Interview with Joe Meeker

November 7, 2001

"I think play is the most important spiritual experience we can have."

I called Joe from Oxford on a rainy November night. It was morning in Vashon Island, Washington, where he lives and a bright sunny one at that! We spoke for 45 minutes and the conversation ranged through a number of topics which have been central to Joe's work. At present, Joe is working on a book called The Comedy of Evolution which will be a sequel to his earlier work. The Comedy of Survival.

Joe is currently a member of the Graduate Faculty of the Union Institute and University. He has worked in higher education for over forty years, and has published a number of books and articles. To read more about him, go to his home page.

In this conversation we talked about the comic and tragic traditions, the power of play, and responses to September 11. Joe gave insight into his creative process and the ways in which he sees the evolving future of humans and the world.

 

 

LVG: I was thinking about things to come to me from your work and certainly play is at the heart of so much of it. I was wondering how you came to understand all of that. Where did play arise for you? Our of your work in biology or your work in literature, or just your general sense of life?

JM: Have you read the third edition of The Comedy of Survival?

LVG: I have. That is the one I have.

JM: Well that tells something about my genealogy and my past. My grandfathers-

LVG: So you have a little bit of both of them.

JM: A little bit of both of them. But I've been emphasizing my paternal grandfather because he's the one who played. And the one who worked was the one I used when I was hustling in my career. The one who played satisfied me as a more mature adult (laughing). But I came to this through the comedy study. When I realized that play is the way you put the comic spirit in action. And it was quite an "ah-ha" for me, a realization and it became for me a guide as to how one ought to live one's life. So I think play is the most important spiritual experience we can have.

LVG: There was a beautiful article in the newspaper we get here today about a community center in Liverpool and the guy who's running it, has been running it since the 60s and basically offers a haven for play in the community and sets up games for people. He calls them "un-children's games." So, musical chairs has been replaced with musical squares with a goal that they take away a square each time, but no players are ever out. So it's how do you get 30 people on the last square? (laughing) And he just put out a book of all of his games which sound wonderful. He said that people in the community stop in just when they need to be rejuvenated. So there's some cultural movement towards play - at least here.

JM: Well, yes, I think there is. We're in need of it. The problem is right now we have moved from a comic mode into a tragic mode.

LVG: Will you talk a little more about that? You were talking about it at graduation and I thought it was such a wonderful way of looking at post September 11 America.

JM: Yes, I think it began earlier. A year ago this week with the election. When we got polarized. Split right down the middle, and we elected somebody who prefers the polarized world and then the natural result of that is to go to war. And that I think is going to dominate us for the foreseeable future. We are in a tragic period.

LVG: How do you think the world mindset changes back to the comic mindset? What does it take?

JM: It's difficult, so difficult. When comedy and tragedy are at odds with one another, tragedy almost always wins because it's simpler. It tells you who the bad guy is and who the good guy is. And asks you to side up on one side or the other. Comedy is not that way. Comedy asks you to look at the whole picture and see some of the complexity of it. And develop a strategy, not just a battle plan. A strategy. So, in a comic way of life, you have to be flexible. In a tragic way of life, you don't have to be flexible, you just have to be strong.

LVG: It's not a good place to be at the moment.

JM: It's terrible. I think we're going to have to wait for a change in world leadership before we find anything else. It's odd. It seems to wonderful to think back on a year and a half ago when our biggest problems were sex scandals (laughing). That's comic!

LVG: You're absolutely right. As opposed to know where all the language is tragic.

JM: Yes. Every time Bush opens his mouth, he talks about someone being evil. When you've got someone talking about evil, you're in a preacher mentality.

LVG: It's much nice over here (England). The media is less rah-rah and very critical of the language being used. So there are long pieces in the paper about the use of language to polarize people. And they're not supporting it. Not so much the actions, but the way Bush goes about doing things is not supported here at all.

JM: I don't think he will be in the long-run at all. In the history of what he's doing it's very, very bad. Western nations have been going into the Middle East for a thousand years or more.

LVG: And not doing very well at it-

JM: Never. They have never accomplished what they set out to do.

LVG: I've been doing some work on Young Adult Fiction as of late and I'm interested in books that appeal to people in the age range of maybe 9-12.

JM: Like Harry Potter.

LVG: Harry Potter isn't what interested me, although I really enjoyed the books. I found that one of my reactions to September 11 was going back to reading favorite books which all come out of that period. Lloyd Alexander's Prydain or Madeline L'Engle's which I think are some of the best uses of science in children's literature.

JM: Yes.

LVG: I was writing out the elements of what makes a good story and I realized it all had to do with the comedy of survival. All of these stories end with the character surviving and not killing evil, but learning to deal with it. And becoming compassionate. I wondered if you had any thoughts as to why that literature, or the importance of literature for that age group in light of the comic tradition.

JM: Well, I think stories of survival are the ones we tell naturally. I was in Santa Cruz at the time of the San Francisco earthquake, and it was wonderful for the year after that. Every place you went, in the checkout line, or talking to someone on the street, they would say, "where were you?" and they would tell you where they were, and then they would tell you how they survived the earthquake. Sometimes they were heroic stories, sometimes they were funny stories, but they were always stories of "how I survived" and they just kept getting better with each story being told over and over again. They found the right metaphor, the right language, And those are the stores we need to tell one another. How you get by in difficult times. They're the most natural things in the world for us. They are healthy stories.

LVG: What stories are influential to you? Do you have literature that you go back to again and again - pieces that either changed the way you saw your world or confirmed the way you saw your world?

JM: Oh my. I'm standing here looking at my bookshelves on which there are maybe 10,000 books (laughing).

LVG: Say you had to pick ten - real books of your heart.

JM: Montaigne would be high on the list. The Essays of Montaigne are wonderful. I love Thomas Mann. I love Proust and Joyce. I go back to them again and again. I love Rabelais. I like irreverent books (laugh). I like forbidden books. I like books that take me to other places and put me in a context that I've never experienced and let me see the world from a new, fresh perspective. I reread the poetry of Li Po over and over again. I don't find myself going back to Greek tragedy expect when I need an example of something. I don't get pleasure from it. That's not true. I can see a performance of Hamlet and I find myself thinking like Hamlet for the next two weeks (laughs).

LVG: When I was looking at the Children's Literature, I realized how picaresque it is. One think leads to the next think. You don't have that preordained sense of Fate hanging over the character. You, the reader, don't know what's going to happen next in the story. The character seems to have no clue as to what's happening in the story. Everyone seems to find out at the same time. I know you talk a little bit about that in The Comedy of Survival. How do you see it as relating as a form? Is that a more natural storytelling form and it's gotten lost in the overstructuralization of the novel since Defoe?

JM: I think the center of that is the center of what we consider tragic. The sense of being alone, of being lost and having no one to protect you and instead of simply pitying yourself, realizing that since you are lost, you have to rely upon yourself. It's that discovery of self-reliance that is at the center of the picaresque tradition. The recognition that no one is out there to take care of you. And that therefore, you need to use your wits. You need to appraise the situation and have an accurate read in and of it and be able to respond accordingly to the situation. And it's that sense of being alone in the world, that rather than being a negative perception becomes a positive. "Since I am alone, I am responsible. And since I am responsible, I have to know the conditions around me and respond appropriately." That is the essence of the picaresque vision. Basically, it is the situation, I think, that every other animal is in, too. All the mammals share that with us. That sense of being on their own and needing to read their circumstances and context accurately and find a way to take care of themselves, according to the dynamics of what's going on all around. That is the ad-libbing, improvising that is a playful part of the picaresque.

LVG: How much does your study of biology infuse your understanding of literature?

JM: (Laughing)

LVG: Which informs the other or are they so intertwined that it is impossible to say?

JM: The study of science in general and biology in particular is that it is about wanting to know accurately what forces are governing your environment. Science is our best way to do that. You've got to be oriented to the knowledge of your own time. And I don't mean the news. The news doesn't do it. But science does. It gives you a credible basis for making judgments and for deciding how to live.

LVG: Last time I say you, you had been reading work on metaphor.

JM: It's a book by Terry Deacon, called The Symbolic Species.

LVG: What do you think of the relationships between the way we create language and our sense of survival? Are we "The Poetic Species?"

JM: Well that leads into what I'm working on now called The Comedy of Evolution. What I believe is that the things that really matter in evolutionary history are the things that introduce novelty into the system. The catastrophes don't matter, plagues, wars and even extinctions of species don't make much difference in the evolutionary picture. The things that do make a difference are the things that are introduced as novelty. Like sexual reproduction and photosynthesis and language. Language is the human contribution to evolutionary history. I think we are the only animal that does it. Terry Deacon's book is a wonderful exploration of how we do that and how unique it is. The gift of language, although we use it badly in many cases, is and in as much as our use of technology in destruction of our environment, but it is the most creative work we've done as a species. We're the first species that can describe our experience. Can describe our world and our role in it because we have the language.

LVG: Do you also think it's a danger that we also have a symbolic language that removes us from the thing itself?

JM: Language permits us to lie to ourselves. We are the only species that can do that, too. And to treat our lies as if they were reality. And we do it all the time.

LVG: Creates an interesting mess.

JM: It is a terrible mess (laughing). I don't even know how I'm going to sort it out. I'm going to have to say some things in this that people aren't going to want to hear. I think evolution is not warfare. It's not a battle. It's a game. A playful game. A game that doesn't have a goal or a purpose.

LVG: I read somebody who said that evolution is the game of question and answer. Once one answer came up then a new question arises out of that answer.

JM: Exactly.

LVG: So it is an endless game of Question and Answer and no one knows where it's going. That's part of the point of it.

JM: Playing the game is what it's about. The trick is to keep the game going. (laughs). It's not a game you ever win.

LVG: (laughing) You can't be the most highly evolved? What do you mean? (both laughing) I work in various places around Oxford and this afternoon I spent time in the museum where the Wilberforce-Huxley debates took place. It's a wonderful space.

JM: I love Oxford. It's a grand, grand town.

LVG: If I have to live anywhere else, this is a wonderful place to live. And I'm spoiled here with places to go and things to do…I was reading the descriptions of the debate and it all boiled down to the Hippocampus. Only the humans had this. And the arguments, back and forth, and finally Huxley slapping down his books and saying, "there's just no point in talking to you. You don't hear me." (both laughing)

JM: I'm sure he was right.

LVG: It's interesting to see 150 years later we're still sorting out what does evolution mean. It's not what people drew those pictures of - that straight line of one thing after another. Getting out of those British hierarchies is very, very difficult. The museum is set up that way so you can see how desperately they wanted to put the little boxes where they belong.

JM: Well, I think it is comedy and play and the only thing you want to do is participate in it. You don't win.

LVG: How do people's perceptions change? This is a wonderful contribution to the world, this idea of play, and here's how and why. Your life will be a whole lot better if you take this approach as opposed to the tragic approach. I know you've spent your whole life working on this. How do you get people to understand? What methods have worked for you?

JM: Giving out play licenses has proved very effective. People have a piece of paper they can put on a wall or hang above their desk and it says you have permission to play. It makes a huge difference. I get feedback from hundreds of people that I've given the license to and they all say it has made a difference. Little things like that. Letting people know that they don't have to spend their lives achieving, and it's not a sin to enjoy yourself. That most of the things that give us pleasure are also good for us. Not always true, but most of the time. I don't know. I think writing books. The Comedy of Survival has done some good work.

LVG: You know every time I tell someone that you're working with me on my doctoral work, people get a huge smile on their faces and they say "You're working with Joe?" (laughs) I've never gotten any other response than that people are jealous or so pleased. That's always the response.

JM: There's nothing I want on my resume more than that (laughs)

LVG: You talked a little bit before about play and spirituality. How do you see the connection between the two? JM: My easy road into that is Dante. In Dante's Paradiso, he describes people at play. People who have no goals, are living in joy, and people could free themselves from the bonds of self destruction. What hell is about in Dante's world is the hell people maintain for themselves. Not that they're being punished, but that they've made choices in their lives that cause them to suffer. And they don't know why they're suffering and keep blaming it on god or something like that. They blame someone outside themselves. They're like addicts. Miserable. But they don't know why they're miserable. I think Dante has given us the best image we have in the Paradiso of people living joyfully. They work. They care about one another. But they do it without punishing themselves. That I think is the meaning. The path that Dante describes has in his own words gone from misery to felicity. Ant that's the path that a good life should take. Finding ways to overcome misery and to achieve felicity. To actually enjoy ourselves.

LVG: So what are some of the things that make your life felicitous?

JM: Oh God (both laughing) Food, Sex, Conversation. Little things like that.

LVG: What happens if you can't find any playmates?

JM: Oh, well there's nothing wrong with solitary play. Play by yourself. Play all alone.

JM: The playful spirit is always underground. It is never a big part of public affairs. And that's because it's not interested in power. Politics in the news is about power. Play is about self discovery. Self fulfillment. I'm sitting here looking out my window on a Douglas Fir, Red Cedar forest. I can see eight species of birds out there doing things now. Some of them hanging on fireweed. Some of them eating seeds. Some of them at my bird feeder. They're doing appropriate living. And they're not suffering as a result of that. They are simply doing what a bird does. I aspire to be like them. That's what I want to be. A good human being doing what human beings do best. And that's what we're doing. We're having a conversation. We're talking and caring about one another and giving one another information that we need. And feeding one another. That's life well lived!

LVG: I agree.

LVG: What do you think of the relationship between creativity and play?

JM: Play is an exploration. It means you have to be prepared for novelty. And that means that you have to find a new way to do things. So, play is the essence of the creative experience. You cannot be a creative person without being playful.

LVG: That's very true.

LVG: Tell me about your writing process. I love asking people who write this question because the answer is always different. (both laughing) Since you're embarking on a book project, it's always a good time to illuminate that process.

JM: I find writing to be very hard work. I like Mark Twain's remark "Easy writing is damned hard reading." I get kind of lost when I'm in the midst of a writing project. I forget the things around me. I struggle and wrestle with words. I try to find the right ones, the right metaphors. When I'm done and when I've written what I intended to write, there's a huge satisfaction when I realize that I've been in this exhausting game. But it is very satisfying when you can find the right sentence or make an idea come to life. I'd rather dig ditches. (both laughing). It's very hard work.

LVG: You know how I feel after writing that essay you just looked at then!

JM: Right

LVG: You articulated that beautifully. I said it was like ripping off pieces of my own flesh. …

LVG: It's a very interesting process for me. Most writing comes very easily to me but there was something in trying to find words for something that was previously wordless that was a very difficult process and it's still not eloquent and it's painful to me that it's not eloquent, but I couldn't get there this time around. So I figure I've got the rest of my life to work on that.

JM: It is a process of exploration and discovery. The only way you can really find out what you think is by writing.

LVG: I think that's true. You talk a lot about dialogues being very important for you. I remember your telling me that you and Paul Shepard had years and years of good walks. Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with him? His writings have been very influential to me.

JM: Oh yes. And to me, too. Paul was a terribly important person in my life. We had adventures together. Paul's ideas are wonderful and I've used them and plagiarized them shamelessly for years (laughing). The things that stand out most are the things we did together that were fun. We traveled together. We went fishing in Alaska. Exploring in England, in South America and Japan. We went to the Naval Museum in Greenwich and we looked up together the ships that our ancestors came to America on. And we found their names on the manifests in 1635. Little things like that. His people came in 1638, my people came in 1635. We found the ships and the names on that list in the Greenwich Observatory.

LVG: That's amazing.

JM: Little things like that and Paul and I have sat around endless campfires and told one another stories. And we have played with ideas together. Well, if we didn't see each other for three years, when we did again our conversations picked up exactly as we left it off last time. No gaps. No need to explain anything. We went through, let's see, he had three divorces and I had one. And we did those together. We were the main support for one another during the pain of those separations. I know and love all three of his ex wives (laughing) and we can talk about Paul, and we do.

LVG: Where did you end up meeting?

JM: Oh God, probably at a conference where we were on a panel together in maybe the early 70s. I had been using his book, The Subversive Science, which was his first book he put out. I found myself on a panel with him at a AAS meeting. But we fell in step at once. Knew and loved one another. It was Paul- The Comedy of Survival first went out to a lot of publishers and was rejected by the first 12 publishers who saw it. One of them even sent a letter saying it should not only not be published, but all available copies should be burned (both laughing).

LVG: I hope you kept that letter. That's a great one.

JM: Yup. The University of California Press. And it was because of my portrayal of tragedy. Anyway it was Paul who said after all of those rejections, "You know that's a good book. Let me talk to my publisher at Scribner's. " He did and it was Scribners who then published it. But it was Paul who made that connection and made the book happen.

LVG: Are there other people who have been good traveling companions that way? People who helped get your ideas where they are or helped you get where you are? I'm always amazed to be so fortunate to know the people I know-

JM: Me too. There are so many wonderful people. Konrad Lorenz was very important and I spent three months studying with him in Germany. His approach to animal behavior was a key in my thinking. It was that study that led to the first edition of The Comedy of Survival. He wrote the preface of the first edition.

LVG: Yesterday I saw in a used bookstore the book, "I'm Here You're There" - It's his last book on the calling back and forth.

JM: He's been very important always. I got to go to his Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm. That was quite an experience. …

LVG: Past and present are very close in this city (Oxford). It's often hard to know what time period you're in when you're walking at night.

JM: You know that's another wonderful thing that's a kind of stylized play in the rituals that we have. Our graduation ceremony last month. I'm always so glad that Union does it in full Medieval fashion. Those are stages in life that need to be recognized and it's great that we have institutionalized rituals to do great transitions like that. Birth, death, marriage, all of those wonderful things. We need the rituals, but they are also play. We do a lot of food ritual at our house.

LVG: Do you?

JM: Helen and I play in the kitchen. We invent recipes. We'll start a recipe and wind up substituting almost every ingredient (laughing). And we bring people over. My son is a professional chef, but he's also a sculptor.

LVG: What an interesting combination.

JM: Last week, I participated in a performance with food. He had made 6 confessional booths. One was Catholic, one was Protestant, one was Paleolithic, one was Buddhist, one was a brothel, and what he did was serve a six course meal to the people in those booths. And the art form was the conversation that took place among the people there. They had little mesh screens between the booths so they could tell things to each other, tell stories, talk about the food, talk about one another, and my role in it was to read. Each course began with a reading. One was a reading from Paul Shepard which was about food sharing. The sharing of food being the basis of all human communication. And there was another part where I read from the Bacchae by Euripedes about bacchanalian things, and then there were readings from Like Water for Chocolate and readings that went along with the food. So it was a combination of literary stuff, and sensory stuff in the food, and the confessional ritual and food sharing. It was a wonderful thing.

LVG: That's fantastic.

JM: We do things like that. We do beautiful things! This is something that is not a work of art that is going to be - it's very temporal. You can't put it in a museum . You can't make money at it.

LVG: It's play.

JM: It's play.

LVG: What do you think about the relationship between time and play?

JM: Time is what working people manage. Time and money. In the tragic mode. I like time the way baseball does it rather than the way football does it. You don't play against the clock. You play for as long as it takes to do it. You play against the rules of the game.

LVG: You must like cricket then.

JM: Cricket is good. Cricket goes on forever. (laughing)

LVG: It's the endless game isn't it?

JM: Exactly. And that is the way the game manages time. By making full use of it, not by accomplishing a goal or overcoming an enemy. But time becomes a medium for expression, rather than a goal in a playful way.

LVG: I think about time as commodity a lot and the dangers of that.

JM: Oh wow. Yes. Do you know Jeremy Rifkin's book Time Wars? It's a good one. It's about the manner in which time is manipulated in a materialistic war. Time is about war. The management of time. The ownership of time. The best view of time is the way the world views it. It goes through the seasons. We have repetitious seasons and they're different each time they go around. It's the medium of cyclic recurrence. Not a straight line.

LVG: No. Very dangerous when it's interpreted as one.

JM: Right.

LVG: I had a very interesting moment in the elderhostel course that I teach because they are demanding that I rename the course, but they don't know what to call it either. Which I appreciated about them. We were talking about the notion of play and their grandkids, and how much they despised the concept of playdates because it was commodifying the kid's play time because it was designed to fit into the parent's schedules. They were so furious with their own children. They kept saying, " I didn't raise my kids to be like this. Why are they treating their children this way. Why are they forcing them to only play with kids who are pre-approved?" It was such a interesting language of backlash against their own children for the way their children were commodifying time. They said that they have to break all of those rules when they have the kids to themselves, because they're so afraid they'll be obsessed with time the way their parents are.

JM: Oh my. When I ask people to write their play histories, what they do is relive the times in their childhoods when they played a lot. But they always hit a point where they lost play and play dropped out of their lives. And they all remember that. They all remember some adult telling them that you can't spend your life playing. Or when are you going to grow up. Or when are you going to take life seriously.

LVG: Or when are you going to get a real job. (both laughing). I have a friend who is a very successful folk singer and he said it's only this year, and he's been doing this 12 years maybe, that his mother has stopped asking when he's going to get a real job.

JM: (laughing)

LVG: He works 300 days a year. He's on the road constantly.

JM: It's awful what we do to ourselves.

LVG: That's always my question in education. How do we keep the play in education?

JM: Well that's what I think scholarship is. That's what you're doing. And it's hard work because you're exploring. You're exploring yourself and the world around you and trying to make sense of the place. It's not easy to do that. You have to go into uncharted territory. You have to confront ideas that you don't understand. Good scholarship is like any advanced art form where you have to do a lot of drudgery in order to get the skills you need to be free. You've got to practice the piano for a million years before you have the motor skills and the understanding to improvise. Or, if you're painting. Scholarship is the same thing. The way you have to sharpen the tools of language and thought in order to do something original. But that's what a doctorate is all about. Doing something original which is what we mean by a contribution to knowledge. An exploration that results in a new discovery.

LVG: Well it certainly felt like that.

JM: It's hard work, but it's certainly worth doing.

LVG: I've been describing it as the hardest work that I've ever loved and hated simultaneously. (both laughing) I got an email from Patricia (Monaghan) today after saying I'd sent off my PDE, and she wrote back, "And now you'll be at that post-partum phase where you look at it and say ' I was struggling over that little thing? Why was I so upset over that little thing?'"

JM: That little thing that I once did-

LVG: It was very interesting because I finished writing and then we went to France for a week where we were doing work in a Paleolithic cave on finger line markings, which is Kevin's field. We made some amazing discoveries about the ways in which the people left the markings, which no one has ever really looked at before. The methodology and that the cave paintings are actually interlaced with the hand markings, and they are not some sort of side thing where someone just stuck their hand there. That they are very purposeful acts and in some places woven into the paintings.

JM: Do you think they're signatures?

LVG: No, I think they're stories. I think that the pictures of the animals are not half as important as the line markings. And that the line markings are ways of telling a story. In one room we were in, we finally found the pattern to a whole series of them. They had a recurrent way of being created and layers. The room had been flooded in some point in the past and people had gone back over the markings again. Much much later. And then gone over them with charcoal and then gone over them with sticks. And, it spoke to the idea of retelling the same story at a different time. And that there is no way to prove that necessarily. But the markings we were looking at had similar elements, combinations of seven and the way in which they were done, the order in which they were done was almost like looking at Chinese calligraphy. You could see why they had to draw this line first and that one next and what does it mean to go over and under.

JM: You could probably make up your own story to fit!

LVG: It was very interesting to think about those questions of language and story and why would people come here and tell this story in this place. How do we leave our mark. And what is the particular purpose of a particular place. And discovery. It was all of that at once in the very focused space of a cave where we were only looking at what the light would show. It was an amazing condensation for me of all of the things I had written about where I was looking at the possible application of saying that we don't know their language, but we know it is a language.

JM: Absolutely. And we're the same people that they were 20,000 years ago.

LVG: Yes. To find their fingerprints on nodules of rock where they left their charcoal that they were using is amazing. Pieces that no one had dealt with in this cave. There we are finding old bits of fire- JM: I love that. LVG: We got permission to go back twice a year.

JM: Lascaux?

LVG: Rouffignac. They've known about it since the 1500s. It actually has a train running through it, to keep the tourists from walking around in it, which is very smart. But the ceilings are so high that it feels like a New York subway station. It is a very clear, beautiful space. (laughing) There are times when I think, this feels like 168th street.

JM: Are you going to publish some of this stuff?

LVG: We're working on it.

JM: I want to see it.

LVG: It's got the potential to be the application of what I'm thinking about. We need to find the science to say that these were storied people. Every tool that they find from these people had these line markings on them and they've been dismissed for years and years as nothing. Because the cave experts only wanted to look at animals. And now it forces them to acknowledge that people might have used their hands to tell stories.

JM: How wonderful.

LVG: The end will be that Neanderthal man will be "Homo Storius" The people who told stories and didn't make as much stuff. It does tie back to those same questions all over again.

JM: I love it.

 

If you'd like to read a piece of Joe's writing, click here to go to an essay called Wilderness and Wisdom.