Comforting Conversations, pt.2

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you from our respective shelters in place via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy and Josh directs the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Josh Landy
Today, it’s the second of two episodes featuring comforting conversations with some of our favorite Stanford colleagues, asking them how the arts and humanities can provide comfort, connection, and common purpose in a world of social distancing.

Ray Briggs
Our first installment focused on stories and storytelling. Today we’ll talk about another novel, but also about music, theater, even meditation. Of course, this is not to say that comfort is the only thing the humanities can do.

Josh Landy
Right, moral philosophy tells us how to treat our neighbors and fellow citizens.

Ray Briggs
And political philosophy tells us we should be holding our elected officials responsible and demanding more from them.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and shout-out to discourse analysis for explaining why we should not use the language of war when we’re talking about a pandemic.

Ray Briggs
But even when we’re fighting the good fight—eExcuse me—even when we’re doing the right thing, we might need something else to keep us going.

Josh Landy
How about a little music, for example?

That’s Stanford professor of music and computer science, Ge Wang, playing his smartphone with an app he designe, called Ocarina.

Ray Briggs
Ge works at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (or CARMA for short), where he builds musical instruments, games and social experiences. We asked me to tell us more about Ocarina.

Ge Wang
Ocarina is this app for a smartphone I designed back in 2008. You hold it like a sandwich, and you play it by blowing literally blowing into the microphone at the bottom of your phone, for example. In here, I’m blown to the bottom of my iPhone while I’m using the onscreen buttons to control pitch in different combinations. And you can also physically tilt the device to control the amount of vibrato for example.

So there that’s me actually holding the phone flat, and then gradually tilting it into a vertical position. And that changes the amount of vibrato that’s applied to the sound, which is actually generated live in the app.

Josh Landy
You know, one of the things I love about this, I mean, not just how wonderful is to have this musical instrument, the sophisticated musical instrument at your fingertips, but also the fact that it can connect you to people around the world. Can you tell us a little bit about that, that aspect of its functionality?

Ge Wang
Yes. So in the same app, you can actually listen to other people blow into their phones from around the world. And there’s this cloak visualization. Here’s anonymous coming from the United States west coast. I’m not sure what they’re playing. Hopefully some free jazz on the Ocarina.

Josh Landy
Sci-fi music.

Ge Wang
This is from Hawaii. Indonesia, peace and love. And so this is a form of an anonymous social network, I suppose based on music, and what you see is where they’re coming from. You see kind of these beams of light emanate from the globe visualization that’s visualizing the music. And and that’s kind of it now you can choose to like something here but that’s a one way street. I believe it was John Stuart Mill that that once wrote, the eloquence is heard that poetry is overheard. So in a way this is kind of a social musical world for overhearing kind of almost like a music voyeurism if you will.

Ray Briggs
So I love how kind of every day this is that like anybody could, as long as they had a smartphone make this music. Do you see yourself as like making music sort of more accessible just to like, is there a difference between being musical a musical person and being like a regular person or a regular people musical people?

Ge Wang
I think this was made really awkward. It was made to be a toy and a playful thing, right? And I think the playfulness definitely lowers the bar of entry into noodling with this and it’s disarming, it’s common. It’s a joke, right? It’s a gag, here’s that it actually works. There’s a little synthesis engine in software that’s running in this app that’s generating the sound in response to how much you’re blowing into the microphone. And also, of course, how you’re expressing the pitches, how long you’re holding the notes, and how much by Bronto. You, you apply. So it is something that well, in the sense is playful is like a toy. But I think sneaking in there is the idea that is also a kind of instrument, and I think of it as an instrument in the sense that this is something you could learn to get better at over time, something that you can learn to make your own.

Josh Landy
Right, and I mean, you say it’s a toy that just so happens to work. And I, to me, it works not just as a musical instrument, but also as something that brings us together, which is why it feels so relevant today that it’s, you know, it’s it’s something I can play in my living room, but it’s not, I’m not just one person on my own, I can listen to that beautiful song coming to me from Indonesia, or the other two and coming to me from Hawaii, is that the way I mean is that something that was in your mind when you were developing it that, that it wouldn’t just be a matter, I mean, it would, of course, be a vehicle for people to perfect their musical skills, and maybe develop new songs and so on. But also, it would be a, a tool for the overcoming of isolation.

Ge Wang
It’s interesting, because the, the globe was designed both to feel like you’re a small sense of connection. But it’s also like, in a way, it is there to acknowledge that a kind of loneliness at the same time, because he’s in the club, you see the need to see Earth, this visualization in this black background. And then there’s this lone, like stream of light particles that come out from the location on the globe, where physically, a person recently played a blow and blew into their phone. And I think it’s both a feeling of connection and acknowledgement and loneliness. And but I think, to feel connected, we also have to maybe acknowledge that we are not always connected, in that even when we are connected, we might still feel, you know, lonely. You know, I mean, to be honest, like this whole app is kind of what you might call a an unnecessary invention, right? I mean, literally, nobody asked for this. I mean, need to blow into our phones and make music. And as far as no real problems that that exist. But it’s also kind of freeing in that way.

Ray Briggs
So I want to ask about separation and loneliness. So when I think about, like, some of my experiences with music, they involve like singing in a choir, which you kind of can’t do right now safely. So how do you see like musicians coping with this? Like, what do you do about the kind of connection aspect of music when you can’t be physically with people?

Ge Wang
Well, that is a, it’s a good question. I mean, I think there are some ways we can cope in there’s some things where we can only try to cope, right. I mean, I think having bodies physically in the room is not something you can quite replace. There’s something visceral about, you know, it’s visceral, it’s also communicative, like we pick up much more than, and then just the direct, like, what is said, or what is played, but there’s, like, you know, perhaps 100 fold information in the way we subtle gestures we make the shared temperature of the room, that the lighting, every small thing, I think, aggregates into how we actually sense others in a physical place that even if we can kind of see, like, you know, someone’s image on over, like a, like zoom or something, it’s, it’s not quite the same. So honestly, I think musicians and really performance art, and just artists in general, many of them are having a difficult time. It’s truly a difficult time. Because we understand how important this this embodied sense of presence actually can be. And we work with that. So it’s, it does present some some issues.

Ray Briggs
I feel very lucky to be a poet right now, because it seems like poetry is far less time dependent. And you can you can sort of send letters and make them into a collaboration and I I sort of wish there were more equivalents for musicians.

Ge Wang
Right? I think it really heavily depends on I think your, your medium or your mediums. And if you’re mediums, one that’s amenable to if you’re actually in your room painting, for example, that’s something you could do, largely the same, you know, painting wise then if you were an actor, right, if you had to go on the stage in front of an audience with people, I think those are seeing very different color consequences under the current circumstances, but I think I feel like musicians and artists in a way are coping like, like everyone else. And maybe the difference, I don’t know is the difference. But I think artists generally do try to always, pandemic or not try to, you know, feel the pulse of the world. I think there’s a, there’s a saying in Chinese is that, you know, when the world laughs, you laugh with it, when the world cries, you cry with the world. And I think that’s what artists tend to do is they, they, they laugh, and they cry with the world, and then you, you got to, you got to feel the pulse out there. And that’s kind of what that’s the stuff that your music or your painting or your novel, or your stories are. That’s what they’re made of.

Ray Briggs
Right. So I’m curious if you think they’re like, what new art forms also might emerge from this small assist, and things I’ve seen actual musician sort of coordinating using click tracks instead of in person. And also, like, it’s, it’s fun for me, because like, I can still collaborate with musicians, by writing lyrics and having them read a song to go with the lyrics, for instance. So I’m wondering, like, you find potential and like everything, like a salad bowl, you find music in that. So like, what are some new musical objects that we might discover?

Ge Wang
That’s a great question, I think that really interesting things that will perhaps emerge from from the situation or things that really make, like fundamental use of the mediums of the time, right. And I don’t know if we quite found necessarily those things yet. But the way that people are now, I don’t know, broadcasting their DJ shows, over zoom, or over or streaming, I think people have kind of up their game, but also, there’s a kind of everyday pneus in the way that we connect. Now we have, I don’t know, musicians performing from their like, bedrooms, because that’s the only place they can do this and broadcasting that. So in a way, it’s, I don’t know, there’s any, like, I’m sure they’re kind of forms new forms of art that might emerge from this. I’m also really interested in just kind of how every day how like, the general lowering of, of expectations in a good way of how we make art and, and who gets to make art and right in, and I feel like that might be kind of a silver lining to something that is tragic and horrible. And that is affecting everyone.

Ray Briggs
That’s a really lovely thought, Ge. But I want to say thank you so much for joining us on Philosophy Talk.

Ge Wang
Thank you so much, Josh and Ray for having me.

John Lee Hooker
Blues is a healer, all over the world.

Josh Landy
Ge Wang, Professor of Music and computer science at Stanford on music as a healer. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about how the arts and humanities can keep us creative and connected in troubling times.

Ray Briggs
Coming up, we’ll hear from scholars in philosophy, theater and literature about meditation and mental action, the politics of plague in 17th century Italy, and a play that brings people together

Josh Landy
More comforting conversations with our colleagues, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. And we’re finding comfort and healing in conversations with Stanford colleagues in the arts and humanities. I’m Ray Briggs, here with my colleague, Josh Landy.

Josh Landy
We’re joined now by Laura Wittman, Professor of French and Italian at Stanford, and author of “The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier: Modern Mourning and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body.” Laura, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Laura Wittman
Thank you. It’s very fun to be here.

Ray Briggs
So Laura, you wanted to talk to us about Alessandra Manzoni’s novel “The Betrothed.” Can you start by telling us a bit about why you chose this book in particular?

Laura Wittman
Well, I picked it because one of the central events in it is a plague that devastated the city of Milan, in Lombardy, in the 17th century. So the very same area where we had Coronavirus recently. And this event was for Manzoni as when he wrote the novel, it was a 200 year old event. And so he was thinking about what does the plague mean? 200 years later. So I thought that would be interesting for us to think about.

Josh Landy
What do you think’s the relevance to Manzoni writing in the 19th century of this plague from the 17th century?

Laura Wittman
He saw himself as writing the first historical novel for Italy as a nation which didn’t exist yet when he was writing in the 1820s 1830s. So he was aspiring to an Italian nation and he thought that a historical novel would be important to having a unified Italian culture and Looking back 200 years, I think allowed two things. It allowed him to say something about an Italian essence of Italian pneus. That was there throughout history and it also allowed him to be critical of his contemporaries. Sort of sideways. Well, you know, with the with the alibi owner, no, I’m just talking about 200 years ago, but really, the way he describes the mishandling of the plague was also a critique of current authorities and a desire to overthrow them and turn Italy into a more modern, more democratic, we would call it nation.

Josh Landy
So no relevance to today whatsoever.

Laura Wittman
Oh, none at all, yeah.

Ray Briggs
So I’m curious about choosing a plague as sort of your your unifying image just because, like, as you mentioned, a plague seems like very divisive and very easy for the authorities to mismanage.

Laura Wittman
So the plot of this quite long historical novel concerns these two young peasants, who are in love and they are betrayals, to the betrayals of the title, and they really want to get married. And they can’t because of local nobleman falls in love with leukemia that a female protagonist and prevents her marriage to Rainbow by intimidating the local priest. And so Renzo and Lucci a runaway and they get separated, they have all these adventures, including, they both encounter the plague and ultimately are reunited in the midst of the plague in Milan. So to some extent, the plague personifies these forces that are much greater than the individual that the individual somehow has to navigate. And a lot of the story is just about how strong and how ethical these two poor plebeian characters are, in contrast with many, not all, but many of the representatives of authority throughout the novel, you know, they’re very romantic era representatives of Italy, these kind of modest peasants, who ultimately embody a lot more fortitude than many of the noble people around them. And the plague is something that they manage to navigate relatively well.

Josh Landy
That novel does have a romantic feeling to it not, not on coincidentally, given when it’s written, this feeling of us against society by either the heroic individual against society, or in this case, a heroic, virtuous couple up against society, you know, the, the legal systems are corrupt, and the power structures are corrupt, and that the church, at least in some of its areas is corrupt. But the horrid couple holds out, Does it strike you that this novel proceeds from a vision of the world in which there’s just no point in trying to reform human institutions? Because they’re just infinitely corruptible? And we should just kind of do what we can as individuals and couples? Or do you think there’s a hope around the corner, and maybe we can make things better at the level of institutions?

Laura Wittman
You’re getting to the core of something Manzoni himself was not entirely sure of, I think he wanted to have faith in institutional change, yet found himself writing a novel about these two characters who, you know, at the at the very end, the last paragraph actually concludes that crises or misfortunes can happen from causes independent of ourselves, the most innocent suffer, you know, etc, etc. Trust in God softens them and renders them useful in preparing us for a better life. So that’s the conclusion is very individualistic. It’s very much about the individual moral fortitude in the face of suffering. I do think that as a whole, though, the novel does critique institutions that don’t understand human behavior well, so I think that’s where you can look at more of the details of the plague chapters and really see that Manzoni also wanted to be a kind of analyst of how crowds work and how power works. And I think a critic, to the degree that critique can help create better institutions, I would say that he despaired of the historical novel as a genre being the way to change institutions. This was the last historical novel he wrote, as well as the first. And he wrote specifically that that he felt that it didn’t go into political reform and and his changing the course of history from an institutional perspective.

Ray Briggs
So Laura, I’m really struck by that last passage you read from from the end of the novel, just how how it paints suffering is this great redemptive thing in the lives of these characters that enables them to be noble? And I’m wondering, does the book have like a coherent take on the value of suffering that comes from I’m sort of natural disasters, is it sort of a religiously significant thing that’s given to you by God so that you can be noble? Is it just some random awfulness? What is the answer—what’s Manzoni’s answere to that question?

Laura Wittman
I think one important sort of moment that addresses this question of, you know, is there are a hand of God here that is justifying all this that makes this suffering meaningful is the moment of course, it’s a very climactic moment when Renzulli Lucci after hundreds and hundreds of pages of being separated are finally reunited. And he finds her in the sick hospital that Lazaretto of Milan that was set up in the midst of the plague to accommodate all the 1000s and 1000s of people who are sick. And he finds her. And instead of, you know, being completely overjoyed to see him, she’s tearful and unhappy. And he finds out that during her adventures, he she promised the Virgin Mary that if rains all survived, she would give him up, she would not marry him, she would stay a virgin. So she made this vow. And this is terrible, because no, he’s fine, but they can get married. And the modest humble priest who has been helping them also miraculously appears to be in the same spot. And he talks to Lucci and basically convinces her that her vow to the Virgin was a good, you know, a fair thing to do in a terrible moment, but doesn’t really count because she had already made a prior vow to get married. And therefore, the virgin can now absolve her of this vow that she made under duress, and it’s very clear that Manzoni and he intends us to get the irony, right, innocent Lucida believes this, this story, but we the readers understand full well that this is not the hand of God, this is the hand of Frank Cristoforo, who is making the situation come out, right? Because he can because he’s a figure of authority, and he believes he’s doing the right thing. So Manzoni his message. Overall, it for the book as a whole, I think is that we don’t know what the hand of God is doing. It’s completely unfathomable and mysterious, and we have to do our best and people who are morally good like for Christopher, who really helps people out throughout the novel, those other people we should listen to, and they have to make decisions in the midst of terrible events today, they have to improvise, they have to improvise the best they can in the midst of very difficult and incomprehensible events.

Josh Landy
Right I mean, if God is all powerful, all good. How does he let plagues happen on his watch, maybe not just let them happen? Maybe he makes them happen. I mean, is it just because we’re terrible people, but when have we not been terrible people at the end of the day, so it seems interesting to me that this novel meant Sony’s Botros is grappling with that and Camus the plague grapples with that. And Boccaccio is the camera grapples. That seems, it seems like every novel about the plague or some plague or other has to feel like it has to get to grips with that central theological question. Is there a God who is all good and all powerful? How do you think this novel helps us think about that question?

Laura Wittman
Well, I think the question is, you know, why? How does the novel depict this terrible evil? I mean, the first thing to say there is that it’s Manzoni spends quite a bit of time helping us or making us see just how terrible it is, how much suffering there is, how so many of the best people are the ones to die and children die. And we see this through the eyes of Renzo especially. So we’re we’re really meant to be emotionally affected. And to feel very poignantly this question, how can if there is a God, how can he let such things happen? Right, I think that’s definitely the experience you’re meant to have. And I think that’s why it’s particularly remarkable that we we don’t really get a final answer. There is a sense that if there is a God, His proceedings are too unfathomable for us to get what they are. And here it matters, that Manzoni was essentially a Jansenist he really had this view that that God’s judgment and his running of things is so far beyond humans as to be to seem arbitrary from our very limited perspective. And we have to operate as it were, in the dark really are and our job. It’s a very hard job, but it’s a very Jansenist job. We have to try to make good decisions and ethical decisions in this extreme darkness. And then I think that’s kind of where he leaves us. And and I think that’s why he picks plague ultimately. I mean, I want to say it’s a very good question, why have something so incomprehensible as part of your supposedly unifying National Novel? Right? And I think that here, what unifies is the experience of being in the dark, which is, you know, it’s a pretty bleak form of unity.

Ray Briggs
So I, I’m not particularly worried about justifying the existence of a Christian God, but I am worried about plague. What morals can I take?

Laura Wittman
Well, I think the thing that has struck me, right, you know, this is a novel that Italian, Italians usually learn the beginning of this novel by heart, when they’re in high school, this this is how well it succeeded in being the Italian national novel. So everyone is so familiar with this novel, that it’s really hard to say anything interesting about it. But reading it in the current situation, the thing that really struck me is that it doesn’t just kind of push against an idea, a providential view of history where God you know, everything happens for a reason, it also pushes back against a historicist view, where we take actions, in view of certain, a certain direction that we think history should be taking. And it invites us to consider the present moment as the moment in which ethical action can take place, like the only moment that we have for ethical action. And that has really struck me as still true today, perhaps because things feel very uncertain, just in the immediate right now. Of our situation, it’s it’s difficult to say, you know, what, the bigger you know, what, what goal for five years from now should I be striving towards? I mean, I can think of some but I think it’s, it’s very difficult. So he makes us think about how you can you still have room for ethical action, even a smaller scale?

Josh Landy
Well, it’s a great note for us to stop on. Laura, thanks so much for joining us today.

Laura Wittman
Thank you very much. It was my pleasure.

Ray Briggs
Laura Whitman on Alessandra Manzoni’s “The Betrothed”—a great 19th century novel set during the plague in Milan.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re talking with Stanford colleagues from around the university about finding comfort and wisdom in the arts and humanities.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Harry Elam. Hes Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford, Professor in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, and the author of many things, including “The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson.” Harry, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Harry Elam
Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.

Josh Landy
So are you’ve got something to recommend our listeners to read while they’re sitting at home staying safe.

Harry Elam
I do have something from books to read and it’s a play a play by the late great August Wilson, American playwright who did a series of plays 10 plays on the African American experience. This is his play of 1911. And it is “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”

Josh Landy
I already love that play. But when you Harry—I’m sorry to make you blush—but when you produced this play on the Stanford campus, it just blew me away. So I want to thank you for that. And tell us a little bit about the play, about August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”

Harry Elam
I’m happy to and that production featured at actor Sterling K. Brown, who’s now won a couple of Emmys for this show. This is a seaplane the lead, Harold Loomis, and the play is about Harold limits his journey. And what happens to him as he looks for his wife, he was held in servitude back in 1911, by Joe Turner, the brother of the governor of the state of Tennessee, Pete Turner, and he held black men in servitude for a matter of years, and then release them. And Harold, once being released is looking for his wife, who has been separated from and he goes in search for four years of her with his daughter. So it’s a metaphor for all that’s left over in terms of slavery, the trauma of slavery, the isolation that happened in slavery, the dislocation from anything that happened in slavery. And the question for Wilson is how do you make peace with all that? And how do you find an inner resolve within yourself to distance yourself from those experiences and set up on a new course? How do you and the way Wilson puts it, find your song?

Josh Landy
What is like what do you think that could mean for us today or sitting in our splendid solitudes one from the other?

Harry Elam
I think it means how do you find space to find space for yourself? To think, to think outside of what the work you have to do or outside of all the other things you have to do around family? Where’s that space to really, that you can sing and find that sense of self and and, and really, it’s not in a sense that you’re doing away with, you know your relationships with other people or your work. But it’s finding that peace, that inner peace, you know that you need to continue on. So for the end of the play, Harold Loomis walks out, and it’s an interesting scene that he walks up with this great new sense of self determination into this son and, and one of his characters by num Bytom says you shining like new money as he walks out. So how do we find that sense? How do we how can we shine as we find ourselves?

Ray Briggs
So Harry, I think that there’s a beautiful statement of an ideal, but I’m wondering what what people do if they don’t have sort of the space for splendid solitude or to find inner peace? So what if you’re an essential worker who’s just being run off your feet right now?

Harry Elam
That’s a it’s a really good question. Right. And in terms of the play another connection to the play, as the play talks a lot about the these bones people were in the middle passage, and that journey from how African Americans being Africans to be coming Afro Americans or African Americans in the new land and space, so is a racial story there as well. And a story of being ripped from your place and not being able to award his time with Joe Turner. Similarly, he was in servitude. So, you know, clearly he wasn’t or seemingly wasn’t able to sing his song at that time. But the character bind them says that still it’s within you, you know, you’ve got it, all you’ve got to do is figure out how to get it out how to sing it. And it’s an interesting relationship between Harold and binome. I mean, and so that sense, there’s a couple of moments that they have, it’s almost a call and response, like you’d find in a black church. So it’s, you can’t do it alone. But it’s that sense of with some assistance with some sense of collaboration with what Biden provides for him, potentially, we all can find that that sense of inner peace, or that sense of self determination. So it’s not a place that blames other people. Okay, it’s not a play that yes, you know, racism existed, yes. Black people were made slaves with still, you know, even within that context, Wilson is saying, you can find yourself. So, even within, you know, the experience that some people are having, how do they find it, and he probably need it all the more to survive. I mean, I feel for those people, you know, who were caught in this and it student, no fault of their own, and a disease that’s disproportionately hitting poor people in black and brown people. You know, how do you deal with that? And how do you find it? Can you still find your song within that environment?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so you’ve kind of emphasized the role of like finding resources within yourself and of solidarity. So I guess another another way to present this question is like, how, how do you make it sort of possible for other people to find their song? And how do you exhibit solidarity with them?

Harry Elam
That’s interesting, again, in the relationship between biome and Harold Loomis, biome is looking for. He saw this vision earlier of very spiritual and religious vision. And in that vision, he was told that he needed to find the shining man, and if he did, that his purpose in life would be met. So the idea of finding help beyond you reaching out to someone else, is really important as well. Also, the play takes place at this boarding house, where Seth and Martha are and that the boarding house is a transient place that people eliminate space in a sense when people come in and out of, but that sense of finding community there. And finding a richness even though you might have very little to make life of is important as well. So the sense of community the sense of the shared it and reciprocal relationship that happens between Bynum and Harold is really important.

Bill Withers
Lean on me when you’re not strong, and I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re leaning on the arts and humanities to find community in troubling times. We’ll hear more from Harry Elam in just a moment.

Josh Landy
We’ll also think more about Drama and Theatre as sources of connection and comfort, as well as the surprising philosophy of meditation—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Ray Briggs
Welcome back. I’m Ray Briggs. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy, and we’re thinking about how the arts and humanities can provide comfort, connection and a sense of common purpose.

Ray Briggs
Let’s return to our conversation with Harry Elam, author of “The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson” on “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone”—specifically on how non black audience members might respond to the play.

Harry Elam
August Wilson was the most produced playwriting in the last decade of the 20th century. So 1990 on same thing in the first decade of the 21st century. So if that’s the case, a lot of people were going to see these plays that weren’t black, and finding within, you know, those stories and the human stories, characters that they could relate to ideas, concepts, and I think that plays out in Joe Turner, as well. And the spiritual dynamic of the play is really interesting is a play famously that back in his in the honeymoon phase of his presidential experiences first year as president, Barack Obama went up to New York on a date night with his wife to see Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in a revival production of it. So that also brought an audience to the play. And interesting lab that production, one of the most celebrated was directed by white director. So within the dynamics of his finding something that’s particular about black people in 1911, in Pittsburgh, is something that he hopes has cross cultural resonance to an audience that’s broader than that.

Josh Landy
So you you’ve been talking beautifully about the the plays theme of isolation and community about how, how slavery isolated slaves, one from the other, including in the context of play Harold Loomis from his wife. But it’s interesting that the play isn’t just about that. It seems as though it’s kind of bringing people together. I mean, there’s that lovely scene of the Juba that the column response dance within the play, where all these disparate people with different interests and ambitions and desires and fears all come together in this shared celebration. And I wonder if the play itself isn’t kind of doing the same thing here. We all are audience members, even even readers of the of the script coming together, overcoming our isolation and joining forces.

Harry Elam
Yes, I think that is the message. And I think that’s why Harold needs to be understood not as his singular character. Yes, as Ray put it, he suffered this historic trauma and the trauma of history is on his back. But it’s something that in his in his final scene, in the climactic moment, he takes a knife, and he cuts across his chest, his wife has been imploring Him to come back to Christ to Jesus. And he says, I don’t need anybody to bleed for me, I bleed for myself. And he walks out into the world after that. So it’s a singular act. But it’s an act with incredibly meaning beyond that, in the sense of community, that sense of you know, that your individual sense of finding yourself or or bleeding for yourself in this case is not an individual act, potentially. But it’s something that is shared by the sense of community, everyone in that community is searching, trying to find. And one of the spaces they find it is in the coming together. You talked about the Juba, it’s a wonderful moment of celebration of spiritual. So it’s, it’s tying you with forces beyond at the same time connecting you to each other. And that’s part of the magic, I think of the play.

Josh Landy
And is it part of the magic of theater? Because obviously, you know, within the play, you see people coming together in this in this communal song, but here we are sitting all together in a theater watching it and sharing an experience. Do you think that’s something August Wilson may have in mind that that theater itself can produce that kind of communal spirit?

Harry Elam
Yeah, he felt that not only could it produce that kind of communal spirit, but it’s something that people could take with them out of the play. So that sense that theater could be a means to get people to think and potentially even to act differently, that he really believed in the power of the medium to do that. Quick side note of his story. There was one production of Joe Turner and do it that happened to be a big audience of black women evangelists were there and would Harold Loomis and bind them winning to this call and response seen this these about 1012 Women on mass, went up to the front of the stage and started praying with Harold Loomis. So that sense of the heart. It’s really the heart of the action took on a whole nother level.

Josh Landy
Well, Harry, thanks a million for joining us today. It’s been absolutely fascinating.

Harry Elam
My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. Thanks for your great questions.

Big Bill Broonzy
They tell me Joe Turner been here and gone.

Ray Briggs
Harry Isla, on the August Wilson play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. This is Philosophy Talk. And we’re thinking about how the arts and humanities can keep us thoughtful and cheerful and anxious time.

Josh Landy
We’re joined now by Antonia Peacocke, professor of philosophy at Stanford. She’s also a featured contributor at the Philosophy Talk blog. Antonia, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Anotnia Peacocke
Thank you. I’m excited to be back.

Ray Briggs
So Antonia, I’m really frustrated with all this sheltering in place. I want to do something I don’t know what to do from my own home. What do you suggest I should do?

Anotnia Peacocke
Yeah, I think we’re all having feelings of similar kinds right now. Something that I’ve invested more time in recently is meditation.

Ray Briggs
Wait, is meditation doing something? I thought it was just sort of sitting there and doing nothing.

Anotnia Peacocke
So I think meditation really is doing something. And I think it’s not only doing something but it helps you do future things, which are mental actions.

Ray Briggs
Tell me what a mental action is.

Anotnia Peacocke
So I think a mental action is something that you do and thought, so some examples might be, you could try to recall what you had for breakfast, you could keep your attention focused on the hummingbird outside your window, you could rehearse your next day’s lecture in thought, these are all mental actions, as I conceive of them, you can do them on purpose, you can do them well, or badly, you can do them successfully.

Ray Briggs
So it seems like for at least some kinds of mental actions, I just can’t do them on purpose. Like I can’t, I can’t have an invasive thought or abolish one on purpose. I can’t want something on purpose. But it does seem like I can do some things on purpose, like, what is the difference between the things I can do on purpose and the things I can’t?

Anotnia Peacocke
Yeah, great. So philosophers actually disagree significantly about this. I think the most famous skeptic about mental action is Galen Strawson, who in this 2003 paper said, Look, you can’t ever deliver a content to mind on purpose, you can only ever sort of set your mind to some task and wait for stuff to happen. So this is interesting for two reasons. First of all, it’s a really clear and bold claim that a lot of people disagree with. But on the other hand, even our most famous skeptic about mental action thinks there’s something that you can do, which is set your attention to a task. And that’s what meditation is all about.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s interesting, because that seems already to concede a fair amount of the the point to the other side, right? I mean, you can in fact, affect what happens in your mind.

Anotnia Peacocke
Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s a pretty big concession.

Josh Landy
So how does meditation work your your, your claim is i I’m setting my mind to a task, the task of meditating. And this is then somehow that somehow makes me better at performing other mental actions later on.

Anotnia Peacocke
Yeah, so I think that the kind of meditation that works as an attention workout is not primarily setting your mind to the task of meditating as such, but instead choosing some object and attending to that. So one object that people often use is the breath. So you’re supposed to attend to your breathing. And since this is an ongoing event, and it’s always there, as long as you’re alive, it’s a pretty useful object of your attention to practice attending to.

Ray Briggs
So I’m wondering if like lots of things that I think of as regular actions that are under my control also have a component like this. So I can make pancakes I did it this morning. But I have to rely on the world to cooperate with me to make pancakes like I have the stove can’t suddenly go off than I am not making pancakes. So like, I contribute a lot of things and like the eggs can’t suddenly be bad. And I don’t have total control over this. But I still think that like I’m able to make pancakes on purpose. So that makes me wonder where where the line is between something I can cause on purpose, as long as the world cooperates with me, even though I didn’t do every part of it on purpose, versus something that I can’t cause on purpose, but I can cause by doing something else,

Anotnia Peacocke
totally Well, Ray, I think your examples from earlier are helpful in this regard, because we want to think about whether you’re role in some event, when that involves monitoring how things are going and adjusting in response to errors like you see this ag as bad so you pick up a different one. Or when you flipped this pancake, it fell on the floor so you pour more batter into the pan right? Whether that kind of monitoring and adjustment is contributing positively To the outcome that you really want to bring about, or whether it can detract from it. So if the case of happiness is like this, that if you monitored and you tried to control and you were constantly on task for trying to make yourself happy, that would be sort of deleterious to the end rather than helpful, then you might think becoming happy is not an action. But look, my pancake thing. There, my mind ring was really contributing positively to bringing about the good pancake based end.

Ray Briggs
So I can teach, I know how to teach somebody to make pancakes, because I can point to things outside of myself. So I’m like, here’s the pan, here are the eggs. Here’s the mixing bowl. And I can sort of guide them through the actions which involve things that we can both see with meditation. Like, if you’re trying to teach somebody to meditate, you’re trying to teach something to them to direct their attention, and you can’t see their attention and they can’t see your attention. So how is it possible to teach somebody to perform a mental action rather than an action on like a shared physical object?

Anotnia Peacocke
I think this is both a tricky philosophical question. And a tricky question that faces us in actual practice, right? Something we have to figure out how to do if we’re going to guide people through meditation. So one thing to note here is that the very notion of attention might not be something that you could teach somebody who didn’t already have this understanding, right? William James is often cited as one of the early psychologists who wrote a lot about meditation. And even what he said here was, everyone knows what attention is. Try to find it in other terms. He just said, You know what I mean, I, here’s a surprising fact, it does seem like people know what you mean, when you talk about attention. So you might think that there’s already something that everybody does, and has ways of doing, and what meditation is, is a focusing down of that task. Here’s how I think about guides to meditation, your attention can be self directed, sometimes Psychologists call this endogenous attention, or it can be grabbed by something outside of you. This is called exogenous attention. And one thing that meditation teachers can do is they can exogenously direct your attention, say, hey, wait a second, are you still focusing on your breath that can in fact, bring your attention back to your breath, so you get a sense of what it feels like to have that effect come about to have your attention redirected. And then you can take the guide wheels off gradually and start to do that endogenously or start to do it yourself.

Ray Briggs
So I’m wondering if at a time when we’re all sort of physically isolated from each other, it becomes more important to focus on mental action. And if mental action can sort of get us goods that are maybe harder to get through physical action right now.

Anotnia Peacocke
Yeah, that was my thought. I think one nice thing about meditation is that it’s best to do it by yourself, and that it has these results that help you out in isolation. So not only distraction, and distraction is a big problem when you’re working from home. But there’s also something Proust to talk about the anesthetic effect of familiarity. So you might think, look, when I’m just sitting in the same room for days on end, the world outside of my body starts to fade into my attentional background, right? I’m just not even paying attention. And that can be really boring and stifling. Prusa actually thought it was really comforting. But I actually think that another nice effect of meditation is that it helps you think what else is there to attend to here and then you can do that on purpose better. So you start noticing things in your otherwise boring rooms and apartment that you might not have otherwise.

Josh Landy
So suddenly, the dirty dishes in the sink are really apparently. This is the benefit of meditation. That’s what you’re saying?

Anotnia Peacocke
Yup, that’s the whole advertisement—do the dishes.

Ray Briggs
I should have cleaned up after I made pancakes, oh my goodness. Antonia, it was really wonderful getting to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining us on Philosophy Talk.

Anotnia Peacocke
Thanks so much for having mem it’s almost like an in person conversation.

Ray Briggs
Antonia Peacocke on the surprising philosophy of meditation. You can hear the unedited version of our conversation with Antonia and all of our conversations from today at our website, philosophytalk.org.

Josh Landy
We hope these conversations have been at least a little comforting, a sort of tonic for the troops.

Ray Briggs
Hey, I thought you said this wasn’t a war.

Josh Landy
Alright, alright—we hope these conversations have kept your spirits up.

Ray Briggs
Much better metaphor. That reminds me, isn’t it time for a drink? Got to be six o’clock somewhere. Bottoms up!

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Copyright 2020.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuan.

Josh Landy
The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Ray Briggs
Thanks also Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the Partners at our online Community of Thinkers.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed_ on this program did not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders,

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And Thank you for thinking.