Krista Tippett: Welcome back to this course on hope. We follow Naomi Shihab Nye with another writer, Ocean Vuong. He is, like her, a teacher with words and about words. And they both illustrate an idea that I love of the ancient rabbis that I experience to be true: that words make worlds. Or to make that more active: we create worlds with our words. We also have a power to destroy with our words. We can make someone’s day or break someone’s day with our words. They are muscles of such force. And if hope is to be defining and forceful in the world we have to remake ahead of us, we must also speak hope into being.

Ocean Vuong is such a fascinating and singular person. He has become extraordinarily important in American letters as a poet, as a novelist, as an essayist. And he did not learn to read until after he was 11. There is a great deal of dyslexia in his family. And his family had immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam, and survived war and refugee camps to get here. And I notice that often, when people describe Ocean’s writing, they describe it as an opus that chronicles the survival of violence. And that is true. But I’d also say that the sweep of his work is about bearing witness to the other side of violence and the possibility of joy while taking nothing away and continuing to bear witness to the fullness of what was carried and what has been survived. And that, I would say, is the quality and content of the hope that I think Ocean carries — embodies.

It’s interesting — I asked him about the spirituality of his childhood, and he talked about how spirituality in his home began with care rooted in physical bodies. And he mentioned that in temples and even in many Asian-American households, certainly in his, when you enter the house, you take off your shoes. This, too, is a spiritual act. It’s an act of respect — I’m going to take off my shoes to enter something, someplace important. He’s echoing Naomi here. He said, “I’m going to give you my best self.”

And Ocean said, “I think, even consciously, when I read or give lectures or when I teach, I lower my voice. I want to make my words deliberate. I want to take off the shoes of my voice so that I can enter a place with care so that I can do the work that I need to do.”

What a thing to learn from.

So here’s a little bit of my conversation with him. I think you’ll hear, as you experience his voice, that he has taken the shoes off his voice. And there’s a lot to learn in these next few moments.

Tippett: The language of energy — and you use a lot of energy metaphors and imagery for how you work with words and how words work in us.

Ocean Vuong: As a species, as life on Earth, we’ve been dying for millennia. But I don’t think energy dies. It’s transformed. And when you’re using language, you can create it, use it to divide people and build walls, or you can turn it into something where we can see each other more clearly, as a bridge. And that notion that you are a participant in the future of language is something I think our American education failed us. Language is always changing. And I think it’s the poets, the writers, and even the youth — they’re using language to cast new meaning, in the same way Chaucer just winged English spelling. There was no standardized spelling.

Tippett: [laughs] Right; right.

[laughter]

Vuong: He was like, “Spring? S-p-r-y-u-g? Sure.”

[laughter]

[laughs] “Let’s try it out.”

And I think the way language exists is similar to — when I was in Hartford, we were surrounded by these abandoned buildings, these old factories. The Colt gun factory was in Hartford, and it sold weapons to both sides during the Civil War. And we would go into these abandoned warehouses just to play and explore, and I remember seeing these old, warped windows, the glass just melting, and looking through at my city, the city I thought I knew so well, through this glass. It was so surreal. Everything changed. Everything was warped. And to me, that’s what language is: the glass. You think it’s fixed. You think it’s clear pane of glass. But, in fact, through years, it starts to drip and melt and change.

Tippett: Even that notion that language is clear, even this presumption that we walk around making — that what we mean when we use any word transmits perfectly to another.

Vuong: We often tell our students, “The future’s in your hands.” But I think the future is actually in your mouth.

[laughter]

You have to articulate the world you want to live in, first. We pride ourselves as a country that’s very technologically advanced. We have strong, good sciences, good schools, very advanced weaponry, for sure — but I think we’re still very primitive in the way we use language and speak.

I grew up in New England, and I heard boys talk about pleasure as conquest. “I bagged her. She’s in the bag. I owned it. I owned that place. I knocked it out of the park. I went in there, guns blazing. Go knock ‘em dead. Drop dead gorgeous. Slay — I slayed them. I slew them.” What happens to our imagination when we can only celebrate ourselves through our very vanishing? And so I think, what happens if we alter our language? Where would our future be? Where will we grow towards?

[music]

Tippett: That question — what happens if we alter our language? Where would our future be? Where will we grow towards? I keep thinking, as I’m delving into Ocean and the question of hope, the question of cultivating hope, I keep interestingly thinking of this clinical psychologist I interviewed years ago, Michael McCullough, who has identified that both destructive and restorative, lifegiving impulses are hardwired in us. So we are hardwired — our brains and bodies are hardwired. They’re hardwired for revenge, and they are also hardwired for forgiveness. We are hardwired for violence, and we are hardwired for compassion.

The difference between which one of those finds expression, he said, is in the conditions we create. And the truth is that there’s a lot in our culture that creates the conditions for revenge or violence to be more likely. And if we want forgiveness or compassion to be more likely — I’m gonna add, if we want hope to be more likely — we have to create the conditions for it to be more possible.

And that feels so resonant with what Ocean is describing — that we are so fluent in the sensibility and imagination and atmosphere of violence with our words. And so part of the work of making hope more reasonable and more possible is going to be putting more vivid, intentional language out there to illustrate its reality and its possibilities, and to do this thing I keep talking about — to start orienting us and orienting the atmosphere of our cultures, both microcultures and the larger culture.

The invitation here is pretty simple. It is first of all to really pay attention to the words you use, the words you engage, and the worlds these words are actively bringing into being and sustaining — to imagine the possibility of building a vocabulary of muscular hope, which to me is just saying, building a vocabulary of the strength and the possibility of life, a vocabulary that makes the conditions more likely for what is lifegiving and redemptive.

As you move through your days and your interactions — and I do this after I listen to Ocean, every time — start to notice all the death metaphors that come so naturally, so blithely, and start to shift them, and feel what that starts to shift in you. And also, how will you move even through the most ordinary exchanges, if you take in Ocean’s wisdom that the future is in your mouth? We will meditate on these things in Part 2.

I hope you’ll listen to Part 3, as well. This conversation with Ocean was really my last memory of life in public before the world changed. We actually spoke in New York City the day that a state of emergency around the pandemic was first decreed, but it hadn’t penetrated yet. And none of us in this crowded room full of podcasters had any idea about what we were about to experience — how everything was about to change. And yet, in the course of this conversation — and we’re giving you the whole conversation as Part 3 — Ocean asked questions like, “What would you store up if the apocalypse were coming?” He also asked how to live a life worthwhile of our breath.

Lots to work with here. And I will see you again when you’re ready.