On Being on dusting

A few weeks ago I got an email from one of the producers of On Being letting me know that Krista Tippett had used an excerpt from a blog post I had written for DotMagis during her interview with poet Marilyn Nelson.

Nelson is one of my favorite contemporary poets, in part because her work tangles with such a wide range of themes, from the desert fathers to modern Trappist martyrs, she is unafraid to draw on scientific imagery, and brings a unflinching eye to the gouges racism has left in our country.  I'm still haunted by Fortune's bones, or more precisely by the thought of Fortune's wife dusting her husband's bones.

During the interview Tippett tells Nelson:

"To that point — I don’t know if this is something you’re aware of — we found this blog post that was written actually by a professor who had just gotten back from sabbatical, and she was dusting her office. Have you read this? I mean, this is the things you can find on the internet. This is the upside of the internet. Is your poem, Dusting?'"

It reminded me of a story one of the Jesuits at the observatory told me about going into the Rome to pick up a piece of paperwork he needed that the government website had shown was ready. When he finally got to the window, he was told to come back.  "But it said it was ready on the internet," he pleaded.  But the Italian bureaucrat was unmoved, "The internet says many things.  Next!"

The internet does say many things, and so it was quite nice to hear my writing called part of the upside of the internet. It was also fascinating to hear a little bit of my own work read aloud, which Tippett does (you can hear it around 25:00 minutes in the segment).

In the "Case for Dusting" I suggested that the dust on my desk might have alien origins: "fragments ...burnt off comets that blundered into Earth’s atmosphere. Crumbs of the infinite lie scattered across my desk."  So I particularly enjoyed the recent piece in the New York Times about jazz musician Jon Larsen's work identifying the micrometeorites in ordinary, every day dust.  The photographs are gorgeous.  Now I really can't bear to dust my desk, knowing what I'm wiping away.