The Jackpod: The fullness
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I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and this is The JackPod, where On Point news analyst Jack Beattie helps us connect history, literature, and politics in a way that brings his unique clarity to the world we live in now. Hello there, Jack. Hello, Meghna. We are at episode 61. It happens to be our final episode of 2024. So what's your headline? Fullness.

Okay, meaning what? Well, let me sidle up to it. You know, like many Americans, I found if I were to come up with a single word, well, I could come up with lots of them. But one word I could come up with to describe my experience of this year, this political year, is it was draining. It was emptying.

You just didn't... I felt after the election I had nothing left. Hope was gone. At the bottom of the cup you could see despair. And there was just a sense of emptiness that the country, you know, for the price of eggs, Donald Trump was returned to office. As grave a mistake as any nation has ever made. Certainly than this nation has ever made. So it was that in that mood of being empty...

I saw a review in the New York Review of Books by the brilliant Adam Kirsch reading In Search of Fullness. And there, it's a review of a massive book, Cosmic Connections, Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment by Charles Taylor, an eminent philosopher.

at McGill, who is now in his 93rd year and has produced this over 600 page work of overwhelming erudition and learning. Anyway, in the review, Kirsch quoted this passage from Charles Taylor. As soon as I read it, I think you'll sense why it grabbed me and why it would, I think, speak to anyone. Here's the passage.

Somewhere, in some activity or condition, lies a fullness, a richness. That is, in that place, life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worthwhile, more admirable, more what it should be. Our highest aspirations and our life energies are somehow lined up, reinforcing each other,

Instead of producing psychic gridlock. Oh, yes.

Yes. I can see why I grabbed you. I felt like the longings, the inchoate, inarticulate longings of my heart and consciousness were put into a paragraph. And if you had put underneath it, by Friedrich Nietzsche or William James or, you know, any great philosopher, I'd say, well, of course, that's how great philosophers sound today.

And that's how at 93 Charles Taylor sounds. And in this book, he talks about the crisis that the Romantic movement, the Romantic poets and thinkers experienced. And it was a crisis of disenchantment. Partly that the universe moved to Newton's laws, not God's will. So there was that. Science...

But there was also the loss of magic, of spirits, which right into the Renaissance were part of the mythology that people used in everyday life. And that was drained from the world too. Intelligent people could no longer believe in spirits, and many of them could no longer believe in a higher power. So the Romantics, without saying, well, let's just go back to the Middle Ages and pretend we're not conscious modern people,

No, they quote, and I'm quoting from Taylor, they long for a unification of self, unity with our emotions, with nature in us, and with nature as a whole. And they began to think that the way to do this, to find this missing fullness,

was through poetry. And here I quote Kirsch, "Even if we disagree about the way of experiencing fullness," some people will take it as mysticism, as the Holy Spirit, "the source of the power which can bring us to this fullness."

whether this is within or without and in what sense, it is a fact, a scientific fact even, that human existence has a spiritual dimension. That's Charles Taylor. It is simply a fact that we have that dimension to us. And the Romantic poets were the first to try to fill that emptiness, that disenchantment,

They wanted to reconnect with nature and in what he calls epiphanic moments to show us, to connect us with the cosmos, with nature. He writes, in the transparent medium of poetry,

The realities of earth and sky show up in all their glory. And in response, we, the reader, experience a heightening, a fullness of existence. This is a huge book, so I'm sure it has many examples. Do you have some favorites?

I do, and to that task we now turn. We're going to have some readings from William Wordsworth, Goethe, Rainer Maria Rilke, and then on the other side, there is no transcendence. There is no connection. We're going to have two readings, one from Matthew Arnold and one from Wallace Stevens. So, fullness, transcendence.

The party of fullness is about to speak, and then a little bit later on, the party of emptiness. The rebuttal, yes. Yes, yes. So here is Wordsworth, and I'll set this up. I'll set the key passage up with what comes before it. This is in his poem Tintern Abbey. And of course, he was instinct with this romantic feeling of...

Let's reconnect with nature. And without resorting to pantheism on the one hand or deism on the other, let's see if we can find an opening to connect us with nature and with its power and secrets. Anyway, here is how he sets it up. It's a passage about loss. And then we're going to have the gain. And that is powerful.

the terrain the Romantics traveled, there was loss. We lost the naive connection to things, but then there's gain. Here's the loss. It starts from a description of Wordsworth's earlier communion with nature. "The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion. The tall rock, the mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, their colors and their forms were then to me an appetite

a feeling and a love that had no need of a remoter charm by thought supplied nor any interest unborrowed from the eye. That time is past and all its aching joys are now no more and all its dizzy raptures. Not for this faint eye, nor mourn nor murmur,

Other gifts have followed. For such loss, I would believe abundant recompense. For I have learned to look on nature not as in the hour of thoughtless youth,

but hearing oftentimes the still sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue. So that's the feeling of having lost, and now the gain. And I have felt it.

a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air and the blue sky and in the mind of man, a motion and a spirit different

that impels all thinking things, all objects of thought, and rolls through all things. This is a vision of connection with nature, with loss of the naive connection and a glimpse of something. He writes, epiphanies in this sense don't just add to our knowledge, they inspire us.

Catching a glimpse of these connections powerfully moves us. The current between us and nature flows once more. We are in the domain of resonance. And then he says, epiphanic languages, which is what he's talking about there, revealing moments, give us a sense that we are called. We receive a call. There is someone or something out there. Mm-hmm.

That would be the experience, the axial experience we're talking about. The poet's trying to reconnect, even re-enchant the scientific world. Re-enchant the scientific world. Okay. So who would you like to move to next? I mean, Wordsworth is a pretty heavy hitter to start with, Jack. He sure is. And here's a shorter, but equally heavy hitter, Goethe.

His connection with the Romantics was complicated, but he gets at this merging of nature and the sense of fullness that that gives. He gets at it in this short poem. Over every mountaintop lies peace. In every treetop you scarcely feel a breath of wind. The little birds are hushed in the wood. Wait, soon you too will be at peace.

And here is the gloss that Charles Taylor puts on that. He said, if we think of what might be the original experience which inspired this Goethe poem, it would be something like this. The deep, uncanny hush in the forest is suddenly the model for a deep repose of the spirit that I have been longing for without recognizing it.

For the moment, my experience of the hush in the forest is at the same time an experience of this spiritual repose. I am experiencing a condition of the forest as a state of my spiritual being.

I think that is what many people do not unconsciously, but very consciously are yearning for. Right, Jack? It is that healing sense of fullness. And it is something that we all have. We know we have. Look at your life and you'll see moments of it. And when they happen...

as he said in that beginning paragraph, our highest aspirations and our life energies, that is our animal energies, they're lined up, everything is working, the high and the low together. And I guess I'm reading these poems and I'm talking about fullness because I wish it for every listener. I wish that gift for all of us.

Well, Jack, that actually brings us to one of my favorite poets. And I'm so delighted that you put him here in this list, Rilke. Yes, Raina Maria Rilke, 20th century poet. In fact, I think Charles Taylor said, from relatively early on, Rilke sees his task as a poet and indeed the task of human beings. One could say the purpose of our lives.

as discerning the meaning of things, the world, the cosmos. In other terms, closing a gap of understanding, of communication between us and the surrounding world. And he puts into prose, Rilke does, the gap.

For let us admit it, landscape is something foreign to us, and we are afraid when alone among trees which are flowering and streams which rush by. Even when alone with a dead human do we not feel so exposed as we do when we are alone among trees, because, mysterious as death is,

Still more mysterious is life that is not ours, life which does not participate in ours and, without noticing us, celebrates its own feasts while we look on with a certain embarrassment like guests arriving by accident who speak another language.

So the poet wants to overcome this separation, to break through this barrier and to merge, to join. And in one early poem, he's the voice of a Russian Orthodox monk.

non-obscene Rasputin who's trying to connect to God and in his searching he's the voice of that monk. And here's the monk's voice closing a gap. "Put my eyes out, I can see you, and my ears shut, I can hear you. And without feet I can walk toward you, and without a mouth I can still beseech you.

Break my arms off with my heart, I will grasp you as with a hand. Tear my heart out and my brain will beat. And if you put a torch to my brain, I will bear you through all my blood. There's the monk addressing God. And then he ends, O Lord, give us each our own death.

Grant us the dying that comes forth from that life in which we knew love grappled with meaning felt need. That one, wow. Jack, I'm not even sure what to say. Yeah, it's overwhelming. And then there's another poem that brings this unfulfilled longing. Again, he wants to break through, to join us. This unfulfilled longing is,

He expresses, he's having a hard time doing that, but another poem expresses his conception of what it would be like to fulfill that longing for fullness. And it ends this way, just a short poem. Through all beings ranges a single space, world inner space. The birds fly silently through us.

Oh, as I want to grow, I look outside me and in me the tree grows. I care and in me stands the house. I protect myself and in me is the protection beloved that I became. On me rests the image of a beautiful creation and weeps itself out.

Inner and outer merge in this single space the poet Rilke, yeah Rilke so that's the party of fullness the people that tell us that about Moments when we connect when our desire for fullness Lines up and we feel and in an epiphanic moment we connect with the cosmos with nature and we feel it in us and us as

in it. Well, there are other poets who say, "That's not on. We don't do that anymore. There's no transcendence." And here is, I think, one of the best of those poems, Matthew Arnold. And of course, Arnold's writing now in the Victorian era after Darwin, when religion and belief in the biblical story is certainly blown apart by science. Dover Beach,

The sea is calm tonight, the tide is full, the moon lies fair upon the straits. On the French coast the light gleams and is gone. The cliffs of England stand glimmering and vast out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night air.

Only from the long line of spray where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, listen, you hear the grating roar of pebbles.

which the waves draw back and fling at their return, up the high strand, begin and cease, and then again begin with tremulous cadence slow, and bring the eternal note of sadness in. The Sea of Faith

was once too at the fall and round earth's shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear its melancholy long withdrawing roar retreating to the breath of the night wind down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true to one another, for the world which seems to lie before us, like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy nor love nor light nor certitude nor peace nor help for pain, and we are here as on a darkling plain,

swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight where ignorant armies clash by night. That's a tough one and that's the other side of it. Poets that say we've got to learn to live without connection. We've got to learn to live without moments of transcendence and to pride ourselves, if you will, on our stoicism in the face of this. No joy is on order.

And there's a sort of debunking of this whole tradition of reading me into nature, reading spirit into nature and connect in a short poem by Wallace Stevens, who was very much of the Arnold persuasion of transcendence ain't on for such as we. And here is Stevens himself reading The Snowman. The Snowman.

One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow, and have been cold a long time to behold the junipers shagged with ice, the spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves.

which is the sound of the land full of the same wind that is blowing in the same bare place for the listener who listens in the snow and nothing himself beholds, nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Oh, Mr. Stevens, come on. Beautifully written, but...

A little dire for my taste. A little dire. And, you know, he worked for the Hartford Insurance Company. He was an executive there. And there's an anecdote about him. They had an immense desk and there was nothing on the desk. Oh, boy.

So, yeah, that's the debunking tradition. And on the other side, there's the sense of, and this is brilliantly put by Adam Kirsch in his New York Review of Books review of Charles Taylor. And it's a review of just immense respect. How could one not respect?

And by the way, this book has 80-page chapter on Baudelaire, 75-page chapter on Marlemé. Rilke is in German and English. The French are in French and English. All of this in this fantastic work from book production, really, from Harvard University Press. But there's another side to this. It's the Gertrude Stein comment about, was it Oakland, California? There's no there there. Yeah.

Sorry, Oakland. Maybe there's no there there in nature for us. And this is that thought expressed by Adam Kirshen. Taylor's work is devoted to defending the value of unscientific things like value and creativity and transcendence. But it is possible to agree that

that these things really exist as part of our experience without agreeing, that they give us any information about objective reality, the cosmos that exists outside our minds. Cosmic connection can be a metaphysical error without ceasing to be an anthropological truth.

What that reminds me of is a different take on whether objective reality and metaphysical or spiritual truth can live side by side. You know of my love of Marilynne Robinson, right? And in her book Gilead, she writes about that love is actually an unfathomable thing.

in her words, because she says it's the eternal breaking in on the temporal. Just thrusts its way in, right? So perhaps they are separate, but the reason why the metaphysical or the spiritual cannot necessarily explain the objective to us is because we've got it backwards, right?

This is what she's saying. The eternal breaks in on the temporal and makes sense of it that way. So that's my defense of the fullness camp, Jack. Amen. I'm with the fullness people. Even if it's just purely subjective, my God, what a completing experience it is when it happens. Yeah, and why can't it just be that? That's what I'm wondering. Maybe it's a particularly 20th century or late 20th century thing to insist that

that that in and of itself is not a full enough experience, right? There must be some connection or explanation or demystifying to go along with it, which, you know, the science part of my brain will do that later. But experiencing the spiritual fullness right now, it's an intrinsic part. This is your main point, Jack, right? It's the intrinsic part of what it means to be alive, to be a living human being, right?

That's right. And to be deprived of it is a life without the possibility of fullness. Well, folks, our question to you for this podcast is a simple and obvious one. What gives you that profound sense of soulful, spiritual fullness? That's what we want to know. So you know the routine?

Go pick up your phones, go to the VoxPop app, the OnPoint VoxPop app, and let us know. If you don't already have it, you can just look for OnPoint VoxPop wherever you get your apps. I'm really looking forward to what folks have to say about their sources of fullness.

Well, Jack, before I let you go today, we're going to take a quick break because we definitely need to catch up with what folks said from their feedback from last week's podcast. So stick with me for just a minute and we'll do that when we come back. Support for the On Point podcast comes from Indeed.

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Well, we're back, Jack, and we've got to make a pretty sudden pivot to the discussion that we were having last week, which was about President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Labor Secretary Lori Chavez de Riemer. You talked about how was her appointment a possible indication that President-elect Trump would work to improve conditions for American citizens?

labor. And I asked folks what they thought about the kind of impact that a second Trump administration will have on American workers. And we got really thoughtful responses, as we always do. But this time, we're going to definitely start with our friend Howard Turner, the man with the view from Elkhart, Indiana, because he sent us some

Pretty profound messages. He describes himself as the typical Trump voter, a poor working class white male without a college degree. But he told us he could never support President-elect Trump. Just because he was able to identify some of our problems, like unfair trade deals, allowing jobs to leave the country, not getting paid more than the cost of living, not having affordable housing. Anyone looking objectively at America could make those same conclusions.

So, Jack, we're about to do something a little bit different because usually we just do little snippets of what people said. But Howard's thoughts and what he was sharing with us this time were great.

We're so moving to us that we're going to play a bunch more because he told us his story of how government policies have had an impact on his life. Yes, Trump's tax cuts did increase my paycheck a few dollars each week. That's just kind of absorbed into the weekly income expenditure.

enables me to eat spaghetti and hot dogs a little bit less, maybe afford those cheaper Nike shoes instead of the generic Payless brand. When the tax cut increased our end of the year refund that bought the Christmas presents, we couldn't afford a Christmas time, paid the bills that we'd gotten behind on during the year because we didn't make enough money and something broke.

So cutting my taxes never really helped me long-term because I've always been working poor because I never made more than it costs to live. What did change my circumstances was both me and my wife were considered essential workers during COVID. So when we got able to keep earning paychecks, enabling us to use the direct payments that we got from both Trump and Biden to pay off some low hanging debt, that did reduce our cost of living.

Then my employer, instead of offering us health insurance, gives us a stipend to buy health insurance. So with the subsidy from the ACA, there is some of the stipend money left over. Again, that lowers my cost of living because now I have health insurance that isn't costing me anything out of my paycheck.

And the other big change was going from getting paid up to $15 an hour to over 20 actually raised my income above my cost of living. And the short period of time between getting that big raise and my wife getting injured allowed us to be middle class for a little bit. But now with her being injured, not working,

we are able to make it just on my paycheck alone and without getting government assistance. That never happened before. So the key is lowering my cost of living and increasing my wages, not cutting taxes. It doesn't work. I just know the Republican Party is for cutting taxes and business regulations, neither of which helps a working person any at all.

So I don't expect the Trump administration to do anything more than to continue to funnel money from us working people up to the billionaire owner class. It's just how fast it's going to go there. Howard, you're the best. You know, Jack, the unimpeachable authority of an American stating the simple facts of his life is

just shows clearly there is a direct connection between policy decisions, left, right, good, bad, and, you know, an individual's life in this country. And here we have a working class man saying, you know, I see the improvements that have been made. I also see what policies didn't work. So I'm just, you know, what do you have to add to what Howard said?

Oh, well, it's hard to do anything but celebrate and acknowledge the authenticity of that. I think of Whitman's lyric, you know, "I am the man, I suffered, I was there." Sort of a talisman of authenticity. Howard was there, is there, and his statement, "Never made more than it costs to live."

That is true of so many Americans. And, you know, I think of my parents. It would have been impossible, unthinkable for them to have been able to live the last, oh, my father's case, mother's case, 25 years of their lives without Medicare. Simply impossible.

They could live in dignity in a house that cost $7,000 and had one bedroom. They could live in dignity and pride and feeling that they were full citizens of the country and didn't, as their parents had to do,

No penury, medical penury in old age. What an achievement. Also, you know, I mean, we see the ACA in here, Obamacare making a difference. And the increase, the bump in wages and all that, you know, the hardness of the cash and the hardness of getting it. Boy, it's right there. Yeah.

Well, we have a lot of feedback that we got on this question. Obviously, we're not going to get to everyone, but here's another one. This is from another regular of ours. This is John Fitzgerald. He's in Camden, Maine. And he says that he looks to Trump's character in order to determine the likelihood of whether the president-elect is going to work on behalf of America's working class. Behold the fisherman. He rises early and goes forth.

full of hope. He returns late and the truth is not in him. That kind of characterizes Donald Trump. The truth is not in him. And this is why John says it relates to American workers. From where I sit, he's already starting to equivocate on his campaign quote unquote promises. Can the American worker trust him? I doubt it. And I think, unfortunately,

They'll pay the brunt of the price for having elected him. Jack? If he's wise, you know, he would become the populist president that he pretended to be as a candidate. But he wasn't that as president in his first term.

I mentioned that his tax cut, which he's going to renew in 2017, each Koch brother got a half a billion dollars more per year out of that tax cut. That's what the tax cut was all about. And before it was even voted, Lindsey Graham said, the Republican senator, "We have to vote on this. Our donors are expecting the money."

And, you know, look who he surrounded himself with, this jackanapes, a musk, the richest man in the world, who's now all for shutting down the government. Now, whether that even matters to some of his voters remains to be seen. Were they in it for remedy, we asked last week, or are they in it, did they vote for him because they identified with his appetite for revenge?

Well, we've got one more here. This is from Jeffrey Addison in Buffalo, New York. And he looks differently upon the presence of people like Chavez de Reimer in a future Trump cabinet. Because Jeffrey says that it's in the authoritarian playbook to form unusual or unexpected coalitions. And he adds that Trump is, quote, talking out of both sides of his mouth, like he and his supporters have done before.

When talking about Trump's own wealth...

So, I think their view on labor is they'll actually throw labor a bone so they can point to it later on, but yet at the same time, with the other hand, they're going to be giving all sorts of favors to their rich billionaire friends and these Fortune 500 companies. Jack?

I mean, I think that outlines exactly the bone, throw the bone. And of course, with Trump, it'll be not a bone, it'll be a steak. He'll say, oh, I did all this great stuff for you. Because of course, once you've departed from reality, there's no stop. You can just keep lying. And the evidence is, and this is what makes, made 2024 so draining. So, you know, led to such an abridgment of hope and a,

Russian of despair is that people believe these lies. They believe it.

Well, folks, this is the last episode of the Jack Pod for 2024. The pod's going to be taking a couple of weeks off for the holidays. Well-deserved, Jack, I'd say, for you. The next podcast will drop on January 10th of 2025. So with that in mind, Jack, I just want to end this episode by wishing you all the fullness of this season. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

Right? That is what this season is for. It's for reflection, renewal, contemplation, and hopefully restoration. And that is what I wish for you, Jack, because we sure as heck are going to need you in 2025, okay? And we need you all the time. Thank you so much for that. I reciprocate the wish in spades.

I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. Happy holidays and happy new year to all of you who are part of the jackpot family. This is the jackpot from On Point.