Meditation
A while back, I asked for suggestions for blog posts. Here is one from a writer I admire, Kate Carroll de Gutes, that I think is pretty interesting—“How to maintain a spiritual practice in a social media world.”
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If feels as if you’re utterly emptied of yourself, then one day you feel yourself starting to fill up again. Or, maybe, you’re a dry stalk, and you feel some green, pale at first, coming back.
This round of chemo’s stayed with me for seven days. Each recovery's slower. I seem to be a bit better, now, but not quite “back.” What, you ask, do I mean when I say I don’t feel well? My stomach feels sour and icky, but the main thing is tired. Not an ordinary tired—a deep, accumulative tired. Not sure how to describe it. Example: Monday I went to the hospital for my weekly blood test. I had to wait maybe 20 minutes (unusual). Normally, I grab anything with print on it and read it, even a Sports Illustrated. But I just sat there, hands folded in my lap as if I were 95, waiting for the next thing. After dinner I stretched out on the sofa at 7:30 and didn’t get up until we made our way upstairs to bed. Gravity announces itself with a ferocity. I just want to lie down.
Tuesday I couldn’t even get through my little stretching routine in the morning, and instead of meditating, once again I went back to bed. I have to choose which one or two things I’ll do in one day. If I go out, I can only run one or two errands before I want to come home and lie down.
The first three days after chemo, I take steroids and anti-nausea pills. When that ends, I crash, and often have a little cry the next night. For at least a week, my mouth 
feels sourly metallic and a bit numb, especially the tip of my tongue. I seem to want salt and citrus right now; other tastes are either flat or flatly obnoxious. After years of eating salads with dinner, I can’t abide them. It’s as if I were pregnant. Things I want I really want, and things I don’t, I hate. Monday night I craved multigrain chips and avocado dip. I bought them, ate too many, felt sick and could hardly eat supper. So then my whole digestive system was in an uproar.
But what do you really want to know? How this is for me, how this matters to me? Didn’t Proust build four volumes on the meaning of the taste and texture of a madeline, the memories that came up when confronted by such objects of the past? I am not yet philosophical. It’s too soon. I can tell you that when I’m a husk of myself, I do what I do, one thing after the other, that’s all. My vision shrinks to this, and then this—not in an enlightened way, but dulled, self-absorbed. Blank to all but my stomach, or what I call fatigue, for lack of a better word.
I’m getting to know aliveness from what it is not to have much of it. I’m getting to see how it is when the world is small and then when it opens again. I am having a lot more compassion for sick or hurting people whose world has shrunk to the bit they can handle.
Nothing clever or allusive in this post. I don't have the energy.
I’m on my back. The red laser-beams have me in their cross-hairs. I’m staring up at where four ceiling tiles have been replaced with light-permeable photographs of an autumn scene, a creek flowing around a rock, rocks on the bank with yellow leaves plastered against them, a yellow forest behind. All is in flux. Or, this too will pass. I try to think what’s meant, who chose this yellow autumn scene instead of green spring or high summer. The autumn of life, maybe. Nah.The foot-thick door is shut with only me inside. The machine circles and steadies itself before it starts up with its soft noise that says deadly radiation is penetrating at precise angles intended to avoid major organs as much as possible. Fifteen minutes, every day, five days a week, for five weeks. I calm my outrage by reminding myself why I have to do this.Did I mention that I don’t feel well? I don’t feel well. The effects of last week’s chemo are still with me—vague, sickish nausea, fatigue. I started all this with a certain bravado. I would do this well, as well as possible. But now I feel tired and sick. My bravado has morphed into a kind of malaise. At least for now. Maybe a few days more away from chemo will help.
This painting of suffering is by an 85-year-old friend, Sally Mitchell. I think about people with chronic illnesses, and those who take care of them. The ones who day after day get up with the same aches, same nausea, same worries they went to bed with. Anyone can endure with an end in sight. But to slog on and on. People have so many ways of working with the mind, to keep from spiraling downward: “It’s God’s will,” “I’m tough and I’ll battle this thing and win,” “I’ll use my sickness to gain sympathy for others who’re sick.” The mind wants to have some control, even if it’s the control of submission.I’m grateful, I repeat, for my meditation practice. I sit every day, unless I feel too nauseous. I do this because it seems that none of us can get out of anything, anyway. We’re going to be sick, we’re going to hurt (psychologically and/or physically) and we’re going to die. I want to do those things fully, look straight into what is the case, not turn away into platitudes. It seems to me the most honor (attentiveness? recognition?) I can give this life is to live it fully, all its seemingly dark and light corners.
Oh, doesn’t that all sound great? Truthfully, I meditate partly because I’m in the habit. I slog on just like anyone else, I write what I can every day because this is what I do. I tell myself the same platitudes that everyone else does—“Come on, Fleda, make an effort to make life easier for those around you,” or “Buck up, you’ll get better later,” or “Smile and you’ll feel better.” My wobbly bicycle stays upright by use of whatever training wheels I can think of.Bonus: Wally's koan for today: Since birds eat worms, and you eat birds, do you eat worms?
As both a meditator and a writer, I wondered what Dinty Moore would have to say in his new book, The Mindful Writer, about the relation of one to the other. He sent me his book and answered a few questions I asked him after I read it.
Q: Young writers for years have been told to “show, don’t tell,” and to “pay attention.” Is what you mean here in your book a different kind of attention, different in quantity or quality in some way?A: Paying attention is always a good thing, but I think my book is arguing for a different type of paying attention. We can fool ourselves when aggressively concentrating on something into thinking ourselves to be mindful, but in truth, I think mindfulness is a letting go, a slowing down, an almost passive way of seeing. Before we can see what is really there, across the street, or in our thoughts and memories, we need to stop the process of super-imposing what we expect to be there. So yes, there is a different quality of attention when one is truly mindful. A softer quality. Certainly a calmer one.Q: I like the way you’ve used quotations by other writers to prompt your own comments. My favorite is from Annie Dillard, “Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all the case. . . .” I like the way you use this to point to Buddhism’s first reminder, that we are “free and well-favored” with this “precious human life” for only a short while, that we must use it well. Did you choose any of the others with specific Dharma teachings in mind? Or, I might ask, do you find that any of the other quotations speak directly of Dharma teachings?A: Oh, I think in one way or another all of them speak to dharma teaching, even the quotes from the famously Catholic Flannery O’Connor. When she talks about Grace, I think she is speaking also of enlightenment. When poet William Matthews says “The depth is the surface,’ he is offering a koan of sorts. Many writers speak of “just sitting” at the writing table until you achieve something. That’s different than sitting quietly on a mat, but not that different. The quote from George Saunders strikes me as worthy of the Buddha himself: “Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”Q: Another quotation I like a lot is from Margaret Atwood, “Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of a human head, but that is wrong. They know less, that’s why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.” Can you say if there is something you don’t know, that you’re trying to find out, in this book?A: The book, for me, was an attempt to untangle what I learned about writing through studying Buddhism from what I learned about Buddhism by a lifelong exploration of the artistic process. It hardly matters which came first, I suppose, but the parallels between Buddhist thought, especially the Zen concepts of total openness and vulnerability to surprise, the sacred smack in the middle of the forehead, and how artist’s speak of creativity are manifold. What do I not know? I don’t know anything. But I do think about these things quite a bit.Q: You say you’ve often been asked to explain how the Dharma teachings have influenced your writing. This book is, it seems, is an answer to that question for the young writer. Do you think, though, that the seasoned writer naturally leans in the direction of mindfulness? Does the writing itself teach us to do that? In other words, are there things we writers can learn, no matter what age, from the Dharma?A: The dharma can be studied and explained, but to truly live it takes discipline. Writing can be analyzed and theorized, but to actually create something fresh, you need the discipline of the meditating monk. The understanding of this perhaps goes both ways.Q: You say that rather than seeing mindfulness and Buddhism as shaping your effort on the page, you’ve come to understand that it’s your writing that has helped open you to Buddhism. I’d like to hear you say more about that. Other writers are committed Christians, atheists, Muslims, etc. What has been true for you obviously hasn’t been true for them.A: I can’t speak for the others, of course, except to mention what many have observed, that the pure teachings of Christianity, especially contemplative Christianity, are remarkably similar to the unadorned teachings of the Buddha. I am no expert, but understand this to be true of some Muslim beliefs as well. It is apparently true of Judaism. Atheists? Well writers need to be skeptical, certainly. They need to question everything they are told. In the end, there is no one path to God, or god, or divine energy, and there is no one path to creativity. In The Mindful Writer, I enjoy examining a possible path, and some parallel tracks.Q: One last question, Dinty, one that intrigues me particularly: If we really, fundamentally awaken, if we no longer understand the world in terms of separations (on an ultimate scale, not the provisional scale we have to use to function), how does, or would, that change how or what we write? Would it? Does it?A: Did you somehow think I had figured all of this out? Goodness, I am merely stumbling through my Buddhist practice and fumbling through my writing career. I do imagine that we are all writing from our enlightened minds now and then, birthing the occasional phrase or paragraph that even we, the writer, know is better than what we normally bring forth. Perhaps the answer is to increase the ratio between how many dull paragraphs we grind out with our everyday minds and how many startling moments we can bring to the page. I live for those unexpected flashes.
As a long-time Buddhist practitioner, I’ve particularly liked teaching Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I get to ask, “Is it true? Is ‘beauty truth, truth beauty’? Is that really ‘all we know and all we need to know’? If they have all their cylinders firing, students get curious about what Keats means by truth, where it can be seen, what it has to do with beauty, and what beauty might mean. Buddhists, of course, have been asking such questions for over 2500 years. If I take Keats’s assertion and question it from a Buddhist perspective, I get something like: Are there objects ‘out there’ that embody ultimate truth? Are there objects (art, music, dance, poetry, fiction, etc.) that can be deliberately created in some way to embody truth?”I’ve thought a lot about these questions. The goal of meditation is to see what is the truth, what is real. Not to “understand” what’s true, which assumes that truth is rational and can be reached by logic. Its goal is to “see” in the sense that truth can only be perceived, not explained. Isn’t the goal of all art to show us what we have no words to explain, a truth that’s embodied in the work itself, inseparable from our relation to the work? I.e., How can we know the dancer from the dance?
I don’t separate meditation in the Buddhist sense from the making of art or our experience as viewers of art. Take visual art, for example. Take a really abstract one: Jackson Pollack’s Full Fathom Five, 1949. Pollack said, "When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess.” So, there is Pollack, aware not in his head, but somehow in his entire being.And, too, as we look at the painting, what happens on canvas is interdependent with what happens in our minds and what has happened in Pollack’s mind as he made the image. What would that image be without us? We’re doing the work of making its meaning together. That doesn’t mean that it can mean anything we want it to mean. There’s the actual paint on actual canvas in a particular pattern. We can’t ignore that and drift off with our own daydream of what it might “be.”If the work is were more representational, it might be easier to imagine that art, artist, and audience are fixed entities, but just as we imagine we ourselves are fixed entities, long and close examination (meditation) will begin to break apart our preconceptions.So who is the “maker” of the art in question? There doesn’t seem to be one. The French literary theorist Roland Barthes said something like this in the 1960s. About literature, he said that the unity of a text lies not in its origins, or in its creator, but in its destination, or its audience. The author is “born” simultaneously with the text. Every work is "eternally written here and now," he said, with each re-reading, because the "origin" of meaning lies exclusively in "language itself" and its impressions on the reader.A knee-jerk reaction might be “So what? That’s obvious.” Or, “This is too, too precious for me to care.” But listen to what Barthes says as it might be put in Buddhist terms. The origin of the painting, says Barthes, is in the sensual experience of paint itself. We invent Pollack. Our minds invent everything, actually, through the compounding Buddhists call mind-aggregates, or, in the ancient Pali language, the skandas.Here is how we invent our world: we see (or experience with one of our senses) a form, we have a feeling about it (love, hate, indifference) , we start developing concepts about it, we recall other things in our past that seem to be like this object and we put it into a category. Finally, we run riot with our minds, fitting the image into all sorts of ideas, theories, memories, and random thoughts about it. The Buddhists note that this is the way our minds get confused—by building up this material, and then believing in all these inventions that begin to surround the simple truth of what “is.” (Our minds, of course, follow that path every moment. It’s our belief that what we’re seeing is true that distorts the truth.)Are you still with me? To see Keats’s poem from a Buddhist perspective, we have to move all the way through the poem (bringing it along with us) into new territory. There’s no object that is “made” by one self and “transmitted” to another “self.” In the first place, Buddhists deconstruct the idea that we are something called a “self.” Where is that “self” to be found? Of what is it made? When we begin to peel the onion, take apart our concepts of what a “self” might be, we find there’s nothing there that is independent, that does not depend upon everything else for its identity.And the same is true for all objects—all art. The work is and is not a “self.” It’s interdependent. Studying a painting (or a poem) in this way is essentially the same work a meditator does on the cushion: just letting our personal mind-games subside. And finally, after much time in looking and/or hearing, the object “as it is” comes clear. In the case of a poem, we enter into the words.Okay, if we are the artist, we paint. If we’re the poet, we write. If we want to come close to a truth, we have enough sense not to dwell among the concepts; we don’t paint or write in order to prove any idea or to promote an ideal. We make what seems right to us, what seems true to us. If we’re the audience for art, we’re its co-makers. We don’t come at it with our preconceived ideas. We look at what’s actually there, on the canvas. We don’t overlay our own meaning. We look. We look as if we were meditators. We simply watch our own preconceptions, our own ideas about meaning, come and go without attaching ourselves to them. We allow the art to be made in the relationship between our mind and the mind of the painter.And as the work comes close to the truth-of-things, the gaps between what can be said and what’s actually the case begin to be more obvious. It is as if we lowered a high-powered microscope on an atom. We begin to see that there’s more space there than there is matter. But as we invest ourselves more and more in the work, we see that the whole thing is simultaneously space and not-space. I could explain this better if I were a physicist, but even if I were, I’d have to just talk around it. Basically, language has no name for it. And it is really beautiful there. Physicists like to use the word “elegant.”How about this as a way to reduce all this abstraction to something Tweetable?—There is a stillness necessary both to make and to receive art.
