The Cosmic Library

Stuck in a lonely motel room, you have a good chance of finding a Bible, left for anyone similarly stuck in a strange interval between days. In this way, it’s yet another night book. The Bible also has famous night scenes, and dream scenes, too: Jacob's dream of angels, Joseph's dream of sheaves of wheat. So this chapter of “Mosaic Mosaic” explores dream interpretation and that foundational dream-interpreter Sigmund Freud, himself a close reader of the Hebrew Bible."Literature guides Freud's thinking all the way through," says Tom DeRose of the Freud Museum in London. And one effect of reading such a literary doctor is a literary, tragic awareness—what DeRose describes as awareness that every effort to "bring things to a better place will inherently contain its own destructiveness within it." Other tensions between contraries exist within the dreams and dream-like passages of the Hebrew Bible. The novelist Joshua Cohen calls the dreams in the Bible "highly demonstrative and overly obvious." He says that "the dreams that are presented are so clear,” which suggests "a way of taming dream space, denying dream space its wildness." On the other hand, the poet Peter Cole finds something like that wildness in the Bible, finds "that porousness of consciousness where the boundary of self is blurred." And so, somehow encountering both blurred boundaries and demonstrative clarity, we’re thinking in this episode of what interpretation can make of it all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“We regulate each other’s nervous systems,” says the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett in this chapter of “Mosaic Mosaic.” “We are the caretakers of each other’s nervous systems.” So feeling—and thinking—and the regulations of law join together; the idea that laws exist apart from our nervous systems, our feelings, doesn’t quite work, in this sense.The poet Peter Cole here describes an emotional state associated with the language of rules and ritual in the Hebrew Bible, and in Leviticus particularly. He says, “I was just totally spellbound by the choreography of sacrifice.” And the novelist Joshua Cohen speaks of living law, a kind of vital legal system that emanates beyond the Torah, through commentary and debates ever after.Laws, rules, rituals: these, you’ll hear, are all alive with feeling. “Regulation doesn’t mean damping down,” Lisa Feldman Barrett says. “It just means coordinating and making something happen.” Poet and critic Elisa Gabbert describes poetry as “a vibration,” which in a way might match the nervous-system correspondence described by Lisa Feldman Barrett. In literature as in legal regulation, we learn in this chapter, language coordinates responses, and it participates in the merging of thought with emotion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This season, we're rambling through and beyond a book sacred in multiple traditions, a book that keeps generating debate and commentary and tangents. It's the Hebrew Bible, home to Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his Ark, David and Goliath, and prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel. Here, in a season we're calling "Mosaic Mosaic," it especially prompts conversations about the mysteries of thought and language.The novelist Joshua Cohen explains in this episode that the Hebrew Bible poses fundamental questions about language. As he puts it: "Why are there letters, actually? Why do the letters form words? This is the most basic question of the Bible." There, language makes things happen on a grand scale. God creates the world by language, by declarations: "let there be light"—Cohen mentions the idea that "one could create life through the combination of letters." And in the Bible, after Adam comes to life, he gives names to things and thereby begins exploration of the world by language. Here's Robert Alter's translation of that scene in Genesis: And the LORD God fashioned from the soil each beast of the field and each fowl of the heavens and brought each to the human to see what he would call it, and whatever the human called a living creature, that was its name. The poet, translator, and MacArthur genius Peter Cole speaks of "the burden of the Bible," which he calls a "pain in the desk chair"; yet he adds that "everything is somehow in it, but only if you use it as a tool for reflection, or a prism, so that both you and the world end up in its pages somehow, refracted by the text." The written word can align past and present, or antiquity with you, the contemporary reader, and some sort of harmony might occasionally result. (Elisa Gabbert, speaking of poetry generally, describes in this show the experience of encountering a text that "feels like how you're feeling.")At the end of our last season, on 1,001 Nights, radio host Hearty White recounted this realization: "When you're talking about Bible stories, you're not talking about Bible stories at all. It's an excuse to talk about other things. It's just a jumping off point." Along those lines: this season, we're starting with the Bible and jumping into explorations of language, the mind, emotions, and more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights. Season three, titled Mosaic Mosaic and premiering on April 11, journeys through and beyond the Hebrew Bible. Guests for season three include: Peter Cole, the poet and MacArthur genius whose new book Draw Me After will be out this fall; Elisa Gabbert, poet and poetry columnist with the New York Times–her latest book is Normal Distance; Lisa Feldman Barrett, psychologist, neuroscientist, and author of books including How Emotions Are Made; Tom DeRose, curator at the Freud Museum in London; and Joshua Cohen, the novelist whose books include Book of Numbers.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 1,001 Nights are not typically about conclusions, but about the suggestion of more stories, more information passed from person to person, language to language. In this, the last episode of this season, Mazen Naous—a scholar whose specialties include the Nights—points out the implication of the phrase “thousand and one nights”: “There’s always one more story, always one more story to be told, the stories have no beginning and no end. That’s partly why the Nights still inspire rewrites and reinventions and adaptations to this day.”“I think the book doesn’t end,” says Yasmine Seale, translator of the Nights, here. “The force of this work, and what’s so strange and uncomfortable about it, is that it’s a book without an end, without resolution, without conclusion.”That openness makes the Nights a work in which you can ramble and find, maybe, anything. Hearty White, of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU, compares such reading to other sorts of study:When you’re talking about Bible stories, you’re not talking about Bible stories at all. It’s an excuse to talk about other things. It’s just a jumping off point. And so what you do is go into excruciating minutiae as a way of opening up—it’s a key, and you use it to open up a tangent, and that tangent takes you to marvelous places. And then I found out you can literally do it with almost anything that’s complicated . . . And you just descend, infinitely, in between the words.The Nights were compiled in a way that supports this kind of reading, this kind of thinking. They’ve been added to, changed, adapted in ways that obliterate any straightforward authenticity or moral simplicity. Reading the Nights, then—and talking about the Nights—means accepting something challenging: stories can exceed easy notions of an author, or a culture, or even history. Stories can, in short, let you participate in experiences far beyond them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1,001 Nights begins in horror: a king threatens to kill, and Shahrazad tells stories to keep the king from doing so. The ongoing nature of the stories, then, relies on a drive to live, manifesting the basic connection between our intuitive selves and imagination.When stories really survive, there’s more to them than repetitive cliffhangers or excessively elaborated detail—something more than escapist entertainment, even if that’s there, too. Hearty White says in this episode, “I don’t care for the movies that are in mythical places. They’re ‘world-creating’? They’re world-limiting. Every time they add another character, another detail, they’re shutting off possibilities, they’re not creating them.” He describes, too, the films and TV shows to which he’s drawn, movies “where I’m shown something and go, ‘Why isn’t the camera moving? I’m getting a little uncomfortable, what am I supposed to look at? What’s my role now?’ Now you’re very conscious of the fact that you’re observing—you’re not on autopilot.”So a vital possibility glows in stories that sustain your questioning, again and again and again. Katy Waldman describes how episodic stories can work by producing more of the same-but-not-the-same. We call it “now-what fiction” in this episode, a kind of story in which there’s “a mix of something enduring and going on and something . . . completely new and different.” In short: these are stories in which something persists or survives, inviting your questions continually, even if those questions are simply “now what?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 1,001 Nights are full of patterns; the stories have formulas, and this too anticipates the world of television, comic books, video games. Yasmine Seale, translator of the Nights, says in this episode, “Formula is essential to the work. It draws it force from accumulation. It draws its meaning from pattern.”But formulaic narrative doesn’t necessarily mean mind-numbing sameness. It can mean the opposite. Hearty White, the host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU, talks in this episode about watching formulaic Three Stooges episodes, which don’t limit the viewer’s imagination. Instead, you get the sense that an artist like Hearty White is liberated by the formulaic, finds a field in which to play and invent within clichés or patterns. He says in this episode, of formulaic story: “I think what it does is, it frees you from the involuntary compulsive predicting that you have to do when you’re navigating your life. Maybe because the same thing is happening all the time you don’t have to guess.”For Katy Waldman, critic at The New Yorker, stories that serially, repeatedly suggest infinity also work with the sense that “things might end . . . but something will persist. And what on earth will that look like?” She describes a dystopian version of the liberating experience Hearty White finds in ongoing, repetitious story. Still, in either case, attention is repeatedly compelled to something beyond repetitions. We are, once more, in the world of night and the dreams that surpass the night. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The House of Wisdom was a center of learning in Baghdad of the Abbasid caliphate. Established in the eighth century, it sustained a golden age of science that coincided with the collection of early versions of the 1,001 Nights. In this episode, we hear about the science of the Nights, the science of the Abbasid age, and the history, more broadly, of science fiction.A similar exchange from culture to culture, language to language, made possible the scientific advances of this time and 1,001 Nights. The very frame narrative of Shahrazad is a Persian story, and leading figures associated with Baghdad’s House of Wisdom were Persian, as well. In this episode, Jim Al-Khalili, author of a book on the House of Wisdom, describes two Persian thinkers, Ibn Sina and al-Biruni:Both these guys were philosophers, scientists, polymaths—and they were having the sorts of debates about the nature of reality that would not seem out of place in modern physics . . . debating about: how does the light from the sun reach the Earth as it travels through space, are there many worlds, are there parallel universes? Stuff that you’d think, “How could they possibly be talking about that?” I just get the feeling that we didn’t invent cleverness in modern times.The Nights and scientific work have more in common than speculative thinking and reliance on cross-cultural communication, too. Both depend on ceaselessly driving toward something yet to be fully grasped—either through repetitive experiments or repetitive storytelling. Maybe it was inevitable, then, that the Nights would have a major part in the history of science fiction. You’ll hear in this episode how magnetism was a scientific preoccupation that became a source of adventure within the Nights—specifically, within the stories of “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,” which also contain a link to a later monument of science fiction: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You know Shahrazad, who tells a story every night in order to survive and save lives; you also know the collection of stories that results: 1,001 Nights. At least, you've felt the influence of those stories. On TV, in books, in comics—you’ve experienced things informed by the episodic narratives of Shahrazad. And in this season of The Cosmic Library, you’ll hear how the Nights opened paths to infinite story possibility within repetitive constraints.Even as the threat of death looms over Shahrazad in the Nights, her narrative inventions promise something that exceeds the power of a tyrant. And so, in this season (as in the last one, which was about Finnegans Wake) we’re once again talking about a night book that takes you beyond the night. Along the way, we’re hearing of a historical golden age, The Three Stooges, the art of literary survival, and possible worlds that emanate from even the worst situations.Such imaginative survival entails changes, some of which are well known: Shahrazad is familiar to many readers as Scheherazade, a transliteration that resulted from translation after translation, and alteration after alteration, across cultures. Yasmine Seale, translator of 1,001 Nights and guest on this season, writes to The Cosmic Library, “I like Shahrazad because it makes clear the name’s Persian origins. There are different theories about its etymology. One sees it as shahr, city, and the suffix zad, born. A child of the city. Shahrazad is an urban figure—worldly, streetwise, unshockable. The stories were about merchants and for merchants.”Meanwhile, the Scheherazade spelling, Seale writes, “is a bit of a monster. The ‘Sch’ smells German, the final ‘e’ is French. English puts the stress on a syllable which is silent in Persian and Arabic. It’s a spelling that tells us more about the various European readings and misreadings of the text, its many messy afterlives, than about the work itself.”This season thinks about classic stories that have had over-brimming afterlives through readings and misreadings, stories that have always suggested infinitely branching ideas, possibilities, and questions. Guests this season include a maker of fiction, a New Yorker critic, a theoretical physicist, a translator of the Nights, and a literary scholar. If our first volume, “Finnegan and Friends,” found creative revitalization in Finnegans Wake's evocation of night, let this second volume, “The Worlds of Scheherazade,” reveal the potential Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Cosmic Library follows tangents out of literary classics concerned with infinity. Building on Lit Hub’s five-part Finnegan and Friends podcast, this series explores the most unfathomable books in conversation with an eclectic cast of guests. The upcoming season, The Worlds of Scheherazade, plunges into and out of the 1,001 Nights with guests Katy Waldman, critic at The New Yorker; Yasmine Seale, translator of the 1,001 Nights; Jim Al-Khalili, theoretical physicist; Mazen Naous, professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; and Hearty White, host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices