A Podcast For You

An episode inspired by Tadeusz Dąbrowski's poem "Sentence", Nick Flynn's "Tattoo" and Jack Gilbert's "The Answer": SENTENCE It's as if you'd woken in a locked cell and found in your pocket a slip of paper, and on it a single sentence in a language you don't know. And you'd be sure this sentence was the key to your life. Also to this cell. And you'd spend years trying to decipher the sentence, until finally you'd understand it. But after a while you'd realize you got it wrong, and the sentence meant something else entirely. And so you'd have two sentences. Then three, and four, and ten, until you'd created a new language. And in that language you'd write the novel of your life. And once you'd reached old age you'd notice the door of the cell was open. You'd go out into the world. You'd walk the length and breadth of it, until in the shade of a massive tree you'd yearn for that one single sentence in a language you don't know. TATTOO You do know, right, that between the no- longer & the still- to-come you are being continually tattooed, inked with the skulls of everyone you’ve ever loved—the you & the you & the you & the you—you don’t sit in a chair, thumb through a binder, pick a design, it simply happens each time you bring your fingers to your face to inhale him back into you . . . tiny skulls, some of us are covered. You, love, could simply tattoo an open door, light pouring in from somewhere outside, you could make your body a door so it appears you (let her fill you) are made of light. THE ANSWER Is the clarity, the simplicity, an arriving or an emptying out? If the heart persists in waiting, does it begin to lessen? If we are always good, does God lose track of us? When I wake at night, there is something important there. Like the humming of giant turbines in the high-ceilinged stations in the slums. There is a silence in me, absolute and inconvenient. I am haunted by the day I walked through the Greek village where everyone was asleep and somebody began playing Chopin, slowly, faintly, inside the upper floor of a plain white stone house. TOPICS COVERED: Alienation; Analytical preparation; Ashberry's trees; Authenticity; Birth and self-discovery; Boundaries of essence; Communication dynamics; Confinement vs. liberation; Consciousness; Contemplation of existence; Cosmic symbolism; Cultural backgrounds; Daily Mail controversy; Deciphering life's language; Developmental path; Disorientation and discovery; Emotional reactivity; Enlightenment and insight; Estrangement and alienation; Ethical boundaries in therapy; Experience of reading a poem; Exploration of self; Expression and concealment; Fowles' "The Magus"; Genie metaphor; Gilbert's "The Answer"; Goldilocks metaphor; Human existential trajectory; Identity construction; Illusion of continuity; Individuality vs. collective unconscious; Intercostal nerves and pain; Interpersonal misunderstanding; Interpretation of symbols; Introspection and growth; Kabbalah and symbolism; Language as a cage; Language's role in suffering; Liberation magic; Life-defining tattoos; Linguistic clichés; Locked cell metaphor; Masson's "Final Analysis"; Merwin's trees; Misunderstanding as growth; Mystic union with God; Narrative construction; Neurological aspects of communication; Personal biases; Physical and mental isolation; Poetic inspiration; Potential for exploitation; Psychoanalytic dynamics; Ramanujan's trees; Recycled materials of past experiences; Relational nuances; Revelation of self-awareness; Rites of passage; Schiffer's character and influence; Self-awareness dawn; Semiotics of Hebrew letters; Silence and bliss; Social contexts; Spiritual symbolism; Stafford's "The Interior Castle"; Symbolic language complexity; Symbolic realm's labyrinth; Symbols interpretation; Tattoo as therapeutic act; Therapeutic boundaries; Transformation through language; Unraveling of human story; Vulnerability and humility. [Transcript of episode]