Young Krishna & the Universe in His Mouth

#226: The Vitality and terror of cities – Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 4/20/26: Tonight, we delve into the world of cities. First, in a passage from Sam Quinones’s Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, the town of Portsmouth, Ohio, is lovingly described in the decades before the epidemic.Next, a passage from Ben Wilson’s Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Great Invention describes the author’s travels to research the book, and his conclusion that the messiness of urban life is key to its vitality and innovation.Finally, I read letters from twentieth-century Jewish immigrants to New York City. Originally published in the Jewish Daily Forward and later collected in The Bintel Brief, the letters describe the difficulties faced by newly arrived immigrants who had rarely (if ever) experienced life outside of the insular world of shtetl.    The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

1. #226: The Vitality and terror of cities 32:10
2. #225 – The invention of the wheel, and the power of storytelling 22:42
3. #224: Let's talk about William Blake 31:20
4. #223 – How to write two novels at the same time, with Charles Dickens 20:51
5. #222: Seamus Heaney – 10 Essential Poems 01:07:41
6. #221: Volcanoes, Plagues & the Childhood of a Kabbalist 26:19
7. #220: The working poor and a so-so murder show 24:58
8. #219: When a paragraph changes your life 21:09
9. #218: Poetry to Live By 15:40
10. #217: Voices from 1900-1914 58:18

One of my favorite stories from Hinduism comes from the Bhagavata Purana, on the childhood of Krishna:

….One day when Rama and the other little sons of the cowherds were playing, they reported to his mother, “Krishna has eaten dirt.” Yasoda took Krishna by the hand and scolded him, for his own good, and she said to him, seeing that his eyes were bewildered with fear, “Naughty boy, why have you secretly eaten dirt?” Krishna said, “Mother, I have not eaten. They are all lying. If you think they speak the truth, look at my mouth yourself” “If that is the case, then open your mouth,” she said to the Lord Hari [Vishnu], the God of unchallenged sovereignty who had in sport taken the form of a human child, and He opened his mouth.

She then saw in his mouth the whole eternal universe, and heaven, and the regions of the sky, and the orbit of the earth with its mountains, islands, and oceans; she saw the wind, and lightning, and the moon and stars, and the zodiac; and water and fire and air and space itself; she saw the vacillating senses, the mind, the elements, and the three strands of matter. She saw within the body of her son, in his gaping mouth, the whole universe in all its variety, with all the forms of life and time and nature and action and hopes, and her own village, and herself. Then she became afraid and confused, thinking, “Is this a dream, or an illusion wrought by a god? Or is it a delusion of my own perception? Or is it some portent of the natural powers of this little boy, my son? I bow down to the feet of the god, whose nature cannot be imagined or grasped by mind, heart, acts, or speech; he in whom all of this universe is inherent, impossible to fathom. The god is my refuge, he through whose power of delusion there arise in me such false beliefs as “I”, “This is my husband”, “This is my son”, “I am the wife of the village chieftain and all his wealth is mine, including these cow-herds and their wives and their wealth of cattle.”

When the cow-herd’s wife had come to understand the true essence in this way, the lord spread his magic illusion in the form of maternal affection. Instantly the cow-herd’s wife lost her memory of what had occurred and took her son on her lap.

Translator Wendy Doniger also notes that this story “is a motif based upon a much earlier myth from the Mahabarata [3.183-190, and the Matsya 167]: the sage Markandeya was floating in the cosmic ocean after the dissolution of the universe, when he came upon a young boy sleeping under a banyan tree. He entered the mouth of the boy—who was Vishnu—and saw within him the entire universe, whereupon he came back out of Vishnu’s mouth.”