The Cosmic Library – Literary Hub

On Journey to the West’s Capacity for Reinvention Across Centuries

The Cosmic Library — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 08:52:19 +0000

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights; season three, the Hebrew Bible. This spring and summer, in a season titled The Hall of the Monkey King, we’re talking and thinking about Journey to the West, the fantastical Chinese novel full of action and comedy and spiritual adventure.

Here, in the conclusion of our five-episode season on The Hall of the Monkey King, you’ll hear about Journey to the West’s capacity for reinvention across centuries—about, in other words, its openness to different circumstances, something like the Monkey King’s own openness, his playfulness.

Julia Lovell says, “Running through Monkey’s actions and personality is a love of this thing called play. He’s an incredibly playful character. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Chinese word in the title of the novel that is translated as ‘journey’—you—can also be translated as ‘play.'”

Kaiser Kuo describes the history of openness in China with regard to cosmopolitanism. He mentions the echoes between the Ming Dynasty (when Journey to the West was written) and the Tang Dynasty (when the novel is set). Both of those dynasties, he says, have “periods of outward-facing and inward-facing.” These are times of intensified tensions that Kaiser Kuo observes here across Chinese history.

Journey to the West makes much of related dynamics between outward-facing and inward-facing, especially through its playful mood. In this novel, adventuring through traditions from China and from outside China, thinking in different keys, leaping from philosophy to philosophy, and seeking transcendence all depend upon a wild amount of play, of experiment, of fun.

Guests this season include Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia; Xiaofei Tian, scholar of Chinese literature at Harvard; Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston—she’s now working on a biography of Disney legend Tyrus Wong; and Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast.

____________________

Subscribe, listen, and enjoy the engaging interviews as we bring you The Cosmic Library. Episodes are available for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, PocketCasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Cinematic Transcendence: On Legendary Quests and Wuxia Cinema

The Cosmic Library — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 08:52:00 +0000

You can encounter Journey to the West in film, on television, in comic books—it’s a 16th-century novel that lives comfortably in an age of cinema and video games. This episode, then, follows a tangent away from the 16th century and into the movies. We’re talking about heroic quests and martial arts in media centuries after Journey to the West’s publication.

Wuxia cinema, in particular, occupies our attention here. These are films of high drama and martial arts in pre-modern, legendary Chinese settings. Karen Fang, scholar of cinema and literature at the University of Houston, notes “threads of connection” between Journey to the West and wuxia, and connections include the similar presence of a spiritual quest and martial artistry in a mythical-historical world. Still, to be clear: in this installment, we’re going for a walk away from the novel and into the movies. It’s just that we find a few patterns that match those of the Monkey King’s adventures.

Wuxia stories, like the Monkey King’s, draw from dynamics between intense self-cultivation and power struggle. The result is a durable kind of kinetic drama—it’s opened up cinematic possibilities for decades. Karen Fang explains the heart of it all: “The underlying idea in wuxia is this idea that somebody can reach a level of human transcendency—a transcendent power, a transcendent skill—through years of training and dedication, both to physical training, but also spiritual dedication.”

Guests in this episode include Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston—she’s now working on a biography of Disney legend Tyrus Wong; Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast; and Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King.

____________________

Spiritual Clarity and Satirical Play: On the Monkey King as Allegory

The Cosmic Library — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:52:25 +0000

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights; season three, the Hebrew Bible. This spring, in a season titled The Hall of the Monkey King, we’re talking and thinking about Journey to the West, the fantastical Chinese novel full of action and comedy and spiritual adventure.

You might, for good reason, not associate restless irreverence with religious engagement. But in Journey to the West, the Monkey King’s adventure through Daoist and Buddhist drama does have both elements, and the book weaves together multiple moods as result, including those of spiritual clarity and zany satirical play. Whether the novel does all this for the sake of ultimate, anarchic satire, for a livelier spirituality, or for other reasons: that all gets debated. Julia Lovell says in this episode:

Literary critics have been arguing about the spiritual, religious elements of the book for centuries. Some have always maintained that the book has actually a very intricate religious design, that Monkey is an allegory for the human mind. So in this reading, Monkey stands for the instability of human genius in need of discipline, namely the trials of the pilgrimage, to realize its potential for good.

There’s justification for such a reading, even if it’s not the only possible interpretation of this book. Lovell says:

The earliest Buddhist sutras translated into Chinese analogize the human mind as a monkey, as restless, erratic, volatile. And by the end of the first millennium C.E., the phrase “monkey of the mind” (xinyuan) had become a stock literary allusion for this restless human mind.

Following the Monkey King’s successful scenes of mischief, you might interpret the book as a joyous celebration of that Monkey Mind; or, the difficulties and disciplinary experiences that change the Monkey King could make the novel seem like a spiritually exacting pilgrim’s quest. There’s no single answer here. You’ll have to choose your own adventure.

____________________

On the Lawful Chaos of Journey to the West

The Cosmic Library — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 08:52:53 +0000

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights; season three, the Hebrew Bible. This spring, in a season titled The Hall of the Monkey King, we’re talking and thinking about Journey to the West, the fantastical Chinese novel full of action and comedy and spiritual adventure.

Different belief systems—and just differences in general—collide and merge in Journey to the West, the classic Chinese novel at the center of this season. “In Dungeons & Dragons terminology, you’ve got this lawful good monk and then you have this chaotic good monkey,” says Kaiser Kuo (co-founder of China’s first heavy metal band and host of the Sinica Podcast) in this episode. And their quest succeeds: the combination of the monk Tripitaka’s lawfulness and the Monkey King’s chaos works out.

That intertwinement of differences shapes Journey to the West, on multiple levels. It’s about a quest for Buddhist texts, but Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, makes his way through Daoist self-cultivation and Confucian thinking, too. The divine realm includes Daoist deities such as the Jade Emperor, but it’s also a Buddhist realm, including the Buddha and Guanyin. There’s a playful engagement with everything here, and the translator Julia Lovell explains the world behind that kind of expansive interaction with various traditions:

The novel sprang from a much older set of legends about a real historical character who lived around 600–664 CE as a subject of the Tang empire in China. Now the Tang is one of the great eras of Chinese imperial expansion, when the empire extends from the edge of Persia in the northwest to the frontier with modern Korea in the northeast. Taizong, the emperor on the throne in Tripitaka’s time—he’s the character who in the novel dispatches Tripitaka off to India to fetch the sutras—Taizong is the vigorous, ruthless ruler who pushes the frontiers of his empire out so far.

And in the decades that follow this, the Tang empire is awash with cosmopolitan products and ideas. And still today in China, the Tang is celebrated as this period of phenomenal cosmopolitan flourishing of the empire and ideas throughout China.

In this episode, we think about how a wild novel gave that cosmopolitan attitude a new narrative life.

Guests in this episode include Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast; Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia; and Xiaofei Tian, scholar of literature at Harvard.

____________________

An Introduction to Journey to the West, the 16th-Century Chinese Novel of Comic Mischief and Spirituality

The Cosmic Library — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 08:52:51 +0000

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights; season three, the Hebrew Bible. This spring, in a season titled The Hall of the Monkey King, we’re talking and thinking about Journey to the West, the fantastical Chinese novel full of action and comedy and spiritual adventure.

The Cosmic Library is back, with a five-episode season on Journey to the West, the classic 16th-century Chinese novel of comic mischief, spirituality, bureaucratic maneuvers, and superpowered fight scenes. It’s the story of a monk’s journey west for Buddhist texts, and that journey is moved along by the rambunctious Monkey King, whose interests include troublemaking and the pursuit of immortality.

In film, television, comic books, videogames, and elsewhere, this book remains in pop culture; for example, its story is woven into the new Disney+ streaming series American Born Chinese (based on a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang). And it’s also the right book to include on The Cosmic Library shelf alongside Finnegans Wake, 1,001 Nights, and the Hebrew Bible—it’s full of transformations, dream-like scenes, and surprising complications.

This season, we’ll hear readings from the book and talk about Buddhism, Daoism, cinema, comedy, and more. There’s a lot here. Journey to the West continually jolts the reader toward some joke, spiritual consideration, or satirical deflation of such considerations. Gene Luen Yang has described, in his foreword to Julia Lovell’s recent translation of Journey to the West, how tales of the Monkey King worked in his childhood as bedtime stories. And in this season of The Cosmic Library, you’ll hear how it’s the kind of book to read into the night, into the dream-like realm where categories blur, where thoughts and moods shift continually.

Guests this season will include Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston—she’s now working on a biography of Disney legend Tyrus Wong; D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia; and Xiaofei Tian, scholar of literature at Harvard.

____________________

Welcome to Season 4 of The Cosmic Library

The Cosmic Library — Tue, 30 May 2023 08:52:13 +0000

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights; season three, the Hebrew Bible. This spring, in a season titled The Hall of the Monkey King, we’re talking and thinking about Journey to the West, the fantastical Chinese novel full of action and comedy and spiritual adventure.

Guests for season four will include Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston; Xiaofei Tian, scholar of literature at Harvard; and D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia. The five episodes will come out weekly, beginning in early June.

____________________

The Unpronounceable Name of God: Concluding a Journey Through the Hebrew Bible

The Cosmic Library — Tue, 10 May 2022 08:49:02 +0000

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights. Season three, titled Mosaic Mosaic and premiering on April 11, journeys through and beyond the Hebrew Bible.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

It’s not just the contradictions in the Hebrew Bible that puzzle and provoke readers—there are, throughout, passages of intense emotional or moral provocation. See, for instance, Ecclesiastes, which in the King James translation begins:

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

Ecclesiastes challenges familiar notions of what life is about, notions of meaning or usefulness. You have to respond to something like that. You almost can’t help yourself: you have to think of your own answer to the book that declares: “There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.”

Poetry in general often poses such challenges that can’t be easily explained or resolved, but in return, these challenges activate the mind. The poet and critic Elisa Gabbert says, “When I’m reading or when I’m writing, I’m just thinking better than I am at any other time.”

The Hebrew Bible prompts you to figure things out on your own, with particular attention to language. As Peter Cole says: “At the very heart of this text, what do you have? You’ve got this ultimate transparency and ultimate opacity, which is the name of God, the four-letter name of God, which is unpronounceable, and no one really knows what it means.”

_____________________

Peter Cole is a poet and MacArthur genius whose new book, Draw Me After, will be out this fall.

Elisa Gabbert is a poet and poetry columnist with the New York Times. Her latest book, Normal Distance, will be out this fall.

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a psychologist, neuroscientist, and author of books including How Emotions Are Made.

Tom DeRose is a curator at the Freud Museum in London.

Joshua Cohen is a novelist whose books include Book of Numbers.

Struggling with Disaster—and Language—in the Hebrew Bible

The Cosmic Library — Tue, 03 May 2022 08:49:12 +0000

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights. Season three, titled Mosaic Mosaic and premiering on April 11, journeys through and beyond the Hebrew Bible.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the book of Genesis on, the Hebrew Bible presents a struggle with language: a struggle to establish meaning, to figure out the right uses of words, to understand one’s place in the world. The famous early scene of struggle in the Hebrew Bible, Jacob’s wrestling match with the divine, goes as follows in the King James translation:

Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.

And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.

And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh.

And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

And he said unto him, What is thy name?

As Peter Cole says, “The release from that one struggle, and the blessing, only comes with a knowledge of names.” Even this physical wrestling match becomes a matter of language, then.

Struggles with outright disaster generate language quests, too. Elisa Gabbert elaborates on disaster poetry in this episode, especially on the subject of W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.” She says: “It reminds you how much text there is in a poem. It’s wild.” She describes a proliferating kind of irony that radiates possibilities in so many directions, to which poetry might grant access.

Find more from Elisa Gabbert on Auden’s poem here.

_____________________

Peter Cole is a poet and MacArthur genius whose new book, Draw Me After, will be out this fall.

Elisa Gabbert is a poet and poetry columnist with the New York Times. Her latest book, Normal Distance, will be out this fall.

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a psychologist, neuroscientist, and author of books including How Emotions Are Made.

Tom DeRose is a curator at the Freud Museum in London.

Joshua Cohen is a novelist whose books include Book of Numbers.

On Sigmund Freud and the “Dream Space” of the Hebrew Bible

The Cosmic Library — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 08:48:44 +0000

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights. Season three, titled Mosaic Mosaic and premiering on April 11, journeys through and beyond the Hebrew Bible.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

Stuck in a lonely motel room, you have a good chance of finding a Bible, left for anyone similarly stuck in a strange interval between days. In this way, it’s yet another night book. The Bible also has famous night scenes, and dream scenes, too: Jacob’s dream of angels, Joseph’s dream of sheaves of wheat. This chapter of Mosaic Mosaic explores dream interpretation and that foundational dream-interpreter Sigmund Freud, himself a close reader of the Hebrew Bible.

“Literature guides Freud’s thinking all the way through,” says Tom DeRose of the Freud Museum in London. And one effect of reading such a literary doctor is a literary, tragic awareness—what DeRose describes as awareness that every effort to “bring things to a better place will inherently contain its own destructiveness within it.”

Other tensions between contraries exist within the dreams and dream-like passages of the Hebrew Bible. The novelist Joshua Cohen calls the dreams in the Bible “highly demonstrative and overly obvious.” He says that “the dreams that are presented are so clear,” which seems to him “a way of taming dream space, denying dream space its wildness.” On the other hand, the poet Peter Cole finds something like that wildness in the Bible, finds “that porousness of consciousness where the boundary of self is blurred.” And so, encountering both blurred boundaries and demonstrative clarity, we’re thinking in this episode of what interpretation can make of it all.

_____________________

Peter Cole is a poet and MacArthur genius whose new book, Draw Me After, will be out this fall.

Elisa Gabbert is a poet and poetry columnist with the New York Times. Her latest book, Normal Distance, will be out this fall.

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a psychologist, neuroscientist, and author of books including How Emotions Are Made.

Tom DeRose is a curator at the Freud Museum in London.

Joshua Cohen is a novelist whose books include Book of Numbers.

Rules, Rituals, and Laws of Emotion in the Hebrew Bible

The Cosmic Library — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 08:49:06 +0000

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights. Season three, titled Mosaic Mosaic journeys through and beyond the Hebrew Bible.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

“We regulate each other’s nervous systems,” says the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett in this chapter of Mosaic Mosaic. “We are the caretakers of each other’s nervous systems.” So feeling—and thinking—and the regulations of law join together; the idea that laws exist apart from our nervous systems, our feelings, doesn’t quite work, in this sense.

The poet Peter Cole here describes an emotional state associated with the language of rules and ritual in the Hebrew Bible, and in Leviticus particularly. He says, “I was just totally spellbound by the choreography of sacrifice.” And the novelist Joshua Cohen speaks of living law, a kind of vital legal system that emanates beyond the Torah, through commentary and debates ever after.

Laws, rules, rituals: these, you’ll hear, are all alive with feeling. “Regulation doesn’t mean damping down,” Lisa Feldman Barrett says. “It just means coordinating and making something happen.” Poet and critic Elisa Gabbert describes poetry as “a vibration,” which in a way might match the nervous-system correspondence described by Lisa Feldman Barrett. In literature as in legal regulation, we learn in this chapter, language coordinates responses and participates in the merging of thought with emotion.

_____________________

Peter Cole is a poet and MacArthur genius whose new book, Draw Me After, will be out this fall.

Elisa Gabbert is a poet and poetry columnist with the New York Times. Her latest book, Normal Distance, will be out this fall.

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a psychologist, neuroscientist, and author of books including How Emotions Are Made.

Tom DeRose is a curator at the Freud Museum in London.

Joshua Cohen is a novelist whose books include Book of Numbers.