Sanity and Sainthood

In a way, I'm probably not the best person to objectively review Tucker Peck's book about "Integrating Meditation and Psychotherapy.  After attending his weekly eSangha classes for roughly three years, I'm not terribly surprised to find that there's almost nothing in the book I haven't heard him mention in conversation on more than one occasion.  Needless to say, this is hardly a critique; I wouldn't have listened to Tucker talk for ~150 hours if I didn't think his teaching was valuable.  But it does mean I can't come to these ideas with the same mindset as someone hearing them for the first time.  The book was still fun to read regardless because it compiles and organizes all these insights for future reference.  It also gives me something simple and tangible to hand to other people who are interested in quickly (it took less than 150 hours to read this) understanding what Tucker has to offer as a teacher.

Perhaps not surprisingly for someone who is both a dharma teacher and a professional therapist, the basic point is that both modalities are useful and even complementary, but they serve different purposes.  Meditation helps us to become aware of the process of our thoughts, whereas therapy works at improving their content.  While this simple distinction seems pretty intuitive, it contains a wealth of wisdom.  Because on the deepest level, it helps us to give up on the craving to have perfect content -- to be perfectly happy -- all the time.  As Tucker repeats throughout the book, and I've seen myself, meditation has a lot to offer, but it does not show any signs that it will magically deposit me in a state of permanent bliss anytime soon.  And while that might sound disappointing, I think perhaps we should see it as a blessing.  Do we really want to do something that leads us towards being unable to feel human emotion?  In fact, while meditation does seem to improve life overall, it actually has a tendency to open me to a much wider range of possible emotion.  A lot of the book gives advice for dealing with this sort of destabilization in a way that leads towards a broader dynamic stability that lets us function as a better, more wise and compassionate person, both towards others and ourselves.  And if this isn't the point of life, then what it?

Deleuze and Buddhism

How could I resist a title like this?  Unfortunately, this collection of essays did not live up to the potential I imagined, and still imagine, in exploring how Deleuze's thought overlaps with Buddhism.  They range across the non-sequitur (Higaki), the awful (See), the amateurish (Cook), and the word salad (Bradley), before culminating in the stream of consciousness (Ueno).  That is, five of the six essays are philosophically useless.  The best that can be said of them is that they made me aware of a few Japanese thinkers who sound interesting -- Kenji Miyazawa and Toshihiko Izutsu -- and drew my attention to a particular passage in A Thousand Plateaus (below).

The only essay I found particularly thought provoking was Simon Duffy's.  He approaches the connection between Deleuze and Budddhism by what seems to me a very natural path -- through drawing on Deleuze's reading of Spinoza.  Spinoza's system already bears comparison to Buddhism, and Deleuze's atheistic reading of it only accentuates this resemblance.  Deleuze reworked Spinoza's puzzling and seemingly contradictory idea that knowledge of the third kind gives us a window onto eternity in terms of an intensive and an extensive part of the individual.  Duffy, in turn, goes on to apply this concept to make sense of the Buddhist idea of reincarnation.  Basically, the more my self-definition begins to revolve around the constructive connections I have with the world, the more "I" shift towards being a intensive virtual singularity and away from identifying with my current extensive actualization of this essence.  In everyday terms, I get closer to being a pure possibility, a way of being that can be taken up by any being and hence re-actualized indefinitely.  This is a very complex thought, and the essay manages to be both a bit pedantic and yet short on the details.  Nevertheless, it poses the interesting question of "what happens when a Bodhisattva dies?"  They become completely expressive, completely virtual, only an intense essence that can live on in any of us indefinitely.  Duffy doesn't make it clear exactly how this differs from an eternal soul, or even from the way a lineage actively preserves the memory and spirit of a sage, so we're mostly just left with this suggestion that the path to immortality is in defining oneself as pure connection.  It may not be the version of immortality you were looking for.  But I found it food for thought.

------

I imagine that the camouflage fish reference in this quote was inspired by its (dis)appearance in Neo-Finalism (probably not Ruyer's only use of this example).  Regardless, it caught my attention as an apt metaphor for non-duality.

Becoming everybody/everything (tout le monde) is to world (faire monde), to make a world (faire un monde). By process of elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece in a puzzle that is itself abstract. It is by conjugating, by continuing with other lines, other pieces, that one makes a world that can overlay the first one, like a transparency. Animal elegance, the camouflage fish, the clandestine: this fish is crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing, that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming imperceptible. The fish is like the Chinese poet: not imitative or structural, but cosmic. Francois Cheng shows that poets do not pursue resemblance, any more than they calculate "geometric proportions." They retain, extract only the essential lines and movements of nature; they proceed only by continued or superposed "traits," or strokes. (ATP, 280)

Individuation Project

Here's the bibliography for the individuation project spawned by my preliminary reading of The Fold.  It includes the philosophy of technology detour that happened between the first and second Simondon books.

Gilbert Simondon -- On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,

W. Brian Arthur -- The Nature of Technology

Langdon Winner -- Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought

Lewis Mumford -- The Myth of the Machine, Volume 1, 2

Joanne Macy -- Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory

Gilbert Simondon -- Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information

Jakob von Uexküll -- A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Elanor Rosch -- The Embodied Mind

Raymond Ruyer -- Neofinalism

Erwin Schrodinger -- What is Life?

Bernard Cache -- Earth Moves

Richard Halpern -- Leibnizing

Gilles Deleuze -- The Fold

Healing Back Pain

My rolfer suggested I read Dr. Sarno's simple and slim volume about the psychological roots of back pain.  Sarno spent many years treating patients with recurring back and neck pain and came to the conclusion that in many cases the pain is actually psychosomatic.  He describes a medical condition which he calls, somewhat unmemorably in my opinion, tension myositis syndrome.  The idea is very simple.  When we have some chronic emotional disturbance (Sarno points particularly to represessed anger) our nervous system can protect us from this threat by using a physical pain to distract us from seeing the emotional suffering.  It's a trick as old as the Freudian unconscious (which itself goes all the way back to the minute perceptions of Leibniz).

After all, in our culture we have trained ourselves to believe that all physical things have a physical cause and that any pain we feel must signal some sort of 'real' physical tissue damage.  That is, we literally can't imagine that a pain could be caused by the mind, because there is no possible mysterious woo-woo new-age mind-body connection.  We take this naive materialist position as an article of faith these days, and indeed, that is what it literally amounts to -- scientism.  When looked at with even a modicum less religious fervor, however, we can immediately see that this sermon can only convince the already indoctrinated choir.  After all, if there's no mind-body connection, there's no pain and hence nothing to explain.  That'll be $4.5 trillion please.  The very possibility that we should look into the mind to find the cause of a pain in the body is excluded in advance, which of course makes this a perfectly airtight mechanism for repressing the consciousness of an emotional state.  It becomes literally unthinkable that the physical pain could be caused by an emotional disturbance.  

By contrast, Dr. Sarno successfully treated back pain simply by talking to patients about their emotions.  The only prescription is mental awareness.  In fact, in order to maximize the potency of this medicine, Dr. Sarno suggests completely ignoring the physical pain, literally pretending that it doesn't 'really' hurt at all, and that it therefore requires no special physical attention or treatment of any kind.  Forget all the scary X-rays and MRI images and other medical rites and rituals.  Once we convince ourselves that the problem is simply repressed emotional tension, the pain which served to hide this tension from us can no longer serve that purpose, and so evaporates.  He says this has worked for many people.  And, at least so far, it has worked for me as well.  

Attentive readers may notice that there is a funny irony to this mind-only diagnosis and treatment.  It requires a similar yet opposite faith that the physical cannot possibly be the cause of the pain.  From the perspective of the efficacy of the treatment, this makes perfect sense.  But from an intellectual perspective, it encloses us in another self-justifying loop of faith.  For now we have convinced ourselves that pain can have nothing to do with the physical body, which is of course only slightly less ridiculous a hypothesis than we began with, since it leads us directly to the idea that there is 'really' no body at all.  The resulting logic isn't quite as self-refuting as naive materialism, but it still leaves us with a very deep mystery.  Why is the idea of a pain in "the body" so convincing that it literally becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if there is no such thing as "the body"?   

The Warmth of Other Suns

A while back I started Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, but never finished it.  It wasn't that I thought Wilkerson was wrong or explaining herself poorly or anything.  I just found that the book didn't have that much new to offer.  Because of course America has a system of hereditary privilege.  It is certainly not a perfectly static system, and we could even argue about how well it maintains itself today relative to other times and other places, but it is surely there for anyone with eyes to see. I tend to think of it above all as an economic system, and I could give plenty of reasons why I think this description provides the best lens for analysis and action.  However it is certainly also a system with a racial component, and indeed, it's often impossible to treat these two as separate variables.  If you'd like to call their correlation over time (in certain cases) a "caste system", I guess that's fine, but what exactly have you offered with this word?  Economic -- which is after all the usual terms in which people pose this question now -- Success tends to mate with Success and beget more Success, and vice versa for Failure.  The logic of this feedback loop clearly leads to a stratified society.  But is this usefully considered a "caste system" when it produces only two castes -- rich people and poor people?  And does the manifest current instability of the racial correlations in this system not make it seem pretty distant from the the Indian system the name references?  

Anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of the US knows that just about every new 'non-white' group is discriminated against upon their arrival (or in the case of Native Americans, upon the arrival of whites).  Irish and Italians and Poles and the many flavors of Asians and Latinos have all occupied this unenviable niche for longer or shorter stretches of time.  The story of these groups is distinct, and they arrive into distinct Americas.  But these stories also tend to have a similar arc.  The discrimination against the group (among other factors) at first forces them to interact mainly internally with one another, and tends to reinforce their difference from the rest of the society and cement their place at the bottom rung of the economic ladder.  Gradually, however, what seems like it should be an endlessly self-reinforcing mechanism nevertheless starts to fade.  This happens pretty quickly with the Irish and Italians, and much more slowly with Asians and Latinos.  But even with Asians, who have seen a century of discrimination, I think this process has largely run its course by now.  I don't mean that racism towards Asians has disappeared altogether, but if we look at statistical measures like median wages or the percentage of people who oppose interracial marriage, it's hard to see Asians as an oppressed minority locked into perpetuating the bottom-rung of a caste system because they can't reproduce with anyone else.  In fact, we might look at the present status of Asian-Americans as evidence that American society is not capable of enforcing a stable caste system over even a century, much less over the millennia this system has existed in India. 

However, before we start congratulating ourselves on how progressive we are, we should consider the history of black Americans.  They've been here for as long as white Americans, and yet this process of assimilation and intermixing has certainly not resulted in their gradual equalization with the rest of society.  It's enough to consider the same charts I just referred to and note that 63% of non-blacks thought that it was a bad idea to marry a black person even as recently as 1990!  Perhaps this doesn't constitute a perfect caste system -- I think it's both inaccurate and disempowering not to see that black Americans are relatively better off than they were in 1619 -- but the fact that these intertwined racial and economic attitudes have been preserved intact for hundreds of years obviously illustrates what Wilkerson was getting at.  So while American society in general is more usefully described as a capitalist rather than a caste system, black history specifically is analogous to the Indian system.  

Which brings us, finally, to The Warmth of Other Suns.  This is the book that won Wilkerson a Pulitzer Prize long before she wrote Caste.  And this book is a lot more interesting.  Instead of a broad-brush political philosophy of dubious generalizations, Wilkerson gives us an intimately detailed and specific piece of the history that helps explain how America managed to maintain its white-black caste system for so long.  We all know this history begins with slavery and continues with Jim Crow.  But while these explanations are undoubtedly central, they leave it fundamentally mysterious how this caste system endured so long after Civil Rights formally ended segregation.  The missing link is, as the subtitle goes, "The Epic Story of America's Great Migration".  It's the story of how millions of blacks moved from the rural South to the urban North and West between 1915 and 1970. I think it's this particular history that accounts for the unique durability of anti-Black racism up to the present moment, and not some generalized American Caste System.  To make a long story short (too late), I wish I'd read this book first because it puts Caste in its proper context. 

The fact that the writing in The Warmth of Other Suns is a real pleasure partially makes up for all the deeply disturbing stuff we have to read about.  As one might expect, roughly half the story takes place in the South and shows us the conditions that drove the desperate hopefulness of the migration.  Wilkerson unfolds this history in novelistic detail, focusing on the personal stories of three representative characters.  The oral history format brings us face to face with the reign of terror that was the Jim Crow South.  But it also brings us face to face with the frustrations and problems of arriving in Northern cities that (usually) dispense with the terror but retain most of the racism.  And because the emigrants arrive in such astounding numbers in concentrated areas, the backlash they provoke in Chicago and New York and Los Angeles sets the stage for the ghettoization that has troubled a lot of black history ever since.  For me, reframing the era that leads up to the civil rights struggle as a type of refugee crisis, where literally half the black population flees the country called South for the one labeled North, supplies a key missing piece of the puzzle.  Throughout the time period of this long migration there is still quite clearly a white-black caste system in the entirety of the US, one that cements itself in economic terms for generations to come because of the enforced concentration of the black caste in the migration's destination cities.  Packing all the immigrants into a ghetto has always been a key aspect of keeping them down.  This is how what is on one level certainly a triumph and step forward for our three heroes -- escaping the terror of the South -- nevertheless doesn't create the promised land of freedom and intermixing one might have hoped for.  Though some fare better than others and the migration is clearly the central event in weakening a caste system that has lasted for hundreds of years, it is not yet the end of that system, but more a kind of mutation in it.  It's heartbreaking to think of how many generations have seen their freedom deferred in one way or another.  Naturally, this is the most touching aspect of the book.  Wilkerson paints these lives with an epic grandeur that befits their everyday struggle, regardless of how much ground they won or loss in the great sweep of history. 

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.