AUDIO TRANSCRIPT
Poetry Off the Shelf: The Future Trembles

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf, I’m Helena de Groot. Today, The Future Trembles.

One time, when Elisa Gabbert was about six years old and she was out playing at some kind of day camp, she noticed another girl, standing with her friends. This girl was beautiful, sophisticated, and older than she was, though probably only by a year or so. Suddenly the girl looked back at her, and said, “Do you have a staring problem?” She felt ashamed, but also understood that you’re not supposed to look at people too long. Although, she writes, “I still stare at strangers; I still have a staring problem.”

Today, her staring problem is her strength. Reviewers describe the poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert as clear-eyed, even clairvoyant, whether she’s trying to understand the pattern behind tsunamis, the contagiousness of violence, or the almost fractal nature of boredom. In her latest poetry collection, titled Normal Distance, Elisa Gabbert looks as far as her gaze will go, at time, infinity, and the fundamental unknowability of human beings.

Here’s our conversation.                 

Helena de Groot: You are an intimidating person to prepare an interview for, I have to say.

Elisa Gabbert: I am?

Helena de Groot: Because I feel like you’ve already thought about everything.

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) What is there left for me to do, you know?

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHNG) I promise you, I have not.

Helena de Groot: Well, let’s see, let’s see. Okay, so I saw on Twitter that you’re close to finishing your next book.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes.

Helena de Groot: And I was just wondering, what is the next book, and what is it like to be near the end of it?

Elisa Gabbert: Oh, it’s awesome. (LAUGHS) It’s a book of essays. And it’s some of the essays that I’ve been working on ever since I finished my last book of essays, which was called The Unreality of Memory, and those were very disaster focused. I was writing it kind of mostly during—no, entirely during the Trump years. And it was, you know, it was a dark book, and I was in kind of a dark place. And since then, I’ve been kind of returning to a more joyous place in my writing. And it’s a lot of writing about books, about reading, about writing, which is just, you know, my—not even my comfort zone, like, my pleasure zone, like, it’s just, that’s so fun for me. And so, it’s really been a delight to work on that book. But like my last book of essays, I sold on a proposal. So, you know, I committed to finishing on a certain time frame. And now that that’s done, like, well, almost done, almost done. But when it is done, like, I’ll be free of sort of planned projects. I feel like I had known for a number of years, like, well, the next thing I want to do is this, and then after that I want to do this. And this is going to be like, the end of my plan and like, I could retire. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Elisa Gabbert: I’m probably not going to retire, but like, I could do anything, you know?

Helena de Groot: Is that a good feeling?

Elisa Gabbert: I could write a novel, I’m probably not going to write a novel. (LAUGHS) Yeah, I feel great about it. I’ve said this a lot recently, but I’ve become obsessed with this idea that, like, seven books is a body of work. And this book that I’m finishing is my seventh book. So I feel like at that point, you know, if something happens, if I get hit by an asteroid, like I’ll know right before, right before it all ends, I’ll be like, “At least I finished my body of work.”

Helena de Groot: That’s great. I also can imagine that once you have that sort of set number of books reached, that every other book that you’ll write from now on, if you do, that it feels almost like, like extra,

Elisa Gabbert: Yes.

Helena de Groot: like people who survive a bad car accident and then they are still alive and they’re like, “Wow, this is just extra time. I wasn’t supposed to get this.”

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS) That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. Yeah, maybe it’ll be like the beginning of a whole new era in my writing. I don’t know, I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself over the past decade, I guess, (LAUGHS) to, like, get things done, you know? And maybe that was fear or just getting older, I don’t know. But I never felt like I could rest or pause for very long. And I feel like once I turn this manuscript in, I’ll feel this kind of freedom to just maybe take a break, like, you know, like just lie fallow for a while.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Elisa Gabbert: And see what happens. Like, it might enable me to do a completely different kind of writing that I’ve never done before.

Helena de Groot: I’m very curious about that, too. You know, I mean, in general, not just writing. Like, what would people do if they didn’t have to?

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah. Yeah! Yeah, I’m obsessed with questions like that. Yeah. Like, I feel we often feel trapped. And there’s always this, this question in the background, like, am I really trapped? Or am I just telling myself that as an out?

Helena de Groot: Yeah, exactly, like, do we need—I mean, I can’t remember who said it, but it’s, it’s, “freedom is the freedom to choose your own chains.”

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And I’ve always loved that one. And I’ve also loved the implication of that, like, oh, maybe we do need chains of some kind, even if they are of our own choosing, you know? And I’m just wondering, like, what will your next chains be, in a way?

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah, I think when we commit to a project, that’s kind of what that is. You’re just deciding, like, I’m going to have this particular sword hanging over me for the next,

Helena de Groot:  (LAUGHS)

Elisa Gabbert: you know, two to five years. But you have to, like, love it enough. You have to love that form of suffering enough to keep returning to it.

Helena de Groot: Yes. Yeah. I wanted to ask you about your upcoming poetry collection, Normal Distance, because, you know, like, I read it after I read The Unreality of Memory, and yeah, as you said, you know, you wrote The Unreality of Memory mostly in the Trump years, even though you don’t mention him a lot. But, you know, there are essays about mass folly and the spectacle of disaster and compassion fatigue. And that book felt really urgent.

Elisa Gabbert: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And then your poetry collection came, Normal Distance, and it is much slower. There are a lot of repetitions, like certain sentences about suffering just are echoed in one poem and then another poem.

Elisa Gabbert: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And instead of writing about spectacular themes like mass psychosis or whatever, you know, you write about boredom and about nothingness, you know, and about the vague and the infinite. And I’m just wondering, like, what pulled you in that direction after writing The Unreality of Memory? How did you come to these themes of boredom and nothingness?

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah, I actually was writing Normal Distance slowly, kind of in-between and while I was working on the essays that eventually went into The Unreality of Memory. And, you know, I feel I’m just always returning to the same themes in my poetry over and over again. (LAUGHING) And like, you gotta, like, boredom and death.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Elisa Gabbert: Boredom, death, time. What, time is the connection between boredom and death, right?

Helena de Groot:  Yeah.

Elisa Gabbert: And I think that, you know, I tend to go back and forth between poetry and essay because they’re just like sort of slightly different ways of processing thoughts. And so, I think a lot about—I know you mentioned slowness and urgency. I think about what way my mind is using time when I’m writing a poem versus writing an essay. And I definitely want an idea to kind of stand alone, to be able to sit in isolation more in a poem. And I think especially with the way these poems look on the page, you know, it’s like, kind of a prose line and then a gap. Like, I kind of want you to sit with it and question its truth value in a totally different way than you would if it was in an essay. Because I can say something in a poem that I don’t believe. This is one of the reasons that I continue to write poetry. I can’t do that in an essay, but I can do that in a poem, because the poem is like, fictive. It’s theatrical. It’s not really me. It’s not trying to convey a stable reality. It’s just a different engagement with truth.

Helena de Groot: Right. Yeah. For a poem, you can almost grab pieces of language from the world around you without having to claim that this is your language or that this is what you would say.

Elisa Gabbert: Exactly. Exactly.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And, you know, there’s also, I mean, you were talking about slowness, and there’s a poem, “New Theories on Boredom” where you write, “All good poetry is slow-interesting,” and then you define “slow-interesting” as “interesting, but at a pace that sometimes resembles boredom.”

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot:   You know, and I’m so—it’s such a cheeky definition of poetry, right, because I think it’s very true, but also hard to admit.

Elisa Gabbert: Right. Well, I

Helena de Groot: That poetry is sometimes, you know, sometimes it’s boring to read poetry, even very good poetry, because our minds are just in such a hurry that you’re like, “Oh, come on, give me the juice already. Why do I have to juice it myself?” You know?

Elisa Gabbert: Right. Yes. I think poetry has this effect where, like, you just have to pay so much more attention than when you’re reading prose. There’s a certain amount of discomfort and frustration in it that people who don’t read poetry a lot, they feel that and they get like, they’re over it, you know, like, “I don’t like this. I’m going to go back to reading a novel or whatever.” But for me, it’s like an interesting discomfort and frustration, you know, more like along the lines of like being tickled or just like, sexual frustration, you know, or like, or just anticipation that, like, goes on so long that you can’t quite stand it. It’s that kind of just,

Helena de Groot:  Yeah.

Elisa Gabbert: pleasurable, almost boring, but it’s a stimulating boredom.

Helena de Groot: I love that. I was wondering if you, if we could get to a poem. Are you okay with reading an excerpt of a poem or do you prefer not?

Elisa Gabbert: Sure. That’s fine.

Helena de Groot: Yeah? Because I was thinking of “New Theories on Boredom”, which starts on page 10, and I was wondering if we can skip over 13 and 14, so that you would read 10, 11, 12, and then 15.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes. Okay.

(READS POEM)

New Theories on Boredom

Once as a kid, I was so bored at my parents’ office that I made a deck of cards.

My brother had a really boring snake who only moved when he dumped a bag of live crickets into its cage.

I wonder what would bore a tortoise.

How bored are dogs? Pretty bored, I think.

I’m kind of interested in people using two stars to mean, “I got bored and didn’t finish it.”

I don’t trust books that aren’t a little boring.

It’s almost like there should be different words for “boring because simple” and “boring because complex.”

“Boring because complex” isn’t actually boring. It can just be mistaken for boring the way a hangover can be mistaken for guilt.

You can call this banality versus tedium, or “good boring” versus “bad boring.” Kubrick movies are often great while also boring.

Whether something is boring or not has nothing to do with how good it is.

You could also call “boring because complex” interesting-boring (boring in an interesting way) or slow-interesting (interesting, but at a pace that sometimes resembles boredom).

All good poetry is slow-interesting.

I often wonder why having a beverage makes something boring more interesting. To put it another way, I love drinking while I’m bored.

I wonder why we don’t get bored in the shower.

Michel Siffre lived alone in a cave in Texas for six months and got so bored he contemplated suicide, making it look like an accident.

I heard on the radio that lazy people have higher IQs, because their minds are more active, they don’t get bored doing nothing.

I don’t think this is true.

Some people outside are having a boring conversation about dogs in general.

When it rains it’s boring.

When it rains it bores holes into your body. Turns out it was acid rain!

Being so bored you actually start crying must be a really transformative experience.

To me, sex is not art. Once it’s over it’s boring again.

We’re in the bargaining stage of civilization, and it’s boring.

Civilization got bored with itself.

Pretty cool how we have evolved to find peace boring.

You can only be bored almost to death.

Sometimes the dystopia was boring.

At least everyone was boring at the same time about something inherently interesting.

Sometimes it feels like if I’m not fascinated, I’m bored.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Yeah, you take us in so many different directions, like also that kind of deadpan like, you know, where all of a sudden you go from boredom to boring holes, you know? (LAUGHS)

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: It’s such a nice reprieve from the repetition of that word, “boredom”, you know, or “boring”.

Elisa Gabbert: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And also, like, (LAUGHS) these things that just made me look up and go like, “Huh. Why indeed are we not bored in the shower?” (LAUGHS)

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Do you, first of all, like, this is not the point, you’re a poet, you know, you’re not—but, why? Why are we not bored in the shower? We just stand there. We don’t have our phone. Nothing, you know?

Elisa Gabbert: I know, well, (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Elisa Gabbert: I feel like it’s one of the few times in the day where, like, because all of the actions are, like, completely habitual and mechanized, right, like, you don’t think about what you have to do with your fingers to, like, suds up your shampoo. (LAUGHS) It just happens, like, totally automatically. Like, your mind is just completely free. And so, it’s like you’re almost just catching up on thinking that you can’t do otherwise.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Elisa Gabbert: But I had somebody tell me once that they do get bored in the shower, so, (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Okay, it’s not universal then.

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah, I guess it’s not universal.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I mean I have to admit that sometimes I’m afraid of getting bored in the shower. Like, I have this plastic—this is so horrible, but I have this plastic baggie that I sometimes put my phone in and then I can blast a podcast without my phone getting wet in the shower, you know?

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS)
 

Helena de Groot: But often I just turn it off midway because I’m like, “Can you stop yelling in my ear? I’m trying to do some thinking here.”

Elisa Gabbert: Right.

Helena de Groot: It’s like, as if, as soon as the water drops hit me, I’m like, “Oh, this is good, I don’t need anything else,” you know?

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah. Yeah, it is. I mean, I never really thought about it before, but it is kind of like a little meditation during the day.

Helena de Groot:  Yeah. Yeah, I was also, to go back to the ending of this poem, “Sometimes the dystopia was boring. At least everyone was boring at the same time about something inherently interesting.” I was wondering, like, what was this conjuring for you?

Elisa Gabbert: I’m trying to remember exactly, you know, the context or the mood that that line arose from. But what it makes me think of now—and I’m certain that I wrote that line before the pandemic, but now it makes me think of the pandemic, because in the first few months when everybody was sort of like energetically locked down, you know, like they hadn’t just been morally exhausted by the idea of lockdown yet, I just felt that everybody was having all the exact same thoughts. Like every time I told a thought to somebody, they would be like, “Me too.”

Helena de Groot:  Yes.

Elisa Gabbert: You know, it was like everybody was having the same dreams.

Helena de Groot:  Yeah.

Elisa Gabbert: And the same, like, challenges with reading, or just everything. It was like, oh, because we are all getting the same inputs. And there was, there was like both something beautiful and something kind of horrifying about that. Like, we’re all so much alike that if we are all seeing and experiencing the exact same thing every day, we’re all going to have the same ideas, too. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot:  Yeah, yeah, exactly. There goes your idea of being like, the lone genius, you know?

Elisa Gabbert: Yes! Yes, exactly. It was like, kind of terrifying, but also, just, like, mind blowing. I don’t know, like, it really kind of changed just the way I think about how the human mind works. Like, I was like, oh, it’s not, we’re not as unique and original as we think we are at all. It’s mostly just that we’re getting different inputs and we’re all in different environments and we’re all on different schedules and we’re all seeing and hearing different things every day. And that’s pretty fascinating.

Helena de Groot: It is. And it makes humans feel much closer to animals that I think we often feel like.

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: I mean, of course we are animals, but it’s so easy to forget, right? Because we have clothes and we have all these ways of expressing difference, you know?

Elisa Gabbert: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: But you’re right, as soon as we are sort of living in the same environment, doing the same things, worrying about the same things, you can almost imagine, like, a kind of cocky biologist being like, “When human beings are bored, they tend to sit on the couch and watch Netflix, you know,” like (LAUGHS)

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: There’s a lot of thinking about infinity in your poetry collection, Normal Distance. And infinity is like one of those things I think we suck at the most,

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: you know, thinking about. It completely eludes our grasp, you know. And in a recent Paris Review essay, you write, “What’s hard about art is getting any good and then getting better. What’s hard is solving problems with infinite solutions in our finite brain.” So I was just wondering, given that it’s such an impossible thing to write about and even to think about, how do you find ways in to the infinite?

Elisa Gabbert: Hmm. You know, I, I really love reading about, like, math and physics. I wish that I was better at those subjects. I mean, I’m not, I’m not bad at them. Like, I got an A in calculus, but.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Elisa Gabbert: But, like, I’m not gifted enough to have, like, studied them, you know, after high school.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Elisa Gabbert: But it’s like, I understand just enough to grasp how, like, complex and amazing it is. Like, it’s almost, it feels to me like a form of spirituality. Like, like I’m not a religious person, but it gives me those feelings of, I have some access to something that’s beyond me. And I feel like, like the way the universe is, is beyond me. But I like to just kind of brush up against it. Yeah, it just makes me feel like I’m part of something larger than myself.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. And is the, is the fact that it eludes thinking or doesn’t elude thinking, like, we can think about it all we want, but we’ll never really get it.

Elisa Gabbert: Right, it eludes solution, right? So it’s a problem that you can spend your entire life thinking about because it can’t be solved. And so, it’s like one of those subjects that I keep returning to. Like you can keep thinking about your own death your entire life, and you’ll never exhaust that, because you still haven’t died yet.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Elisa Gabbert: You still, you still haven’t had that experience, so you can still think about it and your relationship to it as you approach it is going to keep changing and changing and changing. And like, you’re—like, one’s own death will never not be interesting.

Helena de Groot: That’s so true. And I also like that your, it sounds like you enjoy that, you enjoy the fact that there is no solution. You know, that that is for you an inherent good, you know? Whereas I think for a lot of people, that’s what makes it terrifying.

Elisa Gabbert: I really like paying attention to how my own feelings and thoughts about something change over time. And I like paying attention to how people that I’ve known for a long time, like my husband or my parents, like, I like paying attention to how their thoughts and feelings have changed. It’s just, you know, one of those ways that the familiar stays interesting. And for me, like, I just, I find that how I think about death, for example, it just keeps changing. And the way I think about time keeps changing as I get older. Like, this is crazy to me. I have to keep fact checking when my last poetry book came out. Because it came out in 2016. But it feels like that occurred in like, the deep, deep distant past. Like, it feels like it came out in just another era of my existence.

Helena de Groot:  Yeah.

Elisa Gabbert: Like I barely remember it, it was, it just feels like it was so long ago. But when I think about the fact that 2016 was the year that Trump was elected, and it was even the same month, the book came out in November of 2016, so nobody read it. But that’s neither here nor there. But that feels like it just happened. Like that feels immediate. And it’s so hard for me to square that they happened at the same time. And I think it’s because like, one made such a gigantic difference, not just in my life, but in everyone’s life, and the other one made no difference at all. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: That is very interesting. Like the waves of one event are still, you know, reverberating and they’re still sloshing on our shores, in a way.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes.

Helena de Groot:  Whereas the other one made no waves, or small waves.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes.

Helena de Groot:  Yeah.

Elisa Gabbert: Exactly. And so they feel like they occurred at completely different times.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, it’s so beautiful, I think, the way that we can’t even think about time, right? Because we’re in time. And it works on us, and it works beyond us, you know, like, what are the parts of time that have sort of nothing to do with us? And I was wondering if you can read a poem called “Historians of the Future”? And it’s on page 37.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes.

(READS POEM)

Historians of the Future

In the late 18th century, people stopped thinking of “Utopia” as a place (a different place at the same time—now) and started thinking of it as a time (the same place—here—at a different time).

Now there are far more dystopias than utopias.

Now we think of both the past and future as dystopias.

Now, a study showed, we have more pop songs in minor keys. Because “people like to think of themselves as smart and complicated.”

All my imagined futures have turned into memories.

Today, there’s more past than yesterday. But is there any less future?

There’s a 10,000 year clock, “The Clock of the Long Now,” being built in the mountains of West Texas, from “largely valueless materials.”

It’s comforting that there’s so much more past and present.

There’s a period known, in the history of the future, as the eternal now or the ever-present origin. Zero-dimensional.

The eternal now is followed by magic consciousness (one dimension), and then by mythic consciousness, which “knows time, but not space” (two dimensions).

Once we know the future, the past is changed.

I don’t know all my great-grandparents’ names.

My mother can’t die until her hair turns gray.

Before we are born, we exist even less than after we die. We should tremble when we think of that time.

How long until we exist so little again?

The past happens fast.

If there was infinite past, the sky would be nothing but starlight. “Observed darkness and nonuniformity of night” make us finite.

There are few stars, moving farther apart.

The past is bright, but black and white. The future is dim but in color.

The past is still. The future trembles.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Yeah, there’s so many lines in this poem that made me gasp. And this one, especially, “Before we are born, we exist even less than after we die. We should tremble when we think of that time.” And it’s so funny because I’ve only ever—or I think the way that it’s usually talked about is like, we are bookended by not existing. There’s like this implication that it’s the same, you know, like we don’t exist and then we live for a while and then we don’t exist again, you know?

Elisa Gabbert: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: But you’re right, before we are born, we exist even less than after we die.

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: You know? Like nobody remembers us. Nobody, like, you know, it’s crazy.

Elisa Gabbert: Right!

Helena de Groot: I’ve never thought about that.

Elisa Gabbert: I’m glad you agree.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Elisa Gabbert: Well, also, I mean, I think people are so, like, people who are afraid of death—and I can honestly say I don’t know if I’m afraid of death or not—but a lot of people just kind of admit freely, like, “Oh, yeah, I’m terrified of death. Like, I’m terrified of just not existing anymore.” But nobody ever says, “I’m terrified of the time before I existed.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And also, I find it weirdly comforting. Because the fear of death, like you, I’m not sure if I’m afraid of death, but to the extent that I am, I do find it comforting that, in a way, I’ve already done it, and I’ve already done worse, you know? Like I’ve already not existed to a much stronger degree than I will ever, you know?

Elisa Gabbert: I—so, I haven’t even read this article, but I just saw a headline, like a headline yesterday that said scientists think that your brain remains conscious after you die for a couple of hours.

Helena de Groot and Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGH)

Helena de Groot: Oh my god.

Elisa Gabbert: So you’re like, you know you’re dead. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Okay, now I’m afraid of death again.

Elisa Gabbert: I know! I know, so like, before you’re so confident that you’re not afraid of death, (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Oh my god.

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Let me see, I had another question about this. Oh, yes. My most favorite line from this poem is a line that made me, for the first time, begin to grasp infinity. The line is, “Today, there’s more past than yesterday. But is there any less future?” I don’t know, I thought that was bananas.

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Is that something that you (LAUGHS) came up with, or is that something you read, or like, how did this thought come about? I mean, to the extent that you can ask such a question, but do you remember?

Elisa Gabbert: It was definitely just something I thought. And, you know, I think sometimes the way that I’m able to have a novel thought is like, just kind of pushing language around. So like, when I was writing these poems, as you notice, like, almost all of them are very dependent upon repetition. Like, there will be a single word or a phrase that repeats a lot in all the lines. So here, obviously, I was thinking about time and the future and the past and the present and so forth. And when I get in that mode, it’s like, “Okay, have I had all the interesting thoughts I can possibly have in my lifetime about the past in the future?”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Elisa Gabbert: Can I like, try to force a new one to happen? So like, when I think about that line, I have that feeling of like, I was trying to force a new thought somehow. I was picturing a timeline. And, you know, the answer to the question is dependent on whether, like, time is truly infinite or not. So like, if we’re in the middle of the timeline and we move forward one square—I’m picturing it very much like, you know, a video game or a board game—like, even if time began at one point, there has to be more past because we move forward on the line, but we don’t know if there’s an end to the future line or not.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, seriously, this, it made me think in a way, like, I have to admit, I don’t like thinking about time and infinity at all, my dad is like a—(LAUGHS)

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS) That’s surprising, given this conversation.

Helena de Groot: I know. I know. Well, you make it, you make it surprisingly compelling. You know, like, my dad is a very passionate amateur astrophysicist.

Elisa Gabbert: Ooo!

Helena de Groot: And I love hearing him talk about, you know, everything that he’s reading and calculating and thinking about. It’s only when he starts talking about time that something in my—it’s like, I don’t, I want to plug my ears and just be like, I kind of don’t want to know, you know, like it’s so beyond,

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: And I don’t know why, but it’s just something about it goes so much beyond,

Elisa Gabbert: I understand that.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, you do?

Elisa Gabbert: I mean, I don’t feel that way, but I can understand it. I think what it makes me think of is, I really particularly remember this one day in one of my college philosophy classes where—it was like a philosophy of mind class and this professor was trying to, like, walk the class through why, like, free will doesn’t make any sense. And like, a half of the class was like totally in it, and half of the class was like, freaking out. Like, you could tell they were getting agitated and like, like, they walked out of the room that day, like, pissed off (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Elisa Gabbert: that they had been asked to think about free will and whether it makes any sense, like, if it’s coherent or not. Because, like, I think, you know, the human, the human body/mind wants to trust that free will exists, because that’s how we get through the day, and we want time to be the way it feels. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Elisa Gabbert: Because like, this is how we’ve adapted is to feel like, you know, like time is the same for everyone. And knowing that it’s relative, you know, when you read, when you read the theory of relativity or whatever, it’s like, it’s so unintuitive, it can be kind of upsetting.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, it’s so unsettling. It’s like more unsettling than I can handle, you know?

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: I mean, everything else is already unsettling enough, so I think time should just stay the way it is, you know?

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Helena de Groot: I mean, the way, the way I understand it to be, which is like, not really a lot, you know?

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah. I like it. I don’t know, again, that for me is like, good, good, good pain, good discomfort.

Helena de Groot: I wonder also how, because, you know, as a student, when you’re in philosophy class, I understand that you, I mean, anyone, you know, that you’d be into thinking about time. Just because it’s nice, I mean, in college, you don’t really have so much else to do than think, you know.

Elisa Gabbert: Right.

Helena de Groot: There’s time to think. And then it’s fun to think about time. But as we get older, you know, when you said that sentence, “Today, there’s more past than yesterday, but is there any less future?” Of course, this is only true when we talk about whatever the universe or time in general. But it is not true for us, you know, mortals, right? Like, yes, every day that we live, there is less future.

Elisa Gabbert: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And so I’m wondering, does time remain fun for you to think about, now that there is so noticeably less of it for you?

Elisa Gabbert: Yes. Yes, but it’s less—I mean, I’m very aware in every cell in my body that time is less abundant than it used to be. To the extent that—and I keep questioning whether this is really true, but I honestly feel like I don’t get bored anymore. And that’s one of those things that I can’t remember. It’s not that I can’t remember. I can’t decide if it’s because I’m in my 40s and I’m like, my life’s at least half over probably, or if it’s because of the pandemic. But I feel like I haven’t been bored in like three years. Beyond just fleeting, like, you know, I might, I might be a little bit bored in a conversation, you know,

Helena de Groot:  Yeah, yeah.

Elisa Gabbert: or I might start reading a book or watching a movie and decide it’s boring, and then quit it. But I haven’t been bored in, like, a profound way. Like, it’s never been the kind of boredom I can instantly solve by just deciding, “Oh, Instagram just got boring, I’m not going to look at Instagram anymore.” Or like, “This Zoom meeting I’m in is kind of boring, I’m going to look at my phone for a second.” You know, like, it was such easily solvable boredom. Whereas when I was a kid and, and then even, you know, a teenager and in my 20s, boredom was like a real problem for me. (LAUGHS) And I would, I would, like, go to great lengths to avoid being bored, because I hated it so much.

Helena de Groot: What would you do?

Elisa Gabbert: Like risk, you know, being a social outcast or just rude, you know, like if somebody, like, if it was really important to somebody that I do something, I still wouldn’t do it, you know? Like, (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yes. Like, let’s just provoke and see what happens. Like, what is the thing that people say on the internet now? You know, like, like “fuck around and find out,” something like that.

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah. Yeah, so I would just, basically I would be like a selfish asshole to avoid boredom.

Helena de Groot: Yes. But also, I mean, what you said about choice is important, right? Like, when you’re bored with this movie right now, whatever, you have the freedom to turn it off. But when you’re a kid, there’s so much boredom that you can’t do anything about, because you’re a kid, you know, and you can’t decide very many things, you know.

Elisa Gabbert: Right, like your parents making you go to church, right? Like the most, it’s just so boring. It’s crazy that it’s only an hour because when you’re a kid, it feels like a week.

Helena de Groot: Yes, absolutely.

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS) But yeah, I feel like time is so precious. And also like my value system is so much clearer to me than it used to be. Like I used to like, sit through a movie, even if it was mind numbingly boring, because I felt like, well, everybody else likes it, or,

Helena de Groot:  Yeah.

Elisa Gabbert: But now I’m just like, no, I refuse, like, Je refuse. I would rather walk out of here and have wasted my $15 or whatever and like, take my 2 hours back. Like, time is precious, this is my one life.

Helena de Groot:  Yes.

Elisa Gabbert: So I just have to claim my time while I still have time.

(MUSIC PLAYING)
 

Helena de Groot: You were talking about how you’re acutely aware of the scarcity of your time right now. So in what ways in your life does the infinity of time still show up?

Elisa Gabbert: Hmm. I have insomnia a lot, and that can be a source of great suffering. But every now and then, it’s actually sort of wonderful, because when you wake up in the middle of the night and you truly, like, don’t know what time it is, it feels very unmooring. Like, you’re just floating an infinite space and you don’t know how far you are from when you went to sleep or when you’re going to have to wake up. And it is that kind of, like a rift, right? Like finding a $20 bill. Like, I just found some extra time, and if I can just relax and just use that time to think, it’s really amazing. It just feels like this little pool of infinity just opened up in the middle of the night. Because then, you know, eventually I’ll fall back asleep and I wake up the next day and I don’t really know when it was that I was awake or for how long. And it’s almost like I just somehow found, like, a secret passage (LAUGHS) to expand my life, you know what I mean?

Helena de Groot: I do, yeah. Also, I think that sense of infinity comes when we don’t really have reference points.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I was wondering if we can read another poem about time. It’s that poem titled “Detail” on page 74.

Elisa Gabbert: Mm.

(READS POEM)

Detail

How is there never a beginning to a dream?

A dream does not begin.

It ends when you wake—but does not begin

When you fall asleep.

Time comes out of time

Like ribbon from cassettes,

Shimmering, sticky,

More than seems possible,

More and more tape

Like time from a dream

A golden white silken thread

Of incandescent pain

As thin as nothing,

That immeasurable,

Is pouring like a strand of honey

Into the ocean, out of the

Fog in the mind.

It does not begin.

It goes as high as God.

Elisa Gabbert: Wow, that’s what I was just talking about. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot:  I know, right?

Elisa Gabbert: This is one of—and this could be inaccurate, you know, people have blind spots about their own work. But I don’t think my poems, at least in this book, are very image driven.

Helena de Groot:  Mm-hmm.

Elisa Gabbert: So this is one of the few poems in this book that really just came from an image. And I’ve heard that a lot of writers often start that way. Like, becoming obsessed with an image and then having to get it down in writing to sort of rid themselves of it. And that was this kind of a poem. I just had this image of like, well I can still see it. I can’t describe it better than I did in the poem.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. “Time comes out of time // Like ribbon from cassettes, // Shimmering, sticky, // More than seems possible, // More and more tape // Like time from a dream.” I mean, seriously, it’s so good! I just want to quote the whole poem back to you. I mean, I guess I’ll stop now, but, (LAUGHS) You know? “It does not begin. // It goes as high as God.” I mean, I know you said that you don’t believe in God, but you sure can write about it, you know, really well.

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah, I’m really, I’m really, like, dependent on the word “God”. I can’t, I can’t talk without it, and I can’t really think without it. So it’s almost like, “Well, how can you say you don’t believe in God then?” You know, like, I don’t, I don’t think. I don’t really—I’m not a believer. I don’t worship any religion, but the concept is just so incredibly useful and valuable. Yeah. Can’t escape it.

Helena de Groot: I used to also say, like, “Well, I don’t believe in God, but it’s a useful concept.” But I’ve used the concept so often now that it has lodged somewhere deeper, if that makes sense.

Elisa Gabbert: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: Like if so many things are impossible to relate to, without invoking God, at what point does God become real to you?

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah, I, I do think when I was young, and I think maybe other people have the same feeling when they’re young that like, “Oh, people who believe in God are like, really sure. You know, they really, really believe. And they have like this very clear idea of it and this very clear concept. And I don’t feel that. So I must not believe.” And then as you get older and you read more and you learn more and you talk more to people, you realize it’s a lot fuzzier than that. And that even, you know, like men of faith or whatever, like, people in the church, like, feel doubt every day. You know, nuns feel doubt. It’s not that like, 100% or nothing kind of thing that you imagine as a child. And eventually you do start to wonder like, “Oh, is what other people mean by God just this concept that I, that I can’t help understanding and referring to?” You can never really know. I mean, I’m sure some people would tell me like, “Of course not. That’s not what it is.” And I think others would say, “Yeah, it’s something like that. It’s something you can’t define but can’t not have there.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Elisa Gabbert: And I think I’m just, I’m just comfortable with it being one of those things that I’m going to keep having an evolving idea of for the rest of my life. And I don’t feel a need to sort of define myself for it or against it or by it or not by it, the way I, you know, I maybe kind of had that need more when I was younger.

Helena de Groot: Right. I also think sometimes that, you know, because before you were talking about infinity as the closest that you’ll get to spirituality.

Elisa Gabbert: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And I really ascribe to that notion of spirituality, you know, and even God, I guess, you know, like, because you said people who believe in God often seem so certain, you know, even though, of course, if you, if you really know them and you ask, they’re full of doubt, too. But in a sense, I wonder, like, isn’t it the doubt that is real, real faith, you know, because knowing, like being so certain, it sort of closes off possibility, right? And I feel like to the extent that I have a connection to God, like it is the opening up of possibilities, it’s not a closing down. And so maybe unknowing is or like, you know, not knowing if God exists is like a truer version of believing

Elisa Gabbert: Yes. Yes.

Helena de Groot: Then being absolutely certain.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes. Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter once, “Faith is doubt.”

Helena de Groot: Well, she said it better of course. (LAUGHS)

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah, I, (LAUGHS) I mean, really, that’s like my philosophy is, like, uncertainty is knowledge, you know, like, like it’s better not to solve the problem, you know, it’s better to stay in that process of thinking about it forever and not being able to solve it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Elisa Gabbert is the author of three poetry collections, The French Exit, L’heure bleue, or The Judy Poems, and her latest, Normal Distance, which will come out in September. She also wrote three essay collections, The Self Unstable, The Word Pretty, and The Unreality of Memory. The Unreality of Memory and The Word Pretty were both named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and The Self Unstable was chosen by The New Yorker as one of the best books of 2013. She also writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times.

To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Eric van der Westen. I’m Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

(MUSIC PLAYS AND FADES OUT