sober

A year ago yesterday, I had my last swallow of alcohol. Today marks one year of being sober. What does it mean to be sober?

Etymologically, the word’s root, sobrius (Latin) means “not drunk”—from a variant of se- “without” + ebrius “drunk.”

I like the simplicity of this definition, because all later meanings of the word—“moderate in desires or actions, habitually temperate, restrained”; “calm, quiet, not overcome by emotion”; “appropriately solemn, serious, not giddy”; and “plain or simple in color”—describe states that exist in contrast to intoxication. Because when you’re consuming ethanol and coming down, consuming more, and coming down, you’re swinging on the pleasure-pain pendulum. And if you’re biochemically habituated to it, your mood baseline stays lower, causing you to need more alcohol to raise yourself out of the anxious torpor.

But when you’re not only not drunk but never drunk, this contrast falls away. What I mean is, over this past year I didn’t become plain, solemn, serious, and restrained all the time. Instead, as a non-drinker, I’ve felt all of my feelings more intensely and feel more alive and aware of my moment-by-moment experience.

My heart softened, I became more comfortable in my skin, fear became explicable and tolerable, shame cooled and subsided. Mentally, I quickened. Concentration and creativity come more easily. Most importantly, I realized that intensity isn’t something out there to be found; it comes from the quality of my attention and degree of surrender.

The process has awakened so many insights. It shines a bright light on how normative substance use and abuse is in our culture. I used to claim “I’m a European kind of drinker,” quaffing pinot blanc from Alsace and a grappa on occasion. I went through phases. Where there’s a craft beer scene, I’d find a favorite boutique IPA. My social masks hid from me my real reason for being purple-lipped at a party, relying on rosé to help a friendship flow, or punctuating the phases of an avoidant evening by pulling out different bottles: anxiety. All of the fears, worries, inhibitions, shames, shoulds, and don’ts slipped into soothing, if short-lived, relaxation.

Cheers?

Truth began to pierce the veil in 2019, when I committed to practicing mindfulness in a more disciplined and necessary way than I had before, after having lapsed as a meditator for five years. I knew on some level I was fooling myself, taking the path of least resistance, living mythologically as if I could slip through loopholes and come out closer to perfect. But this level of knowing wasn’t enough to convince me that the very normal style of drinking I was doing was doing nothing good for me.

It took almost three more years, learning to practice self-compassion, and taking some courageous steps that involved breaking with outgrown identities, before I was ready. These were steps through dark, hurting places, across thresholds I feared. Contradictions and inner conflicts tied me up. I knew that one change would help immensely to bring my everyday actions into alignment with my desire to live by my values and make progress on the path to clarity, peace, reality, and love. I had to break the cycle.

Sometimes you hear or read the right thing at the right time. This time, it was the episode of the Huberman Lab podcast “What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain, and Health” that convinced me to quit, the day I heard it. My friend Stephanie had been listening to Holly Whitaker’s audiobook, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol, so I bought it and started listening too. These two productions were all I needed to convince me not only never to poison myself with ethanol again, but also never to accept the false storylines that there’s something wrong with me for being “weak” enough to need to do something so radical as quit, that quitting is shameful and not courageous because it implies I “had a problem,” that I need a drink to be fun, interesting, or relaxed enough to socialize, or that drinking or not drinking is a personal failure. Not drinking “in a culture obsessed with alcohol” makes socializing and fitting in a little harder, but it also clarifies for me how and when I want to socialize and what little value fitting in has.

Of real, lasting, sustaining value are the gifts being sober has brought me:

I am vulnerable, naked, alive, and open to all of my feelings; I know anxiety’s signals and now can really practice relaxing around it, knowing that the winds of uncertainty continue to blow because that is life; I catch happiness and joy as they pass and live them intensely for as long as they last;

I never have to suffer through a hangover; I’m more honest, compassionate, courageous, present, and loving; I can really practice the Eightfold Path because my mind isn’t blurred or searching for escape hatches; I know that the intensity, the more I always want, comes through presence with what is really happening in the moment.

happy

How do I feel right now? … Happy.

The voice of judgment says, “How could I be? Countless people are dying in wars and senseless acts of violence. Rivers of fire are incinerating forests, habitats, and homes. People I love are hurting.” Or the self-generating self-referential narrative begins to spit out thoughts like, “Wait. I’m tense, stressed, waiting to hear, and that elbow pain is still there… and, well, my life isn’t perfect yet, so I’m not really happy…” But then the voice of rational responsibility for my own mental well-being says, “Those are the voices of guilt and unworthiness, patterns of the default mode demiurge on autopilot. I feel happy, so I’m going to feel it, be with it, share it.”

Happiness studies in psychology, neuroscience, sociology, geography, and more have popularized and rationalized the pursuit of happiness as never before. The psychotherapy, science-of-well-being, and meditation communities, too, proffer many valuable lessons and teachings about what happiness is and isn’t and how to get more of it (sleep, exercise, put down your phone…). Now there are statistics to support the truism that money can’t buy happiness—within certain parameters—and the homiletic standby that happiness isn’t to be found outside but inside.

Leaving aside the question of whether there is an inside and an outside, the more interesting explorations are the deep and particular ones. What is happiness? What is the feeling of happy? What does the experience of being happy really consist of? What are we pursuing?

When I feel happy, there’s a positive affect, like joy, and feelings/sensations of warmth, lightness—as in a more permissive relationship with gravity—and a brightness, calm or the comfort of confidence, smiling, and general well-being. The stories that stream through the mind when we feel these feelings have the gist of flow. Everything is going well, things are rolling along, or, right now in this breeze and sparkle of damp grass and leaves is bliss. Time doesn’t press. I’ll see what happens…

And it doesn’t last. This is because nothing does, and because of the nature of happiness, which can be discovered in part by looking into its linguistic history.

The word happy is an adjectival form of hap; the addition of the -y suffix makes the word mean ‘characterized by or full of’ hap. Hap is luck, fortune, or chance, so originally and through the late nineteenth century, to be happy was to be lucky, “favored by fortune.” Even the latest definition to arise places it in this context: “having a feeling of great pleasure, or content of mind, arising from satisfaction with one’s circumstances or condition” (OED).

I think this history has hints for us about how to be happy. First, happiness isn’t a state that lasts because it’s a consequence of circumstance and chance. Think of the role of hap—luck—in all of the happy events of your life. Or, as the Talking Heads put it in “Once in a Lifetime”:

And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

Sure, there may have been some work, some effort, some earning along the way, but chance played an outsize role. Chance comes to us from Vulgar Latin “candentia, that which falls out, a term used in dice, from Latin cadere, to fall.”

Happiness is not a final achievement, a house on the coast. It’s also not a thing deserved, or even a thing. If happiness is a state of being full of hap, or characterized by chance, it also can’t be pursued. It’s what falls out of the dice cup in the game of life, so much of which is a gamble. Who or what shakes the cup? Without gods, we’re left with the chance and randomness we observe in the workings of the universe. You could just as likely be unhappy with what falls out, which points to the fact that it’s often our stance that decides.

Happiness is a moment of being happy with one’s circumstances—which are just the things around one’s stance, one’s attitude or perspective. When the circumstances of a rare breezeless morning with high cumulus clouds and the decision to walk across the bridge instead of around the lake presented me with this beautiful mirror, I felt happy.

Something I was first struck by in Gary Weber’s book, Happiness Beyond Thought, and then have heard from many other meditators, is that when they’re able to loosen their identification with self and ego (with thoughts), serendipitous and happy occurrences begin to abound. I don’t think this is because the universe sent them more coincidences. It’s because the attitude of non-identification with thoughts brings with it an approach to life that is less judgmental and controlling, and the recognition that things are just happening. It’s also because when you’re not lost in thought, not distracted by thinking from what’s happening, you notice more. There’s a reason Buddhism calls it “the veil of thought”; rather than being aware and open to what you’re experiencing, when you’re thinking, you’re busy judging, planning, considering how things could be better if different, regretting, hoping, fantasizing, worrying, and so on and on. Start paying attention to this and you’ll notice how often you don’t notice what is happening right in front of you.

To be unhappy is not to notice that sometimes what’s happening is an occasion to be happy.

… like nasturtiums blooming…

…or sun rising through fog…

… or a great blue heron in the city creek …

Take all these little moments that you can, because there is far too much to be angry and sad about in the world.

Quotes are from:

Online Etymology Dictionary, happy and chance

Oxford English Dictionary, happy

The Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”

verge

When we say we’re “on the verge,” we think brink; point after which one can’t hedge; edge—from Old English ecg “corner, edge, point” (also “sword”).

We might wish for a sudden, total change, a transformation. When we’re on the verge of a decision, even when the decision is made, the line isn’t clear; doubts and regrets may linger or stray into focus as fragments of thoughts, illogical fears or hopes still blow in to cloud our judgment. Or maybe it’s a life change we’re on the verge of, one marked by a ceremony or date. What changes? A name, a title, a category, a conceptual overlay on the persona, an emotional orientation.

Rarely is a change total and sudden. But lines, limits, edges still matter because we use them to make meaning, as we use narratives. Forms are like the meadow in Robert Duncan’s poem, where “certain bounds hold against chaos.” These forms, or formalities, are “a given property of the mind.” We need to see edges. Our left-brain-driven analytical partitioning of the world into bits, compartments, categories, and dichotomies comforts us as we view the vast sky, where there is evidently no end or edge.

Where does land end and sky begin, or light end and darkness begin?

The marking off of the unknown from the known, and the uncontrolled from the—supposedly—controllable, is at the root of verge, which stems from the Latin virga “shoot, rod, stick, slender green branch,” which by the 15th century had a specific, metaphorical use: in Old French verge was “measuring rod; penis; rod or wand of office”—the man’s measuring member used to mark the realm under his command. This sense soon “shifted to ‘the outermost edge of an expanse or area.’ Meaning ‘point at which something happens’ (as in on the verge of) is first attested c. 1600.”

But patriarchal order, swords, and properties of mind are powerless against the ultimate verge. Zoom out or in and edges are all gradient and illusion except the one. Todd May writes, in Death, that we grapple with death’s meaninglessness in part because it isn’t a goal or culmination but “a stoppage” (22) that’s both inevitable and unpredictable. We tell stories, hold ceremonies, lay down thresholds, because death leaves us all, according to Epicurus, “in a city without walls” (in May, 24). It obliterates all narratives and forms, so we build them around it or around subjective selves that dread and defy it.

Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote a whole novel of story fragments that question the edge-ness of death and explore its blurred verge. One character, or mask, clings to a construct of kingdom but arrives at the way to live:

God’s kingdom was the moment. The trees, the forest, the sea, the lily, the bird, all existed in the moment…. Even in the deepest sorrow, with so frightful a tomorrow, the bird was unconditionally joyful. Sorrow and tomorrow did not concern it, but were given over to God. To be as obedient as the grass when bent by the wind… (409)

To be obedient in the moment is to enjoy pure existence. “God’s kingdom” here is not one marked out by a rod, not an encircling self-imprisonment but the freedom of Rilke’s “the Open” or Douglas Harding’s Buddhist epiphany on “having no head,” where things are just happening and we’re not deluded by the thought that our thoughts have any control. The difference, though, between being an animal or blade of grass and being a human being is that we do have thoughts. We wonder. If death were not unknown, what would we be? Not humanity… which attempts to capture the inconceivable in concepts. The future is unknowable, but we still make plans and have expectations. We live on the verge, and this makes things matter.

Quotes are from:

Online Etymology Dictionary, verge and edge

Robert Duncan, “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” The Opening of the Field, Grove Press / New Directions, 1960.

May, Todd, Death: The Art of Living, London: Routledge, 2014.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove, The Morning Star, New York: Penguin, 2021.

book

as made thing, as textual whole. What makes a book whole? When is the making of a book done? Done, past tense of do, from Old English don “make, act, perform, cause; to put, to place,” from West Germanic *doanan, from the Proto-Indo-European root dhe- “to set, put, place.” When is a book a thing that can be set on your lap?

To make a book is to arrive at an end which is a beginning, as a birth is the end of gestation and the beginning of life as an individual. As an editor, sometimes my role is like midwife or doula; sometimes I feel like a surrogate mother for days or weeks at a time, as I carry the book within me, nurture it and contribute some molecules of my own.

A book’s end is the end of its making but also the end of its utterance, the point after which no more need be said. The threads all reenter the warp and woof. Text from texture from weave. Text has been since the late fourteenth century the “wording of anything written,” having come to English with the Normans from Old North French tixte “text, book; Gospels” and earlier (12c.), from Medieval Latin textus “the Scriptures, text, treatise.” Earlier, the metaphorical, literary sense’s derivation from the physical life of the word appears: “style or texture of a work,” literally “thing woven,” from past participle stem of Latin texere “to weave, to join, fit together, braid, interweave, construct, fabricate, build” (from PIE root teks- “to weave, to fabricate, to make”).

When the text has reached its final form, woven, built to stand alone, boundaries hold the tapestry together—in the forms of covers and paratexts, those textual pieces Gérard Genette calls “thresholds of interpretation”:

A literary work consists, entirely or essentially, of a text, defined (very minimally) as a more or less long sequence of verbal statements that are more or less endowed with significance. But this text is rarely presented in an unadorned state, unreinforced and unaccompanied by a certain number of verbal or other productions, such as an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations. And although we do not always know whether these productions are to be regarded as belonging to the text, in any case they surround it and extend it, precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text’s presence in the world … in the form … of a book. (1)

This is a thrilling moment for any writer or editor—when the book has its own presence in the world. It becomes something almost magical, a substanceless substance that can change minds and evoke strong feelings and live on as part of the fabric of collective consciousness. It is an utterance and its texture, adorned by thresholds of interpretation.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is used not of books but of people. We all have senses of self, social masks, bodies, and clothing; essentially, we are ungraspable, existing differently in the mind of everyone who encounters us. Sometimes we’re mistaken for texts “endowed with significance” (by author and reader both)… “She’s like an open book.” But is she? “I can’t read you…” says the longing lover. “But you implied ...” Have you had the uncomfortable experience of being overinterpreted? “You’re reading into it too much!” Tone, facial expression, gesture can all be read as signs of subtext resonating from beneath the surface, where the truth resides, when sometimes there’s nothing there. Other times you’re underinterpreted, as you vaguely or obliquely communicate some felt inchoate reality, some seismic vibration deep down, and they can’t or don’t read the details that signify, forcing you to declare in bare, basic words what you really feel, and then only words hang in air like carcasses in cold storage, waiting to be parsed with knives.

—“What do you mean?”—

I’ve written books to figure out what things mean. Or, no—I’ve written texts not ready to have a presence in the world. Or I wasn’t ready.

A book’s words live on. A book may say one thing—be identical to only one composition of words—but it means more than it says. It will go out into the world and circulate, having a different presence in each mind it passes through, with each set of fingers that leafs through its pages. In its origins as an object, and even now, a book is intimate with trees. Book, from Old English boc grew from the Proto-Germanic root bōk(ō)-, from *bokiz “beech,” “the notion being of beechwood tablets on which runes were inscribed. …Latin and Sanskrit also have words for ‘writing’ that are based on tree names (birch and ash, respectively).” The French word for book, livre, (related by root to library) is from “Latin librum, liber (from Proto-Italic *lufro-) was originally ‘the inner bark of trees.’”

A book is a walk through a forest where bark cracks and leaves whisper. Coleridge called his early book of lyrics Sibylline Leaves.

A book’s sentences will have ramifications. Ramification—a branching out, from Latin ramus, branch, which may stem from PIE wrad, branch, root (also root of Greek rhiza, which gives us rhizome); combined with Latin facere, to make (from that same PIE dhe-, to set, put). These derivations would mean that to set down roots is to branch out—which of course it is. A book, the inner bark of trees branches again as utterance budding ideas, as its meanings—mutually created—ramify through readers’ minds.

Quotes are from:

Genette, Gérard, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J.E. Lewin, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Online Etymology Dictionary

choose

To choose is to risk losing all that you don’t choose—to choose is to lose. But “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,” and when you choose, what do you lose but an unlived life? There are greater risks than losing. Adam Phillips describes the risk of regret, of focusing too much on the fantasy formation of the unchosen: “Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live” (xii).

The thought that we could have done differently manifests the mystifying cunning of the concept of choice, and of regret. Could it really have been any different?

To choose is “to take by preference out of all that are available; to select; to take as that which one prefers, or in accordance with one’s free will and preference” (sense 1 OED). It is “to will, to wish, to exercise one’s own pleasure in regard to a matter in which one is a free agent” (sense 3, OED).

Is one a free agent? In the stream of causes in which we’re swept along, could we really have made a different choice? As the streams converge on one moment, no.

And yet… our choices matter, because what we choose to do in this moment enters the stream of causes, as Sam Harris puts it in his argument on free will as an illusion. Free will is an illusion because we are never free; even in the moment of noticing we have the intention to make a choice, we don’t know where that intention came from, and the choice itself is constrained by countless filters, facets, winnowings, limits.

And yet… choosing is freeing because it constructs the self that feels it is a free agent. As Adam Phillips says in the next sentence: “But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are” (xii). When I tell myself I should be doing this instead of that, I free myself from the hurtful implications that I am not ___ enough by saying, “I choose this.” Choice empowers. We feel that we are acting on well-considered reasons, hunches, and yearnings. We feel we’re not driven, not pushed, not compelled, when we choose with intention. We feel we have agency to determine our lives.

I recently made a radical change in my life. For a long time, I stayed suspended, held in a web of thoughts and habits above the crux. Reality arrived and cleared the clouds. I fell onto the crossroads and was forced to choose.

The OED got it wrong. There are no matters “in which one is a free agent.” At least, we’ll never have freedom of choice, and choosing always entails losing and accepting different limitations along with what we’ll gain. Sometimes what we lose, though, is a fantasy.

Winnicott articulates a warning about the unlived fantasy that’s so appealing; he says of one of his patients: “It was clear that she had nostalgia for the certainty of the illness pattern and great anxiety about the uncertainty that goes with the freedom to choose” (43). The uncertainty that goes with the freedom to choose is, of course, most of what we experience as life.

Mindfulness meditation has helped me choose. All of the noticing, all of the slowing down and being present, all of the unhooking of the claws of thoughts and seeing them pass brings a clarity that allows for choice. What posture do I want to hold toward my experience? How do I want to act in this moment? What would be the best choice for my and others’ well-being? When we slow down for being, we can make less reactive, better choices towards our becoming.

At the same time, meditation helps me see there’s no essential me, no I to determine my life.

Me at the chiasmus, crux, crossroads—where am I?

Instead there are conditions, relations, patterns of behavior, habits, automatic thoughts, emotional reactions, autonomic processes, gut-brain communication highways, bacteria, and conscious awareness. Conscious awareness, given attention, can reveal reality as continuous flux and I as a pronoun, a denotation. The word self’s origin was one too. Now it’s an abstract noun that has been described metaphorically as a center of gravity.

From the Buddhist point of view, Bruce Tift explains:

freedom arises from a profound disidentification with any content—good or bad. When our circumstances and experiences are held in the context of open awareness, we are … no longer “inside” the content; rather, we are “witnessing” it within the context of awareness. With that shift in perception, we begin to have a choice about how to relate to our experience. (70)

And:

To free ourselves from our identification with our conditioned history and from our investment in a familiar sense of self, we may need a conscious, embodied relationship with exactly the feelings we’ve dedicated most of our lives to avoiding. (266)

I chose to recognize what my intuitions were telling me. I chose to feel the panic rise from my gut to my face and be calm. I chose to wake up and see the gestalt. I made the right choice, and now I walk the road of reality with memory imprints forming a field of chiastic relations between this one and the other. But I don’t long for that lost unlived life because finally, by choosing, I saw it was not my life. And every choice, especially the big ones, contributes to the ongoing process of the self and ripples out in ramifications that affect the lives of others.

bitter sweet

Choose derives from Old English ceosan, from the Proto-Germanic root keus-, which comes from the proto-Indo-European root *geus- “to taste; to choose.”

How will it taste? You don’t know until you touch it to your tongue, after which you can’t not taste it. To taste is to choose to incorporate something unknown, to make a thing unknown a part of your consciousness, a part of who you are in that moment, a part of your lived life. It’s a risk, but the alternative is to live a life of compulsion.

Quotes are from:

Bishop, Elizabeth, “One Art”

Phillips, Adam, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, New York: Picador, 2021.

Oxford English Dictionary

Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality, New York: Routledge, 2005 (1971).

Tift, Bruce, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation, Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2015.

Online Etymology Dictionary, choose.

groove

Everyone seems to be interested in habit formation and neuroplasticity recently. The main images for describing these phenomena still used by psychologists are ‘firing and wiring’ (from Donald Hebb, The Organization of Behavior, 1949) and ‘pathways’ (William James, Principles of Psychology, 1890). James begins his chapter Habit by demonstrating that habits are physical in nature, formed by repeated actions, and maintained by the traveling of electrical impulses through the nervous system along pathways to and from the brain. Almost everything we do and think takes habitual form.

The more poetic or journalistic writers use images of erosion and industrial forms made by repetition: channels, grooves. A groove is a furrow, a ditch engineered to control what grows and flows, life and water.

Grooves have a positive valence these days, thanks to records and jazz. The phrase in the groove originated among jazz musicians in the 1920s. Musically, we move from the cathedral to the club, as grooves became the spiral channels cut inside organ pipes, in phonograph cylinders, on gramophone records, and finally vinyl.

Being in the groove, lost in the flow of music, is an experience of immersion and no-self and this context lent itself to the meanings of groove in the later twentieth century. A groove is “a pronounced enjoyable rhythm”; in verb form to groove is “to enjoy oneself intensely” and “to interact harmoniously” (M-W). The OED gets more explicit and cites examples from the 1960s when interacting harmoniously meant, more specifically, playing music well together, and “making love.”

Music like water flows in grooves and goes and takes us with it; the transports it can induce are like those of eroticism, which was one reason “grooviness” became countercultural and jazz, to the racist hegemons, a manifestation of sexual power and the threat they believed Black men to embody (see, e.g. “The White Reception of Jazz in America”).

Groove as flow defies death, denies the grave… or is the deepest acknowledgment of its inevitability, an intertwining Georges Bataille articulated in the first sentence of his book, Erotism: “Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.” He saw in eroticism a drive toward the lost continuity and oneness that would come again in death. This intertwining is also in the word groove’s history and root. Being “in the groove” was an attitudinal change from the earlier meaning, from the mid-1800s, when being in a groove was being in a rut, a “narrow, limited, undeviating course” of life (OED) (what we now so often call “stuckness”), a meaning that points to groove’s etymological kinship with grave, both words stemming from Old Norse grof, pit. A rut may be easily mistaken for a groove, which is one reason some habits are so sticky—they seem sustaining, not depleting.

I wondered, at times, if I was in a groove or a rut. My life just took a turn that tuned me into habits as I’ve never been before. A dissonance between the new and the familiar, the now and the before, the present and the absent, has magnified small motions I make in my home as they slough meanings and are laid bare, before they’re layered over again with new interpretations. Emily Dickinson had something to say to me:

The Brain, within its Groove
Runs evenly—and true—
But let a Splinter swerve—
‘Twere easier for You—

To put a Current back—
When Floods have slit the Hills—
And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves—
And trodden out the Mills—

There’s a pleasure in running evenly—and true. When one is in the groove (a phrase which recently has become displaced by “in flow” because of the popularization of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s 1990 book Flow), one is doing something complex with ease and a pleasureful feeling of transport or suspension; it’s an action that has been repeated so many times, through practice, and it has associated mind states that are comforting because familiar and because they fill one up with a lungful feeling of goodness and serenity. It’s the runner’s high, immersion, bliss.

The Brain within its Groove is comfortable and secure. It thinks it knows what to expect; thinks it has finally got it all figured out and is being validated by the universe because things are running smoothly. “But let a Splinter swerve—” and the truth of impermanence arrives. How perfect the half-rhyme of Groove and swerve is here. One the Groove itself, that thinks itself autonomous, self-justifying and -sufficient, correct, at ease; the other the dichotomous action that splinters the Groove, the rut, the habit, leading to flood and chaos.

Swerve is a perfect word here not only for the half-rhyme, but because in this poem it does what it means. To swerve is to suddenly follow a curving tangent off the main trajectory. A groove is a well-run path, and a swerve from it a casting off into untrodden territory (trodden in the second stanza becomes something done by water, as if water is a giant indifferent to the endeavors of humans).

And a Splinter is a sudden and slightly painful introjection. A foreign object that pierces and penetrates, releasing what was controlled, bringing the Floods.

Once a thought, an idea, a person has swerved its way in, you can’t go back.

As the last five lines say, it would be easier to put a river back where it came from, back in its groove after floods, than to go on as if that event had never occurred, because of its significance, its splintering effect on the brain’s groove, on the habit of the deepest sort. The landscape is changed.

We long to be in the groove. But we fear it too, because a mood becomes a mode, a groove a grave.

Change is life, life change. Chiasmus, reflection, mirror, suspension.

Quotes are from:

Merriam-Webster: groove

Oxford English Dictionary, groove.

Bataille, Georges, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, San Francisco: City Lights, 1982 (1957 in French; first English edition 1962).

Emily Dickinson, poem 556, composed c. 1862.

merge

“…like me a believer in total immersion…” Elizabeth Bishop writes of the seal who “regarded me / steadily, moving his head a little” in “At the Fishhouses.”

What is total immersion, and what does it mean to be “a believer” in it? It’s something we seek and pay money for, as in the “immersive” Van Gogh projection show you can do yoga to; it’s a swimming technique in which your body rolls like a slim kayak with the flowing twists of each stroke; it’s the opposite of distraction, but also of concentration. Or maybe concentration is a form of immersion that comes over us when thinking shutters the lens, like the darkling scene, seen from a dark room, of a wooded lake through an oversize window…

…that’s so captivating, magnetic, it obscures the surrounding realm of experience. Being lost in thought is one kind of immersion, but it’s also a form of distraction, in spite of having such centrality in the life of the human mind.

Immersion, from in- “into, in, on, upon” + Latin mergere “plunge, dip,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “probably rhotacized [i.e. formed from a defective pronunciation of r especially a substitution of some other sound for that of r] from PIE *mezgo- ‘to dip, to sink, to wash, to plunge.’” The intransitive meaning “sink or disappear into something else, be swallowed up, lose identity” is from 1726.

So merge subtly splits off in meaning around the Enlightenment, when the transitive sense of “cause to be absorbed or to disappear in something else” begins to become more prevalent. This split in the 1720s marks a divergence between the sense of something dipping or plunging into a medium and yet retaining its integrity, and something that loses its identity and boundaries, becoming one with the medium into which it plunges and maybe losing its thingness too.

The difference between dipping or plunging and being absorbed is the difference between the lost-in-thought immersion that is really a concentrated distraction busily reinforcing identity with its self-referential narrativizing, and total immersion in experience—embodied immediacy, present awareness, rigpa.

Is it a coincidence that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England, when merge took on a loss of identity boundaries, the concept of personal identity, of self, and of soul, were going through an identity crisis? First, John Locke eroded its foundations in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), by suggesting there was no soul but only psychological continuity holding us together. Later, David Hume, in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), obliterated not only soul and self but also continuity by suggesting the common conception of identity is a fictional string on which we hang the beads of discontinuous moments of experience. (He suggests “making merry” with friends and playing some backgammon when this becomes too frightening.)

For many, losing the notion of bounded self or singular ego—experiencing total immersion—signals an emergency.

But what is an emergency—an “unforeseen occurrence requiring immediate attention” from the 1630s—but a signal emergence? From Latin emergens “to rise from or out of anything that surrounds, covers, or conceals; come forth; appear, as from concealment,” 1560s, from Latin emergere “bring forth, bring to light,” intransitively “arise out or up, come forth, come up, come out, rise,” from ex “out” + mergere “to dip, sink.”

An emergency is an event that ruptures the illusion of smooth-flowing time, of immortality and limitlessness. We think we’ll get another chance at everything, and really we only experience everything once. An emergency means someone may die. Life may be cut off, obliterated in an instant, and in fact, it will be. An emergency arises, as its history shows, out of obscurity, out invisibility or its subjective side, unseeing.

Immersion is where you must go after you realize that emergencies are inevitable—an emergency is inevitable. Stay lost in thought and you’re only taking a dip, experiencing in only one mode of what Buddhism refers to as the five aggregates—form/matter, sensation, perception, concepts/mentality, and consciousness—each one of which we cling to but which don’t add up to or arise out of an essential self, belief in which is the cover-up out of which emergency comes to light.

Total immersion is being awake in the moment; there is no adverbial form of awake, which describes being and only being. To be awake is to be immersed in being, to merge, through and through, with being. To be being; to be. Not to plunge into the obscurity of egoism.

I’m a believer in total immersion. I swim laps, I meditate, I practice. But like most of us, I’m too often like Elizabeth Bishop’s immersing and emerging seal, which would

…disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.

Quotes are from:

Online Etymology Dictionary, immersion.

Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”

mood

Altogether too much of life is mood.
—Renata Adler, Speedboat

Too true. But what is mood? A psychosomatic weather system measurable by internal barometer, a mood can lift the heart and facial muscles, lightening and enlivening subtle internal energetics and brightening the visual display arrayed before one… or conspire with gravity and cloud cover to drag the body down and tinge the world with a gray valence of doom.

***

(Some lines of Thomas Hardy’s come to mind:

We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
– They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing….)

***

Mood, “a conscious state of mind or predominant emotion,” like many common monosyllables, has taken the same form in English since before the Norman Invasion, and before that, in its Old English form with a long o, mōd, it was defined as a more specific kind of state—“heart, frame of mind, spirit”—with a certain energy and emotion—“courage, arrogance, pride”—and associated with power, violence, and anger. Further back in history, mood/mōd was the Proto-Germanic moda: mind, courage, intention.

Moods can also be modes of power’s expression, however muted. On a return flight, I read 120 pages straight of Lisa Robertson’s vibrating new book, The Baudelaire Fractal (pausing only to pencil in marks of admiration) about Hazel Brown, a young woman in Paris who dreams of being a writer. Some sentences narrating her dawning realization that she can’t both inhabit beauty and express it—at least in the traditional forms canonical literary and art history have bestowed on us—casts moods in this way: “The man-poets scorned what they desired; their sadistic money was such that the object scorned was endowed with the shimmer of sex. How radiant we were in our gorgeous outfits and our bad moods!” (82). This powerful form of submission, however, must be subverted, though the longing for beauty is strong…

In her book How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett tells us emotions are motivational states, which harkens back to the etymological link between mood and intention: emotions prepare the body for motion, for action based on the brain’s predictions of what will be needed in the next moment, which come from its rapid reading of context and comparing this with previous experience.

A mood, then, is a state of heart-mind that is the ground of intent, will, potential for action, as the phrase “in the mood,” originating circa 1580, conveys. At this time it also became the grammatical term for the way a verb expresses its relationship to action: “distinction of form or a particular set of inflectional forms of a verb to express whether the action or state it denotes is conceived as fact or in some other manner (such as command, possibility, or wish).” But this second sense was a conflation of mood with mode, which meant something closer to manner or form or expression. (Check out my post on the modal auxiliary, should.)

This conflation of a fired-up heart-mind state with the grammatical and musical mode or manner of expression may be why mood, now, has a vagueness to it. We say with some mystification we’re “in a good mood” or “in a bad mood” and that we sometimes experience “mood swings” characterized by light or darkness.

Sometimes one’s mood can shift as rapidly and seemingly without reason as wind over water. But we’re not powerless, though the darkness can seem to have weight and the power to engulf all we see in the gray tones of negativity.

Feldman Barrett offers guidance in dispelling a bad mood: home in on its origins and finer grains. If a mood is generalized feeling, a spell of ennui or tickle of irritability, it vanishes with the application of focus and analysis. She refers to this tool as emotional granularity. Ask yourself when you started feeling irritable; what was the trigger? Bore into the irritability itself. What are its contours? Is it really resentment, ambivalence or anger, or is there a shadow of shame? Emotional granularity can help us deconstruct the seeming solidity of a mood, revealing its ramparts to be repeated thoughts layering interpretations and self-referential narratives. Add to these acts of analysis embodied immediacy, in Bruce Tift’s phrase, by tuning in to the sensations of the affect—a tensed brow, contracted shoulders, or tight chest, maybe. “Affect,” says Feldman Barrett, “transforms interoceptive sensation into something about you” (188). So use emotional granularity and embodied immediacy to seize some control over affect, and vaporize that bad mood.

She also points out, wisely, that

it’s tricky to distinguish discomfort and suffering in the moment. Are you feeling irritated or just having caffeine withdrawal? If you are a woman, you probably have ambiguous physical symptoms related to your menstrual cycle or during menopause, and you may categorize the sensations as having emotional meaning when they do not. (188)

True, but in our patriarchal culture, women have also been conditioned to deny, suppress, and involute our anger, which itself can cause physical symptoms, so it’s important, too, to consider the context of the mood.

As Hazel Brown, in The Baudelaire Fractal, matures, she finds a way to hold both agency and beauty by considering context. In the midst of a diatribe against the conventional dynamics of desire and beauty in our culture (he who desires has the language and agency; beauty is mute and possessed; this is “the formal sexuality of lyric” (83)) she asks, what of a girl’s desire and a girl’s desire to express? Her answer returns to the root of mood:

I did not want to give up on beauty altogether, so gently I set it to the side, and with it the philosophical potency and freedom of the bad mood. Certainly I would return to beauty, I would return to the bad mood. I would arrive at anger. (83)

Quotes are from:

Adler, Renata, Speedboat, New York: The New York Review of Books, 1971.

Hardy, Thomas, “Neutral Tones,” 1867.

mood: Merriam-Webster and Online Etymology Dictionary.

Robertson, Lisa, The Baudelaire Fractal, Toronto: Coach House Books, 2020.

Feldman Barrett, Lisa, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Tift, Bruce, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation, Boulder: Sounds True, 2015.

ambivalence

“It is a condition worse than most because it can lead to catastrophe,” writes Kenneth Weisbrode in On Ambivalence. This claim points to the central destructive irony of ambivalence: by not deciding, we may end up with more than just regret. As we defer, claim confusion, flip-flop, and lack commitment, life continues to happen, and the potential for choice recedes. Ambivalence is a trap that works by deceit: we think we’re weighing the options, preparing ourselves to commit to the best course, on the brink of figuring out how to have it both ways, waiting for a sign… and so on and on, but actually we’re stuck.

From ambi, Latin for both sides and valence, strength, the word entered the language by way of a German neologism invented by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939). The American Psychological Association now defines it as:

1. the simultaneous existence of contradictory feelings and attitudes, such as pleasantness and unpleasantness or friendliness and hostility, toward the same person, object, event, or situation. Eugen Bleuler, who first defined ambivalence in a psychological sense and referred to it as affective ambivalence, regarded extreme ambivalence, such as an individual expressing great love for his or her mother while also asking how to kill her, as a major symptom of schizophrenia.

2. uncertainty or indecisiveness about a course of action.

I picture those foam dumbbells used in swimming lessons and aqua-therapy. Strong on both sides. You pretend you’re lifting weights, getting stronger with every rep, when really you’re just drifting in suspension.

In 2017 I walked across the longest (1,509 feet) pedestrian suspension bridge in the world, in Reutte, Austria. The day was misty, so long drifts of fog obscured the other end at times, at times the ground 374 feet below. The span connects two hills on which ruins sit—one the medieval fortress Ehrenberg Castle and the other seventeenth-century Fortress Claudia.

The bridge swayed and whistled, and my heartbeat quickened. It wasn’t fear—I knew I wouldn’t fall—but a simulacrum of fear, a dizzy agitation. One can become addicted to the heightened arousal of ambivalence.

According to Weisbrode, ambivalence is rampant in our personal and work lives because it’s a manifestation of a kind of dystopic paralysis of choice and the feeling of limitlessness on a global scale: “Surely globalization begets and reinforces ambivalence. Its emphasis, even dependence, on interconnectivity, interchangeability, ‘hybridity,’ and so forth leaves many of us with a sense of loss of place, space, and linear time” (56).

Where or what is the end to this state of neither-this-nor-that?

With awareness comes clarity and choice; with freedom from the delusion of control comes acceptance.

I think ambivalence’s opposite is equanimity, from Latin aequanimitas: aequo animo with even mind.

Quotes are from:

Weisbrode, Kenneth, On Ambivalence: The Problems and Pleasures of Having It Both Ways, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012.

APA Dictionary of Psychology - ambivalence

Thank you to my friend, poet Page Hill Starzinger, for leaving this little volume with me.

fractal

… a disturbance of words within words / that is a field folded …

These phrases unfurl and echo in my mind as I think about fractals (is an echo a sound fractal?) and what I’ve just learned from an article in Nautilus, “Is Consciousness Fractal” by Jordana Cepelewicz: even beyond the visual examples we’re used to—the Milky Way galaxy, a nautilus shell, a tree, mountain relief, veins—fractals are also in the structured creations of the human mind such as literature, classical music, and a Zen garden, and when experienced, they calm us. Maybe one reason forest bathing works, or why, walking or running, I often feel ecstatic, is that we bathe our visual cortex in fractals, soothing the mind with the deeply, primordially familiar.

Noticing signs of calm is likely only the surface of the layered manifestations of a fractal consciousness, that layers experience and memory constantly, becoming “a field folded”:

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos…

These phrases have echoed in my consciousness since college, when I discovered Robert Duncan, from whose poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” the lines come. He was drawn to fractals, before the word was invented, and his poems were like fields folded, ramifying with references to roots and branches, and Yggdrasil the world tree from Norse mythology that stood at the center of the cosmos.

(The poem was playing at the periphery of my mind when I was editing Nona Orbach’s book, The Good Enough Studio, because she was interested in the phenomenon of permission in the process of art therapy. I sent her the poem, and she incorporated it into the final words of the book. Soon after that book became, in her words, “an object in the world,” she called on me again to work with her in the process of unfolding a new book, this time focused entirely on permission as a central human dynamic.)

Duncan’s poem, published in The Opening of the Field in 1960, has fractal aspects, with the folds of rhyme and near-rhyme, repetitions, and references to places of the mind; the “disturbance”—from dis + turbare to throw into disorder—“of words within words” exists within the meadow in the mind that marks a boundary “against chaos.”

The word fractal was a neologism of mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975 to describe what had been observed for hundreds of years, the phenomenon of self-similarity in structures of nature both spatial and temporal. The word derives from the past participle of Latin frangere, to break; each break creates a fragment that evokes both the whole and the finer fragments of which it is made. Mathematically, it is a “curve such that any small part of it, enlarged, has the same statistical character as the original” (OED).

One could say that Alan Watts saw the fractal nature of reality: “The fact that every organism evokes its own environment must be corrected with the polar or opposite fact that the total environment evokes the organism” (104). But we are out of touch with this reality:

…we have lacked the proper self-respect of recognizing that I, the individual organism, am a structure of such fabulous ingenuity that it calls the whole universe into being. In the act of putting everything at a distance so as to describe and control it, we have orphaned ourselves both from the surrounding world and from our own bodies—leaving “I” as a discontented and alienated spook, anxious, guilty, unrelated, and alone. (105)

Immersion in fractal forests may soothe, too, because it brings a sense of belonging by the most direct route, pre-verbally and without relation to self, a corrective to the self-absorbed false belief that we are separate.

“We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. ... Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.”

— Alan Watts, The Book, p. 9

Quotes are from:

Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field, Grove Press / New Directions, 1960.

Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, New York: Vintage, 1966.

problem

Right now, in this moment, is there a problem?

I ask myself this question, silently, during guided meditations and at moments during the day when I feel an urgency flutter into being, an agitation rise.

There are many techniques like it, little practices that prompt us to pause, notice our body’s signals and the thoughts gathering intensity as they fill with emotion like hot air balloons, and seize the moment of choice—to act or relax. The question, is there a problem? gives the mind a little ladder to help it see above the clouds. The thought that was present, right before the question came—is it a problem right now? Usually, the answer is no, not right now. What about that pain in the hip? Not really… it’s just a twinge. As you seek the source of the problem to find out if there really is one, your world becomes replete with sensations, images, feelings, as awareness dilates beyond the dwindling idea that there is a problem, which turns out to be mostly a feeling, a tightness and heat.

Right now, in this moment, I can relax.

But what is a problem? Sometimes it’s something to puzzle out, which puts us in the comfortable realm of goal-directed doing; this is sense #1:

1a: a question raised for inquiry, consideration, or solution

b: a proposition in mathematics or physics stating something to be done

And sometimes (as in the lyrics of the Talking Heads song “No Compassion”: “It’s not so cool to have so many problems. … Talk to your analyst! Isn’t that what they’re paid for?!” David Byrne shrieks) it’s a deep neurotic pattern. This, along with many other examples, is sense #2:

2a: an intricate unsettled question

b: a source of perplexity, distress, or vexation

c: difficulty in understanding or accepting

The word’s history, like that of so many, takes us from mental constructs to its origin in the body interacting with concrete objects: Middle English probleme, from Latin problema, from Greek problēma, literally, obstacle, from proballein to throw forward, from pro- forward + ballein to reach by throwing, let fly, strike, put, place. So a problem is essentially an obstacle we throw or put in our own path.

Interestingly, in Greek, the word had a cousin, diábolos, “accuser, backbiter, slanderer,” agentive derivative of diabállein “to take across, put through, set at variance, attack (a person’s character), accuse, slander,” from dia- through + bállō, bállein. This throw-through compound, which took on an aggressive, notably verbal character, eventually morphed into the words diabolic and devil by way of a translation of Hebrew śāṭān, adversary. Sometimes our problems are devils; they’re our demons.

But we can trick the tricksters out of their diabolic forms by giving them a taste of their own medicine and making them into objects of inquiry on the path.

I’ve found this technique—of asking the question—to be most helpful as I walk the path. Asking, “right now, in this moment, is there a problem?” has helped me practice moments of waking up throughout the day, and using words in the form of self-inquiry provides an anchor when I find it difficult just to have moments of awareness. The words give me a problem in the first sense, a question to consider, so I’m less likely to float into the storm clouds in my hot air balloon.

Often, what I find at the root of the problem, along with sensations, is a basic liking or not liking something. It’s not that some work situation or interpersonal vexation is truly a problem, it’s that I don’t like it. It’s not that this joint pain is a real problem, it’s just uncomfortable, and I don’t like it.

This liking and not liking may seem like a small problem with an easy fix, but it’s not just a problem, it’s our touchstone for selfhood. In the words of William James: “In the midst of psychic change [these primary reactions] are the permanent core of turnings-toward and turnings-from, of yieldings and arrests, which naturally seem central … [and are] a ‘sanctuary within the citadel’ of our personal lives.” Buddhist philosophy calls the feeling tones—pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral—associated with these primary reactions, vedanā. We confuse these feelings, valences, of experiences and our associated turnings-toward or -from with self because they are the deepest, the most interior reactions.

The important thing is not to be taken in by feeling tones alone, or to roll them into boulders we then throw in our own path, because, as Rilke says, “…we continually constitute ourselves anew and differently at the intersection of all those influences that reach into the sphere of our being.” Seeing through problems, these likings and not likings, can reveal them to be cloud-veils.

Quotes are from:

Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/problem and https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/devil.

William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, New York: Dover, 1950 (reprint of Henry Holt, 1890 edn), p. 302–303.

Rilke, Rainer Maria, Letters on Life, ed. and trans. Ulrich Baer, New York: Modern Library, p. 74.

lacuna

For the last decade, I’ve lived in the “land of 10,000 lakes,” where wide spans and small shards of water reflect blue skies and flatiron clouds for endless days. Drive in any direction and you’ll pass or cross these blinding mirrors.

While I like the grassy rise above the rock outcrop, my favorite place on the lake where I paddle and take long walks, either alone or in deep talk, is the lagoon where willows dip their leaves and trees hold the light. To get to it by paddle board, I pass beneath the bridge where cars creep along, windows down, and loose scraps of melody fall with wafts of marijuana smoke. Beneath the bridge, it’s darker, cooler, quieter, and the water seems to move more slowly as I pass this threshold and enter the lagoon—the lake’s aside, its parenthesis.

This sense of time and place in brackets in the lagoon is fitting, as lagoon shares a root—lacus, Latin for pond, hollow, opening—with lacuna: an unfilled space or interval, a gap. In the world of books, lacunae are missing portions, emptinesses where words are supposed to be, words unknown even to have existed sometimes, sometimes just unknown, as in Anne Carson’s edition of Sappho’s fragments which has more lacunae—marked by brackets or blank space—than words.

The lacuna in the latter, the object of her longing, actually embodies the experience of longing. The verb “long” derives from langen, from Old German, where the yearning is felt as a growing long, a lengthening toward what one longs for—the feeling one puts into the words “it pulls at my heartstrings,” “it tugs my heart.”

When we long, we think we’re longing for an object, something or someone or some state, like freedom or love. But longing, with its hint of grief, is different from desire, that wish to possess, have, and hold. Longing feels more like what this fragment of a poem by Sappho expresses, lacuna and all: longing is a yearning to incorporate the lacuna, to hold even the hole, to be whole.

fantasy

Bruce Tift’s book, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation, will shock your eyes wide open when you grasp how directly it speaks to our most confusing neurotic complexes, the ones most of us have, unless we’re already enlightened or too numbed to notice. Tift uses “fantasy” a lot, primarily to refer to the beliefs underlying our stories—the internal, self-referential narratives we deploy as we rationalize, ruminate on, and try to fix our “problems.” These stories are undergirded by a fantasy belief in an essential, flawed self. He describes how to let go of the fantasy of fixing, the fantasy of resolution, which is only an entertaining distraction from the reality of our embodied experience of constant flow and change. He talks about how we come to fear intensity of feeling in childhood, when it really is a threat, and we develop adaptive strategies of defense to make ourselves feel safe that then become outdated but which we still use as adults:

Carl Jung once said, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” I agree with him, though I would say neurosis is always a substitute for experiential intensity. … One of the things I like about Jung’s understanding is that it characterizes neurosis as an activity of intelligence (which is not synonymous with wisdom). It’s not pathological; it’s not some pattern that blindly got put into place. Neurosis is not something that happened to us. It’s an unconscious choice we make, moment after moment. It’s what happens when we say, “I would actually prefer not to feel this incredibly difficult, vulnerable, disturbing experience right now, so I’m going to try to go around it. I will distract myself. I’ll be self-aggressive. I’ll get very activated. I’ll get involved with parenting, or with work. I’ll learn to meditate and be calm. I’ll exercise.” But … the pain and intensity we’re experiencing is probably going to come and go all of our lives. As children, this choice was often the best we could do. As adults, it’s an expression of a basic lack of trust in ourselves. (33–34)

Fear of intense feelings, especially negative ones, fuels fantasies of finally fixing, reforming, and furnishing ourselves so that we no longer feel them. Any resistance to the reality of embodied, dependent, and vulnerable existence takes form as fantasy.

This base layer of the self-making mind is where Jung places fantasy: “As a chicken naturally lays an egg, a human psyche fantasizes… Our dreams are prior to our thinking.”

I heard these lines spoken by James Hillman, as he quoted from Jung’s The Red Book, in a lecture (which Nona Orbach sent me because it related so closely to some ideas she’s exploring in a new book I’m working on with her; thank you for this cross-pollination, Nona!). Jung’s notion of fantasy in this sense is like the Buddhist idea of delusion: “Psyche creates reality every day.” In Jung’s sense, then, the imaginative faculty of the psyche, its most natural activity, creates not fantasy as distortion of reality but what we call reality.

Because I also just read some Anaïs Nin, this notion seemed laced with danger. The blurring of fantasy and reality—is it an imperative drive toward self-actualization regardless of the destruction and annihilation in its path? Or was Nin only more realistic about the self-aggression of repressing one’s desires? She didn’t want to hurt those men… she wanted to love them, each in their own way. She saw with acute accuracy how their fantasies impinged on her and hers on them and did make their realities.

This destructive, damaging aspect of fantasy may be what gives the word’s current definition its pejorative tinge. According to Merriam-Webster, the primary meaning of fantasy is:

1: the power or process of creating especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to psychological need;

also : a mental image or a series of mental images (such as a daydream) so created

What interests me here is the implied clarity of the delineation between fantasy and reality. In this standard usage, fantasy is “especially unrealistic” and “improbable”—as in “that’s just a fantasy” or in Billie Eilish’s new song, played repeatedly by my daughter, who surely doesn’t understand the capsule critique of “male fantasy” in the first verse because she’s too young. In my recent readings, fantasy appears in a more pervasive but also more nuanced, modulated light.

In its earlier forms, it carried less of a negative valence and was more aligned to our sense of “imagination,” (which makes me think of Coleridge on fancy, which he saw as an inferior cousin to creative imagination). Here’s a brief etymological history, courtesy of Merriam-Webster:

Middle English fantasie, fantsy, fansey “the imagination as a faculty, mental image produced by this faculty, deluded notion, figment of the imagination, preference directed by caprice rather than reason, liking,” borrowed from Anglo-French fantasie “imagination as a faculty, figment of the imagination, dizziness,” borrowed from Late Latin phantasia “imagination as a faculty, mental image of something perceived physically, image evoked by a poet or orator, a thing imagined by someone sleeping or ill, delusion,” going back to Latin, “imagined situation or experience.”

I’m interested in the shift from the neutral “mental image” definitions to those associated with negatively judged delusion and caprice. I wonder why this happened. Earlier still, the word evokes simply something that is present to consciousness:

borrowed from Greek phantasía “appearance, presentation to consciousness (whether immediate or in memory), image, imagination as a faculty, imagery,” noun derivative corresponding to phantázein “to make visible, present to the eye or mind, (middle voice) place before one’s mind, picture to oneself, imagine,” causative verb from phantós “visible,” verbal adjective of phaínō, phaínein (active voice) “to bring to light, cause to appear,” and phaínomai, phaínesthai (middle voice) “to become visible, come to light, appear…”

Linguistic history shows a long conflation of mentalizing with visualizing: imagining is making images of. Visualizing is our concrete basis for understanding: “I see!” Ideas appear in the mind. We hold things in the “mind’s eye.” And what makes seeing possible? Light. In fantasy’s earlier history, we come to Indo-European:

*bh-né-h2-/bh-n̥-h2- (whence also Armenian banam “(I) open, reveal”), nasal present from *bheh2- “shine, give light, appear,” whence Sanskrit bhā́ti “(it) shines, beams.”

This Sanskrit origin, this action “shines, beams” captures the most basic phenomenon of mind, in which the knowing and known are like light. Holding something in one’s mind is like turning toward light or bringing light to it. The light of awareness brings it into existence, fantasy is just how we see reality, or as Jung says, “Psyche creates reality”—which is not to say we shouldn’t strive to wake up and see more skillfully.

should

In the summer of 2004, I took a class with beloved professor and “philosophical grammarian” Julian Boyd; it was the only class he continued teaching after his retirement as a UC Berkeley Distinguished Professor 10 years earlier. I was lucky to have the opportunity. It was my last set of classes before the year of studying for orals for my PhD, and it was his last year of teaching before he died. The breezy classroom’s open doors and windows allowed his shouting and joyful cursing, and the roaring laughter of the students, to carry across the colonnade. The entire syllabus focused on modal auxiliary verbs, and hours were spent dissecting the implications of the word “could,” for example, in a paragraph by Hemingway. The course was a revelation.

Here’s what Merriam-Webster says about modals.

Professor Boyd liked to joke that he and his wife had a favorite—or at least most-used—modal: gonna hafta. As in, someone’s gonna hafta take out the trash.

Should is one modal that plays a central role in most people’s mental life, at least most of the people I talk to, read, and listen to, epitomes of WEIRDness. Therapists and gurus are always pointing out all the “shoulding” we do, and how detrimental it is to our emotional equilibrium.

Are you always shoulding yourself? I found myself wondering the other night what is really going on when I’m shoulding. So I performed a Boydian grammatical analysis on my self-talk.

Should, the past tense of shall, has a few definitions, but the one that is used most often in our internal monologues is #2: “used in auxiliary function to express obligation, propriety, or expediency.”

In moments when thoughts crowd out awareness and self-judgments weave a web that thickens into a thicket I can’t grope through, the voice insinuates: I should do less of this, I should do more of that, I should be less this, I should be more that. Take out the this and that: I should do less, I should do more, I should be less, I should be more. Take out the less and more: I should do, I should be. Take out the doing and being: I should. And if I should, implicitly, I don’t enough, I’m not enough. Here we are at the bottom, in what Tara Brach calls “the trance of unworthiness.” The underlying assumption of all the shoulding is I am not enough.

What is left grammatically when all the verbs and adjectives and nouns are gone? Only the obligation, propriety, or expediency floating over a foundation of scarcity. But this is where it gets interesting: in the privacy of my mind where the self-referential narrative thoughts continuously unspool from the activity of the default mode network, to whom am I obligated? Who defines what is proper? Why is expediency important?

I find myself shoulding most zealously when the reality isn’t lining up with the narrative of my life I believed in, when my life dissatisfies me because it isn’t what I expected or wanted. We should ourselves when the “reality,” summed up as a story with a main character (named I), isn’t fitting with our idea of how it should work out. The feeling of shoulding is discomfort with the idea that others will only see the “reality” and not the “truth,” the “real” story on the outside and not the “true” story on the inside, the one that should be. Our lives haven’t worked out as we wanted; somehow the true story got lost beneath the real one.

What, in this, is the obligation, the propriety, or expediency? It seems that the obligation implied is to the me that exists in the alternate storyline, the one that’s not really happening, the one we think of as true. I should have a different life is a thought about the impropriety of the current reality in relation to the ideal self, or the failure to meet an obligation to be that ideal self. Interestingly, propriety has to do with what is right for the self; from Latin proprius “one’s own, particular to itself.”

Shoulding is disowning oneself for an idea-self, a fiction, a fantasy.

The problem with this kind of internal self-flagellation—shoulding ourselves—is that it is premised on a rejection of what is really happening, of reality, of one’s real life right here, right now. It’s just a facet of dukkha, of dissatisfaction that drives us to clinging and aversion. When you notice yourself shoulding, remember its basis in false belief, drop into awareness, and say, “This is enough.”

stance

I bought a pair of used paddle boards from a wealthy suburbanite whose house was a three-minute walk from a lake. “We just don’t use them.” Did he prefer to speed through thrashing wind on waterskis, or sit on an Adirondack chair, hand loose around a dripping gin and tonic? Either way, or neither, the boards now belong to me, who used to say “Boring!” about the people surfing the surface ripples, slow, silent, standing…

I’ve discovered I was wrong, because whether something’s boring or brilliant depends on your stance.

Paddle boarding on a quiet lake is like walking in the woods without a path. You can meander, drift, close your eyes for a minute and feel all the sensations shunted to background by privileged vision rise to the fore—the sun’s heat toasting the left side of my body, especially my ear, the plash of paddles and twitter of swallows and even their zoom through air as they swoop out from the shadow under the bridge and circle each other, voices laughing and calling out from the beaches on either side, the wind-up inevitability of a toddler’s cry, an insistent drumbeat coming from … somewhere … and bouncing off the rocks on the far side. Murmurs, splashes, whirring traffic far off. It’s leisurely and peaceful.

Every so often in his guided meditations, Sam Harris will ask if there’s a “stance” in the mind. What he means is to notice whether we have an attitude toward this meditation session—wanting something to happen, expecting certain feelings or even a state. Wanting… expecting… both of which will invite disappointment; it’s in their nature.

I find myself applying this question to life, throughout the day: What is my stance, right now? Usually, I’m leaning toward something, some desired outcome, hard, tilting into the wind, holding balance against the current. A stance is attitudinal. Analyze it, and you’ll find that it comes down to liking or not liking, wanting or not wanting, desiring or resisting. I imagine if I were actually flowing with the current, or even floating or drifting, as soon as I noticed, I’d try to right myself into a stance. This is the automaticity of the default mode network, always filling in the structure with sense-making cognitions.

Taking a stance in the mind is of course related to the deluded quest for stability and permanence, the wish to stop the shifting beneath our feet and free ourselves from the fear of floundering. It’s difficult not to take a stance, just as it’s difficult to grasp that circumstances are in large part created by our stances. A circumstance is literally everything around a stance that influences or is influenced by the stance.

My challenge, then, is to see all circumstances as shaped in part by my stance—my stance toward life at the moment. When I feel trapped and hemmed in on all sides, rather than running away and ripping through all the circumstances, leaving everything in tatters behind me, I can check my stance: Is it defensive? Is it a crouch? How can it loosen? What if, as when I’m on the paddle board, I give my whole frame a shake, ripple out the stiffness while holding a delicate balance on the watery world? What if I just lie down, so my circumstances become open, unending air, where clouds aren’t obstructions but prisms?

threshold

I like the old Germanic throaty sound of the word and how vividly the abstract meaning clings to the physical slab at the foot of a door. I think of the New England houses of my childhood with giant blocks of granite instead of stoops outside the doors. Stepping up into or down out of a house high up on its stone foundation was significant, sometimes wobbly. A still stone sparkling sill said: this is the zone that’s both outside and in.

So many of our abstractions that have to do with mind, understanding, and perception still sink their roots into the physical world – the world of the body: (the hand) grasping a concept, (the hand again) reaching out to someone to get in touch, getting it, stepping up, facing up to it, and so on. Crossing a threshold is decisive: you were outside, and now you’re inside, in a new atmosphere, setting, context; or it is the point at which discomfort becomes pain, a drug flips from medicine to poison, a transformation occurs that can’t be reversed. In either sense, a threshold marks a change in consciousness.

In the word’s recorded history, centuries and perhaps millennia went by before the piece of stone or timber in a door transformed into an abstraction of transformation. The word appears – in slab form – in Old English and is associated with threshing. After the Boethius citation in the OED, solidly a doorway, nearly a thousand years pass before the word abstracts into a meaning closer to “level of intensity” or point which must be passed for an experience to happen.

Rituals are thresholds. I don’t mean ritual in the common sense of habit, not tooth brushing or pillow fluffing, but in the sense described by Keith Dowman in his introduction to the text ‘A Garland of Vision’ in The Flight of the Garuda: Tibetan yogis perform acts of “ritual magic” – which is an “application of the interaction between special environmental conditions and controlled mental states” (132). He’s describing the acts the monks perform, such as preparing the temple or making a mandala, that transform a place and prepare the mind for transformation. The transformative magic of ritual is a threshold.

Pass through this door and enter a different reality. Open one of Blake’s doors of perception. That’s what rituals do. You know when you’ve crossed the threshold. But do you know when you’re about to step over it? How do you know exactly where it is?

Thresholds can shift. I’ve been using Jud Brewer’s program, Unwinding Anxiety, and it has me noticing how simple it is to change the threshold of anxiety, to really look – or feel – into what we mean when we say “I can’t stand it.” When we say this about whatever experience we really don’t like, we’re standing unsteadily on a threshold, about to be blown over by a fierce wind that’s howling through the doorframe. But what is the wind? It’s our resistance to things being the way they are right now. And what is the threshold? Not a slab but the physical sensations associated with the fight-flight-freeze instinct – shallow breathing, racing heart, heat in the face, tightness in the chest. We can move the threshold by noticing these physical sensations as phenomena in our bodies, as flows of energy, and calm the wind by watching it very closely.

We can adjust the scale by stepping back: When are we in the woods? When we’ve crossed the road, crossed the line of ferns, stepped into denser shade?

Step back far enough, or come in close enough to experience, and thresholds drop away, or are everywhere.

Quote from: Keith Dowman, The Flight of the Garuda, Somerville, MA: Wisdom, 2003/2014.

thing

I was meditating this morning with Sam Harris’s daily guided meditation on Waking Up. He asks of the open-eyed meditator with feet still planted in the ground-belief in a continuous, essential self, “Are you on the edge of this sphere” of appearances? When I looked for “me” I found a vanishing point where all seeing and seen converged.

And where am I among the constant shifting currents and clouds of feelings, emotions, and thoughts? Is this me, this weather system? Where is the center, where are the boundaries? Nowhere to be found: Where is the center of a formless flow? Where is the edge of a cloud?

Again the precocious psychology of William James comes to mind – including his famous statement that “Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly” (145).

And so did the book I just finished editing, the English edition of Johanna Blomqvist’s Hyperreality, originally published in Finnish, which dropped onto my desk serendipitously, in that it entered the welter of questions and doubts already swirling in my mind about the nature of things. Its central question: “What is real?”

But I was thinking especially of some passages from James’s chapter on “The Stream of Thought,” in which he postulates the primacy of consciousness in what is real:

Out of what is in itself an undistinguishable, swarming continuum, devoid of distinction or emphasis, our senses make for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that, a world full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt changes, of picturesque light and shade. …Attention… out of all the sensations yielded, picks out certain ones as worthy of its notice and suppresses all the rest. (284–5)

Consciousness and its sidekick Attention make our reality. They do this by selecting, but how do they select? James says they only notice sensations that are “signs to us of things.” “But what are things?” he boldly asks. They are:

Nothing, as we shall abundantly see, but special groups of sensible qualities, which happen practically or aesthetically to interest us, to which we therefore give substantive names, and which we exalt to this exclusive status of independence and dignity. (285)

Indeed, the word thing has deep roots not in the hard stuff of so-called objective reality, like rocks, but in abstract, human institutions. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the root of “thing” was for centuries mainly of this nature:

Old English þing “meeting, assembly, council, discussion,” later “entity, being, matter” (subject of deliberation in an assembly), also “act, deed, event, material object, body, being, creature,” from Proto-Germanic *thinga- “assembly” (source also of Old Frisian thing “assembly, council, suit, matter, thing,” Middle Dutch dinc “court-day, suit, plea, concern, affair, thing,” Dutch ding “thing,” Old High German ding “public assembly for judgment and business, lawsuit,” German Ding “affair, matter, thing,” Old Norse þing “public assembly”). The Germanic word is perhaps literally “appointed time,” from a PIE *tenk- (1), from root *ten- “stretch,” perhaps on notion of “stretch of time for a meeting or assembly.”

Just as in its historical development, then, thing for James is a metonym for “the world” as it is made by human consciousness.

One implication of this is the undermining of “objective reality”: “A man’s empirical thought depends on the things he has experienced, but what these shall be is to a large extent determined by his habits of attention” (286). James is sounding a lot like Sam Harris here, who often emphasizes that it’s what we do with our attention that determines our experience and the quality of our lives.

On a recent weekend trip to the North Shore in Minnesota, I attempted to put these insights into practice one morning as I sat watching sunlight reflect off the wavelets of Lake Superior, taking the “dissolving view” mode of consciousness that knows concepts are secondary and light is both waves and particles.

A thing is an idea of a thing, and thoughts are things, as ungraspable as light, or clouds.

This doesn’t mean the rock I climbed later was so unreal it didn’t scrape my elbow and chafe my fingertips. But that how we experience things is determined by the qualities we attend to and thereby imbue with objectivity, thingness, reality. Feel the wonder!

Quotes are from:

William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, New York: Dover, 1950 (reprint of Henry Holt, 1890 edn).

permanence

In a free associative mood last night while reading the chapter of William James’s Principles of Psychology called “The Stream of Thought,” after taking a long walk around the lake while listening to an interview with philosopher Bernardo Kastrup in which he explained his theory of monistic idealism, which proposes consciousness as fundamental, I came to the question: Why do we strive for permanence? For things to last. For the one. To settle.

James is advancing an argument against the notion that we feel the same feeling of green every time we perceive grass – that the sensation we get from the same object is always the same, so green is green. No, he says; “a close attention to the matter shows that there is no proof that the same bodily sensation is ever got by us twice.” Instead, “What is got twice is the same OBJECT… The realities, concrete and abstract, physical and ideal, whose permanent existence we believe in… lead us, in our carelessness, to suppose that our ‘ideas’ of them are the same ideas” (231). All of our instant mental categorizing (a left-brain process of breaking the gestalt into bits, according to Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary) is to support that “permanent existence we believe in”: “The sameness of the things is what we are concerned to ascertain” (231).

Every sensation, however, is unique. Every experience has never been had before, and when we say we’re seeing green, we’re actually having a new sensation that the mind is rapidly categorizing as an experience like other experiences of seeing the color of grass. We’re seeing green grass because we’ve seen green grass before and it’s what we expect to see.

In “the dissolving-view-appearance of the mind” no fact that remains unchanged exists (230). This all may seem very obvious to anyone who has heard of neuroplasticity (which James described very accurately in this book from 1890) or thought about the truism of Heraclitus, that you never step in the same river twice. Change is all and everything. Every experience changes the brain; and the brain creates only new experiences.

These great phrases were all chiming with others I’d heard Bernardo Kastrup say in an interview, which tipped into an associational cascade… The mind is a flow of different feelings. We ascribe to qualities permanence, but what’s really “permanent” – from Proto-Indo-European roots per (forward, through) and men (remain) – is a fictive idea of the object as a solid unchanging thing in the world, as matter. We ascribe permanence to qualities to undergird our belief in matter.

Kastrup posits consciousness as fundamental – not matter, not the laws of nature, and not a dualistic combination – and imagines us as dissociated complexes or alters, as in a cosmic dissociative identity disorder. (Thanks here to Johanna Blomqvist, whose courageous book Hyperreality I’m editing, for leading me to Kastrup!) Consciousness is constantly flowing and changing, and hence so is the universe, which is a manifestation of it.

So why do we strive for permanence? Why do we want to believe in the permanency of objects? Why do we even believe in the possibility of permanence in the world of evident flux? Think of how basic this instinct is.

Maybe it’s because the belief in permanence is one route to meaning. Viktor Frankl said we find meaning through loving, serving, suffering (and believing our suffering has a reason) or making a work (something with the possibility of permanence). If we didn’t believe in permanence, in spite of all the evidence of its opposite, would we even care? We have to feel that our actions are directed toward and moving to some future goal. I love the way the etymology of permanence contains flow or motion within it – per, forward, through. It’s something that remains through flux.

Kastrup says consciousness is teleological; it is goal directed and might be called, instead of “universal consciousness,” “universal will.” So what is our telos, what is the ultimate goal of permanence, in so many permutations, we crave? Cessation? To become matter? This doesn’t square with the survival instinct… and yet it is the only inevitable end (goal) we know. At least we know it of others, or at least of bodies.

If we are manifestations of a consciousness characterized by ceaseless change, why would we crave its opposite and want to believe in permanence as a backdrop and end to it all?

Is it an ironic take on the fear of death, masquerading as a desire for what it represents, cessation. We long to arrive, or to settle, because we recognize, in Shelley’s words, with their paradoxical conclusion:

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:—
…
Nought may endure by Mutability.

What would it really mean to accept this? We can’t know the outcomes of any of our actions, and we’re happier when we accept we can’t control outcomes. There’s no escape from the feeling of will, from wanting, especially if this is the character of consciousness. There’s no way around the problem that we don’t know our end – in the sense of our meaning or purpose and of our death – or whether there is one. So we go on in constant flux, contriving various ends (goals) as we strive not to end, which is all we can do.

not stone nor green nor stair nor air

Some writers put this in terms of desire and love. As Anne Carson writes, in Eros the Bittersweet, in a discussion of Plato’s Phaedrus, the lover’s controlling wish to “freeze the beloved in time” (130) causes damage. “The ‘now’ of desire is a shaft sunk into time and emerging onto timelessness, where the gods float, rejoicing in reality…. When you enter ‘now,’ you remember what it is like to be really alive, as gods are” (157).

The same answer comes from so many sources: be present. And being present means going with the ongoingness of the stream, which is only hard because we are human and “forget” “the dissolving-view-appearance of the mind” is more real than the idea of permanence we believe in.

Quotes are from:

William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, New York: Dover, 1950 (reprint of Henry Holt, 1890 edn).

Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 1986.

flow

Last week, the lakes and creek rapidly thawed, and as I ran along the Minnehaha Parkway, I was thinking about flow. Defined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as a state of optimal experience in which the self-conscious self-concept (“the information we use to represent to ourselves who we are” [64]) drops away and the mind and body are totally, and happily, engaged in an activity. In flow, we experience absorption and “freedom from the tyranny of time” (67) in part because the “disciplined concentration” (41) it takes brings all information we’re aware of into the stream of consciousness that is moving toward our goal. And that goal is not extrinsic; the experience is autotelic, an end in itself.

Flow is the opposite of “psychic entropy” (39).

As I ran along with the water flowing over its frozen bed, I thought about how strong the urge is in us to arrive, get to a place where, establish ourselves, get set up, get to the bottom of, figure it out, have closure, reach a state, and so on. I think these are erroneous attempts to alleviate psychic entropy, and as we pursue these illusions of stability and fixity, often we’re only increasing our sense of disorder.

I’ve been working hard to deconstruct these myths of fixity in myself … mainly by reminding myself to relax and flow. It turns out, I was interested to find, that it’s the endocannabinoid system that contributes to these phenomena during a run. According to recent studies, it’s not endorphins that cause that happy, loose-jointed, flowing feel of ease known as “runner’s high” but endogenous cannabinoids performing their evolutionarily determined function of making running enjoyable. The anandamide – named for the Sanskrit ananda, meaning bliss – binding to receptors in my brain and nervous system reduces anxiety, making it easier to let go of thoughts that feed limiting beliefs.

This doesn’t always happen. Sometimes I’m fixated on some thought cluster, and I run for miles barely noticing my body or the world streaming by. This is only when I’m really dug in… One thing I’ve picked up from my brain-book binge, most recently The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, is that this kind of narrow focus and fixation on thoughts, especially thoughts that buttress the sense of self, is by and large a result of left hemisphere dominance, whereas the more open, creative, idea-synthesizing flow that happens at other times is associated with the right hemisphere. I wonder what running and all the brain-chemical, nervous-system, and physiological processes it launches has to do with opening up to a more right-brain, gestalt perspective, which seems to happen more often than not. I’ve always enjoyed this creative outpouring when swimming laps, too, and even work out writing problems while cutting through that wavering matrix of milky light.

The most wonderful thing about flow, and runner’s high, is that it’s ephemeral, a pull to the present moment, “flowing, and flown,” an opening to awe like the transient glow of sunrise…

sunrise over Nokomis

Quotes are from:

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”

helpful

There can be no question, none whatsoever, of making “helpful” books. (127)

It’s unlikely Rilke was commenting here, in a letter, on books written with the intention to be helpful.

Our bookshelves these days are glutted with helpful books – from the explicit “self-help” genre through management and leadership books; books for learning everything from languages to cooking; technical manuals; books on specialized subjects for popular audiences; and so on. Rather than these kinds of books, Rilke was probably talking about books he would write, books of poetry. The passage continues:

The help must not be located in the book but at best in the relation between the reader and the book: there in this space that remains between the one who reads and the book (this peculiar space, which finds its equivalent in the imaginary space of painting and the spatiality that surrounds and is governed by a sculpture) the misunderstanding of assistance might become a transparent event. (127-128)

I don’t know the context of these comments, since they come in an extract selected and translated by Ulrich Baer for the beautiful book, Letters on Life, but there’s a lot of richness to delve into here. Rilke is instructing readers not to expect “help” from literature. Sometimes we read for the aesthetic experience, the pleasure of catharsis or simple appreciation; sometimes we’re seeking something – aesthetic or spiritual transformation.

But this seeking is based on a “misunderstanding” of the experience of reading and of what a book is. This misunderstanding instrumentalizes literature, gives it utility (to be helpful), which reduces it according to a left-brained, narrow-minded, mechanistic worldview.

“Help” is an intervention from some external agent that transforms a problem, causes a change. Help enables change for the better. Help is specific to the problem. Help cannot be found in books but “at best” – if it’s found at all – in that “peculiar space” constituted by the book’s contents interacting with the reader’s mind state, in the space where meaning is made. This space is characterized by both what the book holds and what needs, wishes, desires, psychic states, levels of maturity, cultural references, knowledge, context, etc. the readers brings to the experience of reading. If this mesh of criss-crossing energies and priors meet an articulation in the book and this meeting yields meaning, then the need, the urgency with which the reader came to the book and which energizes that space between can relax, relent, feel nourished, and the reader may find the book “helpful” in that it releases energy and loosens tension.

A “transparent event” in contrast to “help” is something that can’t be sought. You can come to a book or work of art with a readiness, an openness, a vague expectancy, and a wish for aesthetic enjoyment, but you don’t know if you’ll have an “event.” What is an event? It’s a demarcation of time when something of significance occurred, a happening with a beginning and end, a time marked out from the flow of undifferentiated moments by its clear significance.

Transparency is clear; it can be seen through, understood. So a transparent event is a moment of understanding, of insight; a moment of vision. These are the joys of reading. And they occur in the space between the work of art and the perceiving subject.

This space has a corollary with the space between the work and the author, and the “misunderstanding of assistance” is like the misattribution of the meaning of a work to the person who wrote it. I’m reminded of what Foucault called “the author function” (in “What Is an Author?” – an essay I learned and mined and loved during the dissertation years):

It would be just as wrong to equate the author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker; the author function is carried out and operates in the scission itself, in this division and distance. (112)

Just as finding help in a book and calling the book helpful is a misattribution, our attribution of originality or the source of meanings to the “‘creative’ power” (110) of an author is mistaken:

…these aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions that we practice. (110)

In overlooking the gap, the space between, we are limiting and narrowing experience and meaning. “The author,” Foucault admonishes, “is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning” (119). The idea that an author’s intent (maybe to be helpful) is conveyed directly into the book (making it a helpful book) limits the potential for a “transparent event” to occur.

Quotes from:

Rilke, Rainer Maria, Letters on Life, ed. and trans. Ulrich Baer, New York: Modern Library.

Foucault, Michel, “What Is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, New York: Pantheon Books.