John Jeremiah Sullivan's "You Too"

Thoughts on marveling.

You Too

I saw a YouTube video of an owl inside its nest during a storm. 
The scientists had installed a hidden camera in its little hollow. 
The clip surprised me, in that the owl appeared very frightened.
I hadn’t pictured birds as being scared of thunder and lightning. 
They’re at one with nature, I figured. It could never shock them. 
But this one staggered backward until its back ran into the wall. 
It moved just the way someone will when an earthquake begins, 
Or after walking into a hallway only to find a wild animal there. 
Ever since seeing that clip, I do not experience storms the same. 
Now when the lightning flashes white, and I wait for the boom, 
I think about them, in their hollows, in forest and field, millions 
Of tiny hearts racing and parents trying to cover their nestlings. 
The landscape is full of that feeling. An owl in a video looks up. 
Its eyes are big and round, not certain what any of this portends, 
And follow the sound of the wind-driven rain outside the room.


first published in The Yale Review (Volume 113, No. 3) (link here)

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It was an almost-gasping joy I felt when, upon navigating to The Yale Review earlier this week to read some of their recently-published poetry while sitting in the break room of the high school where I teach, I came across the name John Jeremiah Sullivan, who has reached, I imagine, the stage in one’s career of writing when they might have an author’s humble kind of bio that leaves off the fact that they are the kind of writer who can write with a certain orbital and tender curiosity, a revolving door of art-making out of the ordinary, that they are the kind of writer who has published not just Pulphead, one of the great essay collections of any decade, but also Blood Horses, a memoir of sportswriting and horse racing and sonhood that contains the following sentence:

Century after century, we have prosecuted our insane conflicts from atop their backs, resting on their sturdy necks when we grew weary, eating their flesh when we were starving, disemboweling them and crawling inside their bodies when we were freezing.

It also contains this one, gem-like and hewn from somewhere deep within the soul:

One does not, if one is beauty, have to know what beauty is.

So it was joy I felt to read a poem by someone who once wrote, in an essay about his brother’s recovery after being electrocuted by a microphone during a concert:

I’ve tried many times over the years to describe for people the person who woke up from that electrified near-death, the one who remained with us for about a month before he went back to being the person we’d known and know now. It would save one a lot of trouble to be able to say “it was like he was on acid,” but that wouldn’t be quite true. Instead, he seemed to be living one of those imaginary acid trips we used to pretend to be on in junior high, before we tried the real thing and found out it was slightly less magical— “Hey, man, your nose is like a star or something, man.” He had gone there. My father and I kept notes, neither of us aware that the other was doing it, trying to get down all of Worth’s little disclosures before they faded. I have my own list here in front of me. There’s no best place to begin. I’ll just transcribe a few things:

Squeezed my hand late on the night of the 23rd. Whispered, “That’s the human experience.”

While eating lunch on the 24th, suddenly became convinced that I was impersonating his brother. Demanded to see my ID. Asked me, “Why would you want to impersonate John?” When I protested, “But, Worth, don’t I look like John?” he replied, “You look exactly like him. No wonder you can get away with it.”

What does a writer do that makes me want to read them forever? I think they do what this passage does. I think they speak the sparkling truth out of the absurd dailiness of our lives. I think they see that there is always space between the fact of our eyes and the fact of what happens, and they see, in that space, a billion glittering stars worth making into constellations. Experience lives there. Constellations overlapping. Strange truth out of the everyday. What is a writer? Someone who points at the almost-invisible stars that exist between our bodies and what our bodies see, and says look there, look right there, it’s a—

Fill in the blank for me, will you?

One more thing about John Jeremiah Sullivan before I talk about this poem today. Here’s a page from my copy of Blood Horses.

I must’ve asterisked and underlined that paragraph nearly a decade ago, but I still smiled today, flipping through that book and reading it again. And I still smiled, even more, at that phrase: he needed you to be with him for just a moment in marveling. That, too, is one way to describe John Jeremiah Sullivan’s work — that marveling, that look-with-me kind of gesturing. It is also one way to describe the work of writing. And one way, too, to describe the work of living and loving. Be with me in my moment of marveling.

And one more thing, just one more, about John Jeremiah Sullivan’s past work and the fact of marveling. Here’s a paragraph — funny as hell, because laughter, too, comes as a result of marveling — from an essay about being asked to report on the largest Christian music festival in the country, and being asked just the day before by his editor (who he calls Greg) to drive there in a RV:

What should I tell you about my voyage to Creation? Do you want to know what it’s like to drive a windmill with tires down the Pennsylvania Turnpike at rush hour by your lonesome, with darting bugeyes and shaking hands; or about Greg’s laughing phone call “to see how it’s going”; about hearing yourself say “no No NO NO!” every time you try to merge; or about thinking you detect—beneath the mysteriously comforting blare of the radio—faint honking sounds, then checking your passengerside mirror only to find you’ve been straddling the lanes for an unknown number of miles (those two extra feet!) and that the line of traffic you’ve kept pinned stretches back farther than you can see; or about stopping at Target to buy sheets and a pillow and peanut butter but then practicing your golf swing in the sporting goods aisle for a solid twenty five minutes, unable to stop, knowing that when you do, the twentyninefooter will be where you left her, alone in the side lot, hulking and malevolent, waiting for you to take her the rest of the way to your shared destiny.

Marveling, too, isn’t that? We read this and we laugh at the absurdity but we laugh too at the fact that such absurdity is made funny enough for us to laugh at, which means some joy, strange joy, has been found in the midst of what was also, I imagine, awful and wild and humbling and so much else. Between the fact of our experience and our willingness to tell about such an experience could exist a kind of marveling, if we are willing to marvel at ourselves at all. Which is to say: laugh sometimes, even often. And cry, too. And laugh after the crying.

And isn’t that, too, what today’s poem is? A moment of marveling? What else might lead to this line:

Ever since seeing that clip, I do not experience storms the same. 

It’s marveling, isn’t it, that leads us there, isn’t it? It’s the video watched, the curiosity, and it’s the way the “clip surprised” the poem’s speaker. And it’s marveling, isn’t it, that comes after, right? Here, yes. Right here:

Now when the lightning flashes white, and I wait for the boom, 
I think about them, in their hollows, in forest and field, millions 
Of tiny hearts racing and parents trying to cover their nestlings. 

What is that if not marveling? We might think of marveling as what happens in the aftermath of something. We pause, sitting on the rooftop, watching the big moon emerge from behind the hiding place of a building. We turn our necks and stand with our bodies twisted into a dozen different angles to find a rainbow caught between two city blocks, disappearing over a river somewhere. But marveling, too, is what happens in between a moment. Here, it happens in the waiting. In between flash and boom. It’s a kind of knowing of what might come, and feeling what might come, and being changed as a result of all of it. To marvel at the world is not just to stand and watch, but also to feel connected to a million different lives. The birds with their tiny hearts, and all those tiny hearts racing faster than ours could ever move.

“The landscape is full of that feeling,” John Jeremiah Sullivan writes. That’s marveling, too — to notice that the landscape is full of any feeling at all. Sometimes, perhaps often, we forget that. Certainly about others. Sometimes even about ourselves.

Perhaps I am thinking about marveling because of so much. Perhaps it is because of automation and artificiality, perhaps because of the recent videos of the most recent development in AI — these videos generated out of thin air, ones that Emily Chang recently discussed in the latest One Thing newsletter:

Accounts like Time Traveller POV and Impossible AI create POV videos inspired by history: “POV: You’re a Roman aqueduct builder in 300 BC”, “POV: You are a kid in the Stone Age (3000 BC)”, “POV: You wake up as a peasant in 1800s England”. The videos usually begin with a shot of legs and feet stretching out from underneath a blanket as you wake up and continue through a day-in-the-life, casting you as the main character from sunrise to sunset. These videos are equally amusing and disturbing; holding your phone and watching them as a person in 2025 with modern comforts and daily showers, you now have the worn, blackened hands of a middle-aged man working as a coal miner during the Industrial Revolution, and you’ve woken up on a bed of hay underneath a burlap sack blanket — a far cry from the aspirational escapism that social media so often provides us.

It’s funny. Today’s poem by Sullivan — especially if you click through to its original publication — looks like a screen. Each line mimics each line in terms of length. Together, they form an almost-square. A block of text. A screen. But this poem is not a screen. It’s not some video generated out of seeming-nothing. No. And though this poem begins with an act of looking-into-a-screen, it remains what it is: a poem. And the fact of the language that exists within it gives rise not just to images (a bird moving “the way someone will when an earthquake begins”), but also to surprises, and sorrows, and oddity, and familiarity, and more. By enacting the image of a screen, Sullivan makes me question what we look for when we turn to screens ourselves. Distraction, sure. Inspiration, maybe. But this manifold testament to marveling, this kind of wanting-to-be-in-the world? Though the poem begins with a screen, it ends with the world “outside the room,” and outside the screen. It ends with the speaker thinking differently. It ends with consideration, even care.

This poem’s title, too, “You Too” — doesn’t that invite you to care, too? Rather than invite you to look away?

I know my voice is yet another voice amidst a crowd of doomers and technopessimists, but I wonder if marveling is possible in a world of artificiality. I wonder, in other words, if marveling requires the thing itself, and what we make of it. I wonder if it’s possible to be surprised by artificial intelligence, or just to think deductively about its derivatives, and to be saddened by those, rather than surprised. I wonder, finally, if we’ve done ourselves a disservice over the many hundreds and beyond-hundreds of years in which we parceled and portioned out writing into a variety of genres, dividing it amongst itself, making it seem as if there were more differences than similarities between a novel and a book of history, a sonnet and the play in which it was contained. I think, perhaps, that all writing is a form of truth-telling and that all truth-telling requires a bit of make-believe. The blank page, I mean. It was blank, and then you thought of what to put there. You made, I am trying to say, out of your belief. And what you made was truth — the truth of a story, the truth of a moment, the truth of trying to figure out the name of anything that has escaped you in the way that any memory seems to run further away from you as you move away from it, the truth of a fact you cannot believe, an owl that is scared of a storm.

That truth — the truth not just of our experiences, but the truth of trying to make something out of them, the truth of trying to constellate and conjure, to divine and marvel — is a kind of truth I don’t want to miss. Not just because it is a joy to write, and a joy to read, but also because, between the truth of your life and the truth of my life is the space between us. That space is not shallow, as a corporation would have us think. Nor is it nonexistent, as the internet might have us believe. Even if we are holding hands, that space is vast and it is full of unknowns and it is full of possibilities. Even if we don’t know each other yet. We make possible in that space. We make belief. We make art. We make love. We make justice. We make ourselves, and we make this world.

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