Storytelling Is An Emergency: In Our Bones, We Knew This Was Going To Happen / Sophie Strand
Writer, poet, and essayist Sophie Strand joins me to discuss the "emergency of storytelling" in our climate disrupted present and future, and the subjects she explores in her upcoming book releases, The Madonna Secret, and The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine.
Sophie and I entered this conversation a bit fuzzy, a little stunned. We acknowledge this from the get go. We were processing devastating news that morning: Hurricane Ida crashed and dragged itself from south to north across the East Coast, overwhelming the infrastructure, shutting down the grid and flooding cities. We discuss how climatologically, ecologically, we can feel how things have shifted tremendously — in the Northwest where I live, and in Hudson Valley where Sophie lives. While, personally, I tend to explore this broad subject on this podcast, Sophie writes about it. In her essay Storytelling is an Emergency: An Ecological Reading of Scheherazade, she writes:
We are entering into an ecological A Thousand and One Nights of climate change. We are entering into a series of stories that are desperately trying to save their teller: the earth, Gaia, the biosphere, whatever word, for you, encompasses the sum total of spherical, gravity-bound life. Will we like King Shahryar, halt our violence, and begin to listen to a new, non-human kind of story? Will we let these stories change us and reform us? Ultimately, it matters not whether we do or do not. This series of stories will not depend on a human scribe. It will be written into the stone mantle of the Earth itself. (https://bit.ly/3B4CJ6A)
Video Segment:
Bio:
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she’s ever lived in she has been known as “the walker”. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients.
Episode Notes:
Learn more about Sophie and her work at her website
Follow her on Facebook and Instagram
Sounds by Abel Takan
The following transcript was fact-checked and edited for clarity and length by Trish Reader, and given a final proofread and approval by Sophie Strand.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: Well Sophie, we’re both a mess! But, I just started recording because we already started talking about stuff, and I thought I might as well start recording to see what sticks here at the beginning, at least. And, I want to thank you for coming on the podcast.
SOPHIE STRAND: Thank you for having me. Thank you.
FARNSWORTH: Appreciate it. I'm really happy to have you on.
We were just discussing where we're located geographically, within what we call the United States and on this continent, and you were describing being up in the Hudson Valley, in New York State?
STRAND: In the Hudson Valley, right at the confluence of Rondout Creek and the Hudson River.
FARNSWORTH: Okay, right. So, we were both talking about our morning. Kind of where we’re at right now, and I was just reading... I have a bad habit of reading the news too early in the morning.
STRAND: Me too, yeah.
FARNSWORTH: It's a bad habit because it puts you in a funk, right? It can, at least. And the news is, on one level, this sort of enforced — or, what is the word I’m trying to think of — hyper-focused on certain issues to the point where it just puts everybody in a collective state of anxiety. And that’s a part of it. But on a real level, a lot of stuff is really happening simultaneously right now that is very disturbing; and situated within the climate crisis and also just politically in the US, things are going further and further to the right, more restrictive. I was thinking about the abortion ban in Texas that was upheld by the Supreme Court… all of these things just put me in a mood. And you were talking also about your… what would I call it? A disease or a certain condition that you have?
STRAND: You know, it’s a genetic condition that has predisposed me to a bunch of other conditions. So it's a constellation of conditions that all spring from this one, genetic “glitch.”
FARNSWORTH: Right. Glitch. So I guess we're both in this. But I think this is actually an interesting place to be in, to do an interview.
STRAND: Certainly, this is the time. I always think of [Frederico] García Lorca’s essay about [Play of] the Duende, like we're “dancing in the wound.” This is the raw moment, you know? Real art, where interesting things can come out of it. But, whoa!
FARNSWORTH: I know. I was having a conversation with my partner and we're actually going to be moving in together, here, pretty soon. We’ll be moving up to Washington [state]. So that's a part of it. But, when you make big life decisions and you're doing things, there's this space you're in, of transition, and it's easy for me to be consoling or affirming in the relationship, and being, we're going through this thing together. We're making big changes in our lives and there are a lot of things that are just uncertain. There's this middle space that you’re in, between things. It can produce anxiety, of course, and that is a special place, because a lot of things come into your life, and there’s a lot of fluidity and change. It's easy for me to say, it's easy to like frame it… I don't know if consoling is the right word, but affirming and supportive; but, when you're in it, it's really hard to see it, as that. You know?
STRAND: That's something I always think about, when you have trauma happen, when you have illness, people say: it's an initiation and it's a rite of passage. Well if it's really like that you don't know when you’re inside of it. It's only an initiation if you survived; and, you don't know if you will survive when you're working in it.
So, I think in those liminal realms, those moments, they’re a Keatsian idea of negative capability. Can you live with the question, the uncertainty? Can you really not know if you're going to survive?
FARNSWORTH: Right. I acknowledge the nature of it being an initiation, but sometimes initiatory processes kill people.
STRAND: I’ve been thinking — and other people have been parsing this out as well, so I'm definitely a compost heap of other thinkers you know, and Tom Hirons the poet was talking about this in an interview — initiations within communities that are rooted and have actual, historical land-based practices, they have rules. They had elders who've been through them, and you have a history of people having survived these experiences to guide you through them.
We don't have anyone on the other side. We don't have a midwife for this experience. There's no “extinction climate apocalypse doula.” I mean, there it is. It's the Earth and it's the understanding that being a human isn't the most important thing, but there’s not another human-being pulling you through the caul, delivering you.
FARNSWORTH: That’s a lot. It really is a lot and I don't know how else to say it.
STRAND: Yeah. I think a lot about somatics; I think modern somatics is really problematic and complicated. There's some good stuff, there's some bad stuff. But, I do think the window of tolerance is interesting in how you oscillate, and when your nervous system is dysregulated, you're always going in and out of being way too activated and becoming reactionary, or becoming totally paralyzed. And I was thinking that culturally we're in this wild oscillation. We're never within a window of tolerance right now. There's never any moment to bring the cultural, social nervous system into alignment.
FARNSWORTH: You know, I had an experience right before the pandemic, not before it began, but before we started reacting to the pandemic. I had a personal experience where I was in that state of oscillating; going from just above and then below. It was really informative for me to learn why that was happening, eventually. But now, I'm feeling it's happening on a collective level, in a way. And that's a different thing. You know?
STRAND: Well, it's like you're riding the wave and the waves are unpredictable.
There are lots of different metaphors. As a poet, as a writer, I'm always thinking about what metaphor fits. Every day it’s a different one.
FARNSWORTH: On a practical level, I was asking because Hurricane Ida hit the East Coast and New York State, or at least the city of New York, and other parts… New Jersey as well, and other parts of the East Coast were flooded and people were like, okay, here we are, here's this thing, this is new, or not new-new, but relatively new.
How is it where you're at? How are you doing?
STRAND: I would say the past four years in the Hudson Valley have been… well, here’s the interesting thing: you can read the news but when you get distracted by the macrocosm global news you stop listening to the “news" outside your house whether the animals, the slight variations in vegetation, when things grow… I mean, I'm a person who spends a lot of time outside, and so I feel like I noticed about three years ago that something, that things were changing climatically really, really fast. So for me, it was like three years ago I was like, this is a different ecosystem. There are trees that are dying. The invasive species are bringing them down. There are different waves of flowers happening at different times. I could really feel it about three years ago. I think people now, local ecologists and people are like, oh look at this! And I'm like, yeah were you paying attention?
Now it's really loud in New York State. The music has been rising for about three years as far as I can tell with extreme heat and extreme humidity. The Hudson Valley is pretty much a Tropical Zone at this point. Houses are rotting and falling apart. People don't have the infrastructure, the central air and heating, to keep their houses from falling apart. And, on a very dramatic level, we have flooding. New York City is shut down today; people can't get around, people can't get to doctor's appointments, they can't get to the hospital, they can't see relatives that are dying.
So, that's happening, but you know, it's also slower and more gradual. Houses are falling apart, and rivers are drying up and then other rivers are overflowing and totally changing and melding into other rivers. It's an interesting moment.
How are you seeing it where you are? What does it feel like, ecologically?
FARNSWORTH: Well, I live in a very agricultural region, so it is actually interesting. In preparing for this interview I had listened to some other interviews that you had done. One with Dare Sohei. In those interviews, you talk a lot about your connection to the land or the ecology that you are embedded within. And, that's actually part of something I've struggled with personally, is not having that level of connection to where I live, and I wonder why, a lot. I've wondered throughout the podcast a bit why I don't feel very connected to where I'm from. So I've explored it through all these different lenses and different perspectives and stuff. I think part of it, honestly, is here it's very agricultural. It's been colonized to such a great degree that I don't know, I don’t really feel I live in that much connection to the place I'm at, and I wonder why that is. I'm still trying to figure that out a little bit, the nuances of that.
I'll just say on a basic level: heat waves. You know, we had a lot of heat waves this summer. I know that farmers are struggling with water and droughts. Megadrought, I guess they call it now. I think there's a general anxiety about how the economy is going to function with limits on resources, if you want to call them resources, but water and things like that.
And actually, I went up to Washington when the first heat wave hit there, and it was really surreal. I arrived right when it was beginning, and as I was driving on the freeway, the traffic had been slowed down and stopped for a period of time because there were firefighters stopped on the side of the road to stop a fire from breaking out because it was just so dry. And then, as I arrived, in Olympia and in a few other areas it was peaking around 100 or plus 100 degrees, and it was so surreal. It did not feel right. It was out of character, if I could say that about what it's like to be in that region. It felt very strange. It was almost like a fever dream. That’s what it felt like to me, this whole region feels that way. Everything feels out of sync, out of alignment. That's my general sense of things right now. Where I'm at.
STRAND: Fever dream feels like a good articulation. There's a kind of an uncanniness to it, like a spookiness, to what's happening. It's like when someone you know really well starts to act in a really unpredictable way.
So, I grew up in the Hudson Valley, actually. For me, it definitely feels like, wow, you’re doing things I never thought you were going to do. This is not the place I remember. But I don't really want to put my anthropocentric moral interpretation onto that. I don't think it's bad or good. I just think it’s happening, and it is weird.
FARNSWORTH: Yeah, I actually wrote about this a little bit. I had an experience where I went up to Port Townsend, which is right on the peninsula in Washington on the very northern part there. I had dinner with some good friends and then we went on a little walk through the woods, and the woods were shaded and cooling down in the evening. It was right as the sun was about to set. We walked up to the coastline and as we left the trees and got to the coastline, it was hot. It actually got hotter the closer we got to the ocean, and it was so weird. There was this smell in the air. I don't know how to explain the smell. It was salty but like a sauna. I don't know. I can't quite explain the scent but there was something so distinctive and it was so hot and it was really bleak. Looking out over the coastline it felt very bleak and wrong. Like something was wrong about that feeling. It felt really surreal and dreamlike, and that stuck with me. That really, really stuck with me.
Well, I would like to point to, I guess, a relatively short essay of yours. In it, you had written about the IPCC Report, and because we are talking about climate I feel it's appropriate to bring this up. Could you talk a bit about that essay?
STRAND: Scheherazade and a Thousand and One Nights; Storytelling is an Emergency?
Well, that essay uses Scheherazade and the story of the woman, and the king, who kills a woman every night. He weds a woman and kills her every night, and then his vizier's daughter is chosen to be his newest bride and she knows that to survive she has to keep him from killing her. So, every night she tells him a story that's so good that he wants to keep her alive for another night to tell a story.
And for a long time, you know, I've taught young women writing. I've taught creative writing workshops for young women. And, this story had always been a way of me kind of entering into a more dynamic way of getting them to tell the stories that they actually care about storytelling, as an emergency. It's not a cute thing. It's not wanting to write a story that's going to make you famous. You want to tell the story that's going to keep you alive. Like Scheherazade, her stories are these adrenaline-fueled attempts to actually save her life. So, as we tell stories we should ask ourselves, “What are the stories that will keep me alive?” Because, if they keep me alive, they may keep other people alive.
Then I was thinking about storytelling, as I often do, as being a non-human event, as being something that we belong-to but we didn't invent. And I was thinking about the Earth itself, Gaia, The Great Mother, whatever you wish, the biosphere, as being a kind of Scheherazadean character that is telling these stories, with hurricanes, with heat waves, with forest fires, to try and get our attention to stay alive, to say, “Come on, pay attention.”
I think that's the interesting thing. We are so culturally shut down to our sensory experience, that I feel like we've been sensorily receiving climate information for a long time. Like you mentioned smell, and I was thinking, things have probably smelled wrong for a long time but things are just loud enough now that in our very shuttered, very simplistic existence, we’re finally paying attention, but the stories have to get loud.
FARNSWORTH: This seems to be something that was touched on with with Dare and the conversation you had with them.
Our culture, if you want to call it that, our civilization or whatever it is, really shutters off our senses and our ability to sense things with all the senses we have.
STRAND: I think people are so attracted to these big, heroic psychedelic experiences. They just want to turn on your senses and psychedelic experiences will wake up those senses but you also have that available to you every single day.
FARNSWORTH: I've talked about psychedelics and I've kind of backed off a bit because I haven't had many lately in my life.
It was one of those things, when I had my first mushroom experiences, my senses of smell and taste — not just as distinct, separate categories of senses — they were blending together in such a particular way, it was overwhelming. I was realizing in that experience I had access to them the entire time. Whether consciously or not, I didn't want to have that intensity of felt experience, because it was too much to live in this place and in this time, and with my body, and it was too much to take in all the time; because it was, just, hard. It was hard. You know?
STRAND: I also think that sensory gating is a survival technique. Like, you want to be able to hear your name called in a room of people talking. So you have to be able to “gate out” all the other noise to distinguish your name. You want to be able to see an animal coming at you through the woods. So, you have to be able to block out all the other visual stimuli. You see that perturbation, that movement.
I think that gating is actually something that is helpful. The problem is the way we used to homogenize the kind of sensory stimuli we register, had a lot more to do with an understanding of how land worked and how weather worked. But now, it has to do with abstractions and with structures that are totally man-made and have nothing to do with our actual, somatic survival.
So, I think that's the really hard thing, because we do need to gate out. To let in all the stimuli is to be totally overwhelmed. Yeah, but how do we begin playing with that doorway, opening it a little bit, letting in a little bit more, closing it?
FARNSWORTH: In your writing you talk a great deal about mycelium. You talk about it and use it as more than just a metaphor.
STRAND: It’s a lyrical-ideogram. It's the thing that arrived to me, that helped my brain work. I don't even mean it’s like a substance I took. I mean, it was a way of thinking. And I think we all have our cognitive companions that come and help us think.
FARNSWORTH How did that come to you?
STRAND: Well, I loved mushrooms when I was little. I grew up in the Hudson Valley and I was down on the ground, looking at things and pulling up roots and looking at little dangly mycelium; not that I knew what that was at that point. For me, there was an “a-ha” moment when I was in college when I was fascinated with mycorrhizal networks and there wasn't that much information about them yet. I had read Deleuze and Guattari and found it to be really interesting and dry and not rooted in ecology. I was trying to find some way to think about rhizomes in a much more ecologically, scientifically interesting way. While doing this research, as that was happening, as my love of mycology and fungi was deepening into this mycorrhizal area of study, I got diagnosed finally — I’d been mysteriously ill for a long time and was finally diagnosed with a connective tissue disease — and so it was a vertiginous weird moment where I was fascinated with the connective tissue of the soil and realizing that all of my health issues were connective tissue issues. It was a moment when I realized that this had been planted in my body genetically, since birth. That's my interpretation, but it definitely felt like I had grown into my purpose. I had found the being that I was wedded to.
FARNSWORTH: Mmm. I'm trying to figure out how to ask this question, or how to say this. My experiences with mushrooms — we were just touching on psychedelics — the experiences that I've had with them, have always felt like there was an actual intelligent being, or not even a being. It felt like a collection of beings showing me things, actually speaking to me in a hive-mind; and it was mischievous but it contained multitudes.
STRAND: It feels like chattering. It feels like it has a lot to say, and it's bumptious and kind of unruly. Puckish. I always think of the fermented gods, very Dionysian.
I've had that experience too when I've done mushrooms. For me the big experience, the big paradigm shift was about Time. When I had psilocybin experience I had experienced time as flowing backwards. I was feeling my future flowing back into me and feeling moments begin to recursively spiral. It really troubled my idea of the arrow of time.
FARNSWORTH: It seems like mushrooms, when they do that, it seems like it does disrupt your perception; not only your perception of time, but the way it flows.
It seems like a common thing, and I think there's a lesson in that. Right?
STRAND: Well, quantum physics and you know, Libet’s Delay. There's a lot of pretty mainstream science out there that says we don't really understand how time works. Is it this kind of a Minkowski-like cube? Are we a snake that exists along our whole timeline, and we're experiencing this one moment but we really exist along our whole life? There are lots of interesting questions about that. Especially about Readiness Potential.
They've done these studies — Libet’s studies are the most famous ones I think, those were in the 80s — where they would show that people would make decisions but their bodies were registering them and preparing for them before they cognitively made the decision.
And also, that you can shock someone and they'll be preparing for it in their body before they receive the shock, without knowing that they're going to receive it. So there are all these strange temporal kind of glitches in scientific studies that trouble our ideas of free will and of causality.
FARNSWORTH: Do you think part of our sensory gating, that part of our sensory apparatus or our ability to anticipate things, in a way you've described time itself, taking a psychedelic experience which feels like a door gets flung open, that it might be a part of our ability to anticipate something that's pulling us towards it? We may not know what that thing is, but we know we are about to do it, or it is about to be done to us.
STRAND: Yes. Read anything by Eric Wargo, it’s really fun. Or, listen to his interview with Michael Garfield on [Michael’s podcast,] Future Fossils.
Eric Wargo is an amazing amateur, a hobbyist, and he loves science, he loves quantum physics. He acknowledges this is not his area of expertise, and yet he still writes about it in a very interesting, compelling way. And he's interested in the fact that pretty much all cultures up until very recently believed in some form of precognition and precognitive dreams and prophecy, and that if we actually look at at how dreams work... Freud, this is fascinating: Freud had to work really hard to disprove how many prophetic dreams he was having and his patients were having. And, if you actually look at them on paper altogether, you’ll see it’s a lot!
I think in our own lives we can look back at our biographies and see that we've been primed and made ready for certain events in ways that we couldn't know about as they were happening. If we look backwards, we see that we were the Guardian Angel of our own self. We were positioning ourselves perfectly.
FARNSWORTH: A lot of us may have had similar experiences that are like that. I wonder what that means on a collective level? We're discussing climate and it's really loud now. I feel everything that's been happening for the past a few years at least, and maybe in our bones we've known that this was going to happen.
My friend and I were talking about this. He describes it like a “mass psychosis” we're all experiencing because of a deep denial of something we've already been sensing, that the Earth is changing and we know the reasons. And it's affecting us on a behavioral level, and we're seeing the results of that now.
STRAND: And I think the culture has been gaslighting the people who've felt this, on a very bodily, very real level. One of my close family friends is a climate journalist, and for about 15 years, he's been talking about this. About five years ago, he said the apocalypse is happening already. It just hasn't drifted upwards. It's affecting all of the the south. It's affecting the minorities. It's affecting the poorest populations. The third world countries. It just hasn't quite reached us yet. But it's not going to happen, it has happened. I think this past year has really been that, the wave has finally reached us. It's here. It was already happening but now we’re feeling the effects.
FARNSWORTH: Yes and there's no place to go in this, there's no way to escape it. Within the way things have played out over hundreds of years, through colonization and global capitalism and the hierarchies that are imposed, that to a certain degree those of us in the global north and particularly those that have benefited under a sort of a patriarchal form, have been able to buffer themselves on some level from the impacts of that. On people that have been exploited under that hierarchy. We can buffer ourselves from the effects, but this is one of those things where I don't see how. It really is bubbling up to the top.
STRAND: Something that's been talked about for a couple of years in chronic and terminal illness groups that I've participated in, has been more and more young people are very seriously ill. And I think that there has been an experience that people who have disabilities and chronic illnesses have felt this beforehand. They felt that precognitive pulse in their own bodies. And I do think there are people who are kind of the canaries in the coal mine who feel these things beforehand. I have noticed when I’ve felt more “seen” ecologically and more believed about climate change when I was in groups of people who were the survivors of abuse and trauma and with the seriously ill. It was an interesting phenomenon, that those were the people who felt it in their bodies before other people did.
FARNSWORTH: Has your condition allowed you to feel like a canary in the coal mine, on a certain level? That you're able to perceive and feel things or experience things in a way that others maybe can conveniently ignore?
STRAND: Yes. I think whenever you have a a non-normative physical experience, you can either frame it as being a symptom or as a superpower and it really depends on how you want to narrativize it. My body is extraordinarily sensitive to chemicals and to toxins and to foods and to stimuli in a way that is often very dramatic. That can be scary and intense and could limit my life, but it's also a way of thinking about my body as being like an alarm signal. I'm like the fire alarm in the house where there's a gas leak and no one else has noticed it yet, but I'm going off. That’s how the joke has always been. I did sense a gas leak in my house before we actually got it noticed and no one else sensed it. So yes, I'm always sensitive to these small changes in chemicals and pesticides and toxins.
FARNSWORTH: That makes sense. Reading your essays, there is a palpable, sensual thing that I feel when I read your work, and it’s felt. That's how I became aware of you, because you're becoming incredibly popular and people are really appreciate your writings and sharing them. Which is well-deserved. Through the way you're living in your body, you've become attuned to something that most people are kind of numb to.
STRAND: Thank you. Yes, one thing that I've been thinking about is if you're so in your body and have extreme pain events — I’ve had very near death experiences, where I thought I was going to die and everyone else thought I was going to die. And those experiences bring you back into your body, actually, in such an exquisite and intense way. And you can think about that as being agonizing but it also makes you available to extreme pleasure. And so, what I want to make available to people is to embody, to drop back into ourselves right now is to feel the pain but it is also to feel the pleasure that we have been denying ourselves for so long. They both exist simultaneously, and to be able to hold them both.
FARNSWORTH: With the general feeling of the time we're in, there is just an intensity of experience. With some close friends that I talk about the climate crisis with, and all of this stuff, they're like, “this is a hell of a time to be in love.” Or, this is a hell of a time to be in anything, like in any impassioned relationship or experience with anything, not just with another person or other people, it’s like with your work.
STRAND: Makes for interesting times, right? The worst curse you can give to someone.
It's funny, my primary passion as a storyteller, is as a fiction writer. That's what I wanted to do with my life and what I would like to do. All of this nonfiction has come about through the pandemic. And I’ve felt shoved in a corner and given one way of communicating and I was like, “okay I'll do it.” But the thing I'm most interested in is long format storytelling and love stories, tragic love stories. And it's so funny that this is what I've always wanted to write and now I'm in this extraordinarily tragic time. So yeah, what does ecological storytelling look like when it comes off the page and slips into your own life?
FARNSWORTH: When I was preparing for our interview, I had a thought of how the interview begins, for anybody, whomever I’m speaking with, and that sets the flow or the direction of the conversation. And we’re both in this place, and the news, and everything that's going on, one of those subjects was around the climate and we've touched a lot on that. Now you're touching on fiction that you write. You had made an announcement on social media about The Madonna Secret — could you could describe the premise of that a little bit?
STRAND: Sure. I'm a lover of stories and was raised by spiritual scholars who both have an extraordinary respect for the sacredness of life and also a very critical view of religion. So, I've always been interested about why people thought the story of Jesus was a happy story. It's always read as a Shakespearean Tragedy to me! And I've also been interested in, how does a Galilean rabbi get perverted into a figure that inspires thousands of years of genocide and ecocide? What goes wrong? I pretty much wrote this book because no one else was writing it. I’d reached a bottleneck moment in my life where I felt like I had a year to live. Really. Most of my writing projects usually happen at critical moments and I'd been putting off this project but I felt I should write it now. And I wanted to write an ecological, feminist reimagining of the Gospels from the perspective of Miriam of Bethany, also known as Mary Magdalene, where I wanted to bring back to life in a super sensual, historically textured way the people of Galilean Judea and the tricky Galilean storytelling rabbi that might have been Yeshua [Jesus]. I wanted to reframe the gospels as a Shakespearean Tragedy, where when you finally reach the crucifixion, it's a tragedy. You don't want this person to die. This is not how things were supposed to happen. It was an incredibly intense project. The minute I took it on it was a possession experience. It took over my whole life.
FARNSWORTH: The thing about Christianity is, I grew up in — and I've talked about this before — I actually grew up in the Mormon Church. It's kind of a weird version of Christianity.
STRAND: I've had some friends who've been Mormon and ex-Mormon. How do you feel? What is your feeling about that now?
FARNSWORTH: Well, I left the church when I was in my late teenage years and then my early 20s, officially I didn’t want any association with the church. There wasn’t animosity or anger, just thoughts of “what did this do to my development?” and “how did it affect the people around me?” But then it turned into almost an anthropological, fascinated view of how it affected me. I've looked at it through the lens of settler-colonialism; I've looked at it through the lens of American exceptionalism; I've looked at it through the lens of patriarchy. I've looked at it through all these different lenses, that allowed me to unpack it a little bit. Then I've come to this other place where it is one branch on a larger branch of what Christianity has become over the centuries.
And then I've had these experiences where the archetype of Christ himself seems to have a resonance with me and I don't know why and I haven't quite figured that or sussed that out yet. So reading about what your book project is about, made me think, there’s so many different ways that you can imagine the story of Christ, this rabbi as you've described him. And I’ve found the way you're approaching the subject really fascinating. I think it could actually be really liberating on a certain level. Because I've come to understand, we can kind of make what we want of these things. It doesn't have to be what we grew up believing it was.
STRAND: That's pretty much my whole ethos. Scripture and storytelling used to be a constantly adapting “organism.” It's only in the movement to phonetic alphabets and to written text that stories break down and ossify. They stop adapting to changing climatological, social and cultural conditions. It used to be that myths and stories in scripture were told and changed and reinterpreted.
So I think that it's our responsibility sometimes to not throw away these stories that have been so problematic. I always try to plant them back in their original ecological context. Really look at them critically, and say, okay what was really going on here? Who wrote the story? What was their agenda? What got lost? What's really there? Are there other primary documents I can refract around? So to try and resuscitate a lived, sensual ecological experience, plant the story.
Stories get abstracted when we write them down on the page and then try and disseminate them to other cultures and other ecosystems and pretend they'll still work. So I try and replant myths and stories in their original context. But then it's also about composting them, and changing them, adapting them. Saying, what can this tell me about my my current situation? How can I change the story so that it's nourishing to me right now, in the Hudson Valley, in the United States, in Late Stage Apocalyptic Capitalism?
FARNSWORTH: Do you think there's that part of the apocalyptic experiences that we're all having collectively right now, a sense that whatever stories we are telling, whether that be the story of Christ and Christianity as we've interpreted it and experienced it up to the present, that there's endings in that, that it's not about composting it? Maybe the story itself doesn't service any longer? Maybe, not relevant to Christ or Christianity but so many of the stories that we've been telling ourselves up to the present about how things should be and how things are, are just so impoverished and so off from what we've what we're actually living in and experiencing.
STRAND: In terms of patriarchy and patriarchy's conflation with masculinity and the Christ story as was authored solely by the church and by men, what we're experiencing is narrative dysbiosis. It's what happens when you give someone too many antibiotics and it kills off all the microbiome in their gut and then they have a bloom of candida or some pathogen and the thing is not to go in there and try and kill the pathogen but to take probiotics and eat fermented food and eat some dirt and crowd out and repopulate the gut with healthy microbes again. So is the Christ story done? I don't think the teaching of a relatively young rabbi, who is assassinated by Empire in Galilee, is necessarily going to be the most helpful story for us right now. But I think if we look at that story, it can tell us that a biodiversity of stories that honor nature parables, might be helpful. So I think the answer is not to end any stories but to add more stories in, add a probiotic of stories and ferment the stories.
FARNSWORTH: Not to give your story away, but how do you do that with this story that we’re in?
STRAND: I've been a lover of historical fiction and fiction, I'm big reader, and I really don't like a lot of modern fiction because I don't think people do a really good job with characterization. There aren't enough characters in relationships and I think we're constituted by relationships. So if you don't know the trees growing inside your story, the people, their grandparents, their feelings, then your story isn't alive. It doesn't have a circulatory system. And so, the pieces of fiction that I've really gravitated for have been fully fleshed that are not just the story. Maybe there's one storyteller but there may be 50 fully realized characters, and the ecosystem is fully realized. You can taste it. You can smell it. One of my favorite examples of this is the queer storyteller, Mary Renault who wrote The King Must Die, The Last of the Wine, The Persian Boy; these are historical fiction projects where every character lives and breathes and has motives.
So I wanted to bring back to life, I wanted to “resurrect” Galilee in Judea, in Jerusalem, and the people, all of the people in those stories, the disabled people, the females, the queer people and the Jewishness, the inherent Jewishness of that time period.
So just like we human beings aren't really individuals: we have more bacterial cells in our body than we do human cells; we have fungi growing on our skin; our very cells are the product of symbiogenesis, which is different organelles coming together through this kind of collaborative and anarchic act of fusion; we are nested Matryoshka dolls of being. And, I wanted to show that the Jesus story which looks like a monomyth, it looks like monotheism incarnate, it is actually a living, breathing ecosystem of many, many different competing stories.
FARNSWORTH: I think it was in another interview you did, Christ came up as intertwined with the work you're doing around masculinity as well, and you do draw on other figures.
STRAND: Yeshua is not my dominant [figure], I actually think of him as being a bad story, not a very helpful story for masculinity, that he is a vegetal god that's story has been aborted, that his story is interrupted. A true vegetal god gets to go back into the ground and gets mulched and then sprouts back up freshly adapted. Osiris is scattered back into the ground that he fertilizes. Dionysus plants back into the ground. And in Yeshua's, Jesus' story, he evaporates, his body leaves the virtuous cycle of decay and regrowth.
FARNSWORTH: That speaks to that quality of how Christianity has evolved over the centuries and a sense of disconnection from the Earth itself.
STRAND: I have a lot of compassion for the impulse behind that initial schism between body and mind, spirit and matter, which then gets co-opted by Cartesian dualism. You can change the terminology but it's still theology. Current scientific reductionism is Christian theology. People don't really get that. But for me, when you see this break between the body and the mind that Christianity reifies, it's a traumatized people. It comes with the fall of the Bronze Age, and we don't really know what happened during that time, but we know there were incredibly intense climatological pressures. There were genocides. There was agricultural failure. There was incredible social strife. And then you have Judaism itself as being the spirituality of a people who are constantly oppressed and killed and relocated. So of course, these people are frightened by embodiment. Embodiment meant death and pain and starving and being imprisoned. So, you can see that begin to be articulated in the spirituality itself, especially post-Second Temple period.
FARNSWORTH: In uncovering all of that, how do you place it within its ecological relationship?
You mentioned that you felt you were going to die, or that you had to get this out, to write it now. Why did you feel compelled to tackle this subject and to write it, to bring it up right now in light of everything we've discussed to this point?
STRAND: I think that what you love, loves you. And we're all here for different reasons. For me there have been the stories that I can't stop thinking about. The stories that I've known I will want to write. There are about five of them and they're in a line, and they all include incredible amounts of research and time. It's not that they're the most important stories but they're the stories that drive me crazy. They drive me nuts. So I can't tell you that I think this story is the most important story. It was the story that bothered me the most. It was the next project that I probably care the most about, but the Jesus one came up and really poked me. You know, I have family in Israel and I was raised inside… I wasn't technically Jewish but my aunt and my family through her are all Israeli Jews, so all the holidays I celebrated as a child were Jewish holidays. A joke in my family is when I was five, I said to my mom, “Am I Jewish?” She said, “no.” And I spent a good deal of time in Israel when I was a teenager and when I got sick. I had this genetic illness but it didn't kick in until I was 16, in Jerusalem, which is so funny.
So it was almost… I didn't choose this story but it came into me. I'm not saying that's true, but there was this sense that the story chose me, and I couldn't ignore it. And there reached a moment in my life when it was yelling at me that it had to be written.
FARNSWORTH: Is that how it feels when you're writing anything?
STRAND: The flavor of the projects that I care most about is that they come in pretty much somatically. I usually get really sick, and they come out. I'm actually trying to decouple those two things. I'm trying to problematize if the creative process needs to feel like this agonizing physical birth process. What if it could feel a little bit more playful and tender? Stories usually come in and I can't stop thinking about them. And then it becomes an emergency. I have to write them. And I've written two books in the past six months, and that's been a different flavor. They've both been nonfiction and they've both happened so fast that it felt kind of like a nightmare. It's not a super planned experience. I mean, it's planned when it happens. I'm very diligent and very deliberate about how I pull these off.
FARNSWORTH: Well I guess there’s a stereotype, or this sort of a stereotype — whatever the word is — of an agonizing, troubled and miserable, suffering artist. And there's always that truth within it. Right?
STRAND: Well I think it's what I said about embodiment, which is to feel deeply is to feel both the deep pain and the ecstatic pleasure. And I don't love anything more than inviting a story in and feeling it take me over. It's so much fun. I love it. I don't think I could write a story that I wasn't in love with, that didn't totally dominate my thinking. In fact, that's actually always a really good sign. There've been projects that I've thought about, I think it’s a really good idea but they don't stick. They don't make me feel happy and obsessed. I fall in love with stories. It really does feel like falling in love. And yeah, there is that agonizing kind of compulsion that is paired with it. But there's also a deeply beautiful, obsessive fun quality to it too.
FARNSWORTH: Well, let me ask you this, and it's probably the last point I would like to get to in this. The other book project that I wanted to mention is, The Flowering Wand, and the subtitle is: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine.
STRAND: Yes, this project is the funniest thing ever. It definitely really felt like a possession experience in the best way possible. I went to the crossroads and thought I'm ready to invite Dionysius inside. And it was like, get ready, we're gonna be writing 24 hours a day!
I had held storytelling gatherings in my house pre-quarantine for a while, for women and femme and trans people. Where people would come together and talk about health issues, talk about trauma. And it was a way of massaging personal narratives in a pretty intimate setting with food and laughter and wine, where people would help other people see their stories differently, tell new stories about old events, and they were really healing experiences. But it became super clear to me that not having men participate was a problem. And that men were so, and that masculine figures — you know men as being an idea not any kind of biological or social reality — but that we needed to invite the masculine in to really kill these stories. Just when that realization happened, quarantine began. So, that didn't actually get to happen in a super real way, in person. But! I had finished my book on Yeshua. I'd done a lot of thinking about the masculinity behind this celibate aesthetic, problematic figure. Then I started to think about all of the masculine myths that I loved, and that seemed to me to represent more anarchic, vegetal ecologically relevant modes of masculinity. People get so triggered by masculinity as a term because it's been deeply coupled and problematically conflated with patriarchy. But masculinity is a biodiversity, it's a whole forest. It's a polyphony of discordant, sometimes harmonious songs.
FARNSWORTH: Yes. I have had a complex relationship with it, and I think I've tried to figure out a way to… I've had experiences growing up thinking that men — if we're going to talk about this idea of men — and ultimately associated it with trauma or traumatizing those that I cared about.
I knew that I feel as a man, so there is a dissociative quality to it. Through the podcast at least, I've been able to talk with others and think about this more openly and speak to it more.
STRAND: Your interview with Ian MacKenzie was really great.
FARNSWORTH: Thank you. Just as at the beginning of this discussion with you, speaking with IanMackenzie, it was an unplanned thing that happened to put me in this particular emotional state where all this stuff was coming up and then I'm like, all right I guess I'm gonna talk to Ian today! And the timing was right for it. Speaking about that relationship I've had with it is like learning to own something or to recognize the multiplicity, the various aspects it, the ecosystem of masculinity as you beautifully described it. And to kind of embody it the the best way that I personally can, because I think that's a part of whatever way we would define as healing.
STRAND: Just trying to tell new stories, and trying on a new costume every day. That's the one thing I want to offer everybody, is that Lunar knowledge. The solarization of our culture, and our religions and our discourse has been that things are always bright and insistent and the same and the photons move directly from the sun into your eye. But the truth is, life is much more lunar, it's much more cyclical. Some days we're waxing some days we're waning. We're always both and we're always in process. So I want to offer that I don't think anyone has to be masculine in one way for more than a second. I think it can shift all the time.
Are there any stories or figures that you felt offered a counterweight to the culture growing up, or recently?
FARNSWORTH: I don't know if I have an answer to that but I'll just say I didn't really have that and I think it was such a struggle for so long, is that there wasn't. I would very rarely see glimpses of what was possible or what could be in moments, not in any person, because I felt within every man — I had this problem, and I still have this thing where I idealize people and I put them on pedestals and then they disappoint me, because they're people. They have their flaws and I think men are carrying however many generations-worth of bad behavior. And so, I would see often, glimmers of something that I was like, okay, that could be a real thing someday. You know? But it isn't here yet or if it is, it's just out of sight, and I've been looking for it. And that's how I've felt. Maybe I could see it in certain archetypes. I don't know if you meant this in an archetypal sense or in a literal sense.
STRAND: Both, totally.
FARNSWORTH: Yeah. Nothing really comes to mind… but, you talk about Christ and I have thought about him as a figure and, yeah, he's not really the best story of masculinity.
STRAND: Well, he's also the Roman co-opting of the man they murdered. He hasn't left us with a person with a body and with real behavior and real desires and shame and questions and doubt. So, it's hard for that person to be a role model because they're an abstract noun, The Christ.
I felt it in myself. I think I wrote this book because I love men. You know, I am a queer person but I tend to partner with men or people who identify as men. And some of my favorite people in my life are people who identify as men. And yet the worst things that have happened to me have happened inside of masculinity and at the hands of people who identify as men. So, I knew I personally had to heal this. And I had to heal this through, not through one story, but through a lot of different stories. And I was thinking about having kids, and I was thinking, what would what would it be like if I had a kid who identified as as a man? I would want to have a lot of really healthy stories to offer them. So honestly, I think this book was an offering to my grandfathers, I felt they were men who tried really hard and really screwed up and had a lot of those glimmers in them and I wish they'd had better stories, and also to think about stories I'd want to offer to future children.
FARNSWORTH: That really sums it up. Reading your work has been you offering stories and there's something very encouraging in it. Talking about the intensity of the experiences we're having right now, while all of this stuff is happening that is really discouraging and does lend itself to not feeling positive about a lot of things. And I don't want to be overly sentimental, but meeting people like you, knowing that people like you are doing things on the other end of the spectrum… there's some incredibly beautiful things being produced right now by really intensely beautiful people.
STRAND: Well I feel similarly about your podcast and about a lot of people. You know one thing I want to offer — and you are the first person who's hearing this ever — the next book I'm writing is set in the Dark Ages and it's very much about Tristan and his old myths and proto-Arthurian legends. And something that’s fascinated me is scientists considered the worst year on Earth to be 536AD. There was a volcanic eruption and all the crops died. It was winter for a whole year and there was a plague. It was just the worst year ever. This is also a time period when we have no record in England at all. It's called the Dark Ages not because it was a culturally dark time but because we just don't know anything. There's no light on. We don't have that many burial sites. We don't have Roman coins, we don't have text other than the hysterical, raving madman rants of this monk called Gildas. That's it.
But, that's when the roundtable stories are born. That's where they're retroactively placed by later romantic troubadours, is in that dark period. When I think of the roundtable, it’s a biodiversity of stories, it's not the story of Arthur. He hardly ever features. It's the story of a lot of different people doing a lot of different things. It's a whole forest of stories. So something I was thinking about this time period, it's the dark ages right now but we can create that round table of different perspectives. Give birth to stories inside this kind of behind the curtain moment. That's my super messy thinking.
Oh I lost you.
[LOST INTERNET CONNECTION]
FARNSWORTH: Hello? Oh, you dropped off.
STRAND: I lost you, sorry. My computer glitched.
FARNSWORTH Hi! You came back. I was wondering, are we done? No, but that was a perfect time for that glitch to happen. So, wow… a very dramatic exit. I just want to say that's a good ending I think for this recording.
STRAND :And there we go! I really do want to say your podcast is… you were talking about what is it, consolation, earlier? On a side note, I do feel like listening to you talk to other people is consoling.
FARNSWORTH: Wow, thank you.
STRAND: In a way that doesn't feel precious, it feels like honest. And, I think the thing is when people aren't honest to how bad things are, it makes you feel more anxious.
FARNSWORTH: That is a quality that some people in different ways have told me, you're not sugarcoating it, you just kind of be. It's something I've had to learn how to do as well, personally, in my own relationships when something bad, something difficult is happening and the person doesn't want you to say everything will be okay.
It’s like, this is happening, let's just be in it together and then talk about it or maybe be silent together. Just exist in it and know that you have a partner in that, or a companion in that and that's enough.
STRAND: Yes. Stay with what is for the current day. And well, thank you. I was feeling kind of emotionally blah, and now I feel creatively prickled. Thank you.
FARNSWORTH: Well, good. I'm glad that we could have that. Yeah, I was in a little bit of a funk this morning and I feel like I've been pulled out of it a little bit. And so, I'm really glad we had this conversation, Sophie.
STRAND: And I'm on your team and if I can ever do anything for you, let me know.
FARNSWORTH: I'll be sure to let you know. Currently I’m in this transitionary period and it sucks to say this and this is by no means is not what I'm asking of you, but the thing that I've been putting out there is, I need to make money and I need to figure out how to live in a new place. Like, material shit.
STRAND: Yes. Those are the real asks, seriously.
FARNSWORTH: Yeah and so I've been thinking creatively about how do I continue to do the podcast, in the focused way that I have been for the past few years while paying rent in a new place, and it's a whole thing. That's where I'm at currently.
STRAND: We're all hustling these days. I think people who are part of our generation are just there's no… there's no career. We're thrown in here and trying to make it work.
FARNSWORTH: And I want to commend you because when I read the comments under your essays and when you publish them on Instagram and Facebook, you're really connecting with people. People resonate with your writing. It's really encouraging because I see what you're doing — it’s not the same as what I'm doing, per se — but there's this sense of the moment we're in and the time we're in and what we are trying to do is maybe give parts of ourselves over to others, presenting to others, this is what I am able to create right now. And the fact that it's resonating with so many people is encouraging for me.
STRAND: Thank you. It’s been pretty lifesaving to be perfectly honest, it's been a bleak two years. This began as kind of like a hand up for people who will resonate with this. So the fact that it has, has been very cool. I'm honored to be part of this conversation.
FARNSWORTH: Thank you so much for the time Sophie. I appreciate it very much.
STRAND: And good luck with your move.
FARNSWORTH: Thank you.
