Jonathan teeters on the edge of a mystical abyss

"I am blinded by the light we no longer see. I am deafened by the sounds we no longer hear. I am burning with the love we no longer feel."

There's a massive sea of nothingness and we are an awareness floating about in it. We create these islands of metaphors and symbolic meaning and internal emotional architecture that we hold onto…and it's a very terrifying and scary thing to say, Well, wait a minute, all that stuff is just a social or psychological creation. And what we really are is just awareness and possibly love, right?

-Jonathan Foster, writer of The Crow

In one dimension, Jonathan Foster teeters on the edge of a mystical abyss. In another, he navigates the tangible rhythms of daily life, delighting in the simple beauties and nurturing true connection with loved ones. In this interview—and through his stunning, unforgettable essays on The Crow—we meet Jonathan in the liminal space between these two dimensions, an unresolvable tension he balances with remarkable ease and light-heartedness.

Jonathan’s essays lay bare his disillusionment with societal narratives, environmental degradation, the trauma caused by capitalism, and the myths of identity. Yet, within this critique, I sense his profound love and wonder for the human experience, celebrating impermanence as a vital force that makes all this incomprehensible beauty possible.

What sets Jonathan apart is his ability to hold these opposing truths: on one hand, the raw honesty of saying, “Look, we’re kind of fucked,” and on the other, the fervent, tender act of loving what remains. He doesn’t offer easy answers or distant solutions but invites us to find meaning in the fertile, transformative landscape of questioning, each moment by fertile moment.

And if you think this all sounds a bit heavy, his beloved dog Benny is never far, lightening the mood and offering sage advice from his Church of Dog. A recurring companion in his stories, Benny distills Jonathan’s vast wisdom into the simplest of truths: “Relax. Just relax, dudes.” Which is exactly where I hope you’ll end up after listening to this rich, deeply inspiring conversation—a little less afraid to live with wonder amidst the wreckage, and ready for a good nap to digest all of Jonathan’s philosophical goodness once you’re finished.

TRANSCRIPT:

Kimberly

Jonathan Foster. This is so cool to see you all the way from Stockholm, Sweden. Technology never ceases to amaze me that we can just connect like this. Even though I've never seen you in not the flesh but in this digital flesh. I do feel like I really have a sense of who you are because your essays, of course, they're stunning prose. And they also have a sense of humor and this crazy tension of disillusionment. But I also really hear this longing in you to make sense of this world's false narrative and navigate it with as much freaking love that you can muster. And the fact that you can convey all of that in these short essays is pretty profound. So I'm really looking forward to diving in with you today to introduce all of your talent to whoever's listening to us today. So welcome.

Jonathan

Thank you very much, Kimberly. I mean, I think we ought to stop now because you've just opened up such a lovely introduction. I'm only going to ruin it by actually speaking. But yeah, think you've described really well what I'm trying to do with some of these things. In fact, I had something that came out today. And if it's all right, I'm going to read one comment from one of your previous guests,

E.T. Allen

who mentioned something he said, “The way you set a scene is immediately immersive. There's this incredible relatable normalcy that pretends like it isn't teetering right on the edge of a mystical abyss.” And I thought, yeah, that sounds really good. That sounds right. And I think it's not only a mystical abyss, is a sort of a political abyss and a philosophical abyss. And I'm trying to write these kind of little snow globes of entertainment that you can relate to as an individual but also reach out to greater sort of society and so forth and ask the kind of questions that don't really have answers but need to be pondered and thought about anyway.

Kimberly

Mm hmm. Yes. And I love how Eric said it, the teetering on that abyss, because I really feel that tension. And I love that you just said that you don't have, that it's not about offering the answers. I mean, as we grow older, we know that the more we know, the less we know. And you present that complexity and that tension, but sort of this also offering of a resolution that is through the heart. It's extraordinary. So I want to jump in because I want to start with, we're going to explore a few of your essays today.

And the one that I want to start with is Schrodinger's Cat. And because you have such a lovely voice, I wanted to just introduce this with a couple paragraphs from Schrodinger's Cat and then we'll jump in and ask some questions about it.

Jonathan

Okay, well, Schrodinger's Cat's quite an interesting essay for me for lots of other reasons, but we can come to that. But let me just read these three paragraphs and then I can tell you what I think I mean. Okay.

I exited the house like a ninja, creeping past my mother's bedroom, silently squeezing the front door back into its frame, hovering away like a ghost.

I exited the house like a ninja, creeping past my mother’s bedroom, silently squeezing the front door back into its frame. Hovering away like a ghost. It felt safer that way. But it isn’t actually safer because people without weight eventually just float away.

Our town is a harsh place getting harsher, decorated in union jack bunting and casual xenophobia. If people aren’t careful this place is heading for trouble. It’s already stumbling and snarling like a ravenous drunk searching for another bottle, strenuously attempting and comically failing to keep up the appearance of sobriety, stability and civility. It can’t last. Just like us.

Exposed, exhausted and despised our town’s population comprised of the newly coronated Precarious Poor, sinking fast as the shaky ground under our feet is turned to quicksand. Fingers are pointing, tongues are whispering. The country knows who’s to blame. Non-enterprise types like my mother, my brother, my sister and me. Bloodsuckers. Bread-liners. The Undeserved. The Feckless. In this town I’m not me. In this town I’m just one of Them.

So what is that about? Well, I remember in the eighties, because I'm 55 now, so the eighties was a time when I was kind of quite socially and politically aware of a lot of things, even as a sort of younger person. And I remember that, when it says things like, our town is a harsh place getting harsher, decorated in uni and Jack Bunty and casual xenophobia, I mean, it's quite obvious really, isn't it? That was the beginning of that kind of nationalism and this right wing push for deciding who was a valid person and who wasn't. And it was a very much a creation of poverty and a creation of a narrative around poor people. And we were poor people. So I felt that quite strongly. And it was obvious that if they continue, and I say they, I mean, we as society continue and when I say our town, don't mean necessarily a specific place where I grew up, but the towns that we share, right? The places that we are all growing up in. If they continue to treat people this way, then people will begin to react in dangerous and negative ways.

And today we see that. I mean, there's a new, I don't even want to get into this really, but American politics and British politics is not going very well, is it? And the seeds and the foundations of those of what we have today, this horror that we have today, were firmly laid and planted back in the 80s. So Some of Schrodinger's Cat is about the way that society is formed as it goes along and also the personal and individual relationships that we end up having under that kind of pressure.

Kimberly

Right, right. And do you feel like when you were young and experiencing that both on the societal level, but also in the home, did you have an understanding of your own agency within that? Or did you feel kind of like you're just being dragged along in it?

Jonathan

Do you mean within the home agency, within the family or at the family agency within society? I think we had very little agency. I mean, that's one of the problems with inequality and poverty is that you take away people's ability to make decisions and to have opportunities and to feel that they are legitimate actors in the family or in society, right? And if you have a society that treats people constantly in that way, you end up with people treating each other that way, which is why in Schrodinger's Cat, the family are also horrible to each other the whole time, except the “I” character and the sister, which is my way of showing that, in fact, like you said in the introduction, kindness and generosity and love and caring and thought for each other is the only way to really proceed with these things.

Kimberly

Yeah, I guess, that's kind of what I think I was intuiting is that within all of this uncertainty, you were finding some of your own personal, maybe not even agency is the right word, but some sort of sense of value or a guiding North Star that was love and kindness. Am I correct?

Jonathan

Yeah, I mean I think so, I mean but don't you, I mean I think everybody would agree right? I mean isn't that the only salve, isn't that the only thing that that saves us all from the the darkness and the...

Kimberly

Okay, I was just learning a little bit about—maybe you've seen this—it's a 28 minute film from the 50’s by Chris Marker, La Jetée. And essentially, there are still frames for 28 minutes, and it's a stable time loop. So it's science fiction, he goes back in time, but there's nothing that he can change within that time loop. The whole 28 minutes is just still frames except for one motion picture and it lasts for about three seconds and it's the woman that he loved opening her eyes, and in that sense, we are concluding or suggesting that love itself escapes that trap of time and only love. Everything else is static and almost destined except for love.

Jonathan

Yeah, yeah, I think it’s so hard to discuss these things as well. Like, what do we even mean by love? I know that sounds really—, but what is that? I tend to write about identities and the way we think about ourselves as human beings or as people. And I remember that you made a comment once on something, I don't remember which it was, about how I was panning the camera back from the individual experience to the societal experience. It might have been the Schrodinger’s Cat or something, I don't know. And I think part of that is to do with also how we are and our identities, right? So I think of identity in terms of, I have an individual emotional architecture that's become habitual and I call that me, right? It's something that I've, we all do that, I think. That's the internalized identity.

And then there's another identity, which is the one that everybody else sees of me. I mean, I find it incredibly difficult to understand who my children actually think I am, or who my wife actually thinks I am, because she sees me and I have this sort of identity that lives inside of their heads only. And so when I think about things like defining love that we were talking about, then it's not necessarily about this internal identity and something that I get my gratification, my personal growth, my love, but the external identity, the one that lives in everyone else's head, right? That's where love sort of resides in a way. And tending that one so that you have, instead of ownership of everything, you have sort of guardianship of things. That's the kind of love that I mean when I'm saying that.

I actually I have this, I was thinking you might say this. so I got a small piece from The Shimmering Delicacy of All Things. So maybe I'll just quickly read this and you'll see. I was talking about—because another thing before I read—is this frustration that I often show in the writing and this irritation with the way things are going is because I think, Look, this life is so short. It's so incredibly short. It's a little “zip” and we're gone, you know, what are we doing?

So here's the thing.

They say the dead beckon to the dying. They say we are enticed toward death by the guiding hand of those we love, those we loved, those we might love again, because the bonds of love, they say, transcend all. I sip my coffee and contemplate the gossamer-thin delicacy of life, the transience, the volatility, the seemingly perishable meaningless nature of all things.

And yet here is this love, like an embrace, like a home, like a sky, this underlying elemental essential love that's holding everything together.

And so, know, so that's what I'm talking about when I say these sort of things about love. It's not really about each of our, I'm very much, I've always been very much pushing against this kind of atomization and individualization of everything. I'm very much wishing we lived in a world where there was a mutuality and a mutual dependency could be returned some way and I think that—

Kimberly

You said you've always been this way. Was there a moment or were there specific events in your life that deepened this conviction for you or this intention for you?

Jonathan

I grew up in, I was born in Canada, grew up there a little while. You see in Murmuration of Memories, there’s a few things about that. And then I grew up in New Zealand as well for many years. And I spent a lot of time out in nature. And I think that is a, it's a fantastic way to grow up. It's important, I think, to do that. And so I had a lot of, I would say, connection to the world in lots of ways. And then very unexpectedly when I was about eight or nine, my parents divorced and we sort of were flung from New Zealand and taken to England, which was quite a shock at the time, know, from a blue and beautiful ocean-based lifestyle to this kind of gray urban place where the food was so tremendously— Sorry.

Kimberly

And at eight years old, you said?

Jonathan

Yeah, think something like that. And when you have these kinds of, and you must know this from your own life, right, from your own experiences with with suddenly becoming, How do I say this? I don't want to say becoming ill, but becoming…

Kimberly

Yeah, well, dizzy. I mean, to be more specific, it's this constant sensation of discomfort in my body. Yeah, but “ill” I mean, whatever you want to call it.

Jonathan

Yeah, I mean, when something happens where the old world is suddenly the new world, then that sort of philosophical understanding of what the old world was and what the new world should be and our place in it and all those kinds of things. But also, I've always had a kind of, I don't know, it sounds a bit ridiculous really, but a poetic kind of outlook.

Kimberly

Well, the poetic outlook is certainly strong and one of the strengths you have so many strengths in how you convey this in your writing. And I do I have noticed not just in Schrodinger's Cat, but almost all of your essays, you have that zoom lens. And I want to ask you, how does how does that moving from personal to universal inform you in your creative process with writing specifically? Is that something that you intend to do every time you put pen to paper?

Jonathan

And no, I read something recently, I think, think maybe it's wrong this, but I think it was Sylvia Plath or something. And she said, “I write to find out what I'm thinking.” And I don't often intend to do any of these things. I just sort of sit down and start writing. I think also what I was saying about identity earlier, there’s this encouragement these days to think of ourselves as sort of units of individual sort of skin where everything else is outside of us is actually quite a kind of forced philosophical position. It's not really true, is it? I mean, it's not really the experience that we have. I live as much in the heads of everybody else as they live in my head and all those sort of things. So...

I think also the other thing is that what I'm trying to do in some level is get a reader to feel an understanding or an emotional connection to things. And I think that if I write on an individualized level about my own experiences or the fictional characters' then that's a sort of way in, a bit like Eric said at the beginning, you know, these “normal scenes” which then sort of all of a sudden turn. I found that I ended up catching people and then wanting to make bigger points about whatever it is, whatever the topic of the story is.

Kimberly

Yeah, you hook them in and it may even on first glance, you know, be very different or unrelatable for that person. But then when you move into the universal, all of a sudden these little lights go off as we read you and go, I relate, I connect, I understand. So it's a brilliant movement that you're doing between the two.

Jonathan

I mean, it's just a counter movement to the nonsense that we have to live in, isn't it? If you think about it, I think we have so much more, we have this encouragement all the time nowadays, especially to sort of despise each other or to find differences or to sort of compete with each other and all these kinds of things. But actually, the truth is that we share so much of our experiences and our fears and our unfortunate pasts and the terrible mistakes we made and the terrible mistakes we're going to make and all the rest of it. And so when you think about, I was reading something on Substack—I do love Substack—some of the writers on there are amazing. And I was reading something about, from a nurse who was working in, what do you call it when you go to that last place after hospital? I can't remember the name.

Kimberly

Hospice.

Jonathan

Yes, a hospice, yeah, exactly. And she was talking about people on their deathbeds. And I was thinking, nobody on their deathbed ever says, boy, I wish I'd been more unkind to people or boy, I wish I'd bought more junk and, you know, these kinds of things. And so to find ways in the writing that can sort of, it's not so much hook people in, but for people to go, yeah, I recognize that. I feel that too. I have that exact same kind of whatever it might be.

It's just a good way to then be able to poetically sort of sneak up and say, What about this? Or what about that thing? Or whatever it might be.

Kimberly

Well, and sometimes it's uncomfortable. So I want you to, let's have you read something else because I want to give people an example of how in A Perpetual Collapse In Spectacular Silence, you have this extraordinary walk through the deep quiet of the forest. And then you have us speeding through space on a train and reflecting on the short-sightedness of our society. And you're just kind of like, yanked, your heart's in this place of rest, and then, oh but this is still happening too. So let's read both, if you can go to those paragraphs. Okay, great.

Jonathan

Yeah, I think I have them here.

On our walks through the deep quiet of the forest, when there's only the sound of the snow or the dry pine needles underfoot, is peace enough to fall into meditative contemplation, where the past and the future feel like coping mechanisms, evolved to deal with the vast emptiness of time. In these moments, I see that all moments are one and the same, and they describe infinite time as casually as they do our fleeting daily routines, immense incomprehensible stretches of time bursting out of a flicker, like a flowing and rolling Mobius strip. And in this peaceful thought, I am struck by our utter infinitesimal insignificance.

I mean, some of that is about this thing like the death bed, how short life is. What the hell are you doing if you're not?Just before I the next one, I got a great comment from

Weston Parker

who does the view from a carpenter's point of view.

Kimberly

This is a substack that I need to know about? Okay, we'll make sure I link it.

Jonathan

Yeah. And he said, “Why don't I just write in caps on all my essays, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?”

Kimberly

I think Jonathan, we need a list of all your favorite reads on Substack because I think I'm missing out on some.

Jonathan

There's some fantastic... I have got a list actually. Okay, and then so then later on we're on the train, right?

We are such genius design-Apes that we’re able to conceive of and manufacture incredible wonders like this train, and yet we are such moronically shortsighted and greedy Apes that we’ve abandoned ourselves to these foolish trinkets. Shopkeeper Kings have merrily emptied the world of meaning and harvested the majesty of life for their deathly vision. We’ve failed to fight back as they’ve suffocated and starved and drowned that which they cannot profit from, whilst fattening and worshiping and endorsing only that which engorges them. This train hurtles through a world that glorifies the trivial and the shallow and dismisses the serious and the essential and I am blinded by the light we no longer see. I am deafened by the sounds we no longer hear. I am burning with the love we no longer feel.

I mean, think that the thing with the shopkeeper kings and the sucking meaning and value out of the world and whatever, I mean, that's a very long-winded way to talk about capitalism, really, which is a kind of word that's very dangerous to talk about. I mean, it's that we've been so well trained to immediately Pavlovian dog-like say, he said capitalism must be a maniac or something.

But essentially that's what I'm talking about there, isn't it? I mean, the way that we as individuals have had, or we as a species (talk about from the individual to the universal), we as a species have had ourselves removed from the capacity to express ourselves in any other way, except through these very tiny little value boxes. And it's a tragedy I think and you can see that it's a tragedy because the reason I wrote the whatever this one's called-

Kimberly

The Perpetual Collapse in Spectacular Silence.

Jonathan

Thank you, thank you, is because of the way we are utterly and completely destroying the environment. And you have to ask yourself, OK, but for what? I mean, for what? What are we doing this for? So that some people can get even more greedy with—the inequality and the political instability is so huge now that, you know, Egyptian emperors, Egyptian pharaohs would have been embarrassed at the way we we behave.

And I want to write about these important and socially important and politically important things. But I don't want to do it in the way that I've read so many things, you know, like in a kind of very dry and very obvious academic-y sort of way. I want to write about it in a way which, as we were talking about before, makes people actually feel in their hearts. What are we doing? Where are we going? How is this going? And I'm always trying to sort of do that. I think that's a great example of that.

Kimberly

Absolutely. it also, it reminds me of one of the other people I interviewed,

Nina Schuyler

who wrote a book that essentially had a point of view of the earth. And same as you just said, she was tired of reading about all the environmental degradation from this sort of objective scientific perspective. She wanted to reach into the pathos. And it was such an effective technique. We don't anthropomorphize enough, I don't think.

Jonathan

Yeah, mean, entirely. And also we were talking earlier about identity. Why not take into account the identity of an ecosystem or of a Greenland shark or of, you know, whatever it might be. This hierarchy of species importance has brought us to a very, very dangerous place. Talking of Nina Schuyler, is she the one who writes the—

Kimberly

Stunning Sentences, yes.

Jonathan

When I first found Substack I think she was one of the first things I read and I was so thrilled and pleased with it and I loved her thing so much. I was always going, My God, this is amazing! Thank you so much. And she was like, Calm down. Calm down, Jonathan. All right, all right. It's brilliant.

Kimberly

But it is thrilling and I felt it was really tangible and I don't know if you listened to the interview I did with her, but she was even as an 11-year-old girl, was finding sentences that thrilled her and writing them down in notebooks. She has this excitement for language that is just so palpable.

Jonathan

That's exactly what I loved about her. I mean, I find when I'm trying to write these things, what I also try to do is, is sometimes I'll write long sentences with lots of commas and then sometimes lots of short sentences. And there's a kind of a rhythm and a pace to it. And so her Substack about the actual sort of structure of writing and what's happening in the background, they're kind of looking behind the curtain. I just, I absolutely loved it.

Kimberly

Yes. Well, it's validating. I would say I would think it's validating for you because you do have that rhythm. You absolutely have that rhythm. Do you have a musical background or something? Because when I read, it feels like I am, you know, stepping off of land into the ocean and I'm getting ready to be taken away on some other rhythm. And it's it's beautiful.

Jonathan

I've always played the guitar my whole life. I don't really play the piano, I've played the flute, I've played lots of different things and I do have a very, I love music, I'm very musically, or it's always in my life. So yeah, I mean it does. And I think it's, it's really underrated, is that the right thing to say? In the language of writing, how much rhythm and musicality you can actually get in there. I do a lot of times where—I'm not a poet—I don't know what I am, I don't like to be all these gatekeepers of what anyone is, but I'm a prose writer, I suppose. But I also insert a lot of rhyming in there so you can find yourself getting caught up in it. I hope people find that.

Kimberly

You do. absolutely. That's part of the hypnosis of it. And I want to say, well, hypnosis and healing, because you pull us in and then you're offering these suggestions and this balancing of the tension that is quite healing as well. So when we started this conversation, you said you set out to create something that is entertaining to read, but then presenting deeper ideas. And it's very effective, the technique that you're doing, whether that was, you know, something you considered, or it's just as how you operate in the world.

Jonathan

I did both. I have considered it and found out that it was sort of how I operated. What I found, I mean, do you want to hear this? Maybe I'll tell you this. Before I started writing The Crow, I was writing something else which was about the Arsenal Football Club. If some people know that, my apologies.

Because I watch a lot of football, soccer, I recognize that if you practice a lot, if you're a sports person, for example, and you go through the motions, tons and tons of thousands and hundreds and millions of times, eventually you don't think anymore, right? Eventually your body just takes over and you get into this kind of flow state where teams and individual players kind of just do things without thinking. And I thought to myself, Do you know what, if I could learn how to write where I could take the monkey mind consciousness and push that to one side and just kind of get that flow where I could let things happen. And then I kind of, I tried to do that a lot at the beginning and it kind of worked and I kind of discovered that I could then come back later and sort of edit the nonsense and find out what it was I've been saying and where I was going.

Kimberly

It's much more of an embodied technique. I was a ballet dancer for 15 years. And similar to the Sylvia Plath quote you gave earlier, I don't, I can't decipher my thoughts. Maybe there's just a lot of noise in there, but once my fingers or my body is moving, those thoughts crystallize and become clearer.

And so I feel like for some of us, that transmission of whatever is in here needs to come very much through the body and not just through some sort of analytical process. Does that feel similar to you?

Jonathan

100% I completely agree. I as was saying, I grew up in New Zealand. I mean, I was out in the ocean all the time. I was skiing a lot. I was playing tennis. was playing football. I was always doing something. You can have both. You can be a physical and a sort of literal person and find that those things splash over on each other. And yeah, I completely agree with you.

Kimberly

Okay, I have a question. We've we're touching on so many interesting topics. And I want to circle back to something about the well, you describe it as the trauma generation machine. And this reflects on capitalism and your question earlier about What is this all for? You know, Why are we making such a mess? Or, you know, is capitalism really a means to an end that is of value to humanity, to the earth, to all the species. And I love how in this essay you wrote, Fire and Smoke, you write, The most dominant and powerful socio-economic system on earth is a trauma generation machine.

I personally want to believe we're morally driven and feeling into this legacy of trauma helps me tap into compassion for the messiness of it all. But I want you to expand a little bit on this trauma generation machine and what that means to you.

Jonathan

Yeah, I I think that when I'm talking about things like that, it's lots of different things, right? It's the economy itself. It's creating trauma in the environment. It's creating— I'm actually quite a lighthearted and humorous person in lots of ways. So this does sound a little bit heavy or this— but I think that I see a lot of sadness everywhere. I see people that are broken. I see people that are, we were talking about identity, I see people that are identifying with their middle management roles they have in large corporations sort of almost just removing the chance to be themselves at whatever that means. And I think that I see that all over the place, that kind of thing. And where is it coming from? Well, it's coming from the the trauma that is generated by the values of capitalism and the dehumanization of each other and the separation of our collectiveness and our togetherness that is encouraged and happens all the time, right? And when I see that, I find it heartbreaking. I want to, I think the thing I wrote, something came out today about, I've always had x-ray vision. I can see the ghosts, people always trying to hide and I can always smile and nod at their hidden sides. I mean, I think, do you not see that yourself with people wherever you are? And then I think so why do we do it? Why can we not, what are we missing? And this goes right back to the beginning when I said I'm not actually going to give you any answers to anything.

I think one of the problems we have actually is that we live in a society that is very mythical about the Messiah, know, individual people solving problems or that there are individual single solutions to all these massive problems that we have if we just did this, if we just did that. And I think it comes from a kind of, you know, religious sort of thing where there's a single God.

I don't want to get into fetishizing the past or anything like that, but at some point when we started planting agriculture and plants and living in a particularly different way, it enabled humanity to form a much more triangular shape and a steeper shape where some people are more important than others and some people have more power than others. And I think eventually all of these kinds of things over thousands of years right up to now creates the kind of trauma that we see. We see it everywhere. What is going on? And it just gets worse and worse.

I have two daughters, one just 21. The other one's 19. And the incredible pressures they have on them to live up to a kind of very gender specific idea of what it must be to be a woman. And of course, to be a woman, you need to be able to buy all these particular kind of products to prove your womanness and you must be soft and you must be kind and you must be doing all these kinds of things. I find it really hard to be able to intervene as even as an important, because, know, of course, I'm their father. It's an important thing. But the amount of pressure coming from the outside world, this trauma machine that tells them they're invalid unless they behave in a particular way. They're dangerous even unless they behave in a particular way. And yeah, so what do we do? What do we do Kimberly?

Kimberly

What do we do? Well,

Jonathan

I mean my answer is to write ridiculous stories on Substack. I don't know if it helps.

Kimberly

One thing that you are doing, that we are doing, on Substack is we're presenting the questions and we're taking the scarring off. We're opening the wound because there's something about the word “machine” and I like that you usedthat because it implies that it's not human, that it's not sentient. And so most of us aren't making these decisions to fall asleep and to, you know, take that corporate job and, you know, die slowly inside. We're not consciously doing these. We're just part of the machine. But I feel like something about presenting these questions in the way that you're doing so takes the scar, the real rigid part, and it hurts. I mean, when you take it off, it's bleeding.

Jonathan

I think also when you say the machine, it's really a brilliant way to put it because it means that you're not necessarily going to blame anyone, right? I mean, although I am talking about hierarchy and kind of wealth class creating these terrible situations, whatever, on the other hand, I also think that they are locked into the machine. They are also in a micro culture that they can't escape. They also have a set of values that are all about proving certain things or whatever it might be. And so I try to write this stuff so that I'm not pointing the finger at anyone because we are all, I think, what is it I said in something, I'm broken by my innocence, I'm broken by my blamelessness or I can't even remember. But I think it's important that the machine means that it's not necessarily somebody's fault and we really are in an era of blaming everyone.

Kimberly

You're so right. I love how you put that. We are in this together. And if we were all astronauts, we would have come home with the “overview effect” of recognizing that during the day, in daylight, we don't even see the grids, the electric grids from outer space. We just see this ball that is so obviously part of all of us. There are no boundaries.

Jonathan

I think that's actually something that I find a bit annoying in my own writing, is that, and I don't have answers, but I'm really very good at sort of looking at the situation, seeing the structures, seeing the hidden ghosts, sort of pulling it out, making questions. I would like if there was more visions of a new world, visions of something else.

It's not really, it's dangerous really, isn't it? Because anytime you have this kind of vision of something and you try to get there, I can't think of many examples where that's worked very well. But it would be nice, I think it would be nice to have a kind of, I'm gonna try and do that more in the next year, try and write something where there's more hope for change rather than just anger at the way we are.

Kimberly

Are you seeing that maybe potentially as like writing fiction or science fiction, imagining utopias or worlds where there are solutions?

Jonathan

Not so much science fiction, although I do love reading science fiction, no, actually can I answer something slightly different than what you asked? Because I get a lot as well people saying is this fiction or did this happen to you? In fact I think you have mentioned something—

Kimberly

There was the piece Journey into Uncharted Waters. I thought that was a piece of fiction. I thought it was a piece of fiction at first.

Jonathan

Yeah, but it is. It is a piece of fiction. It's the one where the guy goes out in the boat and it sinks and... Yeah.

Kimberly

Yes, your friend Jord- but it was based on your friend Jordy, correct?

Jonathan

Yeah, well, no, I mean—But I think this is a really interesting thing. I get a lot like, a lot of these things are purely fictional. And I find that as a way to be able to deal with that, work out things and, know, because Jordy himself is in some ways representative of the seasons of life, you know, like when I was younger, I was much more probably more likely to get on a boat and go into the sea and do crazy mad things. And then like seasons change, I've calmed down a lot and I don't do that. But Jordy’s also representative of capitalism itself. The need to just rip everything apart and do nothing and do whatever you want, screw the consequences, let's just get on with it. That kind of the fire, that's why that thing has the…

So I write this kind of, and my answer to your question if I’ll write fiction, science fiction, what am I going to do in the future? I don't know because some of it seems to be this half fiction. Some of them are based on things of more memoir-iction or something, you know? But a lot of things I are purely fiction, but they seem to come across pretty powerfully as me.

I think part of that might be because I also write the dog and I. A lot of those are actually me in the forest with the dog, which is also weaved into those things are some ideas that are not obviously happening.

Kimberly

Well, I love this approach though. And actually

E.T. Allen

and I talked about this too, because his story, Coincidence Speaks, was essentially his story, but he decided to write it as fiction with a different character's name, but essentially it was a memoir. And I think just as we're doing with gender and all the other boundaries that seem unnecessary, we're starting to break some of those walls down and my memoir feels much more like narrative nonfiction or even a mystery than it does just presenting a memoir. And I think it's refreshing to not have to have those labels.

Jonathan

Completely. I wonder as well, what is the point of, I get with non-fiction, for example, but even history is fiction to some degree. I mean, it is, isn't it? And written by a certain class of winner who says this is what happened. And then all fiction I ever write is always being drawn from small experiences that I have that I then put into various characters. Is it fiction? Is it non-fiction? I don't know. I mean I find it really hard all these gatekeepers for... I don't know.

Kimberly

Yeah. So you mentioned that you want to maybe focus on or bring in some elements of hope or not necessarily even solutions, but just that sense of optimism, which I sense actually you do. I don't read you and feel like the downer element because there's, again, as I started, there is this real foundation in compassion and love.

So that is a thread that weaves throughout. But I want to explore this with you a little bit more. Like, how do you envision that?

Jonathan

I don't know. I'm really glad that you say that though, because I think my things are really hopeful. I think that they are, but sometimes I think people interpret them as, you know, more depressed or pessimistic than they are. yeah, I think, you know, can we swear on this thing?

Kimberly

Of course. Yeah.

Jonathan

I think we are totally fucked in so many ways, right? But there's something also that, and this is again from the individual to the universal, because though I'm living on a fucked planet and it's going in all the wrong directions and things are collapsing at a rate of unbelievable pain, also I have the most extraordinary and magical and wonderful experience in my life, right? Don't we all? Even the terrible things that have happened, even the impermanence, even the— I mean I think in fact impermanence is a beautiful thing, thank goodness that it exists. If we didn't have winter, what the hell would spring be, right? So yeah, so to answer your question, I'm just talking, I just would like to be able to think is there some way to bring more practical hope, but maybe I'm doing it already, I don't know.

Kimberly

Well, it reminds me of something I read on Substack and I'm going to find where it was. Oh it was

ars poetica

. Do you read Ars Poetica? So they were exploring these tensions of opposites, which is always such an important theme for me. And W.H. Auden wrote a poem, and I don't even know the name of the poem, but it was something about all we need to do is love or die.

And then near his death, he changed it because he realized or wasn't the right word, and was the right word. And I was like, Oh that is so good! Because that is the key here, is that we can talk about how the world is fucked and we can feel the love and feel the hope. And I think sometimes we've been so conditioned to think in a binary way. And so people might hone in on the critiques that you're making and then forget that, you can have that and this deep, profound passion for life at the same time.

Jonathan

100%. I mean, I love that that he changed it to, all we need to do is love and die. Because there is no other option, is there? I mean, that's exactly what's going to happen. I'm going to die, you're going to die. I think it would be a good idea. In fact, part of the trauma machine is refusing death, right? It’s turning our back on it and saying, don't look there, don't go in that direction. It'll never happen to you.

The billionaire fantasy at the moment, these crazy shopkeeper kings and their spaceship mania is also to live forever, isn't it? This sort of, you know, What are you thinking? And when you reach that kind of level of lack of philosophical insight, lack of and die, as Auden said, then you're in a bad and dangerous place, aren't you? And those are the people with the oars at the moment.

There's a lot of certain type of values that we need to really think and consider and going back to what we were saying at the beginning, not thinking consider as an identity for my own growth, but as a shared identity or where, how is my identity, who do you think I am? Who do I think? That kind of thing.

Kimberly

Okay, we keep circling back to identity. One of the more recent pieces that you've shared In Murmuration of Memories, you reflect on this evolving relationship with your family and memory. And I love this one line you say, “I saw they were not the telling of me.” And I want, can you read that? think we selected three paragraphs in there that start—

Jonathan

Yeah, ok.

And my memories, like the tremors of an earthquake, evoked the time when I could not conceive that the world would ever set out to conquer me. And I remembered love. I remembered being awash with love. I remembered being fearless with love. I remembered being invulnerable.

And it was in the quiet of the world, lost in these true memories, when all the stories floated up into the heavens and left me, like a murmuration of starlings rising and rolling in a great dark shadow, no longer in me but instead I saw them like a near-death experience and I realised that I had been torn asunder by these fragile and powerful and explosive narratives. But in a moment of quiet contemplative silence I could let the stories float away, for I saw they were not the telling of me. And I saw I could be released.

And I remembered, in that chorus of beating hearts, that even though love is a high stakes game where you can lose everything, where you can be torn asunder over and over, made raw and left naked and fearful, even though these things are true, we have no choice but to love.

Some of that one was motivated by the pain of individuals we were talking about before. You see so many times the self-fulfilling prophecies that happen in families, where you're the bad one, you're the naughty one, you're the funny one, you're the one we have our hopes for, you, ha, not likely, Sonny. And people internalize those sort of stories. And these paragraphs are about the possibility of just saying, Well, hold on a minute, these things are not my identity, they're not who I am. They're a kind of “murmuration of memories” that have been thrown at me and look at them go away. Who can I be if I'm not, if my family don't decide who I should be, right?

Kimberly

I read that as a real realization and I don't know if that was more of a fictional or a memoir-ish piece, but I read that as something that you felt released when you finally realized this.

Jonathan

Yeah, I mean, that is quite memoir-ish, that one. It was a lot of relief. There was a lot of difficulty in some parts of my upbringing where I'm considering some of those things in that story. But also when we were talking earlier about the way that you write, and I said that you get this flow going. Sometimes I'll write something like that and then come back to it and think, Okay,, so I mean that, I? This is what I'm thinking about. Okay, I get it. And I'm actually almost releasing myself as I go along kind of thing, which is a process of writing, isn't it?

Kimberly

Yeah, yeah. that's so cool. Yeah, I mean, it's a type of I mean, you're doing therapy on yourself in a way. So just curious. when you realized that these narratives were not you, what let's take it a little deeper and so what did you discover as the true nature of your identity then?

Jonathan

Well, I think there's, if you want to get into it, there's a sort of an awareness that we all have. And then there's a massive sea of nothingness and we are an awareness floating about in that in some respects. And so what we do all the time is we create these islands of metaphors and symbolic meaning and internal emotional architecture that we hold onto. This is what the world is, this is who am or whatever. And it's a very terrifying and scary thing to say, Well, wait a minute, all that stuff is just a social or a psychological creation. And what we really are is just awareness and possibly just love, right?

And, you know, I'm not a religious person. I live in a world where everybody is kind of, but I’m not. But if I were to be one, I would probably head towards Buddhism or something because that kind of thing feels very normal and natural to my way of thinking.

Kimberly

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm right there with you. And for me, the experience, because we can't separate body from identity. And I know from my own journey of living with this neurological disorder and all of that, and the discovery of what I thought was my identity through these paternity revelations, there was this constant stripping away, stripping away, stripping away of who I thought I was, how I navigated in the world. And I found the metaphor, it's just such a perfect metaphor because what I landed with is a sensation of constant movement, like the ocean, which is closer to my truest identity in the sense that it is just this vast constantly shifting experience than anything that I could ever define in a solid way. So I have this real visceral experience now of sort of what all that shedding of identity led me to. So anyway, yeah.

Jonathan

But that's brilliant. I feel the same way. I completely agree. I think fluidity, flux, change. What does Heraclitus say? That you put your foot in the river and the river's not the same and the man's not the same. I that's exactly how it is for identity too, right? I'm always trying to write these sort of vocabulary of images sometimes in The Crow. And one of the things I've used over and over is this idea that we're sitting by the firelight and out just beyond where the light is, is darkness, where fear is, right? And so much of what we do to create identity is to try and manage perceived oncoming dangers and fears that aren't even there. They're only really in the head, aren't they? So yeah, I mean, I 100 % agree with you. I like that's a really nice way of putting it.

Kimberly

Well, Jonathan, I have to ask one question and I know he's not here with us, but I'm realizing that we have about five minutes left and I want to mention the Dog because we all worship at the Church of Dog.

Jonathan

Yeah, good. Okay, I am religious. It's the dog.

Kimberly

Exactly. I will worship to the Church of Dog. And what's his name, by the way? Do you ever share his name?

Jonathan

Yeah I know, I know there's a fantastic reader, you probably know,

Lor

, right? L-O-R, and I think she's the only one who actually knows the name of the dog—his name is Benny.

Kimberly

Of course, Lor knows, of course.

Jonathan

And her dog's called Ranger, we swapped dog names, you know. Yeah Benny his name is, he's a Kleiner Minstrelander, which is a small Muensterland, it's a German bird dog and he's a fantastic personality. Really interesting. I mean, yeah, if you want a guru come come and meet Benny. He's a dude.

Kimberly

Yes, I do. And I want to know if he has anything to share. What does he want everyone to know about? Anything, from existence to dog food.

Jonathan

Yeah, I think the thing with him is that he has an appreciation—it’s a really dodgy saying “live in the now”, it's a very peculiar thing and it doesn't really, whatever that means, but he kind of does live in sort of joyous now all the time, he never holds grudges. Yeah, he's just so happy so I mean his advice would be “Just elax, relax dudes.”

Kimberly

Yeah, he's like the perfect foil to humanity's chaos and you know everything we get into.

Jonathan

I know we've got one minute left, but talking of the future writing, I really liked that one in Fire and Smoke where the Dog started, he's begun talking, I've noticed in these things. And he's so much wiser than I am. And that could be a thing, actually, the dog speaking more in the future.

Kimberly

Absolutely, because he does have the answers. Didn't he say, I have it right here, he says, “But what happens when you can't change society and there's nowhere else to go? What happens when the uncharted places have all been charted? What then?” He's asking you this, but then he does kind of give you an answer.

Jonathan

Yeah, exactly. He's smart. That's because the Dog reads David Graeber.

Yeh, I think I'm going to try more of that.

Kimberly

Yeah, sweet Benny. Well, Jonathan, this has just been such a delightful conversation. You are such a philosopher and a poet and humorous, I mean, I do feel the lightheartedness too and that's really—yeah, you're a complex human being and I love that all of those pieces are part of what make you you.

Jonathan

Yeah man, well Kimberly we all are, you are too. Well I want to thank you so very very much for this. It's been an absolute honour to talk to you and I really really appreciate the opportunity to do that.

Kimberly

Wonderful.