How to Be a Better Human - The difference between easy and difficult beauty (w/ Chloe Cooper Jones)

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

Chloe Cooper Jones knows how it feels to be complicit. The critically acclaimed author has moved through life with a rare disability that brings incredible physical pain and plenty of outward judgment. And she’s even guilty of judging herself. But now, she’s challenging our ideas of motherhood, disability and beauty in her memoir, Easy Beauty. In this episode, she talks about using art to step outside of your own mind, sitting with difficult experiences, embracing the messy contradictions of the human experience, and more! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. There was a period of time in my life when I was auditioning for commercials semi-regularly. And full transparency, I was terrible at the auditions. One time, the casting director literally gave me the note, could you be less wooden? And the honest answer was, no, no, I can't be. The weirdest part of the audition, though, happened before I

ever got in front of the camera. I remember one audition for a terrifying energy drink alternative that was like a patch that somehow delivered the caffeine straight into your skin or something. On one side of the waiting room for this audition was a row of identical bodybuilders in white tank tops. On the other side, where I I was seated was a row of skinny guys wearing plaid button downs about to audition for the part of nerd who works from home. There were maybe half a dozen of us who all looked a lot like me, except everyone else was slightly taller or fitter or more handsome. And spoiler, I never booked a commercial, not a single one. But I cannot forget how discombobulating it was to see so

clearly the box I was being categorized in. And yet, for many people, that is a daily experience. Whether your identity is subsumed into parent or woman or elderly, we are all so much more than the reductive label that society might put us into at first glance. Today's guest, Chloe Cooper-Jones, is the author of the book Easy Beauty. In it, she talks about the ways that she's been reduced by her appearance. Chloe was born with a rare congenital condition called sacralogenesis, which affects both her stature and gait and frequently causes her physical pain and discomfort. Chloe talks about the way that she is othered because of her visible disability, but she also talks about the ways that art and beauty and an internal life have helped her to broaden her experience and self-define outside of those narrow boxes. Here's a clip from her audiobook, courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio.

A little setup first, Chloe has been getting drinks with some colleagues when the conversation turns to their views about the quality of Chloe's life as a person with a disability. Unable to leave the table, Chloe tries to distance herself mentally. The men bicker over the issue of my unfortunate birth. I search for anger and find only numbness. I center myself in the neutral room, a separated space inside my mind I constructed when I was very young as a method for dissociating from physical pain. There are no doors or windows in the neutral room, nothing but white walls, and on the walls, one at a time, gray numbers flash. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

5, 6, 7, 8 1, 2, 3, 4 5, 6, 7, 8 And I count them until everything else fades and I'm lost in a void that nullifies, dulls what needs dulling. We will be right back with more from Chloe Cooper-Jones after this short break. And we are back.

We're talking about beauty, disability, and self-identity today with Chloe Cooper-Jones. Hi, I'm Chloe Cooper-Jones. I'm a philosopher and a journalist at the New York Times Magazine and the author of the book Easy Beauty. So I loved Easy Beauty. I think it is so beautifully written and really interesting. And to get started, I'm curious to hear what drove you to want to write that book and to want to be as honest about everything in your life as you are. Because I think often people write memoirs that only make them look good.

And I think something that's really interesting about your book is that it is nuanced and complicated. It's extremely important to the book because the book in many ways is about this feeling that I think a lot of people can identify with. I talk about this feeling specifically through the lens of disability and also being a parent, but I don't think that this feeling is limited to those groupings of people. And that is this feeling of walking around the world and being seen in a specific way that feels really reductive to you, feeling that our exteriors can never match our interiors, and that we're always sort

of fighting to be seen as whole. And so if I was going to enter that sort of conversation about what it means to want to be seen as whole and to see others as whole. I certainly couldn't write a book in which I was just presenting myself as great or all the greatest hits of my life and all the nicest moments. I had to be really honest about my fears, my failures, the ways in which I was as equally capable of reducing others as I felt they were capable of being reductive to me. That was really crucial, not just for, I think, the content or theme of the book, but also telling a story about disability. I think so often the narratives around disability show disabled lives as sort of flat and inspirational for other people, or disabled people are often seen as childlike or without agency or sexless.

And that's often the way that our stories are presented by able-bodied people in most sort of media forums. So I needed to write myself as truly and honestly as possible. And I am a person of agency and lack of agency, of good and bad choices, of, you know, capable of being strong and often choosing my weaker nature. And that's all just the truth of being a complex, real human. How do you think of the word disability? What does it mean? And do you identify as disabled or not? And how has that changed? it mean and do you identify as disabled or not? And how has that changed?

I absolutely identify as disabled. And disability is a really large umbrella term that statistically about one to four out of one in five Americans identify as disabled. I think one of the most interesting things about what we call disability is that if any person gets lucky enough and gets to live a long life, they are going to find themselves in that category. If not permanently at the end of their lives, then temporarily when they get hurt or they get sick or they go through various illnesses or they discover different ailments. So it's a huge umbrella term that is actually just really part of the human condition. I was initially resistant to using that term because I'd only seen portrayals of disability as something lesser than or a signal of weakness or some sort of inherent lessening of a life. And I didn't have great

models to show me that disability is actually something that is just sort of part of the condition of having a body for every single person. So that was one really detrimental narrative that played in my life and plays in everybody's lives about disability that made me resistant to claiming it. Also, you know, the idea of disability is often linked to pity. And I didn't want any of that. I didn't want to be thought of as less capable than anybody else just because I had certain different physical ailments that I was sort of managing my whole life. You talk in the book about one time when you were pregnant with your son, you walked into a bookstore and they immediately said, the pregnancy books are over

there. And you were like, that's not, I'm not trying to buy a pregnancy book. I'm trying to buy like the new hot novel. That's what I want to read. And how that was this instant othering of you, right? Like, of course, you couldn't be interested in the new fiction. Yeah, it was even worse than that. I had been, I walked in and I happened to have my son who was only a few months old at that time in a stroller. And immediately, as I was walking toward the fiction, they said, no, no, no, no, the board books are over there. And it was that sort of forceful redirection. But exactly, that's such a good example of that moment when we're confronted with this reality that other people are constantly reading us. And this is true for every single person alive. People are constantly reading us and they're looking for

any sort of visual cue to tell them who you are and how they can sort you. So when people do that to me, I don't like it, but I also know that it's a pretty unavoidable part of being alive. And the thing that I really want to do, and I think any great art that I've encountered helps me do this, is figure out how to give people second and third thoughts, right? Like go beyond just that first initial reading. There's a quote that you have in the later part of your book from Iris Murdoch, where you say, by opening our eyes, we do not necessarily see what confronts us. And I feel like that is very related to what we're talking about right now. Yeah, absolutely. And Iris Murdoch is sort of like the spiritual and intellectual guide of the whole book and certainly the sort of quest at the heart of the book, she had this belief that the experience

of beauty in the world, whether that was in nature or in art or in performance, wherever we saw the kind of beauty that filled us with that aesthetic joy, that those were opportunities to get outside of our limited perspective, to engage in a world of others, and through that engagement, do some shifting and widening of perspective. So that quote where she says, you know, just by looking, we don't necessarily see anything. What she's saying there is, you know, so much of the way that we perceive the world is, of course, informed by our beliefs and by our very limited perspective or by whatever is happening in our own interiority. And so there's so much more than that to see in the world.

So the challenge to all of us is like, okay, how do we get beyond the limitations of being just one person with one set of experiences. She thinks art is art and the experience of beauty in the world specifically is a tool to doing that to growing larger than than a single self and I think that's that to me is so inspiring as someone who has spent their whole life thinking about art and loving art and finding, you know, most of the greatest experience of my, you know, experience of joy in my life from art, that it's not just for pleasure or decoration, but it truly allows us to grow larger than a single life. If someone's listening and they're really intrigued by this idea of using art and beauty as a tool to get outside themselves and to understand other people's experiences. What are some practical ways they can do that?

What should they do in their life? Well, Iris Murdoch gives this great example. And I think it's a good place to start is just with her example and what she experiences in this example where she is talking about this bird, the kestrel. So she says, you know, I'm sitting alone at my house and I'm thinking through a thing that's causing me stress, or I'm thinking about my own status in the world, or I'm frustrated. And then she says, but as I'm thinking all of this, I'm looking out the window and I see a kestrel. And for a moment, all that exists is the beauty of this bird. And she just observes it.

And she's very present with it. And what it does is, in her description, is it just gives her a bit of a reprieve from the loud, messy interiority that is the self. And when she comes back into herself and her own interiority, she feels a different perspective. So I think if we start with that and we ask ourselves, what gives us that feeling and then we chase it that can and that answer is going to be different for everyone that can allow us to try to experience this this sensation of letting the world come into our interiority and giving us what she says a break break from our relentless ego. So for me, that's reading, but it's also music. I think a great conversation, I think swimming in a lake or walking in the woods. But I think the thing is to really ask yourself, what are the moments in which you're struck by the beauty of the world, the natural world that exists around us,

or the world that other humans are capable of making that create a sense of awe in you or a sense of release from your own interiority and your own dense, messy ego. I wonder if you, Chris, would tell me what does that for you specifically? What gives you that feeling of a break from your own, you know, sort of self? One of the biggest things for me personally is the physical sensation of getting into water, whether it's a pool or the ocean, right? That there's this truly other world of you've entered something. And it just immediately gets me out of my head. Another one that does it for me is to cook, to make food. It silences those voices in my head that are constantly evaluating and criticizing and

worrying and thinking. And all of a sudden my focus and my world narrows down to something as simple as like, how can I chop these carrots in the size that I want to chop them? And I feel very present in the moment and in my body and experience when I'm doing things like that. And as a result, I find them to be deeply enjoyable. Like some of the things that I look forward to the most, because I really do, I don't often get out of my head. I don't often stop the looking and the thinking of, is this okay? What are other people thinking? And those are moments where I can. I love that. I love that. And I think, you know, when we talk about the aesthetic experience, you know, the word aesthetic comes from the Greek, just of the senses. And so what Murdoch is really focused on when she's

talking about beauty and what I'm focused on when I'm writing about beauty is not physical beauty that's sort of sold to us by marketers and magazines, but aesthetic beauty, the beauty that arrives to our senses. there's sort of this common feeling of art and elitism being somehow connected. Like the only real art is in a museum or the only real art is, I don't know, at an opera or something. But the real aesthetic experiences of our lives, if we're paying attention to them and we're not applying any snobbery to them, are so vast. And I think that's what Murdoch really wants us to do is to sit and think about those moments where, yeah, you're swimming in the ocean, you're making a meal, or you're eating a really beautiful meal, or you're watching other people consume the meal that you've made and having a moment of communion with them. And the more broadly we can find those moments and really value them, the more we can step outside of our own minds and widen our perspective. And that can be what Murdoch thinks is a real tool for change.

We're going to take a very different kind of moment right now, a moment for podcast ads. But then we will be right back. Don't go anywhere. Today, we're talking with Chloe Cooper-Jones about disability, identity, beauty, and art. Here's another clip from the audiobook of Easy Beauty from Simon & Schuster Audio. In this clip, Chloe is traveling to Italy, and she's in a museum looking with desire, not just at the works of art, but the other people in the museum. A stranger is staring at me. I drop my shoulder, glimpse him over it. He is tall. He crosses the room, moving toward me with a long stride, smooth and sure.

The stranger's stare fastens, binds me tighter to him as he moves closer. His eyes scrape across my body. Then he looks away, back, away, then skips discretion and takes in my length, eyes prowling up and down. Newness incites the eye, and I am always a new What is the difference between easy beauty and difficult beauty? What is the difference between easy beauty and difficult beauty? to our senses easily or instantaneously. So when we see a beautiful sunset, when we hear an easy spatial rhythm on the radio and we sort of start to dance, when we see a rose or walk outside on a warm, beautiful day and we just eat a great meal and we go, yep, this is great.

This is beauty. This is exciting. My senses are pleased by this. And I don't, there's no barrier between perception and pleasure or perception and appreciation or value. Difficult beauty, he says, just comes with some more work. So he says difficult beauty is beauty that's often more complex, beauty that requires patience. So beauty that we might need to sit with for a while to really unlock its powers or its effect on us. So for example, listening to a really complicated piece of music that at first just sounds like noise,

looking at an abstract painting that at first just looks like random drips on a canvas or experiencing something that is really profoundly challenging to us and later through the experience of it reveals great joy and beauty and profundity. Then he has this third thing and it's a term that he uses in a sort of a technical way where he says difficult beauty often requires width. What he means by that is he says we have to be able sometimes to be confronted with beauty that is so vast and is so overwhelming that as we're experiencing it, we are simultaneously reminded how small we are and how essentially brief our life is and perhaps in the bigger picture of things insignificant our lives are. And he says, width requires us to sit in that experience and feel beauty. And he says most people can't do that.

So I felt that way looking at the ocean and going, oh my gosh, I'm nothing. The ocean is so huge, I am but a speck. This thing will kill me. Looking at a huge mountain range and being like, that's forever and I am here for a second. But I think also the experience of motherhood has given me that experience of width where you enter into this long practice and suddenly your life feels in a way smaller because you're just one of so many mothers or you're one of so many people that are experiencing this great love and this great pain and this great huge human story. And that's so powerful and great, but also reminds you that you're a tiny, tiny speck in that gigantic human story. But one of the things that I think you talk about so, so beautifully, and that I just don't think many other people are

talking about that I talked to is the idea that like, many times you are experiencing things that are painful and that other people, even the ones you love won't actually understand. And so we have to walk this balance between not always being at a distance, but also understanding that sometimes we have to take care of ourselves. And that can mean creating a little bit of a space for ourselves. Oh, absolutely. And I think one of the cruelest things we do to ourselves is try to convince ourselves that love is always going to feel fun or that you're only supposed to think about the positive sides of yourself or other people. And so when I think about the concept of love, I don't want to reduce it. I want to let it be as big as it is. But letting love, whether it's self-love or love for other people, truly be as big as it is means that it contains a lot of other feelings

within it. So real love or real connection includes disappointment, frustration, anger, resentment, obligation, hardship, conflict. Those things, that's just what love is so big. It has to encompass all those things. A life is so big. It has to encompass all those things. Being human, it's so vast and cool and massive that it has to encompass all those things. And one thing I think that often happens is we want to excise those things from

our lives. We want to find the cheat code to get around them. We want to reduce or we run away or we're so deeply fearful of conflict when conflict is a rich and productive thing sometimes. I think one of the best things that we can do is try to make room for failure, to make friends with failure, to make room for pain, to make friends with pain. If someone's listening and they're in this moment, they're struggling with pain or they're struggling with frustration and anger at the limitations of their physical abilities or mental abilities. What can they do to tap into these, this sense to make friends with that, as you say, or to find that, you know, the escape of beauty and art like we talked about earlier? How can they do that?

I'll speak for myself. I think often I make pain worse by adding shame to it, by adding a sense of failure, or by adding a misguided and often incorrect belief that other people are judging me or feeling disappointed in me, that if I say no to something because I'm in pain, that no one will ever ask me to do a thing ever again, that if I say no to something because I'm in pain, that no one will ever ask me to do a thing ever again, that if I express my limitations, that other people will always see me as limited or pity me. That's something that I do that when I'm in my worst moments, just makes them so much worse and so adds a sort of layer of of unreality onto it and I think the thing that's helped me shift that thinking is by remembering that every single person alive has pain is dealing

with really a lot of difficulty and struggle, and that those can be tools of connection and making us feel more, you know, to feel less alone and to feel part of the human experience if we're just authentic about them, if we're honest about them. One moment that I just wanted to highlight because it made me laugh out loud because I thought it was so spectacular is you talk about when you're in Italy and you're discussing how people sometimes have this strange othering reaction to you. And then there's this moment where you're in the park and there's a man exposing himself. And these two older Italian ladies are chastising him and they're like, stop, stop that. And he's masturbating. And then he sees you and he says, Oh, I'm so sorry. He puts his pants away

and he says, may God bless you. And you're like, what, what, what is happening? Like, why did even the, like the pervert in the park treat me differently? It's like, I just thought like that's such a great example of like the, the utmost heightening of what you were discussing into the absurdity of that that he then says may god bless you yeah i love that moment it is just one of those moments of true absurdity where you're going look even this guy even this guy like doesn't doesn't want to see me as like a real person or is embarrassed you, but I think it's a work that just does a lot of, or it's a moment that does a lot of different types of work because it is a moment in which

several people are seeing each other all at the same time and forming all these different judgments and, and disgust reactions or pity reactions. And so even though in, in my life, this was a moment that maybe took up, I don't know, 10 seconds of my real life, it was also the sort of perfect storm of this human thing of seeing and being seen and all these sort of crossed. In that moment, there is just absurdity and humor and also embarrassment and shame and disappointment, all these sorts of things. And that is why I think that you have the highest level of humor, which is not to deny, but to find the acknowledgement of the pain and the suffering and also the humor and the absurdity.

Those two things can coexist at the same time, which I think is kind of at the heart of this difficult beauty that we've been talking about too, right? To hold all the tensions at once. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, that is exactly what difficult beauty is asking us to pay attention to is if we're willing to give something patience, if we're willing to hold all those tensions, as you're saying, if we're willing to look at all the messy contradictions and let them live, you know, and not try to reduce them down to simple cause and effect or A to B sort of logic, but let them live and be sort of in the center of all of these things.

I also think that you have read my book so well. I'm just so honored by these questions and they're so smart. How did you find this book? How did it come to you or to the producer or anybody? I think that behind the scenes, many of the producers had heard about you and your work and were really interested in talking to you. Well, I'm really so grateful that it worked out. I have to say, you know, I've done a lot of interviews. I've been really lucky and people have been so thoughtful and generous. And this is just sort of the nature of things, but I think ties into so much of what we're saying. Quite often people just want to talk about one thing. They want to really latch

onto one tiny aspect of the book and that's fine. But I think this conversation has really moved me because you're willing to go through the whole range of things with me. So it makes me feel very seen and, you know, in a way that I will stay with me for a long time. So thank you. Well, since we are talking about the book, I want to talk about one other moment that is, I think, absolutely hilarious and fantastic anecdote that I would, I just would hate for people to leave

without hearing about, which is that you ran one of the greatest scams in the history of Girl Scout cookies. And I, it made me laugh so much. It also made me love your mom because basically the head of the Girl Scout troop in this act of kind of infantilizing and pity, she kept giving you more boxes of cookies than you'd actually sold. And you kept saying to her, don't give me these cookies. And then if you could share what you did with those extra cookies and what it led to, I would love that. Yeah, I mean, my mother had very, I think, in a very protective and wise, but then also sort of complicated way, a very protective and wise, but then also sort of complicated way, had taught me to respond to some people's lowered expectations of me by understanding it and then using it to my advantage. And so she would always call this, just play your card. If you need to play your card, just play it. And so

this Girl Scout troop leader just assumed that I like wouldn't deliver the cookies correctly or would get all the ordering wrong. And so she just kept giving me all these extra boxes and being like, oh, don't worry. And I was like, great. So I mean, at first I just ate them because I was a kid and I was getting extra cookies. But then I figured out that the kids at my school had, you know, lunch money and they weren't being sold to. So that was a huge market that nobody was moving into. So I did. And because teachers never thought that I ever did anything wrong because of also the sort of infantilizing thing, I could easily sort of run this cookie

scheme at my school and not get in trouble. I think my true moment of innovation was breaking up all the cookie boxes and then selling variety packs at a very high premium. Absolute genius. Yeah, that was I was like, that was smart. And nobody else was doing it. So I was making all this money that I was, of course, keeping and just running the scam. And then my mother found out and she's a woman of great integrity. So she made me go and return the money and, and, you know, I got kicked out of the Girl Scouts. And I think one thing that's so

sort of complex about that moment is, and I think I don't really understand it. And I didn't understand it fully until I became a parent myself is that there's this instinct when you're just a parent, you're talking to your one and only child to say, do whatever it takes to protect yourself, do it, play your card, do whatever it takes to get like, you know, that, that deeply protective instinct. I get it so deeply now. The problem is that I was also playing into that. By playing my card, I was playing into that infantilizing instinct rather than correcting it. And that balance in my life has been really tricky.

I think that's a balance that I still am always trying to figure out. Where are the moments in which I can just play my card and get out and protect myself and keep myself separate from, you know, somebody else's prejudices or misconceptions about me. And one of the times where if I don't face it, or if I don't try to correct it, I'm actually complicit in those bad beliefs. Well, Chloe Cooper-Jones, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for being present in this moment with us and for sharing so much of your wisdom and beauty and joy with us today. It's really been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for this. Can I just say one last thing, just because we talked about the absurdity, the absurdity and humor that's always sort of mixed into reality is I'm doing this interview that I love. I'm having such a good time. I'm, I'm, I'm, you're asking me these brilliant questions.

My dog was sitting next to me and just threw up on my lap. Absolutely perfect. Couldn't have scripted a better, more perfect situation. Yes, that is how it is supposed to happen. So it's all happening all at the same time. That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Chloe Cooper-Jones. Her book is called Easy Beauty and the clips we played from the audiobook

are courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and information about my live comedy shows at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by Anna Phelan,

Whitney Pennington-Rogers, and Jimmy Gutierrez, who are frequently being lusted over in museums. Every episode of our show is professionally fact-checked. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Erica Yoon, who do the difficult but also beautiful work of finding the truth. Thank you to Dave Palmer for recording these credits. On the PRX side, our show is put together by

a team that would be fully unfazed by a dog vomiting directly into their laps. Morgan Flannery, Rosalind Tortosilius, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. And of course, thanks to you for listening to our show and making this all possible. If you're listening on Apple, please leave us a five-star rating and review,

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