Shifting Culture
On Shifting Culture we have conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Hosted by Joshua Johnson, this podcast features long-form conversations with authors, theologians, artists, and cultural thinkers to trace how embodied love, courage, and creative faithfulness offer a culture of real healing and hope.
Shifting Culture
Ep. 451 Scott Cairns - Why Mystery Makes Better Meaning Than Certainty
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In this episode, Scott Cairns talks about certainty and mystery and getting glimpses of the unknowable God. Scott has spent forty years wrestling with, investigating, navigating words to help make meaning in our lives. In this conversation, we talk about words as things rather than labels, about reading a text the way the rabbis did - layer on layer, meaning that never closes - about prayer as communion rather than petition, and about what a culture loses as it stops reading. Underneath it all is a God who is endless, which means the knowing is never fully attained, but it's a beautiful pursuit.
Librettist, essayist, translator, and author of multiple poetry collections, Scott Cairns is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at University of Missouri. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and many other venues, and both have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. He has blogged for the Religion Section of The Huffington Post. His recent poetry books include the recently released Against Certainty (2026), Correspondence with My Greeks (2024), Lacunae (2023), Anaphora (2019), Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems (2015), and Idiot Psalms (2014). His spiritual memoir, Short Trip to the Edge, first appeared from HarperSanFrancisco in 2006, and has been translated into Greek and Romania. His Endless Life (translations and adaptations of Christian mystics, appeared in 2014, and his book-length essay, The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain, was first published in 2009, and has also been translated into Greek. He wrote the libretti for two oratoria, The Martyrdom of Saint Polycarp and A Melancholy Beauty. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014. His current projects include Descent to the Heart, verse adaptations of selections from the homilies of Saint Isaak the Syrian, and a new poetry collection, Ways of Not Knowing.
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Waking in my dark room, I recognize new movement in the air above me, odd and roiling patterns hovering just there in the air above me. I have grown used to this midnight waking and fairly used to this pairing of the colliginous air with the vertiginous answering sense, with which waking thus, my soul responds. Waking many years ago in the dense thickness of our rainforest, I rolled out from my dark tent to step into the night, so as to savor that depth of stillness our rainforest uniquely held for me. Within that stillness, I witnessed a late, answering stillness, pressing low beneath my heart. I heard a voice there murmuring. Tonight, similarly waking, I hear a similar murmuring, voluble if none the less inarticulate. What might I make of such correspondences, troubling both this moment and that rising memory? Darkness no longer frightens, nor does this deep obscurity within both appear now, meet, right, and welcoming?
Joshua Johnson:Hello and welcome to the Shifting Culture podcast, in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host, Joshua Johnson. Our guest today, Scott Cairns. When he's talked to students about words, he told them to look at a window during the day. He says you look through it, you see the yard, the street, whatever is out there. But as the sun goes down and the light shifts, you stop looking through the glass and start looking at it. And what you see is your own face in the middle of everything else. That's what he thinks words are, not pains to see through on the way to some hidden meaning, but surfaces to look at, where you find yourself implicated in what you're reading. It's a strange thing to say in a moment like this one. We can't tell what's real anymore. Things are doctored, they're generated, they're staged, and the instinct is to grab hard for something solid, some claim certain enough to stand on. Well, Scott has spent 40 years writing in the opposite direction. His new collection of poetry is called Against Certainty, and in this conversation, we talk about words as things rather than labels. About what the rabbis knew about prayer as communion rather than petition, about what we lose when we stop reading, and about a God who is endless, which means we are never finished mining the depths of who He is. What if the certainty is the thing in the way? Well, join us as we wrestle with words and meaning making and our way to God. Here is my conversation with Scott Cairns. Scott, welcome to Shifting Culture. So excited to have you on. Thank you so much for joining me.
Scott Cairns:Thank you, Joshua.
Joshua Johnson:This new poetry collection Against Certainty is the culmination of what you've called 40 years of a literary pilgrimage, what are these poems getting at as you're you're pulling these these things together? What is this pilgrimage, this literary pilgrimage for you?
Scott Cairns:Well, it's it's not like the poems in the book were written over 40 years, but but I've been writing this way for about 40 years, and this way is writing not to express. I don't think of poetry as expression so much as as pursuit. I write to find out what I can glimpse. I pour over words. I pour over language to do that. I don't think it's an accident. Say that we speak of Christ as the Word, and and that what I'm talking about is approaching the Word through language, through words, coming to terms, literally with who I perceive that to be, and what our relationship is. So I pour over scriptures. I pour over patristic texts. I pour over poetry. I and then I responsively, I guess, come to terms of my own from poem to poem that wrestle with what I glimpse in those other texts. You.
Joshua Johnson:Talked about it being a pursuit, any good work of arts, any language that we're trying to to pursue opens doors rather than shuts them with certitude or certainty, and it opens a door to meaning making something that we can start to actually move towards the unknown, or or or a question. How do you work at that through through language? How do you open doors and not just say,"This is it.
Scott Cairns:You know, there are a couple flavors of understanding about what words are in the first place, and I think a lot of folks approach poetry in particular, and certainly most people approach scripture texts as if there were a single thing hiding behind the words, and we and we go through the words somehow to get at that thing, that utterance, that is, in some you know, some people perceive to be disguised by the text or obscured by the text. Another way to look at words is not as, and so when you look at words that way, they're transparencies you're trying to see through. I think a more useful way to look at words is as opacities. They are not to be moved through. They are to be addressed, to examined, poured over. And and what you notice, I used I used to use this analogy in my classes with my students who weren't quite getting what I was after about the difference between transparency and opacity, and I'd say, "Well, look at the window, and if it were daytime, of course you could see, you could see through the window, and you see what's out there. And it says, "You know, and then I'd say, "You know, if we were in here this afternoon, as the sun went down, and it darkened outside, we would be looking less and less through the window, and more and more at the window, as the light in here turned the window into something of a mirror. So, what we would also perceive through our looking, we would see ourselves implicated in what we see, our reflections. I think that's the most efficacious way to approach language, poetic language, scriptural language. You see, it deduces from you a better apprehension of who you are, as well as how you relate to what you're reading. So the analogy works pretty well, maybe up to a point, but because at a certain point, you're in the analogy. Of course, all you're seeing is yourself. That's not what we want. What we want is this sort of twilight time when we see something, but we also we ourselves are implicated, as I say, implicated in what we see
Joshua Johnson:with language and and poetry and even spiritual writing about the spiritual life and about God, what does that do for this? The opacity aspect is that does that make good spiritual writing? That then it can influence what we see in ourselves. It could reflect back what I see, instead of trying to say God is this, this, this, and this, what does the good spiritual writing do for us? It helps us to
Scott Cairns:suppose what God is and and and how He is revealed in the text. You know, I'm thinking about this word. Our word education comes from it's it's a form of idus. We you know when when you're educated, it's not like someone takes a truck, a load of stuff, and dumps it into your brain. That's not education. Education is if you look at the word edus, it's a matter of drawing from you what's in you. The God is in you, a baptized person has the God in that person, and I suppose what is being adduced is a is by this engagement with language and this wrestling with language and this coming to terms is is a glimpse of something that hadn't been apprehended yet about that God in inside us, and so I I think that I'd say it's a way of knowing, but you know you don't really know because to know God would stipulate that God is knowable in its in God's entirety, which is not the case. God is endless and goes on forever, and we, as we become more like God, we we apprehend how much that is, and so the journey of Theosis becoming Christ-like doesn't end, even within the even in the next life it. God is endless, inexhaustible, and we move as Saint Gregory Nissa says from glory to glory. But that doesn't end; that goes on. That's the vertiginous beauty of the faith that just makes me happy as can be. But I write just I write to glimpse a little more of that each time.
Joshua Johnson:There's a big culture and a cultural aspect of we want knowledge, and we think that that knowledge and certainty of the knowledge is going to create safety for us. And I think one of the reasons why we are unstable at the moment culturally is that because we have so much information coming at us, we have not figured out what is true and what is real, and it's a really difficult time for us to live in when we don't know if this is a this is really real. Is this AI? Is this doctored? Is this a right statement? And people don't know how to how to stand. They feel unmoored. How does like entering into a mysterious, unknowable God, can that root us? Can that bore us?
Scott Cairns:The circumstances you you you articulate aren't new. God has always been unknowable, like a mystery, and we have always had to wrestle with what's true and what's not true. I mean, people have been lying to us for centuries. I suppose sometimes we're complicit in the lie, but it it may be a matter of degree that you know the current circumstance may be more profoundly confusing, but but it's always been a chore to discern, and that's what prayer is all about. If you don't have a rule of prayer, if you don't have a a life of prayer, you're very likely to find yourself blown around by the masses of messages, the messaging that comes to you. That's why we read the scriptures. That's why we read the patristic texts that comment on the scriptures, and that's why mostly we have prayer. Prayer is communion. I think the the less we think of prayer as petition, and the more we think of it as communion, the more efficacious our prayer will be in this matter that you discuss this this this kind of life of confusion. You know, one is grounded in one's prayer. One is grounded in the communion with God that prayer avails for
Joshua Johnson:us. You've gone back and talked about the patristic text and the fathers for even in a few different answers here, but you you talk about those.
Unknown:Yeah.
Joshua Johnson:Why is it important for you? What what do those do? I think
Scott Cairns:because you know, as the centuries go by, we are farther and farther away from those people who walked with Christ. I love reading the the works by the very earliest patristic texts are produced by people who actually looked upon Christ and walked with Christ and the Gospels, of course. But I mean, it's one thing to read the scriptures and then try to make something of them from one's own position, but it, I think, one is assisted in making something of those texts by other texts that have by people who have done the same thing. You know, they've been wrestling with all this and come up with different glimpses of how it might mean, and that assists us in our necessarily new wrestling with how it might mean. So I, I think I like the company, the Christian life. The human person is not a Solitary being, we're persons in community. The church is a community, and we we need each other, not just the live ones, but the dead ones, the apparently dead ones. This way of trusting the surround is, you know, trusting the church. The church are those people who precede us? They're the body of Christ. I think G.K. Chesterton spoke about tradition as a democracy in which even the dead get a vote, and I always like that. I want to be aware of their votes as. As we as we grapple with how these things mean, and how and how we should act in response to what we see them their meaning.
Joshua Johnson:If the dead get a vote, and then the global body of Christ gets a vote, what does language do in the different languages that we speak throughout the body of
Unknown:Christ,
Joshua Johnson:how does that get us into I don't know maybe a different knowing of the unknowable or the of the mystery of God and who we are as the people of God with different languages? Do they speak two different things? What does happen when we have different languages speaking to one another.
Scott Cairns:Well, a necessary collaboration happens. I guess we we keep talking in order. If I say something in my language that someone else does, you know, a lot of people in my who speak English don't often know what I'm talking about. But you know, it's just a matter of continuing to talk in the babble of, I guess that's what you're referring to-the babble of all the languages. You know, there are wonderfully, thank God, many people who have multiple languages and they can assist us in helping to communicate with one another. I also think that English is a really wonderful language for writing poetry because it's comprised of so many languages. You know, it really is. I mean, America may no longer be well. It's becoming less and less of the melting pot that you know we aspire to. But but our language is genuine melting pot of languages. Our English words are haunted by other other languages words, and the more we can glimpse those suggestiveness, the the more interesting our own poems become. Because we they are they are haunted by other kind of connotations and implications, suggestions. I love language, and I pour over it all the time. That's what I do. I don't have a lot of other language. I, you know, I can deal with German, and I can deal with Spanish, and I can deal a little Italian, and I'm getting better at Greek. I wish I had pursued the Hebrew that I started to pursue, but that was one bridge too many for my for my mind.
Joshua Johnson:Language learning is not for the faint of heart. It's not an easy thing for for some reason. It's not an easy thing for an American English speaker to go and learn other languages. You know, I I lived in the Middle East for a while, and I learned Arabic.
Scott Cairns:Yeah, you traveled, and quite a bit.
Joshua Johnson:And many people that I I sat with and I ate with speak multiple languages, and you know they they could speak five different languages, and it's just easy for them. And they grow up in these different types of of language. What happens if we don't, especially in English, when there are roots of English in in different languages? What happens if we don't get some of this grasp of other language, even as we're trying to like create and write?
Scott Cairns:Well, we miss a lot. We we miss a lot of even what we say, you know, you know I have a lot of habits of composition when I'm making when I'm working on poems or even you know then they're not the poetry books but other books and other essays etc. My compositional process is to is to write out longhand most often and then look at the words, and kind of interrogate the words for the words hiding in the words. You know, the Latinate or the Greek suggestion is hiding in the word, and to meditate on that as I make more words. And and so the the compositional progress process for me is really, it's an etymological way. You know, I spend a lot of time looking at words and roots of words, and and then constructing something on the page that kind of chimes with all those haunted notes. And hardly any readers bother to notice that, but I get a kick out of it as I make the thing.
Joshua Johnson:Like in your your soul, as you're just playing with words, if you're in the playground of language,
Unknown:yeah,
Joshua Johnson:what does poetry do for you that prose maybe doesn't? Like, what are you trying to do with poetry that you aren't doing in prose? Yeah,
Scott Cairns:well, I think the poetic operation of language happens not just in poetry, but in really good fiction or really good nonfiction. The poetic operation of language is is the thing we've been talking about. It's it's where a word isn't just a name for a thing. You know, I learned this from the rabbis from. Rabbinic genres of biblical engagement, scriptural engagement. The Jews understand words are are not just names for things. They are names for things, but they aren't just names for things. They're also things. They have agency. If we think back to our creation myths, we we realize that you know all that is was languageed into being, and so there's an agency, there's an energy, there's a power in words. Words make things. What I love to pour over, and what I learned from rabbinic texts like Midrashim and pages of Talmud, albeit translated pages of Talmud, is that poring over a scriptural passage, not thinking that. And I talked about this just a minute ago. When you know we're not looking to get through the scriptural passage to some hidden thing, but we're looking at it and we're wrestling with it. We're grappling with what, how can it mean? And you know, one rabbi would, one Darshan, a writer of Midrash, would say,"Well, it might, it might mean this. And then another would say, without negating that, says, "Well, and another interpretation might be, and then says something else. And the Talmud is actually all this layers and layers and layers of, it could mean this, it could mean this, it could mean this, and then and then there are even layers of commentary on the layers of commentary. So it's just like this endless. So Torah expands out to reach all the layerings of commentary. I I just think that's exciting for me. Just that to imagine how, and in a ways, it is an image of the God that we love. Is this endlessness of mean, this expansiveness? It's in some ways a figure for the God we're pursuing, who has pursued us and found us and joined us.
Joshua Johnson:For me, it's inspiring to say, okay, maybe maybe words on a page can actually do that. I know so many words on a page are flat. Like, so how do we get to a place where words aren't flat, but there is a depth of meaning that is is almost endless on the bottom. Like, what makes it not flat?
Scott Cairns:A tilt of the head, maybe. I don't know that we can blame the flatness always on the text itself. I mean, some texts are-it's just absolutely utilitarian. We're kind of-I mean, this is not a bad thing. It's-it's great that when you know Christmas Eve you're trying to put together the bicycle for your kid, that there's an instruction manual that tells you how to do that, and there is a one-to-one correspondence between these words and this thing-that's that's that's very useful. But but I think most of the sorts of texts we're talking about, you know, ideas, words, texts that are about ideas and about trying to know more and see more and apprehend God's nearness more profoundly. I mean, these are. It might not be the text that's not doing that. It's just maybe be the way we're looking at the text that isn't allowing that. Any text can be made richer by our attending to what it's actually saying or what it might what it suggests. I think it may be a a subjective tilting of the head, as I say. You you look at it differently. If it looked flat from this angle, think of look at the word word by word through there, and think of all the words hiding in those words. And it could be more there than it seems to be at glance, but you know, I'm I'm not going to disagree with you that some texts are flat, but that's what poets are for-is make them richer.
Joshua Johnson:That's right. So, what do we do as readers? Like, as we enter into a text, what makes it for a for a good reader, a rich reader of a text,
Scott Cairns:having read, I think the longer you read, the more deeply you read, the more widely you read, the better reader and the more pleased reader you'll be because the text isn't hiding something. We're not really we don't really care what the author says or author thinks. What we what we care about is what we can make of this thing that's in front of us, and what we do when we are in that activity of making meaning with a text, we're bringing to bear upon that text all the other texts we hold, all the other experiences we hold. Just text textual experience, but all that we are, which includes the texts we've read, comes to bear upon that page, and and we we we should feel free. In fact, we should feel obliged to make bring all that to bear upon the page. So, you're asking what makes a good reader? Well, a reader who doesn't stop reading, you know, a one who keeps reading and keeps acquiring, and so that when you see this phrase turn up that you read somewhere back here in this text, suddenly a lot of that text comes to inform more than just that phrase. All all of what you had read before participates in what you're reading now, and so it's not a short journey to move from being a an okay reader to being a great reader, but it's doable. It just takes time, and it takes energy, and it takes a a love of a love of reading and a love of a love of the mystery behind the read the text.
Joshua Johnson:I mean, an article came out in the Atlantic this month about how America is not literate; that's post literate. There's a couple of books coming out this fall about the post literate communities, basically the fall of reading. As we become in America, at least a society that reads less, what do you think that we lose, or do we lose anything when we become more of a oral culture and less of a literate culture.
Scott Cairns:I was prepared to say to answer one way, then when you said become an oral culture, I thought, well, I'm going to have to answer a different way because because that yeah, it's still language and it's still evocative and it's still it obliges our drawing upon other ways we've heard those words. You know, it's still a thing. I I think the the lack of or the diminishment of literacy, I don't think is as. I mean, it's always been an issue. There's always been well read people versus not so well read people. We all get to vote. I think what happens is we get dumber and dumber, and we we lose our historical sense. We vote we vote badly because we fail to appreciate the historical contexts that inform our moment. I mean, there are a lot of dangers involved in becoming a non-literate culture. I think those dangers have always been there to some degree, maybe more acutely now, but yeah, there's some there's some risk involved in not knowing your history, or not knowing history, or lying about your history, or erasing, redacting your history. I mean, there there are a lot of things that can go wrong by not reading, and not reading deeply, and not reading widely, but you know, it's been gone wrong off and on. And then, fortunately, those of us who have an historical sense aren't panicking so much as those of us who might not, because we we know that this is not the first time such subterfuge has been undertaken by people in power,
Joshua Johnson:that is true. But if we come to the the Bible or the the Hebrew text, a lot of that was oral tradition passed down until it was written down, right? And so these stories were were told, and so we have some oral tradition within the tradition of the Bible, and when you said
Scott Cairns:oral, that's when I had to rewrite my answer because I thought, well, that's a great tradition as long as it is a tradition. You see, as long as they do continue to tell the stories and retain the stories and repeat the stories and enhance the stories, then it's a it's a viable vital tradition, but if if it becomes just a matter of repetition, not so good. See what I love about literary tradition is it's a long, it's a conversation that's been going, and it began with an oral conversation, and then became redacted into textual conversation, but it's still a conversation, and you receive what comes before you. You ingest it, you make with it, and then you add to the conversation. That's a beautiful thing, and that's culture. That's what culture is. You receive. You receive what you inherit. A great riches, and rather than burying them or investing unwisely, you're the good steward who makes something with it, receives the the talents, and produces more talents. I don't know. This is a new thing, but but I I love how you know you you took us back to the oral tradition, and of course our our scriptures began as oral our literature with I mean, what's the what's the big box office today? Marsha and I are going to go see it tomorrow. We're going to go to the Odyssey tomorrow, and I can't wait, but I I love that book. I I think they're using a different translate. I noticed they're using a different translation, but it's still a great story told. Even the new even new translation is is again engaging in the conversation. You know, it's the same original text that was redacted into Greek, Homeric Greek, and then centuries of people have been translating that into many languages, and it's it's that's the conversation. And what I'm talking about when I'm talking about literary tradition is, it's that going in all kinds of directions. It's just this exciting expansiveness of language and ideation that makes me happy to still be alive and kicking.
Joshua Johnson:Something like the Odyssey, where it is-it's like song and poetry coupled with story, and it feels like you know, as we are storied creatures, we're narrative beings that we need a story to be able to live inside to create meaning for our lives and have coherence and purpose to move forward. What do you think that even in the midst of like narrative of scripture, as as we see the story of of the people of God, we see the story of Christ, but then we have the interspersal nature of poetry that's commenting on the unknowing, the mystery of of God, and trying to make sense of these things within narrative and story. What then is the purpose of poetry as we are creating meaning and purpose in our lives.
Scott Cairns:I may misunderstand because
Joshua Johnson:because you have both. There there can be story within poetry, but when I think of poetry, I think of something. What you're trying to do is, I mean, I'm I'm just drawing circles on this page when you're talking about getting to the depths and underneath of trying to get underneath the thing, it feels like it's a it's a depth that the story hasn't gotten to yet. But there is a depth of of poetry. Is there something that that that depth of trying to parse language into something that is unknowable, that can do for us as we live into the story of God.
Scott Cairns:Well, I guess it keeps us actively engaged in creating the future. So yeah, I don't think the future is written. I, you know, I think we're obliged to participate in shaping it. I mean, that's what we're called to do. Even back when I was a Presbyterian, how did we talk about it? We talked about in terms of assisting in the reconciliation of the world. Yeah, that's a beautiful thing, and I I think that that's what we do when we when we make our own poems, when we read our poems, when we engage texts of any sort, with all of our passion and with all our imagination, and with all of our noetic capacity, intuitive, God-driven noetic capacity, then we glimpse more and more and more, and we and we are and we find ourselves wanting to do more and more and more, to assist others into glimpsing, and and that's how we shape a future. That's how we bring a future into being. We're absolutely co-creators in that way with the God who made us creator, who created us as creators. So I find that exhilarating to to take it up and to do with it, and and not to think that the story's written, and we just have to wait for for our part to be
Joshua Johnson:done. You said our noetic capacity that we have capacity of the mind to be able to create and imagine something in the future. I mean, it comes from the word nous, right? As you look at the etymology of words as you dig deep in in that word in noose. Is there something that, as you've dug into that, that you have found that is that is deeper than the surface that we think about the mind in our capacity?
Scott Cairns:Yeah, there's a wonderful bishop in in the Orthodox Church who recently passed not that recently, but passed away some 10 years ago. Bishop Kalistos Ware he he wrote about this. I I think his term for what his little definition was just seems so right to me. He said he characterized it as the intellective. Aptitude of the heart, and that's when I glimpsed it as being a-it's a-it's an intuitive capacity for knowing, for knowing more, for apprehension. Of course, we all have anus. Well, for most of us, most of the time, it's not very useful because it's clouded and soiled by our own accretions of sin, but prayer is the one thing that is guaranteed to clear it up and make it more useful. Prayer as communion with God is the one way to regain and then retain that intellective capacity of the heart, and to have it be useful to us, so that we can actually-it not only connects us to our God more directly, more mystically, and immediately, but it also connects us to each other. So, the noetic capacity-I mean, it's it's imperative that we all take this very seriously and get to work on clearing up our noetic capacity, because it's it assists our connection and our understanding and our our sense of God's nearness, which helps us act better. By the way, if you really do believe God is right here with us, you're going to act better. And when someone mistreats you, you're going to be less likely to be angry and more likely to be sort of embarrassed for him. I mean, this is something I learned some years ago, and and I've treasured that glimpse of truth. Is that yeah? I no longer get as angry as I used to get, and so it offended me. I just think, geez, I'm embarrassed for this guy. So it it makes you more aware of God's nearness, and also it helps you see people better. It helps you appreciate the brother, the sister, the stranger. It it helps you see people better, and it helps them see you better if if they're also engaged in this recovery of the noose, then you're going to find people treat each other better. They see each other more clearly. They have more compassion. It's an absolutely necessary thing that we need to recover for our people. This interior work.
Joshua Johnson:Is there a poem that you have written in your life that opened a door to meaning making for you that you walked through, that changed or shifted maybe even a director direction of meaning for your own life, and how did that impact you?
Scott Cairns:I would have to say yes, many poems, but but see, I I hesitate to say yes because you're going to make me go look for it, and I have I read a lot of poems, and I think this new book is my 15th book, so it's it's hard to grasp, hard to point to one, but I think they all kind of do. I mean, there's a book I wrote in which I have a bunch of things called Adventures in New Testament Greek, and there's just a series of poems sprinkled out throughout the book. And one of them is Adventures in New Testament Greek Noos. Each one's with Adventures in New Testament Greek, and then there was a colon, and then there'd be it's a Greek word, and then some pages later there'd be another adventures in New Testament Greek, and then there'd be another word. But there is one called Noos, which I think might be useful. And I might, if you want, did you want me to find it? I don't, I don't need, I don't feel the need to. If you don't feel the need to,
Joshua Johnson:you don't have to. But I would love for you to read a poem from your latest collection against certainty. Something that has impacted you that you'd like to share.
Scott Cairns:Yeah, here's one that's helped me a lot. So I don't know if, yeah, this isn't really that important, but I have a little thing going on with my body that's not great. You know, I've I have a little blood cancer thing that's not going to go away. So these last two books have been actually pretty more, much more personal about such things than any of my previous 13 books. So, but this one, what the dark, what the darkness sometimes serves, waking in my dark room, I recognize new movement in the air above me, odd and roiling patterns hovering just there in the air above me. I've grown used to this midnight waking and fairly used to this pairing of the colliginous. Air with the vertiginous answering sense with which, waking thus, my soul responds. Waking many years ago in the dense thickness of our rainforest, I rolled out from my dark tent to step into the night, so as to savor that depth of stillness, our rainforest uniquely held for me. Within that stillness, I witnessed a late, answering stillness, pressing low beneath my heart. I heard a voice there murmuring. Tonight, Similarly, waking, I hear a similar murmuring, voluble if none the less inarticulate. What might I make of such correspondences, troubling both this moment and that rising memory? Darkness no longer frightens, nor does this deep obscurity within both appear now meet, right, and welcoming.
Joshua Johnson:It's beautiful.
Scott Cairns:Thanks. Anyway, that that's in the middle of the book. I don't know why I went to the middle of the book. Usually, you go to the end of the book where all the really juicy stuff happens.
Joshua Johnson:There's there's a lot of of depth in the in the midst of that that actually helps for me now. Right, you know, as I as I listen to your poem, you you know that is that has helped you is you're wrestling with with the dark and the things in your body, it's then having me ask questions of when did something like that happen in my life. What is the the meaning of this murmuring? What is the meaning of the darkness in my own life? And then I'm starting to walk in that, so it does something as you listen to it. Then I want to personally, I want to take that and I want to start to wrestle with it, and I want to start try to make some meaning with that in my own life. Well,
Scott Cairns:then I haven't wasted my time, Joshua. That's such good news.
Joshua Johnson:So if you, as you put this collection together and you've written these poems, is there any hope that you have for for readers of these poems besides what happened just to me at the moment?
Scott Cairns:Well, that's what I hope for the reader. See, yeah, I don't have the illusion that a lot of people are going to read this or any of my books, but what I do pray is that whoever does kind of joins the conversation, enters into making something more with it. I've read a lot of books and I've received from those books, and then I make each of my poems is somehow made. I think, necessarily comes from, derived from whatever that mix of prior matter has been. It comes to a point here and makes this thing. And then, what I really pray is that someone will pick that up, and that it will be part of their making thereafter, and it need not be, of course, another poem. Though it'd be wonderful to inspire another poem with a poem, but I don't know. Even if it just means being a little more aware of of the moment we in which we live, being a little more aware of the meaning that we are making of the moment in which we live, and being more aware of the persons around us, and having compassion for them, and caring for them, and caring for ourselves, maybe to a greater degree. So I, I just think that that's what I hope most is that poetry. My poetry does for other people what other poetry has done for me, which is to make me sort of see better, see more clearly, not just myself and not just the poems, but all that's in front of me, just to appreciate it more. A
Joshua Johnson:couple questions I like to ask at the end. One, if you go back to your 21-year-old self, what advice would you give?
Scott Cairns:Don't give up. Yeah, yeah. You know, when I was 21, I I had written, I think, maybe a collection of poems that I was sending out, and you know, it would come back. I I don't think I published my first actual book was in 1985, and I would have been closer to 30. So you know, yeah, I was I was probably 30 when it was accepted. So my. 21-year-old self came very close to giving up, and I was like, "Don't give up. You know, just keep working it over.
Joshua Johnson:Anything you've been reading or watching lately you could recommend?
Scott Cairns:I'm not a big fan of the Russians currently, but I love Russian novels, and you know, I read Bros Karmatsov every summer. I I've yet to do it this summer, but it's right there. I can get it. But there is a a a living Russian novelist that I really dig. His name is Eugene Vodolovski, and so I read this one of his first. It's called Laurus, and it was the first of his I read. It's just the most beautiful, rich, rich novel I I could recommend. And then he's got the the one I'm just read just read a history of the island, and it's it's a kind of it's a beautiful kind of imagine it's it's a almost a fantastic. I think in in some ways it's it's a very thinly veiled appraisal of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine today, because his mother I think his mother was Russian, his father is Ukrainian, and so he has this sort of, and he's a living in Moscow, teaching, I think, in no Saint Saint maybe Saint Petersburg, one of those some university in one of those cities, and he's a, I just it'd be pretty risky for him to rate such a thing, but but he's a brave man, Orthodox Christian man in Russia, who I really get a kick out of his work. He's he's got a beautiful, loving imagination. But I would recommend Larus to people who were you know looking for a novel. And I'm always reading poetry. I mean, my whole desk is riddled with books of poets collections. So,
Joshua Johnson:well, against certainty, your new poetry collection will be out and available for anybody who wants to go and get that. And so, I just yeah want people to go and start to to wrestle and and read the these poems and figure out how we could start to see more clearly and to make some meaning out of that in our own lives, to have these things open the door to new possibilities, new imagination in our own lives to have a conversation with these poems. So, Scott, is there anywhere that you'd like to point people to? How could they connect with you and your work and and what you're doing.
Scott Cairns:Well, I I have a Substack, and I I float new stuff on that all the time. Even lately, I've been just putting excerpts from this new book, so people might be tempted to go get it. But but mostly, I use that to float works in progress out and have people see if they have any opinions about them. Tell me, oh, don't do that again. You know, oh, okay, I won't. So anyway, yeah, there's that. That's probably the best way. I, I'm, I'm findable. I'm findable on Facebook and Substack. Bless you, Joshua. Thanks so much for including me in these conversations that you're having. These, it's been really kind of you. Thank you.
Joshua Johnson:Yeah. Well, it was a rich and it was a deep conversation. I really loved it. So thank you for having this conversation. It was great.
Scott Cairns:All right. Adios.
