E217 - David Whyte: The Conversational Nature of Reality

David Whyte (0:00)

The human voice is so powerful, someone using language in a generous way can really bring the best out of us, but we often will close our ears to another person's voice. A lot of conversations are not conversations at all, it's just me waiting for a gap so that I can fire off this invisible pile of ammunition. You can't hear anything but your own voice, and the rest of the world actually can't find you.

André Duqum (0:24)

Right now, we live in a culture that is in many ways attention deficit.

David Whyte (0:28)

It's really just about paying attention to things other than yourselves. So why not just fall silent? It's because you feel you're going to die, that's why. You feel as if your identity is falling apart. But it's actually almost the opposite. In the silence, I realized that every part of the world was speaking back to me, the animals and landscapes and plants and trees and the ocean. You can have that also with your partner or your daughter in the kitchen in the morning. The conversation is going to look back at a part of you that you might not have looked at for a long time. Everything's alive. Everything is waiting for you.

Just be on yourself. It's where you need to be. Just turn your face towards it. Just fall even in the direction in which you're supposed to go.

And the first step I always say is stop.

André Duqum (1:24)

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today trained as a marine zoologist and spent over nearly two years as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos. He's one of the most globally decorated and cherished authors. He's a treasure of wisdom and his books, 12 poetry, 5 prose, really give great insight into the conversational nature of reality itself. David Whyte, thank you for being here.

David Whyte (1:55)

It's a pleasure.

André Duqum (1:56)

The pleasure is absolutely mine.

I thought we could start with words themselves. As you describe them, they could be turned against us, used as weapons, or they can be leveraged as a greater means to gain access into reality itself. I would love for you to share in your own words about words themselves. Yeah, yeah.

David Whyte (2:19)

You know, when we're children, and we're very small children, and we're first learning whatever language we're growing in, when you hear a word, it's not about something. It is the thing itself. And when you hear the word door, as a child, you immediately have a physical apprehension of the door itself. And it carries everything that doors hold, being closed, being open, hiding something, being a portal to something larger. It depends on the doors in your house too, as to whether they hold fear, or they hold love and invitation, or more often something of both. So I do feel that our later use of language is often an abstraction of how we first came across it and how it first arrived in our bodies. So you could say that poetry is the art of reestablishing that direct, the direct presence of language in the body.

And speaking of the word doorway, as a doorway to your next dispensation of understanding in your life, and the next emancipation of your character, of your ability to be generous with the gifts that you were given. And you're going to give a lot of those gifts through the way you speak, and the way you make invitations, and the way you hold the conversation of life.

André Duqum (4:10)

That understanding that we are sort of passed down words and then we live inside this abstraction. Nobody really defined for us.

When you say that poetry is sort of a doorway to like rediscover these words, can you say a little bit more about how often we're living in an abstraction where we haven't defined? We're through around words like love, consciousness, home.

And it's a medium we both traffic in. In this podcast, it's something that I'm increasingly gaining more, putting more attention to, right? An artist or a painter will study the medium in which they're using of paint. And I, in my past, have not given as much weight to exploring words themselves as doorways in your words. And so, I'd like to set that framing a bit more.

David Whyte (5:04)

Yes, and the human voice is so powerful. And we often will close our ears and ourselves to another person's voice because we don't want that voice in our bodies, actually. Because the voice actually travels not only through the ears, but all the resonant bones in our head. And if you look at the phenomenology of hearing, it's not just the timpani in the ears. We listen with our whole bodies, actually. And it's transmitted through the whole body. So, someone we love or someone we fear speaking can affect our stomach almost immediately, can affect our way of being. And on the other side of it, it can also, someone using or embodying language in a generous way, can really bring the best out of us here, can make an invitation to us that we didn't realize we wanted or deserved.