"Having lost a sense of the sacred, the only thing we want is acquisitiveness—more of everything. How can we break this vicious cycle of avarice? It seems to me that the only way we can possibly reign this in on ourselves is some retrieval of the sense of the sacred, something beyond ourselves." Poet Micheal O'Siadhail discusses his latest collection of poetry, Desire—reading several poems and commenting on how he dealt with the pandemic and sought to understand it through verse. With Evan Rosa, he discusses his poetry as a living and synthetic record of human history, the nature of human greed and avarice and how it has marred the earth, and the calling to reshape our desires toward what's truly worth desiring: a desire for the sacred, for the transcendent, and ultimately, a desire of God for God's own sake.
"Having lost a sense of the sacred, the only thing we want is acquisitiveness—more of everything. How can we break this vicious cycle of avarice? It seems to me that the only way we can possibly reign this in on ourselves is some retrieval of the sense of the sacred, something beyond ourselves.
And I think that relearning humility—realizing that a parasitic pathogen can spread across the globe and wreak havoc as it did—brings us to the question again of the sacred.
Dare we speak of a God who is worthy of all our desire? That we as creatures might want with all of our heart, all of our mind, to contemplate. Should anything less deserve our desiring really? Clearly there's a hierarchy of desire, but what is our overarching desire? Can we gamble on reimagining the wonder of a capacious God of endless surprises?" (Micheal O'Siadhail, from the episode)
About Micheal O'Siadhail
Micheal O'Siadhail is an award-winning poet and author of many collections of poetry. His Collected Poems was published in 2013, One Crimson Thread in 2015 and The Five Quintets in 2018, which received Conference on Christianity and Literature Book of the Year 2018 and an Eric Hoffer Award in 2020. His latest works are Testament (2022) and Desire (2023). He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Manitoba and Aberdeen. He lives in New York.
Show Notes
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Micheal O'Siadhail: It seems now that we really, having lost a sense of the sacred, the only thing we want is acquisitiveness, more of everything. How can we break this vicious cycle of avarice? And it seems to me that the only way we can possibly rein this in on ourselves is some retrieval of the sense of the sacred, something beyond ourselves.
And I think that, you know, relearning humility, realizing that a parasitic pathogen can spread across the globe and wreak havoc as it did, brings us to the question again of the sacred. Dare we speak of a God who is worthy of all our desire, that we as creatures might want with all of our heart. All of our mind to contemplate should anything less deserve our desiring really clearly there's a hierarchy of desire.
But what is our overarching desire? Can we gamble on reimagining the wonder of a capacious God of endless surprises? Such constant need for more than we require, so we still behave as if living just for what we crave and greed now seems to be our only aim. World at risk as never seen before. Will our generation take the blame?
Can we mortals ask ourselves once more, what do we desire?
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.
This time, four years ago, we were all afraid to go outside. Afraid to shake hands. Afraid to buy groceries.
Afraid to hug. Afraid to breathe. Generally, afraid. And this very podcast launched as we were shutting our doors, social distancing, going remote, standing six feet apart, but four years have passed. How have we dealt with these realities? Not just in the sense of how well we've dealt, but by what method?
How do we work through and collectively come to understand what we've lived through, or barely survived? The Irish poet Micheal O'Siadhail processed the pandemic through a poetic chronology that transcends a mere chronicle of events. To look for the historical, global, species level causes and effects of the pandemic.
The symbols, the rituals, the structures of meaning that we use to process and understand it still today. And throughout his rhyming verse, O'Siadhail digs and dives deep into the nature of human desire. Asking in his own way, the very question we've treated so many times in this podcast and across our work at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, what is worth desiring?
What's worth wanting? In this conversation, now four years after the onset of the pandemic in the United States, Micheal and I discuss his latest collection of poetry entitled Desire. Over 100 poems divided into four sections, which he calls Pest, Habitat, Behind the Screen, and Desiring. Across this work, he details the quotidian and the mundane experience of a global pandemic.
Quarantine, lockdown, clapping in the streets, arguing over masks. In part two, he traverses time, it seems, to the ecological roots of creation, to examine how idolatry and Have marred and destroyed the earth, our only home. And he peers into and beyond the screen at the impacts of technology and digital existence.
And ultimately, he points to the final desire of humanity, the sacred, the transcendent, the desire of God for God's own sake. And across our conversation today, he punctuates so many of his points by reading several poems from the book. To get us started, I asked him to read the opening poem from the book, Epigraph.
It's really a summary of the entire collection and a distillation of the way Michal sees the pandemic and sees the nature of human desire, greed, and the distance between what we want and what's worth wanting.
Thanks for listening today, friends. Hope you enjoy.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Desire, epigraph. A pest will pass. All will be said and done. Yet in its wake, will we be more aware How nature's filigree is frail and won, Where neighbors keepers breathe one gardener's air? But have our garden's climate changes led To wildlife shifts so we live cheek by jowl, With raging viruses we host and spread, Around this now endangered globe we foul?
We want and want more than a life requires. The masters of the net who push their wares will grab and bend our minds with ghost desires. No time for contemplations, garden prayers. Beyond our avarice, our greed still birth. What's worth desiring now for all we're worth.
Evan Rosa: Micheal, it's so great to have you back on the show to talk about your latest collection of poems, Desire.
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be back. I'm excited to talk to you about this, not least because this very podcast was launched just at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic. And now that we've traversed a full four years since that time. It's so interesting to look back. This is a moment to be looking back and to be seeking that understanding that I think we wanted in the moment as well.
We wanted that understanding about the impact the pandemic might have. Why it was the way it was and why we responded to it the way we did. You can begin by sharing a little bit about the origins of desire as a collection of poetry.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Yes. Well, quite frankly, it was somewhat of a chronicle because the poems about COVID, they were written.
throughout COVID. And it was my way of dealing with it. After all, that's what I do as a poet is I have come through life, dealing with life by writing poetry. So I was very afraid. It was a time of extraordinary dread and fear, which we seem to naturally want to put behind us and forget, but it's It was a time of terrible terror because I was in the age group where if I had got it in the initial stages, I probably wouldn't have survived.
And so I was very afraid. And I thought if it's the last time for me to write poems, well, at least I will leave a record of how this was. And when you think about it, you know, there's not very many poems, as far as I know, that come from the 1918 influenza. So we don't really have a description of it as how it was to live through it.
And I It would be wonderful to leave some sort of description of how it was. Do you remember what it was like to learn to wash your hands again, for instance? You know, do you remember what it was to see people queuing up outside with six feet apart and so forth? So I think I've cut some of the details of that and some of the feelings that we had going through and we didn't know whether it would be a second wave, for instance, all of these things.
Evan Rosa: Would you just say a little bit about methodologically what it is to deal with one's life through poetry? I mean, I realize I'm like asking you to go way up to universal perspective on the nature of your work, but I think if you would comment a little bit about how you use poetry, the writing of poems, and I think of even like the, the root word of poesis to, to make.
as a kind of generation, a making of a kind to deal with something like that through poetry.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Well, I suppose it's, I mean, a book of mine called One Crimson Thread, which just chronicled the last two years of my first late wife's Parkinson's disease and her, her dying and my coping with it. Well, in the same way I did that as it was happening, because it was, I got up every morning.
It was the only way I could deal with the pain and suffering, which we were both going through. And I suppose it comes from childhood, right as a child, whenever, certainly from my very early teens, when something got me very emotionally, it had to come out some way or there are other, I came from a tradition of words.
Perhaps if I'd had music at an early age, it might have come out through music, or if I had the gift of hand and eye, which I don't, it might have come out through paintings, which I love. And I love music, but for me, it had to be words. And all my life, it's been that. I've coped with life. I have celebrated life.
And it just, it has to come out. It's an emotional temperament. It has to give expression. And if you come from a tradition of words, as I did, it came in poetry. And of course, it could come in prose, but the intensity of poetry is what appealed to me. And the intensive use of metaphor is what appealed to me.
So this, this book Desires started with this, this description, if you like, and this coping with COVID, coping with the coronavirus and the time of it, catching the details of it, but also the fear of it and so forth. But then it went further because that's the opening part of the book. But it went further because after that, I had to ask myself, why did this happen?
You
Evan Rosa: know,
Micheal O'Siadhail: where is it coming from? And I'm afraid science tells us, and the journal of science tells us that it's not a question of if, but when. Another pandemic will occur. And the explanation given is indeed climate change, because one of the, one of the, all sorts of things are happening. So the climate change then was something I had been thinking about previously when this occurred, when, when the COVID virus virus arrived I had been thinking about this.
And so then the two came together. I said, well, I've got to deal with this. What's happening to our environment. What's happening with climate change, because this is causing this, caused the pandemic and causing the danger of further pandemics. And it seemed to me that that comes down on, you know, to consumption.
It comes down to our inability to control our desire for comforts, our desire for convenience and so forth. And that, that, so we consume and we consume much more than we need. And it's, I think it's based on, it's based on greed, basically. It's, it's, it's an avarice built into our culture.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, you, you comment on this on capitalism and consumption in particular, you say avarice, this bottomless craving for wealth and power is a strange perversion of healthy human desire.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Absolutely. And the trouble about it is, and that led me to another matter, which was that second part, obviously the first part I called Pest and was about the coronavirus and the time of it. But the second part is called Habitat in the book, which just talks about what we've been doing. And we're going the planet, how we've been destroying it by our consumption.
But then the question comes is what is driving this consumption the whole time? And a big factor in this is in fact, the internet. It's a blessing and it's a curse. I mean, if you think about the internet, people are seeing their grandchildren abroad and other who live in other countries that you might never see.
It's a wonderful blessing for people. It's a wonderful blessing for contact, for facial contact and so forth. But on the other hand, We're being spied on. There's a wonderful book by, um, Shoshana Zuboff, which I had been reading when this occurred. It's called Surveillance Capitalism. And it's a frightening book because it tells how we're being spied on the whole time.
And that the internet, which started in idealism, I mean, it started by young people who were going to give the world all availability to all knowledge, But then they succumbed to Mammon because with the crash in 2008, their backers, their financial backers put lint on them and said, we need to make money.
And so they discovered that they could see what everybody had been looking at, the exhaust as they called it. And suddenly that became a goldmine. They could sell this for target marketing. And so we're being spied on the whole time. We're being profiled, even our personalities are being profiled with the view of selling us things.
So this one click system, you know, is feeding our consumerism, which in turn is feeding the climate change. So that was the third part. The fourth part, I ask myself, how can we break this vicious cycle of avarice? And it seems to me that the only way we can possibly rein this in on ourselves is some retrieval of the sense of the sacred, something beyond ourselves, which gives us the humility to realize we're not masters of the universe.
One small, parasitic, tiny, Pathogen could bring the whole world to its knees. So a relearning of humility in the light of creation and desiring something that's worth desiring, which to me is the recovery of the sacred and seeing that something wonderful is there, a creation which we're part of, and which is an ongoing process we can be part of.
Evan Rosa: You occupy this really interesting moral and, and ethical and, and at times political perspective too. And I don't mean just like necessarily party politics, but I do think like really richly, robustly, thickly political perspective. And, and I, so let's extend that question about using poetry to deal with life.
Does anything else kind of come to mind for you about occupying a particular perspective? And. interacting with life's events from that moral, spiritual perspective.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Well, I mean, I think an interesting thing was, and this is, this was a detail which we'll very easily forget, of course, you, you know, the Black Death is still in our culture.
It's believed that we say, bless you when someone sneezes because the Black Death was supposed to have started with a sneeze. And that's right across. It's interesting. It's in Europe, in some form or other, you know, in Icelandic, they say, Guðjálfurðir, let God help you. May God help you. In Irish, they say, Díolinn, God with us, and so on.
But it's right across Europe, with a few exceptions. Norwegians say, Prosit, which, which is not, has, has, well, it's not, it hasn't got a, a, a particularly religious thing on. The Germans would say, Gesundheit, or Yiddish is Gesundheit, and so on, just health. But it still reflects The dangers of the Black Death.
Now, I think that what was very interesting during the COVID virus was that bless wasn't a word we used. Bless is not a word that comes easily in our culture. We did, but the care was there. Suddenly there was a realization we were one humanity. The past had no respect for boundaries, no respect for, for, for borders and so on.
It was, it, it just was everywhere. We were one humanity.
Evan Rosa: Oh yeah. It's interesting to think of a virus as very democratically inclined.
Micheal O'Siadhail: It's like, I'm afraid it's like death. It's, it's very democratic, you know. So, so, but we did say things, you see, we did, we did wish one another well and different. And so I'd like to read a poem that catches that, but also the other, the other thing, which was very fascinating to which as a detail, which you could easily forget is how people stood.
I think it was seven o'clock at night on street corners and clapped. to thank the medics for what they've done, because we owe them a debt of gratitude. You know, the doctors, the nurses, the ambulance people, not to mention those who worked to find a vaccine, or even those who volunteered for a vaccine trials, you know.
So this, this wonderful applause came at street corners.
Once the black dead threatened humankind, bless you, we respond still to a sneeze thought to be its start. And to remind us how we're still prey to new disease. Plagues we've only read of turn so real, every pest reverbing from the past, as we watched coronavirus steal all across our shrunken globe so fast.
We just said, be well, be safe, take care. Owning up to just how frail we're still, Though bless is not a word, all moderns dare, Nothing changes in our love's good will. May each blessing anyhow expressed hallow all who die from every pest. Worldwide, citizens would now begin, stopping in a street or anywhere, to applaud and raise a goodly din, clapping up a thankfulness all share.
For all tenders are one grateful sign. Those who lived from shift to shift in fear, medics, nurses, holding our front line, often lacking sealed protective gear. Now it's reckoned at the very least, one in ten infected as they worked, still unknown how many since deceased. No one could have blamed them if they shirked.
Scattered noise could lift a city's mood. Strange commotion of our gratitude.
Evan Rosa: I hear also this, this kind of simultaneous, a desire to, to bless and care for the other, a kind of, a kind of wish for the other, even in something as benign as a sneeze that is paired with gratitude. And I'm wondering if you'd comment on the experience of gratitude within particular moments of fear or anxiety.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Well, there's, there's no doubt about it. I mean, you see, the, the thing we can very easily forget to is that there were certain positive sides. I mean, When we talk about, I mean, we must never forget that when we talk about 1 million in this country and possibly 6 million worldwide who died, they're not numbers.
They're somebody's beloved face. It's each, each death brought with it, it's mourners, you know? And so it's not to be, it's not to be simply dismissed in numbers, but the extraordinary thing about it is that it also, there were certain good things came. When you think about it, just on a social level, it was a edged sword.
But it was wonderful to be able to spend time, if you're in a marriage with somebody you love, to be able to spend that time at home together. It was, that was a great blessing for some. For others, of course, it broke up marriages because it exposed the empty nest or exposed weaknesses in the marriage.
But it was a lovely thing to have that sort of time together. And people could suddenly think, why am I rushing around all the time? Why am I Why am I always pressuring? Why am I running? So it was a kind of a retreat in some fashion, which was a positive side of it.
Evan Rosa: I might read back some of your own verse from another poem.
This is number 20 in the section past where you say, it's a chance to do those things so long dreamed of, listening and relearning how it feels. To enjoy long days with those they love, some who'd thought such joys beyond their kin, ask what in God's name they'd striven for, not in need and loathe to start again, thought now that working less they might live more.
Gifts their drivenness could not foresee, time enough to live, to love, to be. And that giftedness is this other aspect that really jumped out to me about, and I recall about, about a heightened awareness, more attunement. to the giftedness of life, regardless of what the quality of that life might be at a given time.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Yes. And there were, there were, there were another thing, which I discovered a lot of people who had meant to get in touch with other people for years and so on from their past and so on, they found themselves on zoom talking and making contact again. That's all on an individual level, but on a social level, think of it to here in Manhattan, where I live, There were pigeons walking up and down the street.
It was a wonderful sight. Normally they swoop over overhead, over the high rises and back and forth on ledges. There were, there were just pigeons on the street. It was very beautiful. It was also recorded that pollution in places like London and Paris and so on went way down because we weren't turning around in cars and consuming, consuming petrol and so forth.
So it's, there were positive sides to it, but at what a price.
Evan Rosa: Indeed. What I find interesting about this, the way that you draw connections here, there's, there's the chronicle of the pandemic and kind of looking into the details of it that exists. You know, most obviously in pest, but you know, throughout the whole collection, but then you back things up quite a bit.
You back things up to a garden. So the first word of your section, habitat garden, given us to dress and keep in our greed, we mar. And then the marring of this garden. seems to be a, a trope that continues from there. And you've already described a little bit about, about essentially the ecological disaster and the consideration of our place in the, on the planet and our home here.
I wonder if you can introduce a little bit of some of these theological biblical allusions that you use, um, to the kind of creation mandate to steward rather than control or dominate beer.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Certainly. Yes. I mean, I think there's, that's a very, very important thing. It's also very fascinating. I think that we often think of the pollution and the ecocide, which we are in the processes of, we often think of it as something that sort of really goes back to the industrial revolution and so forth, but actually, It's now, in our generation, that it's really, really has accelerated.
Let me just perhaps quote a poem which deals with that.
Almost like a debt of smog and grime, We're now paying for, so we think this built up long before our time when industry began. Yet the half of all that we have ruined happened in one decade's span, Mother Earth sustaining half her wound during one lifetime. What a restless species we now are, hurtling here and there, jetting fuel vapor through the air.
It's true. Gadding on our motorways non stop, Spoilt first world uneasy in our core, We still drive and fly and country hop, Smirching as we never had before, Roam this earth we mar. Deadly virus, stowaways conspire, Find their hosts worldwide. On our unrest, spongers hitch a ride. Could we not explore here where we are?
Wonder in the ordinary merge? Ask ourselves why should we journey far? Or what drives disquiet's consuming urge? What do we desire?
Evan Rosa: I think it's a fitting moment to really take up that final question of this poem. What do we desire? I mean, you phrase it, I think really wonderfully from the, from the introduction to the piece, the prose introduction where, and again, I'll quote, in the light of all that people have suffered during this pandemic, any reassessment of our values, any pondering of our age must ask what is worthy of of our desire?
That's the ultimate question in our frail and passing human lives, you say, like a reassessment, which is to say that we don't just simply baptize whatever desires we find ourselves with. And yet we do find ourselves with desires based on certain technological capacities. There is a new level of power of access and capacity and agency.
We can do a lot. We forget to ask. What are the limits of this? What are our limits? And so I love this, um, from the poem. Could we not explore here where we are? Could we not just be where we are?
Micheal O'Siadhail: Yes, there's this extraordinary feeling too, I think, and it's been about for a long time that somehow it's almost a status symbol to be on the, to be roaming the globe, you know, globe trotting, as it was called.
It's very strange. I'm missing out, of course, on, um, on the sense, the stabilitas, as the Benedictines call it, you know, the, the stabilitas of being where you are.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Say a little bit more about that. What does stabilitas mean to you? I love that concept.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Well, it's, it's quite, quite, I mean, just down to a very practical thing, where I work.
I'd like to be the same place. I like to feel the table that I, the desk that I work at, I like the chair, I like the view, I like the things that are on my table. There's a sense of continuity, a sense of being, of being grounded where I am and working for years. I thought I could never work except in the house where I lived and I never, until I actually moved to, moved to New York and then found, I found that I made a new home and therefore I was able to create another space where I could work.
But that sense of stabilitas I think is terribly important and a sense of belonging and a sense of place. And it, it also extends to, to neighbor, and people around you, people whom you feel. at ease with who you greet and so forth. I think that is a very important part of our humanity, which we lose in this rushing around.
But I think to to, you know, I think you're right, we are dealing with another phase, in a sense, due to the technology that's available to us. And sadly, The very sad thing about it is that it seems now that we really, having lost a sense of the sacred, the only thing we want is acquisitiveness, more, more of everything.
And, uh, I think too, that the, one of the things we have to think of, and it is the, the tragedy, as I've mentioned before, it's almost like a Greek tragedy that the, That young people who start wanting to supply the world with information and think what that could have meant to African countries who wouldn't have a national library, that everything was available on the net.
It's extraordinary. You know, it was very altruistic that sadly they have the whole moral sense for which they started is sold out. So, but let me, let me, let's just think a little bit about, uh, about this ecocide.
When what watched a kettle on the boil, Jenny spun her wheel. Come electric power, come coal and steel, and our want to fabricate en masse, everything scaled up pursuing wealth. We keep fracking oil, extracting gas. We pollute and risk our own good health on this earth we spoil. We who saw the dirt and smut of coal watch another phase, as tech wizards who at first amaze, turning to new avarice will spy, auction off what was their moral sense.
From first promises, so far a cry. Once enough to earn at health's expense, greed wants mind and soul. Such constant need for more than we require, so we still behave as if living just for what we crave, and greed now seems to be our only aim. World at risk as never seen before. Will our generation take the blame?
Can we mortals ask ourselves once more? What do we desire?
Evan Rosa: And what's interesting here is, you know, several poems as we, we end with the same, with the same question, what do we desire? Yes, it's building up. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's, it's, well, it's just the kind of question that you just can repeatedly ask.
There's always that differential between what we do desire and what we ought to.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Yes. And the trouble is too, that, you know, one of the things we do desire, I think, uh, it, it is. We desire very much community. We need community. Our, our, the whole of the first world has gone so individualistic. And, and it was, it was so obvious during, during, during the coronavirus, you know, people, this, this, it became politicized and I don't want to enter into the politics now with a, with a big P, but, but it became so politicized whether one wore a mask or not.
And as if it was an individual right. With no sense of the community around you as, uh, and what, what it meant for other people, not just my right, but. What about the people around me? You know, so, so I think that we need, we need community. We need this support of other people. And I think that the masters of the internet in a way have decided to exploit this, this need for, for, for community and creating these false communities they call friends on the net and so forth.
And young people, young people sit there waiting for likes. evaluate themselves. Their self esteem is dependent on how many likes they get and so forth. It's very insidious and frightening. So, so I think they have us worked out.
Evan Rosa: That's yes, absolutely. And I think this is probably a moment to kind of move into the next section of the, of the collection behind the screen.
And in particular, I'm thinking of this poem that really expresses a lot of the loneliness playing on. I should say, preying on our need for connection and, and the feeling that you're calling out, which is that are we being played by this algorithm? And we call these friends, sometimes we call them followers, the distinction between truly being known and be simply being famous is really at stake.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Yes, absolutely. Yeah.
Evan Rosa: Which we don't often appreciate that kind of distinction to really be known by someone rather than simply be recognized. It really, I mean, it really calls into question, what is recognition? What is it to be seen? What is it to be known? And what is it to be loved?
Micheal O'Siadhail: So I think the latter word is probably the key, but we'll come to that, we'll come to that a little later.
So, so just a poem which deals with this third section of this book, Desire, which I called behind the screen because it is talking about how we're being manipulated and how we have been, we're all the time, as I said, being profiled and used, exploited.
So instinctively they've sussed us out, maestros of this age's own zeitgeist, playing on our angst and on our doubt. Freed from stater times we sacrificed, old stabilities of sure lifestyles. Gambling on new openness, we diced on a bigger game, become exiles from the lands of our own well worn past. Found our way by choice, by chance or trials.
Solo thrill of each iconoclast can so easily in time fall flat, feeling we have somehow been outcast. Sensing this, the clever technocrat, touting what is named connectedness, plunders when online we tweet and chat, feeds relentless hunger to express. Now our two edged, newfound liberty, how in freedom we know loneliness.
We still crave support so we are free, telling us we're who we're meant to be.
Evan Rosa: That line, uh, now our two edged, newfound liberty. How in our freedom, we know loneliness. Those are haunting lines, the desire for freedom, the desire for individuality. And yet the way that pushes us into a kind of lonely place.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Yes. From, from a traditional society where we were much more bound to one another.
You know, I, I came to manhood in the sixties, which was the ultimate in, in believing in spontaneity and individualism and so forth. But there's a tremendous price to pay for the lack of community. And I think this has been spotted by the high priests of the internet, and young people fall so much victim to this, uh, this need for, for numbers of friends and for approval and for, for likes, I think is the big word.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. A deep desire to, to be accepted by others. There's a brand new book by the social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt called The Anxious Generation. We're just approaching two decades of. Having any kind of meaningful research on the impact that life behind the screen or in front of the screen, life with screens is doing to us.
And, and the impact on young children is profound. And, and so that two edgedness, the way it cuts both ways, it really gives a lot of pause.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Yes. And another fascinating side of it too, is that, you know, I, at least I find it very fascinating is that it's so unforgiving. The internet is utterly unforgiving.
It stores everything up and holds it against you. I mean, think of young people who put up pictures of themselves drunk at parties and so on, thinking it's all fun at that age. How will that look in 10 years time? You know, and it's, you know, they're going through natural stages, but you don't want those stages kept and held against you the rest of your life.
It encourages and then punishes impulsivity. Absolutely. You couldn't put it better. That's exactly what it does. So I, I, I, I think of that. And of course, it's when I say unforgiving, it brings me to the thought of forgiveness, of course, and the, the, the whole idea of pardon. And so, so let me just, I read one more poem from Desire here,
Granting us a life that rebegins. Once we thought a pardon could wipe clean, all might be forgiven. All our sins. Ruthlessly in cyberspace they glean any breach or blunder that can taunt us and keep our misdeeds evergreen. Norms that youth's exuberance will flaunt, Images unwisely some may post, Every indiscretion comes to haunt.
Searches place all scandals uppermost, Rubbing in whatever mistakes made. So our pasts remain a tethered ghost, while in secret privacies betrayed, openly available on sites, credit ratings, debts, the fines we've paid, nothing is absolved, all stored in bytes, no clean slate, no chance of amnesty, no infringement, mercy underwrites, each transgression there for all to see.
Damned to internet eternity.
Evan Rosa: It's fascinating how the pandemic pushed so many of us into this digital space, which is such an unforgiving digital space. The line that really sticks out to me, I think the most of the moment is our pasts remain a tethered ghost, that kind of haunting, you know, that, that is just sort of following you around, tethered to us.
That's not the kind of dealing that I imagine. That's a good image of not being able to deal with that past, to understand it in any kind of way that adds to our flourishing now. It's a kind of awful by product and consequence of, as you say, being damned to the eternity of the internet. You know, I've heard Miroslav Volf recently even point out once again, like just the sense in which our culture is, is it's simply.
A culture of unforgiveness. I do want to, before we go to the final section, I, I, I can't help, but, but just coming back to one of the things that I'm interested in about this project is the way that it's, yes, you describe it as this moment where you as a poet, we're just trying to use the medium you knew and loved best words to deal with an external reality that was impacting the world.
You, you do this wonderful job of, of synthesizing these other historical elements. And I just want to appreciate that about the way you have done poetry, the way that you have, have done this very synthetic work. I think it's very clear in the five quintets, of course, but I think all, all over your body of work, that's a gift to, to this particular moment.
And that's part of what it is to deal with these kinds of realities is to understand things. in the context of the whole. So one, thank you for that. But two, the first poem in this section, I just need to bring us back to it because I think it hits on the sort of primordial sins of idolatry and certainty, right?
The, and so it's a moment where you are back in the habitat, right? Like we're back in the habitat, we're back to the creation but what comes, you know, the, like the fall that comes after that mandate is. Is this temptation to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and that knowledge, that certainty, that temptation toward certainty.
I think I would love to, I mean, if it's okay with you to have you read that just to kind of help place a little bit more of that theological and moral context for us.
Micheal O'Siadhail: When the serpent came and tempted Eve, Had she ever seen a spring come twice? Did she along with Adam not believe, even in creation's paradise, seasons would return if they could trust? In what's patterned and yet not precise, freeing things to change and readjust, let sap improvise when each tree shed.
Instead they're overcome with lust for control, predicting what's ahead. They devour the apple, sure they'll see, everything that their creator said only was so, they'd not own the tree. His omniscience, his last defense, Satan baited them with eternity. Would they not outdo God's opulence? Knowledge is the fruit that might enthrall.
Hold in check the riskful future tense. Tragedy of that one apple's fall. Our first garden's greed to know it all.
Evan Rosa: It says a lot. It says more than I could, I could sum up or ask you to sum up. And yet it's this kind of moment and it's, it's a sort of, we talk about the past being tethered to us like a ghost, this one remains tethered and so much more so in the, in the wake of not just the industrial, but now this like technical revolution, new technological revolution, a digital revolution, and now an AI revolution where, where the question of, of, of our humanity is, is there.
and an understanding of what makes us human and this desire for knowledge. I come, let's come back to that desire. Why? Why do we desire to know it all like that? It's really that primordial idolatry.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Yes. I mean, knowledge in itself, seeking knowledge can be a very prayerful thing. It's the, I think it's the seeking of knowledge as control is the Nobel version in some ways, is wanting to be in charge of the future and not trusting to the God of surprises.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I mean, It's not easy to trust the god of surprises. No,
Micheal O'Siadhail: no, it's sometimes very, very hard.
Evan Rosa: You have taken us now from a poetic chronology of the pandemic back to our habitat, all the way into the kind of inner workings of screen technology, capitalism, consumerism, and yet now we, we land here in this final section.
at the question of desire again.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Yes, well, it's been building up towards this throughout the book because I've asked the question a couple of times, what do we desire? And I think that, you know, relearning humility, realizing that a parasitic pathogen can spread across the globe and wreak havoc as it did, brings us to the question again of the sacred.
Dare we speak of a God who is worthy Worthy of all our desire, that we as creatures might want with all of our heart, all of our mind, to contemplate. Should anything less deserve our desiring, really? Clearly, there's a hierarchy of desire, but what is our overarching desire? Can we gamble on reimagining the wonder of a capacious God of endless surprises?
Evan Rosa: Yeah, I mean, you end the section with two of my favorite poems from this entire collection, numbers 24 and 25. Perhaps we could just give them both a go.
Micheal O'Siadhail: What on earth now matters most of all? What is worth the sum of striving hearts? We who bear the flaws of Adam's fall. Even as we play or walk on parts, no advances come in fits and starts, all imperfect, never quite entire, yet a world that's shaped by our desire. Sores of centuries still haunt us now.
Worlds of us and them were power obsessed. In our long unhearing, we allow others different cries to be suppressed, as in greed and We foul the global nest. Poor and broken we have left behind. History lists the blindfolds of our mind. Can we love the world in all its breadth? Difference embraced, not just allowed, means we all can sound each other's depth.
Past missteps now openly avowed. Our desire a world of which we're proud. yale. edu. Poised between our thanks and hope's rebirth, as in heaven, so we dream on earth.
Evan Rosa: And I'll pause you just to say this, this kind of dreaming language that, that is this allusion to the Lord's prayer on earth as it is in heaven, but thinking of it as a dream and, and, and allowing ourselves to kind of see our dreams as our hopes and wishes.
Our desire, desiring heaven on earth. It's, it's evocative and it's beautiful.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Yes, it comes into this final one as well, a second time it's reinforced.
Our dream is drawn far further than we yearn, Dazzled more than we could ever hope. Our desire outpaced at every turn, With such lavishness we barely cope. Hauled by boundless height and depth and scope, In our longing we can never tire. So desirable, What we desire, maker and creation not discreet. Earth and heaven somehow intertwined.
If inspired God's want and ours both meet, such desire and ours will be. Once they're aligned, grant us insights to that copious mind, so each day creation re begun, all desire and will converge in one. Anywhere out of a heaven's blue, when besotted by joy's radiance, all the world is new, forever new, glory glimpsed in one astounding glance, love's free lancing we have caught by chance.
Taken by surprise, we double take. We desire our God for God's own sake.
Evan Rosa: You're really coming to the, the core desire that it seems like you are recommending from this sort of theological moral perspective that it's a kind of retraining of desire to see and, and, and truly want God. And that would be a kind of reordering. When you say reassessing, and when, when you're asking that question of what's worthy of our desire, what's worth wanting, this would be that kind of footing to, to, to do that reorientation.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Yes, I, I hope so. I mean, that is the thrust of the book is moving towards that hope to, that we might be able to reeducate our desire. I, of course, have an epilogue, and just as the epigraph prefigures the themes of the book, this book, Desire, the epilogue is a kind of recapitulation of the central theme.
It connects me, too, of course, with the previous book of mine, The Five Quintets, which you mentioned and which we discussed on, on these podcasts. I expressly allude to it and its covering of science and the arts and economics and politics. It also suggests the love spoken of in John's Gospel. Might break chains of avarice and move our hearts to glory in a creator.
Where to now? We know we can't return to old greeds that play with nature's fire. Never such an urgent need to learn how to shape our world with new desire. Science, arts, or purse and politics, history and hope quintets express, Yet this mesh of faults we need to fix, Vision is best tested under stress.
Though new desire may drive new human care, Yet we work to find the way and will, Moves to hasten overdue repair, We must be creation's menders still. No long fingered decades now to waste. In our world, so one and interlaced, In a reckless world which greeds destroy, How we shape desire, now make or break.
Will we trust fulfillment in God's joy? All creation loved for love's own sake. Joy that is before and after time is already here and now, if we in our desire can shift greed's paradigm. So the love with which you have loved me, May now be in them and I in them. Millennia in turn will pass and still from this farewell prayer all future stem.
Every choice we make for good or ill. Trust in how both heaven and earth conspire. Glories in one ultimate desire.
Evan Rosa: What is so beautiful about the way that desire ends is, is the oneness, is the kind of unity. that you're calling for. And what's fascinating about it is, is this idea that if we did reorient our desires around a kind of, as you say, love for love's sake, a desire for God, for God's sake, it, it would draw us together and would do that kind of Re knitting, kind of both exposing the ways that we are in fact already one and interlaced as you say, but doing that kind of mending work, that, that healing work, that response to a pandemic and that a response to ecological disasters and a response to capitalism and the disorienting, exploitative, and destructive elements of all these things.
There's still this vision to come together in unity. I wonder if you'd comment on that to close us out.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Well, yes, it is, I hope, dealing with, uh, and I'm thinking particularly of, you know, I mean, it's not a global condemnation of capitalism, but rather an awareness of surveillance capitalism and how that is, in particular, is, uh, stimulating our Ghost desires is what I call them.
I hope there's a oneness both in this book desire and in the way it comes together with the, with the causes of COVID and what's stimulating these causes. And finally, what might break this vicious circle of greed, basically, which is causing the destruction. And I can see no other way, but by transcending ourselves and transcending ourselves.
in, in humility and the acknowledgement of being caretakers of a creation. And I would hope that this in turn is connected with love, love between us for love's sake. And only that I think this wanting to use a phrase, um, which Levertov, the poet, uh, uses this wanting is, is to my, to my mind, the only hope that we have of creating a world more livable and.
Retaining our humanity in the light of creation.
Evan Rosa: Micheal, thank you so much for writing this text, for doing that work of processing. Something that we all went through and that we're all still learning to deal with. But thank you for giving us that orienting and grounding and wanting kind of work.
Micheal O'Siadhail: Thank you, and thank you for your interest in the book.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured poet Micheal O'Siadhail, production assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu, where you can find our past episodes, articles, books, and other educational resources to help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If this is your first time listening to the show, welcome friend, and remember to hit subscribe in your favorite podcast app. And if you are a long time listener, but you haven't given us a review yet, we would love if you would head over to Apple Podcasts and tell us how we're doing.
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