Joy Harjo — The Hope Portal Ep. 6

0:05Joy Harjo:Our teacher this time is the extraordinary Joy Harjo. She is a musician, a visual artist, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and she's also former Poet Laureate of the United States. She grew up in the state I grew up in, Oklahoma. but we might as well have grown up in parallel universes. Part of the rupture of our time for many of us is revisiting history we thought we knew, seeing in a whole new light places we thought we inhabited and that is very much true of growing up in Oklahoma. It's very much true of me that I have work to do for the rest of my life to reconcile terrible stories I did not learn or did not hear, to take in unimaginable cruelty and atrocity for which I must take some responsibility, also to take in beauty I didn't see.

1:17Joy Harjo:So I grew up in a town called Shawnee. Not knowing who Shawnee was, Joy Harjo's ancestors landed in Tulsa, which was at the end of the Trail of Tears. They were sent there after being forcibly removed from their homelands in the Deep South. She has composed a glorious life out of very hard beginnings. But from the beginning of her life, from childhood and even before, Or she has carried and retained a sense of space and time and life that is so much vaster than present circumstances. She uses this evocative phrase for the sense of time she knows and lives. She calls it the whole of time, W-H-O-L-E.

2:11Joy Harjo:When she does that, she reminds me of Einstein, the way Einstein reimagined the reality of time, which is quite different from how we perceive it with our senses. Time, he reminded science, is not an arrow moving forward. It is relative, not fixed. Seen at a deep level, it's not a compartmentalized past, present, and future. Past, present, and future are all happening, interacting with each other all the time. And we actually know this. We experience it constantly in our thoughts and in our hearts, in our lives. But the way we structured the modern world and our daily lives hasn't caught up with this fundamental reality.

3:01Joy Harjo:We are living in a Newtonian world of calendars and clocks and deadlines and hard stops. Years ago when I did a show about Einstein and spoke with another physicist about Einstein's sense of time, he said that what Einstein really did with high physics is restore time to the heart of nature where it had always been in traditional cultures, in human cultures, and that is time as seasonal, cyclical, generational. this is also the sense of time in our religious traditions it is the understanding of time in martin luther king jr's evocation of the long arc of the moral universe that bends towards justice and it is stunning to be present to joy harjo and see someone who holds this sense of time She's always known it, never lost it.

4:04Joy Harjo:And she beckons us to enter and relearn. In this part of my interview with her that you're going to hear, she'd been speaking of the pain and betrayal that has marked centuries of her people's history. And we were also speaking about an incredible Supreme Court decision that came down in the middle of the momentous summer of 2020. So much was going on that few of us, I think, noticed that our conservative Supreme Court of the present named and upheld the promise that was made to her tribe and others. This was a source of incredible joy and possibility and celebration for her and her community.

4:58Joy Harjo:And she was telling me, though, that immediately forces began to rally to undo this undoing of a wrong. So I asked her about something she wrote in The New York Times after that Supreme Court decision in the middle of 2020. She said that her elders always believed that there would be justice. Though justice is sometimes seven generations away or even more, it is inevitable. And I asked her if that is real to her still, even in the face of this most recent despair that she had been describing. How can she continue to hold those things together? I have grandchildren, great-grandchildren and children.

5:49And in the original teachings, we're told that they're all our children. I have to think of them and they're the rudder of hope. I mean, that's where we're going with them. I have to know that there is a larger, beautiful sense. I think even, you know, all the teachings ultimately wind up, the stories, everything wind up at a point of harmony. And when you wind up at that point, everything will be reckoned with. I feel like you have this sense of different kinds of time.

6:26Joy Harjo:So there's history, there's the time of European settlement, there's a lifetime, and there's also somewhere, I don't know where this is, you write about the whole of time, W-H-O-L-E, which makes that perspective possible. I think so. A human mind tends to be pretty literal, even as it can jump around, but it doesn't necessarily have the access to other kinds of time. You can think about it and analyze it and make structures and architecture to hold the ideas of other kinds of time. But you have to, you know, just like you wouldn't use a certain kind of meter to measure electricity that doesn't measure electricity.

7:15You know, there's another kind of perspective that you bring to understand or even move within time that would give you that perspective. I mean, that's why that image, that NASA image of the Earth when it was released, because it was top secret for a while, that showed the Earth as a beautiful, beautiful being was so powerful. Because it shifted, certainly it shifted awareness. Yeah. And it gave us a perspective, which, you know, going into a larger kind of time or place can, like my grandson and I standing there watching this field that we were inside of, even as we were watching it. It gave us that glimpse into even another kind of time, even the Internet and the idea of networks can be linked to that image.

8:13Joy Harjo:Yeah. Yeah. And the story matrix and the story field, as you describe also, is more generous and expansive than that linear cultural imagination. It's in sync with that idea, with that vision. And I watched this beautiful ceremony that was kind of your inaugural, or not your inauguration, but your inaugural appearance as Poet Laureate. Was it the National Book Festival? And I'm assuming that you were the first Poet Laureate to walk out on stage with her saxophone around her neck. Yeah, I think so. I don't think there were actually a few poets who play saxophone. But no, I think that I, yeah, I'm the first one to do that.

8:58Joy Harjo:There's a, let's see, it's page 77. When you tell this story, this is in An American Sunrise, when Adolph Sachs patented the first saxophone on June 23rd. Would you read that? Yes, I like that piece. Yeah. And I always say thank you to Adolph Sachs that I use my poetic license and write a poem where Rabbit invents the saxophone. Yes, that comes before it was too long. For radio. Okay. When Adolph Sax patented the first saxophone on June 23, 1846, the Creek Nation was in turmoil. The people had been moved west of the Mississippi River after the Creek Wars, which culminated in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.

9:46We were putting our lives back together in new lands where we were promised we would be left alone. The saxophone made it across the big waters and was introduced in brass bands in the south. The music followed rivers into new towns, cities, all the way to our new lands. Not long after, in the early 1900s, my grandmother, Naomi Harcho, learned to play saxophone. I can feel her now when I play the instrument we both loved and loved. The saxophone is so human. Its tendency is to be rowdy, edgy, talk too loud, bump into people, say the wrong words at the wrong time, but then you take a breath. all the way from the center of the earth and blow.

10:29All that heartache is forgiven. All that love we humans carry makes a sweet, deep sound and we fly a little.

10:50Joy Harjo:Our children as the rudder of hope. And that insistence, almost as an aside, that all children are our children. There are so many invitations here, but one of them is to get less literal, less Newtonian in how we work with time, which is to say to more completely enter the reality of time and space, to claim a hope that is big enough to meet them as they are, and as Joy said, to fly a little in our perspective, to believe and to insist and to live as if time and space are on the side of deep justice and human flourishing in which we all become more whole. so joy brings us full circle with adrian marie brown in this notion of the imaginative power that we must summon towards the world we want to create and be part of and pass on to all of our children it fascinates me how just as emergence is actually a more reality-based grasp of how change happens than our faith in best laid plans, this wilder, mysterious time is more reality-based, in fact, than a linear way with time of clocks and schedules and deadlines.

12:28Joy Harjo:And just think about that word, deadlines. It's another use of language that ocean would have us pay attention to. It's an image of time doing violence with us or us doing violence with time. So with joy as our teacher, I think we're called to practice living in the whole of time. to practice knowing in our bodies and our minds time as a more generative canvas and companion on which we carry and confront and inhabit and work with the hardness and the sacredness of what we have before us to reconcile on this kind of canvas who we want to be with the histories we've lived and told and the future we desire.

13:31Joy Harjo:I want to acknowledge here also personally that when Joy Hardow speaks of seven generations and the whole of time, I know, I feel that she feels that in her bones. It is not an abstraction. action, it's not even a mystery to her in the way it lands in me as a mystery. It is an existential reality, and it is part and parcel of her hope. It is part and parcel of her power. And I do not, I did not inherit that feeling in my bones from my family, from the way history was imparted to me. And I think many of us in the West don't. We became separated from that sensibility. So in the journaling this time, I'm going to give you an image to carry around, a thought exercise that was passed on to me from my teacher, John Paul Lederach, passed on to him from his teacher, the sociologist Elise Balding.

14:42Joy Harjo:it is called the 200 year present and it's a way to cultivate a reality-based longer sense of time and ancestry and the possibility that comes with that so again this will be in the journal but i want to just share it with you quickly here how it works first take your mind back to the youngest age you can remember and the oldest person you can remember holding you, holding you. Calculate back to their date of birth, their year of birth, roughly. Second, bring to mind the youngest person you have held in your arms and the year to which they might live, which is a fascinating exercise in a century in which it is projected that people born in the early part of this century might well in great numbers live for an entire century.

15:51Joy Harjo:The span of time that you will be able to calculate from these two, from this date of birth and this projected date of death is going to be roughly a 200-year present that is very tangible, a 200-year present that your life on this earth spans, that you have literally touched and been touched by. See how this stretches your imagination, which we have explored as so powerful. See how it stretches your sense of the possibilities of the imprint and agency of your span on earth. It doesn't make what we stand before easier, but it absolutely makes it more spacious. And that is a great gift.

16:59Thank you.