Dear Life

Since I enjoyed Runaway so much I thought I'd try another book of Alice Munro short stories.  Dear Life is actually her most recent short story collection (2012), and given that she's 89, probably the last one.  While these stories are still finely crafted, with the same understated and allusive rural canadian drama, I think I enjoyed Runaway more.  Munro seems to have moved further in the direction of short and inconclusive sketches.  They are models of economy and implication, as I think a short story should be, but somehow many of them left me wishing for more exploration or elaboration -- not an ending maybe, but perhaps more of a clear direction.  Most of these stories tail off like a trail that got washed away.  If this sort of thing interests you, it's worth noting that the last few stories, including the title story are announced as mostly autobiographical.  Strangely, these actually struck me as the weakest stories in the whole collection.  

The Spell of the Sensuous

Sometimes, paradoxically, a book is so obviously an ally that our discussion of it can end up sounding like one long critique.  I think this happens when the ideas are close enough to our own that we feel a strong need to distinguish ourselves from them as from our double.  No one finds as many problems with an idea as the person who, having had it yesterday, woke this morning to a realization of its partiality.  Before we start then, I should make clear that David Abram's The Spell of the Sensous is a wide-ranging, insightful, and thought provoking book.  It's beautifully written (though at times he takes the poetry a bit overboard for my taste).  The main idea is something I am entirely sympathetic to -- the development of civilization has changed the way we think about and even perceive the world in deep and fundamental ways.  And I learned a lot about the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Pintupi and Koyukon stories, and the history of the alphabet.  So, overall, I highly recommend the book.  

Now I'm going to tell you about all the things that are wrong with it.  Abram's basic thesis is pretty simple.  He thinks the alphabet fucked us up.  You can see that the thesis has two parts.  

1. We're fucked up.
2. It was the alphabet that did it.

If that sounds overly simplistic to you, you've identified the first problem with the book.  

Abram's tries to show us how human consciousness of our environment has shifted over time.  We've moved from our ancestor's intensely local, physical, and sensous participation in an enveloping animistic environment, to our current more global, cerebral, and detached interaction with an environment we see as merely a mechanical entity we can exploit.  He illustrates this older way of looking at the world by examining how various oral cultures that survived into the 20th century tell stories about their direct sensuous participation in their particular environment.  In the meantime, he denounces our more recent idea that we are an immaterial consciousness merely imprisoned in a physical body, because he sees a direct line between that idea and our current (as of 1996) environmental crisis.  Then he attributes the shift between these two mindsets to the invention of the alphabet.  

Which, as a historical thesis, is just ridiculously oversimplified.  No doubt the technology of the alphabet, and the way it lends itself to a more universal literacy, has had a profound impact on human society.  In fact, for as much as we talk about it all the time, I think we dramatically underestimate the impact of simple technologies on the shape of our world.  Language.  Agriculture.  Writing.  The alphabet.  The printing press.  Double entry bookkeeping.  Corporations.  Radio.  The internet.  These technologies all changed the world in profound ways, and generally we don't even think of most of them as technologies.  But if it's a clear oversimplification to draw a straight line between even the radio and Hitler, how much more tenuous is laying global warming at the footsteps of the first written vowel?  This is when history starts to verge on conspiracy theory.  In his conclusion, Abram admits to the problem, and acknowledges that there were many causes of the shift in worldview he discusses, not the least of which would be the shift to sedentary agriculture.  To wit, every single "oral" culture he discusses in the book turns out to also be a nomadic hunter-gatherer-pastoralist culture as well.  So much for the control group.  He also tells us that he wasn't trying to present a historical thesis but merely to "tell us a story" about how we lost our connection to nature, a just so story akin to the Aboriginal one about how Little Wallaby Man pissed the Ooldea soak into existence.  This disclaimer would have been a lot more convincing if he'd put it at the beginning of the book.

While soft-pedaling his historical argument seems disingenuous, he's right that we can get more out of the book by reading it in allegorical and poetic fashion.  There are quite a few lovely and provocative images meant to upend our modern techno-scientific worldview.  These all center on the way our embodied physicality comes before our ability to represent the world and our inner self.  So, for example, instead of thinking of our perception as picking out discrete objects in the world, he encourages us to see our senses as participating in an ongoing exchange with an entirely animate environment, which, "... ensures that my body is a sort of open circuit that completes itself only in things, in others, in the encompassing earth"(62).  Merlau-Ponty's ideas about the reciprocal sensing and sensibility of the perceiving 'flesh' then dovetails with the animism he attributes to all oral cultures who don't see themselves as fully separate from their environment.  Likewise, before we see language as a representational or propositional code specific to humans, we can appreciate its kinship with the expressive music of our environment, the songs of birds and insects and streams.  Even our seemingly innate notions of homogeneous empty space and linearly passing time can be seen as reductions of a more originary embodied space-time.  We began in a local and heterogeneous space we call the landscape, filled with particular formations, each with a story that connects us to them as we literally move through the space.  On the other hand, our sense of time is just a metaphor for hidden dimensions of our immediate sensual world -- the past lives hidden underground, the future is just over the visible horizon, and even the present is filled with the mystery of the air, hidden in plain sight.  I don't think these metaphors we live by make for compelling history, cognitive science, or philosophy because they are simply too reductive.  But they do provide some different ways of conceptualizing our experience, which makes them hugely valuable.  

Abram is also right that we can learn a lot by exploring the new metaphors that come with the act of writing.  The first of these is covered in Plato's famous discussion in Phaedrus of the impact of writing on memory.  Written symbols form a kind of portable and external memory that can come to supplant our own internal memory palace.  This severs the connection between oral memory and spatial location, and encourages a culture like the Hebrews to conceive their entire history as contained in the book rather than the land.  The Greeks of course take the system a step further than the Jews by adding written vowels.  This takes all the participatory guesswork out of reading a sea of consonants and creates a perfect synesthesia where the marks on the page literally speak to us.  And lo, the voice of the author, with its concomitant linear internal subjectivity, is born!  Finally, how could the identity of the written symbol, and the particularly arbitrary identity of the letter with a syllable, not lend itself to thinking of signs in the world as an immaterial code that represents what it codifies?  This metaphor will eventually turn all of nature into a book, albeit written in the language of mathematics (though this is still mostly Greek to me).   

So we are left with the question of what to make of all these metaphors.  If we leave aside the dubious historical thesis about the role of the alphabet, we are still left with "original" metaphors about our continuous sensuous interaction with the world and later "derived" metaphors that qualitatively separate our mind from our body and our self from the world.  Which means that story has the narrative arc of The Fall, and the alphabet figures as Original Sin.  This is exactly where I start to have deep philosophical problems with the book.  Not just because of the moralistic christian pessimism of its unquestioned assumption number 1: we're fucked up.  But because the desire to turn the narrative into a morality tale leads to all kinds of irreparable philosophical blind spots.  It commits Abram to seeing phenomenology as a science of direct or immediate non-conceptual experience.  It commits him to romanticizing this experience as "ab-original" just as it commits him to romanticizing the Aborigines.  It blinds him to the incredible creativity of the new evolutionary processes set off by the technologies of language and writing.  And, most fundamentally, it commits him to knowing what it means to be human, knowing that the only true and authentic way to happiness is through the life of the land, back to the Garden of Eden we have so despoiled.  This sort of certainty is philosophically and pragmatically problematic.

There is no original experience.  There is no direct and firm bedrock of what your experience is "really like" that you can arrive at through introspection of either the phenomenological, scientific, or buddhist sort.  And so there are also no invalid experiences.  None of experience is second class or derived or illusory.  None of those categories make any sense without their opposite.  All experience is just experience.  We can gain a great deal from inspecting it, but what we can't do is get back to its root or ground or origin.  We can't recognize with certainty any of those starting points, for certainty is itself just another experience.

Those observations may sound depressing or limiting, but I see them in exactly the opposite light.  Because without an origin, we escape from the narrative of The Fall.  Which means we also escape from its sin and its end, always our present infamy.  The lack of origin liberates.  It opens up the possibility of continuing to discover more experience.  It makes the question of what is valuable in experience open-ended, does not foreclose in advance on new possibilities in the name of an authentic and aboriginal way of life.  This may rob us of our moral high ground on environmental degradation, but in its place, it gives us the ability to sift through all our modern experience and evaluate what works and what doesn't.  What we lose in Good and Evil, but we gain in good and bad.  

We can phrase this thought in the more concrete terms of the book.  In a sense, it is one long expression of the idea that we are just animals, enmeshed in an animistic world where everything lives and breathes with an animal power.  This idea immediately makes me hear Spinoza's great protest against the limits of our knowledge: "we don't even know what a body can do".  Spinoza wanted to remove the limits we arbitrarily place on the body to circumscribe its possibilities.  Who knows, maybe a body can even think.  The same question, though, applies to any concept we want to use as the origin point for our thoughts.  We're just animals, but we don't even know what an animal can do.  An animal invented writing and everything else that now "artificially" separates it from the rest of the animate world.  Maybe technology itself is an animal, reproducing itself just like a virus.  If it's fine to breathe life into the rocks and streams, then why deny it to anything a particular hairless chimp did after 800 BCE?  What's more, it's clear than the phonetic alphabet does not create the power of abstraction and representational codification that so incenses Abram.  It merely accelerates a possibility that has been there from the beginning of language.  So maybe the more authentic animal state is the entirely pre-linguistic one, in which case we're going to disqualify birds and dolphins because they possess at least some power of representative communication.  These arbitrary dividing lines define a concept that will serve as an essential origin point and limit for what it means to be a human animal.  But these sorts of lines can never be understood as anything other than phase transitions in some ongoing process.  We need to explore this process that defines 'animality' by linking up various animals as they transform into one another.  Instead, Abram offers us a definition of animal that relies on little more than a howl of moral outrage whenever we transgress the lines he happens to have in mind.

The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching

It doesn't seem there are really any bad Thich Nhat Hanh books.  Somehow the deep practical wisdom you can feel in them keeps his simple writing style from toppling over into self-help platitudes.  I think anyone, regardless of whether they are a buddhist or a meditator can profit from reading things like Anger or Being Peace.  But while The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching has plenty of practical advice for better everyday living, it's a little different from those others.  Here, Hanh elaborates his own understanding of the classic concepts of Buddhist doctrine.  There are many chapters devoted to the four noble truths, one for each limb of the eightfold path, and others for the various lists that Buddhists seem so drawn to, such  as the three dharma seals (aka characteristics) the four immeasurable minds (brahmaviharas), the five aggregates, the seven factors of awakening, etc ... In other words, this is not really a book for beginners.  It's clearly aimed at people who already practice, who are already familiar with some of these sanskrit terms and ideas, and who want to get a fuller and more precise sense of what the Buddha had to teach.  

Which is not to say that Hanh just presents a straight-up traditional account of Buddhism.  He wants to make these ideas accessible to a modern audience, and he proposes making some important changes in our understanding of the traditional formulations in order to do this.  His biggest beef is with the traditional focus on the centrality of suffering.  Indeed, he goes so far as to say that dukkha is not really even the third characteristic, at least if we consider these are the ultimate descriptors of what is.  Suffering is not universal in the same way as impermanence and non-self.  Instead, Hanh replaces dukkha with nirvana in his formulation.  Nirvana is actually the third fundamental and universal characteristic of everything, which is then obscured by suffering.  We didn't need the Buddha didn't teach us that there is suffering or that life is unsatisfactory -- we needed him to teach us that there is more than this, that there is a way beyond suffering and struggle.  It's a substantial and, I think, wonderful substitution that changes our whole perspective on the tradition.  Instead of reading the three characteristics as negations (im-permanence, non-self) it allows us to read them as positive and liberating factors.  Nothing lasts forever.  We are not separated from an alien universe.  And if we look into, accept, and let go of our suffering, and our clinging to permanece, self, and suffering, we can find the unimpeded joy that's already present.  Awakening, in other words, is a positive process of unblocking what's already in this world, not a negative one of leaving it behind.  We only negate the negations, the things that hold us back.

Hanh's shift towards a more positive interpretation of Buddhism fits well with another (for me) surprising aspect of the book-- his heavy emphasis on the non-dual.  Though he doesn't mention the concept much by name, he speaks repeatedly of transcending the subject and object, existence and non-existence, and is constantly reminding us of the "interbeing" of all things.  What I'm calling his non-dual subtext reaches a climax in the penultimate chapter on dependent origination.  Hanh would like to see the model of 12 links arranged in a linear causal chain, replaced with 10 links arranged in a network where each is connected to all the others.  He calls this "interdependent co-arising" and uses one of the Buddha's images of three reeds standing up by leaning on one another, teepee style, to illustrate how everything co-is, so to speak.  This network or vortex model of causality is dear to my heart, so I enjoyed the overall aim of the presentation even if the particular 10 or 12 links involved seem kinda arbitrary to me.  I would be interested to know what other people with more commitment to the traditional scheme think of his re-working.

I Am a Cat

The title tells you most of what you need to know about  Natsume Sōseki's popular classic.  It's an early (1905) entry in the "narrated by an animal" genre so recently perfected by Henri.  As such, it's a satirical look at humans from the aloof and superior perspective of our domesticators.  

Unfortunately, like a lot of satire, much of the punch is probably lost in translation, both literal and cultural.  Satire is always specific to an era, in this case to the Meiji period, and to be funniest requires an intimate familiarity with the customs and common wisdom of that era.  In this case, on top of the cultural distance, there's the problem of linguistic translation, particularly when a lot of the humor depends on a juxtaposition of literary and everyday language.  Per the translator's introduction, this is an important part of why the novel is a Japanese classic still taught to schoolchildren.  They seem to do a good job of preserving at least some of this in the translation, so I think even an English reader gets some sense of Sōseki's humor and refined literary style.  Most of it is just not that funny though.  With the exception of a few scenes, the comedy is less apparent than the bitter, disgusted, cynical tone that pervades the novel.  Not a single character comes off looking even remotely sympathetic in the story, including, ultimately, the cat.  Even our initial affection for the not so humble narrator evaporates as he is gradually corrupted by his humans.  So in the end, the whole works is just kind of a sneering downer whose interest was lost on me.  

Satipatthana Meditation: A Practice Guide

A friend recently took a class with Bikku Analayo at the Barre Center For Buddhist studies.  The class was based on the Analayo's interpretation of the Satipatthana-sutta -- the Buddha's discourse on the foundations or establishment of mindfulness.  As both a scholar and a monk, this is not the first time Analayo has written about the Satipatthana-sutta.  This time though, instead of focusing on academic questions of textual scholarship, or comparing the Chinese and Pali version of the sutta, Analayo has written a book to help us put the instructions in the sutta into practice.  The book is tremendously helpful in doing this.  The Satipatthana-sutta itself talks about various components of mindfulness, or various things one can be mindful of, but it doesn't really make clear how they are linked and why these are the particularly important ones.  In addition, like other suttas, the terminology used can be a bit arcane.  In other words, there's quite a distance to cover between the text and a set of meditation instructions.   

Since I haven't read them, I can't compare Analayo's success in covering this distance to older and more traditional approaches.  For me though, this book really brought a fairly obscure text alive.  Analayo turns the sutta into a connected set of meditation instructions that build upon one another as they go.  The instructions are clear and easy to follow, especially if you use the guided meditations that accompany the book.  There's also a lot of wisdom and experience contained in the book's extended reflections on what the various meditations are meant to offer us.  For example, meditating on the body as simply composed of skin, flesh, and bones can help us avoid becoming obsessed with our physical appearance.  Meditating on what becomes of the body after we die can help us face our own mortality.  Focusing on feeling can help us see how transitory all our reactions are.  Etc ... 

As the book progresses, we move into more and more abstract contemplations, and as an inevitable result, deeper and deeper into the Buddhist interpretation of meditative experience.  In fact, by the end, we are really getting a crash course in Buddhist philosophy or religious doctrine by contemplating the five hindrances and the seven factors of awakening.  Of course, as one one of the world's great spiritual traditions, Buddhism has a lot to offer.  In fact, for me at least, it pretty clearly has the most to offer.  And Analayo's explanations of the way the various lists that so obsess orthodox Buddhism complement one another is very insightful.  But I still believe that we should be mindful of our movement along a continuum from observation to interpretation.  That our feelings change and our body is composed of the same stuff as everything else seems to belong as firmly on the side of observation as anything could.  That a certain five or seven states of mind form the on and off ramps of the road to a fairly mysterious endpoint called awakening seems to me to belong equally firmly on the side of religious interpretation.  Which ultimately makes this one of the most explicitly religious meditation books I've read.  This is not meant to be a critique, but an observation.  Analayo is upfront about the establishment of mindfulness being only one aspect of the soteriological path to awakening.  In other words, he is guiding us towards establishing a specific type of mindfulness, focused on specific aspects of our experience, that will lead us towards specific moral and philosophical conclusions.  We have to remember to evaluate this practice and its fruit based on our own experience of it, just as we evaluate everything else in life.  

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

After reading The Good Lord Bird, I felt inspired to go back and read the classic it reminded me of.  Or perhaps it was re-read; I don't have any memory of this book from high school, and perhaps they had stopped assigning it by the time I got there (towards the end of the neolithic revolution). It's a thoroughly entertaining read.  There are some spots (mosty the parts with Tom Sawyer) where it drags things out for longer than I would have thought necessary.  Though maybe this pacing is appropriate for a novel about floating down the Mississippi on a raft?  I also really enjoyed the vernacular language of it and plan to incorporate "warn't" into my daily speech.

The basic story is simple.  A 14 year old Huck Finn runs away from his drunken and dangerous Pap near Hannibal, Missouri.  In his escape, he crosses paths with Jim, a negro slave who has run away from the family who took Huck in when his father proved to be a drunk.  Together, the two of them float down the big river 1,100 miles to somewhere near Point Coupee Parish, Lousianna, on a homemade raft, having various adventures along the way.  At the end of this journey the two stumble upon the family farm of Huck's good friend Tom Sawyer, and Jim is recaptured.  Since Tom arrives soon after for a visit with his Aunt, he and Huck lay a plan to free Jim and let him escape to the North.  The plan is an epic and hilarious failure, and leads to Jim's recapture, but it turns out that he is actually not a runaway slave after all.  His former owner declared him a free man when she recently passed away, a fact which Tom knew all along.

Thematically, the novel is one long sardonic take on the idiocy of antebellum South.  The characters Huck and Jim come across in their travels range from narrow-minded to mendacious.  And while some of them may mean well and even help them out, there are no heroes along the way.  Which observation indirectly brings us to the central controversy that today surrounds this once banned classic -- is it a racist book?  

To begin with, true to its vernacular, it features the N word prominently.  Since that alone will keep you off the college cheer squad these days, we're not off to a good start.  In addition, the few slaves depicted in the book are uniformly portrayed as uneducated and superstitious, often with a tinge of a mocking or comic element to them.  Of course, some of this can be defended as Twain accurately picturing the realities of the language and culture he grew up in.  But using black characters as comic relief is harder not to see as anything except playing off and reinforcing every stereotype of the era -- minstrelsy!  However, when you consider in addition that most white characters in the novel often see even less flattering, and equally stereotypical, portrayals, you might be willing to say that the novel depicts a racist world, but is not itself racist.  

However, this lukewarm defense seems to miss a key point.  The central tension that holds the whole book together is the 'sivilization' of young Huck Finn.  At the outset, Huck chafes at the strictures imposed by his guardian the widow.  Under her roof, he can't cuss, has to use a knife and fork, wear shoes, and go to church.  His escape down the river with Jim liberates him from all of these rules that just seem like nonsense to a 14 year old boy who loves to be in the backwoods.  At the end of the journey though, it seems likely that Tom's aunt will end up adopting Huck and finishing what the widow started.  Set within this context, all the Huck's many reflections on what to do about Jim take on a special significance.  On the one hand, Huck knows that he's supposed to follow the moral rules these women lay down.  These include not lying, and not stealing, both of which he is contravening by not turning in a runaway slave.  So Huck constantly feels guilty for helping Jim.  On the other hand, he and Jim have a great time together, and Huck knows he's a true friend who has bailed him out many times over during their adventures.  In other words, his first hand experience of Jim finds a full human being, and not a piece of property.  So throughout the whole novel, Huck has to struggle against what he sees as the morally correct thing to do -- turn Jim in -- which constantly wraps his teenage conscience in a knot.  He can't ever bring himself to quite do it, but he knows it's wrong and attributes this moral failure to his terrible upbringing.  

I think it's impossible not to see Huck's journey as gradually moving away from the absurd rules of 'sivilization' and towards an appreciation of the humanity of Jim.  Huck is taught to be a racist, but he fails at it.  And we see the entire process by which a young mind wrestles with and overcomes the stereotypes it began with.  This culminates in the tension of the final jailbreak.  Tom Sawyer concocts an elaborate and almost quixotic plan for freeing Jim.  It takes weeks to prepare.  But of course, for him it's all fun and games, since he knows that Jim is already free.  Huck, Jim, and the reader, however, don't know what Tom knows.  Which makes the ridiculous plan, and the too many pages spilled on its comic execution, a double edged sword.  It's funny and absurd and makes an adult Jim seem crazy for going along with some adolescent fantasy.  But you, Huck, and Jim can also all feel the frustration with this absurd plan build into a panic -- stop fucking around or they're going to sell Jim down the river tomorrow dammit!  So in the end, you get to really feel the commitment of Huck Finn.  He's going to lie, cheat, and steal from people who have treated him well.  He's even going to risk getting himself killed.  Now that he's made up his mind, he is going to do whatever it takes to free his friend Jim, 'sivilization' be damned.  It's hard to see how Twain could have more thoroughly dramatized the process of overcoming of the racial attitudes of the day.

Anatomy of Breathing

About six months ago I started to explore non-dual awareness by using Michael Taft's collection of guided meditations.  Each of these videos starts with an initial period of deep belly breathing where you focus on making the exhale longer than the inhale.  Initially, manipulating the breath in this way felt effortful, but once I got the hang of it, I found it shockingly and viscerally relaxing.  The effect was powerful enough that just about every morning I found myself wondering what the hell was going on and remembering that I had seen physical therapist and shoulder guru Eric Cressey recommend a book about the anatomy of breathing.  

So finally my curiosity got the better of me and I picked up Blandine Calais-Germain's book.  It is just exactly what it says it is.  She goes through all the terminology that a physical therapist or voice coach would use to describe types of breathing (tidal volume, inhale and exhale reserve volume) and then goes on to describe and provide an anatomical sketch for every muscle and bone that has any role in the process of breathing.  Since I knew next to nothing about this stuff, I found it surprising and enlightening -- it's amazing how much is involved in this simple motion that we take for granted.  The book ends with a series of exercises you can do that allow you to actually feel the action of each of the muscles involved.  

Overall, I found it well worth reading.  If you're a physical therapist or have already studied this anatomy for some other reason, I imagine that it would mostly be just a review.  My only disappointment was that there weren't more exercises that describe specific breathing techniques from various traditions -- meditation, yoga, opera, martial arts.  She mentions these traditions in passing during her anatomical explanations, but it would have been great to see a survey of those techniques linked directly to the anatomy they use.