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Laura Giles: Hi, I'm Laura Giles. I'm an educator and a board member for the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, and a fellow listener. This podcast is just part of the wonderful work that the Center does to create a more just and flourishing society in a world that seems increasingly fragmented and polarized. The center creates points of connection between people who might otherwise seem to be.
Quite different. But by asking the right questions and listening the team behind this work creates a realm of mutual understanding that I believe is critical. Please consider supporting this work by making a generous December donation at faith dot Yale dot edu slash give your generos. Is invaluable to this work that I believe is knitting our culture back together.
Evan Rosa: Friends, A word before we get into it today, this episode is sobering. It contains descriptions of violence and extended reflection about school shootings where children are involved. Many of you may find it very disturbing. I certainly do, and in many ways I found it very hard to listen back and edit.
It's also a heavily politicized topic, but in this episode, we keep it personal. My guest and I agree that policy does matter, but policy always and only ever should exist for the people that it impacts and serves. But we present it in a spirit of remembrance, and our guest today is able to offer a glimpse into the beauty of grief that leads to healing action.
And the beauty of childhood, despite it all. So with that, I encourage you to stay with us From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is for the life of the world. A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Carol Ann Davis: I just happened to have moved to Newtown from Charleston, South Carolina in July. Of that year, and so that was December of that first year, and I was teaching a class down at Fairfield University where I'm a professor of poetry and secretary stuck her head in and let me know that something was happening.
And luckily my office was directly across from my classroom, so I went and sat. At my computer and she said there's something happening in Newtown. I don't know what school yet, and I do remember this like 20 or 32nd period where we were trying to find out what school and what happened.
Evan Rosa: This is Carol Ann Davis.
She's a poet and an essayist and a professor of English at Fairfield University, where she's the founding director of Poetry and Communities, an initiative that provides poetry, curricula to communities hit by sudden or systemic violence. In 2012, she found herself the mother of two elementary school.
Kids in Newtown, Connecticut, she described to me the haunting sequence of events that happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14th, 2012, 13 years ago. Today,
Diane Sawyer: right here in Newtown, Connecticut, the site today of a mass shooting and this time gunfire aimed at elementary school children. There are 27 victims, 20 children, seven adults, and we've heard all day about the incredible response by teachers inside the school.
Chris Cuomo: This morning the Sandy Hook Elementary School was full of kids concerned about Christmas, and then at 9:40 AM shots rang out
911 Dispatch: all units. The individual that I have on the phone is continuing to hear what he believes should be gunshots
Carol Ann Davis: There was maybe 90 seconds of just not really understanding. And then the next thing I remember is just my colleague next office over who lives in New Milford, which is one town over just coming and grabbing me into this enormous. Bear hug as we discovered the extent of what was happening. And he and I, you know, we don't socialize necessarily the way you do with colleagues, but like there's just, I often think he was with me on my darkest day and his answer was.
This incredible human gesture, and then he ran outside and screamed because he couldn't, couldn't hold it. You know, for more than a minute,
Evan Rosa: consider that crushing fear. That hollowing out the panicky feeling that comes when you only have enough information to suggest something terribly wrong. King terribly close to your child.
Those seconds somehow shift into eternity. Is my kid okay? Is my child alive? But some people don't want to imagine, at least not to the full extent, and others with good humble intentions say they can't imagine really though, because of course you can. You just have to let yourself call more of the experience to mind.
You have to sink down into the what it's likeness and explore. Now it's not easy, but in some important sense you have to, you have to.
Carol Ann Davis: And in Sandy Hook in particular, I would often hear people say, I can't imagine, like people would say that and they were saying it in a kind way, you know, can't imagine living there.
I can't imagine. And. I wanted people to imagine. I, I, I felt like if we're Americans and we're gonna go ahead and not change the gun policy, then actually it's your job to try and imagine.
Evan Rosa: So back to December 14th, 2012. It's a few minutes before 10:00 AM the bell at Sandy Hook Elementary School had just rung. And time for Carol Ann and many others is at a standstill.
Carol Ann Davis: My boys went to Holly School, which is about two miles from Sandy Hook, and there are four public elementary schools in Newtown, along with several different private schools.
And so I know for sure that my husband was texting me, letting me know that. You know that he and Luke were fine and, um, that he was watching the news and figuring things out. And then pretty soon each of us got a message from our principal, like our principal at Holly, and she said something amazing.
Because it became a refrain in how I understood it. She said, nothing has happened at Holly School. Please hear me. I have opened every door in seeing your children because it was almost impossible to take that in.
I have opened every door in seeing your children,
and that is one of the wonderful things about being a writer. I think that. I am so grateful. I have like the document of when I tried to nail the time down. As a writer, you also like allow mystery in you a allow unknowing to still remain there.
Evan Rosa: Carol Ann as a poet, observes life without abstraction with an attentiveness to the sharp details of our worlds, allowing herself.
To be nailed to the moment refusing to overlay the artifice of a narrative plot line onto a bountiful life of multiverses and individual perspectives and experiences where each and every frame of each and every experience contains its own eternity. This was her activism to offer words that might begin moving toward the horror, the inhumanity of it.
The profound grief and the lasting scar.
Carol Ann Davis: The phrase that we used to say in Newtown, we said directly affected families. We now say families of loss, people who were directly affected, and we began to understand that. There were these ripple effects, but one of the, it's gonna sound strange to say, but there was a blessing to being useful in Newtown in a way that I think wasn't true elsewhere after that event.
One reason we focused so much on directly affected families as a phrase and not on what had happened to other people who lived there, uh, was because it was, it was an honor and also just. Deeply human at practice to work to try and assist directly affected families.
Evan Rosa: Nothing has happened and yet everything has happened. That's just one of the rhythmic refrains that emerges in the words Carol Ann uses. To rebuild December 14th, 2012. But it's another refrain this time. Her own words that hits me, quote, and that was what? It is not to suffer. This is the not suffering, happy ending story and quote.
Carol Ann Davis: So there really was a period where nothing had happened at Holly School felt totally true and then it hit me, I think as a writer, maybe earlier than other people, because of how my. Makes me narrow focus. Like I, I'm always narrowing focus to say, okay, what, what did happen to me? And then parenting of course, is a narrowing of focus as well.
So what is happening to my children? And then there was that work, and then there was whatever work of course, that anyone could be called to do. That was appropriate, that would help anyone with a, a direct effect. However, I think I realized pretty early on that there was very little I could do for anyone who was in that situation.
And I sort of said about the outer rim of just writing poetry and community because that felt good to me.
Evan Rosa: The collection of words, she began recording in the wake of this ugliness, this evil. Became a book she published eight years later in 2020. The nail in the tree essays on art, violence, and childhood mirroring that slow growth of a tree, gradually incorporating and absorbing, integrating a rusted nail into its living flesh.
The book is a devastating set of observations that pulls you into each moment of trauma, suffering, and grief, allowing the spectrum of words both available and unavailable to hold you in this confusion, this anger, and that tender sadness of it all. Carol Ann, thank you so much for joining me on for the Life of the World.
Carol Ann Davis: Thank you for having me, Evan. I'm, I'm pleased. To be here,
Evan Rosa: Carol Ann Davis', also author of a forthcoming book of poetry songbird, a flowing set of lyrical verse that allows her to move from the conflict of violence in childhood. She felt up close in Newtown in 2012 back into her own childhood experience, and the result is a beautiful phenomenology of childhood bodily experience innocence that matures into wisdom.
And what it means to sing the Song of One's own life. In this conversation, she and I remember the Victims and the Families of Loss on this 13th anniversary of the Sandy Hook School shooting. She reflects on how lived trauma narrows our attention exhausts and then reshapes our language, how plot based narratives might actually diminish meaning.
And how poetry, parenting and faith dwell inside the human capacity for violence without resolution or closure.
Carol Ann Davis: My older son was in the fourth grade when Sandy Hook happened, and he was in the ninth grade when Parkland happened. So part of this journey was walking with my boys as they just entered language in different ways.
As you do, as you. Just progress in your intellectual life. And for my older boy, gun violence was a companion through that time. Like, and I know I, I use that word in a paradoxical way to say, part of parenting is identifying trends in your child's life and what they might be. And for him there were these markers of formativity that had to do with being in the fourth grade when this happened in his town and being in the ninth grade.
So like for one event, he had a figurative understanding, which I'm gonna explain, which was the nail in the tree. And for the next event, or not even the next, but for the next one for him, he had a more of an activist understanding. But for my son being in the fourth grade, the nail in the tree. Is his understanding and what, like when he was nine years old, he said to me, I think of the shooting as a nail driven into the tree, and I'm the tree and I'm gonna grow strong and tall, but I have this nail and if I pull it out, it actually hurts me.
So I have to learn to love the tree and the nail mom. And it was like. Within two months of it happening, he had this figurative, imaginative relation. That was how he conceptualized it. And actually when, by the time the book came out, he was a teenager and he said like, I never said that. That's too beautiful.
He said, mom, you made that up and you, you said that. I said it. And I thought when he said that to me, that that was sort of the tree. Like growing like over, oh my, where the nail had been, oh my right. To the point where he wasn't healed or anything that isn't even like in the concept, but a kind of accommodating,
Evan Rosa: I wonder if there's an integration, is the word
Carol Ann Davis: something I don't know.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, like integration comes to mind because it's such a vivid metaphor that I think it at at once, and I think it's important to put in the context of this event to, to bring home the reality that this impacts children. Right? And, and the nature of childhood Yes. Is very much in question here. And the way that adult society treats children, and I think we don't treat them.
With nearly enough seriousness and we don't take them seriously enough and we don't let this kind of wisdom soak into us nearly enough or integrate into us. And I think that's, it's a beautiful thing to say, probably beyond what he could understand even at the time. Right? Like how, like the extent of what that means because they're of the simplicity with which a child sees something like that.
And then to integrate it into oneself. And become forgetful even.
Carol Ann Davis: Right, or possibly maybe even moving through it with such engagement that he moved through it onto other parts of it. He was still dealing with gun violence. I mean, the Newtown High School children walked out the day that the Parkland children walked out.
Yeah. That was what was going on while I was writing the introduction. Wow. I was like listening for that and I was down the street from that. I just want to be near it while he did it.
Evan Rosa: I think that kind of solidarity req that kind of, again, the narrowed focus, you can't have that form of solidarity without a narrowed focus to understand.
It was forced in the case of Newtown children, uh, they had to, but we need to take our own lesson from that. And this is the point I want, I I, yes. Really enjoyed about your commenting about the narrowing here and what that tells me about your ability to say something about this event as a writer and poet, because there is a point at which you do wonder how the limits of policy talk about it.
Carol Ann Davis: Yeah, there was a period for sure when I could only be narrow. I could only be in Sandy Hook, like people were having big policy conversations and sometimes I'd run into people who'd wanna have them with me, like, and I would just be like, I'm Ra, I'm writing poetry and raising kids and playing soccer here.
Like I, I don't know. It was, it was important to just be here and do those things that I could do and let maybe other Americans call themselves in to other parts of it. It was more than one thing. Mm-hmm. And so, yeah,
Evan Rosa: trying to pull in an affected member of the community, like as you say, a family of loss or a directly Right.
Affected family to attempt to pull them out of that narrowness into the broadness of a policy debate. It's not to say debates can't be narrow or that policy debates have to be unhelpfully broad. That, that there is a, a. An importance to codifying law about this, but there is some kind of injustice that happens when you force someone out of the narrow focus into something broader that's really just a spectacle.
Carol Ann Davis: I think what was fascinating and really beautiful to watch over time with many, with all, I would say every single. One of those families contributed something unbelievably generous to our world. You know, the world after the worst thing that could happen had happened to them. They showed up. Uh, they showed up according to their own.
Sets of interests. So some of them did do policy work and they did amazing policy work that was their special interest or way of being a father to their child and a mother to their child, parents of their child. Of course, you know, I can't mention them all, and we all know the work of Sandy Hook Promise, but it's sort of according to, I'm guessing, a deep discernment process in each one, but.
That's the hard part is like you only walk a certain amount in that work because it, there's so many unknowns for that experience.
Evan Rosa: You have this refrain throughout the first, the first piece in the nail tree, which is as you describe your personal experience,
Evan Rosa: It's your starting point, your narrow starting point, and that. Is what it is not to suffer that day. This is the not suffering, happy ending story. Right? And what is, first time I read through that, I felt that like a kind of pang of of context, right?
The contextualizing nature of that statement is powerful and the divis of of repetition.
Evan Rosa: Because as you narrate a horror that as a father and as many parents listening can understand the horror of, of, of considering the fear of losing one's child in this way,
Carol Ann Davis: right.
Evan Rosa: Of losing one's child at all.
It's, it is helpful to, to, it does appropriately broaden the focus somehow because you're allowing context to come in.
Carol Ann Davis: I just have an aversion to the idea of story anyway, like the idea of a story. I don't love story.
Evan Rosa: Say more.
Carol Ann Davis: So, I don't love beginnings, middles and ends. Ha. I don't believe life feels that way.
So I feel it's almost unethical to chop experience up into a story. And often a story is. I mean, you'll know. We can get into it, but I love, I love me some King James Bible and I am absolutely a Southern Baptist. However, I do blame the parable for what's happened with stories in American culture. So,
Evan Rosa: wonderful.
Tell me, please continue. Please continue.
Carol Ann Davis: So. Now I'm really alienating 98% of people because who doesn't love story? But I just, I don't, I think stories lie to us. They teach us the wrong stuff sometimes. Not that Jesus did, but you know, like
Evan Rosa: I'm not afraid to hear you say that, that it's very interesting,
Carol Ann Davis: the moral of the story, for instance.
So you take something as simple as the moral of the story. What's the moral of the story? And I'm like, okay. Then does anything matter inside the experience besides what you can take back as the learning? I'm much more, and this is because I'm a lyric poet who believes in like staying as long as you can in the momentary beauty without understanding it.
But I think there's an edge, to my phrase, happy ending. Suffering, happy ending story because I'm saying there isn't a happy ending story, even though I'm also acknowledging. As one needs to always do that there's somebody hurting more in this situation than me.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. What is incredible about the device, and uh, I wanna appreciate the, the thing about story and, and parable in a moment too, but, but what is lovely about the device is the way that it negates itself almost.
Yeah. And I see that this is your point, right? I'm just,
Carol Ann Davis: I'm acknowledging my beef with the entire enterprise of telling stories like I just.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. And, and here's, so here's a gentle pushback and Okay. Just for the sake of conversation, but I do think I, I, I would stand by this. What I do appreciate about that is consonant with what, what I, I think is consonant with what you're saying is that mm-hmm.
The parable, as I understand Jesus's point of parables to be is, is in fact to let those in on a meaning. Closer in and let those out on a meaning, leave them further out and let there be less understanding. And I wonder if it's what it's, it's always what's not said in that story. It's always like the negative, what's left out.
Evan Rosa: Well, um. That does so much for it, and I, and I, so I wanna appreciate that the fact that the reader has to bring that, if you do take the story as concrete and mm-hmm. Cumulative or comprehensive, then yeah. We're, we have a problem. But I just wanna appreciate the, the nod to a, a kind of non-understanding that that needs to be there, especially in order to keep a narrow focus to be in the moment Yes.
That you describe Yes. And to create enough space. For a genuine human experience to occur, whatever that might be, and just to simply let it be a let yourself be human in the into the moment.
Carol Ann Davis: Yes, I think I would. I'm probably being too doctrinaire saying I hate stories as much as I do because honestly like
Evan Rosa: No, I appreciate, I appreciate it.
Carol Ann Davis: The poetic imagination or like my own understanding of language is completely grounded in. In my upbringing reading the Bible, and I think what I'm talking about is simplistic interpretations of stories, and I think you're absolutely right that a parable or a story that is worthy of human understanding or engagement or is worthy of us, is one that opens toward in an invitation.
To engage with it and perhaps change it.
Carol Ann Davis: so the listener is engaging, and actually this goes back to figuration and metaphor and simile and in the Bible. I don't think those parables taught one thing. I think those parables taught many things, and it
Carol Ann Davis: and this may be my, my, my Protestant, my reformation coming out, but like a deep ownership.
Of the life of those stories. Mm-hmm. Unspool the story in a bottomless way.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Carol Ann Davis: If you let it.
Evan Rosa: Well said.
Carol Ann Davis: Those are stories I could take. What I don't want is a takeaway. What I don't want is a nugget of, well, what you said was this or, and that, that's really hard because that's a way of people. Pushing discomfort and disequilibrium away in a way of people not engaging fully and in what it means to really suffer and we all suffer.
Evan Rosa: So pushing discomfort and. In equilibrium a way is a really great important phrase to hear, and I think that, you know, that experience of not wanting a book to end, you know, wanna close, right? The book on, on something is that is the tension that's there. And allowing something to generate new meanings is I think part of what it means to have an imagination that's even alive at all.
Carol Ann Davis: And in Sandy Hook in particular, I would often hear people say, I can't imagine. Like people would say that and they were saying it in a kind way, you know, can't imagine living there. I can't imagine. And I wanted people to imagine, I I, I felt like if we're Americans and we're gonna go ahead and not change this gun policy, then actually it's your job to try and imagine if, I don't want you to try to just imagine being me, not someone who lost a child.
You know, just, just me. So I couldn't tell a story exactly because. That would be like not inviting. I don't know. Invitational storytelling is really hard.
Evan Rosa: I can see that there is something timeless about that. Like you can't allow, there's something even, I mean maybe even violent about like the kind of concrete objective izing of this, like the takeaway that you say or Right.
Closing the book or there's a violence that comes to. The significance when you don't allow it to simply live and be right and right. Right. And I, that's what I'm pulling from this, this paradox of, of loving the tree and loving the nail. Mm-hmm. That they are now together. Yes. In a way that cannot be.
Disassociated and it creates a new opportunity for meaning and pain. Mm-hmm. And beauty, that's part of what it is to be human. I need to notice in the theological context as well, like, you know, that, that there is an, the kind of cruciform nature of this.
Carol Ann Davis: Oh my, yeah. I was just about to bring it up myself, like,
Evan Rosa: okay,
Carol Ann Davis: yeah, well, images are wild because they're, and images are different from stories.
Right. But, so there's the story. Of Jesus' crucifixion. And then there's all this stuff that of course, my narrowing has to do with, I mean, I can't tell you how much. Like, in my first book, there's a, a little bit of the original wood, that's the phrase in my book, and it has to do with someone holding some of the cross in their hand.
And one of my friends was saying how the last image of the book is me swimming in the ocean. And the wa she's, the water closing behind you as a swimmer is, it's like you are the nail and the tree is. The ocean. And of course with my Southern Baptist upbringing, I was immediately like, and the world is the cross.
Carol Ann Davis: You know, like everything is the tree,
Carol Ann Davis: Yeah, we are the nail, like we're the nail penetrating Christ. Like it goes wild places. Yes. And that's why I like liberating the story and letting the image sort of operate on the story. So yeah, the nail in the tree, you can't get away from it. I mean, Christ is there inside it.
You might have noticed the book is a series of paragraphs
Carol Ann Davis: It's like I did, it's like 120 pages of just paragraphs titled.
Evan Rosa: I, I think your attention, what you're telling me about yourself and the way that, um, form. Matters as much as content and I, for any poet that's gonna matter. But I wanna appreciate about your new book, songbird.
Mm-hmm. The, the importance of some of your other poetry that I had seen. The way that that spacing Yes. And placement on the page helps to bring us back into moments and not attempt to find just one thing to sum everything up
Carol Ann Davis: right. Like another antidote besides image to story would be the paragraph.
The paragraph itself, isn't that a big enough space? Like, so what's interesting is this Simone Vay piece that we're about to read is from before the shooting. I wrote this essay before the shooting,
Evan Rosa: but you wrote it before.
Carol Ann Davis: Well, thank goodness I had written this before and I had published it because it showed me that I had been concerned about this before.
Carol Ann Davis: because this title of this is on Brotherhood and Crucifixion. It's about my boys and whether they can suffer equally. I mean, this particular essay is speaking of, well, if you think about it, it's a little bit of a cheeky interrogation of the crucifixion story, right? Because like it's like, okay, yes, we know the crucifixion story, but now I'm gonna talk about the person watching the person being crucified and say they are hurting more.
Evan Rosa: I think it's brilliant.
Carol Ann Davis: Oh, thank
Evan Rosa: you. It's not cheeky. I don't, I wouldn't call it, it's a little
Carol Ann Davis: cheeky because it's, well, now that, that I'm,
Evan Rosa: you're allowed to say, you could call it cheeky if you want. Well,
Carol Ann Davis: now that I'm at a Catholic institution, I realize how way out in space I am with my like very opinionated theology that I have.
I mean, I have my own theology. Sure,
Carol Ann Davis: That is what, that is what we Protestants think we're supposed to do.
Carol Ann Davis: But anyway, so yeah, this is literally something I wrote about the boys when I was studying the iconography of crucifixion inside Art Georgia O'Keefe, and then Simone Bay. So for context, this is this cult that used to go out into the desert and crucify one of their own in New Mexico.
Then at some point they started not nailing, but only hanging the crucified one. This part is called Inside the marata. Inside the marata where the men gather, the adobe walls are painted a bright white in the windows hang curtains on heavy paper Ian supports and enough room for the her. Lay brothers of the order to stand facing each other.
It said that they never refuse a request for help. Perhaps this is why Loomis, who was the photographer who took the pictures, perhaps this is why Loomis was permitted to take his picture. In these quarters, they watch each other draw blood perhaps. Here the crucified received the four inch long wound on his side.
Loomis reported, it's not visible in the photograph, Simone May calls the moment when Christ calls out on the cross, the moment when affliction, human affliction, a suffering of body and soul combined with social degradation enters the mystical body of God. This is a great privilege for him. He has at last crossed the distance between God and God, something only he can do.
She tells us, and thinking of this, I wonder if such a distance finally blooms as interior or exterior space or a third something I'm incapable of understanding, but somehow related to perspective in painting, the distance is exterior. If it's the distance, the Penitentes walk together from the marata to the crucifixion point in the hills.
Or the distance of sky above clouds four to the ground below. O'Keefe so afraid of flying. She did it. Only when Alfred Stits lay in a New York hospital and later only for the view or the distance is entirely interior. The one I walk from my writing table to the living room where my two sons dual first with pillows and then with swords.
I hear the change in weapon before I see it, or it's the distance between the swords as they move through space, each swing relative to the other, a third thing that locks them into reticulation with one another.
So here's the nail in case in case you want it.
Evan Rosa: I do want it.
Carol Ann Davis: Okay, so the nail. Concerning the divine technique of the crucifixion. Simone Bay writes that the infinite distance separating God from the creature is entirely concentrated onto one point to pierce the soul at its center. This is the nail who's had is infinite, but whose point is tiny and precise.
This is the nail the penitent was asking for. But his brothers, because they would have him live, substitute ropes and therefore open the several distances. Again,
Evan Rosa: reading that back, what is what? What's significant now when you take, take into account the piercing nature of this nail. Mm-hmm. This practice of the Penitentes and then this observation about your sons.
Carol Ann Davis: Well, it's wild to read it now when they're both, one is 18 and one is 22. But I mean, it's funny how things are a core sample of your thinking and how.
It's reassuring to me how coherent I feel that, like I really have been curious about the crucifixion my whole life and how comforting that is. So that's a personal thing, but also how elemental violence is, and I think that was what I was trying to. Admit to myself at the end of this paragraph was just, I mean, I believe this truly that all of us are capable of very violent things, and so one of the things I'm facing there is like the play acting that is basically a human play, a human morality play.
Like my own boys, they switch from pillows to swords, like boom. You know, like it's, I don't know. What is that relationship between the piercing of Christ's side and the boys taking up the sword? Just there's these things. If you take just the images, going back to the idea of the narrow focus of the writer or the poet, there's almost no difference.
Which is kind of where they is headed. I think too, like
Evan Rosa: it's so powerful. Elemental violence mm-hmm. I think is something that is really hard for, you know, a, a good Christian people to face.
Carol Ann Davis: But this is like the hair, Hannah rent stuff, the banality of evil. The idea that like within us, I mean, what is it Vay who has that part that says if 20 people were surrounding me and singing Nazi songs in my own heart, I know I would become a Nazi.
Evan Rosa: Oh my.
Carol Ann Davis: I'm gonna have to look it up now. Like I think about that a lot. People think that they're not capable of things. I actually think the opposite. I'm capable of anything. I'm afraid I'm capable of anything. Let's just say that
Evan Rosa: I have to be with you. I have to, I have to be with you within it. Uh, I mean I, there's a kind of, maybe it's narcissism or maybe it's solipsism or some kind of just centering of one's own virtue that that gets in the way of acknowledging.
The human capacity for evil and violence, and I think this is, it's a hard, this is a hard, hard one to swallow about. I would, I would take
Carol Ann Davis: it, I would take it further, like I would say I grant the human capacity for violence, but like for me as a poet who trains herself onto the five senses. Sometimes I think it's also animal inside me.
Like the animal. The animal parts of us, the parts that are sensing, just sensing the reflexive sensing. I mean, but this is almost like above my pay grade 'cause it's more philosophy. But like is that I'm making an argument that it's possible the bad things are coming from just the way that nature is violent.
And, you know, and you are saying it's something essentially human, but I don't think we'll resolve it. But that's,
Evan Rosa: no, and I'm not searching to re resolve it, but, and I wouldn't call it essential to humanity necessarily. Uh, I wouldn't wanna write that into Right. I would say that there's a capacity there, right?
Mm-hmm. To the extent that that freedom is real. There are, there's a spacious within experience Yes. That, that, that can, that can veer into violence sometimes without even knowing it. And it's also important to stipulate is not necessarily a conscious kind of, kind of thing. Um, no, but to no, but to allow that to surface is, is I think part of appreciating.
The human experience and trying to come to a, a process based or progress in understanding as one goes through their life to make sense of this. I mean, we're always trying to make sense of something. Sure. And to the extent that sense can be an additive. Meaningful experience. Mm-hmm. Great. But I would do wanna, I do want to not close the book on the making sense of something either that there are new senses all the time and have to be highly attuned to what we're capable of and not make an exception of ourselves.
I think.
Carol Ann Davis: Yeah, exceptional thinking is, is dangerous. I maybe also like making sense for me. There's a distinction between making sense of something and dwelling again inside something, and so like intellectual mastery as like a lesser goal than dwelling in experience. So I don't know if that makes sense, but like, um,
Evan Rosa: no, I think, well, I, I would love to hear you say a little bit more about dwelling in experience because I don't, I think for plenty of people, especially those who say, I can't imagine,
Carol Ann Davis: right,
Evan Rosa: there is something moving from deep inside, either a fear or a trauma or some other kind of thing that is.
Working against the ability to dwell in one's experience or in the experience others.
Carol Ann Davis: Yeah, I think that sitting quietly with the body in remembrance of how the body felt. Another time. I know I'm being kind of abstract here, but like I was just thinking as you were talking, I was working on this poem, it's not in songbird, but it's called On Seeing a Heron Fish in Winter, and I was like really legitimately thinking while I'm working on this poem that.
I was just enjoying watching in here and fish behind my house in winter. Okay. Like completely only looking and describing that. And then it got a little weird in the middle as I am aware happens. And the analogy started the like the little things and suddenly I was asking to be the thing. It was fishing on the rock.
Cut, like, you know, cut me open on the rock and I let that all happen. And then the end of the poem was this, which is only saying what's always been true. I tried to love and out of me came poison. Yeah. No, still. Yeah. Like to this day, like talking to you about it, like
Carol Ann Davis: It's a horrible experience and I realized it was about myself as a mother that like.
That fear we have as a parent, speaking of violence, that like we would think we were loving and it would be poison. Isn't this our biggest fear?
Carol Ann Davis: That we would be bad for our children, like without meaning to. I tried to love anatomy, came poison because in the end, like with the heron was, was eating a fish and the fish was poisoned by, you know, humankind.
Like it doesn't work itself out in the poem at all. 'cause my poems don't work stuff out, but, but it's just that, that punch in the gut.
Evan Rosa: Well, your ability to work with imagery. Mm-hmm. Let the imagery say something and continue to speak, I think is, you know, I wouldn't expect you to kind of wrap it up in that poem, nor does the heron or the fish expect anything to really wrap up.
Carol Ann Davis: Right. And that's, I guess what I mean by animal.
Evan Rosa: Yes. I think that does connect back there. There is some. An understanding of ourselves as animal. Mm-hmm. And as body. Mm-hmm. And as flesh and blood, both in its fragility and, and its violence. I mean this in some ways, I wonder if this is just the sort of like the over intellectualization of the human experience.
When we don't allow embodied realities to sim simply be there and oppress themselves upon us. We're trying to encapsulate. Through reason.
Carol Ann Davis: Yes. Which
Evan Rosa: does its own work, you know, it's a beautiful thing in itself, but, but it shouldn't be to the exclusion of understanding. I say understanding too, but like it's a different kind of understanding.
Yeah.
Evan Rosa: Well, it's a, it's a being, it's being in the experience, dwelling and experience create space that you're in to be oneself. And I think there, it, it opens up. The path to a kind of flourishing As ourselves as well. Yes. That we need to be able to appreciate and feel and experience. And this is what, what is really emerging in the way that you describe, not just the heron and the fish, the nail in the tree.
Carol Ann Davis: Those are rhythmically similar,
Evan Rosa: the pillows and the swords. Yeah, sure, sure.
Carol Ann Davis: So there's lots of duality obviously, too. Yeah,
Evan Rosa: but I, but that's what you're bringing together, right? Mm-hmm. Like it's not an actual dualism that you're describing, because I dislike
Carol Ann Davis: those. You might imagine.
Evan Rosa: I could only imagine that, that you would.
Uh, yeah. But, but they, but they can be of service by pulling things together and allowing paradox to exist and, yes. Yes. And facing contradiction down.
Carol Ann Davis: Yeah. And, uh, well, is it, is it. Negative capabilities, like the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in conversation.
Evan Rosa: Um, I don't, I'm not familiar and I would love to hear about it.
Let, if you wanna say more about it. Well,
Carol Ann Davis: let's, I mean, just that, that poems do that. The poems are, that's sort of like a definition of what poetry's supposed to do is hold contradictory. Concepts in conversation without, without destroying the center. And I believe figuration is a big part of that. Like I believe like in 200 or 300 years, we're not just gonna have logical, deductive reasoning, illogic, creativity.
I think we're gonna open up a whole other thing and it's gonna be analog thinking as its own thing. And like analog thinking is actually where the wisdom is.
Evan Rosa: This kind of analog thinking is present in medieval theology.
Carol Ann Davis: Yeah. Yes. It's not new. It's just been rejected because of the, the enlightenment.
Evan Rosa: We're gonna speak directly, we're gonna achieve certitude, we're gonna, we're, we're gonna Yes. It's the, it's the champion of reason. Yes. That, that pushes away from analogy and metaphor and en embodied cognition.
Carol Ann Davis: Absolutely. And actually, someone had said that Songbird had a eucharistic sexuality. Huh? I know when some, my editor said that The sexuality in the book is, shall I say, Eucharistic?
I was like, oh my gosh. When he said it, I remembered. This is relating back to medieval theology. Yeah. I remembered like in my Southern Baptist church, there was the communion table. Very, very plain communion table. Not ornamented. The only ornament was the silver cross on the top of the tray of mm-hmm.
Grape juice. Trays, like we didn't drink wine but carved into the, carved into it. Of course, one of the first sentences I've I ever read, which I remembered when he said it was, you're gonna know it. Do this in remembrance of me. Okay. So I was telling this to my colleague in religious studies, a mid who has studied medieval theology, and I said, I think maybe.
Everything I do is in remembrance of God. Like to this day, like I think my 3-year-old self reading that. Then all the other things that happened as an adolescent, like I think I do sex in remembrance of God. I think that is something inside me. I said that to my colleague and he pulled down the medieval text and showed me that this is what the female mystics.
This is a very common idea.
Evan Rosa: That's right. I, I think I, I wanna say it's Theresa Villa. That, that there is an erotic side of this equation that can't be denied and doesn't need to be scandalized. Um, no. And of
Carol Ann Davis: course we know about it in terms of the bride is the church and the Christ is a but we're talking the medieval.
They take it a different, they take it to a totally different place.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, yeah, that's right. And
Carol Ann Davis: I actually took all his books 'cause I was like, okay, if I'm gonna like, I need to read up on this. 'cause I think Songbird might. Be in conversation with this and maybe even the whole idea of analogy is in some ways an erotic act because it takes something and it transfigure it.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Part of the issue with this, I think, is that aeros has been. Overly sexualized as well.
Carol Ann Davis: Absolutely, yes. There
Evan Rosa: is an element of eroticism that is so, it is just around desirous and attraction to, and being pulled into, and I would say almost a Trinitarian parais or something like that. Mm-hmm. Like you can, there's all sorts of ways that allow for an erotic understanding of love and desire.
To come through here that allows for the body to be kind of incorporated into a spiritual experience.
Evan Rosa: Caroline, your new collection of poems you've described as emerging out of the period in which you were focused on the events of Sandy Hook. Yeah. And the writing. Of those events and the dwelling in those events that you have offered and how that has driven you to an understanding, well, a new understanding, I should say, of your own childhood, um, bringing more of yourself.
So I almost see this as a kind of cyclical, working back into the narrow focus. Yes. And bringing yourself back to an experience of childhood, if that, how does that resonate with you?
Carol Ann Davis: I do think, and even the very last correction I made on the nail in the tree was to change the title to include the world word childhood.
So it said essays on art. Violence. Mm-hmm. And parenting. And then at the last minute I was like, oh, it's childhood. Because the last is about me swimming in deep water as a child and. So I can see now that Songbird came from that little change to saying, oh, it's actually about me and about my own experience of childhood.
So one of my favorite poems in this collection is actually one of the smaller ones. If you wanted me to read a couple, I do. Okay. This is back to where Sugar, and it's just about the iconography of my childhood. Back to wear sugar on errant tongue blooms. Back to my ordinaries boiled sweetly on the good eye movement of my arms through salt water what?
Asphalt blisters terrazzo cools abrasion of hems gathering pine needle thick. To accompany coin in laundry, jangles back to the sloped wood of beach varieties floor. Its tray of ill-fitting nails back, ghost sugar way after the lunar to the oysters visible under bridge. At low tide, the fine hairs of the wrist and legs dangling high in 40 feet of ocean, a sugar drop floating.
Indelicate atmosphere, shimmers of what would out barely animate. Then all that would open, and these my eyes, all that would see.
Evan Rosa: I'm feeling the nails
Carol Ann Davis: and yeah. There's a lot of what we've talked about.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. As well as the kind of some fully present duality, I would say. Yeah. And, and, and. Yeah, it's taken in through your eyes and can't help it, but find your image of legs dangling and 40 feet of ocean to be really spectacular as well.
That's great. A sugar drop floating in delicate atmosphere. And that's a like what a wonderful depiction of childhood. Like
Evan Rosa: it's, and it's quaint. It's not a quaint one because there's danger there. People ask
Carol Ann Davis: me. They're like, what do you mean? I tell people like I would swim so far out that I could not see the beach for the curve of the earth.
And I was like, eight years old.
Evan Rosa: That's adventure.
Carol Ann Davis: I don't know, like that seems so amazing to me. Now.
Evan Rosa: It makes sense. It makes sense. There's something that. Enveloping about it and the eyes loading in delicate atmosphere because it's, there is a, there's a sweetness to the danger as well. Mm-hmm. I mean, like you can read delicate, there is fragile, and yet the imagery of the ocean that you're in or the atmosphere above, it's enfolding and encapsulating and.
Carol Ann Davis: And there's, of course, there's a whole part in the nail, in the tree about the oceanic feeling and theology and how, you know how that's one of the basic theological ideas is it's comforting to be small in something big. Oh yeah. It's just, yeah. The most comforting thing is to be like, I am small. It is big, or it's terrifying.
Some people are terrified by it. I'm comforted by it.
Evan Rosa: Well, and let us appreciate the depiction of childhood that that is. Yeah. To be small in something big, big in, in the arms of something big, but also the potential for terror. And that's what is important to me about the pairing of the nail in the tree and songbird, is that you're able to.
To bring childhoods together and see the, the rising and falling of, you know, child to adult maturation and the, and mm-hmm. Through generations. Mm-hmm. The cyclical nature of that, that if there's not an ending of it, it's just cyclical. Mm-hmm. But we're talking about bringing dualities into two cupped hands.
Mm-hmm. We're talking about, you know, sandwiching ourselves between atmosphere and ocean and to reconnect to the child in us that had the wisdom. To see the nail as integrated into the tree. Like that's,
Carol Ann Davis: I mean, I guess I would say if I had anything to offer in all this difficulty, it would be, I heard my son say that, like, how many times are we missing hearing the thing that would help us?
So like ears open, eyes up, but also that. The beauty is coming in the narrowing and in the precision, so it's intensifying according to our ability to stay present. In that case, it was an exchange from my son, but what if all around us all the time, if we stop and listen, there's a kind of abiding beauty that would not only console us, but allow.
Us to act more thoughtfully toward each other.
Evan Rosa: Carol Ann, I can't close a conversation like this. The book?
Carol Ann Davis: No,
Evan Rosa: we're not gonna wrap up the story.
Carol Ann Davis: No.
Evan Rosa: It's just gonna end in a kind of gratitude. And also I a remembrance, you know, a remembering of the children.
Evan Rosa: Of Sandy Hook, who lost their lives, and the many people who have lost their lives to gun violence and the need to continue to hold them.
Carol Ann Davis: Yes. We do, we do. We continue to hold
Evan Rosa: all of them. Thanks for joining me.
Carol Ann Davis: Thank you, Evan. And thank you for all your work
Evan Rosa: for The Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Carol Ann Davis, production assistance by Alexa Rollow and Emily Brookfield. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith dot Yale dot edu where you can find past episodes, articles, books, and other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity.
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