Before The Poem
Before The Poem, an eight part podcast in which writer Rebecca Tantony sits down with extraordinary poets to explore faith, spirituality and the creative act. Fascinated by the collision point between creator and creation: that place where words, divinity, doubt and imagination overlap. Together, they will examine the mystery of trying to make sense of the world through language, and the strange, beautiful work of creating something tangible out of the unseen.
Before The Poem
Before The Poem with Tom Sastry- Myth Making and the Middle Path
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In the second episode of Before the Poem, Rebecca Tantony is joined by poet Tom Sastry for a conversation around myth-making, belonging, autonomy and what it means to inhabit the space between certainty and uncertainty.
Together they consider the value of the middle path, and how recognising both difference and similarity can create a rich, generative place to reside. They discuss the editing process as both a solitary practice and one sustained through collaboration and they look at how journeys and the paths we walk through life echo the narrative models that shape our creative work.
The conversation moves through reflections on atheism, agnosticism, faith, and the search for essence and centre, while also examining the ways dogma, community expectations, and rigid belief systems can shape, and sometimes limit, our lives.
Meandering, thoughtful, and full of unexpected connections, this episode celebrates nuance over certainty, inviting listeners to consider what becomes possible when we remain open to complexity, and to the space between self and other, belief and doubt.
Hello, my name is Rebecca Tantoni. I'm a writer and host of Before the Poem. This is a conversation about poetry, spirituality, religion, language, and the mysterious act of making meaning. This is a space open to all, believers, agnostics, atheists, and anyone curious about creation and the creative act itself. Each episode I speak with a contemporary poet about the spiritual landscape that shaped them. Childhood rituals, silence, prayers, doubt, imagination, grief, creativity, and the search for what lies beyond ordinary language. Together we explore writing, not simply as pride, but as a way of listening, of reaching towards the unknown, a form of attention, perhaps even a kind of devotion. I'm interested in what poetry can say where all other language fails. In the connection between creation and creator, in the words we inherit and the ones we spend a lifetime trying to find. I am so very glad that you are here. With a dear friend and a wonderful poet who is Tom Sastry. Welcome, Tom.
SPEAKER_03Oh thank you, thank you, Rebecca.
SPEAKER_02And we're in your we're in your lounge. We've got the sun coming through the window. And actually, Tom, I used to live Sevier Street, so just is it was it Sevier Street? Literally just behind these block of flats. I live for a very long time.
SPEAKER_04Sevier Street some Worbst.
SPEAKER_02Oh sorry, I'm thinking, okay, car.
SPEAKER_04Behind the flats will be Dove Street South.
SPEAKER_02Pablo, car. Um was it called? Or Jamaica Street. It wasn't called, it's behind Jamaica Street.
SPEAKER_04There's Dove Street South because Dove Street's this weird shape. It sort of does goes round the corner, and then if you walk down through the flats, you'd actually come out onto Dove Street South.
SPEAKER_02It wasn't called Dove Street South. Armada Place? No, it was called Dalton Square? Dalton Square!
SPEAKER_04I lived that's just just around behind the bell.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely, yeah. I lived in Dalton Square for years and years and years. Actually, when I was studying at Bath Spar University, the study of religion and creative writing. So I used to commute from there and um yeah, go to uni and then drive back again. So how long have you been here?
SPEAKER_03Uh since January 2014.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so I think I left January 2012.
SPEAKER_03Wow.
SPEAKER_02So we just missed each other. So how are you?
SPEAKER_04I'm really good. I am really good. It's it's bank holiday weekend.
SPEAKER_02It is.
SPEAKER_04Um I am emptying my head of all other things except for this podcast, which is very nice. I have a cup of tea in front of me, and and it's it's lovely to see you back in Bristol, Rebecca. So I'm very good.
SPEAKER_02So I'm gonna begin with our first question, which is a question I'm gonna pitch to all the poets I interview, and inspired by the On Being podcast, I think this question really sets the tone for what I want the exploration to be around for this particular session. So the question I'm gonna pose to you, Tom, is what was the spiritual or religious or neither of those things landscape of your childhood?
SPEAKER_04Um, it was pretty featureless, actually. I'm thinking sort of steppe or possibly tundra. Um I didn't grow up with any religion at all, and not really a lot of understanding of the spiritual tradition that my dad had come from. He he grew up in in India in the 1930s and forties, and my mum had no religion at all. Um but I was I'm old enough that I would even though I didn't go to a school that was a religious school, there was a kind of default Christianity. Um so but we were very matter-of-fact about it. You know, I I I'm sure ever I'm sure a lot of people will be familiar with this. You know, you'll hear a Bible story or something like that, and it's it functions as a story.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And you're not conscious that it's any, you know, you're kind of vaguely aware that people take it more seriously than they might take Snow White, but fundamentally it's it's it's functioning using those rules of storytelling rather than and I think that was about as much religion as I had. And also I think because of the generation I am and actually part of the country I grew up in, I was gen generally taught by older people who had done their teacher training in the 1940s, 1950s, and so the idea of religion in in the hymns we sang and in you know, it was quite unforgiving. It tended to be something you associated with people who are very conservative in outlook, very conservative in their ideas about how children should behave, which obviously matters to you a lot as a child. So I think I grew up with an idea of religion as sort of you know a bunch of stories and a characteristic of people who like to tell you off.
SPEAKER_02And do you feel that that relationship to it has shifted much, or is that still a baseline kind of narrative that you have?
SPEAKER_04Um It's definitely shifted a bit. Um I mean I still I don't see it as something that's necessary. But that's possibly because I'm doing the same thing in things in different ways. Um I I think we've all lived through this period where kind of established institutional religion has retreated, certainly in in this country, and has been replaced by a kind of more amorphous, I'm spiritual but I'm not religious, and it's I think there can almost be a bit of a snobbery about that. You know, I would never belong to an established religion with a hierarchy, I'm far too free-spirited, but I'm very spiritual. I think that's there's often sometimes actually I think less humility in that than there is amongst people who are embedded in a tradition.
SPEAKER_02That's interesting. I'd like to come back to that.
SPEAKER_04Um But um but I mean obviously if you live in Bristol, especially in creative communities, y you can't help noticing there are a lot of people who are very invested in spiritual ideas who have absolutely no desire to be kind of authoritarian mouthpieces of a conservative religious worldview. I mean, it's just just obvious that the face of spirituality has changed in my life. Um my brother, who is um very, very different to me by temperament, also has no religion, but he is very evangelical about having no religion. My joke is that he would actually go out knocking on the doors of Jehovah's Witnesses, asked to come in with his pamphlets and explain to them that there's no God and here's a reason, um, which strikes me as a slightly futile thing to do. Um and I think and I've I've come to recognise that that also is a contestable ethical position, because actually where he's coming from is the idea that a scrupulous attention to the factual truth of things is the highest virtue. And that the other things people are trying to get at through religion are inconsequential because the problem is, as he would see it, that the truth claims of religion, the incompatibility of those claims with our best rational and empirical understanding of things, is a moral problem.
SPEAKER_02You know, we tell our poems and we integrate our life story within them, but at times we use surrealism and imagery and metaphor and all of these techniques to create a story. How do you see this relationship between what is logical and factual and can be proven and where uh imagination and and make-believe and all of these things come in to create narratives that potentially have a moral telling or archetypes or you know, some kind of guide guidance and guidelines for how humanity conducts themselves or lives.
SPEAKER_04I tend to think that the the spiritual YouTuber who says, ah yes, science can tell us these things about only my spiritual worldview can actually get at what really, really is to be human. And the evangelical atheist who says, Oh no, no, no, you can't possibly believe that. It's morally lax to believe anything which is possibly not factually true, I think they're both they're both making what to me is the same mistake.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_04And that mistake is that, you know, if you think about it, you know, if you take all the time that people are taking on some kind of spiritual practice, they're praying, they're meditating, and then all the time that people are taking, you know, engaging with science or philosophy in a rigorous way. Perhaps more so in universities than in pubs, but no, no. And you add up all that time, it's a tiny fraction of human life. Most of the time we're bumbling through. We're using some kind of very kind of strange, mediated common sense. We're trying to make sense of the world. And most of life, and certainly most of the stuff that I think any curious writer would want to write about, is neither the spiritual practice, nor is it the you know, rigorous engagement with factual truth or logical or or or logic. It's all the stuff in the middle that is actually that's actually interesting.
SPEAKER_02That we're trying to make sense. Yes.
SPEAKER_04So I I kind of think the stuff that we're trying to write about is quite resistant and quite kind of sometimes spikily resistant in my case to the claims from either of those sort of, if you look at it that way, fringe activities, that they have some kind of higher insight into what's going on when we're bimbling through life, going to the shops, catching the bus.
SPEAKER_02And I think yes, and I totally see what you're saying. I think as writers that's what we're constantly doing, isn't it? We're putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and trying to make sense of the world around us, trying to create story, create, you know, m emotional movement in another person, trying to tell our version of things. And nothing is finite, or you know, we write something and a year later we look back at it and we go, oh no, do I? And we're we're constantly sort of catching up with the version of us as now compared to the version of us a year ago, etc. So everything is in process, everything is us trying to make sense of it all. And I hear you when there is this definite it is, it is God, it is science, this is the truth, this is the facts, this is, you know, maybe we struggle. We struggle as poets, we we struggle as artists, we struggle as humans because no, everything is a question mark that we're trying to answer. And never quite getting there, never quite reaching it. And I really relate to that because even those moments where I write a poem or I write a you know a piece of nonfiction, and I think, yeah, yeah, I've got it. I've said how I feel, or I've I've said it how I want to say it, I turn back to it as I said a month later, a year later, and I'm like, ah, darn it. That's not quite how it is anymore. So yeah, I get that perspective. Going back to your childhood, and I'm thinking of you and your brother, and you know, I hope he doesn't mind us sort of bringing him into the conversation as he isn't here. But do you feel growing up in a household in an environment where religion wasn't at the fore and it wasn't something that you know was infiltrated into your everyday life? Do you think that set you up for not being religious yourself? Um Do you think that set you up for being a poet?
SPEAKER_04I think definitely the second one. Ah I'm not sure about not well, I think it's obvious. I always think people's relationship with religion, or let's broaden it out, spirituality, is two things. One is social, so you'll have a certain experience of spiritual cultures in your life. And another is sort of a bit deeper, and it's about whether you use religious ideas or spiritual ideas or techniques to understand the world. So you can grow up in a very religious environment, and that religion can go very deep, and that mythology can be part of the way you process things, but you can also have very bad experiences of those communities, and so those two things can push in different directions, and I think we all know people for whom religion is both very deep inside them, but also a source of great hurt.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely.
SPEAKER_04And similarly, you can you can grow up with a very surface-level idea of spirituality, discover spiritual communities when you're older and sort of skim your way through them and get a great deal of pleasure from it, but actually it's not that deep inside you. So I think that idea I I just say those things about your sort of sentiment towards religion and spirituality and how deep it goes with you. I think those two things sort of all move independently within a person. And I think I've become generally more amenable to being, you know, to those ideas without really participating in them, but I don't think it's ever got any deeper with me.
SPEAKER_02I do think that depth can also be source, even if it wasn't fundamentally there to begin with. Um I don't know if my depth of religion was ever there growing up because it was a a regular church visit on a Sunday, but it wasn't a ritual in the house, it wasn't particularly Bible stories, it wasn't prayers before dinner, it wasn't that much talk of God in terms of faith in our home. So there was a constant curiosity and definitely a rebellion at one point in my teenagers, no doubt.
SPEAKER_04Again against religion or yeah, against religion.
SPEAKER_02And then as I said, I I ended up studying religion, and so my curiosity uh came from a place of academia and and trying to make sense of it as an observer and a sort of anthropological perspective of religion, and why do people believe what they do and what makes up religious communities, etc. And then I had a very interesting experience with a religion that was very different from the religion I was brought up in in my late twenties, yeah, maybe early thirties, late twenties, and um it was the first time I ever felt God, what I would call God, but yeah, the experience of God sort of being in my being and in my head and in my heart is a very tangible experiential thing, and I felt that depth, and that depth probably lasted for me for about a year and a half until I went, No, I I can't fully belong to what it means to belong to this religion, so it's not for me, and and I carried on skimming and I've skimmed ever since, I think.
SPEAKER_04Um is that because it was sold to you as a package that you had that if you if in order to get that in order to get that feeling, you had to accept propositions two, three, four, five, and six.
SPEAKER_02And I'm really pleased to say that it wasn't, it wasn't sold to me as a package. It it I was never pushed towards a certain theology or doctrine or showing up in a certain way. I reached a point where I felt like you know, to go down this path, that is what I'm gonna have to do. And equally, I don't know how true what I'm about to say is, but I thought about it a lot, and that is I've always been on the periphery of faith, and I've always felt like I've never fully felt what it is to experience faith and God and the commitment to that because I've never fully given myself to the entirety of a religion. Warts and all, commitment and all, day in, day out, what it is to show up in the uncomfortable, the discomfort, oh I don't really believe in that bit, and I don't particularly like that bit, and oh, I've got to wake up at 8 a.m. to get to church, you know, at this time. And and I think there's something I've missed out on. And I'm almost a bit envious of those around me who fully give themselves to it and take themselves on the journey of giving themselves over to it and what they might get from it.
SPEAKER_04I think you can lose yourself in an enormous institutional religion because while the Pope or the moderator or whoever's in charge might be saying this, that, or the other, people can quietly get on with things in the shadows and not be noticed. Whereas I think if you're in a small community of 20 people, even if no one is officially in charge, you will always get individuals that are exerting a lot of informal power over people. And I think one of the things that quite shocked me, having grown up with a kind of slightly lazy idea that the problem with religion or politics or anything was institutions. It's kind of like the kind of small A anarchism that that that that teenagers often have. And you suddenly realize that what actually happens when you strip away all institutional power is you have a bunch of people in a room, and as some people tend to do, some people dominate others, and you haven't solved the problem of power at all.
SPEAKER_02You've And here it is playing out again.
SPEAKER_04But you've made it impossible to name because everyone's invested in the idea that they have solved that problem, and that can make it very dangerous.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that power, that power dynamic sort of top down starts to show itself, and it it's I always find it so heartbreaking. It's like, oh, there's the request for money, oh there's the you know, the ownership over a certain type of terminology and language that needs to be spoken here, oh, there's the preference of um how we partner up within you know, and then it gets more and more extreme, and you just think, oh no, I absolutely don't want to be part of this.
SPEAKER_04I don't know why we're having this conversation because this has been a fantastic conversation to have ten years ago. But now all you have to do is find on communities and social media who basically have Share your principles and watch how toxic they become, even though ideologically you're in sync with them. And this is kind of the lesson the whole world has been learning in real time for the last decade, isn't it? That, you know, that as bad as those solutions of law and institutional power were for dealing with the general tendency of you know of people to use power in an unregulated way. As bad as those solutions were, the problem was real. And I think we we keep discovering this.
SPEAKER_02To, like you said earlier, we're not on the extremes of it's this way, it's that way, science exists, faith exists, we're curious, we're exploring it, there's no definitive answer, we're we're artists, we're everything else in between, but there isn't institution, there isn't sort of this dominance of power. Like what what might that look like?
SPEAKER_04Well, I think ethically it's quite easy because I think it's kind of all the things you've articulated that if you have a preference for doubt over certainty, um if you have an instinctive preference for allowing people to be different, if you have a suspicion of orthodoxy, these are all things that I think are quite protective, and these are things that actually you will find in artistic communities. And I think they are really good virtues to cultivate because they give you a real basis to jump into other people's realities without getting sucked into them in a way that will destroy you. And I think this might be the answer to why you haven't actually given yourself completely to it, you know.
SPEAKER_02And I I like that thinking, Tom, because also what we do, sorry if I've interrupted you in any way, is as writers, we do jump into the shoes of others. Yeah, it's what we do. Whether we write fiction, non-fiction, we're constantly going, how does this person think, feel, what's their lived experience? Let me try and give language to that. And maybe, you know, I'm I'm interested to see during this series if I am in dialogue with a poet of faith and what that faith looks like because you know, so far it's it's been similar conversation where there's an openness, there is a greater or lesser degree of sort of interest and acceptance around it, but there isn't a full giving over to faith and artistry simultaneously. Um, and my thinking there was, you know, I totally get how that fits us as writers, it fits our kind of perspective on the world and how we show up to the page and to our art. I wonder if there is something as well that keeps us reserved and lonely and insular and struggling and independent as well.
SPEAKER_04Well, I think we we do tend to as a community, loose community, we do tend to love our doubts. We love that, you know. I think you we're endlessly fascinated by our own contradictions and by extension the contradictions of others. And that's you know, well, that is a middle way, isn't it? Between, you know, um so I think there's there's definitely that aspect to it. Um and I think but I do also think that there is something about the process of creation, at least as I understand it, which is analogous to a lot of spiritual practice. And what I mean by that is that we talk about science and institutional religion, but actually the real tyranny in our lives is the timetable. You know, that faculty, that ability to see the things in between the things at a timetable is really it's fundamental to creativity, but it's also fundamental, I think, to life. Um so if you went on a walk, a long walk with me, I don't recommend it. I am terrible because because I find walking quite difficult, you know, I have poor balance, I you know, um I stumble a lot, all of that kind of stuff. I'm very focused on the act of walking, so I'm thinking in five miles we'll get to the point where we can stop and have a cup of tea or get to the pub. Whereas someone who's good at it is actually not thinking about that stuff at all. They're thinking, look at that, look at that, look at that. And I would I would definitely like to be more like that. It's difficult for me because that's something I find physically challenging. Sure. Um, but I do think that that general ability to to look between the scheduled or expected thing is so fundamental to any kind of creativity. And if you start doing it, and then you write even one of those things, all the other things come in, uh and in those good months, it actually means that you stop living your life and remembering your life through the structure of the timetable, and you start actually experiencing life as it is.
SPEAKER_02That's so true, and I absolutely relate to when you are immersed in that project, when that poem has taken over your thinking, everything becomes that poem. Everything becomes that narrative, yeah? You shut the door, you walk outside, oh, that could contribute to that piece of writing. You know, you feel something on that walk that contributes to the writing. And I can't help but draw in this moment some kind of parallel between the person of faith, take away the structure of faith and the dogma and the text and everything else, and just person of faith in that walk, experiencing the world, observing it, feeling it, noticing it, celebrating it, allowing it to contribute to their inner landscape. We're doing exactly the same thing. As a poet, immersed in that poem, immersed in that story. We're both gathering the world outside of us, bringing it into us and celebrating it. And I I love that kind of parallel if I think of it like that, we're not too dissimilar.
SPEAKER_04I think I've only just started thinking about it, just obviously the oldest spoken word tradition in the world that I'm aware of, is seems to be very global, is um traditional storytelling. In a traditional story, what happens is let's say you have a problem, maybe your crops won't grow, and you say, and you and someone says, Oh, well, if you leave Bristol and you walk to Western Supermare, there's someone there who will have the answer for you at the end of the pier. And so you set out on your quest to walk to Western Supermare, and we think what's going to happen is this is gonna be all about your journey from Bristol to Western Supermare to find the answer. But actually, it turns out that that's just giving us some structure, and they're gonna be side quests, almost certainly three of them, because everything will go by to the rule of threes to make us feel comfortable in the story. And somewhere around maybe you know, Long Ashton, you'll you know you'll make a little detour, and um, you know, and you're you know, and and you'll meet a bird, and the bird will say, Oh, we we have no food, and you've got some seeds in your pocket, and you feed the bird, and you have it, and then you rejoin the path, and then there's another side quest, and you meet the bee, and the bee needs that, and then you finally get to the end and we discover that the side quests were actually how you learn the answer, which is that you need to be nicer to the animals on your farm and your monoculture is killing all your crops, and actually you didn't need the wise person at all. What you actually needed were the side quests that were off the path. And the journey, yes. Love it. And that's how that is that storytelling mode is so ancient and so common to so many cultures, and it's actually all about the fact that you think it's about the you kind of need the path to keep you going, and you need the idea of the path, but it's actually not about what happens on the main path.
SPEAKER_02I um I see an art therapist, and what art therapy is, in case you don't know, it's it's therapy, but we integrate art practice. So I might draw a picture, or she might tell me some kind of mythological story that's relevant to my current situation. I've sort of had clay in my hands and made figurines before. It's really interesting. It's the first time I've ever done anything like that, but I I like it a lot. And I was sort of expressing the the current life challenges that I'm navigating with. And she very briefly reframed it as a kind of a spiritual quest, the pilgrimage. That was what she called it, a pilgrimage, and just that reframe, just that language of like oh, this is a purposed kind of time of my life with a start point and a middle point and an end point, and I'm in it because there is some kind of growth, and there's some kind of inner knowing I'm gonna discover, or it suddenly made it okay, and actually more than okay, it suddenly made this time in my life kind of worthy. Ah, I'm on a a pilgrimage of you know, an unknown end. I'm on some kind of discovery, and therefore I can do this. That was the feeling I had, yeah. And similar to what you're saying, just having story and having this framework of story can really help us make sense of the lives we're living, and of course create art from it as well. I want to go back to your answer probably about 20 minutes ago, because it's been in my head, which is when I said to you, do you feel the um non-religious upbringing of your childhood informed your life choice to become a poet? And you said most definitely. But is there anything else to add? Because I I find that really interesting.
SPEAKER_04It's. Obviously, I think all art is to an extent mythological because you're trying to create, even within something as small as a short poem, you're trying to create a world which which through metaphor or analogy actually speaks to something much bigger than itself. So you're already in the business of myth making. But I think people have access to different levels of myth. And my background is it's it's an immigrant background, I'm mixed race. I don't know anything, I didn't grow up knowing anything of my father's first language, of his background, even his parents' names, not because he was absent, but just because it was not part of our upbringing, really quite extreme in that way. At the same time, I go to this is ambient Christianity in the schools in the 1980s, but you absorb them it at that time the racial mix of Britain was very different, certainly the part of Britain I was growing up with. I was very conspicuous, not being a white child. You hear a lot, you know, oh, why do you get Christmas presents? Christmas isn't for you. So you have that kind of exclusion as well. And then there's the fact that there's this worldview, I think, in the home outside the home, which is which is very little. So so really there's very little myth. You know, national myths not for me. Religious myths not for me. And so what you what that forces you to do, which I think is actually quite helpful as an artist, is you kind of have to fill the gap that myth and metaphor would otherwise you know, you you know, you have to there's a huge act of self-invention that has to occur to fill that gap in a way that is satisfying. And I think that is really valuable. I think there is something about the experience of not belonging, but which I don't mean in the necessarily in the painful, alienated we won't talk to you, but just in the sense of not being part of the story. I think there is something about that outsiderness, which is absolutely fundamental to the way I make art and the way I see the world, and I see a real positive value in it, which is why I tend to get into arguments with people who take a very essentialist view of what it is to be, you know, a brown person, you know, you know, or you know, or any any other characteristic. I think I think when you get this idea that what we need, particularly as a minority group or an oppressed group, is a strong identity that's built on a shared myth, I think, well, all you're doing is you're reproducing that idea that some people are central to the group and some people are peripheral. And I I have a very, you know, I always think the people who claim to be speaking for groups that they're members of, by determining for everyone else what the essential characteristics of that group are, I always think they're bullies. And um, and you know, um so and I think that, but I think that that very strong sense that being excluded or just the myths of your people not being relevant to you or not including you is a very strong basis from which to make art. It's also a strong basis to do, as I suspect my brother has done, to reject the metaphorical, or to reject, you know, but I think if you have to do it for yourself, you become very aware of the fact that it's a construction. So you can't lean into it too hard because you you kind of know I've made this up. So I I think I'm very aware of the stories I tell about myself and my life, and I'm also very aware that they're stories. And I think that that's quite a quite a good place to to make art from it.
SPEAKER_02So yeah, thank you. That was so well said.
SPEAKER_04Well, I will read a poem, but first I'll say something about just the project, it doesn't matter that it's a book, but the project it came from was I was reading a lot of stuff a few years ago about hope. And sometimes people can be very moralistic about hope, you know. You know, despair will never never get us anywhere. What we need is fear's hope, radical hope, all of this. And it can shade into a kind of emotional correctness where if you're not sufficiently optimistic, you're part of the problem. And I think that's a very bad place to get to. Um because I think it's against honesty and it gives people an incentive not to be honest with themselves, and I think that's both unhealthy at an individual level, but also at a collective political level. And so I started thinking about pessimism as a country. So I thought we're living in this country of pessimism, but it turns out that just like the country of optimism, the country of pessimism is not just pessimism, it's not just a black sky. It turns out that it has its own hills and valleys, and people make funny jokes about it, and there's, you know, and there's beautiful music, you know, in it, there's all of the things that you would find. It's just everything is a slightly different colour, but actually it's still its own country. So I thought, well, wouldn't it be a good idea to actually talk about the state of pessimism as a country that we live in now, but also talk about all of those hills and valleys and details, rather than getting into this idea that once you have abandoned or have been abandoned by optimism, you are in a hopeless place. And so I wanted to so anyway, and and I really relate to that, Tom.
SPEAKER_02I think particularly as a mother to a toddler who feels loudly every emotion very strongly and very expressively. This idea that you know we it's okay to reside and to to live in a certain feeling, whether that's pessimism, optimism, anger, you know, it's okay. It's okay to reside there and let's be curious, let's explore it. We don't have to wait for the flowers to grow and for the sun to come out to recognize it as a as a place, as a state in its own right.
SPEAKER_04So this is my poem from the end of the world. And it seems it has a title that's quite apt. Um this is a title that I enjoy taking to places like Totnes and um um St.
SPEAKER_02Agnes.
SPEAKER_04This is St. Agnes, yeah. This is um you can't take your spiritual cliches with you. At the end of the world, I meet a guru I'm crapping myself. He calls this unwise. How should I face a day with no future? He says, like a mayfly. He's just a man blowing air into the shape of an answer. I know that trick. Perhaps I can do this. The guru is the last thing I'll need. The not so secret wisdom of my evasive heart. He's my permission to make myself an eye which holds no grief. And so, at the end of the world, he's there telling me to notice notice. There's nothing left to notice except I'm afraid. I loved it so much.
SPEAKER_02I loved that. And I love the fact that your penultimate line was brilliant and your last line was even better. Stunning.
SPEAKER_03I don't know what to say about that, but thank you.
SPEAKER_02I feel like our dialogue is taking us a lot through Yeah, this in-between. That feels like that's been the central focus, this in-between of faith and non-faith, science and belief, and where as artists we we find ourselves and the individual and the creation of the individual voice against the backdrop of belonging to community or belonging to religion or whatever it is. And that's been yeah, it's been really interesting to talk to about all of that. I'm gonna ask a question, which I feel I might know what you're going to say, but I'm gonna go for it.
SPEAKER_04You're just encouraging me to be the verse.
SPEAKER_02Do you write towards meaning or towards the absence of meaning?
SPEAKER_03Um neither.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, of course. How can it not be neither after everything else we've said?
SPEAKER_04I mean it could be both, of course, you know, I mean how happy it's the middle of the middle of it. Um I think meaning with a capital M, I'm suspicious of. I don't quite one of the things I like about myself, and there's many things that I don't like about myself, is that I'm not that bound up with the search for meaning because I don't believe there is one single meaning with a capital M to anything. And and I think I place a very high value in the ability to see a plurality of things, sometimes contradictory things, in a person, in a situation, in in anything. So I find the idea that you would ever feel like you had totally grasped anything which had any degree of complexity, just by saying, I know this thing about it, I know this property that it has. Which is what you tend to get at the extremes. Um, I find that idea quite disturbing.
SPEAKER_02I do as well.
SPEAKER_04Um
SPEAKER_02And so oppositional to how I think and feel and see the world and engage with the world.
SPEAKER_04But I think, of course, when we're talking about the search for meaning, we're not actually necessarily talking about a philosophical position that says everything has some kind of essence that you have to grasp in order to know that thing, which is a I think an absurd pro absurd idea and dangerous idea. But you know, it's also just the fact that as human beings we need to feel that things matter. And that can be a transient thing, you know. You watch a, I don't know, you know, you know, you watch a game of football. And, you know, my experience, I mean I know this is not the case of diehard fans, is that I can care very much what happens during the game and then it's over and I go, oh, shrug. You know, meaning can be quite, you know, fleeting. Um, but nevertheless, it's more fun. If if you care about the result while the game is happening, you'll probably have more fun watching it. You'll be more immersed than if you don't. And I think that sort of. So I do think that it's really important to affirm that things really do matter. And not to try and police that and not to try and sort of enforce some kind of scepticism about where people find value, while at the same time being extremely sceptical about the idea that any kind of meaning is absolute or that there's a final answer to what does this mean. And I think that I'm not really talking about poetry, am I? I'm talking about other things, but I do think that that sort of I think if what I try to put into my writing are these kind of flickers of meaning where things matter intensely in a moment without creating the impression that that is actually this is timeless wisdom.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. It's funny I find myself contradictory because in one breath I completely relate to the nuance of everything. I cannot help but see everything from multiple angles, and it all exists at once. You know, nothing is like we said, finite, definitive, absolute. And yet I have this curiosity about the essence of everything. I have some belief in me still that there is, and I don't know what that is. I don't know how to kind of articulate what that is, but and maybe that is you know the idea I have that there is such a thing as God. And again, I'm sort of really sort of thinking aloud as I say that because I I couldn't tell you what that looks like, where that comes from, what that version of God is, but it is really in me to try and find the centre pinpoint to everything. And I suppose the language we have for that is God. Um so yeah, I find myself quite contradictory in that sense.
SPEAKER_04I suspect they will discover that people who were drawn to faith and people who are drawn to scepticism have some, maybe not that enormous but significant and noticeable difference in their makeup. So here's a question, because we are developing a theory that writing is actually a far more effective and virtuous and efficacious spiritual practice than all of the other spiritual questions.
SPEAKER_02Well, interestingly for you to give language to that because when I said to you earlier, well what's the answer, Tom, if it's getting rid of power and sort of, you know, dis um what's the word, dissembling these kind of structures and hierarchies, that's what I thought you were getting at.
SPEAKER_04But, but if you went to I know you I know you teach writing, and I know, you know, I I suspect your method is very different to this, but if you were to randomly search for writing retreats, the tutored writing retreats, and to look at the way they're taught, actually you'd end up in a room with a bunch of people and people will be reading poems out and people will be nitpicking about whether that metaphor was appropriate. It's the most well, whether it is a good way of putting your poem into you know into the clinic and emerging with a slightly better and titled poem is a totally different question, because that's also, you know. But it's certainly the opposite of that kind of attentiveness that we're talking about, and that kind of pseudo-spiritual emotional thing that we're talking about getting from writing, sort of being in there and you know having arguments about commas or you know so maybe so why are we so bad at teaching that life-enhancing aspect of writing when I think we are agreed that you can you you can go to writing and other forms of creativity for the same things that people go to meditation or yoga or for or all these other things for, but but when when it comes to teaching them in community, we don't do it, I think, very well.
SPEAKER_02I have a a mentee who lives in Bristol. No, he lives in Bath, sorry, close to Bristol. And he has, I hope he doesn't mind me talking about this because I'm saying it in in utmost sort of respect and celebration. He has a way of writing that feels quite channelled, it's very meditative, it's very stream of consciousness, it's very sort of esoteric and philosophical. And often he will submit his work to me for editing, and I can't. I can't do it because of the nature of how he's created that particular piece of writing. And I think that's speaking to what you're saying. There's a difference between the act of writing, be it that also the walk and the observation and the emotional movement that we feel when we engage with certain things, and then putting pen to paper and allowing that piece to arrive, to come, to enter us, or for us to you know birth it through through ourselves, and allowing it to be in its own right, and we don't mess about with it, we don't edit it, we don't critique it, and then there's the the editorial process, which what you're talking about is other people contributing to that. So maybe it's allowing, and it comes back to the individual again, doesn't it? Just getting rid of everyone else and just being in our autonomy, being in our sense of artistry, in our sense of self, and letting ourselves create and be creation and not needing anyone else to contribute to that. Maybe that's the answer. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04I think once you've learned how to edit, you can edit your work. It's why I find all of this kind of workshopping slightly strange, because I think once that skill is learnt, you're a better editor. The only thing other people do for you that you can't do for yourself is to read a poem. My case, without all of the backstory I've got for that poem in my head, that's obviously not there on the page.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_04You can't repli you cannot replicate the experience of someone who is looking at that piece of work without any idea of all the things you know it's about.
SPEAKER_05Absolutely.
SPEAKER_04Um, but everything else, all the technical stuff, you know, you know, is my lineation right? Well, you you can sort that out for yourself. We're all, I think, better at doing that for ourselves than we are than other people are at doing it for us.
SPEAKER_02It's it comes back to this outsourcing, doesn't it? And this kind of belief maybe we have culturally, societally, that we need to outsource and we need those around us to guide us, to teach us, to tell us what we're doing wrong and right, etc. Whereas if we were to just return to the self and this autonomy and this self-trust and this self-belief, I can do this, I can edit my own work. I don't have to go outside of me and believe someone knows more. I will say, you know, to slightly fly the flag of support, um this is also my job. I don't want people not to hire me. Um, but I do believe what I'm about to say. I think you're absolutely right. How can you fully see the piece of writing when you have all this prior knowledge to where it's coming from and what you're talking about? But I also think when you're in it, I think like of being in a swimming pool and the the piece of writing is the water. When you're in it, you can't really see it fully and you have to step out of it, or you have to have someone else. And I think the stepping out of it is time. So when you look back at that poem a year later and and you see it differently, or I think it is someone else at the edge of the pool looking at it and going, Oh, I can I can see the fullness of this. You're in in it, you're in the water, you can't see it like I can.
SPEAKER_04I I I'm I'm Victorian dad when it comes to my poems. I yeah, they go in a drawer and they have to think about what they've done. I lock them in the dark, and then after a month they come out again and they go, Well, no, you you couldn't see before you couldn't see what you were doing wrong, but now you can. And um, so yeah, I'm afraid I'm I'm I'm very mean.
SPEAKER_02I um I can't help but obviously this is the topic, bring it back to um some kind of spiritual process for your poems where there is some kind of deep prayer or medit meditation, contemplation in the drawer, and you think it should have you know that they come out as anchorites, sort of babbling about you know, you know, Jesus as an orange or something.
SPEAKER_00It's a great line. You said there isn't a word that rhymes of orange. I guess that you've never been to Stonehenge. I go there every summer for the longest day of the year. And every summer solstice they open up the stones, and everyone can climb aboard and have a little go. It's a real good party with no electricity, just some hippies and travelers, bongo drums, and weeds. And when the sun comes up, they all start cheering. And let me tell you now, it's a very special feeling. You show me a tarot card and I'll show you the world. I got my window wide open and I'm hitching home as well. And if it rises in the morning, he'll probably sleep and dream. You're just a tiny little speck of history in the grand scheme of things. A tiny cog in a big machine with the power to change everything. But locked inside the mysteries of who we are, where we're from, and how on earth we came to be.
SPEAKER_02You know what it is.
SPEAKER_03I don't think I do. It's Jesus in Werbergs. Okay, then I'll do that one.
SPEAKER_02This is my um this is my one of my absolute favourite poems from Tom. Um I used to live in St. Werbergs, and there's something when I hear this poem that I can really like picture the ordinary of it. And I think for me, something that has always been my um motivation when it comes to understanding faith for myself and how it sits in the world is finding it through the ordinary, through the mundane, through the familiar, through the cigarette butts, through the chewing gum, through the you know, the like gritty conversations. That for me is where I find it, and it it really shows itself to me. So I really like this poem for the kind of familiar ordinary of of religion in the everyday.
SPEAKER_04Well, this is Jesus on a gap here. He spent 2,000 years in heaven and he thought, I'd better go back to my mum's country, see what's going on with the mortals, that's part of who I am as well. And so obviously he comes to Bristol because where else would you go in order to find out what human life is like? There's a lot of human life out there, as as you'll discover when you when you when you walk out the front door. So, Jesus of Bristol. Jesus came to live in St. Werbergs at the junction of a ley line and an underground river. One day, in the chip shop queue, he met a woman passing a wedding ring between the fingers of each hand. She had forgotten her purse, so Jesus bought her chips. When she told him there was too much vinegar, he swapped them for his own. Let me walk with you, said Jesus, who never believed he was a stranger. She thanked him for the chips. She was sure he meant well. She preferred to be alone if he didn't mind. Jesus apologized and went on his way. Afterwards he thought, When I try to give, do I just take? He went to one of the dozen Buddhist centers on Gloucester Road for an answer. In the lobby, he met a man who turned his chair and made a show of giving his full attention. The man's voice was soft and uncuous as unsalted butter. It said, You have told yourself you are the giver. It has become a compulsion. Let go of your story and live. The man was sharing his treasure. He needed Jesus to see its value, so Jesus gave it a go. It didn't go well. You shouldn't get over yourself if you are God in man. It does strange things to the weather. Also, you get terrible dreams. It was because of these dreams that Jesus went to the psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst asked Jesus about his father. Jesus spoke for a long time in surround sound. The analyst, who was a Freudian, licked his lips with the driest of dry tongues and appeared to take notes. Then he said, Tell me about your mother. Jesus began to cry softly at first.
SPEAKER_02Oh, it's how I love that poem so much.
SPEAKER_04It's I just realized it's actually the rule of threes. It's the story that I'm gonna read.
SPEAKER_02It is actually, yes, you're right. The journey. And I just, you know, there are there are certain poems. I think of, you know, some of the Sufi poets, Hafiz and Rumi, and there are certain, you know, beautiful sacred songs that that move me into this place of reverence. And poems like that do as well. You know, they really ignite in me this feeling of humanity and kindness and yeah, the the great intellect that we have that we can we can write a poem and suddenly think about God's wife. I think it's absolutely brilliant. How have we got this far and not thought about God's wife? Oh, thank you so much.
SPEAKER_04Behind every omnipotent deity.
SPEAKER_02Do you know what I mean? Oh, thank you so much. It's been so great to talk to me. It's been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining. My name is Rebecca Tantoni, the host and creator of the Solid Earth. As always, we will finish with our thank yous and shout outs to everyone who's made this episode. So, firstly, I want to thank Tom Sashry for this fascinating dialogue that took us into the middle and the in-between of it all. It really allowed me to go away from our conversation and really think about the value of that. Second twin blaze, for trusting this concept, for really believing that there is something here that needs to go out into the world. And a huge shout out to Daniel Gingsburg, who has been creating the visuals for this podcast. Next, let's go to our sound. So, first we have Hollow Reed and Passionately Wandering by The Bird and the Butterfly. Orange by Beans on Post, Wild, Galactico, I Dreamt All Night, and Isla Nocturna, Trapped by Panther Panther, Poly Sound from BBC's Sound Effects Library, Roy Green and Pro Tone, who did this, featuring Jules, all over music, sound and brilliance by the wonderful Pablo Villarreal. Keep following, we have more episodes to come, and we cannot wait for you to join this.