The One You Feed - Bayo Akomolafe on Finding a Home

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

Bayo Akomolafe is a widely celebrated international speaker, post-humanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and the author of two books – one of which he and Eric discuss in this episode. In this episode, Eric and Bayo discuss These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters To My Daughter On Humanity’s Search For Home.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!Bayo Akomolafe and I Discuss Finding a Home and…His book, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters To My Daughter On Humanity’s Search For HomeThe most beautiful thing in the world to him right nowHis observations of his young autistic sonThe limitations created when we name somethingThe way insanity is viewed in his Nigerian cultureFinding home in the middle of the mess of lifeHow everything is “becoming” in every momentWhy he describes himself as a recovering psychologist and a fugitiveThe healing journeyBayo Akomolafe links:Bayo’s WebsiteTwitterWhen you purchase products and/or services from the sponsors of this episode, you help support The One You Feed. Your support is greatly appreciated, thank you!If you enjoyed this conversation with Bayo Akomolafe, you might also enjoy these other episodes:How to Build a Home for Your SoulFinding Grace with Eiman Al ZaabiSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Blackness wasn't blackness until it met a white modernity and it needed to stake its claims to equal rights, to equal values, to equal worth, all of that. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter.

It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor. What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Bayo Okomolafe. He's a widely celebrated international speaker, post-humanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and the author of two books, one of which Bayo and Eric discuss here, called These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home.

Hi, Bio. Welcome to the show. Good to see you, brother. How are you doing? I am doing very good. We're going to be discussing your book called These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One's a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which

represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to know what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I know that parable, at least an iteration of it, a variant. And it came to me through the interlocking walls and sieves and borders and

boundaries of my faith. It was a highly Christianized version, basically saying, the premise, of course, is that we're all born with a sinful nature, original sin lurking somewhere within us. Your choice determines if you're holy slash righteous, or you end up in eternal damnation. So basically, I learned the story of the two wolves in terms of sinful nature and the Christological salvific work of the Christ. I no longer see the world in those binarizing ways, so I don't think we're locked in some civilizational or spiritual eternal battle between good and evil. But that story still makes some sense in terms of an invitation to pay pay attention to the world around us, the intelligences around us. And I love the materiality, the humble gesture of feeding something, right? It's service, but it's also

a way of de-centering us as humans, right? So I like the idea of feeding and nurturing something other than ourselves, right? So I hear this story of feeding and nurturing something other than ourselves. So I hear this story right now, responding spontaneously, because you've asked me to. I hear it as an ecological invitation to pay attention in different ways to those things that exceed us and our vaunted centrality as the species of note on this planet. That's how I respond. Thank you. So I want to start off by asking you a question that comes from your work. And I don't quite recall where I found it in your work, but it doesn't matter. I do so much research for a guest. By the time I get here, I'm like, I don't remember where I saw this. But it was a question I believe you were asking. So I want to ask it to you. And it is, what is the most beautiful thing in the world for you right now? I cannot help but smile because I asked the same question to a mentor, friend, colleague,

couple of years ago. What is the most beautiful thing to you right now? And I think I'll respond the way she responded. This moment, because it's connected to all other moments. We may not feel like the contemporaneous populated by threats of World War III or by the threat of climate collapse or by the terrible stories of racial injustice. We may not feel that this is a beautiful moment, but I don't think beauty is necessarily that which is harmonious. I think the sacred is that which invites us to worship, that which invites us to long after something else. So that beauty becomes a doing. To do beauty, in the words of Toni Morrison, is to meet the world in ways that appreciates

our humble space in its promiscuous worlding of itself. So this moment is connected to all other moments. It's processual, it's entangled. It's the working out of something so miraculous that words cannot capture it. This moment is the most beautiful. That makes me think of an idea I've often sort of thought about, which is if every moment is sacred and everything is sacred, then its inverse would be no moment or nothing is more sacred than any other moment.

And that used to disturb me. That actually used to trouble me. It somehow seems correct to me now in some way. It feels like, yes, everything is just kind of what it is and what we imbue it with is so critical. But I'm kind of curious just how you would reflect on that. Well, I'm thinking of the umbrella concept of everything. And I'm thinking of how the world eases its way from such categoricity like everything. I think that's a convenience of our language, the language we're sharing right now. But when I think about the sacred, I think about how things spill, how things call for excruciating specificity. I often refer to my son, who is in the parlance of dominant psychological paradigms on the autistic spectrum. If you told

my son, it's time for food, he's four years old, he would not like that you said that at all. But if you told him, it's time to eat porridge, which he loves, he would say, aha, yes, I love some porridge. Food and porridge are not in the same schema. We organize the world in neat and convenient containers. Burgers, rice, eba, dodo, all of that is, you know, part of a schema that we call food. To him, porridge isn't food. You can't collapse things like that. The world is deeply specific to him. You can't gloss over things. I think the sacred is a realization, and maybe even more than a realization, that what philosophers might call thinginess or being is always a becoming, right? That Eric is

not quite as Eric as he thinks he is, or as society might think he is. Eric is a nomadic spilling, a concept that is diasporic and yet to come. And that for me causes me to gasp, right? It's a realization that there's nothing we can do to pin this thing down, this thing that we rudely call reality or truth or whatever. There's nothing we can do to pin this thing down, this thing that we rudely call reality or truth or whatever. There's nothing we can do to finalize it or capture it because the moment you capture it, it's already gone. It's doing something else. It's experimenting with possibility and impossibility. So it's not quite the case that we can come up with a heuristic and say everything is sacred and everything is equally

sacred. I think that is a moral structure. I think there are other ways to conceive of processual sacredness that does not need to be reduced to a notion of equality. I think we can say that spending time with our kids and protesting on the streets may not have equal importance to a moment, but could be equally sacred, right? We need to live in a world where things are worthier than others. If everything were equally worthy, then I don't think survival would be possible. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's that idea of what's most beautiful right now, right? And so to orient that way is to say, in essence, for at least this moment for this orientation, I'm going to set aside that it should be this way, it should be that way, this should be happening, this shouldn't be happening. I set that aside and I go, what's beautiful is here. However, this all happened, which is countless causes and conditions. It's here and it's beautiful. In Zen, we talk about, you know, going between the absolute and the relative, you know, you're kind of going back and forth between these ideas of, on one hand, some part of me in order to find the moment beautiful has to drop into it exactly as it is. And there's also a part and a place that has to be, like you said, making decisions about what's more important. Yeah. You know, all right, well, this moment is beautiful the way it is,

but I probably should stop spending it on playing Candy Crush and go spend it with my son, right? You know, like... Yes, indeed. That's a very worthy example right there. I don't want to wade too deep into this because I'm going to show my catastrophic ignorance in this area, but I don't know autism well. But I'm curious if what you just said is true more broadly with autism is that categories don't exist in the way for an autistic person in the same way that they do for the rest of us,

because we divide reality up into categories and concepts. I heard you on, I think it was Rick Archer's show. I won't get the quote right, but the minute you name something blue, you've excluded everything else, right? You've done violence to the landscape in a sense. Do autistic people have less of that categorization and conceptualization? Is that a signature of that? It's often pathologized as a failure to have a concept of mind. The very notion of autism, as a failure to have a concept of mind. The very notion of autism, it's like an excruciating self-involvement, which I don't agree with. It's like facing inward so much that you're cut out from the senses of the world around you and thought as usual, right? The normative, so-called

neurotypical way of being in the world. I think that's why the literature emphasizes a spectrum yes there's no such thing as a particular way that is universal for everyone who might identify with that spectrum there is no one thing yes so i want to stay with the specificity of my relationship with my son okay and notice that he does something that I named today. I found the courage to name it today. Of course, every naming is a risk, but I did name it. I called it, you know, the Greek hero Theseus. And there's a philosophical riddle about the ship of Theseus that I don't want to get into

right now, but it's about the metaphysics of identity. Like, where's the ship of Theseus that I don't want to get into right now, but it's about the metaphysics of identity. Like where's the ship? If you take pieces of the ship and you make those pieces, another ship, which is the real ship or which is the original ship, which is Theseus' ship. So my son does something that I call tracing. He traces, he borrows things or features that should belong to other things and he makes it his own. Like the other day, as well as today, he takes a little bit of blue from a blue book, rubs his hand over it. Of course, it's not leaking in any way, but he rubs his hand over it and he does this. What are you doing? I'm painting my face blue, right?

And then he takes white. It's like maybe to him, maybe to see through his eyes is to see how colors are dancing all over the place. Maybe things are not as neat and tidy and discreet as the way that I would see things. So I call it a Theseusian tracing. He knows identity is spilling. He knows identity is not stable. And he's part of that composing of possibilities by tracing things with each other. Maybe that's part of his architecture. The refusal to see things in such rigid categories.

Again, I use this language very with great hesitation. We as neurotypicals have learned to see the world. Yeah. I second your hesitation on the word neurotypical, because in the same way that autism is on the spectrum, you certainly would say to label everyone else. There's huge variety within that. It does make me think about, though, the idea that, and I think you said this again on perhaps on Rick Archer's show, that in your indigenous Nigerian culture, that insanity was often seen as an opportunity for a breakthrough. Baba Laos, who are a group of priestly people who have adopted or have inherited some shamanic skills, ways of listening to plants, listening to the environment, healing arts. Listening to them, studying with them, I learned fascinating things. Now, these are people of my own culture, but I grew up, again, like I've implied or stated

explicitly in a Christal-centric subculture. And I learned quickly to demonize my own culture, to see it as inadequate because it wasn't quite up to par with what was received by our hitherto colonial masters. But then I went to them. I was driven to them, I had to sit with them and I learned from them this idea that sanity, what we rudely call sanity, is not as complete or as closed as we think it is, right? That there are other ways of being in the world that have been pathologized or are pathologizable because we live in a city and the city has its imperatives and we have to get by and we have to be productive. And so we've inadvertently cut off our connections with ancestry,

with voices, with spirits, right? Because we built a highway in the middle of the forest. And so I remember asking one of the Baba Lawals, what if someone presents to you a potential client with what we Western trained psychologists call auditory hallucination, hearing voices in your head. What do you do about it? And he was confused by my concern. Like, why would you want to medicate? That's possibly a gift right there. That could be your grandmother or someone whispering to you. So you guys have no conception of dreams. You guys have no conception of someone coming back and speaking to you. In other words, their ontology was full and robust, teeming with life, not this mercantile, rationalistic, rectilinear arrangement that we call modernity. It was filled with animated

animacies. So it is with that understanding that I make the claim that what we rudely call insanity here might to them be a gift, an opening, an invitation to listen more instead of an invitation to put a band-aid and get back to progress as quickly as possible. Yeah, there's certainly been people who have suggested that the biblical prophets, were they around today, would probably be labeled schizophrenic and locked up. And yet we sort of have based, you know, 2000 years of culture upon them, you know, which raises all kinds of interesting questions. It makes me think of that classic Krishnamurti quote, which is, you know, it's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. And, you know, I think these questions are really interesting and difficult ones because if you are embedded in a profoundly sick society, you are still embedded in that society. And to not function in it can be a great suffering, you know? So, you know, we see what schizophrenia does. It is not, in a lot of cases, a benign condition for the people and the families who have it. And maybe in a world that was structured differently, we would be able to

nurture those gifts in some way. And that doesn't appear to be the world we inhabit. So then that makes how do you deal with and treat that I just find it a really interesting question, because on one hand, you're like, well, I want to honor the gifts this thing has, and I want to explore it and see what's in it. And then on the other hand, you're like, and I can't separate this person from their culture that they're embedded in right now in the society they live in. And so what is the best, quote, unquote, healing for that person in this state? It's just a very interesting thing to think about. This is one of the reasons I'm highly suspicious of notions of healing that are popular today. Well, don't let me use the phrase highly suspicious, but cautious about the

ways we use terms like wholeness and healing. And I don't know, think of any synonym. But the idea of healing is often a power move, a way of tethering ourselves to the familiar, right? It's a way of just like identity is a tracing. It's a snapshot of, just like identity is a tracing, it's a snapshot of a moment. We only deploy identity paradigms in a way to respond to an ecological constraint, right? Blackness wasn't blackness until it met a white modernity and it needed to stake its claims to equal rights, to equal values, to equal worth, all of that.

And so it said, this is what I am. I will be seen as equal in the eyes of the state. So identity is, of course, a power move, just as healing is, in a sense. It's a quest to be seen and recognized in particular ways. in a sense. It's a quest to be seen and recognized in particular ways. The thing is that that is dangerously, potentially malleable for fascism and fascist interests. Because once we think of ourselves as bodies within a containing environment, and we think of healing as adaptation to that environment, we could very well healing as adaptation to that environment, we could very well be adapting to circumstances that proliferate our incarceration in that environment. It's like, what if in some near future, to be well means to be well connected

to a laptop, right? Or some other device. But that device feeds on the environment. It's fueled by the demise, the equal side, the death of other species. But to be well, we need to be connected to that system or device. Then we run into problems, right? So I hear you when you say we need to live in this world, but I'm also not particularly given to the world as a world. I think there are worlds within worlds within worlds within worlds. Yes, yes. Right? And the world is a worlding, right? And so this is probably what might be heard as the performative potential of a crack or an illness or a sickness, you know,

of a crack or an illness or a sickness, you know, that something about that is, refuses to give itself to the world as it is and potentially links us to other worlds. Now, I'm not saying that it's romantic. I'm not saying that autism or just being autistic means that other worlds are immediately available. But I think that it's a line of flight. other worlds are immediately available. But I think that it's a line of flight. This is a Deleuzian concept from the French philosopher, that autism seems to be like a break away from sanity, right? From the rectilinearism of sanity, and potentially leads to other ways of being and becoming with the world. I could tell you the story of a man called Fernand Deligny, who was a French, probably never described himself man called Fernand Deligny, who was a French, probably never described himself as a philosopher or an artist, who was a provocateur on some term.

But he created this, he called it attempts or tentatives in French, you know, communities of interest where he refused to pathologize autism, especially of the nonverbal kind, and decided to listen, right, to follow these children as avatars of the not yet glimpsed new. Instead of trying to perpetuate an inclusionary politics by forcing them into what we already know, how about we co-create a transgressive politics? And my brother, I think that is what we might need to start paying attention to today, because we're stuck, and our sanity is getting us nowhere. I imagine then this is a question that you're living deeply into right now, which is, if you have a son who is labeled as autistic, right? And I know you do that hesitatingly,

but we've used that term, you've got to be wrestling with, to what extent do I try and help him adjust to this world? Because it's our children, right? I mean, we have this thing that's like, we've got a whole nother conversation about finding a home, right, that your whole book is about. We haven't even gotten there yet. Right. But, but I know from reading you how deeply making sure that your children are okay and home in the world and supported in the world is so important to you. So you've got this desire to honor who your son is and what those gifts are and what that brings forward and what that path of flight is for him. Right. And a desire to say, oh, and I've also got to make sure that once we're not here, he's taken care of. Yes. You must really be deep in not just thinking about these questions, but living them right now. It is paradoxical. It's not a contradiction, but the capacity to hold tensions.

Yeah. Right. Noticing on one hand, the risk of cure, the risk of a cure, right? Yeah. That when we speak about cures and restoration and justice, you risk perpetuating the known, right? Where it's cured you. Get away from your mutational possibilities and get back to what we already know, the figure that we already know. And this plays out in many forms of so-called pathologies, psychopathologies that we can name, species, disorder, and all of that, you know, you can name them. But on the other hand, you also want to

notice that no world sprouts intact from the previous, that every world is a local co-performing of possibilities. Like even capitalism. I do not think of capitalism as evil, right? Or modernity as something to be banished because modernity is not a pure concept, right? There's no thing called modernity. It's an analysis. That's right. It's speculative too, as well. But embedded in every worlding process, every terraforming politics is glimpses of what might yet be. So meeting my son is not about dragging him out pure and intact from the evil world that is so that he can thrive motionless and transcendent in a world that hasn't yet come. That's too puritanical for me. It's about meeting him halfway. Borrow the words of Karen Barad, meeting him halfway. So I really want to follow him.

My wife and I, our family is built around following him, our son, you know, and his line of flight that we also want to give him vitamin D. Yes. Right. Vitamin D and vitamin K2 and fish oil. Yes. So that his body and his gut can find some comfort with the foods of this planet. Right. So there is no pure liberation. There is only a

diffractive middling process. And that's the reason why some of our politics in its search for purity to sterilize the others tends to repeat and reproduce what it's trying to escape. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you two?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. God bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to

reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's change direction a little bit. I want to come to the idea that was at the heart of your book, and it was really this idea of finding a home for your daughter. You say,

I make a promise to give you a home, to work for your future, to love you with my darkness, to be the ground upon which you stand to greet a whole new world. I promise to be your father. You wrote a whole book about this, so me asking you to summarize this very quickly is unfair. But tell me a little bit about, as you went deeper into this, how the word home changed for you, or your idea of home changed for you. creation myth that the heavens populated by deities called Orishas, that at the beginning of the world, filled with waters through and through, no lands to be seen anywhere, a delegation of gods came down from heaven on a spider's web. down from heaven on a spider's web, the one that is called Obatala came with a calabash and filled with sand on one hand and a chicken on the other hand and descended on the spider's web. Don't ask me how. And the first thing that was done was to spread the sand, the soil, on the waters, and then to deploy this chicken to basically spread the sand.

And that's how you have the United States of America in a nutshell. I think I refer to this story because it's quite meaningful to me now, the dustiness of home. I started out that writing project, this book, with an idea of home as a permanent form of arrival, right? What instigated this was the loss of my father. And in my mind, he was perched somewhere in heaven, right? At least in the ways that I was retrospectively analyzing it, that he was somewhere in heaven, and heaven represented a form of utopian arrival. In the by and by, I will arrive home.

You know that song, this world is not my home. That's the best American accent I can pull. But yes, it was arrival. But by the end of the book, I was already failing at arriving. In a sense, the book is an ethnography of failure. That even my promise to my daughter is already failed, in a sense. That I cannot provide her a final home.

I cannot provide her absolute security. I cannot protect her from everything. I cannot do all the things that I think I want to do as a father. In fact, I don't even know if I can turn myself a father. I can barely call myself a father. Maybe I'm a becoming father. Because at the middle and at the end of the book, my conception of home was written as having shifted, right? It had changed to become something else. Home no longer as what lies at the end of time, but home as the middling temporality, as the ongoingness of being in the mess, right? That even our failure to make a home is some kind of homemaking practice that might remind us of a chicken surrounded by messy waters, spreading

sand everywhere in the hope of, right? So it's like the book is about the failure to arrive because as those who have read the book, the book ends with a plot twist, and I might just say it because I don't care at this point, that the person who had been speaking and narrating the book, me, all this time was dead, right? I'm dead, and I'm speaking to my daughter from the wind, and I never found the final material to make the ritual that will guarantee her home. Just like Freya, the goddess, never really found everything to guarantee her son, Baldur's safety. Right? There was something missing.

And in this book, it ends with a crack. Something is missing. And that's home to me. Something is always going to be missing. Yeah, you have a line. Home is such a slippery concept. She misbehaves, she shrinks and then vanishes in the tightening grip of your efforts to own her. Yes, that's foregrounding right there. understanding the, you know, the Buddhist term is impermanence, but that just makes it sound like, well, nothing really lasts, which is true. But the deeper understanding there is more of what we're speaking about here is that literally everything is becoming in every moment and you simply can't pin it down. I mean, we try and we think we have, but if we look a little bit more

deeply, we're like, nope. You know, I love that metaphor. It's like a chicken spreading sand. I mean, it's just nothing to really grab on. And you talk a lot in the book about home. You also get into this idea and you've referenced it eight different ways in this conversation. And every time you use slightly different words, which I love, they're all very poetic. You say the middle isn't the space between things. It is the world and its ongoing practices of world in itself, right? The middle is now. Yes. I use the middle a lot to signal not just the middle passage of the transatlantic slave trade fame, but that we're all here and our ontologies that are anxious about where did we come from?

As interesting as they are, right? How might things end finally? Like, is it a big bang or a creation event? Or is it a big whimper, you know, at the end of time? And I think those questions are products. It's not to say that those things we should not give attention to, but to notice that they are co-produced by and within the middle, which is where we are. That history is, the past is a production of the present and future politics and the future is

always produced in the here and now, in the thick now. You know, to conceive of a politics that is dedicated not so much to the vanishing future. As it seems, modernity is an orientation to a singularity out there, right? Sometimes we might merge technology and flesh finally together, and then when I want to be happy, I could switch on my happy button, right? Or something. I could feel a high just by punching in some code. All of that is created here and now. And we need a politics that focuses on what we're missing right here, right now.

That doesn't look so much into the transcendent but focuses and appreciates the imminent the imminence of time the imminence of the sacred right now here that God is here in a sense and we should conference together your descriptions of yourself are fascinating and they seem to change from time to time. They do. Currently on Twitter, you've got a nice little list here. Some of them are pretty normal. Speaker, Republican, intellectual, professor, poet. I'm curious about the last two that are listed right now, though. Anything you want to say about them? One is recovering psychologist, and the last one is fugitive. So I'm open to hearing about either of those, or both. I mean, the way that I speak about recovering from my art, from my science, is mainly to recognize that psychology is the policeman of

capitalism, right? What it does well is to situate the individual, the fetish of the individual. What it wants to do is to build a society around the individual, the isolated, dissociated self. And I, of course, don't mean to subsume or collapse different ideas of psychology under the one notion of psychology. But it seems historically psychology and its gravity has lent itself to the perpetuation of the isolated self, the determined self, thought as usual. And that is pretty, pretty a good deal for capitalism, which wants consumers isolated. You know know it needs a consumer society consumption eternal and for that it needs isolated boundaries and selves and so i describe myself politically

as a recovering psychologist not to dismiss the hard work and the contributions that are ongoing in that field but to notice to bracket psychology as a colonial and colonizing concept, to say that it has boundaries that are always cross-cultural or culturally closed rather, and that to think of the self as a universalizing trope is to miss out on all the things that are happening within the boundaries that we call selves, right? And you can even listen to someone within the field who is often understood as the father of archetypal psychology, James Hillman, that the psyche is not in the body, is not within the mind. Instead, the psyche exceeds the mind. It exceeds the body. What happens when we think about the world in that way then then it means that we are in an

alien situation rather and to think of politics economics you know spirituality as just what we are doing we're missing out on all the fun and the terror right so recovering psychologist means that i was trained in western arts that may not be locally relevant to my people. It means that we need new psychologies. We need new ways of thinking about the self, especially in times when our best efforts to produce results that meet our times, you know, only perpetuates it. And that also describes fugitivity. My escape or my attempts to escape the plantation and its colonizing efforts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block

your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back

the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer and you never know who's going to drop by mr brian cranson is with us how are you hello my friend wayne knight about jurassic park wayne knight welcome to really no really sir bless you all hello newman and you never know when howie mandel might just stop by to talk about judging really

that's the opening really no really yeah no really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go back to the psychology thing for a second, because there would be two ideas that came to mind as you were talking about that. And I suspect you mean both, but I'm going to

go a little deeper here. You talk about psychology being this focused on this isolated individual self. And I think there are two ways to interpret that. One being to take that self out of its greater context is going to harm it. It harms the organism to consider it on its own, not as part of its entire context, ecosystem, all that. So I think that's one. The other would be to say that it constitutes an idea interior-wise of the self as a singular thing when what the self actually might be is this multitude. The latter sense is about essentialism in a way. It's about the kernel of the self is within. It's a ghost in a shell. It's the spirit and machine of the flesh. And the former sense is that we are always making cuts. By cuts, I mean, in the words of agential realism, we are always making performative distinctions between ourselves

and the others and the environment. And we need those distinctions. I don't mean to perpetuate some nonsense that we need to live in entanglement. No, we need definitions and we need distinctions. I don't mean to perpetuate some nonsense that we need to live in entanglement. No, we need definitions and we need distinctions, but they always come at a risk. So where modernity defines at least one strand of modernity might define the self is at the tip of our fingers, right? This organic conglomeration of flesh is the self. And it is distinct from the ground I'm walking on. It is distinct from the chair that I'm sitting in. And that may be cross-culturally different from a different way of seeing the world that invites us to notice that furniture is part of what it means to be a self.

That when you dream, for instance, your dream is not your own. It is part of some grazing collective conscious or unconscious that is enlisting your mind as part of its mattering. So there are different notions of where we draw a line. Modernity just seems to draw a line at a particular place. And that's fine, except that it comes with risks. Now, because we've drawn a line between us and the cybernetic patterns in the environment,

we now see the environment as instrumental to our goals, to our imperatives. And as a result, we are at the anthropocene, so-called. As a result, we are at the anthropocene, so-called. So the thing then is the question of what can bodies do to quote Baruch Spinoza and the age-old philosophical dilemma of how do we identify a self? What does it mean to be a self, right? So the question then is not how we leave our bodies behind and go into some misty, muddled, undefined mess. We need new definitions. We need new lines, new cuts in the fabric of becoming.

And until we learn to do that, until the prosthetic bursts into the thesis of our being, we will continue to perpetuate a paradigm of stockness as we are in. We're all of a sudden back to the ship of Theseus a little bit, right? Yes, yes. Metaphysical identity, yes. What makes up me and how much of me needs to change? Right. You know, at what point do I cease to be me? Or, you know, at what point am I more of me? And it gets back to this idea that, to me, the clearest way to appreciate any of it is as this sense of this unfolding process.

Right. You know, that we are far more complicated, both interior and our exterior dependencies, than most of us ever realize. Yes. Work with me a moment. realize. Yes. Work with me a moment. If we are composed, I think I'm getting the numbers right, of 30 trillion cells and we lose 500 million a day, right? Thereabout, I think. Imagine that Eric is no longer a stable concept, right? Yep. He never has been. Never has been. I think lots of people would agree with that, but no, I'm making a joke. I hear the double entendre there.

Yes. That Eric is a fading away. Eric has always been a becoming other, a becoming something else, a becoming tree, a becoming rock. Your cells are participating in things that you have no control over right now. The dust from your cells, your skin, nails, all of that becoming something else. What if I were to gather in seven years, hypothetically, the dust of your becoming, right? All these cells and somehow with some magic gizmo stuff,

compose a new Eric, right? From the dust of your becoming, which would be the new Eric or which would be Eric? Who's the real Eric then? Is it the one I've just composed about this? That's the thesis ship metaphor, right? It's how do we allocate identity? I think a way of thinking about it is that processual becoming exceeds identity. Once we start to speak about identity, we're always at a loss. Identity is only a snapshot or a trace of a murmuration of possibilities, right? So the question is already inadequate. The question about identity is already missing something because of the inadequacy or the not inadequacy, the promiscuity of becoming, always fading into something different.

To circle back around to the term of healing, I think is interesting, right? Because healing or wholeness, we're going back to some state of where we weren't broken. And this makes a lot of sense in certain ways. If we take somebody who is, say, suffered a great trauma, right? We want to heal that person. But we have this tendency to say, it's this very interesting thing I noticed, which is that, like, let's take somebody who suffered a great trauma and they will look and they will go, well, there's some essential me that didn't have that trauma in it.

And yes, there was a you before that trauma occurred. But to assume that we could just erase that part of you, it's like we often take the bad things that happen to us and we go, oh, we need to get rid of those pieces of us without recognizing that the good things, it all conditions who we are. There is no essential me that I just can pull these certain parts out of and get back to the more essential. Yes. We're always this stew of infinite causes and conditions. And again, this gets back to not being so binary in one way or the other,

because we certainly would say, yes, if you've suffered a great trauma, like let's work on healing, right? Right. You know, so I'm not saying that that's not it. But I think it is also to recognize that at any moment in life, you are a sum of the causes and conditions that have been inside you and around you. Right. When you talked about healing, you know, it made me think about returning somebody to the way they were. And it made me think about I'm a recovering alcoholic and heroin addict. And there was an idea that a lot of people, I think they approach their recovery journey with like, let me just get this thing under control and behind me so I can get back to

life as normal. I don't know why. I don't know the reasons. But for whatever reason, early on in that process for me, I really saw that this was not me going back to who I was before. This recovery process was really launching me into on this path of flight. It was taking me to a new possibility for myself that had never been seen before. It's transmutational, but it's how bodies become different. I was reading recently about how a

certain species of monkey, I can't quite remember the species involved here, heals itself when it's wounded by rubbing the wound against some worms or something like that. It's hazy right now. I think I was reading it while sleeping or about to sleep. But that idea is what I would call the convexity of the wound, right? We often think about wounds as concave, right? The concavity. It's a break into the individual. It's an invasion of the individual. And then the negative space that has been created is what needs to be quickly patched up. And then we imagine that the body does this on its own, preserving the selfhood of the self. But every wound, every opening is already a political project. Like a monkey going on an ethnography

or going on a cartography of healing by going to the same places, right? Going to worms or going to river or something like that. That every opening, every biological opening is already a political possibility or recovery. And that helps me to understand that healing is not just a fait accompli. It is somehow coterminous with larger political realities and possibilities that sometimes might be so risky that they restore the familiar, because it's about the same way we approach ecology, the same way we approach the environment, and that restores the image that we're used to, right? Speaking about the familiar. So the way of the monster comes in when we refuse to some degree not to patch things up, not to rush into a solution. When we ask new questions, that leads us off that trail, that well-beaten track that may not be identified as healing to any degree,

but takes us to a different path of possibility where that opening in the flesh can be tended to in a different way. For instance, instead of patching things up, it becomes a ritualized opening that becomes the possibility for different speciation or different ways of meeting a tree or different ways of meeting each other, right? Just in the same way a fungal pathogen became a delicacy in Mexico, right? With Tlacote, a disease, instead of healing it, it became food, right? This is how the world differentiates itself. And I think that's the calling of our time. At least barely glimpsed and heard that don't rush back into healing.

Don't rush into the immurement of security. Maybe you might want to pay attention to what this pathogen is doing, other than disturbing your convenient modernity. Maybe you want to listen deeper in a different way. How do we be with that uncertainty or indeterminacy? Like we talked about with you and your son, right? You guys are in the midst of some of that, right? Right. We're living that question now. How do you do pedagogy of it is a question of our times, right? It's subsidized by the movements today, by the impasses today, by the problems we have with cyclicity. Hence, we start to think maybe the way to go is not the way to go. And so it becomes available to thought to think about alternatives, right? There's something pedagogically compelling about it. But there's also, I think for me, a socio-material force that makes some disabilities impossible to cure and demanding of a different kind of attention, right?

Like we've quickly put death in a family way. Death is this black box that we cannot cure. And so we've made it part of the furniture of our experiences. We have coffins and graveyards, right? So it's part of the furniture of modernity. I'm speaking about those moments when the furniture moves, right? And we don't know what to do with it. We don't know how to think about it. I think in those explosive moments, different

movements and engagements and modes of attention become possible. That's not to say they will succeed in their attending, but it's a glimpse of the new. It's a glimpse of possibility. When the pandemic hit, a guy in Kerala, here in India, put up an altar and called it an altar to the Corona goddess, which the scientific authorities scorned, laughed at, and said, this is rubbish. This is primitive. We shouldn't attend to this this way. What we should do is come up with a vaccine, cure this issue. Right. But something about that was a Deleuzian flight away from the conventional.

He was worshipping this virus as a goddess, as a possibility, as a divinity, as messianic. And there's so many possibilities in that. I think he may have been pressured that he closed down the whole enterprise. I don't know. But that speaks to how the new and novelty happens that in an explosive emergence or eruption of new thinking, the familiar is resilient and will often do its best to put it back in a family way. Right? Come back here. Where are you going? Sure.

You errant limb. Like, there are only two arms allowed here. Where's the third? There's no space for a third arm, right? Or a third eye. Yeah. Right? So it does its best to quarantine the monstrous.

But sometimes the monstrous exceeds its cage. And those moments are what I would think of as a making sanctuary, attending to novelty. I think what's interesting about this idea of an altar to something like coronavirus, and let's just take out the specificity and say an altar to the new and the difficult, is that, you know, part of the reason we have an altar is that we keep showing up to it, right? We keep devoting ourselves to it. That's some of what we were just talking about, about how do you do this, right? Is that you keep turning towards. I just spent the weekend in Florida visiting my father who is declining quickly from Alzheimer's. And that's a disease that has been around my life for my partner's mom. I've

been around a lot of it lately. I have a desire to explain it, escape it, get away from it. You know, I mean, you talk about questions of identity, right? You watch somebody with Alzheimer's. For me, I start to see like, well, okay, their familiar sense of who they are going away, their familiar sense of what the world actually away, their familiar sense of what the world actually is and what's actually happening in the world is very, very different, you know? And for me, I watch it and I'm like, this is what our brains are doing all the time. You'll see somebody with Alzheimer's just immediately, instantaneously spin a story about what just happened. And that story, from a rational

perspective, you can look at it and go, no, that's not correct. Like, I just sat here and watched what happened, and that is not what happened. But they construct the story instantly, and they believe it completely. And I find it fascinating because I look at that and I go, that's what my brain is doing. It may be doing it slightly more, quote unquote, accurately at the moment, but that is absolutely what it's doing. It is drawing on its memories, its associations, whatever bubbles up into this, and it's creating a story out of it and it's believing it completely. So my point with all this is this whole thing makes me decidedly uncomfortable and I keep

sort of trying to turn towards it as an altar in a way to think about like, what's here for me in this? You know, what is the piece of this that's giving me something? I don't like the word learn because it's deeper than that. But you get what I'm saying. I do. I can remember the anthropological account that described and tried to distinguish between altars and shrines. Shrines are always devoted to things that we already know, and altars are basically gifts to the unknown, right? Ah, okay. To alter, I hear myself speak about alterations,

that an altar is a mark to the difficult. It's a mark to the place where God has visited. And in response to our prayers for blessing, he punched us in the face or smote our thighs and dislodged it. Smote our thighs. Is that the right, is that the correct past tense of smite i'm not familiar with smiting or smoting thighs smitten smited smote well is is that biblical account of jacob running away from his brother and he prays to god for a blessing wrestling with god and god smites his thigh, smites specifically. It doesn't just punch it, but smites the thing.

And so I often say that Jacob walked in there with confident gait, but he left with a limp, right? And there's something about those broken edges that invites novelty, the new, and different ways of paying attention. novelty, the new, and different ways of paying attention. I would say, you know, in that regard, that maybe the brokenness of Alzheimer's presents us with new names, new ways of naming things, new ways of meeting the transitory, transient, ephemeral nature of the world. And in spite of the fact that it registers to us, you know, in our convenient positioning as proper subjects, as a pathology, that maybe there's something about it that might very well link up with what a colleague of mine, Lewis Halsman, calls the joy of Alzheimer's. That there's something that is available in that disabling moment,

that crack in completeness that invites an altar, an altar, a place of falling apart, a place of humility. But your question really is how do we get there, right? How do we alter things this way? How do we come to this moment? And I would say the answer is somewhere in everything I've said, that the conditions are not always possible. We're dealing with territorial forces here, right? Novelty is the concatenation of multiple agencies,

not human ones, right? The new does not ride on the back of our manifestos or our genius. It comes in delible, sometimes inadvertent and unspeakable moments. It might come between other species entirely that have nothing to do with the human. Right. But we're dealing with principalities and powers in a sense. But there are some times, and I don't want to reduce everything to the intelligible, but there are some times when the world shifts in such a way that it gives us room to approach the altar or to make an altar. And this is what I mean by making sanctuary. I'm using the physical dimensionality of the middle age sanctuary project, which is a way of tending to criminals by offering a sense of disruption in the landscape. A church became a home to a fugitive, to the accused person. And if that accused person held a part of the church

and claimed sanctuary, then they could be given some rest away from their accusers. And everyone who accused them was forbidden to enter into the place of the holy or into the sacred to drag them out. It sometimes happened, of course, but the idea was to claim sanctuary is to be immune for a while, is to be exiled from your condition, which means that the landscape was no longer flat. There was a bump, you know, in the landscape that was over the modern, right? We don't have claiming sanctuary projects now. We have lawyers and courts and judges and prisons, you see. But I'm thinking about making sanctuary in these times. Now, making sanctuary to me does not mean rushing to safety. It's about how do we, who are the church in this instance, the metaphorical church, the institution of bodies, of the known,

of the familiar. When a fugitive rushes into our midst, how do we cater to this fugitive? How do we cater to a virus? How do we cater to Alzheimer's? How do we cater to the middling monstrosity of a mental illness, so to speak? How do we stay with that moment? How do we wash the feet of the virus and listen to it as if it were an agent of change? And that's the politics of the moment. There's no answer to making sanctuary. There's only an invitation to convene around cracks, right? To convene around Alzheimer's, to convene around the places that modernity has not finished with its closure so that we might perhaps perhaps brother perhaps happen upon new worlds well i think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up to perhaps find our way to new worlds i love it

perhaps perhaps yes that's a key word there. There's no guarantee. Or even partially. Even partially. I mean, everything shows up in parts. That's the thing right there. Bayo, thank you so much. I'm so glad we got to do this. It's a pleasure. So nice to connect. And I appreciate you staying up late to do this because you're in India currently and it is late into the evening for you. So I appreciate your time. Thank you very much, brother, for the conversation. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

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