The Rider

 I'm not sure where I discovered Tim Krabbé's wonderful little window into the world of high level amateur cycle racing.   I do remember it was suggested as a classic example of short fiction, and I can see why.  Krabbé, a journalist and former chess player in addition to a serious cyclist, narrates his ride in the Tour de Mount Aigoual.  It's a fairly short but incredibly hilly road race in Southern France that has occasionally featured in the Tour de France.  

This may not sound like a great setup for a story.  Just a bunch of fucking amateurs moving their feet in circles for hours.  But Krabbé manages to make it exciting and entertaining the whole way.  Of course it's a sports broadcast of sorts.  Who broke away from who and what the racer's strategies were.  This part alone is surprisingly entertaining, to the point where it almost makes you want to watch cycling on TV while eating a baguette and shouting allez!  But Krabbé's narration is also constantly interrupted with stories drawn from his own past and the history of professional cycling.  In other words, precisely the knowledgeable commentary you **wish** sports broadcasters provided.  

The really amazing thing, however, is the way the writing style captures the type of thoughts one has on a long ride.  I haven't raced a bicycle since I had one with streamers and the prize was bragging rights about who got to the end of the driveway.  But I have done some long riding and noticed how thoughts get incredibly short and repetitive when you're working hard, but then can sometimes take crazy flight into delirious daydream when the pace lets up a bit.  It's a real *tour de force* that you can read faster than he rode it.

The Gambler

This short novel was packaged alongside The Double in Pevear and Volokhonsky's new translation. Unlike The Double, this one was written smack in the middle of Dostoevsky's most creative period, which included classics like Notes from Underground, The Idiot, and Crime and Punishment. Unfortuantely, The Gambler is nowhere near as interesting as any of those.  It tells us the story of young Russian employed as a tutor by a wealthy family passing time in "Roulettenburg".  Alexi Ivanovich is tormented by his doomed love for one of the young ladies in this cortege, and, in an attempt to help her out of some monetary difficulties, takes to gambling.  Unfortunately, he wins.  This gets him a lot of money at first -- although not the girl he wants --and a lot less money later, as his beginner's luck inevitably turns on him.  In the end, it is a novel about addiction, though for the bulk of it that addiction is to unrequited love, and not specifically to gambling.  Apparently, Dostoevsky saw them as equally corrosive.

The Ministry of Time

A friend recommended this new sci-fi novel from an author I'd never heard of.  Its a breezy, entertaining, forgettable, and not really science fiction even.  In fact, it's more of a romance novel with some light time travel grafted onto it.  While the writer is perfectly competent at making the pages turn (no mean feat), there didn't seem to be much intellectual substance to the novel beyond some vague implications that the British Empire might not have been wholly a good and glorious thing.  

The plot centers around the way that 'expats' can fall in love with another one simply because they feel out of place in their new society.  The narrator is a really quite helpless and annoying first generation British woman whose mother is a Cambodian refugee.  She falls in love with a mid-19th-century British explorer who was plucked from arctic starvation by the titular Ministry's new time machine.  The past, it seems, is a foreign country.  But a sexy one!

The Magic Mountain

Sometimes, the great books just aren't. I found Thomas Mann's classic pretty underwhelming.  It's long.  It's kinda boring plot wise -- the narrator at one point evens calls it an attempt to tell the story of time passing.  It features too many epic philosophical debates between a humanist and a Jesuit that end up sounding like just so much sophomore dorm room bullshit.  And it's filled with interminable descriptions of the way the snow glistened and her eyes looks and the exact dimensions of the latest stereo system.  

Perhaps, in its defense, we can imagine the way it may have spoken to its moment when it was published in 1924.  The novel is set almost entirely in a Swiss sanatorium before the outbreak of WW1.  It describes an idyllic world of 'illness' completely removed from the 'healthy' goal driven "flatlands" of Germany, where our hero Hans Catorp spend years on end recovering from even a hint of tuberculosis and other maladies of the age.  In other words, it depicts a seemingly endless and meaningless pause in the 'real' life of the world below, a sort of aristocratic nihilism where the values of discipline, productivity, and efficacy no longer have the same import.  When the madness of war gradually intervenes in its final pages, the question of what is 'sick' and what 'healthy' takes on a new poignancy.  I can only imagine that in Weimar Germany this may have struck a chord we can no longer hear.

The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti

This translation of "A Mahayana Scripture" by Uma Thurman's more famous dad fits into the recent penchant I've had for exploring related spiritual traditions via things sitting on the shelf at the cat bookstore.  I believe it caught my eye because at one point I started the Michael Taft & M.C. Owens lecture series (before finding M.C. Owens intial overview a bit long-winded).  It's the first Mahayana scripture I've read other than the Heart Sutra.  And I guess it confirms me as 'Theravadan', at least for the moment, because I didn't find it particularly approachable or revelatory.

In fact, it leads me to reiterate the same question I asked in the case of Tantra Illuminated -- if the philosophy is so simple, why is its exposition so ... gaudy.  The basic idea is so profound and straightforward that it is almost totally summed up in the five short pages of Chapter 9, "The Dharma-Door of Nonduality".  ALL PHENOMENA ARE EMPTY.  Thank you for you attention to this matter.  And yet this scripture has an elaborate literary structure that spans multiple universes and involves uncountably large contingents of boddhisattvas doing various magic tricks.  On top of that, it rather condescendingly uses all the Buddha's 'Hinayana' disciples as whipping boys to illustrate the superiority of the Mahayana path.  I get that all this is supposed to expand our mind in trans-rational ways, and there is doubtless a profound teaching in that.  But I simply don't have the background to find this stuff helpful.  I think I better stick with the Early Buddhism I'm familiar with and that makes sense to me.

Tantra Illuminated

A couple of years ago I read Christoph Wallis' translation of and commentary on the Recognition Sutras.  It was an interesting glimpse to Kashmiri Shaivism, a nondual branch of what we now call hinduism.  So when I saw his earlier introduction to the broader scope of tantric teachings, of which Shaivism is a particular lineage, floating about my used bookstore, I figured I should expand my mind a little.  I found this book less well written and less interesting than the Recognition Sutras, but it was still worth getting a little fuller picture of this tradition.

The book's subtitle, "The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition" also turns out to be its organizational principle.  The first part contains a long discussion of nondual philosophy, including a set of lists to rival even the Buddhist list obsession -- 36 tattvas, 5 acts of God, 4 levels of the world, 5 states of Awareness, etc ...  This was all interesting enough, but ultimately feels to me like just another arbitrary metaphysical construct. Certainly, part of this response is simply because, right now, I find myself more interested in the marked contrast between this philosophical apparatus and the Buddha's refusal to even engage these metaphysical speculations.  But there's also a coherent intellectual objection here that I first formulated in the context of people talking about Dzogchen (a system which Wallis suggests is extremely similar to Kashmiri Shaivism).  If everything, including ourselves, is really just an emanation of a single divine energy, why are there so many different gods and practices and lists involved?  Compared to Theravadan practices and philosophy, the Tantric world is incredibly complex.  I understand that it's more of a lay tradition, not aimed mainly at monastics.  And I understand that this naturally means it is a less renunciate path, more open to the beauty and complexity of everyday life.  But one would naively think that the practices which fit with what Wallis calls a "nondual monism" would be more like shikantaza, and less like multi-part meditations with elaborate visualization of deities and channels.  To be clear, I think this objection is simply the beginning of conversation, not some sort of invalidation of these traditions.  I still find the contrast between core belief and philosophical articulation notable.

The second, more interesting, part of the book explains the history of Tantra.  Wallis is not merely a spiritual practitioner, but also an academic, so he does a great job of situating this tradition with the context of medieval India, distinguishing it's various flavors, and tracing some of its later influences.  For example, it's remarkable to learn that we can trace the origins of hatha-yoga back to a much corrupted version of tantric practices.  It was also kinda interesting to get such a succinct overview of the way various branches of the tradition can be organized into a left-right spectrum defined by how seriously they take the concept of nonduality.  I personally might have wished for more detail concerning the way that Buddhism clearly influenced these branches of Vedanta, as well as more insight into how their influence in turn percolated back into Vajrayana, and especially Tibetan, Buddhism.  But this was probably beyond what could be put into one volume. 

The final part contains a quick overview of tantric practices.  There's not really enough detail to start doing these practices on one's own, though this is clearly by design.  Wallis feels like anyone interested enough in this way of seeing the world should pursue a relationship with a qualified teacher.  So we really just get a flavor for some of the pranayama and visualization practices that were central to almost all the tantric lineages.  There's even a section regarding what you might call "insight" meditation -- looking at the world in ways that loosen our self-centered concepts and thus bring us into contact with some larger field, interpreted here as divine.  

On The Way To The Far Shore

I've found all of Leigh Brasington's books so straightforward and useful that at this point I'd probably read anything he wrote.  But I was actually particularly keen to go thorough his new commentary on the Pārāyanavagga because it is the other collection of suttas (alongside the Aṭṭhakavagga) that people think are the earliest writings in the Pali Cannon.  Since I just recently read Gil Fronsdal's commentary on the latter, along with a few Upanishads to set the context, it seemed like a good moment to continue in the same vein.

Like the "Book of Eights", the "Way to the Far Shore" also pears down the Buddha's teaching to its core message.  Be mindful and investigate the way that craving causes suffering, and the way that letting go of craving leads to the end of suffering.  Here, these observations are not ariticulated as a list of "Noble Truths", but the teaching is the same.  This core message is very simple. and repeated many times in these verses.  We have to investigate for ourselves how holding on prevents us from living peacefully.  Brasington of course has more expansive commentary, and some very interesting reflections on the translation of certain terms, but his short book is mostly aimed at helping us to see how simple and direct the pre-Theravadan path can be.   

Cosmos

Deleuze recommended Witold Gombrowicz's strange avant-garde novel in several places, so I decided to finally give it a shot.  It was actually fairly entertaining ... for an avant-garde novel.  But it is definitely not going to be everyone's cup of tea.  To wit, I think I remember seeing one Amazon review that classified it as "unreadable".  I didn't find it to be that exactly, though you will be sorely disappointed if you're looking for a page-turning story.  While the novel does have an identifiable plot of sorts, and isn't merely a series of language games or meta-references like some experimental novels, it can at times be a repetitive and frustrating experience.  So a lot like life in general, and in particular like being fully present inside our own everyday insanity.  Ultimately, that's what the novel is about -- the way we construct a 'meaningful' cosmos out of a thousand tiny and unrelated details by welding together correspondences that serve our desires.  In the end, it seems clear that Gombrowicz feels the cosmos lacks any innate meaning and is simply a chaos of constellations we squint into form.  Though, given that we are also part of the cosmos, perhaps this squinting already is an innate meaning.

Upanisads

Both Leigh Brasington and Gil Fronsdal have suggested that we can better understand some of the early Buddhist suttas in the Pali Cannon by knowing something about the religious and philosophical background of ancient India at the time the Buddha was teaching.  The main source for the ideas then current are the Upanishads, the philosophical end of the Vedic texts that form the foundational scripture of what we now call Hinduism.  So, increasingly intrigued by these early suttas, I decided to plunge into reading what the translator identified as the principal early Upanishads.  

Unfortunately, this shit is just totally obscure.  It's not that there aren't some interesting creation myths, some pointed moral stories, and even some philosophical insights here.  The problem is really that, like most oral traditions, these documents are not meant to stand alone.  To really understand them it's clear you need a very detailed grasp of the extremely complex Vedic rituals whose metaphysical inner significance they are meant to illuminate.  In fact, the very word "upanishad" means something like "hidden connection".  The idea is to explain the cosmological reasons why one must let the horse run free for a year and must stand to the North when it is sacrificed, and etc ... Since I don't know anything about the details of these rituals, I was mostly only able to glean a few high-level takeaways from the text.  

First, what we find, overwhelmingly and repetitively, is a list of correspondences. The parts of the hose correspond to the parts of the cosmos.  The parts of the human being correspond to the elements of the universe.  Even the syllabic parts of the ritual chants correspond to the parts of the human as well as the cosmos.  The whole text is dominated by lists of point-by-point correspondences, hidden analogies or upanishads.  

Second, these analogies are ultimately arranged in the way implicit in the very concept of analogy -- concentric circles.  Essentially, everything is a scaled version of everything else.  The small figure corresponds point-by-point to a larger figure, which in turn corresponds to an even larger figure.  This naturally culminates in the famous philosophical and mystical conclusion: Atman = Brahman, Self = Whole.  The entirety of the universe is analogous to this grain of sand.  The upanishads demonstrate this concentric structure again and again by listing out how Z depends on Y depends on X, depends on ... until we get back to A, which is always the Breath or Self.  The whole infinite universe depends on and is identified with an innermost metaphysical core or foundation, a correspondence between that which is larger than the largest, and smaller than the smallest, as it were.  

It's obvious that reducing 3,000 years of beautiful tradition to a couple of bullet points reflects a pretty superficial reading of these texts.  Nevertheless, even just seeing these aspects firsthand does help me appreciate what Brasington and Fronsdal are getting at.   

Brasington, for example, suggests in his Dependent Origination and Emptiness that the Bahiya sutta is addressed to a follower of the Brhad-aranyaka Upanishad because its titular character is identified as "Bahiya of the bark-cloth".  A little more research shows that this is a plausible though maybe not a slam-dunk reference.  Brasington's footnote (pg. 152, 160) indicates that John Peacock told him that the Brhad-aranyaka Upanishad -- one of the two Upanishads people agree is "early", and whose title literally translates as "Great Forest" or "Great Wilderness" because it was recited in the wilderness outside the village (Olivelle xxxii) -- "makes a big deal about trees".  I think this overstates the case a bit.  Olivelle's index only includes four entries under "tree" in the BU.  I don't think it's fair to call it a central theme of the whole text or something it makes a big deal about.  However, it is clearly the main metaphor of the poem quoted at 3.9.28 

Man is like a mighty tree—
that's the truth.
His body hairs are its leaves,
His skin is its outer bark.
Blood flows from his skin,
As sap from the bark of a tree.
Blood flows when the skin is pricked,
As sap, when the bark is slit.
His flesh is the sapwood;
His sinews are the fibers—
that's certain.
His bones are the heartwood;
And his marrow resembles the pith.
A tree when it's cut down,
Grows anew from its root;
From what root does a mortal man grow,
When he is cut down by death?
Do not say, "From the seed";
For it's produced from him
while he is still alive;
And like a tree
sprouting from a seed,
It takes birth at once,
even before he dies.

A tree, when it's uprooted,
Will not sprout out again;
From what root does a mortal man grow,
When he is cut down by death?
Once he's born,
he can't be born again.
Who, I ask,
will beget him again?
Perception, bliss, brahman,
The gift of those who give,
The highest good—
awaits those who know this
and stand firm.

This poem constitutes a pretty direct correspondence between the 'covering' of a man and the bark of a tree.  Since it's tough to actually change one's skin into bark, it seems plausible that this analogy might be the source of the ascetic tradition referenced in the Mahabharata of going off into the wilderness clad only in twigs.  Since I don't know how widespread this practice was at the time of the Buddha, it's hard to be certain that identifying Bahiya as "of the bark cloth" would also immediately identify his religious beliefs for the hearer, but it seems like a reasonable guess.  But the guess is strengthened dramatically by the further correspondence between the teaching the Buddha gives to Bahiya and some of the other parts of chapter 3 of the BU.  Brasington illustrates this with a couple of quotes, and there's one more that's nearly identical.

"You can't see the seer who does the seeing; you can't hear the hearer who
does the hearing; you can't think of the thinker who does the thinking; and you
can't perceive the perceiver who does the perceiving. The self within all is this self
of yours. All else besides this is grief!" BU 3.4.2

"He sees, but he can't be seen; he hears, but he can't be heard; he thinks, but he
can't be thought of; he perceives, but he can't be perceived. Besides him, there is no
one who sees, no one who hears, no one who thinks, and no one who perceives. It is
this self of yours who is the inner controller, the immortal. All besides this is grief." BU 3.7.23

"This is the imperishable, Gargi, which sees but can't be seen; which hears
but can't be heard; which thinks but can't be thought of; which perceives but can't
be perceived. Besides this imperishable, there is no one that sees, no one that hears,
no one that thinks, and no one that perceives. BU 3.8.11

Given that it's repeated so often in this chapter and throughout the BU as a whole, I think it's pretty fair to conclude that uncovering the ineffable internal self or soul is the basic goal of this Upanishad.  It would be too long to include the full context leading up to these quotes, but as I mentioned in the bullet points, it's structured around a long list of nested dependencies that culminate in the central position of this secret self.  The text promises that if you know this self, you will be able to "eat the world" and "move freely in all the worlds" and be "imperishable" and avoid "grief".  Seeing this unseen self at the center of everything is the highest goal, and it allows one to possess the world by analogy.  The whole structure couldn't contrast more with what the Buddha says to Bahiya:

"Then, Bāhiya, you should train yourself thus: In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard. In reference to the sensed, only the sensed. In reference to the cognized, only the cognized. That is how you should train yourself. When for you there will be only the seen in reference to the seen, only the heard in reference to the heard, only the sensed in reference to the sensed, only the cognized in reference to the cognized, then, Bāhiya, there is no you in connection with that. When there is no you in connection with that, there is no you there. When there is no you there, you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two. This, just this, is the end of stress."

The Buddha is not only replacing a doctrine of essential Self with one of not-self, but it seems he's implicitly critiquing the entire structure of Vedic reasoning.  Instead of an essential core of an analogy, we have an in-essential emptiness at the center of everything.  Instead of concentric circles, we have the links and loops of dependent origination.  This latter is less obvious, but I think even more important.  Dependent origination is not a set of linear dependencies, but a system of feedback loops.  It doesn't work by analogy and point-by-point correspondence, unless we think that all things are 'analogous' because they exists only as "streams of dependently arising processes interacting", as Brasington puts it.  The whole point is that there is not a core inner Self -- of a person or of anything else -- that is analogous to a total outer Whole.  Stuff depends on other stuff ad infinitum, to the point where the term 'stuff' becomes misleading.

The contrast between the logic of the Upanishads and the logic of dependent origination brings me to Fronsdal's suggestion in The Buddha before Buddhism that a familiarity with the BU can help us understand the Book of Eights generally, and in particular its important "Discourse on Quarrels and Disputes" (chapter 11, pgs 87-98).  This might be the oldest version of dependent origination (Brasington compares various translations here).  Fronsdal is certainly right to observe that this sutta starts by paralleling the concentric circle structure we find throughout the BU (section 3.9, which ends with the tree poem above, is a perfect example of this).  Quarrels and disputes depend on what is cherished, which depends on desire, which depends on the pleasant/unpleasant, which depends on sense contact, which depends on name and form.  If this were the BU, the list would inevitably end with " ... depends on Atman (Self)".  In the Upanishads, this inner kernel, in a strange twist, is always equal to the outer Whole (Brahman).  When we realize that we are everything, that Atman is Brahman, we enter into a non-dual realm that no longer supports any sort of concept of differentiation.  BU 4.5.12-15 provides a very clear articulation of the result of reaching the end of the chain, which culminates in the famous "neti, neti".

"It is like this. As the ocean is the point of convergence of all the waters, so the skin is the point of convergence of all sensations of touch; the nostrils, of all odors; the tongue, of all tastes; sight, of all visible appearances; hearing, of all sounds; the mind, of all thoughts; the heart, of all sciences; the hands, of all activities; the sexual organ, of all pleasures; the anus, of all excretions; the feet, of all travels; and speech, of all the Vedas.

"It is like this. As a mass of salt has no distinctive core and surface; the whole thing is a single mass of flavor—so indeed, my dear, this self has no distinctive core and surface; the whole thing is a single mass of cognition. It arises out of and together with these beings and disappears after them—so I say, after death there is no awareness."
After Yajnavalkya said this, Maitreyi exclaimed: "Now, sir, you have utterly confused me! I cannot perceive this at all." He replied: "Look—I haven't said anything confusing. This self, you see, is imperishable; it has an indestructible nature.  For when there is a duality of some kind, then the one can see the other, the one can smell the other, the one can taste the other, the one can greet the other, the one can hear the other, the one can think of the other, the one can touch the other, and the one can perceive the other. When, however, the Whole has become one's very self (atman), then who is there for one to see and by what means? Who is there for one to smell and by what means? Who is there for one to taste and by what means? Who is there for one to greet and by what means? Who is there for one to hear and by what means? Who is there for one to think of and by what means? Who is there for one to touch and by what means? Who is there for one to perceive and by what means?

"By what means can one perceive him by means of whom one perceives this
whole world?
"About this self (atman), one can only say 'not—, not—.' He is ungraspable, for he cannot be grasped. He is undecaying, for he is not subject to decay. He has nothing sticking to him, for he does not stick to anything. He is not bound; yet he neither trembles in fear nor suffers injury.
"Look—by what means can one perceive the perceiver? There, I have given you the instruction, Maitreyi. That's all there is to immortality."

While the Buddha doesn't end his list by saying that name and form depend on the Self, he seems to describe something pretty similar when he's asked where form disappears:

Appearances disappear when
Not conceiving concepts,
Not conceiving false concepts,
Not nonconceiving,
And not conceiving disappearance.
This is because conceiving is the basis of conceptual differentiation. (BbB, pg 97)

Both these descriptions, then, seem to point to a state of non-dual awareness.  In the Upanishads, this is clearly the highest state, and reflects our identity with everything.  So is the Buddha endorsing this union with Brahman as the end of the path as well, even if he doesn't explicitly call this the Self?  Fortunately, we don't have to speculate; the very next question posed to the Buddha is whether, "learned ones here say highest purity of the spirit goes only this far? Or do they say it is something more than this?"  

And this is where the magic happens -- the Buddha doesn't answer the question one way or another.  He doesn't refute the Self of the Upanishads, nor does he endorse it.  Instead -- if Fronsdal is correct in linking the word "upanissitāti", here translated as "conditional", to "upanishad" in its etymological meaning of "hidden connection" -- the Buddha basically cracks a joke.

Knowing, '[both] these [claims] are conditional [upanissitāti],'  

A sage investigates conditionality. 

Knowing, the liberated one doesn't get into disputes. 

This wise one doesn't associate with 

Becoming or not-becoming (BbB, pg 98)

We don't get this joke till we see that the "upanishad" of the Upanishads is ultimately always the Self.  The Self is precisely the "hidden connection" that unifies everything into a Whole, the inner concentric circle and last stop on every chain of dependency.  The Self is literally God, and this is the esoteric doctrine the text is aimed at uncovering.  

About this self (atman), one can only say 'not—, not—.'

He is ungraspable, for he cannot be grasped. He is undecaying, for he is not subject to decay. He has nothing sticking to him, for he does not stick to anything. He is not bound; yet he neither trembles in fear nor suffers injury. Now, those are the eight abodes, the eight worlds, the eight gods, and the eight persons. I ask you about that person providing the hidden connection (upanisad)—the one who carries off these other persons, brings them back, and rises above them? If you will not tell me that, your head will shatter apart."

Sakalya did not know him, and his head did, indeed, shatter apart. Robbers, moreover, stole his bones, mistaking them for something else. (BU, 3.9.26)

The funny thing is that the Buddha is agreeing with the Upanishads in a sense.  Our self is a sort of hidden connection between things.  This isn't because it is the center of or equal to the universe, but because everything is equally a hidden connection between all the other things.  They all arise dependent on one another, not from some essential core.  And our Self too is conditional -- dependent on, and hence connected to, other stuff.  Rather than a hidden center, we should think of it as a node, just another node in a vast network of nothing but nodes, nothing like the point of convergence we find in the ocean.  Or perhaps it would be better to say, anticipating the Mahayana, that the Buddha is pointing to a void where the Upanishads located the center of the circle.  

Now that I understand the reference better, I appreciate the power of the way the sutta ends.  The Buddha has led us through the highest state that meditation has to offer, a non-dual experience of a world where we no longer cherish our concepts.  But his pun takes away the possibility of interpreting this state metaphysically, as proof that we are one with the universe.  This is just another state, just another connection the world is capable of forming.  And we are urged to investigate it as such, to examine how it works, not cling to its significance and opine on what it means about us.  Thus do we leave behind quarrels and disputes with the Upanishads.

The Awakening of the West

Since I've enjoyed some of Stephen Batchelor's other writings I figured I'd take a chance on the cat bookstore's copy of his history of "The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture".  It's a fairly quick read that delivers on its subtitle by recounting a series of vignettes linking current (as of 1994) Buddhists teaching in the West back to the Eastern teachers that founded these traditions.  The result is something more engaging than a dry chronological history of everything that happened between Menander meeting Nagasena and the Dalia Lama showing up at the Berlin Wall.  Instead, we get a much better sense of the larger than life personalities involved in each of these living traditions that have enabled them to expand and grow and transcend their cultural roots over the past 2500 years.  However, this feature is balanced by a bug (if you can call it that).  The book contains so much history in each of its dense, often partly overlapping, stories that there are a bewildering number of names associated with an ever ramifying number of traditions that we have to try and keep distinct.  While it's a not a scholarly work and is trying to appeal to a broad audience, it's attempt to touch on everyone who is anyone in the long history of Buddhism sometimes makes it feel a bit exhausting and over-written.  So it may not be a good first stop for people who don't at least have some of this history already mapped out.  

Tree of Smoke

While Dennis Johnson's novel about Vietnam is my least favorite of his works that I've read so far (though that's just Jesus' Son and Already Dead) it was still compellingly written and kinda interesting.  Halfway through I realized that while I've seen many films about Vietnam, I can't recall reading another novel set there.  The benefits of dealing with the subject in a novel are obvious -- there are lots more unrelated characters here, spread out over a much longer time span, and hence encompassing more dimensions of the sprawling mess that gave birth to the Boomers.  As one might expect though, the message ends up being rather similar to everything else we've heard about Vietnam.  That war destroyed the American soul in a unique way.  Every trip to Vietnam was a trip into the heart of darkness.  

The Buddha Before Buddhism

Having read a little bit about the subject of "early Buddhism" (mostly from Leigh Brasington) I've long wanted to read Gil Fronsdal's translation of "The Book of Eights".  This short collection may be the oldest stuff in the Pali Cannon, and hence the closest to what the Buddha himself taught in his lifetime.  While Fronsdal's introduction and afterword review the multiple strands of evidence for this chronological position, it remains speculative.  And he suggests that, in the end, it may not be all that important.  What's clear is that this text is different in both tone and teaching from the other parts of the Pali Cannon that I've encountered.  For one, it's all in short verses, instead of long stories (though there is still a question posed to the Buddha that frames many of the chapters).  Perhaps because of this, it relies much more on paradox and aporia than other suttas.  The teaching is mostly about what not to do -- chase after sex, hold onto and quarrel over particular views -- and not about the traditional Buddhist lists of characteristics and factors.  

While I've found those lists incredibly helpful devices, it's refreshing to find the message here pared down to what I take to be its essence -- don't hold onto anything, even Buddhist doctrine.  Holding fast to any belief will eventually cause us to suffer; the path to peace and freedom lies in moving through life without needing these supports.  In short, the message is very Mahayana, and if these poems indeed represent the undiluted and uncodified teachings of the master, then it's much easier to understand why Nagarjuna felt the need to renew the tradition beyond all the Theravadan apparatus.  This is not to suggest that anything here contradicts the Theravadan interpretation.  In fact, we get pretty clear statements of dependent origination and not-self and the noble truths.  But we hear these doctrines before they have been formalized, at a point where they feel less like truths to be taught and memorized than experiences to be encountered along the road to peace.  

James

I'm likely the last human alive to read Percival Everett's re-writing of Twain's masterpiece.  Fortunately, everything I heard about it is true.  The novel is smart, funny, deep, and just plain great entertainment, regardless of whether you remember the original very well or not.  

Part one of the novel (roughly 2/3rds) is roughly what I would have expected upon hearing the premise.  It sticks relatively closely to Twain's plot, but tells the same story from Jim's perspective.  It's a clever enough trope, but the real delight is in Everett's masterful execution of it.  Here, Jim is not only human being from the outset (something he can only grow into in Twain's telling) but he's sardonically literate to the point of being erudite.  Twain's thick negro dialect is recast as a put-on invented by slaves to keep white people imaging they're simple fools.  The titular 'adventures' of Huckleberry Finn that occupy the bulk of Twain's lazily floating novel are immediately converted into the terrors of Escaped-slave Jim, who now finally gets to tell his own story, rather than being forced to entrust it to a well meaning white man.  

I won't spoil parts 2 and 3 by giving away Everett's twist, except to say that his ending has all the power of Twain's, and is a good deal less open to misinterpretation. Go read it.

Stages of Meditation

I no longer remember how the Dalai Lama's commentary on a Tibetan translation of Kamalashila's Bhāvanākrama ended up in my to read list, but when I saw it at the cat bookstore it went on the pile.  I vaguely remember that the idea was that this was deemed HH's most 'technical' writing about meditation, which I probably found intriguing.  And it is indeed pretty technical.  The basic idea of the original text is that there can, perhaps paradoxically, still be stages to the cultivation of awakening despite the Mahayana view that everything and everyone is already empty.  So in a sense, it a meditation instruction manual.  Meanwhile, the commentary from HH sticks pretty tightly to the original, without a lot of tangential attempts to modernize the text or discuss how he practices with it day to day.  

The stages Kamalashila describes are pretty simple actually.  First, cultivate compassion for all beings.  Interestingly, the text suggests going about this in the opposite way from which it is often taught.  Instead of beginning with metta, we are told to begin with an equanimity that regards all beings as equal.  That is, we first cultivate an equalization of feeling towards ourselves, our friends, and our enemies -- ultimately, we are all in the same boat.  Then, when we focus on wishing beings well in our metta, we are able to extend this loving-kindness to all beings equally.  After this, a feeling of compassion for all beings will arise naturally anytime we discover that they are not doing well.  Finally this mind of universal compassion for all beings inspires the Bodhisattva vow characteristic of the Mahayana.  After establishing this base of compassion, the practitioner can then focus on developing samadhi and vipassana, here termed "calm-abiding" and "special insight" meditation.  The latter of these is the specific Mahayana insight into the emptiness of all things.  And that's basically it, both the text and the Lama emphasize that these two aspects of meditation need to be balanced to achieve awakening.

While it appears that these stages or components of the path are relatively familiar and straight-forward, I should acknowledge that I don't think I understand this text very well.  I've come away with this summary high-level view partly because the material is coming from traditions that I am not that familiar with.  It's 9th century Indian Mahayana practice reflected through a 20th century Tibetan lens.  So what feels to me like needless repetition in the text regarding the balance of calm-abiding and special insight, and then later "method" and "wisdom", is probably a subtle distinction that I just don't understand.  Like most of these older texts, the material is not meant to be read on a standalone basis, but under the guidance of competent teacher.  The Dalai Lama's commentary certainly makes the original more accessible, but mainly to those already steeped in the Gelug tradition from which he teaches.  So basically I was just not the intended audience for this one.  Interesting nevertheless.

The Sound of Silence

 Since I've been training in the Thai Forest lineage for the past year and a half, when I saw this collection of talks from Ajahn Sumedho (one of the more important teachers in this tradition and one of its key links to the West) in the cat bookstore, I thought I would set it aside for later.  But after perusing the initial talk (which is probably on dharma seed) I found the style so direct and engaging that I just wanted to keep going.  These are really wonderful teachings that one can hear on a variety of levels.  They're very straightforward, without a ton of technical meditation details or lots of pali terms; I think most anyone could get something out of them.  But they are also profoundly encouraging -- this guy has been meditating for 60 years, and yet he describes starting the process of de-identifying with his own mind again and again, moment to moment, as if he were always a beginner.  And we can all aspire to be beginners.

Cosmopolitanism

It was Evan Thompson's thought provoking Why I Am Not a Buddhist that originally made me aware of Kwame Anthony Appiah's philosophy of "universality plus difference".  Since that discovery I managed to put two and two together and realize that Appiah is also the author of the NYT column The Ethicist, which I have occasionally enjoyed without much noting who was playing the role of Anne Landers.  So, despite the fact that I was underwhelmed by Evan's presentation of the philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, when I saw the book at the cat bookstore I figured I should give it a chance  And ... I remain underwhelmed, at least philosophically speaking.  Though I enjoyed and would happily recommend the book.

Appiah is an elegant writer, especially if you're into the whole brevity thing.  One fairly wizzes through his clear arguments and entertaining stories.  There's a great deal of food for thought in both these aspects of the book, and they are woven together especially tightly in this case.  Appiah grew up in Ghana, went to school in the UK, and now teaches in Amerika, so he tells engaging stories about the many cross-cultural ethical dilemmas he has navigated over the years.  Meanwhile, he argues that despite all these cultural differences, we still share so much that we are almost always capable of understanding, tolerating, and even learning from one another, if only we are willing to put a little effort into building what my meditation teacher would call a "universal translator".  So it's both argument and lived experience together that lead him to a slogan for cosmopolitanism that he draws from one of Terence's plays -- "I am human: nothing human is alien to me".  It's an attractive idea that expresses confidence in the possibility of a coexistence without conclusion, an openness that doesn't require agreement on universals (beyond an attitude of openness).  We are all different; but we are similar enough to appreciate and live with that difference.

While this is an attractive vision, I think it's rather underwhelming as philosophy proper.  What Appiah lays out is more properly a matter of religion or politics or just plain common sense.  And much of the philosophical argument in the book is aimed at undermining the various narratives we hear that purport to order all values in light of the one true universal value.  Value-free scientism, religious and racial fundamentalisms, and even all-encompassing theories of colonial cultural appropriation are critically examined and found lacking.  Much of the task of building a cosmopolitan outlook lies in the negative work of loosening up the boundaries and deconstructing the reasons we erect to separate ourselves from the rest of humanity and reinforce our own identities.  In essence, Appiah is just trying to extend the innate moral sensibilities that evolved from our tribal ancestry to cope with a much larger modern world.  This doesn't require him to build a new ethical philosophy (and in fact he is quite skeptical of rationalist ethical philosophy) but mostly just to remove the obstacles we constantly erect to feeling interest in and compassion for people who are different from us.  So in the end it's not really a critique of the book to call it philosophically underwhelming.  Whether or not you consider it our 'natural' tendency, the cultivation of kindness to strangers is something that requires practice, not theory. 

The Phenomenon of Life

I've enjoyed several of architect Christopher Alexander's other books, especially A Pattern Language, and I've always been curious about his 4 volume magnum opus The Nature of Order.  So I was pretty excited when I found a (slightly) discounted copy of volume 1 at the used bookstore.  Unfortunately, as so often happens with magnum opera, here he jumps the shark.  I got something out of reading it and I even share many aspects of the same vision.  But his attempt to create a grand unified theory of everything is too long, too abstract, and too full of breathless insistence on its own profundity to make me want to read the other 3 volumes. 

The basic idea is simple and lovely -- architecture is about bringing space to life.  In retrospect, we can see this as a simple way of describing what the patterns in A Pattern Language are meant to do.  By paying attention to these simple functional patterns we can create spaces that are more pleasant to live in because they respond to many natural human needs.  The resulting spaces don't merely solve a particular problem but weave together a container or a frame that contributes to our overall mood and vitality day after day.  So the goal is to create spaces that create more life, spaces that amplify life instead of disciplining it.  This seems like a fine theory of architecture (and fits remarkably well with Cache's theory in Earth Moves or Stewart Brand's discussion in How Buildings Learn) that lets us clearly articulate some aspects of what's gone wrong with modern architecture.  The fanciest postmodern facades routinely contain nothing more than a set of boxes, optimized for properties such as cost of construction or maximum workplace productivity, boxes which remain utterly indifferent to the actual experience of the human beings they discipline.  At its worst, this 'architecture' actually aims to produce a space that reduces the amount of life that can happen in it, and even at its best it assumes that life is something which can only be properly ascribed to the occupants of space, rather than the space itself, as if our outer context had nothing to do with our inner experience.  Even quite high end contemporary architecture frequently produces these big neutral rooms that function like a sack of space, a container fit for potatoes not people, and then dress this failure up in stylized features that look good in magazines.  The real art here lies not in the architecture, but in the sculpture or the photography, or perhaps simply the marketing.  It frequently seems like we've forgotten that architecture is for living in.

Alexander's goal, however, is not simply to define architecture, or critique other pretenders to the throne (although there is quite a lot of the latter here).  He wants to systematically explore how to create spaces which are alive.  Which brings us to the tricky question that occupies all of volume 1 -- what do me mean by life?  With this book, Alexander tries to go well beyond the somewhat vague and intuitive way of posing this question that I've started with.  He wants to literally define the life of a space in an 'objective' manner, as if the space itself had a sort of structural life inherent in its geometry, irrespective of the humans who might happen to occupy it.  In fact, in some sense, Alexander's vision has no place in it for living humans per se, since in the end nothing exists for him but space itself.  This would be the supposedly objective medium that nevertheless has a quasi-mystical capacity for arranging itself into subjects or, as Alexander terms them, "centers".  These centers are not pre-existing entities, but arise as nodes in a field constituted by smaller centers.  But then they also react back upon the smaller nodes that they unify, modifying those centers, and hence modifying themselves in a perpetual feedback loop.  It's turtles both all the way up and all the way down.  It's an empty non-dual world where all of space is alive to varying degree, and "life" is little more than a measure of the sort of "density of space" in a certain region.  Thus when Alexander talks about architecture bringing a space to life, he means it literally -- architecture is the queen of the arts and sciences because it manipulates space directly, and the architect is a kind of god because they create life through this manipulation.  Like I said, it's a theory of everything. 

Setting aside the architectural hubris of it, I find the general idea quite attractive.  It's very similar to Deleuze's idea of folding, or Joanna Macy's understanding of dependent origination as a form of systems theory, or Simondon's crystallization schema for individuation. All of these are descriptions of the way something arises out of nothing in the manner of a vortex.  And they all share an infinite recursive structure  both in spatial and causal terms (what Macy calls mutual causality).  Insofar as I have a philosophy, this is pretty much it.  So Alexander adds another metaphor we can use to think about how ontology works -- he thinks of it as the production of centers.  He also fleshes out an interesting list of 15 ways that centers can interact to amplify one another and even create new centers.  I'm unclear how useful these would be for creating architecture in the colloquial sense (for those purposes, we might be better served by treating them as 15 categories that encompass his 253 pattern language), but they do provide food for thought.  Perhaps in principle anything can happen in mutual causality, but in practice there do seem to be certain ontological patterns that frequently repeat.

Why then, if I like this vision, am I not going to read volumes 2-4?  Ultimately, the problem isn't with Alexander's vision, but his articulation of it.  While he endlessly insists on how this view of the world is profoundly different, he spends a lot of time trying ineffectively to justify it using the same old philosophical concepts of 'objectivity' and 'subjectivity' that it clearly explodes.  So, for example, he spends forever telling us how life is an 'objective' property of a region of space that can measured mathematically.  But this mathematics is pretty sketchy, which of course is hardly surprising given the complexity of the question and the recursive creativity of life.  Having failed to convincingly calculated objective life, the text promptly pivots to assure us that the best test of life is actually the "mirror-of-self" test, a completely subjective measure that asks whether space A or space B is more like a "picture of our deepest self".  We are to assume that this will somehow just naturally agree with the previous objective measure, even though we are simultaneously cautioned that it takes a lot of introspection to perform this test correctly.  All of this risks legislating that what is 'natural' or 'living' is simply whatever Alexander likes.  In fairness, he contends throughout that, at bottom, we all basically like the same stuff, or at least feel alive in the same spaces.  And while I think there's a lot of truth in that, it's pretty clear it doesn't make for a scientific consensus.  If I tell you that 75% of physicists think theory B is better, you'd hardly consider the matter settled, and yet Alexander seems routinely willing to dismiss this level of diversity of opinion about his own measures as due to people just not getting it.  So ultimately the problem is that these elaborate justifications of his theory take up a lot of space and yet actually end up detracting from it for everyone.  They won't change the mind of the 'hard-nosed' materialists who will remain unconvinced that the universe contains anything but marbles.  And for those of us who have already joined the choir, they simply get in the way, muddy the point with amateur philosophy, and dilute what we can take from his ideas by spreading them out of four times as many pages as were required.  I find I'm slowly becoming more curmudgeonly with long books -- if you can't say it in 150 pages, you probably don't know what's truly important to say, and if you find yourself talking for 1500 pages, something has clearly gone wrong.  Don't give me your magnum opus that sums up everything.  Give me a single idea worked to completion.

Breakfast of Champions

I decided to quickly breeze through this one because I just saw Alan Rudolph's cinematic version.  Though the film was a complete commercial flop it actually had some interesting elements that reminded me of things like Fear and Loathing and Schizopolis.  I can't say it was a great movie, but it was kinda entertaining, and this is exactly how I would describe the novel as well. It's certainly not one of Vonnegut's best.  It's too scattered and indulgently meta-fictional to not feel a bit like a well know writer trying to come up with just anything to publish.  But it's also got a few great laugh-out-loud moments that only the non-author of "Wear Sunscreen" could have come up with. 

The Anomaly

Thanks for this one goes to another esteemed colleague from Tejas, Dr. Maddog, who recently suggested that I might find Hervé Le Tellier's novel interesting.  And while I'm not sure describing it as a "novel' is completely accurate (Le Tellier called it a scoubidou of short stories), I definitely enjoyed and would recommend the book.  The plot centers on the gradual revelation of the eponymous anomaly, and there's little point in discussing it without giving away the central conceit.  However, part of the pleasure of the story lies in initially knowing nothing about how it's structured, so ...

SPOILER ALERT

The anomaly is a duplicated plane together with all its passengers.  Air France flight 006 from Paris to New York lands in March, and then an identical flight literally falls out of the sky again in June.  Accordingly, the novel is broken into three parts -- the stories of the various passengers before the anomaly has been revealed to them, the comic relief provided by the deep state machinations that bring the two sets of passengers together once the anomaly is discovered, and the aftermath of this strange duplication.  The first part is an interesting stylistic exercise because each character's story is told through the lens of a particular type of genre fiction (ie. thriller, drama, sci-fi, psychological novel, etc ...).  It makes for a very fast paced and interesting way of setting up what we gradually see coming -- something about the flight they took back in March unites these otherwise unrelated and unsuspecting characters.  It's a neat trick on Le Tellier's part because introducing so many characters so quickly might otherwise have left us confused and bored rather than off-balance but intrigued.  The second part, as I say, is mostly comic relief.  Imagine Douglass Adams or Mel Brooks describing the Deep State tripping over itself in an effort to contain such an anomalous event.  The third part is naturally the most interesting bit, since it explores the classic literary theme of the double or doppelgänger.  Here, Le Tellier pursues the main metaphor that guides our interpretation of the anomaly -- it lends credence to Nick Bostrom's version of the hypothesis that we are living in a simulation.  Many folks don't think about the connection between this modern version of the double (or n-tuple) and the long tradition of thinking about twins, though, as Le Tellier makes clear, he is not one of them.  Modern simulation believers tend to treat the hypothesis as a scientific one, when in fact its main function -- reiterated from mythology down to Dostoevsky and Nietzsche -- is ethical.  And this is clearly what the third part of the novel is all about.  What exactly would you learn from meeting your double? 

What most simulation hypothesis adherents fail to understand is that a duplication of identity in time and space meant to prove that there is a glitch in the matrix can never be a physical fact.  But thinking about such a duplication has long served as a lens with which to examine our concept of identity and our notion of reality.  This has been true ever since the Buddha compared the body to a lump of foam and consciousness to a magic trick.  The prehistory of this idea that there is something illusory about reality basically encompasses all of history.  The modern simulation hypothesis is amusing because it simultaneously taps into the deep root of this intuition, at the same moment that it betrays it.  Because the simulation is based on analogy to the contemporary computer, we immediately assume that it must be run by some programmer and on some hardware. These seem to be the necessary correlates of the idea that we are nothing but software.   Inevitably, this analogy leads directly to the establishment, explicit or not, of a concept of "base" reality composed of both an ideal base 'knower' and a material base 'known'. 

But of course this concept is nonsense; the materialist philosophy this concept relies on is self-contradictory, and there's no way we could ever know if we were in base reality  By contrast, just about any experience can suggest to us that we are a sort of simulation.  The encounter with a double obviously provides an extreme example because the individual identity we all subjectively feel literally provides the model for our very concept of identity. If there can be more than one me, then I am immediately forced to rethink my innate conviction that I am a unique, atomic, self-existent entity and consider a world that is capable of producing multiple copies of my self.  This is why we reach so naturally for the simulation hypothesis in this instance.  

Notice though, what's actually happening here.  We are simply perceiving two of the 'same' thing.  But this very act implies some sort of consciousness that the things are not the same, otherwise we would not say that there are two of them.  To be exactly the same, they would have to perfectly overlap in space and time and not just in DNA and personality as Le Tellier's characters do.  In which case we would not perceive two separate things but a single one.  Perceiving two things that are 'the same' is hardly the stuff of science fiction though.  It's our most commonplace experience.  We are constantly fabricating the identity of all things when what we are given is ceaseless flux.  When we say that we see two of something it's a sort of shorthand -- we take it for granted that if we look more carefully, we'll find these things differ in some way, and that we can later go on to specify how the two distinct sets of phenomena were similar enough to treat as the same for certain purposes.  In other words, embedded within the very concept of repetition is the notion that the identity of things are constructed, that the solidity of objects is not innate but depends on context, and that our perception of reality is changeable.  These are all observations that most everyone would agree with but that we all constantly overlook in everyday experience.  The power of the anomaly lies in the way it forces these truths on us by showing us they apply even to the one thing we think cannot be constructed -- our self.  But in principle, every experience can be anomalous.  Indeed, we might think of our brain's main job as to avoid seeing every experience as anomalous so as not to be overwhelmed by it.  But take some drugs or sit very still for a long time and watch the way your perception changes.  All of our experience and all of the things in it are constructed, fabricated, and hence empty.  The only thing you need to do to observe this is watch.  So the world that is capable of producing multiple variations of me is not some post-human hyper-technoligcal simulation, but this very world, which is already in itself a sort of simulation, a "star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightening in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream".

So naturally, this brings us to the question of what we can learn from the shock of meeting our double and seeing our reality and our identity as a construction.  The answer is probably obvious -- we can, if we choose, imagine reconstructing it some other way.  The theme of duplication constantly illustrates a world of possible variation.  Whether due to chance or wisdom, we could be different.  This is often the central point in doppelgänger stories like Dostoevksy's The Double or Notes from Underground where the hero is poised on a knife edge of self-aggrandizement and self-abasement, or Borges' Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, where the author's recreation of the Quixote is, "verbally identical, but ... almost infinitely richer".  And it is certainly the deeper significance of Nietzsche's myth of the Eternal Return.  We have lived this exact moment before, indeed innumerable times before, down to its finest details of feeling and motivation.  But what exactly is this moment that we are reliving?  And is our awareness that it is being re-lived a source of joy or the greatest weight?  The answers, according to Le Tellier, vary.  Some of us love our double as ourselves (Slimboy), and some of us need divorce proceedings (Lucie).  Some of us make a change (André) and some of us repeat the same sorrow (David).  And if we look carefully in the mirror, we'll probably find that most of us go through all of these emotions every single anomalous day. 

Built From Broken

I think someone from GMB must have recommended Scott Hogan's no-nonsense guide to keeping the body running.  Since our library had a copy I perused it very quickly and found it quite interesting.  While I haven't double-checked any of the references and investigated the quality of the studies Hogan cites, it does appear to live up to its subtitle: A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body.  The focus throughout is not on how to build the most muscle mass or train for any specific sport, but on what really counts as we get older -- the ability to maintain a wide range of motion in a variety of circumstances.  Hogan provides some scientific backing to an empirical conclusion I had already arrived at; this basically comes down to how well your joints and connective tissue function.  So what we really need to train is joint health.  

Coming at fitness from this slightly different angle doesn't necessarily imply a huge change in the exercises we do.  The book is filled with pretty standard looking stuff.  But knowing what the prime target is, and knowing something about the way joints differ from muscles in their response to training, can definitely change how we do many of these exercises.  The takeaway isn't earth shattering nor terribly different from the approach GMB constantly cultivates.  We want to move more often, with greater attention to the details of our exercise, through a greater range of motion (with perhaps a lighter load), and above all, more slowly (especially in the eccentric phase).  In addition to explaining why these principles are important to our joints and giving us a list of exercises, Hogan describes a 4 week workout program that includes an interesting periodization.  Though the exercises stay the same, each week is devoted to a specific goal like "connective tissue remodeling", "hypertrophy", "strength", and "endurance plus energy loading".  The changing goals correspond to changes in not only sets and reps and weights, but in how we perform the exercises.  Since I just finished the book, I can't comment on how effective this workout program is for healing painful joints and preventing injury, but it sounds plausible and I'm eager to give it a shot.

The Volcano Lover

Even though she's gotta be high in the running for the sexiest female intellectual of all time, I'd only ever read a few of Susan Sontag's essays.  So when the cat bookstore kindly furnished a copy of one of the novels, I figured I had to give it a shot.  I found it a bit slow going for the first hundred pages or so but it gradually grew on me.  While Sontag never makes this obvious, and doesn't even tell you the names of the characters, it turns out she's written a historical novel.  

The plot consists in the real lives of three famously intertwined characters from 17th century English history -- William Hamilton, the British ambassador to the kingdom of Naples, his second wife Emma Hamilton, the most famous and notorious beauty of her age, and Horatio Nelson, the British answer to Napolean, the most famous war hero of his day.  As far as I can tell from the Wikipedia articles, the plot is historically accurate, and Sontag's fiction lies only in her narrative attempt to get inside the experience of these characters.  This accuracy also accounts for why the novel begins relatively slowly, and as a meditation on the art of collecting.  Sir William was one of those Englishman who "discovered" the beautiful antiquities of "backward" regions that today populate the British Museum (such as the Portland Vase).  This placid existence of a wealthy collector accounted for the first 50 years of Sir William's life.  Things only changed when, after his first wife died, he made his greatest find and discovered Emma, a former prostitute pawned off on him by his cousin.  Emma turned out to be not merely a beautiful trophy wife, but so remarkably intelligent and creative that she quickly became the talk of Europe despite her scandalous history.  Despite an age difference of 30 years, the two married and lived quite happily for many years.  Until Horatio Nelson turned up on the doorstep one day, fresh from his historic victory in the Battle of the Nile but desperately ill and in need of nursing.  Thus began a passionate affair between Emma and Nelson that Sir William, now in his dotage, simply accepted as inevitable.  At this point the center of gravity of the novel naturally starts to shift away from Sir William, and becomes more of a reflection on gender relations circa 1800.  Sontag shines most in the way she illuminates the psychology of the asymmetric situation you can easily discover by examining the wikipedia articles.  A huge chunk of Emma's is taken up by her decade long involvement with Nelson, but Emma barely merits a passing mention in the much longer Nelson article, despite the fact that she bore him a child and that the two lived in open sin for many years while Nelson remained married to another woman.  History demands that both the hero and the temptress fit in a certain mold, and Sontag imagines how ill-fitting this must have been for these larger than life characters.

Finally, my favorite part of the novel was the last 50 pages, which contain a lovely narrative twist (not to be confused with a plot twist) that I won't spoil.

A History of Mathematics

Back when I was working on the Leibniz project, I realized that I could do with a better grasp of the history of mathematics.  Deleuze was making all sorts of references to the development of the calculus that I mostly followed, but only more or less.  So, after a bit of research, I settled on this Boyer and Merzbach tome.  It definitely did help me better understand the way that the calculus was originally oriented around infinite series; this has mostly been lost in how it is taught today (well, at least how it was taught 30 years ago).  But I actually found that the most interesting part of the book was the first 300 pages leading up to the calculus.  It was fascinating to read about things like Mesopotamian sexagesimal fractions and the incredible work of Apollonius on the conics.  While it's a cliche, it really does give one a renewed appreciation of how far ahead of their time the Greeks were.  Unfortunately, even though I read it slowly and in small doses, I find it hard to recommend the book as a whole.  While I began reading pretty closely and working out some of the problems myself, by the final 150 pages or so I was mostly just skimming.  Once they go past Euler and Gauss you pretty much need a complete undergraduate education in pure math to follow much of the story. 

Breath

I find that I'm usually not quite the intended audience for most popular science writing, so I can end up sounding overly critical of books I have actually enjoyed.  The genre frequently leaves me as frustrated by its incompleteness and lack of depth as it does intrigued by the research it covers.  While James Nestor's bestseller is no exception to this pattern, I would still recommend the book.  I haven't seen anyone else cover, even superficially, this many aspects of breathing in one place.  The topic is simply so interesting that it shines despite the breezy, introductory, should-be-read-at-1.5X quality to the writing. 

Nestor begins with a discussion of the evolutionary changes in human head and neck structure caused by our adaptation to cooked food.  These seem to have made breathing inherently more problematic for us than for any other mammal.  In modern times, we've compounded these problems by adopting softer diets that exercise our jaws less, as well as by living in that state of chronic low grade tension otherwise known as "civilization".  All of these changes make it more difficult to breathe effectively through our noses and to take full, deep breaths.  And this is apparently very bad for us.  

Nestor goes on to explain some of the reasons for why this is bad, and some of the ways we can combat it.  But he's more interested in striking anecdotes about rogue research than in consensus science, so most of these come off as pretty sketchy and not always coherent.  For example, he sometimes tells us that what we really want to do is learn to tolerate higher levels of carbon dioxide in the blood by extending our exhale and breathing much more slowly than we often do.  At other points he encourages us to breathe much harder, almost to the point hyperventilation, in the style popularized by Wim Hof.  Then again, maybe we should use yogic breathing techniques like alternate nostril breathing and etc ...  To sort out which of these partially contradictory ideas actually has any scientific support would require an extended tour through Nestor's bibliography (a very nice resource to have online).  While that might be an interesting project, I imagine the correct conclusion is likely predictably underwhelming: it depends.  The 'best' breathing techniques are wildly likely to depend on how you are and what you want to accomplish.  And this is of course precisely why these techniques are hard to study scientifically.  Which means that Nestor's book is ultimately most useful as a survey of possible ways to breath that we can experiment with personally.  So I'm excited to go through his instructional videos and see what happens.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

I've had Kuhn's classic on the shelf since college, but somehow never gotten around to reading the whole thing.  Which in a way is too bad, since it could have saved me a lot of time -- Kuhn articulates more or less the same beef I've had with science for many years now, but in much clearer and more concise form.  The book is a classic for very good reasons.

Kuhn's basic thesis is so well known that it's hardly worth spending much time repeating it.  Science does not progress towards truth through successive falsification, as if asymptotically approaching some limit.  Instead, it progresses through revolutionary shifts between completely incompatible paradigms, shifts which are catalyzed from within by the way each round of "normal", or paradigmatic, science extends and develops the paradigm it unquestioningly takes to be the true model of reality.  In short, Kuhn takes science to be an evolutionary process where new scientific theories arise like new species that simply out-compete the old ones, rather than somehow disproving them.  This process tends to produce theories of increasing complexity, scope, and accuracy that can legitimately be seen as 'progress' in some sense.  But as with Neo-Darwinian evolution, this isn't progress towards some one true final species. 

While I was already familiar with, and largely agreed with, this thesis, reading the original version of it was still rewarding for several reasons.  First, because you can clearly hear Kuhn's tone, which is in marked contrast to many of the people who popularized his idea.  As he points out in the postscript, Kuhn does not consider himself a relativist.  On the contrary, he began life as a physicist and thinks of his historical and philosophical project as being more, not less, 'scientific' and empirical about how science actually works.  At no point does he suggest anything close to the idea that scientists can just make up whatever theory they like, that all theories are equally good, or that the sole factor in the acceptance of a paradigm is simple social consensus.  He is even a firm believer in the 'progress' of science.  However, as the quotes suggest, since Kuhn rethinks the very structure of science, his theory changes what we mean by the terms science and progress.  He wants us to see that since science isn't the successively closer approximation of truth we took it to be, it doesn't progress the way our textbooks teach us.  And while he cannot, by hypothesis, argue that this is a truer view of the scientific enterprise, he does a fine job of putting forward all kinds of perfectly empirical and theoretical reasons to convince us we should adopt this view of science.  So while he he takes seriously the observation that all the science we know of is practiced by a certain species of hairless chimp, he does not intend to suggest that science is merely a social construct.  We should recognize the reductionist relativist position for what it is historically -- a weaponization of Kuhn by struggling humanities departments.

Second, I was delighted to discover the extended use he made of the gestalt switch model for perception.  Scientific revolutions take us from seeing the duck to seeing the rabbit.  After a phase shift, the same data crystalizes in a new way.  Today, we could make the same point even more effectively by discussing Predictive Processing and the Bayesian Brain framework.  Kuhn actually already moves in this direction by repeatedly arguing that scientists are not simply interpreting neutral facts and assembling a theory from a sea of bottom up data, but are using their prior training to directly perceive the entities their theory posits from the top down as real.  Scientific revolutions are the sudden shifts in scientific perception triggered when experimental errors and theoretical anomalies reach a critical threshold that causes us to adopt a new set of priors, a new paradigm.  I think part of what made Kuhn's book controversial was the way this inverts the flow of information in our usual model of perception; it's hard to convince most folks that they are actively constructing and inferring their world (and self) when it feels like these things are simply given to them.  Of course, if you've already drunk the kool-aid, this controversial analogy is part of what makes the book brilliant.

Nexus

I breezed through a copy of Ramez Naam's techno-thriller at the suggestion of a local bookstore hooligan.  They claimed it was such a gripping and fast paced read that I would surely want to move right on to the other two books in the series.  Since I agree completely with the first part of this assessment, it's somewhat surprising that the second half breaks down; while I thoroughly enjoyed Nexus, I have no plans read Crux or Apex.  The trouble is that Naam writes good but quite generic sci-fi, and seems above all to be auditioning a script for the next Bourne franchise film -- his creative motto is apparently, "always be blowing up".  But while it was certainly a quick and engrossing read, there's something inherently unsatisfying about a story that takes all kinds of themes I'm interested in -- drugs, meditation, AI, neuroscience, geopolitics -- and mashes them together in the least surprising and interesting ways.  

The main plot device is solid idea.  Imagine if you could take a programmable psychedelic, as in, a drug that actually consisted of chips that stayed in your brain and could be used to send signals in and out of it.  Theoretically, this would let you change your perception in more fine grained and functional ways that simply flooding your system with serotonin.  It would also provide a sort of weigh station between normal human experience and the experience of that great staple of modern sci-fi -- the fully digital being.  Naturally, once we became able to program individual brains like this, we would surely want to start networking these analog-digital hybrids.  Which then makes each hybrid computer a potential hacking target, and etc ... You can imagine where it goes from here.  This is a fine premise that affords connection to a bunch of interesting questions, each of which is represented by Naam's well-drawn if slightly predictable and cardboard characters.  The trouble is that Naam is so prisoner to his screenplay that he doesn't have time to delve too far into any of these from an intellectual perspective.  The reader apparently cannot be counted on to wait more than about 10 pages between either tense near misses or gory combat scenes.  Eventually, this makes the plot feel kinda predictable and paint-by-number, and gives it that Hollywood sheen that leaves every movie looking like every other.  Will the good guys win in the end?  I'll admit that I'm kinda curious what happens.  I guess I'll just watch the Netflix series to find out.  But that too will take material suited for a 90 min film and, using suitably timed explosions and faux-epic grandeur, scatter it over 600 minutes of television.  And sometimes, you should just write a single novel, not a trilogy.

The Origins of the Second World War

I no longer recall who suggested that A.J.P. Taylor's short study of European politics between the Wars was a masterpiece.  Which is too bad because they were right and I should listen to more of their suggestions.  Taylor does a great job of explaining the tensions remaining after the Treaty of Versailles, and then tracing these lines of force forward as the complicated machinery of European politics played out over the following 20 years.  Since I've never studied the details of this history before, all I can say is that it is a fascinating story that seems well supported and well argued enough to perhaps be mostly true.  The book has apparently come in for a lot of criticism, and the reason for this is entirely predictable -- he doesn't blame the war on how evil Hitler was.  However, Hitler's inherent evilness is only a convincing historical explanation for people who just want to have a simple way to avoid considering the question.  For the rest of us, it's obvious that while Hitler's evilness may be a true and even necessary cause of the war, it is far from sufficient.  By explaining anything Germany might have done, it explains nothing about what it actually did.  

Instead, Taylor suggests that while Hitler transformed Germany domestically, his foreign policies were almost identical to all other German leaders since the end of WW1.  Since that war ended with German defeat and humiliation, but not a dismemberment of the German state, the goal of German leaders and the German people thereafter was to restore their greatness as the largest power in Europe.  And since Germany was the size of France and Britain combined, Taylor asserts that both those countries accepted that a restoration of German power was the inevitable outcome of the gradual dismantling of Versailles.  Naturally, they both also hoped that this could be delayed as long as possible, and ultimately carried out peacefully.  The shocking part of Taylor's thesis is that he suggests Hitler shared this latter goal.  Hitler had no intention of starting a great war with France and Britain in 1939.  He merely used the threat of force to hurry along the process of reunifying the German speaking people who had been separated off into Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig (Gdańsk, Poland).  Germany had long sought this reunification, and the French and British had long assumed it would eventually happen despite whatever objections those small countries might have.  So while successive occupation of these three areas was indeed the direct trigger for the start of the war, Taylor argues that their reincorporation into Germany was not a sign of Hitler's endless desire to dominate the world.  Instead, Hitler's tactic all along was one of bluffing then waiting.  He threatened to use military force, and constantly exaggerated the capability of the German army (apparently much to the discomfort of his generals), but only as a means of pressuring the various European powers to acquiesce without a fight.  Unfortunately, gambling is a dangerous business.  Sometimes people call your bluff, and the rest is history.

Against the Gods

Peter Bernstein's "Remarkable Story of Risk" had been on the shelf for so long that it somehow migrated into bedtime reading.  While it was engaging and well written, I found I wasn't really the target audience for the book.  I was already familiar with all of the mathematics, and even many of the historical anecdotes, that he discusses in the first half of the book.  And just a routine tour of duty in finance makes the second half's discussion of risk management techniques a bit redundant.  In fact, I almost stopped reading after the eye-rolling-ly triumphant late 90's tone of the introduction; these days, that era's presumption that we had managed to design a foolproof self-correcting risk management system looks nothing short of amazingly naive.  However, I'm glad I pushed on despite my misgivings.  I ended up enjoying the way Bernstein unfolded his story and nuanced the neo-liberal tone he began with.  Ultimately, it's not a bad book to hand someone who has never reflected on the issue of what "risk" is, nor how our definition of this concept has shifted over time.  

Religion and Nothingness

I'm unsure how to approach this review of Keiji Nishitani's collection of essays on the relationship between religion and nihilism.  

From a comparative philosophy perspective, they form a deep reflection on the connection between the Buddhist concept of emptiness and the way Nietzsche saw the history of Western philosophy dead-ending in nihilism.  Exploring this connection, and especially examining Nishitani's reading of Eternal Recurrence as, "... breathing ... the same pure mountain air that we felt in approaching the the standpoint of Dōgen ..." (RN, 215), could easily be a review in itself.  It's the only time I've seen anyone transpose Nietzsche's idea to a Buddhist context and ask the rather obvious question -- does the Eternal Return describe samsara or nirvana, the greatest weight, or the most unbearable lightness of being?  Yes.  

But there's so much more to the book than this question that it seems unfair to focus on it exclusively.  In fact, even if we stick with a purely philosophical lens, there are so many point of correspondence with The Fold and Nietzsche and Philosophy that the book also deserves its very own chapter in my forthcoming magnum opus The NonDual Deleuze.  Nishitani reinvents emptiness as the plane of consistency, a field of force that holds everything together in a "non-being that is not the being of the negative".  He insists that this field of experience only arises on the far side of our personal ego, after a journey through the center of an impersonal nihilism again to a Great Death.  He discusses various syntheses of time that lead us to see every instant as a "monad of eternity".  I could go on, but it's clear these two are breathing the same mountain air of non-duality.  

And yet, even this longer review would fail to do the essays complete justice.  Because ultimately Nishitani doesn't even see his point as purely philosophical.  As a devoted Zen practitioner himself, his point is also deeply religious or "existential" -- he is concerned with that aspect of our human experience where we necessarily call into question just who we are and what it means to experience, where we begin to look outside of ourselves in an attempt to understand what's happening on the inside, and thus begin to blow apart the nice stable contained self we imagine is our birthright.  This vertiginous exploration of the ground of our existence is for Nishitani the essence of the religious impulse and directly explains it connection to nothingness.  Colloquially speaking, it's that moment of quiet reflection when we wonder, "what does it all mean?"  When we live, rather than theorize, this search, we find ourselves starting into the same groundless abyss that stared back at Nietzsche. And only by crossing this river of absolute nihilism, this gulf where nothing really means anything, can we reach the far shore where the abyss converts 'full circle' into the empty suchness of the present.  In other words, at the deepest level, I think Nishitani is trying to construct a philosophy adequate to his lived experience of sitting zazen.  In a sense, we might see it as asking what is the transcendental condition of possibility of Zen -- who or what are we that sitting still and doing nothing can have such a profound effect on our experience?  The answer of course is that we are the world, and the world is a field of infinite emptiness.

There's so much more that could be said here.  For example, another interesting review would focus on how Nishitani continues Heidegger's line of thought about technology and the fixation of human telos as mechanism.  He illuminates this question by bringing it into connection with Nietzsche's ideas about the master-slave 'dialectic' and Buddhist thinking about freedom and dependent origination.  Yet another review would be needed to address the theory of Christianity that Nishida develops, which centers on a mystical interpretation of the circumincessional unity of the trinity as another expression of what Thich Nhat Hanh called interbeing.  But since it's clear that I'm not going to write all these reviews, or in fact any of them, I think I'll just leave it here and start rereading the book.