The Cosmic Library

Different belief systems—and just differences in general—collide and merge in Journey to the West, the classic Chinese novel at the center of this season. “In Dungeons & Dragons terminology, you’ve got this lawful good monk and then you have this chaotic good monkey,” says Kaiser Kuo (co-founder of China's first heavy metal band and host of the Sinica Podcast) in this episode. And their quest succeeds: the combination of the monk Tripitaka's lawfulness and the Monkey King's chaos works out. That intertwinement of differences shapes Journey to the West, on multiple levels. It’s about a quest for Buddhist texts, but Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, makes his way through Daoist self-cultivation and Confucian thinking, too. The divine realm includes Daoist deities such as the Jade Emperor, but it’s also a Buddhist realm, including the Buddha and Guanyin. There’s a playful engagement with everything here, and the translator Julia Lovell explains the world behind that kind of expansive interaction with various traditions: The novel sprang from a much older set of legends about a real historical character who lived around 600–664 CE as a subject of the Tang empire in China. Now the Tang is one of the great eras of Chinese imperial expansion, when the empire extends from the edge of Persia in the northwest to the frontier with modern Korea in the northeast. Taizong, the emperor on the throne in Tripitaka’s time—he’s the character who in the novel dispatches Tripitaka off to India to fetch the sutras—Taizong is the vigorous, ruthless ruler who pushes the frontiers of his empire out so far.  And in the decades that follow this, the Tang empire is awash with cosmopolitan products and ideas. And still today in China, the Tang is celebrated as this period of phenomenal cosmopolitan flourishing of the empire and ideas throughout China. In this episode, we think about how a wild novel gave that cosmopolitan attitude a new narrative life. Guests in this episode include Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast; Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia; and Xiaofei Tian, scholar of literature at Harvard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Cosmic Library is back, with a five-episode season on Journey to the West, the classic 16th-century Chinese novel of comic mischief, spirituality, bureaucratic maneuvers, and superpowered fight scenes. It’s the story of a monk’s journey west for Buddhist texts, and that journey is moved along by the rambunctious Monkey King, whose interests include troublemaking and the pursuit of immortality. In film, television, comic books, videogames, and elsewhere, this book remains in pop culture; for example, its story is woven into the new Disney+ streaming series American Born Chinese (based on a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang). And it’s also the right book to include on The Cosmic Library shelf alongside Finnegans Wake, 1,001 Nights, and the Hebrew Bible—it’s full of transformations, dream-like scenes, and surprising complications.  This season, we’ll hear readings from the book and talk about Buddhism, Daoism, cinema, comedy, and more. There’s a lot here. Journey to the West continually jolts the reader toward some joke, spiritual consideration, or satirical deflation of such considerations. Gene Luen Yang has described, in his foreword to Julia Lovell’s recent translation of Journey to the West, how tales of the Monkey King worked in his childhood as bedtime stories. And in this season of The Cosmic Library, you’ll hear how it’s the kind of book to read into the night, into the dream-like realm where categories blur, where thoughts and moods shift continually.  Guests this season will include Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston— she’s now working on a biography of Disney legend Tyrus Wong; D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia; and Xiaofei Tian, scholar of literature at Harvard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights; season three, the Hebrew Bible. This spring, in a season titled "The Hall of the Monkey King," we're talking and thinking about Journey to the West, the fantastical Chinese novel full of action and comedy and spiritual adventure. Guests for season four will include Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston; Xiaofei Tian, scholar of literature at Harvard; and D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia. The five episodes will come out weekly, starting in late spring of 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's not just the contradictions in the Hebrew Bible that puzzle and provoke readers—there are, throughout, passages of intense emotional or moral provocation. See, for instance, Ecclesiastes, which in the King James translation begins: Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. Ecclesiastes challenges familiar notions of what life is about, notions of meaning or usefulness. You have to respond to something like that. You have to think of your own answer to the book that declares: "There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after." Poetry often poses such challenges that can't be easily explained or resolved, but in return, these challenges might activate the mind. The poet and critic Elisa Gabbert says, "When I'm reading or when I'm writing, I'm just thinking better than I am at any other time."  The Hebrew Bible prompts you to figure things out on your own, with particular attention to language. As Peter Cole says: "At the very heart of this text, what do you have? You've got this ultimate transparency and ultimate opacity, which is the name of God, the four-letter name of God, which is unpronounceable, and no one really knows what it means." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the book of Genesis on, the Hebrew Bible presents a struggle with language: a struggle to establish meaning, to figure out the right uses of words, to understand one's place in the world. The famous early scene of struggle in the Hebrew Bible, Jacob's wrestling match with the divine, goes as follows in the King James translation:  Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. And he said unto him, What is thy name?  As Peter Cole says, "The release from that one struggle, and the blessing, only comes with a knowledge of names." Even this physical wrestling match becomes a matter of language, then. Struggles with outright disaster generate language quests, too. Elisa Gabbert elaborates on disaster poetry in this episode, especially on the subject of W.H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts." She says: "It reminds you how much text there is in a poem. It's wild." And she describes a proliferating kind of irony that radiates possibilities in so many directions, to which poetry might grant access. Find more from Elisa Gabbert on Auden’s poem here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/06/books/auden-musee-des-beaux-arts.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stuck in a lonely motel room, you have a good chance of finding a Bible, left for anyone similarly stuck in a strange interval between days. In this way, it’s yet another night book. The Bible also has famous night scenes, and dream scenes, too: Jacob's dream of angels, Joseph's dream of sheaves of wheat. So this chapter of “Mosaic Mosaic” explores dream interpretation and that foundational dream-interpreter Sigmund Freud, himself a close reader of the Hebrew Bible. "Literature guides Freud's thinking all the way through," says Tom DeRose of the Freud Museum in London. And one effect of reading such a literary doctor is a literary, tragic awareness—what DeRose describes as awareness that every effort to "bring things to a better place will inherently contain its own destructiveness within it."  Other tensions between contraries exist within the dreams and dream-like passages of the Hebrew Bible. The novelist Joshua Cohen calls the dreams in the Bible "highly demonstrative and overly obvious." He says that "the dreams that are presented are so clear,” which suggests "a way of taming dream space, denying dream space its wildness." On the other hand, the poet Peter Cole finds something like that wildness in the Bible, finds "that porousness of consciousness where the boundary of self is blurred." And so, somehow encountering both blurred boundaries and demonstrative clarity, we’re thinking in this episode of what interpretation can make of it all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“We regulate each other’s nervous systems,” says the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett in this chapter of “Mosaic Mosaic.” “We are the caretakers of each other’s nervous systems.” So feeling—and thinking—and the regulations of law join together; the idea that laws exist apart from our nervous systems, our feelings, doesn’t quite work, in this sense. The poet Peter Cole here describes an emotional state associated with the language of rules and ritual in the Hebrew Bible, and in Leviticus particularly. He says, “I was just totally spellbound by the choreography of sacrifice.” And the novelist Joshua Cohen speaks of living law, a kind of vital legal system that emanates beyond the Torah, through commentary and debates ever after. Laws, rules, rituals: these, you’ll hear, are all alive with feeling. “Regulation doesn’t mean damping down,” Lisa Feldman Barrett says. “It just means coordinating and making something happen.” Poet and critic Elisa Gabbert describes poetry as “a vibration,” which in a way might match the nervous-system correspondence described by Lisa Feldman Barrett. In literature as in legal regulation, we learn in this chapter, language coordinates responses, and it participates in the merging of thought with emotion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This season, we're rambling through and beyond a book sacred in multiple traditions, a book that keeps generating debate and commentary and tangents. It's the Hebrew Bible, home to Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his Ark, David and Goliath, and prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel. Here, in a season we're calling "Mosaic Mosaic," it especially prompts conversations about the mysteries of thought and language. The novelist Joshua Cohen explains in this episode that the Hebrew Bible poses fundamental questions about language. As he puts it: "Why are there letters, actually? Why do the letters form words? This is the most basic question of the Bible." There, language makes things happen on a grand scale. God creates the world by language, by declarations: "let there be light"—Cohen mentions the idea that "one could create life through the combination of letters." And in the Bible, after Adam comes to life, he gives names to things and thereby begins exploration of the world by language. Here's Robert Alter's translation of that scene in Genesis:  And the LORD God fashioned from the soil each beast of the field and each fowl of the heavens and brought each to the human to see what he would call it, and whatever the human called a living creature, that was its name.  The poet, translator, and MacArthur genius Peter Cole speaks of "the burden of the Bible," which he calls a "pain in the desk chair"; yet he adds that "everything is somehow in it, but only if you use it as a tool for reflection, or a prism, so that both you and the world end up in its pages somehow, refracted by the text." The written word can align past and present, or antiquity with you, the contemporary reader, and some sort of harmony might occasionally result. (Elisa Gabbert, speaking of poetry generally, describes in this show the experience of encountering a text that "feels like how you're feeling.") At the end of our last season, on 1,001 Nights, radio host Hearty White recounted this realization: "When you're talking about Bible stories, you're not talking about Bible stories at all. It's an excuse to talk about other things. It's just a jumping off point." Along those lines: this season, we're starting with the Bible and jumping into explorations of language, the mind, emotions, and more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights. Season three, titled Mosaic Mosaic and premiering on April 11, journeys through and beyond the Hebrew Bible.  Guests for season three include: Peter Cole, the poet and MacArthur genius whose new book Draw Me After will be out this fall; Elisa Gabbert, poet and poetry columnist with the New York Times–her latest book is Normal Distance; Lisa Feldman Barrett, psychologist, neuroscientist, and author of books including How Emotions Are Made; Tom DeRose, curator at the Freud Museum in London; and Joshua Cohen, the novelist whose books include Book of Numbers.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1,001 Nights begins in horror: a king threatens to kill, and Shahrazad tells stories to keep the king from doing so. The ongoing nature of the stories, then, relies on a drive to live, manifesting the basic connection between our intuitive selves and imagination. When stories really survive, there’s more to them than repetitive cliffhangers or excessively elaborated detail—something more than escapist entertainment, even if that’s there, too. Hearty White says in this episode, “I don’t care for the movies that are in mythical places. They’re ‘world-creating’? They’re world-limiting. Every time they add another character, another detail, they’re shutting off possibilities, they’re not creating them.” He describes, too, the films and TV shows to which he’s drawn, movies “where I’m shown something and go, ‘Why isn’t the camera moving? I’m getting a little uncomfortable, what am I supposed to look at? What’s my role now?’ Now you’re very conscious of the fact that you’re observing—you’re not on autopilot.” So a vital possibility glows in stories that sustain your questioning, again and again and again. Katy Waldman describes how episodic stories can work by producing more of the same-but-not-the-same. We call it “now-what fiction” in this episode, a kind of story in which there’s “a mix of something enduring and going on and something . . . completely new and different.” In short: these are stories in which something persists or survives, inviting your questions continually, even if those questions are simply “now what?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 1,001 Nights are full of patterns; the stories have formulas, and this too anticipates the world of television, comic books, video games. Yasmine Seale, translator of the Nights, says in this episode, “Formula is essential to the work. It draws it force from accumulation. It draws its meaning from pattern.” But formulaic narrative doesn’t necessarily mean mind-numbing sameness. It can mean the opposite. Hearty White, the host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU, talks in this episode about watching formulaic Three Stooges episodes, which don’t limit the viewer’s imagination. Instead, you get the sense that an artist like Hearty White is liberated by the formulaic, finds a field in which to play and invent within clichés or patterns. He says in this episode, of formulaic story: “I think what it does is, it frees you from the involuntary compulsive predicting that you have to do when you’re navigating your life. Maybe because the same thing is happening all the time you don’t have to guess.” For Katy Waldman, critic at The New Yorker, stories that serially, repeatedly suggest infinity also work with the sense that “things might end . . . but something will persist. And what on earth will that look like?” She describes a dystopian version of the liberating experience Hearty White finds in ongoing, repetitious story. Still, in either case, attention is repeatedly compelled to something beyond repetitions. We are, once more, in the world of night and the dreams that surpass the night. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The House of Wisdom was a center of learning in Baghdad of the Abbasid caliphate. Established in the eighth century, it sustained a golden age of science that coincided with the collection of early versions of the 1,001 Nights. In this episode, we hear about the science of the Nights, the science of the Abbasid age, and the history, more broadly, of science fiction. A similar exchange from culture to culture, language to language, made possible the scientific advances of this time and 1,001 Nights. The very frame narrative of Shahrazad is a Persian story, and leading figures associated with Baghdad’s House of Wisdom were Persian, as well. In this episode, Jim Al-Khalili, author of a book on the House of Wisdom, describes two Persian thinkers, Ibn Sina and al-Biruni: Both these guys were philosophers, scientists, polymaths—and they were having the sorts of debates about the nature of reality that would not seem out of place in modern physics . . . debating about: how does the light from the sun reach the Earth as it travels through space, are there many worlds, are there parallel universes? Stuff that you’d think, “How could they possibly be talking about that?” I just get the feeling that we didn’t invent cleverness in modern times. The Nights and scientific work have more in common than speculative thinking and reliance on cross-cultural communication, too. Both depend on ceaselessly driving toward something yet to be fully grasped—either through repetitive experiments or repetitive storytelling. Maybe it was inevitable, then, that the Nights would have a major part in the history of science fiction. You’ll hear in this episode how magnetism was a scientific preoccupation that became a source of adventure within the Nights—specifically, within the stories of “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,” which also contain a link to a later monument of science fiction: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You know Shahrazad, who tells a story every night in order to survive and save lives; you also know the collection of stories that results: 1,001 Nights. At least, you've felt the influence of those stories. On TV, in books, in comics—you’ve experienced things informed by the episodic narratives of Shahrazad. And in this season of The Cosmic Library, you’ll hear how the Nights opened paths to infinite story possibility within repetitive constraints. Even as the threat of death looms over Shahrazad in the Nights, her narrative inventions promise something that exceeds the power of a tyrant. And so, in this season (as in the last one, which was about Finnegans Wake) we’re once again talking about a night book that takes you beyond the night. Along the way, we’re hearing of a historical golden age, The Three Stooges, the art of literary survival, and possible worlds that emanate from even the worst situations. Such imaginative survival entails changes, some of which are well known: Shahrazad is familiar to many readers as Scheherazade, a transliteration that resulted from translation after translation, and alteration after alteration, across cultures. Yasmine Seale, translator of 1,001 Nights and guest on this season, writes to The Cosmic Library, “I like Shahrazad because it makes clear the name’s Persian origins. There are different theories about its etymology. One sees it as shahr, city, and the suffix zad, born. A child of the city. Shahrazad is an urban figure—worldly, streetwise, unshockable. The stories were about merchants and for merchants.” Meanwhile, the Scheherazade spelling, Seale writes, “is a bit of a monster. The ‘Sch’ smells German, the final ‘e’ is French. English puts the stress on a syllable which is silent in Persian and Arabic. It’s a spelling that tells us more about the various European readings and misreadings of the text, its many messy afterlives, than about the work itself.” This season thinks about classic stories that have had over-brimming afterlives through readings and misreadings, stories that have always suggested infinitely branching ideas, possibilities, and questions. Guests this season include a maker of fiction, a New Yorker critic, a theoretical physicist, a translator of the Nights, and a literary scholar. If our first volume, “Finnegan and Friends,” found creative revitalization in Finnegans Wake's evocation of night, let this second volume, “The Worlds of Scheherazade,” reveal the potential Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some of Finnegans Wake’s canniest readers, like guest Olwen Fouéré, don’t read the whole thing. That makes sense, too, considering that the book is itself incomplete: the last line doesn’t end, has no period. You’re left with a book that cannot conclude itself, that avoids coherence. So what are all these words doing, if not communicating? In part, they’re making music. They’re an experiment with language’s sounds. Joyce obsessed over such sounds, including the sound linkages that connect meanings in ways impossible to track consistently. The scholar Joseph Nugent says in this episode, “Joyce does things very frequently for the fun of it, or because of some coincidence that was inside his own head that the rest of us have no access to whatsoever. We give up after a while imagining that we’re going to make entire sense of this book.” Some of the sound connections are easier to make than others, especially when we think of the book’s music. The book alludes often to the song “Finnegan’s Wake,” but it also echoes the song about poor old Michael Finnegan, which has lyrics—“poor old Michael Finnegan, begin again”—about restarting. When you read the book with songs in mind, you can end up noticing glorious constellations that scholars have catalogued for decades. Consider the closing lines, with their patterns of iambs and rhyme and alliteration, their music that carries you along with the rising and falling of waves: "We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the" You, reader or listener, have to figure out where you go from here. But the Wake gives you rhythms and sensations to encourage those next steps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Think of your most obscure, private, family chatter—some combination of baby-talk and nicknames and reiterations of the same concerns or jokes. It wouldn’t make sense to outsiders, but it makes a special kind of sense to you. It’s language that communicates in a highly local way, and not at all in other ways. And yet: everyone sort of knows how this language works. In Finnegans Wake, that private language converges, even, with broadly recognizable mythic language. We’re reading about a family—the patriarch HCE, the mother ALP, the sons Shem and Shaun, and daughter Issy—but they’re all associated with mythic figures: Aesop’s characters (the ant and grasshopper turn into the Shaun-like responsible Ondt and the Shem-like irresponsible Gracehoper), the HCE-like Humpty Dumpty, and, most Irishly, Finn MacCool. The Wake shows us how the super-local is also mythical, shared. Wittgenstein framed the idea of private language as follows: “The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know—to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.” But in the Wake, the most inscrutably private language echoes beyond privacy. The cryptic HCE’s name at one point stands for Here Comes Everybody; characters flow into one another, mix together in their most private moments. Washerwomen gossiping about the private lives of ALP’s family are overcome by the river that is itself tied to ALP, swept up into the mystery rather than ejected from it. The document that supposedly might reveal ALP’s family truth is the “mamafesta,” a manifesto of the mama. Joyce mocks usual methods of interpretation, Freudian and Marxist, of this document. Efforts to interpret that private language create epic resonances, of Greek language and grandiosity, useful in a story about the epic dimensions of everyday characters. You can see some of that here: "that (probably local or personal) variant maggers for the more generally accepted majesty which is but a trifle and yet may quietly amuse: those superciliouslooking crisscrossed Greek ees awkwardlike perched there and here out of date like sick owls hawked back to Athens" The most majestic connection to HCE would be the mythic Finn MacCool, the Irish hero linked to the fallen Finnegan in lines like, “Macool, Macool, orra whyi deed ye diie?” In this episode, the scholar Katherine O’Callaghan describes how HCE’s fall and rise recall the fall of the ancient Irish hero, the fall of “a sort of Finn” and “the old myths of the Fionna, a warrior tribe in Ireland in the first and second centuries, with Finn the leader.” O’Callaghan tells us that in the Wake, we find “the fallen Finn, but the idea of course in Finnegans Wake is that Finn himself might be woken in some way and come back out of his burial site and rise again.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices