Interview with Saul Ort, pt 1

In the spring of 2025, I first met the poet Saul R. Ort at his hermitage in the Pyrenees. I was eventually asked to be a partial executor for his body of work, a task which has already consumed much of my winter. (I hope to begin batched releases by the end of 2026.)

In sorting through Saul’s archive, I found a recording from our first week together, in which Saul asks about my own work. I’m cleaning up and releasing the transcript, thirty minutes at a time, in the hope that it provides useful context for my work. This is the first of several parts.

ORT: I am not sure how to describe your writing, or how to articulate what field of knowledge you work within. Is it science? Are you a fellow poet, distinguished by long-windedness?

REASON: Tyler Volk, who’s a professor emeritus at NYU I believe? Has a book named Metapatterns, a word lifted from the anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson. Volk uses this word to describe high-level formal strategies, or geometries, that repeat themselves across scales. Lichen on a rock will bloom radially in a way that resembles how a city grows, because they’re solving similar problems.

Volk’s metapatterns include spheres, tubes, sheets, arrows, boundaries. Some of which I was already independently working on when I discovered the book, midway through 2024. For instance, my writing on gardens and pearls explores how semi-permeable boundaries are a universal organizational strategy: Life grasps outward, foraging and concentrating energy in central locations, and is then tasked with defending its stockpile, either with moats and castle walls, or cellular membranes, or social shibboleths.

Spheres, to give a related example, are surface-minimizing, volume-maximizing forms. If you’re building a boundary to protect your energy stockpile, you can wall-off the most amount of material with the least amount of wall. Many fruits convergently evolve into spheres, in part to prevent moisture from evaporating in the sun.

Sheets, on the other hand, are surface-maximizing, volume-minimizing. This is why elephants have enormous ears: all that surface area allows them to release heat. If a peregrine dives, it tucks it wing-sheets in, to become more spherical; and when it pulls out of a dive, it extends them again, to become more sheet-like. Sheets often get used as near-distance interfaces: screens, walls, ceilings, picnic blankets, tin foil, plastic wrap, dust jackets, clothes. They are mediators between neighboring surfaces. Whereas tubes—cylindrical sheets—are distant mediators; their pipes, wires, and trunks are designed to narrowly transport resources or messages across great lengths.

Often what you get, in both natural and man-made systems, are networks of spherical or sheeted nodes linked by tubes or wires. A television is a sheet connected to power tubes which perhaps ultimately hook up to voluminous boilers, or the sheets of solar cells. An animal is a system of bladders and tubes.

Long answer short, Volk calls thinkers who extend in many directions “spherical.” Bateson is his archetype. I mostly work between fields and make connections. I would like nothing more than to show that there’s a meaningful structural analogy between Homeric monomyth and the foraging strategies of slime mold, where “home” is something like that stockpiled, well-defended accumulation of resources under threat. Either by pillaging, depletion, or everyday rot.

ORT: You wanted to create your own sphere.

REASON: Yes. Assembling a new world with the debris of the old. Which is always how this works. Flames and molars destructure the ruins of a cow, and let you grow your belly.

Part of this means assembling a language. A language that properly belongs to the 21st century. Compiling decks, building a vocabulary out of technical jargon, online memes, and pidgin phrases, so that I could learn to speak the now, and learn to speak the future.

What I am trying to build is a world as strange, as enchanted, as encompassing as the worlds of an exotica record. Yet which, like exotica, on close inspection is revealed to be a portrait of our own world, defamiliarized.

ORT: You told me that your early work, which I have not read, was more clearly classifiable as criticism. Literary criticism, music criticism, film criticism. The fragments of the Maqamat which you’ve showed me feature few reactions, few direct challenges, opinions, deconstructions.

REASON: At some point, I no longer wanted to wage war on what I thought ugly. I no longer wanted to accuse. Love and hate being both intense preoccupations. I wanted merely to avert my eyes. To turn toward some other, lovelier source. Much of what drives this book is merely a love of its sources.

I also came to feel that any accusation I made of others could as easily be turned upon me. I tried to humble my pride which earlier scoffed. I realized I had been constantly wrong.

ORT: Can you talk about the influence of Kenner’s The Pound Era on your thinking? That is a book which has always fascinated me.

REASON: Well this relates to what we were saying earlier about George Lakoff’s work, showing how a handful of underlying conceptual metaphors guide how we think about emotions, relationships, religion, society, and even scientific fields. How these very basic ideas we have of the world, such as UP = GOOD and DOWN = BAD, are the underlying roots from which the buds of novel expression grow. “Cycling in a Tiered World” takes this structure and runs with it—what is sometimes called a “tiered world” model, in anthropology: the notion that Heaven is above us, and Hell below us, and we in the middle are always striving to “transcend” or “ascend,” to not “get stuck in the mud,” to escape our chthonic origins, and so on.

One of the more productive models of late, across neuroscience and artificial intelligence, is “simulated annealing.” That’s a metaphor taken from metallurgy, about the way crystals bind and rebind molecular structures dependent on temperature. Shiva, lord of fire and death, is integral to the process of rebirth. To strengthen steel, first you heat it up, and then you cool it down in new formation. Psychedelics, as Friston and Carhartt-Harris have argued, are special insofar as they’re a kind of neural heating, that allow the brain to reanneal in a new form. But if you look at their paper, their diagrams reiterate a basic hill-and-valley metaphor. I think the cycle of heating and cooling my thoughts is one of the most important things for me to keep track of, as a writer and thinker. The cycle of creating and curating, generating and editing, believing and disbelieving. The Yes function and the No function, James called them.

ORT: A stream, a garden, a game—these are “metapatterns,” in the Volk sense, but they are also conceptual metaphors.

REASON: The Pound Era taught me many things. Kenner, as exception to the rule, helped me understand my grievance with academic writing, namely, that it disenchants its subject. There is a real vampiric knack for possessing vibrant living works of art, and sucking the life out of them, presenting something so anemic, so impoverished in comparison. I am more interested in stabilizing and extending the enchantment field of the works I love. And The Pound Era does that, for Pound. Some have faulted Kenner for buying into Pound’s magical vision, for not being a detached skeptic, but I think they miss the purpose of The Pound Era. There are very few scholarly works that say “Yes, And” to an artist in the way Kenner does. That have the creative capacity to build atop great work. My writing on Joanna Newsom. On the poet Heronbone. None of it would exist without Kenner.

The other important thing Kenner introduced me to is the notion of “fossil poetry,” which you can attribute to Pound or Emerson but has been remarked upon many times in the history of letters. In many ways its a natural predecessor to Lakoff. It is the discovery of the etymologists that the abstractions we now rely upon were first founded in material metaphors. As time passes, we forget that they are metaphors—that they are “poems,” that they are examples of figurative and creative speech—and we believe ourselves rational technocrats wielding sophisticated abstractions. But all we have is poetry.

For instance, if we are talking about what happens to an institution, over its lifespan—as Weber does, when he speaks of the transition from prophecy to priesthood—then we will inevitably talk of the institution ossifying (oss meaning bone), or calcifying (lime), or petrifying (petra, stone); as becoming sclerotic (skleros, hard) or encrusted; of its practices becoming “set in stone.” It will lose its “green suppleness,” its living flexibility. All these ten-dollar words are just ways of saying that something living has become bone or stone, and since bones are stones—are mineral formations—this amounts to the same thing. Over and over, in our modern world of institutional theory, all we can say is that something which was figuratively living has becoming figuratively dead.

When Shelley says that poets are the future legislators of the race, I understand this to partially be what he means. That in coining words and concepts, in discovering new metaphors or extending the existing ones, we create the terms which will be manipulated for future decision-making, political and otherwise.

What I wanted to do, then, was to take up this project—which I think has been largely forgotten, with the dwindling of humanistic thought. And take it up particularly in light of our tremendous scientific progress. The river, the stream, is one of our core metaphors for thinking and speaking about change and flux: the stream of experience, the stream of consciousness, the stream of thought. Process philosophy, and the lives and the nature of organisms. The flow of information (we “stream” media). But when poets, including those unrecognized and nameless everyday geniuses—farmers, fishermen, ships captains and so on, who noticed the natural world and drew an analogy that stuck—when they worked, they did not know there were great underground rivers, slow-moving beneath the Amazon. They did not understand the physics of sediment deposition as we do, they did not have our understanding of fluid dynamics and eddies, and the ways that rivers like the Mississippi move and meander over time. They understood some of this, but not to our extent. And so, my proposal is that we understand the source domains of these conceptual metaphors better than ever. But we have not updated and extended the metaphorical targets, the conceptual metaphors themselves, in light of our new knowledge.

So there is a tremendous work to be done, for one who wishes to take it up. I have taken it up not just in my writing on streams and gardens, but my work on hills and valleys, pearls and pearl divers, natural growth cycles, mineral evolution, rot and decay, or the pollination ‘courtship’ between flower and bee.

One of the materials I am most excited to work on is glass. We live in the Age of Glass—the age of mirrors and screens and windows and fiber-optic cables and silicon chips. An age of the light, which passes through, or refracts, or reflects off, glass. So the Crystal Palace, the greenhouse, the skyscraper of steel and glass—all these are important in thinking through the material conditions of our existence, so as to then author a corresponding symbolic, conceptual stratum.

The last thing I will say. Since it proved important to my later notion of “geometric vision.” Is that, if we take seriously this notion that a culture’s concepts are built from metaphorical extensions of material phenomena, material dynamics. Then it follows that a culture’s conceptual tools are somewhat limited to the material phenomena which exist around them. All ancestral cultures have had a sun and a moon, and a body of freshwater, and some kind of plants that take root. But some tribes inhabited deserts, filled with reptiles, where water is scarce; and some lived in wetlands; and each possessed a unique ecology of metaphor. The ecological lessons, the mythic structures, which such environments offer should likewise vary.

A lizard is a bundle of metaphors. It sheds its tail, if you try to grab it. It sits in the sun to charge. It has certain egg-brooding behaviors, certain feeding behaviors. If you have lizards, if they are a central part of your world, you will have parables and myths about lizards. You will learn to think in a certain way, more like a lizard.

There are islands without snakes. Cold northern regions. The snake is central to so much cultural development, from its shedding skin to the ouroboros; Eden’s temptation; the staves of Caduceus and Asclepius; the Mexican flag and its triumph of the eagle over the snake (which is reflected in the Chinese dragon). What myths does a culture without snakes write, instead? What conceptual resources might we lack, if snakes had never existed?

It is often said that desert tribes—faced with that single, powerful beating sun, and a barren landscape—tend toward monotheism, while jungle tribes—living in a place totally alive and brimming with spirits—tend toward polytheism. I haven’t fact-checked this, but it’s another example.

Elias Canetti has written about the crowd symbols of different nations—the metaphor they choose to represent social organization, and mass movements. And for him, for his home country of Germany, he believed the crowd symbol was the army as a marching forest, with its upright trees in density and great number. No doubt, many of the forests he had in mind were not old growth, but modern plantations for the great shipyards.

ORT: Speak more on the mythologic aspect of your work, or your interest in mythology generally.

REASON: Well, it’s not unique certainly, many contemporary thinkers have shown a resurgent interest in myth, although perhaps few have taken it to so full an extent. I think you are interested in myth, for instance the poems you showed me tracing the Catholic Calendar across southern Europe.

I think there are two sides to my thinking on “new myths.” One is anthropological, the other is cosmological.

The anthropological side is interested in mythic figures, in the heroes and monsters of our age. Part of defamiliarizing the present, as I mentioned, is trying to see the Big Now from a perspective that is now now. This is part of what appeals to me about Beat writing—they’re always going on about the ancient skies, the prophetic revelations. Ginsberg’s “Howl” is full of this. It enchants the present by casting it in ancient quasi-mythic terms. But it also helps connect the present to the past, it creates a continuity by describing today in yesterday’s terms. So I wanted to take seriously the idea that, as human beings, we are mythmakers, we live in myths, and so what are the myths we live in?

The Marvel Comic and Cinematic Universe is perhaps the most popular mythic system ever created. Billions know its lore. Millions wear its costumes. They adopt its language, their behavior is inspired by the on-screen behavior of its heroes. There are all sorts of interesting cybernetic loops happening, for instance the way that Tony Stark’s cinematic character is partly inspired by Elon Musk, but ends up inspiring Musk in turn. Musk’s reputation, his fame, his character, is inseparable from the great mythic American figure of Tony Stark, this whiz-kid technogenius who sleeps with all these women and has a frought but active engagement with the US military. The Hulk is an extension of the Jekyll & Hyde myth, which I think has a lot to say about the way that people contain multitudes, the way that people change in different settings, or when they’ve been drinking, the way they become someone new.

I think, similarly, you can get a lot out of the monsters. For a century we’ve been obsessed with zombies and vampires and werewolves. There’s a tremendous amount there, in terms of testifying to and channeling and helping us understand our own psyche. With zombies, you have all the stuff about mass television packed in, about mass culture and the uprising mindless masses. You have fears around Hiroshima and the nuclear bomb and radiation. Around genetic engineering and novel vaccines and hard drugs. Contemporary zombie depictions take cues from the homelessness epidemic. Vampires are just endlessly interesting archetypes, these beautiful rich glamorous aristocratic types who are pale-skinned and only go out at night and prey, in a very sexual way, on young men and women. There is a lot about bisexuality, decadence, and romantic poets built into this stuff from the get—one of the first vampire stories is written by a friend of Byron’s, as part of the same group writing project that produced Frankenstein. You see the vampire archetype pop up all the time these days in talk about Thiel—who is wealthy and gay—or Bryan Johnson and life-extension technology, the notion that Clinton and the Washington elites are sucking the life from children, perhaps receiving literal plasma injections.

In this spirit, I spent about half a year watching and writing about Westerns, since I think the gunslinger myth, the frontier myth, the role of indigenous peoples, the silent stoic American type—all of this is so foundational to the American psyche, and especially the libertarian psyche. I spent half a year studying and writing a book-length treatment of James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water because I thought its channeling of eco-myths was important. That work was very much inspired by Jacob Clifton’s television recaps; it wouldn’t exist without Clifton’s work; I’m tremendously indebted.

And then the final aspect of the “anthropological” side of my myth work consists of reading biographic material and then trying to boil lives down into mythic, parable-like forms. [NB: These have been published as “The Book of Names.”] I’ve done this with the Herschel family of astronomers, with Lucia Joyce, with Earl McGrath, with the poets Heronbone and sighswoon, with figures like Jack Parsons, an acquaintance of L. Ron Hubbard who founded JPL while neck-deep in the occult. These individuals lived lives which were deeply influenced by the mythic archetypes of our culture. But they are were real people, whose lives are tests and testimonies to these archetypes, and therefore help us update these myths, and write the myths of tomorrow. Well, I’ve gone on long enough.

ORT: You said there was a cosmological side of this work?

REASON: Well, yes, there is. It probably dates back to the month, maybe February or March of 2023, when I was living in New York, and visited the American Natural History Museum every day. It’s an enormous museum, and to do it comprehensively takes hundreds and hundreds of hours. Most people go and feel they’ve done a good job if they’ve spent a full day, seen a few wings, but this is like skimming a few chapters of a book. It really is a book—there is an encyclopedia’s worth of text written, between all the plaques and signs and pamphlets, plus audio narrations, or the script of the planetarium shows. Not to mention the actual exhibits, which are so rich that to spend time with and really take in each of them is an enormous task. I saw maybe half the museum, working fulltime that way for a month. Certain sections I had to skip for my own sanity. I could not take it all in. Certain displays I decided were less relevant to the story which I was trying to tell—the story of the museum, the story the museum tells its visitors. There is a cosmic story it tells, almost theologic in its implications, and I was interested in understanding that, and trying to simplify it and narrativize it into something as compressed and multifaceted as a diamond.

And the basic story is that the Universe is evolving and merging from simplicity to complexity. Whitman, the American poet, understood this, when he wrote that God’s will was the spanning and networking of all the earth. This worldview is found in neo-Teilhardianism, in talk of the noösphere, at the Santa Fe Institute, in Lurianic Kabbalah.

The whole universe begins with just hydrogen and helium, the simplest elements. And in all that heat they forge into new more complex atoms. Carbon, Silicon, Iron, Gold. One thing I learned at the museum is that we can speak seriously of mineral evolution. And when you look at planets that do not have life, their mineral diversity is an order of magnitude lower than here on earth, where we do have life, because life produces all sorts of novel mineral forms that won’t exist otherwise. I realized suddenly that life could be meaningfully conceptualized as another step in the story of mineral evolution. That rocks, so to speak, could be said to have invented life so as to make more rocks. There is a too much agency attributed, in that sentence, an imposition of intent to evolution, but it destabilizes our view of the universe a bit, it’s a Copernican revolution of a sentence, and my reading of Lynn Margulis helped teach me about the Copernican revolutions, such as Darwin’s, which have decentered the human in our cosmic picture. Margulis herself pioneered an important, in her privileging of micro- over macrobiological forms like ourselves, but more on this later.

When we are talking about the beginning of life on earth, which is another step in the complexification of the Universe, the most common scientific theory is that it starts in a porous membrane of clay. There are amino acids inside the pore, and lightning strikes the warm soup they’re in, and the membrane protects them just enough that the energy, which snaps the acids into organization, isn’t immediately lost, the pattern doesn’t immediately break apart, but is kept and incubated, and begins a self-reinforcing loop. Now, life from lightning is a common mythic idea, one Joyce treats in the Wake, and the idea that man is made from clay is again very Biblical. Galvanism is a mythic belief, but it is also scientific; the body really does run on electric signals! We restart hearts by means of electroshock! So I am interested in seeking these resonances, and building bridges between poetic and scientific thinking, rather than iconoclastically privileging one or the other. I want to help us locate ourselves in time, and in a very long time, and not the blind sunken gulches we normally find ourselves in.

The other thing that interests me about this story of the origin of life is that it neatly plays out my notion of a garden. A garden is a living space surrounded by a semi-permeable barrier. The barrier keeps disruptive forces out, which would otherwise steal way the energy and resources inside the barrier, which are critical to keeping the internals alive. But it must be semi-permeable because the living space must continue taking in new resources, new energies, to maintain internal reactions. In order to keep local entropy down. And furthermore, it must flush its waste, to avoid being buried by its own metabolic process. You see this happen with bacterial colonies in petri dishes, they explode to the hard glass edges of their dish, eating up all the resources inside and then either starving, or drowning in their own byproduct. So the barrier must be semi-permeable.

Now in my conceptual metaphor, a stream always runs through a garden. It brings in the new resources and flushes the waste. When it comes to stationary organisms, such as most plants, there is a dependence on stable sun and rain, passively reaching them, in this way. For mobile organisms, they can often go out and forage resources themselves. But I’m also speaking, when I think of gardens, I’m also thinking of cities and castles and country landscapes. With man-made gardens, there is often a gridded aspect. I take as archetypal the Roman method of urban development, which has been very influential on the modern world. Roman surveyors would set a tool called a groma, in the center of their planned encampment; the tool was essentially a plus sign, four right angles, that allowed them to draw a cross in the ground. One axis of the cross ran north to south, the other east to west, and each became a road. At the center, at the crossroads, as so often happens, was the forum, the center of commerce and discourse and governance. A wall was put up around the town, with four gates, one at each cardinal direction, for each entrance and exit of the two crossing roads. And the whole place was gridded, or centuriated.

ORT: Are you trying to extend the grid?

REASON: I suppose I am. But it sounds reprehensible, when you put it this way. I love the wild, but I spend my time taming it. I am not sure if that is contradictory.

ORT: Perhaps all of us love the wild and tame it, who do this work.