All Fours

My special lady friend suggested that I read Miranda July's wildly popular new novel.  I didn't know anything about July as an artist, filmmaker, or writer, so I assumed at the outset that I was reading a piece of fiction.  Slowly, however, it became obvious that there was a strong element of autobiography to the story.  Obviously, we wouldn't want to confuse our (not so) humble narrator and main character with July herself, but the similarities between the story of a woman's sexual awakening/midlife crisis and July's own life are clear. Normally, I'm not terribly interested in highly autobiographical fiction.  Of course, it's all a matter of degree, since every author unavoidably puts much of themselves in every work in one way or another.  But generally I've found that the closer we come to autobiography, the less interesting the fiction becomes, perhaps simply because people are too close to their own life to really have much useful or broad or wise perspective on it.  Without a deliberate thrust towards universalization on the part of the author, it seems to me that the story often ends up lacking enough imaginative power to fully draw us in.

I think July mostly avoids this trap.  In part this is due to the fact that the story is pretty inventive and unpredictable, and the writing funny and philosophical enough to keep us entertained.   But the larger reason the narrative partially transcends autobiography is because it focuses in an almost sociological way on an experience that more than half of the population will at some point relate to -- menopause.  Now, on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, but loyal readers are doubtless aware that my personal reflections on menopause should be taken with a grain of salt.  Still, it seems to me that the novel is an interesting and honest exploration of what the experience might be like.  And July not only tells her own story, but to some extent tries to weave in the experiences of other women with all the girl-group discussions she details.  

There's a limit to this however, and in the end this limit points to the biggest problem I had with the book.  People who write highly autobiographical fiction tend to take their own life way too seriously, and these people are kinda unpleasant to be around or read about because they're basically just narcissists.  In reading the novel, I couldn't help feeling my compassion for the main character run out time and again for the simple reason that, despite going through menopause, she still doesn't seem to be able to grow up.  She remains incapable of considering the impact her actions are going to have on those around here.  Fundamentally she seems rather neurotic, childish, and self-absorbed.  The novel is all about her 'exploring her desires', in principle a brave and admirable thing, if done in a responsible and adult fashion, rather than as one long train wreck.  In fact, seen from a distance, the relatively happy moral it leads us to is that you can have everything you desire in life ... if only you stop worrying about how much damage your frantic grasping at it has on you and everyone around you.  Which strikes me as whatever the exact inverse of wisdom is. 

This assessment of what was really an enjoyable and interesting book is clearly too harsh.  There are all sorts of ways to work ourselves back towards compassion for the main character, not to mention the distinction between this character and the author. The birth of her child was a major medical and emotional trauma.  We have a tough culture in which to be a successful and sexually independent woman.  And maybe we should look upon menopause itself as a form of trauma.  These all sound like pretty tough things to cope with.  When I criticize something these days, I frequently realize upon further examination that I'm really just saying I wasn't the target audience.  Which in the case of this novel is a pretty obvious observation.  

At the same time, I think it's worth doing a simple thought experiment.  Imagine that All Fours was written by a middle aged man freaked out by the fact that he has a hard time getting it up anymore.  In wrestling with how catastrophic this existential midlife crisis feels, our hypothetical 'hero' goes on a bender with a much younger woman that ends up destroying his marriage.  I submit to you that many such autobiographical novels have in fact been written, and that we wouldn't consider this sort of story new, interesting, bestselling, or anything except the same deplorable one that the "Great Male Narcissists" (as DFW called them) have told so many times.  Of course, something changes when we switch the genders and mix up the sexual orientations.  And we shouldn't ignore the fact that certain people have historically been unfairly locked out of casting themselves as the 'hero' of this story.  But we also shouldn't necessarily think we are reading a fundamentally different, and somehow magically more admirable story.  Something doesn't change when we retell this story.  Indeed, how big a stretch is it between Miranda July's unnamed main character and Ben Turnbull?

Maybe the only thing the reader ends up appreciating about Ben Turnbull is that he's such a broad caricature of an Updike protagonist that he helps us figure out what's been so unpleasant and frustrating about this gifted author's recent characters. It's not that Turnbull is stupid - he can quote Kierkegaard and Pascal on angst and allude to the deaths of Schubert and Mozart and distinguish between a sinistrorse and a dextrorse Polygonum vine, etc. It's that he persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair. And so, it appears, does Mr. Updike — he makes it plain that he views the narrator's impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and he clearly wants us to mourn it as much as Turnbull does. I'm not especially offended by this attitude; I mostly just don't get it. Erect or flaccid, Ben Turnbull's unhappiness is obvious right from the book's first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole.

The Poisonwood Bible

I'm not sure exactly how Barbara Kingsolver's best-seller landed on the to read list, especially since I haven't read any of her other books.  Nor am I likely too.  Not because this one was so bad or anything; on the contrary I generally enjoyed this very engaging story of a fraying missionary family in the Belgian Congo.  The setting is interesting, the characters well drawn, and the unusual narrative structure keeps things lively by always presenting another side to the same story.  However, the book is noticeably too long, the writing often rather melodramatic, and the moral parable aspect a bit heavy-handed.  The problem is not that Kingsolver herself has a simple black and white moral lesson, but that her various shades of grey are so constantly backlit with neon brightness.  The reader is forced to Wrestle with Moral Complexity almost to the point where the plot begins to resemble one of Tata Price's interminable sermons. 

The Gradual Training

Since I got a lot out of Leigh Brasington's two other books, I figured I would see what he had to say about The Gradual Training: The Buddha's Step-by-Step Guide for Awakening.  In the end, this book turned out to be less useful to me than the others, not because it is intrinsically less interesting, but simply because at this point I've already absorbed the overall trajectory of the Buddhist path from all the reading I've done in the past 5 years or so.  Ethics, Concentration, Wisdom.  Of course, the book goes into much more detail with each of these, and contains all sorts of useful advice and reflections on the path.  It also has a particularly detailed Q&A section at the end that deals with common questions and doubts Brasington has addressed in his teaching career.  But the real audience for the book is someone who hasn't seen this type of full outline before, and so, as the preface indicates, thinks of the path as, "... a bunch of post-it notes with all these ideas from Buddhism randomly stuffed into an envelope."  For this person, the book does an admirable and efficient job of telling you where you can stick these.

Empire of the Summer Moon

I picked up S.C. Gwynne's story of "Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History" at the suggestion of my esteemed colleague from Texas.  Since the subtitle leaves little to the imagination, about the only thing I need to add is that it is also, as a sort of byproduct, an interesting history of Texas from the Mexican period up through the Reconstruction era.  Learning more about this wild and wooly history of early Texas actually makes it pretty obvious why Texans are so weird (aforementioned esteemed colleague excepted).  If I had lived the bloody history of this contested frontier -- constantly forced to defend itself from the Mexicans on one side and the Comanches on the other, as well as equally constant witness to the clueless incompetence of the US Federal government's interventions -- I'd probably also want to solve every problem by picking up a gun and doing it myself.  

That was some traumatic shit out there!  The book is filled with horrifically detailed stories of just how nasty, brutish, and short life could be on the edge of the empire -- regardless of which side of the edge one was on.  Obviously we're not surprised to discover that in the end the whale wins and the Comanches are almost completely wiped out.  But the way their culture of extreme violence towards the settlers and other Native American tribes allowed them to survive many decades against overwhelming odds is pretty impressive from a military perspective.  Beyond this perhaps over elaborately described military history, the book also tells the story of some of the human beings who lived all this trauma.  The most compelling character is of course right there in the subtitle.  Quanah Parker was the son of Cynthia Ann Parker, a settler captured as a girl and raised as a Comanche, and who, as a grown woman, famously showed no interest in returning to white society.  Quanah begins his career as a rabidly anti-white Comanche war chief and ends it, after his people have been confined to the reservation, as an optimistic voice of modernization and adaptation.  It's hard to imagine a more surprising second act in life.

The New York Trilogy

While I've heard the name of Paul Auster kicked around for years, I don't recall what prompted me to finally pick up The New York Trilogy.  I'm grateful to whatever it was because I really enjoyed these postmodern deconstructions of the detective novel.  The Trilogy contains three short novels that appear unrelated until one arrives at the final pages of the third.  While the plot of each of those is relatively simple and easy to follow, and the writing soberly realistic, their strange and almost spooky atmosphere turns them into haunting parables.  As with Kafka though, it's hard to say what they're parables about, unless it would be the tortured process of writing them. 

A Guide to the Good Life

Allow no one to convince you that I'm not up on the latest social media trends.  Every month I read a new post.  Last month, someone on my exercise network asked people about their favorite books, and William Irvine's book on "the ancient art of stoic joy" came up.  Now, long ago, I read some Epictetus; I paged through some Marcus Aurelius.  And while these gave me some idea of what Stoicism is all about, I figured it was an occasion to revisit the topic.  Irvine's book does a reasonable and accessible job of fleshing out the history of stoicism and massaging what is a rather diffuse school of philosophy into more doctrinaire, and thus more readily applicable, form.  His main goal in the book is to convince you that you should join him in practicing Stoicism.  If you're curious about the philosophy, and this is the sort of practical overview you're looking for, then I think the book can be very useful.  Unfortunately, while very clear, both the writing and thinking peak at drab, so it's hard to urgently recommend the book to a wider audience.

Irvine begins by trying to convince us that we should all adopt a "philosophy of life".  By this he means that we should examine our values and make sure that our goals and actions are commensurate with them.  That way we won't sit bolt upright on our deathbed and lament the fact that we didn't watch The Big Lebowski more often.  I'm tempted to call this advice common sense even though it's uncommon to find anyone -- and especially any professor of philosophy-- following it.  I mean, how would one purport to live well without pondering the meaning of "well"?  In a way, this question is perhaps Irvine's most valuable insight.  Our Western culture seems to have completely lost sight of the ancient root of philosophy as a way of life.  So it's refreshing to see someone remind us that the discipline began as an ethical or spiritual practice, and not merely the logical analysis of beliefs or language that it has devolved into.

Of course, the Stoics didn't merely ponder the question of what makes for a good life, they answered it.  For a Stoic, the goal is to live a "tranquil" life.  This is how Irvine translates ἀπάθεια, which he claims is the highest good of stoic philosophy.  Irvine doesn't go into the history of this word, though he is careful to distinguish it from the modern connotation of "apathy".  The goal of Stoicism is not to do or feel nothing at all, but to avoid being moved by "passions".  Instead, the Stoics would like to train themselves to follow the dictates of reason, because they ultimately see this as the essence or nature of humans.  Irvine is at pains to convince us that following our reason we can not only escape our negative passions but have a full, positive, active, and even joyous life.

There's a lot to recommend Stoicism and Irvine succinctly summarizes most of it's practices in his section of Stoic psychological techniques.  These include praiseworthy ways of approaching life such as: 

• practicing negative visualization so as to better appreciate what you already have by considering the possibility of losing it
• pondering which things you can control and which things you cannot in order to avoid wasting time worrying about the latter
• accepting that, since the past is fixed and the future unknown, your life should be focused in the present moment
• breaking your addiction to pleasure/pain avoidance by sometimes voluntarily remaining in discomfort
• carefully watching how you react to various situations in life and considering how you would like to react and why you often don't react as you would prefer.

These all seem like very valuable thoughts to me.  In fact, I'd say that I practice thinking these things many times a day, though certainly not continuously.  These general habits of thinking, together with specific advice the Stoics gave about dealing with envy, anger, insults, etc ... together constitute the stoic "philosophy of life".  Irvine claims that in his personal experience, practicing these thoughts has helped him to lead a lot more tranquil life, more focused on the things he believes are important and less disturbed by the things he has decided are unimportant.

I too find Stoicism appealing in many ways.  In fact, I don't think there's a single thought in the book I'd disagree with.  But this is actually weaker praise than it sounds.  The problem with Stoic thought is that it is just that -- at least as Irvine describes it, almost the entire practice of Stoicism entails entertaining certain prescribed thoughts.  This is great as far as it goes.  I would certainly agree that our thoughts have a major impact on our lives and vice-versa, creating the possibility of a feedback loop.  And we can systematically alter that impact through becoming more aware of what we're already thinking, and using that mindfulness to weed out certain thoughts and cultivate others.  As far as I can tell, this is pretty much what cognitive based therapy is all about, and while I haven't tried that modality myself, I know people who have found it very useful.  However, we should notice that the only non-cognitive practice Irvine describes is under-dressing for the weather so that we get used to handling the discomfort of feeling cold. 

But I know from my own experience that practice can go much deeper than merely manipulating thoughts.  Irvine mentions on several occasions that Stoicism has a lot of similarities to Buddhism.  He even confesses that before he became a practicing Stoic, back in his shopping-for-a-philosophy-of-life days, he considered devoting himself to Zen.  But he seems to have gotten the impression that Zen is all about sitting around not-thinking, emptying the mind in the sense of stopping thought.  This would understandably be a threatening practice for a philosophy professor.  Once you start actually practicing Buddhism, however, you quickly learn that it has very little to do with thoughts at all.  You're certainly not encouraged to stop thinking. For the most part you're encouraged to simply let thoughts come and go.  And while you might consider the cultivation of the brahmaviharas -- as antidotes for thoughts of hatred, anger, envy, and anxiety -- a type of cognitive based therapy, I've found that these practices become potent precisely when they transcend thinking and become somatic, emotional, and energetic practices.  In short, Buddhism isn't asking you to practice thinking a certain way, but to practice actually being a certain way.  The practice is mainly concrete and embodied, not abstract and 'rational', emotional and perceptual, not cognitive.  Or rather, its positive cognitive aspects are effects, byproducts, and not causes or the main goal of practice.  Changing the contents of your thoughts can change you a lot.  But changing your moment to moment embodied experience of life can completely transform what it's like to be a thinker. 

This comparison between Stoicism and Buddhism brings up the fascinating question of their historical relation.  Irvine talks a bit about Stoicism's Greek beginnings, and even gives us an overview its relation to its philosophical contemporaries Pyrrhonism and Epicureanism.  But he doesn't dive very deep on the evolutionary thread you can see running through these schools.  Each of them cultivated what you might call "tranquility", or what the Buddhists would refer to as equanimity, but it turns out that the original words involved here are not the same.  

As we saw, the Stoics aimed for ἀπάθεια, a-pathy, a-pathos or a-passion.  In his modern retelling, Irvine considers this state of mind as the goal in itself and even tells us that if we don't value tranquility highly, we probably shouldn't become Stoics.  Historically though, the highest goal of Stoicism was living a virtuous life in accords with our inherent human nature, which the Stoics took to be our Reason.  So a-pathy was in fact a nice byproduct but not itself the main goal.  

Irvine actually doesn't share this view that Reason is the essence of human nature.  Instead he adopts the viewpoint of evolutionary psychology and suggests that human nature is all about a drive for biological reproduction which gives no fucks for our individual happiness and is by definition 'irrational' (since mechanical).  However, somehow evolution accidentally invented Reason, and now we can turn this remarkable faculty to our individual advantage by going against our evolutionary nature.  Irvine, then, recommends the same Stoic practices even though his view of 'human nature' is diametrically opposed to the Greek and Roman Stoics.  I think he sees this as a relatively small modification, but in fact it introduces a lose thread that threatens to unravel the whole logic that distinguishes Stoicism from others philosophies of life.  This is because it robs a-pathy itself of any reason.  For Irvine, it becomes a state that we value in itself, the valuation of which can thus not be rational or essential or natural.  Indeed, insofar as we adopt evolutionary psychology as our viewpoint, Reason is 'completely 'unnatural' (if it even exists, a possibility that Irvine does not contemplate).  This puts Reason in the uncomfortable position of being a sort of nature-against-nature, a twist which quickly denatures the whole concept of the natural.  Following Nietzsche, I tend to believe that Essence and Reason and Nature are all categories invented after the fact to put a stamp of legitimacy on what you already wanted to believe for other reasons.  And once we admit that we like tranquility because it feels good in itself and because ... well ... that's like ... our opinion man ... then we've actually departed from Stoicism as a philosophy and become Epicureans!

Because the Epicureans believed that pleasure was the highest and best good.  Of course, Epicurus was no rock-and-roll drummer; he had a pretty high minded idea of what was truly pleasurable.  Chief among these things was achieving a state of "tranquility" that he called ἀταραξία -- a-taraxia, un-perturbedness, un-troubledness.  I don't know enough about Epicureanism to say  whether a-pathia is a subset of a-taraxia (as wikipedia suggests) -- whether this un-troubledness was considered synonymous with true pleasure or whether it was more a tool in service of reaching other pleasures.  There's clearly some subtle questions about higher and lower, shorter and longer term pleasures that would need to be addressed here.  Nevertheless, it seems to me that we're moving in an interesting direction, and one that Irvine already instinctively moved in without quite seeing it.  All of these schools of philosophy pondered the fundamental question of how to live a good life.  I observed earlier that the Stoics definitively answered the question -- live in accordance with reason, which is the opposite of passion.  It's a plausible answer, but it's surely not the only one, nor even close to the most obvious one.  Isn't it simpler and more parsimonious to punt on the question of the content of the highest value, and instead simply observe that whatever it is will feel pretty good when we get it?  With even just a little modern skepticism about whether there can be a single correct contentful answer about how to live well, we naturally tumble back towards the Epicurean position, and this is what happens to Irvine without his realizing.  He thinks he's a Stoic, but once he removes the bedrock Stoic assumption that we are inherently reasonable, all he's really saying is that, for him, it feels liberating to adopt a 'rational' perspective.  He says as much without seeing that in a broader sense this actually converts him into a Epicurean.

I say that we "tumble back" towards Epicureanism because it's clear that this is less of an answer to the question of how to live a good life than the Stoics provide.  In fact, one might even claim with some legitimacy that Epicurus doesn't answer the question but dodges it.  The way to live a good life is to feel good about life?  Isn't that a tautology?  Perhaps we should look at this non-response as a feature rather than a bug though.  In fact, maybe the important thing is not answering the question, but posing it.  My idea that there is an "evolutionary thread" reaching back from Stoicism through Epicureanism towards Pyrrhonism and its common root with Buddhism is based on this idea.  The Epicureans don't firmly answer the question of what constitutes a good life, but while jettisoning the assumption that it must follow the dictates of Reason, they preserve the assumption that it will feel good, something they assume we all understand and inherently value.  

By contrast, Pyrrhonism calls even this assumption into question.  We can think of it as even less of an answer to the original question.  Pyrrho thought we should be completely skeptical and withhold judgement entirely.  By distrusting even our senses, he undermines our belief that we know what feels good to us.  The idea is that this radical suspension of our own first person judgement is going to be a 'better' way to live because it will leave us un-troubled (ἀταραξία) even by trying to decide whether this particular experience right now is good or bad.  Instead of answering the question of what is a good life, Pyrrho dives headfirst into an endless asking of the question, holding fast only to the lack of answer.  The good life is one un-troubled even by whether or not life feels good, un-troubled even by needing to know what life feels like at all.  Clearly, this position contravenes common sense because it stops us in our tracks.  It seems like our only response to this line of thought would be to just sit there and experience ... what it's like to experience stuff as good or bad, while withholding judgement on whether it is 'really' good or bad.  Nobody seems to know what the actual practice of Pyrrhonism was like, but from this description it seems safe to conclude that it could not have been exclusively cognitive.

It's at exactly this point that the connection to Buddhism becomes clear.  Now, I don't know enough about either Pyrrhonism or early Buddhism to have much opinion about debates regarding their interaction.  So I can't even tell whether it makes me a Pyrrhonist or a Buddhist to withhold judgement!  But I was very intrigued by Stephen Batchelor's interesting comments on the topic.  While he considers these distinct philosophies that perhaps had some long-distance interaction, he nevertheless points out their similarities in a passage I found particularly compelling.

What is immediately apparent on reading the Four Eights is that they are strikingly devoid of any classical Buddhist doctrines such as the Four Noble Truths, the links of dependent origination, the jhānas, nirvana etc. And let alone as part of a triad of 'characteristics', the individual terms anicca, dukkha and anattā do not occur even once. Instead, we have a series of verses that present a profoundly Pyrrhonian view of life and the world.  Here are some examples:

Wrong-minded people do voice opinions
as do truth-minded people too.
When an opinion is stated, the sage is not drawn in— 

there's nothing arid about the sage.
Nowhere does a lucid one
hold contrived views about is or is not.
how could he succumb to them,
having let go of illusions and conceit? he's uninvolved.

he does not take up or discard any view— he has shaken them all off, right here. 

Dropping one, you clutch the next— 

urged ahead by self concern
you reject and adopt opinions
as a monkey lets go of a branch and seizes another.
The priest without borders
doesn't seize on what he's known or beheld.
Not passionate, not dispassionate,
he doesn't posit anything as 'ultimate'.
he lets go of one position without taking another—
he's not defined by what he knows.
Nor does he join a dissenting faction—
he assumes no view at all.
he's not lured into the blind alleys
of is and is not, this world and the next—
for he lacks those commitments
that make people ponder and seize hold of teachings. (Sutta-Nipāta. 780, 786, 787, 791, 795, 800, 801)

The sage or priest mentioned in these verses could easily describe Pyrrho himself, who according to Diogenes Laertius,
seems to have practiced philosophy in a most noble way, introducing that form of it which consists in non-cognition and suspension of judgement.... 

For he would maintain that nothing is honorable or base, or just or unjust, and that likewise in all cases nothing exists in truth; and that convention and habit are the basis for everything that men do; for each thing is no more this than this...

The Mysticism of Sound and Music

I had high hopes for Hazrat Inayat Khan's "modern classic".  And it certainly had many inspiring ideas as well as interesting insights and beautiful passages.  But ultimately this book is neither one I will come back to nor especially recommend.  I think this disappointment mainly stems from the fact that I was looking for a book about music that happened to be written by a mystic, whereas Khan is a mystic who happens to write about music.  

As a musician and musicologist himself, music is of course central to Inayat Khan's Sufi mysticism.  This is, however, really only because music stands as the most obvious experience we have of the vibrations which are, for Inanyat Khan, the ultimate nature of the universe.  Rhythm and tone are thus simply the most abstract form of a cycle, a succession of opposites, which in the end always symbolizes the synthesis of these opposites into a harmonious unity.  Music expresses the divine harmony of the universe.  It's one of the great wonders of the world that the formless and abstract world of music holds such intense emotional power for us.  Here is a 'cosmic vibration' that we can feel directly, both in its intellectual and sensual beauty.  In fact, given the Islamic penchant for a purely geometric art, I think one would naturally expect a similar use of music.  After all, it's hard to think of a better or more moving metaphor for the non-idolatrous worship of the 'face' of God.  Indeed, this seems to be precisely the Sufi position on the matter, even though apparently this makes them quite the minority in the Islamic world. 

Now, I would hardly object either to mysticism or to the use of music as an analogy in a mystical context.  Unfortunately, lifting music up to this metaphysical plane can tend to rob it of its specificity.  This is one of the problems that besets any articulation of mysticism.  Since all things and all practices converge on the ineffable divine, the distinctions between them tend to dissolve and the starting points to become relatively meaningless.  This can be either feature or bug, depending on your perspective.  On the one hand, the divine is always only one step away.  On the other hand, every step we take becomes in some sense the same.  From the latter perspective, mystical thinking can become a bit repetitive, and that is certainly one of the things that made this book less enjoyable.  Part of this repetitiveness stems from the fact that it was not written as a book but is merely a collection of unrelated public lectures for general audiences that Inayat Khan gave in the mid 1920's.  But part of it is inherent to the nature of his mystical beliefs, which center on the omnipresent, unified, and unique nature of God.  Since all doors necessarily open to a single divinity, the particular resonance of music with that divine can fade into the background.