Political Samsara

Why the country swung right is very easy to see if you just live out in the world and don't "listen" to the news or to social media. 

1. What I mean here by "not listening" to the news or social media is this: visiting both conservative and liberal sites, maybe a little social media, and just watching it happen, very lightly. Not actually engaging, just observing. Maybe looking once a week, no more than that. Any more than that will create confusion. 

2. Pay attention to the world, see how people talk, what they're talking about. I recommend eavesdropping. I recommend listening to friends - your friends might be in tech, they might be professors, they might be a contractor. I have friends in all these jobs. Listen to them. 

3. Once you've listened, it becomes easier to understand what people "believe" in. 

4. Don't believe in good or evil. There's no such thing as good and evil. There are harmful acts and beneficial acts, and there acts that we can't tell at first whether they're harmful or beneficial. Lots of people believe in good and evil, as essences, as eternal things, but that's fantasy. 

5. This is the method I used to understand that Trump would be elected again well before the actual election took place. Here are the specifics I saw.

6. During the pandemic, the left went crazy. They instituted DEI stuff in response to black men being killed by police. I genuinely think the intention behind the response was positive, but the response itself went too far. DEI stuff and LGBTQ+ rhetoric - not the actual actions (though at times some actions went too far as well), just the language around it all - alienated a lot of people. It was at this point that people who were in the middle or who were center-left-right began to feel as though they were not part of the reality of the country. The media played a big role in this (and it should be noted the push from left was a response to a push from the right - now we're going back to the Obama years, etc, but let's not - everything has a push a pull; in this years election, this was one push). This alienated a lot of people. 

Caveat: The first bodhisattva vow is "being are numberless, I vow to save them all." I live by that vow. All beings, especially human beings, are precious, unflawed, worthy of love and compassion. It is important to correct historical wrongs as best we might be able, to shift karma. But the response - within language, not as direct actions - went too far, and most importantly, it all became self-righteous and self-aggrandizing - this response alienated people. 

7. As people moved right in response to cultural shifts promulgated by universities, media outlets, and Hollywood (wokeness essentially, against stemming from other factors itself), the economy got worse, the Biden administration messed up in Afghanistan, the govt lied either accidentally or willfully about covid, and people became even more alienated. 

8. Mainstream news became sensationalized to the point of ridiculousness (that includes liberal and conservative outlets). It was always "democracy on the line." This escalated up to the election. CNN claimed Trump was a fascist; Musk (who is essentially a media head) said democracy would be over if Kamala won. The hyperbole was so off the charts as to be laughable - problem though, people took it seriously bc it was contextualized seriously. 

9. Trump went on Rogan; Kamala didn't. Bad move, though it wouldn't have saved her campaign. That was already lost due to the preceding three/four years. 

10. People viewed Trump as a way to bring the economy back, stop the flow at the border, and get away from a "woke" mentality that, as Jon McWhorter writes in his book Woke Racism, infantilizes black people and makes white people have to tiptoe around black people. Additionally, mainstream media - it's major flaw being that it exists in a 24 hour cycle and must get views, thus constantly having to drum up sensationalized BS to get people to look at it - was exposed. If mainstream media wants to get any credibility back, it should become a once or twice weekly publication online, and then stay quiet. The 24-hour news cycle is BS people have seen through. 

11. Thus, Trump elected. 

For liberals who are upset, I recommend watching the Rogan podcast with Trump. He exaggerates and lies about stuff - sometimes moronic stuff - but mostly what you see is a capitalist. (you could also watch the Musk podcast with Rogan - he also lies about stuff - it's funny to hear him talk about how "dems" are "importing illegals," for instance, to bolster election numbers, especially in the context of Trump winning pretty sweepingly; either dems did a bad job at this or it is what it is, a delusion, but you get a better idea of what he's about - you might not agree with it, but it's not "the end of democracy either") Basically, if you watch the Rogan podcast with Trump, what you see is a person wanting to be viewed as impressive (he talks about his "weave" a lot, he's a great weaver). He also discusses various issues - he's not always that articulate or clear, he never is, but he basically outlines policies that many conservatives might have, and then he has some policies that could appeal to liberals as well. I agree that it sucks that women's rights couldn't be thought of as important enough to vote for. It's a disrespect to women. The drill-baby-drill idea is also a bad one, and one hopes the national parks aren't up for grabs now. But generally speaking: he wants to open up the economy, end regulations, set up his tariffs, and close the border. I would view things in this way, and then consider the ways that democrats alienated people. 

For the conservatives who think they won, don't be mistaken, there is no winning, that's a fantasy. Additionally, Trump likes attention, he likes being viewed as important; if you don't believe this, investigate your own need for attention and validation; do you need attention and validation, does it help you feel as though you exist, help make you feel important? That is very real for most people, and in fact is how most people operate. Certainly how America operates. Trump is no different than that, in fact he is that idea taken to an extreme. Musk is the same way. You don't get a lot of followers and people validating you unless you are seeking that, wanting that, believing you need that. There's a lot of fear in that, a lot of fear in needing attention and validation - it's a protective position, a position of believing you are so essential, so real, that you need to be dutifully protected and then validated. It is the opposite of being courageously alone in the world. This sense of protection is a psychological guardedness, a basic defensive posture, only reaching out for attention and validation. It is the opposite of openness. It is what Trungpa called Spiritual Materialism: believing that you must protect your being and only then reaching out in order it to get something (validation or attention or money or fame, whatever). Openness is the opposite - it is the sense that there is nothing to protect, no ego to prop up with validation and attention - there's actually a giving away quality. You give of yourself to others. In this way, you serve others. Make no mistake: that's not Trump and it's not Musk. That doesn't mean that some of Trump's policies won't work out, but it does mean that most (most) of the policies will be based on a defensive posturing based on serving the self. 

A final thought about this: politics are an illusion, though there are "real" consequences. The idea that the mainstream media is less real or true than a podcast is an illusion, though a podcast has certain elements that make it more appealing than mainstream news. Social media is an illusion, a mess of conceptualization, distanced from the ground of life. It is, also, the ground of life, but conceptually, in our heads, where we engage with it, it is an illusion - we don't even know what we're seeing. There's no actual solution here, not with Kamala and not with Trump. It's just the system we've set up. Generally speaking, America, as fucked up as it is and as illusory as it is, is a pretty decent place to live. Most importantly though, there's an existential ground that we don't pay attention to. In Tibetan Buddhism, it's the charnel ground - we live upon the dead; all reality dances upon the dead, on death itself. Life is death; death is life. Politics is not the ultimate reality; it's an aspect of human existence, a contrivance, that is meant to help us organize society but that we then mistake for reality, for ultimate truth, and which then keeps us from paying attention to ultimate reality or truth. It is a distraction from who we really are, from what some people might call our spiritual selves. This ultimate reality is beyond concept, it can't be intellectualized or explained, it is not your mind but it is not outside your mind - the only thing that can really even come close to pointing at it is art. It can only be directly experienced. When you look at another person, are you seeing them? Or are you seeing you? The swinging of politics, from right to left and back again, is just samsara - it's so easy to see if the reference point is not the ego. Just samsara, which in buddhism is confusion, the world of confusion, and the cycle of that confusion. The wheel of confusion. Understood in this way, the political world is just another aspect of our samsaric minds. Swinging one way, then swinging the other. Just as has happened and will continue to happen. Being lost in confusion, wandering, swinging left and right, confused, thinking it's all real from the reference point of the confused ego, looking out at the world like a scared animal - politics, save me! But there's another reference point altogether, another world to live in. It's not some fantasy-land, it's not some matrix-y version where you "see through" things, though it is a way of seeing, of learning to see. This other reference point is a fundamental change in the locus of identity, and it leads you to another world, which is just this world, the one not seen. The question to be asked is what is the existential, cosmic ground upon which our samsaric minds rest? Who is experiencing this moment now, now, now? 

Politics, Joe Rogan, Trump, Kamala, Mainstream News: A Take

It's the same thing both ways: each side says we'll lose democracy if the other wins. This isn't about policy. It's not about the constitution. It's not even about which candidate you like better. It's about projected realities. You can believe you're a "free thinker" by choosing a certain side, but in actuality there's no such thing - our consciousnesses are intertwined, and only by cultivating a basic and grounded aloneness can you open the door to even the first glimpse of truth, which is that we live in a world of others all projecting their own realities. This is so common and so subtle no one actually sees it. Here's how to start seeing it: don't watch the news, don't watch podcasts, get off the internet, get off social media in particular, experience the world directly, every day, and see where "politics" exist there. That's a start.

The Writing Life

I love not being in the literary game. I watch people play it, and watched them sign up for twitter and tweet things, and watched them sign up for instagram and post pictures of their books, and I'm watching them write little articles for substack. I can't imagine it's anything other than maddening. Who'd want to create content all the time? But it's like this. If we don't do something, we don't exist. We're so constantly trying to prove our existence. That proof can be aggressive, in the form of being a pushy person, or it can be really needy, needing attention, or it can be really arrogant, believing you should get your ideas out there. I'm so tired of ideas, of hearing people explain the world. It seems to me that I'd only like to relate to my own pain in order to learn how to better relate to the pain of other people. This begins in myself, extends out within my family, then with my friends, then with the people where I teach. I once believed that there was somewhere to go with all this, but I don't think there's anywhere to go, with writing or anything else, though the material world makes you believe there's somewhere to go. But there's not. There's just the constant work of relating to the razor's edge of pain, sadness or aggression or arrogance and ego, all versions of pain, of projecting. And this big game of making sure to constantly put oneself out there, so exhausting, and just a gloss or a kind of lubrication over dissatisfaction and pain, which is also a lubrication over joy and delight. Which of course means a distance from life itself. My worry, of course, is that because I don't platform and play the game, and because my books don't sell, that in the future new ones won't be published. But even this is an ego-driven worry. It's an illusion in the same way all the stuff on social media is an illusion. It's surprising to see that the literary world is just as susceptible to delusion and illusion as everyone else - there's just a higher intelligence quotient, a more intellectual way of contextualizing all the same stuff. I read books, but I don't really talk to anyone about what I read. I sit zazen, but I never speak about that. I write, and whether that writing ever gets published is not something I can know, and at some point, there's nothing to say about writing either. I can't imagine calling oneself a writer or an artist in any serious way. I can't imagine offering advice to anyone about "the writing life." Writing is a way to examine confusion - the basic samsaric ground of our lives - that's all writing is, and in that examination, one hopes to touch basic sanity or goodness, the earth itself, but it's all just shadows. It's only within direct experience that contact can be made. 

Ego and climate change

I was talking with a friend about climate change, and said to this friend, as evidence of the phenomenon and as a segue into something I'd recently been considering, that the winters were getting shorter out west, making the ski season shorter. He quickly said something like, as if it's just an inconvenience for us, which left me a little embarrassed, and which he said with such a low level vitriol that I shut down and our conversation ended. I also could see that he wouldn't want to hear my argument, probably. In actuality, I was trying to say two things about climate change, which I had then felt stifled in saying. One was simple, just that it was occurring and we could see it in these obvious human terms and it was important to see if obvious human terms; the other was something I wanted to talk about, but no longer could talk about it, since the conversation felt shut down, but it was this: shouldn't we be appealing to these wealthy people? I understand that viewing climate change as an inconvenience to wealthy humans is not really crux of the issue...but actually, it might be the crux of the issue. What I mean is this: climate change is caused by human greed, desire, control, all of that. And if we can appeal to the sense that, hey, you wealthy people (probably shouldn't call them this) you are going to lose your ski season, we must stop this fossil fuel stuff that is causing you to lose your skin season. In other words, actually appealing to these people's egos, I think that would get us a lot further than saying like: the planet is more important than any individual or tribe. And while I agree and feel deeply that the latter is true, I believe that appealing to ego - in a somewhat cynical way, perhaps - would end up being more beneficial for the planet. In other words, using the so-called "inconvenience" that climate change causes for certain wealthy participants in the human dramedy and making it clear that they will be losing their coastlines, ski slops, coral reefs, Malibu beach houses, all the beautiful places that they consider their own and that they might feel would be horrible personal losses. Appealing to that ego I think could be helpful, beneficial to the larger world (wealthy lobbyists and such). But I couldn't say that bc the party-line of "as if climate change is just an inconvenience" had been stated. 

 The polarization in the country is very easy to understand, and I want to outline how I see it happening in academia. I see three things happening: 

1. Fear of change creates a sense that things need to stay in place or go back to how they were (this is maga, the far right). 

2. Believing immediate change is the only antidote common sense is forgotten and often somewhat extreme (to sometimes very extreme) policies are put into place (this is the far left). 

3. Then, both factions push against each other. 

In addition this, there is a fourth factor that exacerbates it all: 

4. The internet and media have their agendas and biases. Algorithms on social media excacerbate rhetoric on both sides; media plays to their own agendas and audience. The result is that neither side can hear each other. Thus, extreme policies are put into place in college campuses, whereas in state governments legislators try to restrict those polices. Both sides dig in. 

By way of example, take DEI initiatives: this is a good-intentioned idea, to make campuses and workspaces more inclusive to minorities. Of course there would be pushback from the right: that guy just got a job because of his identity. That could be foreseen. The right would dig in in this particular way, which of course is an ugly point of view. What couldn't be foreseen was that DEI has begun to homogenize campuses even more ideologically speaking: while diversity regarding identity alone has improved, diversity regarding ideology has declined on college campuses. That's one. Two, and the point Jon McWhorter often makes, is that such initiatives, when they go too far (there are examples of these but I'm not going to bother to link them here) can make bipoc students feel as though they are there not necessarily through merit (many students have imposter syndrome already), that they might be a token of some kind. Basically, my argument, is that a lighter hand is needed. Unfortunately, right now, that lighter hand doesn't exist in this country. The question is can a calmer, less outraged point of view, from both sides, exist? 

It should be totally acceptable that workplaces and campuses diversify, but also let's not tokenize or coddle anyone. 

Diversity of ideological point of view should be a consideration in DEI training/initiatives too. That could be surprisingly helpful. 

I see no reason for everyone to have to conform to the announcement of pronouns. If a faculty member or student wishes to make that available, that's totally fine and needs to be respected, but otherwise, common sense often makes good sense, and you'd probably get less pushback from the far right. 

Dag Solstad

I finished the novel T. Singer by Dag Solstad last week. I've read two others he's written: Shyness and Dignity and Novel 11, Book 18. I've loved all of them, and I can't compare them. I wouldn't know which was better or why. In the reading experience, I feel totally connected to the character's mind-states, which I think is incredibly rare. Most writers don't accomplish this. I also feel totally immersed and connected to the flow of life, the confusion and delusion of the character, and in this case, his resistance to growing and changing - I found it very beautiful and incredibly sad, while also being amusing throughout, sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph. The most impressive thing about T. Singer to me is that hte book seems to be about a person who has no "inner self." Who is unknown to himself, in the same way that he is unknown to others. This is fascinating because, as Buddhism posits, we all have no inner self - the self we believe we are is a kind of fiction. BUT. Buddhism doesn't just do away with personality, character, or any of that. This is the confusing part about Buddhism for most people. How can there be "no self" and also people exist and have specific personalities and traits etc. The thing is: Buddhism is talking about a metaphysical self. There is no metaphysical self that holds a person together, essentially - there is only consciousness moving within the sea of birth and death. And so, in Buddhism, what one comes to be intimate with is not the metaphysical self or soul - what one comes to be intimate with is the self of reality,  oneself as an interconnected phenomenon, fully complete in each moment, fully one-self. In other words, beyond the "little self" that is our ego self, there is a kind of larger self, the radiant and pure light of consciousness or buddha-mind or buddha-nature or interconnection or whatever you want to call it. This is what begins to be one's self over time. Interestingly, in T Singer, Singer knows he doesn't have an essential self, a soul, but he does no further looking - this is fascinating because it's almost as though he's taken a step on the path of Buddhism - he is often calm and immerses himself in banal tasks like stamping books at the library and he takes joy and pleasure in these simple acts - but then he gets stuck. What I think is happening is that the fact that he believes he is no one, that he believes he is a mystery to himself and others, which causes him anxiety and loneliness, this belief becomes his self. In other words, his belief that he is no one and a total mystery to himself hardens into an ego reality, and then this is who Singer is, and from there, there's no escaping who is. Of course, what's most tragic about this is that this is how most people are: rather than allowing growth and change, rather than investigating beyond the little self, the self they believe they are hardens and stagnates until the ego dictates all they do, even though the ego itself is a fiction. I thought Solstad depicted this in a unique and moving and amusing way. 

new goodreads strategy

rather than finding books that have thousands of ratings and thousands of reviews, and reading those, find books that have only a hundred or less, but still with strong ratings, and read those. 

Summer

After three weeks of heat and humidity in the south, rain. 

I got bitten by a tick on one of many hikes and had to go on an antibiotic, which has disrupted my gut biome. But I feel okay. 

Daughter is swimming well, placing second in breast stroke. 

Son is learning to ride a bike, play tennis. 

If you have children, I recommend sports, physicality, hiking, books, drawing. I recommend art and sports. I recommend working on both body and mind. I recommend a sense of discipline within playfulness.

Emily and I have been hiking, playing tennis, reading, watching Copa, awaiting Wimbledon. Healthy and tan and inside of green summer. 

I began a new book, a new novel. I'm enjoying its form, its attention to thought and physical action, on a small scale. 

Gave a talk at the local Temple on Dogen's Mountains and Waters Sutra: "Mountains do not lack the qualities of mountains. Therefore, they always abide in ease and always walk. You should examine in detail this quality of mountains walking. Mountains' walking is just like human walking. Accordingly, do not doubt mountains' walking even though it doesn't look like human walking."

Abiding in ease is walking. Walking is living in impermanence. Realizing impermanence, abiding there in ease, is to realize permanence, what is permanent. When you hike a mountain, do you hike up it, or does it walk you up? Do you think you're so different from a mountain? Mountains walk just as humans walk, and this is called "being on the path." Being on the path means being within the reality of impermanence. Sitting zazen, we walk the path. Standing still, a mountain walks. We should be grateful for this impermanence, because it is what allows us to grow, to see and learn from our delusions, to see each other growing, to see our separateness as also togetherness, together in the mountains, upon which we are walking, and which are walking us. 

Leave the World Behind and other things

The reason I'm writing about the new film, Leave the World Behind, based on a novel by Rumaan Alam, is because no one's said what I said right after watching the movie: it's liberal propaganda, and shockingly shallow, even for a satire. It makes me wonder if the book is similar to the movie. The characters feel more like pawns being moved around a stage than human's living out any real existence. Each scene feels like an "idea" and each character in each scene meant to represent some ideological (whether that be class, race, or gender) concept. In other words: it felt like the most contrived and artificial viewing experience I'd had for some time. I'm really curious to see if the book feels the same way. I could give away some spoilers (though I'm mostly talking to myself here), but I don't see a reason. Suffice it to say: the white man interjects seemingly on the black man's behalf during the standoff with the true conservative racist (the upper middle class liberals weren't "true" racists, just accidentally, ideologically blindly so), and the white woman interjects on the black woman's behalf during the standoff with the true deer racists (just kidding, the deer aren't racist, they're just dumb (although, the scene with the deer all staring at the characters as though they're going to ingest their souls is most I've laughed at a movie in a long time)). 

I suppose this is the problem with satire, and with not really letting characters be people, but instead forcing them into stereotypical containers (white woman, afraid of black visitors (they're not really visitors, they own the airbnb, like, it's their house, but wait, they're black, so maybe not! Be worried, Julia!); black visitors, suspicious and subservient in presence of these condescending upper middle class whites, etc) all so that, later on, over drinks, these stereotypes can be overturned and white woman can apologize, white man can confess, while black people, they can see that the white people, deep down, are people, and not condescending racists or whatever. Class is in there too, as a way to mix things up. Look: the intentions are lovely. If this was a townhall meeting, some of these tropes might be helpful (Jeb, calm down, everyone have a drink, we're just people here). But in a film, it all felt too preposterously artificial. When Julia Roberts complains about these visitors being in "my house" even though, obviously, it's their house, it felt like the script-writers were trying to make something compelling for a sixteen-year-old - my god, white people are so oblivious! 

What's this have to do with anything? Not much, but here are some films and books I did enjoy this year, though not necessarily from 2023: 

Films:

Past Lives

You Hurt My Feelings

Talk to Me

The Killer

Infinity Pool

Banshees of Inisherin 

The Stranger

Reality

Books:

The Second Body

The Undiscovered Self

Darkness Visible

Kudos

Something To Do With Paying Attention

Tremor

Denial 

Weather

Stella Maris 

The Hidden Life of Trees

Read and watched more than that, but those are the standouts.

Draft of new novel

I've been working hard on finishing a new novel. There's usually a place I come to when working very intensely that is very one-pointed in terms of concentration. I'm dreaming about the novel, thinking about the novel, seeing scenes from the novel, hearing sentences from the novel, emailing myself emails about the novel about things to include when I happen to be at the grocery store or walking in the woods. Then I realize that it is so all-consuming that I'm irritable around people, and that is when I know I need to take a break. So, I'm on a break.

The whole book is beginning to feel very complete - the form has come together in a way that I couldn't have anticipated, but that I feel very good about. It's about two writers - one of whom is struggling to be content in his life outside of writing, to perhaps learn to put writing down, another of whom has been so consumed by being some author that she's become unhealthy, lost, sick. It is about whether art makes us healthier and wiser or sicker and more solipsistic. I've enjoyed working on it for a year. A draft is complete now, but I feel like it won't be fully "finished" for another six months to a year. It's longer than I was anticipating - 90K words. I'd like it to be 75K words, which means I'll need to cut a lot of it.

It begins with several epigraphs. One is from William Styron's memoir about his depression. I read a lot of books about mental health in order to write the book, some of which were Darkness Visible by William Styron, One Fine Day in April by Donald Antrim, The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Wang, and Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker. Then I read several books about psychology, namely Jung's The Undiscovered Self and a book about the intersection of Zen and psychology called Nothing is Hidden, both of which were illuminating reads. After reading several books about psychology, part of me wishes I'd been a counselor/therapist rather than a writer/teacher, but then I enjoy writing so much. 

I'm taking a break from the novel now. I probably take small peaks at it over the next couple weeks, seeing if I like sentences and paragraphs and sections, but I won't do a big dive back in until mid-July. 

As of now it's called The Second Self. 

More Buddhism Mistakes - no-self

There's often this thing that people say about Buddhism, which is that it is a philosophy of "no-self." And people make a really big deal of that. That a person doesn't have a self. But that's just sort of wrong. What Buddhism is talking about here is a metaphysical self, or, to put it into christian terms, a soul. The reason Buddhism posits the notion that there is no soul is because Buddhism has no metaphysical components. There is not a world under or behind this world animating it - this world is it. That is wondrous. It is an interconnected self that doesn't need some outside thing to animate it. Another way to say this is like this: Buddhism doesn't view spirituality and humanity as separate. It doesn't view animalness and sacredness as separate - they are the same thing. It doesn't view nature as lesser and the spiritual realms as greater. This is what no-self really means. It means things can't exist without each other. Each thing creates another thing, from which a thing itself has been created. This is "no-self." The whole world is the self, the entire universe is, and when this is true, each moment is "spiritual," whatever that might mean. But I mean, look at it: the trees are green, the sky is blue, the clouds are white, and they are all the same thing, changing form. 

At the same time, Buddhism would never discount one's personality and character and inner life. While it's true that thoughts are fleeting, so are clouds, and thoughts are their own reality, just as clouds are. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't trust or believe our thoughts because they're "no self' or not real or something, it just means we hold them lightly because we know they will change. There are individual selves - that is one side of buddhism; but all selves are also one self - that is the other side of buddhism. We don't have to have a metaphysical system to see this ontological reality: you come from, are birthed by, two others, who come from, are birthed by, two others, and couldn't exist without the sun, the air, etc, etc, the entire universe, on and on. John Muir said, investigate one thing and you find the entire universe is hitched to it, and that is true of us as well. This is the actual meaning of no-self. It has nothing to do with the idea that you aren't fully real or don't have a functioning self in the world. It's much more practical than that and opens a way of seeing and then being that is different from worrying about some soul you might have. What you begin to worry about is your self - the self of reality, which means all the people, critters, plants, around you - you worry and care for them just as you would care for your own eyes, because they are also you and you are them. 

the less time I spend online, the better I feel

the less time I spend looking at any type of social media, the better I feel 

the more I meditate, the more stable I feel

the less I meditate, the more unstable I feel

the more time spent in a forest, the more grounded I feel

the more I learn about nature, the better I feel

there is no going back to the past, there shouldn't be a mistake of some pastoral, perfect place back in time, but that doesn't mean we can't learn about, respect, and be healed by nature now

going forward, not backward, into a slightly different nature than the holocene, but also different than the anthropocene 

the more I'm in and read about nature, the closer I feel to reality

the less I pay attention to the wider world of literature, the better I feel, more intimate with what's real

the more I focus on writers I know, just small connections, the better I feel, more intimate with what's real

at the same time, there's an awareness that there is no better or worse on a fundamental level, on a fundamental level, no stable or unstable, but relatively, there is a cultivation of what I mentally consume, which must be done skillfully, for this small I. 

No Opinion

When we have an opinion about things out in the world, we overlay a reality on top of reality, which means that we don't see, experience, or become intimate with actual reality. 

When we go around having opinions about what is right and wrong we isolate ourselves from the emerging moment, which is neither right or wrong. We can't see a person because we see only our opinion of their conceptualizations. 

This happens more online than in what might be called actual physical reality. Though people do this in actual physical reality as well with their minds. It is intensified online. 

The reason this is intensified online is because life on life is almost exclusively filtered through conceptualizations - Instagram and TikTok might be visual platforms but they're still inherently conceptual - what we're seeing here is not reality as reality, but curated reality, and thus a conceptualization.

Language is more corrosive online than in actual physical reality in the mere sense that it dominates digital/online environments - comments, tweets, replies, articles, text on photos, text attached to photos, are all layerings upon reality, and the online world is already a layer upon reality, which means we're several times removed from reality when online. Spontaneous body language and other forms of communication are not present.

Online is also just online from a certain point of view - it's also just an aspect of what might be called physical reality. No one treats it like that though because no one sees it like that. 

Everyone projects who they want to be, their opinion of themself and others, into the digital world, which compartmentalizes the self. 

There's nothing right or wrong with the online world: there's only delusion or lack of delusion. This is the same for what might be called physical reality. The online world is a world of delusion manifested in its highest form: it's like a super-samsara, where everyone believes they are individual entities, avatars, that are speaking to other individual entities, avatars, but in reality all that's happening is one mind is spinning and spinning and spinning, turning over and over, ideas and opinions making and re-making, and protecting, and reinforcing the self. This is the wheel. 

To get off the wheel, a good starting point is not having any opinions, about oneself or others. Then life online begins to seem dumb. There's no self to make, no self to protect, nothing to spin with.

But it takes a long time, and a willingness to make the wheel stop. It's the first step toward intimacy with something beyond conceptualization. 

Joy Williams, Harpers, and Cormac McCarthy (probably will come back, revise, add quotes from the book later)

Joy Williams, a writer I like and sometimes admire, recently wrote about Cormac McCarthy's two new novels for Harpers. The piece is a kind of fan fawning and self-validation - a great writer noticing another great writer. Also, the two have things in common: Christianity, namely, or the possible impossibility of it. McCarthy's voided and bleak worldview is Williams' main portal through which we should be enjoying him. That and that language is an imperfect conveyor of reality - stuff we know. 

This isn't a review of McCarthy's The Passenger - it's my thoughts about the book; I'm not going to quote (or maybe I'll go back and add some later); I'm not going to do a plot breakdown. Bobby and Alicia are brother and sister - they are in love, or were in love. This is, obviously, a forbidden love. There are echoes of Shakespeare, namely Hamlet and probably Romeo and Juliet. There are echoes of McCarthy's other books. I've never enjoyed a book and felt more distant from it than this one; I appreciate McCarthy as a stylist, but my worldview - really, the reality I experience - is no longer lined up with his. I view the novel as a novel of the western canon, affirming that canon. I see Shakespeare, Hemingway, Melville, etc, here. There are allusions to quantum physics, some general relativity, and lots of god-play. It is the most Western Canon Novel I've read in a long time. Compared to most other contemporary novels, it's much more interesting, much more enjoyable to read - it sort of screams Capital L Literature and yet is completely readable. And yet. I'm a tough read, and, often disappointed by contemporary novels, I was looking forward to this one. It was one of the oddest reading experiences I've had: let me try to break down why I think so below. 

I haven't read Stella Maris yet because I wanted to let The Passenger sit in my mind - or, as McCarthy might have it - in my unconscious. The book read quickly. Being in McCarthy's world is like being in a bad dream, but one that's fun to be in. You're being chased, but you don't know by whom! Just like Bobby Western is being chased by some ambiguous "they," the government, the FBI, the IRS, so too the reader is being chased by an awful nightmarish vision of reality. Like Joseph K in The Trial, Bobby has been arrested, though he's never captured, caught - he's on the lam. It's a bit of McCarthy fun to sort of wander, very, very barely paranoiacally, through New Orleans, eating at places that sound really nice to eat at. I kept finding myself hungry when I was reading about lobster or linguine with clams (white sauce, I'm assuming). There are lots of conversations, purportedly deep ones. McCarthy is at his best when he's describing scenes, which means, things, objects, physicalities (like Oiler telling about the atrocities he witnessed and participated in in Vietnam (blowing up an elephant, for instance) or people wandering and lost and dying in the aftermath of one of the atomic bombs, thinking the world had ended). The best cheeseburger a character ever ate is conjured - sounded great. It's the prose style, of course, that keeps one reading: just how McCarthy renders the physical world is wonderful, a complete delight. But, let's be honest: he's not a great explainer of ideas. In fact, for a novel packed with ideas, this novel didn't feel like it really grappled with many of those ideas, which I found odd - the ideas were just sort of there, like the vague "they" that track Bobby, somewhere out there, but not really tangible. Likewise, inner states are not McCarthy's thing. Or, better put, the mind isn't really his thing - this is strange for a writer so enamored and interested in the unconscious. It's really hard to see Bobby. He feels a bit like a blank slate, until you sort of realize the hellish reality he's in is his inner life. Symbolic of it at least. But if that's the case, then all I know of Bobby, really, is that he's atmospherically moody, sad, possibly apocalyptic. It just felt vague, by which I mean, Bobby did. Psychology, as Williams rightly points out in her essay, is beside the point, which make the sister sections of the book feel a little silly. This is madness? The sister talking to a mutated dwarf? It reads like if Goofy tried to explain the cosmos to you, which is to say: something I'd like to watch, but not easy to pull off. The sections don't work as being anything other than interesting wordplay - a little like reading literary theory. Thanks for the game, now I have to make a cup of tea. I mean, I get it: the kid is Alicia's unconscious protecting her - however insanely - from some deeper, more horrific understanding of reality. I just didn't buy it, though I enjoyed reading it. I often felt McCarthy was doing an impression of Shakespeare - which is to say, at least he's going for it. Yet. Where is the life and mind we're all living now? How does this novel relate? Does it need to? Probably not? Sheddan was immediately a Falstaff - so now we've got echoes of the Henry plays. There's a way in which the novel felt like McCarthy going: look, the Western Canon, and I, an author of important things. That sounds mean, but there's a bit of that in the book. 

After I let the book sit, it sort of sank, like Bobby into the deep, diving on some salvage mission, only to come up with, well, not much: the world is a howling void and will return to howling voidness. That's fine. Shall we be in terror the rest of our lives? Even the folks on Naked and Afraid - hungry and gaunt - eventually get a fish. Really though, those paintings by our elders in caves, the ones of horses and creatures to kill and eat, that was nice, wasn't it? I mean, we're here. 

McCarthy is interested in big ideas in the book. Capital M mathematics, but I don't see much evidence of any sort of math except simple addition. Nor is it clear how Alicia's math skills have led her to some larger understanding of the world, but they have. She sounds like a genius, I guess, but then I've never been very interested in geniuses. McCarthy is. Quantum Mechanics is there - the world wasn't there until there was someone to observe it. The book makes reference to primal eyeballs - the awareness necessary. But when those eyeballs weren't there, was there anything? Stuff was moving, one character tells us. So, here we are. There are some basic physical principles that freshmen get in Intro to Physics. The unconscious is conjured to a strange degree - Alicia's seemingly-protective hallucinations and Bobby's bad dreams (weird and anciently, spiritually "scary," though I was never scared). The people have it hard in the book, living rough lives, almost all of them, like Bobby, seemingly on the lam, and yet I kept wondering what McCarthy's office at the Santa Fe Institute was like. Probably a nice chair there. I bet he gets emails. Hard, hard lives. Pie is eaten fairly frequently in this hellscape or purgatory. 

So, where did the book leave me? It feels like a book that could only be made by a person enamored with Christianity and the afterlife, being mad at an absent god. Grief-stricken about the unfairness of all that - at times I felt it whiny, but we all have our complaints. It's true that humans are destructive and stupid, violent and cruel, have desires we can't reconcile, and that nature is seemingly indifferent (is it?), and it's equally true that it's not necessary to layer meaning onto such a reality. In other words: McCarthy's novel seems to be saying: cruelty and human confusion is bad. And confusing. Also tragic. And in the same breath that the book says cruelty and confusion bad, it then says: but if nothing means anything then it's not bad, it's just nightmarish. The problem here is that that meaninglessness is a great layering of meaning onto reality. The very thing that McCarthy purports to understand - that even mathematics is just a description of reality, never reality itself; that language can only direct at best, distort at worst - is what he's failing to embody as a writer. He's not describing reality, in other words; he's describing how Cormac McCarthy views things. 

In rendering the world either an empty, desolate place, or one that could possibly belong to the nightmare of some terrible god, McCarthy is adding a layer of meaning atop the world. He is mad about god, that there is no good one. He's mad that there's a void, grumpy about it, irritated. Bobby is sad about his sister, misses her terribly, is losing her, her memory, sick in love as they say, and sister is existentially sad about the void - or the deep demon - she's seen into due to, uh, math. The problem, as other critics have noted, is not that neither of them come off as real people, it's that their ideas feel, well, dated: for someone as supposedly up on math and science as McCarthy is, reading nightmarishness onto, or into, reality feels not just odd, but incorrect: as most any natural science will tell you, the world is an interconnected reality; the cosmos itself forming itself from itself. Violence is just what it is - a simple fact, and also, a way that energy changes form - but for McCarthy, this cruelty (the cruelty of just being here when we didn't ask, of being in this human form when we didn't want to be, and have no idea why we're here or where we're going) is evidence of a horrible, terrible reality, cooked up by some demon or cruel god. Whereas from a scientific point of view, and from a Buddhist point of view, it's just life doing what it does. 

My own view (which is a view) gets us into all kinds of slippery places regarding climate change and apocalypse, which McCarthy is concerned about (the bomb is referenced, it's world-ending-ness always there - Bobby and Alicia's dad worked on the Manhattan Project, so), and so let me try to clear some of that up: speciation loss is sad, tragic, but it's only sad and tragic from a certain point of view, namely, ours. It's deeply, heartrendingly sad that we don't know how to better take care of living beings. Maybe we'll learn. Maybe we won't, and it's too late. Either way, the dinosaurs went away, and so might we - the universe doesn't particularly care. But it's not indifferent either - it can't be indifferent since we are it. And we (at least some of us) are not indifferent, and yet we live in an inescapable system of harm - dismantling that system is nearly impossible. But it will eventually be dismantled, of its own accord - we can only hope that life goes on. Like Gary Snyder, I suspect it will, though changed, and perhaps non-human. In any case, this, of course, is where McCarthy's ideas - and Joy Williams ideas - feel dated: the characters - the mythic Adam and Eve in this book, as well as the other characters - are passengers seemingly upon the world, upon reality. Like McCarthy's layering of meaninglessness and possible demiurgery - the people in The Passenger are not of the world. They are passengers upon it, lost in this nightmare or purgatory. In other words, weirdly, the vestiges of a Christian worldview make it so that McCarthy's characters are separated from reality itself. They are in reality, but they are not of it, they are alien to it, and like central characters of other writers (see Moshfegh, Lacey, and Ferrante) wish to escape it, disappear from it, or to have never been born in the first place. It makes for a good, if bleak, read. 

There's a part in the book, toward the end, where Bobby protects some tired birds on their migratory journey. It's a lovely moment. "That none disturb these passengers." A little moment of light. Of love. It works nicely against the backdrop of what feels like evil. In its smallness, the moment is grandiose. 

I've loved Cormac McCarthy's books, but they no longer speak a language I understand. If we are the sentient part of that universe, then caring is in us, and when it's in us, it's in - not in, is - the world, is reality itself. This is really what McCarthy's books fail to see, and what most Christian theology struggles with. Books dedicated to the external, to notions of god and evil and souls, essences, are bound to be bound - the rules are strict and manmade. Some souls are good, some bad - god knows all. Be wary of evil - incest. What if something else is true: there is no metaphysical reality that confers either meaning or feeling (ie, love) onto the world. No god or demon beneath the physical world pulling the strings. No, as Alicia suggests, demonium at the core of reality. No meaning and no meaninglessness. Not atheism and not theism nor deism. There is just the world - just as-it-isness. This as-it-isness is all that there is. Nothing more is required. That you are here is it. And that it is here is you. 

Buddhism is Isness, Part 2

The other thing people get wrong about Buddhism is that it's nihilistic or somehow focused on suffering. This is a common misunderstanding. It's easy to see why someone might feel this way: the first noble truth, after all, is some variation of "life is suffering." I like to tweak this translation to something more like "suffering exists in life." But whatever, it seems to start from this very negative place. Life is suffering. Often, newcomers to Buddhism don't love that, which is fair. Who wants to focus on suffering? 

But what Buddhism, and zen in particular, is trying to do, is a get person to ask: where is that suffering coming from? Often, we view suffering as something external to us, outside stuff making us suffering internally. In zen, this duality of inside and outside is immediately broken down in zazen. There is no such thing as inside and outside, and the practitioner begins to experience this after practicing zazen (seated meditation). This takes some time, but it does become apparent. (what does this mean for the literary cliche "you can never really know anyone?" I've been writing toward this cliche for years, in an attempt to dismantle it). 

So, where is suffering coming from? Buddhism says it comes from our mind, which is an intermingled part of the world. So, what Buddhism is doing here is going: take responsibility for your life, for your own suffering, for the stories you tell yourself, unwittingly, that cause your suffering. We practitioners don't get to blame our suffering on something external - we are making it. Caveat: if you get beat up, abused, harassed, neglected, yes, those things are "external" forms of suffering that buddhism acknowledges as real, but what buddhism is really focused on is our sense of dissatisfaction, that life is dissatisfying, that we can never get what we want, and we can never avoid what we don't want. 

So, we're wrapped up in this very neat game of: I want what I want, and I want to avoid what I want to avoid. Capitalism plays on this perfectly. It's the default mode for all human beings: to focus on my own pleasures and my own safety, my own aversion to displeasure or suffering. Then to tell a story about that in an attempt to harden it into a reality. 

Buddhism says: let go of that bullshit game, that bs story. Don't chase after what you want, and don't be averse to what you don't want, because guess what: you're not in control. Over and over, the practitioner learns: I'm not in control. So, let go. Let go of this self that wants and craves and wants to avoid pain and suffering. 

Here, buddhism is isness. Just be. Just be what you are. So, in sitting zazen, we simply sit. We just are what we are. All kinds of thoughts, emotions, cravings, aversions come up, but we are not those things. What are we? Buddhism asks. Who am I? Over and over, this question. Over and over, letting go of that egotistical self that wants life to be just so. Letting go in order to what: experience life as it is. Not as we want it to be. Right there, as-it-is, is liberation. Freedom. Freedom of the desire to control everything, and in that desire to control, when we fail, which we constantly do, that's where suffering is. And buddhism says, just drop that control and you're free. So, Buddhism is practicing isness, which itself is freedom, and which allows people to be compassionate to other people who are swept up in the cravings and aversions and attempts to control life that inevitably lead to suffering and pain. 

Okay, so I thought I was only going to do two of these posts, but I'm going to do one more, probably about life and death, and how zen buddhism views those things. 

An interesting thing about twitter is that it makes people feel as though they can make a bald pronouncement and that that bald pronouncement will hold true for all time. This is why art, novels and poems, are more interesting than twitter. It's strange to see artists making these bald pronouncements when they know better: everything is fleeting - there is nothing you can say about reality, or even society, that will hold true, or won't change with degree, over time. 

For instance, there is a general idea of "health and nutrition" that exists, but twitter hardens that idea into "a perfect diet" championed by however many people, various diets championed as perfect. This doesn't exist. There is no such thing as a perfect diet in reality. There's only intelligent food choices and stupid food choices (with variation, depending on the person, allergies, etc). 

The likable thing about twitter is that you can share things on it. FB can do this too. I imagine instagram can. What I don't understand is why the corporate ownership is necessary. Why are people making content for twitter? 

The unlikeable thing that twitter can do is make it easy to 1) gather the info you want without making you actually learn anything, 2) seemingly "authorize" that material, meaning twitter itself seems to make whatever material "credible" and coming from an "authority," which then makes the user feel like an authority, when they're not, which leads to 3) people only conspiring with other people on twitter who think in the almost exact same way that they think, who they deem to be other authorities, basically, which leads to 4) a country being extremely divided rather than only pretty much divided, which means 5) twitter has hardened the lines of division because it allows people to make bland pronouncements that are seemingly true but that will inevitably change, thus making people believe that there are exact certainties in the world to hold onto when there are none, and that they are the purveyors of these exact certainties. twitter hardens ideas and opinions into what people feel are facts but are not, which leads people to feel like authorities, when they are not. 

The only thing "true" about this post is that, while a bald pronouncement about twitter, it takes into account that twitter could change: it doesn't have to be this way. Though I see no other way for it to be. 

Buddhism is Action, Part I

There are two things about Buddhism that I think most people get wrong about it, particularly about Zen Buddhism. I'm going to talk about the first mistake today, and then another mistake later in the week, maybe tomorrow. The first thing people get wrong about Buddhism is that it's passive. Because the essential mode of operation in Buddhism is seated meditation, either zazen or koan introspection, it looks very passive. Like people aren't doing anything. But zazen is an action. It is a practical action in a world that is chaotic, cynical, and kind of stupid. First, it is grounding: you sit in a particular meditation posture to be very grounded upon the earth. We are in free fall: we will all die, everything we love will pass away, the things we hate that we like to hate will also pass away. Seated meditation immediately grounds our life here, now. Alive. What is zazen? one master asked another. Alive! said the other. So, that is first. Meditation isn't passive. It is an action. It is the action of embodying our universe-ness, of sitting not just with, but as the universe. When we sit in this way, the entire universe sits with us. Starting from seated meditation, the rest of Buddhism is also an action. Buddhism is not about thought, it is not about having thoughts about the world. Thoughts are useful tools. Human intelligence is wonderful and a part of Buddhist life, but it is not the whole life. Bowing, sitting zazen, lighting incense, cleaning the dishes with attention, doing the laundry with attention, paying attention to your kids, paying attention to your students, whatever it might be, that is Buddhist life - directing your actions very mindfully, from the rooted place of zazen. The world is action, and thus Buddhist philosophy is a philosophy of action. To act with the universe, as the universe. To step into it fully. Doing this does two things: first, it relieves neurosis of all kinds: depression and anxiety have less of a chance of existing in this place of action because you're here, not somewhere else in your head; secondly, it allows you to see more clearly the suffering of others, when for so long all you could see was your own suffering, and in seeing the suffering of others, you begin to care about it, through very basic actions, like paying attention (this doesn't mean getting mired in someone else's neuroses). Buddhism then is the action of the universe acting to know and be itself compassionately. 

"Literature" and "genre" writing

For as long as I've been writing fiction, people have told me I should try to writer a thriller or a mystery novel or some other genre book. That way, I'd make some money, and then I could go back and do the literary stuff that I enjoy doing. I always tell them that it's not for lack of trying that I haven't written those books. I just get bored. I've written a couple sci-fi stories. I've written one "crime" short story. But they never really look or feel like the genre things they're supposed to. I don't mean to suggest that I pretentiously can only write "literarily," whatever exactly that might mean. Many literary books I find to be just as formulaic as a genre novel. Sally Rooney's last book, for instance, which I blogged about, I count as one. Again, that it follows a literary formula doesn't mean it's a bad book - just that there's a formula in place that isn't so different from a thriller or some other genre novel. 

Here's the actual problem and why I probably can't write genre stuff: I'm just very interested in day-to-day, moment-by-moment life. The very basic struggle of it. The very basic sense of dissatisfaction that arises there. And the basic, interesting sense of joy, also, when one is present in it. 

Additionally, from what I can see, we are constructing stories all the time, inwardly. We might be sitting at a computer, looking at a video on Youtube about gut health or something, while at the same time an internal drama is playing out about someone we've had some small altercation with at work. The nuance of that is interesting. Then, we might think about how that altercation is not unlike altercations or disagreements we've had with our father, in the past. Then we're in the past in our mind, while also being at work in our mind, while also being on Youtube externally - that's super strange, and to me, incredibly interesting and frankly, exciting. That we're creating all these worlds without even realizing we're creating them. And as we're thinking about our father, our altercations and disagreements, we're seeing that one of the reasons we don't get along with the person at work is that they remind us of our father. This is what I call a small epiphany. It's not some grandiose thing, but it is a basic insight into something. And then we might see our own hangups - is our dad really that bad? Or did we bring our own shit to that relationship? The little tracks in our thinking just kind of spiral like this, and if we can pay attention to it, I think there's something rewarding there. 

What is this meant to say? I'm interested in writing hte inner lives of characters, and I'm interested in treating daily life - that grinding, seemingly boring thing that everyone is involved in - as worthy of being fictionalized. I see no reason that a small, mundane moment at work or in the home or in the car on the freeway or on a walk with a dog can't be as dramatic, interesting, and compelling as a story in which there's been a murder, and we're trying to figure out that murder. What if the internal story is a story about how unhappy a person is, and they see they're unhappiness, and they're trying to understand how to end it - this too is a story of discovery, of someone mudering their own sense of happiness, and then, hopefully, finding a way out of that hellish place of the mind. Those are just the stories I'm drawn to, and that I want to represent on the page. Not because I think literary stuff is better than genre stuff, but because it's what I understand. In this way, I see people making art all the time - they make art with their very lives, and that itself is beautiful and worthy of exploration, but if they don't see that they're making it, I feel like someone should point it out, and that's part of what I'm trying to do. I'm not saying anything positively or negatively, nothing political, nothing about morality; I'm only saying, Look at your mind and how you create worlds moment-by-moment.

One month

It's been a little over a month since Our Last Year came out. In that time: 

My children and wife got strep throat. 

I got the flu. 

A couple people have said some nice things about the book, but the main thing I've really heard about the book is that it's difficult. 

I don't really understand that, but okay. I mean to say: I'm surprised. But then, so many books bore me because they seem like Netflix specials. So maybe it has something to do with that. I don't know. 

I read Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney because many people urged me to. I thought it was fine. There was a lot of fingering in it for a book about adults. I also thought it was like 16 year olds dressed up in adult bodies and that's how the characters were made. I just didn't find it that interesting, though it was "compelling" in the sense that I wanted to see how many chapters were about a sexual encounter. It got a bit repetitive at about 150 pages. I can understand why people would like it, though I don't think it looks very much like life at all - it reads like a novel, meaning that the people seem to be people who you would find only in a novel. It's also political in the perfect way - everyone is a perfect liberal, with nice amounts of liberal guilt. Formally, the book felt unadventurous, and the emails seemed almost pedantic. 

I read, for research, Donald Antrim's book called Surviving Suicide, which is just a slightly lengthened version of his long article in the New Yorker of the same name. I thought that was very good - in particular, the sense that suicide is an illness itself was interesting, but even moreso, that mental illness also has a very physical component. That the person might feel sick - I've felt that before, and what he writes here rings true. It also reminds me of DFW's description where every cell feels as though it's on fire - something like that. I've read a few books about mental illness in an attempt to write the book I'm currently writing. I have no idea if I'll finish it or not. 

I've gone on trail runs, hiked. Our little boy is trying to use the potty. Our little girl was a fairy for halloween, the boy was a strawberry. I have no idea if I'll try to publish a book again. It seems like it might not be something for me, but for other people. It's easier to understand this and be okay with it on a fall day, when the trees are bright and yellow and red and orange, and the day seems more like a dream than day.  

Something Else

This fall, I'll have a new book coming out, and one of the things I think about having a new book coming, and having to talk about that book, is how anything I say about that book will be inadequate. It will be taking the thing and reducing it some way. Based on two folders filled with word documents, it appears that I began writing the novel in August of 2018, shortly after my wife and I had put our marriage back together. The novel is about that. It seems that it took me about a year to write. It's composed of four sections, following the seasons: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer. The novel is quite literally about the near-destruction and then regeneration of a marriage (our marriage), and this destruction and regeneration followed, almost unbelievably, the seasons. We also created it ourselves. There are things I can say about the novel, about why it was written, about how it was written, about the philosophy informing it, about my understanding of the nature of consciousness, and about my understanding of the natural world that was born from the book, but none of that gets to what the novel is doing on its own. So, I feel some hesitation, some resistance in discussing the book because to discuss it is to limit it in some way. The novel is saying something, but it's doing so in a way that is open-ended, up for interpretation and consideration and reflection and contemplation. And yet, at the same time, I know that I'd like to talk about it and that I sort of have to. But ideally, I'd just like it to be experienced. This is really where my hesitation comes from - it's the experience of a book, just like it's the experience of going on a hike or riding a bike or doing whatever, that is most interesting, and it's much less interesting to say something about it.And yet here I am saying that it's much less interesting to say something about it. I feel this little predicament is a constant one, kind of informing all life, but I think articulating it helps, lets the listener know that whatever I say about the book will be inadequate, and to go to the thing itself. Even the book itself is pointing beyond itself, beyond language and storying, toward something else. Really, it's this something else I'm most interested in. 

some thoughts about art

I write, but I don't really consider myself an artist. I feel like I consider myself an explorer of the mind, of being. I'm not exactly sure what it means to "make art." I hear other writers, musicians, painters, etc, discussing "making art," but I never feel like I'm making art. When I play guitar and make up a new song, I don't think about making art. It feels the same as hiking a mountain to me or swimming in the ocean or even digging a hole, doing yard work - I don't see a big difference between the two acts. I sit in zazen each morning, which could look like its own specific place for zazen, but then I notice that there's nothing that isn't zazen. I feel the same about "art." I don't even, when I write, feel as though I'm "making" anything. There's some sense of creativity, a creative energy at work, I think, but I really often don't know what art is. I'm probably being dense, but I'm more likely just sort of dumb. I love books, movies, music - and I often really dislike "entertainment," like comic book movies - but I rarely think about "art." Instead I think about perception, being, thoughts and emotions and how the two influence each, physical body, the importance of being physical or active, stillness, rest. I'm much more interested in writing and films that ask questions, and that ask questions about everyday life. Most "realistic" fiction doesn't do this in a way I'm interested in (relying primarily on basic representation just for the sake of it), and fiction that is more speculative or imaginative often seems as though its purpose is escape of some kind, but I'm not interested in escape. I'm interested in not escaping, I'm interested in "art" that doesn't escape, that doesn't want to escape. How to not escape. Many books, literary books, seem to me to be about the fact that we can't escape our situations, our limited consciousness, our bodies and the characters try to escape, or the art itself tries to escape, but I'm interested in making writing in which a character recognizes their desire for escape is a faulty premise: escape into the void, into another dimension, into art or something else, into religion, seems to me to be a faulty premise. In other words, it's misunderstanding perception and consciousness from the start. There's nowhere to escape to, nothing to escape from - that's the big delusion. A lot of literature, like psychology, starts from the idea that we're all separate, we can't know one another, except fleetingly, through language or something like art or writing. Connection is tenuous, dangerous, risky. But what if our perception of ourselves is incorrect - what if we are not separate? Or what if we are separate and not at the same time? What if our thoughts and consciousness are not what they appear to be? What if every book that is written is not one separate book, one book among a sea of books, but just a part of one big book? What if all consciousness is actually one consciousness, which we just perceive as being separate and distinct? What if not escaping and staying here, but deeply, could reveal this? 

 

Some thoughts on zazen

 Zazen is sitting down in order to not do harm. That's the first thing. You could say it's to calm down or just be or to concentrate or let go of thoughts and emotions, but really, I think, the first thing that happens when I sit on a cushion is no harm. No harm can be done on that cushion. Zazen is a training in, first, doing no harm. It's actually a small miracle: sitting down and not doing anything means no harm can be done in that space. There's a lot more that is going on in zazen, but the very first thing is doing no harm. In the space of doing no harm, all kinds of other things can open up: calmness, understanding one's mind, just being, a sense of expansiveness, a sense of settling into reality as-it-is, without any overlay of mind, compassion for the existence that you're part of. But for any of that to be there, to be witnessed or seen into, first there is the space of doing no harm. The space of doing no harm is like drinking water from a cool spring - that cool water reminds you of something, and in the same way, the space of doing no harm reminds you of itself. It's not yours. It's just a thing that is there. I think harm is done every day in little ways. Not necessarily the big ways we see on TV, the big forms of violence and oppression that are omnipresent. But just: a cutting glance, a curt word, an easy meanness. We don't talk about them, they don't make the news or the internet, but these are all small forms of harm. We maybe say sorry after that or maybe we don't, but what zazen does is give a space where no harm can occur, and then allows that space to bloom, to spread, to be felt more deeply - then one can see one's actions, ones past moments of harm, much more easily, and can much more easily see how to treat others in the future, the next moment. A course gets charted without any volition because when you sit in the space of no harm, you want to stay in that space, and you want to make it spread, and you want to follow it. This is what the Buddhist's call "sowing good seeds." Sowing good seeds just means creating a space in your body and mind of no harm, a gentle, calm space that radiates outward and becomes a little path you want to follow. 

Retrospective: Part II

Family got covid in late January, which completely derailed my idea for writing more on this blog. But we are fine now. I think sometimes it's necessary in some way to maybe document for people how covid went , but I don't think that's necessary here. We got sick, and it was a sort of strange sickness (I felt very weird - Emily had buzzing or vibrations in her body after the initial fever and cough, etc), but beyond that we're okay now. 

So this is a return to what I wanted to write about before, which was a retrospective on my writing life so far. The first retrospective ended with the notion that I developed a writing style that arose from the practice of meditation (Zazen). I began to understand that I wasn't experiencing reality, but that I was constantly experiencing my thinking mind. Or my emotions. And while thought and emotion are "real," they're also just an aspect of consciousness. In any case, I wrote stories with long, winding sentences, meant to mimic the vast hallways of thought and emotion I encountered in my own mind, lost in that labyrinth of thinking. Then, over time, as my mind settled more and more, I began to see other ways to write. 

One of the things I noticed after practicing meditation for a long time (over ten years now) was that I was distanced from the physical world. Or, maybe better put: I chose moments to be in the physical world, and moments to be in my mind, and mostly, my life was lived inside my skull. Practicing zazen brought me back into my body (mind and body not two), back into the physical world, and back into a relationship with nature. Because of this, my thinking contained more "gaps," more empty spaces, and I began to sense how nature moved, which was different than how my thinking mind, so immersed in a certain form of culture and intellectual activity, moved. It was slower. So, I began to consciously write toward this slower place. My sentences became shorter. I began to write in sections. And finally, I began to write directly about zen practice rather than indirectly, which was what my previous books had done. The book that came out of this is The Oxherding Pictures, which is based on a famous Buddhist text of the same name, depicting the stages of practice that a practitioner moves through (though these stages aren't neatly linear). I began to understand that I didn't need to live in the wilderness (a fantasy I had engendered in myself for years) to encounter wildness - it was right there, to some degree. The rhythm of the natural world became more apparent - I began to garden, to pay attention to birds and learn their names and songs, to pay attention to trees, to see where they grew and why and learn who they were. They began to seem like people. Then I started to see people in a new way: they were personalities, like always, and biological entities, but they were all also me. In everyone I began to see myself, though not the "Alan" of myself. There was some other recognition there. And in talking to almost anyone, it began to seem as though I was speaking to a being deeper inside them and also right on the surface waiting to be spoken to. So I began to write from this place in which it was clear to me that I was only me because of the people and world I had encountered, and the same was true for everyone else, and thus everyone was both biologically, organically, connected, but also psychologically intertwined. There seemed to not be a bunch of individual minds, but one large mind to experience and live inside. This changed my writing style to one that was slower, more physical, and based in gaps and imagery, rather than a style based in tracking how an individual mind works - I don't view one style as better than the other, just different, and each valuable. 

Such is the place I am with writing currently, and I'm looking forward to whatever new evolution occurs next. 

How to Talk Honestly about Writing (an interlude)

For some reason, there's this tendency for writers to overstate things about their own writing or about what writing should do or how it should be. I think this impulse comes from a place of wanting art to be more than what it is. Which is not to say that art isn't important in some way, but I often feel confused about the way writers/artists talk about their art/writing, or how others should write/do art. This might be because I feel differently about art - I feel that it's a kind of tool, and that while I'm interested in "art," I'm also terribly suspect of "art." What art is for. I'm not sure what I think writing should be for, or what a sentence should do, though I do often feel that writing should in some way attempt to express the inexpressible (that koan for all writers to play with or become dismayed by), but beyond that I have no idea. In any case, here are some other writers saying things about writing in a way that I'm both interested in, and that I'm confused by (all are writers I admire, teach, and either still read or once read with, for me, great care): 

1. Joy Williams, a writer I've always read and loved, says a story should have "sentences that can stand strikingly alone." I agree with this in principle, and then the more I think about it, the more I think it doesn't make a lot of sense, even for a devoted minimalist, which I don't think Williams really is. In any case, if you take a story of Joy Williams, like "The Visiting Privilege," and then just sort of randomly look at some sentences, you have to be honest and say that these sentences certainly can stand alone, but they're not very striking: "Donna had been visiting Cynthia for about a week now"; "The old woman was a mysterious opponent, not at all what she seemed"; "Cynthia came into the room, eating a piece of fruit, a nectarine or something"; "The house didn't seem that strange to Donna." These don't seem like striking sentences to me, and really, while I like this story, find it strange and convincing, and am moved by its kind of metaphysical or spiritual hiddenness beneath the surface of narcissism and distraction, the sentences, frankly, need accrual to have any force. Most of them only make sense in terms of other sentences, and additionally, while I can locate some that do stand "strikingly alone," - like "The dolphin that had persisted keeping Lucy company had an immense boner"; "He looked like a stereo speaker"; "Cynthia kept talking, pretty much about her life, the details of which Donna had heard before and which were no more riveting this time" - it's not even as though these sentences do much of anything except be slightly interesting. So, the whole idea that a story, in particular,= should have "sentences that can stand strikingly alone" sounds really good, but I don't know if I even understand what it means in practice. In fact, I'm not sure it's practicable. I should note here that in the interview from which I've taken this Williams quote, she goes on a bit about Gordon Lish. So let's go to another Lishean. 

2. Kathryn Scanlan, another writer I really like, says this in a "Notes on Craft" piece: "I try to write a sentence as unbudging and fully itself as some object sitting on the shelf in my office." Scanlan then quotes a writer quoting Gordon Lish, and then quotes another writer, paraphrasing Gordon Lish. Everyone is going on about sentences. What the sentence should be. Here's a standout: "narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude...the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the ear and the eye as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself." That's Gary Lutz (or Garielle Lutz). His sentences are incredibly interesting, if they also feel intractable at times. Here are a few chosen at random from his complete works: "I would choose his aisle"; "They won't let me back into class until I get ten people";"I got used to being one of sleep's discards"; "My ex-wife: I could tell that a lot of thought had gone into the things she had taken out on me." Some of these sentences are pretty banal if one begins from the above quotes, but in my mind they're just doing the work that fiction, or any writing, occasionally does. But they don't live up to the standards of a sentences that is a "totality, an omnitude." In other words, I feel like this is artistic exaggeration, which makes me suspect of art in some way. It also turns my own tendencies and proclivities elsewhere. Toward something more unspeakable - using language as representational and reality at once. In any case, a couple of those Lutz sentences are very interesting: "I got used to being one of sleep's discards." That's an interesting way of writing that. Giving agency to sleep, etc. Anthropomorphizing it, basically. But again, even Lutz's most interesting sentences - and I was fairly enamored with his stories, and confounded by them, years ago - don't seem like totalities unto themselves. They just seem sort of interesting. I'm not entirely sure that anything can be a totality unto itself unless we're speaking in terms of ultimate reality, in which each thing in the universe - this sentence, the computer I'm typing on, this coffee cup someone made for me - is intimately tied and connected to everything else, and thus, is everything else. This is basic principle in zen, though, and ultimately of little interest. In other words, the whole universe in a flower, and yet that flower is also just a flower. It's not trying to be special or an omnitude unto itself. It just is what it is. But this began with Kathryn Scanlan. Here are a few from the story hitched to the interview, which is called "The Poker" (and this is a story I really like, which I teach each year, along with Gary Lutz stories): "I threw my cigarette to the ground"; "We stopped at street carnivals to try our luck"; "My daughter was lifted, tickled, fluffed." Again, these are just a few I pulled at random - the last seems the most interesting, the best sound, etc. But again, is this an omnitude, a totality unto itself? None of this is meant to say that I don't like these writers. I love these writers, but I sometimes think there's this reverence toward the sentence that borders on the religious, that is basically unfounded. It's just a kind of artistic or aesthetic idea, and while I enjoy reading these writers, it seems to me that the aesthetic principles behind the work are more aspirational than practical. In each case, it's the accrual of less interesting, more banal, "workmanlike" sentences that lead to a sentence that sings. And I'm not saying these writers don't have unique ways of writing. They clearly do. I'm only pointing out that I think a lot of writers sort of overestimate what they do on the page when they begin to talk about it. 

3. Let's do a couple "maximalists" now, and what I'd like to do here is simply show that their writing advice is completely at odds. One is David Foster Wallace. The other is William Gass. These are both writers I've liked, though I don't read Gass anymore and have grown away from his very sort of stringent sense of art for art's sake, and I occasionally teach a Wallace story because I think he's relevant, especially for young people. Here's what Wallace has to say about writing for an audience: "One of the things that’s good about writing and practicing writing is it’s a great remedy for my natural self-involvement and self-centeredness. . . . learning how to write effectively is, in fact, probably more of a matter of spirit than it is of intellect. I think probably even of verbal facility. And the spirit means I never forget there’s someone on the end of the line, that I owe that person certain allegiances, that I’m sending that person all kinds of messages." Okay, so he's thinking about the audience here, and there's a notion of self-improvement inherent in the project. Here's William Gass: "As far as writing something is concerned, the reader really doesn’t exist. The writer’s business is somehow to create in the work something which will stand on its own and make its own demands; and if the writer is good, he discovers what those demands are, and he meets them, and creates this thing which readers can then do what they like with. Gertrude Stein said, “I write for myself and strangers,” and then eventually she said that she wrote only for herself. I think she should have taken one further step. You don’t write for anybody." So here we have the complete contradiction to Wallace. So which is it? You write with a reader in mind? Not an audience, but just with the notion that you're trying to communicate? Or you don't write for anyone at all? The point I'm attempting to make here is that while it's sort of enjoyable to talk about the creative process, I don't think one can really say much that is useful about it. Gass also says to "stay away from the novel that teaches." Wallace says that good art should be "morally instructive." So which is it? We're in different territory than the above Lisheans, but the point is that, like reality, it's really very difficult to say anything useful, practical, or even instructive about a certain type of writing, which most people call art. There's a Zen book by Dainin Katagari (a student of Shunryu Suzuki) called "You Have to Say Something," which is a kind of Zen joke about how it's frankly impossible to really say much of anything about Zen practice. You can say a few things about the practical side of it (which I believe is true of writing as well), which is that you sit like this, you breath like this, you put your hands like this, but when you get to the mystical side of it (Dogen was called a Mystical Realist), you can't say anything. It has to be experienced directly, beyond language. This is true of writing as well, in my view. 

What I mean to say is this: sometimes I write sentences that seem to be able to stand strikingly alone, but sometimes I don't; sometimes there are sentences that seem real as any object in my room, an omnitude unto themselves, but mostly not - I'm more interested in accrual; sometimes what I write seems instructive, to myself and others, and seems to be communicating, meant to communicate; sometimes it is so deeply not for anyone that I'm not even sure where it's coming from. All of this to say that I think it's very difficult to speak about writing in a honest way, and yet, here I am, through the use of other authors I love or have loved, trying to say something honest about writing. 

Retrospective: Part I

For a long time I wrote stories and felt that I had something to say, though it was unclear what I had to say, and it was in writing stories that I attempted to figure out what it was I wanted to say. I wrote a lot of different kinds of stories, in different modes, in order to figure out what I wanted to say. Some of those stories are listed on the right, though a few of the links are now dead/defunct. This period was extremely exciting - lots of young writers were writing really interesting things and everyone was publishing online. It's how I found a lot of the writers I still read now. During this time, from 2004 to maybe 2010, I wrote stories in a very traditional, plot-driven mode, then I wrote stories in a very minimalistic, Lish-type mode. Occasionally I did surreal stuff, but that was less frequent. These two modes, the two dominant modes (basically a kind of basic, realistic mode, and a minimalistic mode), were the two ways I wrote to figure out what I had to say, but I never could figure it out using those styles. Those ways of writing were ways of writing that I saw other people doing, that I knew I myself could do, but that didn't yield an understanding of even why I was writing in the first place. I just knew I could do it - it was interesting, and the stories had a particular shape, but for some reason I felt as though something wasn't quite right about what I was doing. Stories in the first mode over on the right are in Storyglossia, Prick of the Spindle, The Florida Review, The Fourth River, and New Ohio Review. Stories in the second mode are in elimae, Hobart, Dogzplot, Dark Sky Magazine, Monkeybicycle, and kill author (now dead - several links over there are now dead). I began to get frustrated with both modes. Sometime in 2011 I stopped writing in these modes and began writing in a new way. I had begun to feel that these ways of writing were dead ends for me. Minimalism seemed so artificial, and so out of line with the zen I was practicing - though I like reading these authors (authors who regularly show up now in Noon), the way of writing felt like I had to stifle the creative energy I often felt. It also felt that everyone had really sharp sentences, like sentences that reviewers say stuff like "sentences like gems" and "razor-sharp sentences." But I began to feel that both of these modes were too controlled - they lacked messiness that I had begun to prefer, and not the neat messiness of minimal style, where messy things happened, but those messy things were contained in a prose that was excruciatingly controlled. In other words, there was no following the flow of a particular energy, and so the minimal stuff always felt a little stiff, a little too ornamented on a sentence level, and the more plot driven stories felt contrived, but more from a structural point of view. So suddenly I began to write differently. The new way was more internally-oriented, more driven by thought, how thinking thinks, and emotions, and how emotion grows, and while the external world was still there, I no longer was writing much plot and I began to care less about an interesting sentence and more about tracking how I mind worked: in this way, what I felt was "art" was no longer applicable, and I was no longer interested in trying to figure out what a story should be, what 'art' should be, and became much more interested in how I thought I saw minds working (mine and others), and how mind interacts with other minds, and with itself. That maybe sounds pretentious, or possibly it just sounds like nonsense, but that's what I found I had always been interested in, but didn't have a way to write about it: how the mind interacts with itself, forms itself, forms its world, forms its reality, all through very limited keyhole of language, and I began to see that fiction was the way to explore that. Using fiction to explore how we make fictions of our lives, and then the instances/moments when we see beyond the fiction, ie, the mind. Because of this, my writing changed: sentences and paragraphs got longer because I wanted the experience of reading to be like what it was like to be inside a mind (or that's just what naturally happened, how the prose took shape very naturally, very simply - I just followed the mind), and because I began to see that others were similarly sort of stuck inside their heads (even supposed minimalists will talk and talk if given the opportunity, their minds spinning in a not very minimal way), it became clear to me that I would be tracking how thought and emotion become a sort of prison if not met with awareness. I was also meditating a lot at this point and what I saw about myself was that I was endlessly stuck inside my own thinking and emotions, so much so that I had no idea what "reality" was  - I believed what I was experiencing was real, but what I found was that I was experiencing the very surface-y, language-y area of mind/consciousness. That was fascinating because then it became clear that experience happens at a level much deeper than language, but we all go around - writers especially - thinking that everything happens in language. 

The first story in this new mode of writing was in the Missouri Review, and then other stories in this new mode followed. It's the mode I've been writing in for nearly ten years, until last year I wrote a nonfiction book, in which I decided that I wanted to change how I thought and experienced life, and so I began to use a new prose style. That book is what I'm calling a non-fiction-novel. It's what is now driving my interest in writing, which is as a tool to change my consciousness. I'll talk about that in my next post, I think.

This is the end of Retrospective: Part 1. If you'd like to continue reading Retrospective: Part 2, please tune in next week when the world may have already ended or could be just beginning. 

In Winter

Going to begin writing on this again. Feels like the right time to do it, in winter, when no one is watching. 

I like writing when no one is watching, especially in the winter time. 

Meaning, I like the feeling of writing completely freely, without any expectation. 

I would think a more well-known writer might feel some expectation, some way others want them to be. 

Now that it's winter, I realized I've finished a lot of writing over the past year or so. Stories and a book, which I think of as a nonfiction novel. Now I'm reading a lot. 

This winter, students have been asking what it feels like to be a writer, and I tell them I don't feel like a writer at all. And most definitely not an artist. This confuses them but it's definitely true. I have no real interest in being a writer - I do, however pretentious this might sound, have an interest in mind, consciousness, thought, emotions, reality, etc. I view writing just as a tool to explore these things. 

This is the period of time - the winter - when I most dislike going to my office and sitting there for what seems to be almost no reason, and which is, in actuality, no reason except a basic social construction we've all tacitly, begrudgingly agreed on. 

This is complicated by the understanding that it doesn't actually matter where I am, in the sense that wherever I am could be the place I just am, never in society actually, if I allow that to happen. 

In winter, I have to remind myself to allow myself to just experience the plain, basic weirdness of everything, including people, animals, plants. It's more difficult in winter to do this for me for some reason. 

In winter, I try not to think of society or culture very much. 

In winter, I try to see through those things, which are normally things that are immediately apparent as being artificial constructions. 

One thing I've been thinking in winter is that it's weird that a child becomes more and more aware of social roles and manners, etc, of all types, and then, possibly, as they grow up, begin to see through and wish to be beyond those things. 

Seeing that with my daughter to some degree. 

The days look cold and grey, the trees are bare and stab the sky, and there's a moon during the day - all seemingly like winter, but it's also very warm today, which is jarring. 

Students ask me a lot of questions about writing, and one thing I said recently was that at some point, probably mid-to-late twenties, I began to recognize a central problem in myself: I began writing because I knew I could (this understanding was very simple and clear, suddenly apparent one day, even if I wasn't necessarily "good" at it), and then, over some period of time in my twenties, I became confused, and my confusion stemmed from the idea that I couldn't tell why I was writing anymore. I saw a part of myself that was writing for recognition, and this bothered me a lot. People told me it shouldn't bother me, but it did. This part of me took over. So I quit writing for a while, abandoning all my old stuff, until I began to clarify the other part of me that wanted to write, which was a part of me that wanted to understand myself, others, and what was "true," though I use that word very loosely. It was after learning that, sometime in my early thirties, that I began writing again and writing in a completely different way, with this other thing as my intention. I don't know if it's true, but it seems to me that all of these things occurred, over many years, in winter. 

Recent drawings by my 4 and 1/2 yr-old daughter

 

                                                                Alien with planet cut-out

                                                                     Rainbow person

                                                                      Circle rainbow

                                                                Sad person losing balloon

                                                                        Robot Alien