It was maddening to me that so many of my intellectual heroes had made this error. So I really tried to figure out what they were saying. What I found was much more reasonable than I had been expecting. For instance, St. Augustine was brilliant. He is a joy to read. How did this delightful and subtle man come to dedicate himself not only to “God” but to the specific fable of Christianity? The answer he gives is that he wants to feel the amazing thrilling connection to other people, and to oneself, and to the universe, past present and future, that human beings sometimes feel. There is something about that feeling that asserts itself as true, and many people think that once you have found truth – that feeling – it doesn’t matter how you get there, just get there. Over the course of his life Augustine essentially shopped for the philosophical or religious devotion that would most reliably get him to that profound place of beauty and belonging. For him, Christianity was the big idea of Greek and Roman philosophy, delivered in terms of the big idea of Judaism, a single, universal loving power. I’m not personally persuaded by this, but it makes fine sense and I respect it. There is no error here, because Augustine says he is choosing a method to get to an experience of Truth (that feeling I describe above).
Then there are the great thinkers like Aristotle, Montaigne, and Spinoza for instance, who say they believe in God, but when you get up close they certainly don’t believe in anything we would today recognize as God. The thing many such geniuses are talking about when they use the word God is a thing that doesn’t move, that can not think, that didn’t make us, and that does not even know we are here. So if I get past modern ideas about what God means, and listen only to their descriptions of the universe, I find I have very little intellectual difference with them.
Alison: You're coming to Tucson to be the Templeton Fellow for our Astrobiology and the Sacred Project. Readers can check out the abstracts of your three talks at www.scienceandreligion.arizona.edu. This project has a goal of "fostering a constructive engagement between science and religion." Any thoughts on that rather tall order?
Jennifer: I have a deep respect for religion. I think of religion as the great repository of human ideas about how to live in beauty and meaning. People need community, meditation, and ritual. They need it on a regular basis. I believe you can get all of that without religion, but religion has a lot of wisdom to lend, if we want it.
I believe that the most supernatural thing in the universe is consciousness. The fact that the meat in your skull is reading this and thinking is the most amazing thing there is. A close second is that together we form societies. I think the content of religion is really just talking about these two amazing things, but in a kind of displaced way. The real magic is consciousness and all its feeling and knowing; society in all its loving and trying. I think religion may do a disservice to itself by this displacement, by putting the sacred outside us.