I and Thou

In an ongoing effort to read things that are already on my shelf, I picked up Martin Buber's slim classic.  It was an interesting short read that left me deeply ambivalent in precisely those places where it didn't leave me deeply confused.  

On the one hand, it appears that Buber is writing a theistic version of non-dual poetry.  Despite the theistic angle, the primacy of the I-Thou relationship he tries to describe is clearly marked by a lack of subject-object division.  This promises to make Buber's Hasidic take on non-duality another chapter in Loy's great catalog of primary source materials.  I find it hard to believe that anyone is capable of writing passionately about such spiritual matters without having directly experienced ... something.  In other words, this is no mere intellectual book that argues for a particular metaphysical world view.  This, I think, legitimately pardons some of its obscurity, and suggests that the wisest approach here is similar to how we might approach Zen literature -- to simply take away what we can understand and lay aside what we cannot for another time.  Seen in this light, the essence of the book is the simple but profound idea that we don't always have to see the world as a collection of discreet things that we the subject experience as objects.  The I-It relationship is not the sum total of all possible experience.  Buber's I-Thou concept points us to another type of experience in which we are seamlessly enmeshed in and connected to the world, rather than separated from it by an unbridgeable metaphysical gulf.  Though Buber would prefer to call this non-dual type of experience "relation" so as to avoid confusing it with the inner experience of the subject, it's clear that, despite the terminology, the I-Thou relationship at least lies in the same family as paradoxical Zen experiences of a mystical unity of diversity.  I and Thou are different, and must come together in a "meeting", but nevertheless we are held together as aspects of one totality (the Eternal Thou).

On the other hand, it's not at all clear that Buber approach to describing or conceptualizing this unfathomable experience is helpful.  How can we really reach the non-dual if we take our experience of other subjects as our root metaphor?  He encourages us to relate to God as if this relation were an extension or generalization of our best relationship to other humans.  Of course, we see other humans (and sometimes natural and spiritual beings) as subjects, not objects.  But has this advanced us into the non-dual?  What is a subject but a thing that requires an object?  And doesn't my recognizing this subjectivity in another simply involve me a game of mirrors where I turn myself into the object that I call subject?  Isn't this way of the describing the non-dual in terms of the Absolute Person bound to fail in the most obvious fashion -- by reifying our own concept of personhood?  I'm certain that Buber feels as if he has answered this objection, if not in the text, then at least in his postscript.

     Is what has here been said valid except as a "personalizing" metaphor? Are we not threatened by the dangers of a problematic "mysticism" that blurs the borderlines that are drawn, and necessarily have to be drawn, by all rational knowledge?
    The clear and firm structure of the You relationship, familiar to anyone with a candid heart and the courage to stake it, is not mystical. To understand it we must some­ times step out of our habits of thought, but not out of the primal norms that determine man's thoughts about what is actual. (I-Thou, 177, Kaufmann translation)

But this response only reinforces my suspicion.  Buber is eager to defend his I-Thou distinction from any charges of "mysticism" which could be leveled at the notion of an Absolute Person or Eternal Thou.  For example: Isn't this latter nothing but a metaphor that drags our 'normal' conception of the you beyond the "primal norms" for which it makes sense?  Buber replies that we all already know what it means to be an I who relates to a You.  This may blunt the charge of mysticism, but only at the price of placing a mystification into the heart of our direct experience.  Do we really know what it's like to be an I or a You because of some "primal norm"?  Is this given?  In fact, it seems to me that this is the whole question.  What's it like to be me?  What's going on?  And what's it like to relate to others with some unstated assumption of mutuality if I don't even know who I am?  We've learned nothing from Nietzsche if not that the presumed unity of my self or your self reflects nothing but the surface of reality, and none of its depths.  

As I say, I reserve the right to change my opinion on this book.  But on this reading at least, I didn't find it led in a particularly useful direction.  

Black Wings Has My Angel

When I mentioned The Long Goodbye to my esteemed colleague and former Cherry-Stepper JZ, he suggested that Elliot Chaze had written another noir masterpiece I should also check out.  The suggestion did not disappoint.  Everything in this novel -- from the language, to the confessional narrative style, to the way the plot so satisfyingly twists up your expectations -- comes together to carry you smoothly to the brink of inevitable doom that pervades the story from the start.  While Chaze's writing is often simpler, and his plot less complex, this one is nevertheless on par with the Chandler novels I've read so far.  More's the pity that there has yet to be a good film adaptation.  

Hyperion

I think I picked up Hyperion at the cat bookstore simply because I'd had a good experience with the SF Masterworks series. But this was even better than The Forever War.  Dan Simmons doesn't break any new conceptual ground, but the craft of his writing is excellent by sci-fi standards, and he tells a great, page-turning story.  I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the novel revolves around the effect of various manipulations of time.  With this theme in mind, Simmon's structures it as a series of Canterbury Tales.  Each of the main characters tells their own backstory, each line of which begins at a different point in the past and converges onto the novelistic present.  This reaches a climax at the end the book, when all the characters have spoken and we are finally oriented to the mystery that has lurked throughout.  The situation is far from resolved at that point however, and it would be almost impossible not to read the second half of the novel, published in a separate volume as The Fall of Hyperion.  Stay tuned!

The Fractal Geometry of Nature

Since I had been having vision of the Mandelbrot set as a manifestation of god, I figured I'd better learn a little more about it.  And what better place to start than the classic from the man himself?  The only problem turned out to be that the book doesn't make it to a discussion of the famous bug until page 188, roughly halfway through, which turned out to be about as far as I could follow it.  While Mandelbrot's style is mostly informal and aimed at 'the general reader', his explanations still often suffer from every mathematician's annoying habit of over-compressing things because they're 'obvious'.  For me, that was fine with the less complicated material early on in the book (self-similar and scaling 'linear' fractals), and with a little effort, I felt pretty good about my grasp of his examples.  But as the material became more complicated (non-scaling, self-inverse and non-linear fractals) more and more obvious things were anything but, and while I was still getting the gist of it, I was mostly just taking his assertions on faith.  

Still, it was an enjoyable and mind-expanding journey while it lasted.  And I did finally come away with a clear understanding of what saying that something can have a non-integer dimension means.  It turns out that there are various ways of defining 'dimension', and the topological definition we are accustomed to is only one of them.  Mandelbrot motivates another definition (the Hausdorff Besicovitch dimension) by considering the question: how long is the coast of Britain?  The answer is that it depends on what size ruler you use to measure it.  A kilometer long ruler appropriate for making a map will give you a smaller length than the roughly meter long ruler you would use if you were trying to walk the complicated edge of every bay and inlet.  Similarly, an ant-sized ruler forced to crawl the perimeter of every rock would calculate an even larger length, and so on ... till we discover that the length of a coast seems to be infinite.  Needless to say, since we don't usually think that the size of our ruler influences the length of the thing we are trying to measure, this realization poses a problem.  

It turns out you can solve this problem and calculate a determinate coast length independently of the size of the ruler, only if you allow the 'dimension' of the coast to be a number between 1 and 2.  This works because the coastline length calculation exhibits an approximate empirical relationship where the total length measured by a ruler of length e is proportional to e^1-D.  The D in this equation is empirical and varies by coastline, but if we make an abstract model of a coastline using something like the Koch snowflake, we can calculate it exactly.   If we choose D=1, we find that the coastline length tends towards infinity, for D=2, it tends to zero.  If we pick the correct D in between these we get a well defined total length that no longer depends on which e we chose to use as our ruler size.  This is exactly how we intuitively think measurement of length, area, and volume should work -- we break the original shape into smaller pieces, and then we raise the size of each piece to the appropriate power and add them back together again.  It's just that the "appropriate power" for a rugged coastline happens to be non-integer.

Who Is My Self?

I've enjoyed Leigh Brasington's books so much that I thought I would read something from his teacher Ayya Khema.  With Who Is My Self? though, Khema tries to do something that I think Brasington wisely avoided -- trying to outline the entire path in a single short book.  While this type of overview of the Buddha's teaching is both interesting and useful (eg. In The Buddha's Words) I've heard enough of it now that it no longer offers more than repetition and reinforcement.  Since the path has to be continually cultivated, I hardly cause for turning this observation into complaint.  Who Is My Self? is a fine book that I quite enjoyed.  But because it's a survey, it's not terribly distinctive in my mind.  And if I want to explore some of the themes it addresses -- jhanas, not-self, path-moments -- in greater depth, I would reach for other, more specialized, writing.  So I have doubts that I would ever come back to this one.

The most interesting aspect of the book is the way she structures it around the exegesis of a single sutta: the Potthapada Sutta.  This long discourse summarizes the entirety of the gradual training, beginning with morality and guarding the senses, and progressing through the jhanas towards insight into the three charateristics.  Khema reads through and comments on each aspect of the sutta, loosely translating it into her own words and converting it into a sort of meditation manual.  Like I say, it's a fine introduction to meditation if that's what you're looking for.