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Last week, Naropa hosted the inaugural Symposium on Violence and Community at which four writers presented an installation/event, read poetry, and participated in a panel discussion. I missed the installations/events on Tuesday but was able to attend the reading and subsequent panel discussion on Wednesday.
Each participant displayed the hallmark style of poets associated with Naropa and the avant-garde; a panoply of images, concepts, and tropes radically juxtaposed to provoke and transmit. The flow of language, intense and heady, was contagious. Automatist inflected writing–reminiscent of mediums and soothsayers–doesn’t want to convey information but to impart states of mind. In other words, the poetry was mind altering, and my notes reflect this.
Melissa Buzzeo evokes lovers submerged in an ocean, down below the coral reef, among crustaceans and piranha. Refugees from an ancient forest, lovers are simultaneously sacred and pariah. (shout out: Agamben) A sea change is possible in this context, and meaning becomes lost. The images are rich and strange; I’m not sure she says what I hear. Writing is like waste. Language excretes from our bodies the way a spider spins, a pathetic fallacy, a dead metaphor. We swim in language and drown in non-meaning.
Kate Zambreno writes on gendered language and how it is used to censor and censure. “He do the police in different voices.” (shout out: Eliot) Hysteria and gossip devalue certain types of speech and undermine certain speakers. Irony, though, can subvert these pernicious effects. (shout out: Judith Butler) The language of violence reveals the violence of language.
On the other hand, to say violence is gendered is to misapprehend the interpenetration between violence and masculinity. One is saturated with the other, so that one is indistinguishable from the other. To enter into the realm of violence (from any direction) is strictly masculine and results in one’s body being treated as masculine, that is to say, violently. As masculine, the body can be fodder for the war machine, can be incarcerated, and is valued for its ability to perform work.
On the other hand, society condemns violence against women as amoral; the horror of the act is that it treats a girl’s or woman’s body as masculine. Likewise, women who commit violent acts must also enter the masculine domain, and their bodies are treated as masculine—mitigated by a vague rule of thumb limiting the sanctioned level of violence.
On the other hand, the bodies of men and boys are masculine—are violence. Masculine bodies don’t experience trauma but rites of passage. Violence inures boys to a life of violence.
Reed Bye intervenes with a brief description of the Buddhist concepts equanimity and dependent co-arising. Categories of experience result from interpretations of causality, a web of karmic (cause/effect) connections that perpetuates violence.
- Violence results from attachment, aversion, or ignorance.
- Equanimity is the antidote.
- Understanding dependent co-arising generates equanimity.
David Buuck calls on an army of lovers–animals of the ancient forest–to save us from future violence. Beast and beloved commingle as we flee the same torrid blaze and gather outside a supermarket, probably a Whole Foods. Duck and rabbit occupy the same semiotic system, but you never see them both at the same time, kind of like Superman and Clark Kent. You see what I’m saying? See what I mean?
As a writer-activist in a culture where the value given poetry is dubious, he creates poethical forms of representational art and does activist work with Occupy Oakland. Writing fiction and eating toxic dirt are part of the same semiotic system. “He do the polis in different voices.”
Gabrielle Civil’s focus is on intellectual violence. She holds up to the audience a Lite Bright “Fuck You” in blinking rainbow colors, making manifest her erudition and panache. “Knowledge is to cut.” (shout out: Foucalt) The writer seeks Poetic Justice, but she says, “sometimes the cop is racist to you.”
In her own words, she makes a claim for the avant-garde desire that “art is to be integrated into the praxis of life.” and incants the phrase used to open the slave narrative, a phrase that simultaneously establishes a moment before violence and the conditions for it:
I was born… I was born… I was born…
The symposium asked, “What happens to language in a time of violence?”
Happens: Supplicant’s hands split open. Desire multiplies.
Language: FUCK YOU
Time: We swallow language, and it swallows us. The Ouroboros drowns in nihilism.
Violence: Narcissus shows us meaning, and we claim it.
“…true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society.”
(shout out: Trotsky and Breton)
On Saturday I attended The Shape of the I, a conference sponsored by ELN, Colorado University’s journal of literary studies. I missed out on the Friday panels, but fortunately Timothy Morton recorded some of the discussion. In fact, the impetus for my attending the conference was to meet Professor Morton, shake his hand, and thank him for his pedagogy; I’ve been listening to his recorded lectures (via iTunesU) for a couple of years.
I enjoy panels and discussions such as these but always feel anxious and out of place at academic events. Actually, I feel anxious at all events (and non-events), but talk of literature and art is delectable and motivates me to confront my social anxiety. Despite the nervousness, I went. Even a small moment of bravery generates serendipity; another teacher of mine, Bhanu Kapil, happened to sit next to me in the afternoon. Instantly, I felt at home, as if I were back in a class at Paramita or an impromptu conference on the sidewalk outside Sycamore; even a brief moment with Bhanu generates confidence.
All the talks on Saturday seemed to concern themselves with the concept of authenticity (or perhaps my own feelings of insecurity inflected my note taking–but no, the anxiety is not my own; it isn’t personal but social, as Julie Carr writes at Harriet the Blog).
During the first panel on memoir and personal essay, Lawrence Hergott spoke about why he writes, specifically referring to a personal essay on his grief after losing his son. Hergott is a medical doctor. The essay was published in JAMA, and by his request it was in an issue that went out around the holidays when people “might be at home with their families.” During his talk he described the selflessness that a doctor exhibits when diagnosing a patient. I was reminded of Donald Preziosi’s talks at Naropa, where he likened the concept of authenticity in art to the process of diagnosis, finding its roots in the Renaissance, when market demands for Hellenic artifacts meant collectors needed to determine authentic relics from counterfeits.
When a patient meets a doctor (or her proxy in the person of an RN or PA), the patient tells the story she thinks appropriate for the doctor. The patient, healthy or sick, forges her experience. This complicates the encounter described by Hergott. No matter how selfless the doctor tries to be, the terms of engagement have been dictated for all participants. Likewise, the writer tells the story she thinks appropriate for the reader. Following Robin Hemley’s talk praising the fake memoir, the panelists discussed ethics for both writers and readers. The reader may desire an authentic account of the writer’s experience, but words prevaricate.
The second panel juxtaposed an antiwar novel, Sozaboy, and several documentary photographers. Erina Duganne and Karen Jacobs discussed different approaches to documentary photography, but what I noticed was that each photographer grappled with the same concern, namely what Roland Barthes identifies as the certification of presence, recalling Timothy Morton’s comments during Friday’s panel (which I’m listening to several days later):
“… if you’re going to have an ecology without nature you have to have a metaphysics without presence.”
A photograph exacts authentication from the viewer. The form of the novel, on the other hand, forecloses authenticity. The photographers seemed, each in her own way, to be using words to leverage distance from this exacting authenticity; while the writer of Sozaboy, by including an introduction and a glossary, pushes (as Sisyphus) toward authentication.
After lunch, Marcia Douglas spoke of I&I and Rastafari, how the community can extend or withhold authenticity. Adam Bradley responded, pointing out the influence of slave narrative on literature of African Americans and the African diaspora. The authors of slave narratives were in earnest to establish authenticity in order to compel readers into political action. Bradley cited Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, and I would add the narrative of William Wells Brown, which he begins:
I was born in Lexington, Ky. The man who stole me as soon as I was born, recorded the births of all the infants which he claimed to be born his property, in a book which he kept for that purpose.
These are the first lines of Brown’s narrative but not his book. As with many slave narratives, letters introduce the text and attest to its (and the narrator’s) authenticity. This imperative for authentication is not engendered by the form of memoir or personal narrative. Brown is also the author of the first African American novel, Clotell; or The President’s Daughter, and his fiction too includes a biographical account of his own escape from slavery and letters of support attesting to Brown’s authenticity. Writing, regardless of categories such as fiction or non-fiction, can never have enough authentication; or in other words, writing is towards authenticity. This assessment is only valid for writing that wants to do something–another way of writing isn’t trying.
The final panel opened with a talk by a self identified performance artist, Petra Kuppers. She enriched the doctor-patient and reader-writer metaphor by turning the tables and instructing the audience in appropriate ways to listen. First, she encouraged audience members to sit on the floor instead of chairs or to move around. She read poetry and asked for audience participation. Mary Klages made reference to Hellen Keller to demonstrate how restrictions put on disabled writers can limit their narrative concerns. Out of this came my favorite quote of the conference:
“Anywhere you could touch her, you could talk to her.”
I was reminded of Agamben’s distinctions between poiesis and praxis, and I tried to correlate them with categories such as body and performance and discourse and artifact. I came away with a hierarchy possibly not intended by the speakers (my own misreading); performance, considered a live communal experience, is privileged over (more authentic than) the text, considered a solitary and perhaps moribund experience. Certainly, after the panelists concluded I felt uplifted and happily inspired, but I was inspired to go sit somewhere quiet and write fake fiction about a deathbed conversion, exercise 77 from 3 A.M. Epiphany.
My year reading and responding to True Perception concludes with a response to the last point highlighted by Acharya Arawana Hayashi during the weekend training in Boston:
Our message is simply one of appreciating the nature of things as they are and expressing it without any struggle of thoughts and fears. p.2
I explored the first half of that sentence in a previous post on self-representation and the path of dharma art. Here I’m responding to the second half concerning expression without struggle.
Trungpa distinguishes between two types of art: exhibitionist art and genuine art. The adjectives suggest one is better than the other, so I prefer to say dharma art instead of genuine art. He, too, emphasizes that a moralistic approach to art is inappropriate. Exhibitionism is inherent in creativity.
“Whenever a need for recording your work of art is involved, then there is a tendency toward awareness of oneself…” p.26
The above statement was made in front of an audience at the Vajradhatu Seminary in 1973 during a recorded talk. He knew of what he was speaking. Exhibition is inescapable when making art, but that isn’t to say it is the provocation of art or that it nullifies absolute symbolism.
The absolute symbolism of dharma art is like the sky. We look out up at the blue sky, and we are looking at nothing. There is no roof over our heads. The blue sky we see doesn’t refer to anything. In fact, there is no blue sky; there is air and light. We could take a deep breath and inhale sky. The blue sky is nothing and symbolizes nothing-out and out and out above us and beyond us is nothing, just space.
…space exists in front of our eyes and…it is not demanding anything. It’s a free world, a truly free world. p.23
Absolute symbolism is intrinsic to art making, even if the space is filled with relative symbols. But unlike exhibitionist art, dharma art is its own provocation, and awareness seems to be its essential ingredient.
I consider writing as both expression and communication; where expression does not relate between self and other, and communication does. Communication uses relative symbols, and expression makes use of absolute symbols.
True Perception furthers the dialectical process by comparing mindfulness practice (shamatha) and awareness practice (vipassana). Mindfulness practice is bounded with (ever so slight) restrictions. Awareness practice, like dharma art, is simply appreciation without demand. It is important to note that what is called sitting meditation is mindfulness-awareness practice.
When I write-as I am now-I use relative symbols and part of me is thinking: “If I record that brilliant idea I’ve developed, in turn, quite possibly accidentally, somebody might happen to see it and think good of it.” (p.26) Indeed, as I post this blog I have hope that you will read it and perhaps send me an email.
I write and create a record that exhibits my creative endeavor. Whether I reach out or pull back, writing is unavoidably exhibitionist. If I don’t struggle against these thoughts and desires, then absolute symbolism becomes possible. Space opens up. Writing as dharma art is not necessarily writing about the dharma (but it could be); neither is it motivated by the desire to create beauty or entertainment. Dharma art is a mindfulness-awareness practice.
Creating a work of art is not a harmless thing. It always is a powerful medium. Art is extraordinarily powerful and important. It challenges people’s lives. So there are two choices: either you create black magic to turn people’s heads, or you create some kind of basic sanity. Those are the two possibilities, so you should be very, very careful. p. 24
Having a mind results in thinking, because minds make thoughts. To be alive is fearful, because life is tender. Creating art is exhibition. The path of dharma art is to not struggle against mind or life or creativity:
Genuine art-dharma art-is simply the activity of nonaggression. p. 2
My dark ecology reading of Trouble on Triton continues with a response to the following question:
What poetics does Samuel Delany deploy to describe the environment in Trouble on Triton?
Timothy Morton uses the word ecomimesis to describe nature writing, implying mimicry and Plato’s idea of the poet’s divine madness. Ecomimesis evokes a pervasive quietness (like a hush) that authenticates an atmosphere. The result of ecomimesis is a shared ambience called “nature”. He provides six elements of ambient poetics that are vital to ecomimesis:
- rendering,
- tone,
- medial,
- aeolian,
- timbral,
- and the re-mark.
Instead of exclusive categories, these are intentionally vague and overlapping. As I went about identifying exemplars of these elements from Trouble on Triton, the ambivalence between categories revealed varying layers of significance and emphasized the foregrounding-backgrounding function.
Rendering
The term is borrowed from cinematography and describes the technical process by which the appropriate atmosphere of a scene is invoked. This process pulls all the various elements together to simulate the moment portrayed in a scene.
“Rendering attempts to simulate reality itself: to tear to pieces the aesthetic screen that separates the perceiving subject from the object. The idea is that we obtain an immediate world, a directly perceived reality beyond our understanding.”
Delany uses free indirect speech riddled with parenthetical interjections for an overpowering sonic effect, like the soundtrack of a movie. Parenthesis are used so frequently throughout the novel that, like everything ubiquitous, they become part of the background. The parenthetical statements, though, extend the range of the text. Some of the interjections provide short background information, some more extensive background information, and some immediate description of events. The parenthetical voice is also in conversation with the rest of the text, responding to it and answering it. Page one introduces the complete range:
He had been living at the men’s co-op (Serpent’s House) six months now. This one had been working out well. So, at four o’clock, as he strolled from the hegemony lobby onto the crowded Plaza of Light (thirty-seventh day of the fifteenth paramonth of the second yearN, announced the lights around the Plaza-on Earth and Mars both they’d be calling it some day or other in Spring, 2112, as would a good number of official documents even out here, whatever the political nonsense said or read), he decided to walk home.
He thought: I am a reasonably happy man.
The sensory shield (he looked up:-Big as the city) swirled pink, orange, gold. Cut round, as if by a giant cookie-cutter, a preposterously turquoise Neptune was rising. Pleasant? Very. He ambled in the bolstered gravity, among ten thousand fellows. Tethys? (No, not Saturn’s tiny moon-a research station now these hundred twenty five years-but after which, yes, the city had been named.) Not a big one, when you thought about places that were; and he had lived in a couple.
The tension between a formal device of parenthesis and free indirect speech of the parenthetical voices seduces readers to “switch off our aesthetic vigilance”. They remind us that we are reading a story but trick us into thinking the story is being interrupted.
Interruptions are direct and immediate. As Morton points out, “…even if we know very well that it is a special effect, we enjoy the deception. Despite inevitable failure, how well the narrator imparts a sense of immediacy!” Parenthetical interruptions while reading a book (or a web page) are always happening right now.
Medial
The medial element refers to the phatic function of the text, after Jakobson’s functions of language. This is the microphone check that “seeks to undermine the normal distinction between background and foreground.”
Each chapter begins with an epigraph from a postmodern philosopher or linguist, reminding readers that this is “a text of borrowed words”, to use Bahktin’s phrase, and is written in the early 1970s. Likewise the presence of appendices and a forward, establish the bookness of the book.
Medial devices in Trouble on Triton are more than just tags at the beginnings and endings; the structure of this novel emphasizes the medial. In the appendices, Delany writes that everything in an SF novel should be mentioned at least twice-he immediately restates the point parenthetically by commenting that the repetition must be in a different context.
Sure enough, scenes and confrontations are doubled throughout the novel, including the opening scene with Bron in the Plaza of Light; he returns there after his trip to Earth. Not only do the scenes take place in the same location but Delany uses a similar onomatopoetic description in both passages:
“A truck chunkered, a hundred yards away.” p.9
“Inside, something chunked! reproachfully.” p.190
The emphasis in the second sentence is Delany’s. The echo is not only changed from the original but is stronger. Morton quotes Thoreau’s writing on hearing distant bells ring through the forest:
“The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what is worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.”
An attack on Triton rocks Bron on his second visit to the Plaza of Light. Earth forces cut power to Tethys and disable the sensory shield. The moon’s “real” gravity is temporarily restored, causing structural damage and gale force winds as the atmosphere escapes into space:
Somewhere across the Plaza, someone screamed.
Then he felt the breeze on his neck that grew. And grew. And grew. And grew-Bron suddenly staggered erect. The war! he thought. It must be the …!
Timbral
Timbral is the physicality of the text itself. On the last page of the novel is a place date subscription:
“-London, Nov. ‘73/July ‘74”
The effect of concluding with the time stamp, as Delany does with all his novels, is to jar readers out of the fictional world and into the socially constructed world of the book. Foreground and background shift. We know that the story, which we are reading, was not just now written, but if we are to read fiction at all we must forget that fact. Reading brings the story into our present, but the place date subscription sends the story back to the early seventies -when bomb blasts rocked central London- and stops us from reading at just the right moment: the end.
The last page of the novel, though, is not the last page of the book. Two appendices comprise another thirty pages. The first appendix is titled, “From the Triton Journal Work Notes and Omitted Pages”. While it is made up of the same narrative as the story, the discarded fragments and notes are documents outside the story. The conflict between inside and outside is precisely what the timbral quality of ambient poetics evokes.
“The timbral is about the sound in its physicality, rather than about its symbolic meaning…” and is related to percussion. It describes the way the sound “strikes our ears”. The first appendix is divided into sections, the first and last sections being discarded fragments of the novel itself. The middle three sections expatiate on the nature of the science fiction genre. Like the various parenthetical voices in the novel, the sections in Appendix A also have a sonic effect, but the systematic organization suggests a musician tuning an instrument or playing scales.
Aeolian
Umberto Eco argues that the existence of fictional characters as cognitive objects is (epistemologically) completely determined:
“…I know Leopold Bloom better than I know my own father. Who can say how many episodes of my father’s life are unknown to me…In contrast, I know everything about Leopold Bloom that I need to know-and each time I reread Ulysses I discover something more about him.”
Fictional worlds exist beyond the confines of the book, and characters may seem to live on long after the end of the story. The aeolian is how ecomimesis “establishes a sense of processes continuing without a subject or an author.” Delany, in the first appendix, describes how this quality is active in the SF text, specifically:
“In science fiction, “science”-i.e., sentences displaying verbal emblems of scientific discourse- is used to literalize the meanings of other sentences for use in the construction of the fictional foreground. Such sentences…leave the banality of the emotionally muzzy metaphor and…become possible images of the impossible.”
The joining of two words such as sensory and shield, in an SF context, is not merely a metaphor describing how the society of Triton is incapable of direct experience, but the sensory shield is emblematic of the universe where such a society exists. Delany further explains:
“…sign, symbol, image, and discourse collapse into one, nonverbal experience, catapulted …via the text… at the peculiarly powerful trajectory only s-f can provide.
The fundamental quality of SF being described is aeolian; this particular explication, written into the text itself, is closer to medial.
Tone
Tone is tension, a penultimate moment sustained, disco. Ambient tone utilizes familiarity with a pattern to affect a stasis “of the space-time continuum in an artwork”. Ecology Without Nature provides an example of ekphrasis from Homer’s Iliad, the lengthy and detailed description of Achilles’ shield amid the final battle scene. This is a literary version of the slow-motion bullets in The Matrix, achieved on film by zooming in, slowing down, and adding the detail air turbulence. Time stops, and space reifies.
Trouble on Triton is a war story, among other things. The first battle scene occurs in the second chapter. Sam, the agent for the government, calls it a “nonbelligerent defensive action”. The sensory shield is down for the first time and briefly so is the artificial gravity. Most of that early chapter is devoted to vlet, a complicated board game played by several characters. The chapter opens with this description:
“He gazed over the board: within the teak rim, in three dimensions, the landscape spread, mountains to the left, ocean to the right. The jungle between was cut here by a narrow, double-rutted road, there by a mazy river. A tongue of desert wound from behind the steeper crags, alongside the ragged quarry. Drifting in from the border, small waves inched the glassy sea till, near shore, they broke, foaming. Along the beach, wrinkling spume slid up and out, up and out… The river’s silvers leaving the mountains, poured over a little waterfall, bright as falling mica. A darker green blush crossed the jungle: a micro-breeze, disturbing the tops of micro-trees.”
The passage is slow and pastoral, holding readers attention in stasis with minute detail: a double-rutted road, the rhythmic crashing of waves, and even the tops of trees swaying in the breeze. The ekphrastic description of the vlet landscape-so vivid and lifelike- is in lieu of a panoramic description of the cityscape of Tethys. Any description of the environment would be a description of artifact (until the moon’s artificial gravity is turned off).
Re-mark
Morton describes this quality by explaining what it does: “A re-mark differentiates between space and place.” The term comes from Derrida, and Morton identifies it as fundamental to ambiance.
“To identify the re-mark is to answer the question: how little does the text need to differentiate between foreground and background, or between space and place?”
The final twenty-two pages of the book (not including the About the Author and the Library of Congress cataloging data) are comprised of a research paper on Ashima Slade, identified in the novel as the founder of the metalogics, the discipline which is Bron’s profession. The complete title is:
Appendix B
Ashima Slade and the Harbin-Y Lectures:
Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus,
Part Two
A Critical Fiction for Carol Jacobs & Henry Sussman
Carol Jacobs and Henry Sussman are two actual scholars, professors at Yale. The subtitle, “Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus Part Two,” connects this book with the actual Neveryona series that provides the other three parts of the Modular Calculus. Ashima Slade is an eccentric intellectual mentioned several times in the novel. The dedication is to real people; the subtitle is shared with real books; Ashima Slade and the Harbin-Y Lectures, though, are pure fiction.
Appendix B is set inside the fictional world of the novel -one year after the war- and registers as a particularly dry species of nonfiction, the academic essay. This final section of the novel renders the world of Triton as historical and is more palpable with its timbre of nonfiction than the most visceral passages of fiction. Bron, the main character of the novel is pushed beyond significance as the intellectual work of Ashima Slade becomes the focus. Once again, flip the background and foreground.
I became aware Samuel R. Delany when he was a writing teacher at Naropa’s Summer Writing Program. What made an impression on me was a talk he gave about the differences between story telling and story writing. At the time, I was occupied with writing dramatic monologues, so his insights were especially appreciated.
I read Nova and sent it to my nephew who I thought would enjoy it (and be up for the challenge). Next, I read Hogg—which I definitely did not pass along to my nephew. Finally, I came across the Neveryona books and knew I had found something truly special. I was delighted and sought out all I could about the series. I found there was a prologue, a science fiction novel.
Trouble on Triton could be read as a postcolonial allegory. Distinct cultures developed as a result of humans spreading throughout the solar system. Moonies live on various satellites. Marsies and Earthmen live on the planets Mars and Earth.
Ultimately, war breaks out between those who live on moons and those who live on planets. The novel could be read as a war story. Bron, the main character, was born on Mars but immigrated to the satellites; he is caught between the two sides, even if he doesn’t realize it.
The novel begins with Bron in the Plaza of Light in the city of Tethys located on one of Jupiter’s moons called Triton. He is trying to determine if he is a reasonably happy man. Bron travels to Earth and spends some time at an archeological site in Mongolia; he returns to Tethys just before the war begins.
I read Trouble on Triton as an environmental novel, a cautionary tale about a society that dominates the environment. When I took up this novel I was also reading Ecology Without Nature by Timothy Morton and came upon a parenthetical statement that resonated with Delany’s novel:
(I often wonder whether ecological writing is at bottom nothing other than the poetics of these fields altogether. If it were not for the gravitational field, the earth would have no atmosphere at all.)
The satellite civilization Delany imagines is possible because the gravitational fields on the moons are artificially increased (using iridium/osmium crystalline sheets that orbit beneath the cities—a process, explains a Tethys government agent, that can only be understood by metaphor or mathematical abstraction). During the brief but devastating war, the method of attack by Earth forces is to disrupt the artificial gravity and destroy the cities.
I also came upon a line in the appendices of Trouble on Triton that resonated with Morton’s book. Delany has one of his characters—the same government agent—explain the genre of late 20th century science fiction:
“…the episteme was always the secondary hero of the s-f novel—in exactly the same way that the landscape was always the primary one.”
There are definite connections between the two texts, and to help me clarify my thinking around both authors I’m studying Trouble on Triton using the techniques of dark ecology from Ecology Without Nature. Morton structures his approach in three distinct sections: describing, contextualizing, and politicizing, and so I will respond to the following three questions: - What poetics does Delany deploy to describe the environment in this novel?
- How is a dark ecology reading of this novel different from other readings?
- What does this novel make possible/impossible today?
Happy New Years. I’m continuing to contemplate the path of Shambhala Art and the weekend training with Acharya Arawana Hayashi last year. Specifically, I’m considering the message of “appreciating the nature of things as they are”. The path of dharma art is a way of perceiving the world based on inquisitiveness rather than fear and desire, seeing without pushing away or pulling towards. This way of perceiving is contrasted with a process that colors and edits our world to reinforce the ideology of self.
In a series of four lectures, Professor Christopher Peacocke at University College London discusses the nature of self-representation. Although his own position on self and self-representation doesn’t easily coincide with the view outlined in True Perception, Peacocke’s lectures are a thorough overview of several philosophical theories related to self. The example he uses to analyze his theory is especially revealing:
“That thing is coming towards me.”
According to Peacocke, this statement is self-representation at a level more basic than conceptual representation. Experiencing a ball coming towards “me” doesn’t require a social or cultural context. There is no judgment or reason at that level. Furthermore, the statement is stronger than the type of representation that happens when one sees oneself in a mirror. The process of coloring and editing our world discussed in True Perception can also be illustrated with this example.
On the surface, the statement seems to be a declaration about the “thing” but is actually about the self making the statement. The “thing” is implicated in representing the self. The difference between what the statement seems to say and what it actually says is how the self-representation slips in under the radar, so to speak.
Peacocke offers several possibilities for “that thing”: that ball, that predator, or that friend. The strength of the self-representation is proportional to the strength of the attitude toward the particular thing. The strongest self-representation happens when we perceive a thing we strongly desire or fear. The self-representation weakens as the attitude of desire or fear diminishes; ultimately, a thing that is neither desired or feared, that is wholly inconsequential, is not perceived.
True Perception identifies three types of experiences that reedit our perception. Passion colors our perception; we see what we desire. Or, we reject with aggression, pushing away and avoiding what we don’t want or what we fear. Ignorance, when we don’t know whether to desire or fear a thing, results in a state of panic. All three experiences occur as sub-radar self-representations, such as the example given by Peacocke.
The view of Shambhala Art is not grounded in self-representation but inquisitiveness. The world is not divided into categories motivated by self-representation. Instead, every experience is a phatic message, an absolute symbol of itself:
“That thing is moving in space.”
Habitual self-representation is often overwhelming and difficult to detect. We can’t simply deny what we desire or embrace what we fear without falling further into ignorance. True Perception warns of too much philosophy, and points to meditation practice is a technique for developing this new sight for ourselves. This week I went to a meditation talk at Boulder Shambhala Center, and the speaker addressed this very topic. The instruction was clear:
“Don’t stop passion or aggression or ignorance. Just notice.”
I find appreciating the nature of things as they are extremely difficult, especially when I don’t like how things are. In those moments, I can appreciate the “not liking”, really notice how it feels. It feels good, I’ve noticed, to let myself not like something I don’t like. It reminds me of a quote, attributed to Clarence Darrow:
“I don’t like spinach, and I’m glad I don’t, because if I liked it I’d eat it, and I just hate it.”
In the second lecture, Peacocke quotes Daniel Dennett on the role narrative has with self-representation:
“Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not building dams or spinning webs, but telling stories – and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others, and ourselves, about who we are…”
Bennett’s theory is that we use narrative to construct ourselves, specifically to construct in the minds of others the self we want them to think we are. Self-representation, then, is a useful tool. He compares it to the concept of center of gravity, a useful fiction used by physicists. It would be incorrect to claim there is no self, but it would be correct to say the self doesn’t exist. To quote Roland Barthes in The Pleasures of the Text: “…the subject [self] returns, not as illusion, but as fiction.” Like the physicists’ tool, a self is only useful in some situations; when self-representation becomes the only available tool, our world becomes very small and full of pain. Dennett continues:
“…we (unlike professional human story tellers) do not consciously and deliberately figure out what narratives to tell and how to tell them; like spiderwebs, our tales are spun but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source.
Creative writing has the potential to consciously and deliberately use narrative for other than self-representation when writers are inquisitive about how stories are concocted and how they are told.
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Here are two poems I wrote inspired by leading workshops in schools:
“Where I’m From”, based on an exercise in George Ella Lyon’s “how-to” poetry book:
I’m from fast motorcycles
and old cars rolling over
rolling hills.
I’m from double lines
stretched through burnt desert
and snowy peaks.
I’m from too much TV
and video game calluses.
I’m from get your hands up
and sit your butt down.
I’m from what are you doing
here and
where you think you’re going?
I’m from a pacifying ocean
and an angry book,
my Achilles heel.
The River of Words curriculum integrates the detailed observation of a scientist with the creative passion of an artist.
Stiff-tailed duck
makes a long
ripple, dipping
underwater.
Fish fins flap,
and gills gulp.
In the cattails,
glides the duck.
You Are Not Here and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction
Ed. Keith Kachtick, Wisdom Publications Boston 2006
The radical notion of collecting Buddhist fiction presents a sort of koan: Is fiction the dharma? Is the dharma fiction? The stories in You Are Not Here, like most anthologies, are hit or miss. The hits are very good, and even the misses offer fine writing and a valuable response to the koan.
The first story, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler, concerns an elderly man from Vietnam now living in the US where his children and grandchildren have grown up. His family is still actively anticommunist, but he is being visited by the ghost of his old friend, Ho Chi Minh. There are direct Buddhist references in the narrative, but more importantly the story evokes the contemplative aesthetic:
“This was a smell that had nothing to do with flowers…”
Butler uses the sensation of smell, a sense that develops pre-language, in a narrative that exists only as language, mimeticly demonstrating the contemplative experience. Consciousness is not a thing but a process of experiencing. By describing the memory of smells in a kitchen, the fictive quality of the old man’s consciousness is highlighted. He smells sugar but it is a scent that has been gone for decade, it is a scent that is not there. By describing the smell as having “nothing to do with flowers”, the fictive quality of the reader’s consciousness is highlighted. What a reader, so moved by the story, actually smells is the process of consciousness, a scent that is not there.
Any story could be read with a contemplative interpretation, especially within the context of this anthology, but other readings are also possible. Ringworm by Kate Wheeler is explicitly Buddhist and almost entirely set in a Burmese monastery. The writer created a plot emblematic of capitalist realism and a narrator mired in its ideology. As this Guardian article points out, Western-style Buddhism’s palliative qualities might actually allow the suffering of modern life to continue. This approach sidesteps the destructive aspect of the Four Noble Truths, essential to the Buddha’s first teachings. At the conclusion of Ringworm the narrator has left the monastery and is having dinner with her father:
At this dinner he proposed a toast to me and my adventures. I didn’t stop him from filling my glass with French wine… The first drop told me I was capable of anything.
That drop would have brought my kittens back to life; as I drank it, the monastery gates closed behind me. The most rigorous enlightenment system in the world shut me out. Or so I felt that night, not understanding my own rigorousness.
“Here’s to you, too, Dad,” I said, and drank the rest of the glass. I didn’t quite know how I’d go on living, but I knew that I must.
Of course, the wine and the dinner with the father are emblematic of Christianity but also of capitalism. The wine is French wine. The father is Republican. The narrator has returned from her exotic quest in strange lands to live in the heart of the empire, the real world, a world that is both unacceptable and necessary. As Mark Fisher would describe, the means by which the dinner restructures of her social reality back into her father’s world is contingent on the cynical distance provided by her contemplative attitude that enables the ideology of capitalism to function. Her experiences in the monastery have made her the ultimate cynic, allowing her to simultaneously disavow and consume.
Humans by Dan Zigmond is another explicitly Buddhist story with contemporary Western themes. The main character is a Zen monk living and working within a overly bureaucratic system indicative of late capitalism. The bureaucracy first gives him enjoyable work and nice places to live, but finally sends him to Malaysia to do the impossible task of teaching meditation to orangutans. Just as with secular capitalist bureaucracies, the impossible task must be monitored by the authority of a Big Other, and the main character is placed in a position of needing to show “a little progress” so the authority will promote him out of the impossible situation. Eventually, both the orangutan and the monk (but not the authority) accept the task is impossible and have a satisfying exchange. Yet, the story concludes before the authority figure arrives, giving the reader a sense that the characters languish in a Kafka-like indefinite postponement.
Stylistically the stories in this anthology are varied. Geshe Michael Roach’s parable Meditation is pure meditation instruction. The Tale of THE by Sean Murphy playfully recounts a definite article on the hero’s journey. Several stories engage the theme of mortality and two stories concern the concept of rebirth, specifically. Samsara Suite by Sean Hoade has the feel of flash fiction describing the interactions over millenia of several characters. Ann Carolyn Klein offers a sexist critique of the lama tradition in Tibet in Dream of a Former Life. The narrator’s consciousness chooses to be reborn as a female and encounters unexpected life circumstances. Even when stories in this anthology miss the mark of Buddhist fiction, the writing is good fiction.
More importantly, these stories are culturally and psychologically necessary if the spiritual teachings of Buddhism are to be integrated and lived, rather than merely studied. If students of dharma only read non-fiction texts, they will be lulled into believing in the finger. The stories in this collection, along with other Buddhist inspired literature, such as Osamu Tezuka’s graphic novel series Buddha and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, can-more effectively than a dozen other manuals and guides-point to the moon because the finger is fiction.
The last few months I have been responding to six principles identified by Acharya Arawana Hayashi during the Shambhala Art Weekend I attended in Boston last spring. In this post I am contemplating the principle of confidence, “…when we are actually creating a work of art there is a sense of total confidence. (True Perception p.2)
In his lecture on Neopragmantism, Professor Fry offers a theory that human language did not originate out of a need to communicate but out of a propensity to scribble doodles and make melodious or rhythmic sounds. Language has come to serve human communication needs, but existed prior to performing that service. This theory on the origin of language is in radical opposition to the often quoted axiom that we write to be read. One version of the axiom, by Leo Rosten, goes:
A writer writes…because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.
I’ve quoted Rosten and other writers saying the same thing. The things I believed I was communicating varied: memory, fantasies, ideas, emotions, attitudes, etc. I was deeply convinced that as a writer, my primary purpose was to communicate. It seemed obvious and incontrovertible, a natural and empirical fact, which should have been a red flag. As Alenka Zupančič points out:
…it is precisely here that we should be most alert to the functioning of ideology.
Professor Fry makes a compelling argument. Humans can use fire to cook food, but does that mean the purpose of fire is to cook? Cooking is only one of many purposes humans have found for fire, and it continues to exist whether we give it a purpose or not. Humans can live in caves, but is the purpose of a cave to be a home? By analogy, making marks and sounds can be used for communication but that may not be their purpose.
There could have been a human being sitting by a fire and making marks in the dusty floor of a cave. The first mark might have been /, another mark was made, \, two short strokes slanted in different directions. Then maybe this person made those two marks in the same space, X, creating a new mark made of / and \ but different from either one. What was the writer in the cave communicating with any of these marks?
By fire light, this person continued making marks, squiggles and scratches. A mark something like O might have been made, perhaps after the marks S and Z were written on top of one another. This person was then able to write, XOXO–a pattern of opposites; X is an inside with no outside, and O is an outside with no inside.
True Perception identifies two types of art, relative symbolism and absolute symbolism. When writing is communicating something, such as a memory, fantasy, idea, emotion, or attitude, the marks are relative symbols because they rely on contextual reference points. Written in the context of a personal letter, XOXO is a relative symbol signifying kisses and hugs.
But this pattern of marks is also an absolute symbol that communicates nothing other the pattern itself. Trungpa uses the phrase, its nature is like the sky to describe absolute symbolism. Applying the analogies Professor Fry used, absolute symbolism is like a fire or like a cave.
At the World Science Festival in 2009, Bobbie McFerrin demonstrated how an audience can quickly recognize musical patterns and create music within that pattern. The scale he uses is the pentatonic scale, an ubiquitous musical scale used in folk music from West Africa to Korea to Scotland. The notes of the pentatonic scale do not themselves communicate any message other than the scale itself. Like a corecursive acronym, such as GNU, an absolute symbol represents itself and communicates phaticly.
These marks are not being made because of a desire to communicate, and yet these marks can communicate. Perhaps, this writing is a manifestation of a base instinct encoded in my human DNA. As Professor Morton describes in a lecture titled Beautiful Soul Syndrome, a spider’s web is an expression of its DNA, but it would be a misunderstanding of evolution theory the interpret such expressions of DNA as teleological.
Our lungs evolved from swim bladders in fish. There’s nothing lung-y about a swim bladder, nothing predictive or teleological about it, nothing superior about a lung, nothing metaphorically suggestive of breathing in the swim bladder, and so on. Like history, the more you find out, the more ambiguous things become.
Writing is one of humanity’s most audacious activities. How daring to mark the world! Writing is also as natural as a spider’s web or a beaver’s dam. The approach to art making and art appreciation in True Perception is as a natural phenomena. Because writing is an expression of natural instincts, I don’t need to write with a sense of insecurity or worry, or even with a sense that I am a writer.
…we develop a sense of confidence, confidence that space exists in front of our eyes and that it is not demanding anything. p.23
When I’m engaged in the act of writing, I can tap into that base instinct where the writing space does not demand anything. I don’t need to worry about communicating clearly or even communicating at all. I am only concerned with the marks themselves.
If I choose, I can return (and I often do) to the web I’ve created with a mind toward making the text communicate. That part of my process resembles reading more than it does writing.
The third of six essential points from the Shambhala Art weekend that I’m reviewing can be summarized in this sentence:
“In art, as in life generally, we need to study our craft, develop our skills, and absorb the knowledge and insight passed down by tradition.”
from page 1 of True Perception
The alternative to this approach, Trungpa says, is very “hit or miss”. A novice can pick up a brush and create a profound work of art but only rarely.
I see this to be true when teaching poetry in schools. Visiting second grade classrooms once a week for two months ensures that almost every student will write a great poem. The creative process itself is beautiful for that reason. But these students invariably struggle the way all artists struggle when confronting a blank page or empty canvas or lump of clay. Confidence falters, and fear arises. My role in the classroom is to bolster students’ confidence so that their natural creativity can shine.
The best and most sustainable means of generating confidence is practice. The more someone has a successful creative experience, the more confident he or she will be in the possibility of having more such experiences. In fact, there comes a point when a master artist discovers that the creative experience is available every moment, always.
The two most effective creative practices for writers mastering their craft are (1)writing and (2)reading. My daily writing practice is founded on my journaling (morning pages per Julia Cameron) but also includes writing fiction, poetry, and blogs. My teacher, James Baker Hall, called it priming the pump. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe poets can wait for inspiration but to write fiction you have to write everyday and prime the pump.”
Walter Mosely says the same and makes a comparison with therapy: one can’t expect the same results from a month of therapy sessions as from one four hour session. He explains that the unconscious part of the mind works in between sessions, so the results are much greater than what could come from the conscious mind only. Likewise, the unconscious mind works on the story in between writing sessions, so when the writer returns to the page the unexpected happens.
Creative reading eliminates fear and generates confidence. Generally, I have several books going at one time: something nonfiction, a novel or short story collection, and a book of poems. My nonfiction interests include psychology, religion, critical theory, and philosophy, especially mathematical philosophy. I’ve been using the Poetry App and listening to Writer’s Almanac to find poetry. I also receive short poems from the people I follow at MYKUWorld. I don’t write MYKUs daily, but I do read them.
Occasionally I read online pubs for short stories, but I’m a bit of a Goldilocks. I don’t like stories that are too short, and I don’t like stories that are too long. My preference for online reading is 2000 to 4000 words. For printed text I can appreciate short shorts and long stories, as well as novels. Lately, the advice to re-read has started to sink in. I’m revisiting a novel I read several months ago, this time with a highlighter and pen for note taking.
The practices of creative reading and writing develop two skills necessary to write well: confidence and fearlessness. The process is simple but takes time and dedication. What really has my interest is that the process is the same for learning life skills. The first practice is live responsibly, be present and aware, respond to life. The second practice is connect with teachers and relate to everyone as such. Through both these practices come confidence and fearlessness.
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