Articulate Experience
Articulate Experience
Higher Power
On this episode of Articulate Experience—four writers discuss the role of God in how they think, and live.
Now in his 80s, the poet Billy Collins isn’t waiting for the afterlife to find joy— his heaven is here on earth.
John Darnielle left Catholicism more than two decades ago, but the Church’s shortcomings haven’t short-changed his faith.
Though Vikram Paralkar maintains a cultural connection to Hinduism, he looks to existentialist philosophers and modern scientists to shape his understanding of the universe.
Carmen Machado was raised in what she describes as “a chill Methodist” household. Today, she’s an atheist, but along the way, explored evangelism.
- [01:35 ] Billy Collins
- [16:08 ] John Darnielle
- [27:51 ] Vikram Paralkar
- [37:00 ] Carmen Machado
Articulate Experience examines stories of humanity, resilience, and wisdom through the words of some of today’s greatest writers.
Articulate Experience is a production of the Articulate Foundation.
More at articulateshow.org
VOICEOVER: Welcome to Articulate Experience — the show that examines stories of humanity, resilience, and wisdom through the words of some of today’s greatest writers. I’m Jim Cotter. On this episode— four writers examine their beliefs about a higher power — or, lackthereof.
America’s most popular poet, Billy Collins, sees paradise all around him.
BILLY COLLINS: Look around. Look at the world you have. You want more? You want to be immortal now?
VOICEOVER: The prolific indie rockstar and novelist John Darnielle is a devoted Christian, but doesn’t believe that God is working through him.
JOHN DARNIELLE: I don't think of God is staying my hand or, or turning the wheel. I think of God as the person to whom I can cry and need.
VOICEOVER: In Vikram Paralkar’s novels, the usual laws of the universe don’t always apply. But off the page, the doctor-slash-author’s understanding of the world is more scientific than supernatural.
VIKRAM PARALKAR: How does modern humanity bereft of the idea of God, and straddled with all of these questions cope with either the absence of God or at least the silence of God
VOICEOVER: And, Tori Marchiony reports on how, before she started identifying as an atheist, Carmen Machado fell in and then out of evangelism.
CARMEN MACHADO: There was something in that fervor and something in that sort of wonder that I think really spoke to something in me. And I think even though the way that it's manifested has changed, I think that part of it was tapping into something that I really needed at the time.
VOICEOVER: That’s all ahead, on Articulate Experience.
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Billy Collins
VOICEOVER: Billy Collins is among America’s most popular poets—a darling of high school and college syllabuses around the country, his 13 books have sold in quantities that most other living poets would die for. But though Collins, an only child, basks in this public adulation, he’s quick to clarify that who he is on the page is not quite the same as who he is in person.
BILLY COLLINS: That's what the persona is. The persona is a filtered down version of myself. A lot of it has to be kind of rinsed out before you get this kind of pure form of the persona who is, uh, really, like Emerson says, a kind of transparent eyeball. He's just an observing person, almost always in the present. The sense is that the poem is happening as it's being written, and therefore it's happening. As you read it, it's happening again. And that's why I'm always trying to stay in the present to make it a, a kind of living thing as it's re as it's reread by other people. To me, it's a dead thing. After I finish writing it, it's like a dead flounder and it just sits there. But it's, it's for other people.
JIM COTTER: And you, you're looking out a window rather than looking into a mirror,
BILLY COLLINS: Uh, or looking into someone else's house. Yeah. As people who write fiction and drama have to do, being interested in other people is not a requirement for me to write poetry. There are very few people in my poems. My mother and father get some play, and I, I did have parents. That's clear. There are love poems, but often they're just love poems, right? I mean, it's a genre, but you don't see uncles and aunts and lots of friends in my poems.
JIM COTTER: But in, in terms of looking at the world, I mean, you're not prying. I think the implication is that, that people who write made up stories about other people get to pry a little bit because they have created the characters.So they can then,
BILLY COLLINS: Well, that's omniscience. And that's, I would say if I were to make up rules for poetry, if I was the poetry, you know, secretary of Poetry, Czar, uh, there'd be no omniscience. Omniscience is for fiction.
VOICEOVER: Collins may not be the Czar or minister of poetry… but he was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. Now in his 80s, he lives in Florida with his wife— Suzannah. But much of his early life was spent in New York; Queens, then White Plains—where he was raised by two loving parents who were committed to passing their Catholic values onto their only son. Collins remembers his mother, Katherine as beautiful, resilient, and in her twenties, adventuresome. Born in rural Ontario, she disregarded her father’s wishes that she marry the local haberdasher and instead bolted for Toronto. There, she earned a nursing degree before beginning a nomadic existence, moving from hospital to hospital, city to city, throughout the United States. On a stop in New York, she met Collins’s father, William— a stylish practical joker who came from a poor family in Massachusetts and had worked his way up the ranks of an insurance company.
BILLY COLLINS: He was a secretive man in some way, very gregarious, very outgoing. On the way home from church he would always, you know, be making fun of the priest and the, and the extortion of the second collection. But he never left the house without his rosaries and set his prayers on his knees at night. So he was a quiet, you know, the male Catholic. And my mother's Catholicism was much more demonstrative, Legion of Mary and lots of, uh, ality work and, and stuff like that. But, um, more by example, I mean, she was an incredibly sweet charitable, uh, woman and, um, you know, daily communicant, uh, until she couldn't do that anymore. A woman of moral compass and a woman of unshakable faith. And that's what she transferred to me is the faith out of which those attitudes of respect and decency, charitable and generosity, and then some of the other virtues spring from, from that. She, she showed her character very quickly. A Jehovah witness would sometimes come to the door and, uh, she'd bring them in and, and, and try to convert them to Catholicism, <laugh>, you know, she was not on the receiving end of any of that. <laugh>.
JIM COTTER: How are you still in relation to faith and to God? To the religion?
BILLY COLLINS: I guess I'm a Catholic agnostic to be honest
JIM COTTER: Rather than we go to the recovering Catholic?
BILLY COLLINS: Well, I'm recovering that. I'm recovering from being a medievalist and a a lot of other things. Recovering smoker, uh, <laugh> and, uh, recovering product of Jesuit education. <laugh>,
JIM COTTER: Which is not the worst thing.
BILLY COLLINS: No. That, that carried a lot of benefits, actually. But I would say, I mean, it's all—
JIM COTTER: I mean, will there be someone at the gates to meet you sometime in the next 30 years or 40 years, if you,
BILLY COLLINS: Right, it's all guesswork in, in a way. So my stab would be that yes, there is a creator, but he is absent or, or she or it is absent. So it's not a personal God. I can't imagine someone who creates the universe and then is interested in, in how the Yankees do against the Red Sox on a Thursday night.
JIM COTTER: That's blasphemy in certain parts of Boston, I hope you know that
BILLY COLLINS: <laugh> certain parts of the Bronx then, and, and, uh, and Boston. I, I, I don't know. I I think it's presumptuous to think you'd have a, the spirit or, or whatever that would, I mean, if you look at the Hubble telescope findings of what's going on in the universe, these explosions and star nurseries or star little stars, or like being born and shot off into the space. I can't put that spirit together with someone that you pray to to get a, an A on the test or to yeah,
JIM COTTER:. And what about a vengeful God? Cuz you would've grown up in the time of, that's, that would've been the backbone of Catholicism when both of us were growing up, was the idea of that. There only two states of human existence. Love state and fear state, right? And we were definitely in the fear column when I was growing up Catholic. And I imagine the same was going on here in the United States. Yeah. You were God fearing, literally.
BILLY COLLINS: Well, it was, uh, there was hell, there was, uh, there was limbo back then. I don't know if you know Richard Rohr. He's a wonderful, uh, kind of breakaway, uh, Franciscan. But he, he, he, but he says going to church, he, he feels is is basically an avoidance system because you go to visit, you put God in this building, and you go visit him on Sunday, and then you leave and you say, see you next Sunday. But you don't bring hi him or into your life. And your consciousness is not altered at all by this dutiful ritual. And he also says, how do you, how do you jive the vengeful God? You know, the fire and brimstone God with the compassionate Christ, which do you want here? I mean, they're, these are two different texts, two different cultures. But how do they get together?
VOICEOVER: Collins has been known to harbor a rebellious streak—a quality he attributes to having spent decades in strict religious schools. After graduating from a Catholic high school in White Plains, New York, he moved to Worcester, Massachusetts to attend the College of the Holy Cross— a tiny Jesuit school where he studied English. Those years, he says, left a lasting impression.
BILLY COLLINS: You learned the lessons of being dutiful, punctual. If you turned a paper in late, F. There was no negotiating. You just got an F. It was two days late. That was fear also. You were afraid of authority, and you begin to question the structure of what authority do the have to mete out such kinds of punishment,
JIM COTTER: They are the marines of the church. They are the special forces of the Catholic church.
BILLY COLLINS: And this was the early sixties in an all male, uh, Jesuit college. Mass was required— just to take you back there for a little bit. Mass was required every day. And it was a card you had to fill in. And there was a man or a, a student who went on and collected the cards and made sure they tallied with a number of heads. And the, but people would kind of drag themselves down there. I think it was at 7:30 in pajamas with it, overcoat over it. And people would be kind of nodding off. And this, of course, it's snowing out. And if you went to church Monday through Friday every morning at 7:30, would you go Sunday? Well, you'd think, isn't that enough <laugh>? You know, and it kind of got people out of the habit of going to church on Sunday.
But the other point was that if you failed to go to attend mass for a certain number of times, you got what was called Dawn Patrol. Now Dawn Patrol meant that you had to wake up at 5:15 to be down to the main office there at 5:30. That's often snowing, blizzarding, whatever. You had to make your way down there at 5:30 and check in. Here you are, you check in, then that's it. That's all you had to do
JIM COTTER: Back to bed?
BILLY COLLINS: Well, if you could go make your way back through this snow to your dormitory. Now it's a little after six and can you sleep for another couple? And it's, it was, it was, uh, sleep deprivation or kind of mental torture. Yeah. What do you do? At that time? It was, it was not so much the checking in. It's, that's there you jolly well at 6:30. Take your punishment.
VOICEOVER: After his undergrad studies, Collins was quick to trade the frigid Northeast for the warmer west coast. He spent the better part of a decade at the University of California, Riverside—earning his masters, then a PhD. Upon graduating in 1971, He flourished in academia while collecting fodder for his first book; 1977’s Pokerface. It was a short collection that Collins usually discounts — preferring to consider 1988’s The Apple that Astonished Paris his proper debut. Since then, he’s kept a steady pace, releasing a new book every few years, and poem by poem becoming one of the most recognized names in American poetry.
And though he detests the word “accessible,” welcoming the reader in, he believes, is a matter of good manners.
BILLY COLLINS: The beginning of the poem, I think it's important to not make demands on the reader because we haven't quite been introduced yet. I mean, I think of the poem as a social engagement and the start of the poems, the social
JIM COTTER: That's the handshake, the, hello, how are you?
BILLY COLLINS: That's right. My name is John, right? That's, that's the hospitality or the, uh, the invitational nature of, of the beginnings of my poems. Once the reader comes in, then that's the welcome mat. Then the poems usually get more complicated.
JIM COTTER: They're still comprehensible. We don't need a dictionary to read them.
BILLY COLLINS: Not very often, no <laugh>. And I think often by the end of the poem, we've reached in a very odd place. It begins in a simple, familiar place. I'm looking out the window of this cherry tree or whatever, and it ends up in a more complex place, a more, um, hypothetical, a more, well
JIM COTTER: Also a more thought provoking place. And I know you're not going to provoking anybody, right? <laugh>, but I am, by the end of it, I go, oh
BILLY COLLINS: Yeah, well, we've reached some, some point, uh, at the end that's different from the beginning. We've gone somewhere. The consciousness of the poem is a little willy-nilly. It's not to be trusted cuz it, it sees something shiny and it goes off in this other direction. And that's kind of the, uh, entertainment for the writer, I think, is to watch it take these unexpected turns and paths. And, and then when you get to the, when I get to the ending, I realize the whole, this whole poem has just been a, a matter of finding this ending. It's like, let's find an ending to this first sentence. And that's the game of the poem. Find the ending. And, uh, a lot of my endings, they have nothing to do with the beginning of the poem. I mean, they might end on an image that you couldn't logically get from the beginning to the end, unless you use some back alleys and, uh, associations that were not completely logical.
VOICEOVER: Here’s Me First, from the Billy Colins’ 2020 collection, Whale Day and Other Poems, read by the author:
We often fly in the sky together, and we're always okay. There's our luggage now, waiting for us on the carousel, and we drive lots of places in all manner of hectic traffic. Yet, here we are pulling in the driveway again.
So many opportunities to die together, but no meteor has struck our house. No tornado has lifted us into its funnel. The odds say then that one of us will go before the other like heading off into a heavy snow storm, leaving the other one behind to stand in the kitchen or lie on the bed under the fan.
So, why not let me, the older one, go first. I don't want to see you everywhere as I wait for the snow to stop before setting out with a crooked stick, calling your name.
VOICEOVER: Billy Collins writes endings that feel inevitable, but not predictable. His poems aim to captivate each reader and focus their attention on a perpetually unfolding present.
And when it comes to that most inevitable of endings—death— Collins isn’t hoping for a second act. Now in his 80s, he’s no longer comforted by the Catholic conception of heaven that he was raised with.
BILLY COLLINS: Yeah, I don't believe in an afterlife. I mean, when I use mortality, I mean mortality. I mean, that's the end. If I can imagine the creator, I mean we, this again, this is all presumptuous guesswork, shooting in the dark. The creator is saying, “wait a minute, I gave you all this. Look around. Look at the world you have and you want more. You wanna be immortal now? No, I'm immortal. You get this, dig it. You know, this is, this is it. This is you. Check it out.”
VOICEOVER: This belief that we are all already living in paradise is key to understanding Billy Collins, both the man and how that man is reflected on the page. Do everything you can here on earth, because this might just be it.
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JOHN DARNIELLE
VOICEOVER: When John Darnielle is writing, he feels as though he’s fulfilling his purpose in the universe.
JOHN DARNIELLE: It’s primal for me almost, something I very much enjoy doing that gives me pleasure all by itself, that I feel like I was made to do, that when I am doing it, I feel useful and I want to feel useful.
VOICEOVER: Darnielle is a novelist and an indie rock star whose band, The Mountain Goats, has been going strong for more than three decades. Fans of his songs and stories alike are drawn in by his candor, his darkness, his depth.
A Christian throughout his adult life, biblical references pepper Darnielle’s writings— but he isn’t trying to convert anyone to his way of thinking. He says he’s just trying to tell it the way he sees it.
JOHN DARNIELLE: Because I'm a child of the 20th century, it seems obvious to me that the universe is mechanistic, right, and that any meaning we give to it, we put there to keep ourselves from going mad and from doing monstrous things, right? We invent a whole framework within which to be our better selves, which is awesome.
But I call that God, right, and on the days that I like best, I think it's just the sky God who preexists, who exists before the universe exists. Again, in terms of Jesus' life, I want to put scare quotes around it, "sends his son." Okay, right? But who makes a great sacrifice, who takes on human... I might get excited about it.
JIM COTTER: Frailty.
JOHN DARNIELLE: Frailty, who puts on flesh to dwell with us, right? Sorry. That to me is a beautiful idea, right, because it enables us to imagine ourselves as better than what we know we are on our worst days.
VOICEOVER: John Darnielle has had his own share of bad days. Growing up with his mom and an abusive stepdad on the central coast of California, he was eager to escape. At age 16, a nearly fatal dose of prescription meds landed him in the hospital; soon after, his birth father helped him to move to Portland, Oregon to recover. Instead, the teenaged John started doing heroin and meth—overdosing again at 19 before picking up a cocaine habit. During day-long binges, he entertained himself by writing songs and poems. But gradually, making art took over from taking drugs.
Today, the 56-year-old Darnielle is healthy in body and mind, but his recovery hasn’t meant total sobriety. For five years he was part of the abstinence-only support group that has sustained millions of members worldwide with its 12-steps and commitment to a higher power. Darnielle says the program did help him, but that ultimately, he couldn’t accept the doctrine that his addiction would always be a part of him.
JOHN DARNIELLE: I view most of my addictive behaviors of my teens and, and early, early twenties as uh, responses to where I was at then.
JIM COTTER: So can you safe, I mean, tell me to mind my own business. Can you, can you safely drink now?
JOHN DARNIELLE:
Yeah. I mean, but not all the time. Every once in a while I will overdo it.
JIM COTTER: Rreally?
JOHN DARNIELLE: And uh, and oh man, I think it's true of a lot of people. I mean, if you told me I could never drink again today for whatever reason, my heart would not break. It's, it's fine. But I do, I do have addictive tendencies.
JIM COTTER: No, no, I understand
JOHN DARNIELLE: You put a whiskey in front of me. I'm probably gonna have two. And once I get past the third one, it gets a little rough. <laugh>, right?
JIM COTTER: The bottle.
JOHN DARNIELLE: Yeah. Yeah. And I did, the five years I did in the program were incredibly valuable to me. I'd probably dead without them. But there's a line in the Big Book, I think it's the big book who, the 12 traditions where they say, you know, “if anybody can do the right thing and drink like a gentleman, our hats are off for them. To them heaven knows we've tried long enough or hard enough to do it ourselves”. Well I gave it a shot while I was out on tour after five years away with my original basis, we had literally a shot after a show. And to my great surprise, I didn't then drink five more and then go find out where the cocaine was at. Right? <laugh>. So, which was my old M.O.
JIM COTTER: Mazel Tov!
JOHN DARNIELLE:. Well this was, well this was my old pattern is I would get real drunk and as soon as I got drunk enough, I'd go, you know, “there's way better stuff like five miles from here.” Right? That's no longer in my nature. Whatever happened to it, it went away. I'm a bad, I don't ever want anybody to say, well, “if John can do it, I can do it”. I'm not a good example.
JIM COTTER: No, no, no. But but also like, where's the high power and all this? Did you have a higher power all the way through? Were you always a believer? Were you always a Christian?
JOHN DARNIELLE: Yeah, yeah, yeah
JIM COTTER: And was God always present then in your life? Do you feel like God, God is watching over you now as you navigate this, this
JOHN DARNIELLE: Well what do you mean by watching over?
JIM COTTER: Like, making sure that you don't go looking for the
JOHN DARNIELLE: No, that's not God's job. <laugh> that's my job. It's not God's job to… God is there to love you whether you're making good decisions or bad decisions, but it's not God's job to make your decisions for you. That's how much you're— let's take God as a father and you have children, right? Um, you truly love your children when you let them make their own decisions, right? That's when Right. But no matter what they are. Right.
JIM COTTER: But, but as it turns out, it could be either Jack or Johnny Walker who could be making your decisions for you, right?
JOHN DARNIELLE: Yeah. But in the case of God, I don't think of God as staying my hand or, or turning the wheel. I think of God as the person to whom I can cry and need. Right? And who will be present in whichever way will be useful to me then. But I don't, I don't have the semi invisible Jesus who stands between me and, and, and the car wreck. God doesn't mind a car wreck. God's investment is not in this body.
JIM COTTER: Ah, interesting. That's not, I won't say it's not usual, but
JOHN DARNIELLE: It's not No, it's unusual. That's right. Yeah. <laugh> well in, in the absence of the church hierarchy to tell me how to think, you go esoteric directions,
VOICEOVER: Despite his willingness to self-reflect, John Darnielle is quick to caution his audiences not to believe everything he writes, saying that the narrators in his songs and stories are intentionally unreliable— the worlds he evokes, fictional.
Even so, Darnielle’s biography still has a prominent place in at least some of his work. After his first decade leading The Mountain Goats, he penned back-to-back albums delving into his personal backstories: 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed explores his teen years hanging out with meth users. 2005’s The Sunset Tree revolves around Darnielle’s childhood home—and the characters (violent stepfather included) who shaped his early life.
And though many listeners see their own painful experiences in Darnielle’s work, he’s quick to understate his own emotional scars.
JOHN DARNIELLE: For all the difficulties of my house, I think of my, my dysfunctional house as a fairly normal dysfunctional house. Not, not a, a nightmare. You know, it's like, no, but that's why, that's what I always hoped when I tell that story was like to, to somehow paint a complex picture. It is difficult to talk about the complexities of that sort of thing because you want to always be foregrounding that, you know, one must mistreat once children, you know, that's important. But, but it also, I think, you know, when I talk with fellow people who grew up in houses like mine, the parts we bond on is, it is much more complicated moments than, “yeah, it sucked”. It's like there, there's much more to it than that. But that's the thing you realize is like, like here's a, this is an analogy, but like, so I left the Catholic church over 20 years ago. I can't imagine going back to the church, but then whenever the church almost gets something, right? I mean, my heart just swells. I want a good church, you know, I want a good Catholic church. I want them to get there. You know, even though I, at the same time I'm going, well look at how arrogant you are telling the church how to live. Like tell, tell you, it's like,
JIM COTTER: Well it hasn't done a very good job of itself. Maybe it needs to ask for an opinion from someone else
JOHN DARNIELLE: Right. But the thing is, but I'm still rooting for the church. Even though, you know, you look at the stuff in the past 150 years happen in Ireland, a person, especially an Irish person, hundred percent within their rights to go, “no, no, the church can all jump off of a cliff. Right? And, and, and take every last nun and priest with them”. I get that take. But at the same time you go, yeah, but you know, I've had experiences in the pews or it coffee afterwards that shaped me, that helped me be who I am. And the same things happen in families that, that are less than perfect or that aren't working very well. As you still have experiences that shape you, part of the, you, you become, you owe to those people to some extent And uh, and unless, unless you decide to say “No, look, I made something that that had nothing to do with any of you”. But I, I don't, with my stepfather, I have to give him a lot of credit. The reason I know Randy Newman, my stepfather was obsessed with Randy Newman is his favorite songwriter. Right. I think I have a better read on a number of those songs because of how much we would talk about that stuff.
JIM COTTER: You also tried to forgive him or did you
JOHN DARNIELLE: Uh, yeah, I mean, I didn't get there. I haven't got, maybe I don't think I will get there.
JIM COTTER: Well the, I mean the problem with not forgiving is that the only person carrying around that lack of forgiveness is the victim, not the perpetrator
JOHN DARNIELLE: That’s correct. But I also, I tell you what, <laugh> becoming more forgiving. I can't speak for anybody else, but after you leave the church, it does become harder to just rush to the forgiveness space. It's like that was carved out for you by that ideology.
JIM COTTER: As somebody who, and I'm guessing that you are somebody who the work flows through, not all the time, but you get, do you get something that you don't, that you, you're slow to even take credit for having written them?
JOHN DARNIELLE: Oh, it's not like that. No. It's work. It's always, yeah. I mean inspiration is, is real. There is such a thing as inspiration. But the main thing is, is you've developed the tools to, to work with
VOICEOVER: This work ethic has brought prolific output as well as abundant acclaim. In 2022, Darnielle made The Mountain Goats’ 21st studio album, “Bleed Out,” which peaked at number 10 on the Billboard charts. The same year, his third novel, a best-seller called Devil House was named one of the year’s ten best works of fiction by Publisher’s Weekly.
Yet none of these achievements seem to have inflated Darnielle’s ego. He believes that even though he does the work, he doesn’t deserve all the credit.
JOHN DARNIELLE: I really have this aversion to dwelling on John Darnielle. It's my work. Here's the thing. No matter what I've done, no matter what work I have done, what good it may have done for people, it will never for one night keep you warm the way your house does. But when I say, well, you know, it took an architect to make that house, I would have to work on you for a long time to get you to talk about the architect and name him the way you name me. But I'm doing the same thing the architect of your house did. I'm building something that is very useful, hopefully later useful in a very intimate and personal way. Much like your house, the architect, he wasn't thinking of you. He was thinking make a good house, houses are neat, right? And they function a certain way. And the potential of them to do all these things is infinite.
And, and an architect would know that they're infinite. I don't Right. My house will be, if I were to design one, it would be pretty simple. Cause I don't know architects, but I do know songs. Right. I know how useful they are. Right? I know how, if I get to a certain level of intimacy in writing, one, if I get to a certain level of, of self-disclosure, if I get to a certain level of, of universally held sentiments or near universally held sentiments and combine them with idiosyncrasies of the way I look at the world, that I can build a structure into which people can enter to feel at home and heard and seen. But I'm saying,
JIM COTTER: And warm and dry
JOHN DARNIELLE: And, and, but the second people say, well, “well John Darnielle did this”. Technically yes, I'm the guy who did that. But I don't want anybody thinking I'm special for that reason, cuz I'm not. I'm just a good architect. And that's good. That's, that is not a bad thing.
JIM COTTER: It's a very, it's fine thing. It's so wonderful.
JOHN DARNIELLE: But it's not
JIM COTTER: But do you have any ego about the success? Because you've, you've done fine, great. You have these, you know, fans, you have all that stuff. Do you ever look at, I don't know, R.E.M and go, “I'm better than them, I should have had more than they did”
JOHN DARNIELLE: No, I'm an utterly selfless creature and I I don't think I have an ego
JIM COTTER: Go on <laugh>.
JOHN DARNIELLE: Um, no. The thing is like, I consider myself considerably more successful than I ever deserved at this point. I'm, I mean really honestly, what I do feels so niche to me and so strange that it's quite miraculous to me that as many people as are into it are. And I also, my superiors are so superior to me that I look at them. Jonie Mitchell, Randy Newman is a songwriter, come on. And the people who are better than me, they're not just better than me, they're kicking me all up and down 57th.
VOICEOVER: John Darnielle is fueled by the belief that the act of creation is in and of itself sacred. His body of work is a testament to his own resilience, craftsmanship, and humility — his words, a comfort to those they touch.
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Vikram Paralkar
VOICEOVER:By day, Vikram Paralkar is a doctor who treats patients living and dying with cancer. After hours, he’s a novelist who explores the limits of mortality. His supernaturally-tinged fiction is often grounded in medicine, but like the author himself, it’s most concerned with right and wrong.
VIKRAM PARALKAR: I think I was interested in moral questions ever since I was a kid because it just seemed to me that people around me were seeing things and doing things very often with very little foundation and with very little thought about the consequences of what they were doing. An example of something that everyone who lives in India has to face is public corruption. So, it's almost impossible to live in India without bribing someone or the other.
VOICEOVER:Born in Mumbai, India in 1981, Paralkar was raised by parents who were both doctors, in what he’s described as a marginally religious Hindu household. When at 13, he announced he was an atheist, some relatives were scandalized, but his parents took the news fairly well.
VIKRAM PARALKAR: My parents are actually the first doctors in their respective families and they were seen as rebels in their own families. So both of their families were fairly orthodox temple going fasting on certain days, going to pilgrimages and things like that. Uh, whereas my parents were never interested in that kind of thing. My mother is marginally religious. Uh, my father is agnostic. And so there was really no pressure in my family to be religious. That said, we used to celebrate religious festivals because in Hinduism ritual is much more important than declarations of belief. So it is not important for you to say, I believe in X, Y, and Z I believe that so and so is a God and I believe that so and so is his messenger, his prophet. But what's more important is participating in social festivals and being a member of a community. And so that aspect of religion was something that was actually actually quite meaningful to me growing up.
JIM COTTER: What was the process of forming your own personal moral core?
VIKRAM PARALKAR: When I began to think about morality, I think the writings of existential philosophers and existentialist authors began to resonate with me. Cuz it very quickly became clear that at the end everyone's morality is founded upon some kind of arbitrary set of axioms that very often are very difficult to ground in any kind of physical, uh, reality about the world. What that means is that each individual then is like an island who has to formulate his or or her own moral principles and moral core and constantly has to weigh it against the society in which they live. The inner voice that they have that is an inner, uh, sensor that is constantly telling them that what they're thinking about is wrong or what they're thinking about is right. And, um, I still don't think that there is any, if there existent objective morality. I don't know if humans actually have access to it. And what that leaves us with is that we constantly have to be in an unstable moral state where every decision we make has implications, but we may never know if the decisions we make are right or wrong. And this in some way it really informs my writing.
VOICEOVER: Paralkar’s first book was published in 2014. The Afflictions imagined a world where illnesses infect souls as well as bodies. Three years later came Night Theater, the story of a disillusioned surgeon working at an isolated rural clinic in India.
VIKRAM PARALKAR: So Night Theater came out of four questions or concerns that were swelling in my mind. Uh, for years before I began writing the book. The first dealt with the position of the doctor in society. So doctors are seen to be separate from patients. The patient is the one who comes with illnesses of the body or the mind. And the doctor is this perfect empathetic intellectual who diagnosis and treats them. But what happens when the doctor is exhausted or sleep deprived or drained of empathy? What happens when the doctor himself or herself no longer believes in the mission? To what extent is a doctor allowed to be just another flawed human being? That was the first question. The second question was just as science has thought as an immense amount about the world of the tiny, the world of cells, of dna, of proteins, it is also taught us about the world of the immense about galaxies and start star clusters.
And we now know that we live in a universe that is 14 billion years old. That our galaxy as a hundred billion stars and there are probably a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. How do we reconcile that kind of scale? But another way does the cosmos care about the sickness and death of a human being? The third one had to deal with ideas of religion and philosophy in God. And over the years I've found myself very sympathetic to the questions that religions ask, but I've not found myself to be very reassured by the answers. And I find myself in this complicated position where I'm really annoyed with God for having created us and, uh, thrust upon us all these dilemmas and then having the sheer audacity to not even exist to help us out of them. And so the third question was how does modern humanity bereft of the idea of God and straddle with all of these questions cope with either the absence of God or at least the silence of God. And then the fourth set of questions had to do with corruption and the way in which it distorts human beings and societies. And having lived in India and having looked at casual corruption in Indian society and now looking at what's happening in American politics and the way in which corruption is almost becoming institutionalized in certain sections of the government, um,
JIM COTTER: Oh no. In all sections of the government, let's call it what it is. It's just the law here. It's not the law in India.
VIKRAM PARALKAR: Yes. Yes. And it raises the question of how must a moral person exists and conduct himself or herself in a society in which the corrupt are rewarded and the moral are punished. And so those were the four questions that led to the idea for Night Theater to crystallize in my mind. And the idea actually came to me in a flash, uh, which is there would be a dissolution surgeon working in an isolated rural clinic in India, battling government corruption, who was faced one night with a challenge that would dwarf any task that had ever been placed before him in the course of his career. And that would be to restore a dead back to life.
(Excerpt from Night Theater, read by the author)
“It couldn’t be, it just couldn’t. Why have you come to me?,” said the surgeon. “Go find a priest, a sorcerer, leave me alone.”
“We need you to fix our wounds, Dr. Sahib. At sunrise, our bodies will fill with blood again, and we will no longer be walking corpses.”
“How? Why? How is that possible?”
“The answer is long and complicated, Sahib, and I don’t understand everything myself. I can only tell you now that an angel took mercy on us. I’ll explain everything else later. We have so little time, I know nothing about surgeries, but I’m sure that injuries as severe as ours will take you all night to stitch up.”
JIM COTTER: If death is inevitable why I live well?
VIKRAM PARALKAR: All of us know that we are going to die. And the fact that we do is in some ways both the tragedy as well as the beauty of the human condition. That we know that we have transient lives, that we are flecks of dust in the amber of deep space and deep time. And,
JIM COTTER: But we feel so important to ourselves.
VIKRAM PARALKAR: Yes we do. And we feel important and we are important to ourselves. And if you think about it, imagine the coincidences that went into creating us. Imagine the number of chance encounters and DNA divisions and sperm and egg fusions that that had to happen since the beginning of time for us to exist. The geological changes and social changes and uh, population shifts that had to happen to create us. And so that's an immensely privileged position to be in. Now of course, I could be ungrateful and say that, well this is not enough. I exist and I have my 80 or 90 years of existence. But actually what I want is immortality. And I don't think the universe owes that to us. And so we can mourn the fact that we don't have immortality or we can celebrate the fact that we exist at all. The thing that gives value to our lives is existing not just for ourselves, but existing for the people around us, existing as part of a society. And this means finding love, finding friendship, being of use to others, and being a good citizen of the community in which you live. These are all things that give life meaning and value.
VOICEOVER: After a full day at the hospital and before sitting down for a night of writing, Paralkar can often be found unwinding at home with his husband, Nate, a Unitarian minister.
In his life as in his art, Vikram Paralkar ponders existence, interrogates death and ultimately, embraces mortality by making meaning.
Carmen Machado
VOICEOVER JC: Carmen Maria Machado has an unnerving talent for weaving the disturbing, the provocative, the horrifying, into her stories. She says it’s all in good fun, but she’s always had a pretty macabre sense of humor.
Indeed, Tori Marchiony discovered that this sensibility can be traced all the way back to childhood.
VOICEOVER TM: As a child, Machado and her best friend loved nothing more than playing elaborate games of doctor— always attempting to save their beloved dolls from mysterious, deadly illnesses.
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO: We actually both had American Girl Dolls and we played American Girl Doll hospitals. So, cause her mom was a nurse, so we built little like cardiac machines that like we could scroll out a little piece of like a little cardiac reading and her mom like drew like the appropriate correct cardiac reading and then also a bad one so you could pull out whichever one you wanted. And we made IVs out of like plastic bags and tape and color dye and like a string. And um, you know, we taped the, a safety pin like to their arm. And my, my dad helped me build like a little hospital bed. And it's funny cuz now my friend, this friend to play with me is now a doctor <laugh>. So like, she kind of went into like the medical, so she's like a little, a literal actual doctor. I think actually she might even work with children, which is super funny.
And then like I am just went off and became a writer.
TORI MARCHIONY: So do you like writing or having written better?
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO: Oh, I like both actually. I feel like a lot of people will say like, I like having written cause then it's done. But I actually enjoy writing. Yeah, I know a lot of writers for whom like the writing process is actually really arduous. But I always find it very pleasurable. It's like playing, you know, it like gives me the same sensation as like when I was a kid and I was like playing with the dollhouse, you know? And so it's, it's that sort of same sense of creative control, um, you know, and sort of like cre generating a world and generating characters and generating conflict and creating this like space and, and doing so to reflect something that's inside of me. Like I, I actually think it's really fun.
VOICEOVER: Machado’s idea of fun is on display in “Difficult at Parties,” a disturbing story from her National Book Award-nominated debut collection, “Her Body and Other Parties”. As the narrator and her boyfriend, Paul, approach a housewarming party for some of his friends, her PTSD makes even the mild encounter with good-natured strangers pulse with menace.
(Excerpt from Difficult at Parties, read by the author):
We pull up next to a row of parked cars, in front of a renovated turn-of-the-century farmhouse. ‘It looks so homey,’ says Paul, stepping out and rubbing his gloveless hands together. The windows are draped with gauzy curtains and a creamy honey color throbs from within. The house looks like it’s on fire. The hosts open the door. They are beautiful and have gleaming teeth. I have seen this before. I have not seen them before.
TORI MARCHIONY: I'm so uneasy. And you didn't say anything categorically creepy, but you managed to make it so sinister.
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO:Mm-hmm (affirmative).
TORI MARCHIONY:Is that how you see the world?
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO: I feel like when people ask me about like writing horror or horror adjacent fiction or saying things like, yeah, you're, it makes me uneasy or there's something very like, unsettling about it. I think I really do approach the world in that way, or I see the world in that way, which I know sounds really dark, but it's just sort of the way it works. You know, like I, I always make this joke whenever we drive past that billboard, like out on one of the highways where it's like the Chick-fil-A and it's like the cow that's like painting and it says like,” eat more chicken”. And I'm, I always say to my wife like, “oh my God, like the cow doesn't wanna die. And so he's this like barely literate cow is like trying desperately to paint a sign to encourage humans to kill and eat another kind of animal to spare their lives that's so dark”.
Like who came up with that <laugh> like as an advertising concept. And so I feel like that's just the way that my brain works. I I, I don't know why. I mean, I think it's like from reading and just being like a weird kind of goth kid and like thinking about death a lot, <laugh> thinking about the way the world is kind of a nightmare. A world that I actually do mostly enjoy living in, you know? But, uh, yeah. And I feel like that just comes through in my work. And I think that sort of eeriness, even when like the material isn't explicitly at that moment horror, there's still this like, sense of unease. And also I feel like I respond really well to fiction when I read fiction. So like, Shirley Jackson's like a favorite writer of mine and when I read her work, there's just this like pulse of dread that just like runs under everything and it's so precise and it's like, I don't even know how she did it exactly, but it's just, it's incredible and terrifying and um, I just love it. So <laugh>,
TORI MARCHIONY: Do you have to write it so that you don't hold it? Like if, is it sort of a way, is writing it a way to not hold onto like feeling threatened, feeling uneasy?
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO: No, I feel like it actually lean, I lean into it in more. I don't really think of writing self. I think people sometimes talk about writing as like a therapeutic act and I think writing can be therapeutic. I don't think my writing process is therapeutic. Like Lovecraft actually has this really amazing essay that he wrote about horror and what he called “the weird tale”. He wrote it like back in the thirties. And in the essay he talks about how the sort of the, the prevalence of the idea of the weird tale and the idea that like the unknown is this like horrifying thing to all people is so powerful that writers that otherwise don't write horror will occasionally write a, a single work of horror. And he talks about, it's like discharging this like energy. Like they, like they are feeling something dreadful but they don't know how to put words to it. So they like write this one book or this one story or this one thing that like helps 'em discharge the horror. It's not like it's, it's discharging the dread from me. It's like I'm trying to show it to other people. Like seeing like, “do you see what I see?”
TORI MARCHIONY: Are you angry? And is anger however justified a useful emotion?
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO: Oh yeah, I'm angry. I'm angry all the time. Sometimes anger is justified and is righteous. I was really loved the story of Jesus turning over the tables in the temple because it was this example of like righteous anger about something that was like unjust and not right and like it was okay to be angry. I think that's always like always was really a good story. I'm glad that it's there. You know, I'm glad that it shows that like even this peaceful person could, could demonstrate anger. And I think that anger can be very useful. I think it can be productive if it needs to be. Sometimes it's brief, sometimes I'm just, you're just angry cause something is unfair. Even if it's like a silly thing and I'm like, the anger just is. And I think anger also, like people, like people will say things like, “you shouldn't be so angry. It's not healthy for you. It's not good.” But it's like also like we live in a deeply unjust world. I'm angry about sexual harassers, I'm angry about domestic abuse. I'm angry about women's, you know, women's rights. I'm angry about police brutality. Like, and we should all be angry about those things. And if you're not, then I'm like very worried for you. You know, if you're not angry about those things, then like, hmm, I dunno how to help you. You know? It also can be debilitating if you let it take over your life or run your life. But I think it can be useful. And I feel like people, so people really want there just to be like, not actual peace, but like people, something, people are a conflict avoidant, right? They're like, “I don't want you to be mad at me. I don't want people you to be mad.” And sometimes you actually have to be mad. And I think some people, some people just don't understand that like anger can be good and useful, productive, and even if it's not productive, it can still be right. People who think anger makes people irrational are probably people who are having anger righteously directed at them. I used to have this quote of Khalil Gibran’s the guy who wrote, um, The Prophet, I had this quote of his on a post-it note and it was up on my desk. I had found it once and I kind of liked it. And it said, “if your heart is volcano, how shall flowers bloom?” And I kept it there for a while. And then one day I was working on the memoir and I got really mad and I like crumpled it up and threw it away.
And I talk in the book about how like, it's almost like he's making the wrong point because like, the thing is that volcanoes, the soil near volcanoes is actually really rich and like things grow in it. That is actually, that's why people live next to volcanoes, not because they have a death wish. It's because the soil is mixed fruit and flowers. And so it's like sometimes you can't grow things unless things get destroyed. Like you need, like, like you need to have that reckoning. You need to have that anger, that anger can be transformative and can transform the whole world. And I think if you say otherwise, you're lying to yourself or you're lying to other people.
VOICEOVER: Carmen Machado has always been willing to speak—and write, her own truth—even as it has evolved over time. As a teenager, she fell in with a group of young evangelists who gave her a sense of clarity and belonging—but inappropriate encounters with a pastor would ultimately sour the experience.
Decades later, a grown up, atheist Machado thinks back on those strict religious years through new eyes.
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO: You know, it gave me what I needed when I needed it. And I think that was really important. And it's, it's funny cause I, I wasn't, it wasn't like I was raised that way. It was like this choice that I made for myself, which like, when you think about it, it's like super, everyone always assumes I was raised that way. I'm like, “oh, no, no, no”. My parents were like, they're Christians. They're like middle of the road, Methodist like super chill. But I was looking for something and, and I feel like there was something in that fervor and something in that sort of, that, that wonder that I think really spoke to something in me. And I think even though the way that it's manifested has changed, I think that part of it was tapping into something that I really needed at the time. And I think for me, the sort of the thing that I've had to learn, the way that religion has sort of changed for me is also like respecting. I mean like, I think when I first sort of stopped leaving God, I was like, “anyone who believes in God is, is just a lying to themselves.” You know, you go through that, that sort of process where you're like, ah, it's all lies, you know, <laugh>.
But I think now I'm sort of like my wife practices certain pagan rituals and like I participate with her and those rituals, even though they're not my rituals. And that's just, that's fine. You know, people have different needs and people have different ways of responding to the, the unknown. I mean, to come back to the Lovecraft essay that I mentioned earlier, right? Like we, we have different ways of thinking about how to grapple with like what we don't know. And I think that even though, I mean obviously the problems become when like the system that you create to, to come to that understanding and to ha- fill that void or to like make that space or to have those thoughts then becomes like an oppressive group, right? So it's like, it's not bad that somebody participates in a, in a faith practice, whatever it is, it becomes bad when they like use that to oppress other people. And so that's really what I'm more concerned about is like that militarization of faith as opposed to the actual existence of faith. Even though for me, I'm like, I don't agree, but that's okay. That's fine. You know, that's not, and I, for all I know I'm wrong.
TORI MARCHIONY: How do you negotiate with the unknown now that you don't have the religious framework?
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO: I just recognize that it's unknown, you know, that like, there are things we don't understand. The human mind is very strange. The world is huge. There's this, this idea in writing and world building where they talk like people will talk about how there's such a thing as conceiving of another world too, too much that like new worlds that you create, so like a fantasy world for example, has to have a sense of wonder, has to have a sense of unexplored vistas, you know? And even for us, like there are parts of the ocean we don't fully understand and there are like parts of space that we don't fully understand. Like we still have so many questions and like, even with all of our technology and everything we have available to us, like there's still this sense of mystery. And I think for, for some people that's that mystery is God, right? It's either God or it's like God knows. So it doesn't really matter if we know or not, but for me it's like, there's just mystery. And I think that's really beautiful. I think that's super interesting. And I'm always excited to like read when people have like, they figured out a little part, a new part of the mystery
TORI MARCHIONY: That's really cool. So it's like the mystery is inviting rather than terrifying.
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO: It's like, yeah, It's, it's terrifying. Also, you know, I say this as like a hypo, like an anxious person, a hypochondriac. Like certainly there are parts of it. I always joke, you know, the human body is a nightmare and it is in a lot of ways you're like, what is my body doing? Like, what's happening? Like this horrible meat sack. I wish I could just like free myself of this like terrible albatross of a body and just like float free, you know? And I feel like most people who have been sick in any way <laugh> if I feel that way. But yeah, but I do. So yeah, it is a little scary. But I think also it's sort of magical.
VOICEOVER: Carmen Machado sees the darkness, and the magic, all around us. And with a rare combination of emotional honesty and intellectual ferocity, her writing amplifies our discomfort—by pressing on our collective bruises, exposed nerves, and mortal fears.
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Promo
VOICEOVER: On the next Articulate Experience: three writers reflect on maternal influences in their life and work.
Chip Delaney wrote openly about homosexual intimacy in a time before being gay was widely accepted. But he never told his own mom.
CHIP DELANEY: “I thought, well, I'm going to have to come out to her. And that's when she had her stroke.”
VOICEOVER: Tori Marchiony reports on how becoming a mom (has) upended novelist Karen Russell’s worldview in the strangest, most delightful of ways.
KAREN RUSSEL: It's sort of like wanting two contradictory things all the time. So there's a part of me that kind of longs to be alone, if I'm honest, but equal and opposite desires all the time.
VOICEOVER: And, Tori Marchiony delves into mother-daughter dynamics with the best-selling young adult author Elizabeth Acevedo, who says her mom always loved seeing her in the spotlight.
ELIZABETH ACEVEDO: She put me in modeling classes and acting classes and singing classes. And like, there was always this joy that she had of, of seeing me speak up in public.
VOICEOVER: Join us for the next Articulate Experience.
Credits
Articulate Experience is a production of the Articulate Foundation.
More at articulateshow.org
The program is produced by Tori Marchiony with help from Christine Walden, Mark Miller, Tom Contarino, Eva Roben, Matt Hoisch, Gabby Bing, Paula Butler, and Mary Morilla.
Our fact checker is Christopher Munden.
Original music and sound design by John Avarese.
I'm Jim Cotter.
