Encouragement to Keep the Mistakes

Robin Romm discussing writing programs Michael Silverblatt of KCRW’s Bookworm (3.26.09). She has written a collection of short stories (The Mother Garden) and a memoir (The Mercy Papers), both fueled by the experience of her mother’s death from cancer.

Robin Romm: I didn’t have a lot of expectations. I didn’t know what would be up for the taking. And what I found at San Francisco State were a lot of faculty members who were interested in new ways of approaching the creative life, who had sort of gotten away from workshop. And I didn’t take too many workshops actually. I spent more of my time in classes generating work and finding ways to look at the world—to learn to stare and to go deeper.

And for me, graduate school was this very interesting pause in my life where I could scrapple with what was going on for me emotionally, intellectually and try to get that down on paper somehow. And it was less about nit picking a sentence and making it conform to something.

And interestingly when I first met my editor on the phone, she said, “Did you take workshops?” And I said, “Not very many.” And she said, “I can tell. These have the quality that they’re different from a lot of the stories that I see. They’re rawer. They have edges and sharp places.” And she meant that as a compliment not a criticism.

I do think that the writing workshop is a great place to generate work and to get feedback on your work, but it has its limits, too.

Michael Silverblatt: It interests me because I have said and I think it’s true that what a young writer needs is encouragement to keep the mistakes. That what people are calling the mistakes are probably the sounds and insights that make the writing strange and individual. And that making sure that the writing is all mistake is the process of finding your own voice.

• Read an excerpt from The Mercy Papers.
• Poets & Writers interview (1.30.09)

The Ability to Be Still

Excerpts from Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle:

Silence is helpful, but you don’t need it in order to find stillness. Even when there is noise, you can be aware of the stillness underneath the noise, of the space in which the noise arises. That is the inner space of pure awareness, consciousness itself.

You can become aware of awareness as the background to all your sense perceptions, all your thinking. Becoming aware of awareness is the arising of inner stillness.

* * * * *

Any disturbing noise can be as helpful as silence. How? By dropping your inner resistance to the noise, by allowing it to be as it is, this acceptance also takes you into that realm of inner peace that is stillness.

Whenever you deeply accept this moment as it is—no matter what form it takes—you are still, you are at peace.

* * * * *

Pay attention to the gap—the gap between two thoughts, the brief, silent space between words in a conversation, between the notes of a piano or flute, or the gap between the in-breath and out-breath.

When you pay attention to those gaps, awareness of “something” becomes—just awareness. The formless dimension of pure consciousness arises from within you and replaces identification with form.

* * * * *

Do you need more knowledge? Is more information going to save the world, or faster computers, more scientific or intellectual analysis? Is it not wisdom that humanity needs most at this time?

But what is wisdom and where is it to be found? Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and just listen. No more is needed. Being still, looking, and listening activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you. Let stillness direct your words and actions.

[This handout contains is a summary of strategies developed by Shinzen Young designed to support experiencing these insights directly.]

Forgetting and Remembering the Self

Quotes from Zen master Mitsunen (Lou Nordstrom) excerpted from “Enlightenment Therapy,” by Chip Brown, The New York Times Magazine (April 26, 2009):

“The Zen experience of forgetting the self was very natural to me…I had already been engaged in forgetting and abandoning the self in my childhood, which was filled with the fear of how unreal things seemed. But that forgetting was pathological. I always had some deeper sense that I wasn’t really there, that my life and my marriages didn’t seem real. In therapy with Jeffrey [Rubin] I began to realize this feeling of invisibility wasn’t just a peculiar experience but was maybe the central theme of my life. It was connected to my having ‘ability’ as a Zen student and to my being able to have a precocious enlightenment experience. In a sense it was as if Zen chose me rather than that I chose Zen.”

“One of the most important insights I got from therapy with Jeffrey is that subconsciously I want the depth of my suffering to be witnessed by someone. I want to be seen for what a strange fellow I am. As a young guy I got off on the sense of being different. There was some arrogance and elitism in it. The positive spin of the surreal nature of my childhood was that there must have been some special destiny for me. To give up tenure, to become a monk, I embraced an aggrandized narrative. What Jeffrey has done is indicate that forgetting the self is not a constructive approach. What one needs to do from a psychoanalytic perspective is remember the self.”

“As a boy I consciously constructed this idea that I’m in a situation that makes no sense whatsoever. The only meaning I can glean from it is that there may be some kind of completely different life in store for me. There will be a compensation. I am owed.”

“This abandoned life of mine is like the abandoned boy, and I am the mother I never had who returns to claim that life and embrace it. It is a source of great pathos to reflect that without the therapy experience I might have died without having been reunited with my life! And in that sense, without having truly lived.”

Ideas Are Like Fish

“There’s billions of ideas. Just gotta catch ‘em.”

~ David Lynch, from David Lynch Foundation Television

Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

Married to Amazement

When Death Comes
by Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

As If For The First Time

My Name
by Mark Strand, from New Selected Poems

Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.

Momentary Playthings of Recognition

Some Playthings
by John Hollander, from A Draft of Light

A trembling brown bird
standing in the high grass turns
out to be a blown

oakleaf after all.
Was the leaf playing bird, or
was it “just” the wind

playing with the leaf?
Was my very noticing
itself at play with

an irregular
frail patch of brown in the cold
April afternoon?

These questions that hang
motionless in the now-stilled
air: what of their

frailty, in the light
of even the most fragile
of problematic

substances like all
these momentary playthings
of recognition?

Questions that are asked
of questions: no less weighty
and lingeringly

dark than the riddles
posed by any apparent
bird or leaf or breath

of wind, instruments
probing what we feel we know
for some kind of truth.

Hidden in Plain Sight All Around Us

Excerpts from David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address which has been recently published by Little, Brown under the title This is Water:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

...a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

...Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education—least in my own case—is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

...And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

...But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving...The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

...It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over.

"This is water."

"This is water."

Our Central Fixation of Self

“Nobody can really explain what the personal self is; we just feel it. It’s a visceral thing. It’s not just how we act and what we say; it’s our central fixation of self. As we see through it, we realize that the personal self is not who we are and that it was not ever anything substantial to begin with. And as we really see into our true nature, there is a paradox that arises: the more we realize that there isn’t a self, the more intimately present we actually are.”

~ Adyashanti, from Emptiness Dancing

How Wrong We Can Be

“The wonderful thing about the novel form is that it can accommodate lots of different kinds of stories. Just between the covers of a book you can gather them. I worry about the ease of fundamentalism in all its forms. The ease with which it enters our lives and we become certain about these stories. A novel does seem to be a place where we can let those fundamental stories unravel a little bit, because they're put into some sort of tapestry where they're participating with other stories or competing with other stories or different versions...and maybe not offer absolute answers. For me as a writer, I'm passionate about fiction's ability to render uncertainty...The novel is a great place to consider how wrong we can be about things...how we can make mistakes. Those are good stories to tell, aren't they? When the stories are mistakes.”

~ Joanna Scott, in conversation with Michael Silverblatt of KCRW’s Bookworm (4/23/09) about her new novel, Follow Me.

Little Emotions

“Don't let's forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives, and that we obey them without knowing it.”

~ Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo

Like Yesterday

“You must not count overmuch on your reality as you feel it today, since, like that of yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.”

~ Luigi Pirandello

[Thanks Alex!]

From a Bus Window

From a Bus Window in Central Ohio, Just Before a Thunder Shower
by James Wright, from Selected Poems

Cribs loaded with roughage huddle together
Before the north clouds.
The wind tiptoes between poplars.
The silver maple leaves squint
Toward the ground.
An old farmer, his scarlet face
Apologetic with whiskey, swings back a barn door
And calls a hundred black-and-white Holsteins
From the clover field.

Leaving the Doors and Windows Open

Jonathan Carroll on writer’s block. Read the rest of his essay at Timothy Hallinan’s The Blog Cabin:

I like to write.  I have always considered writing my friend. We sit down together in the morning and do our job.   But (and this is a big but) if my friend Writing (notice the capital W) says not today because I’d rather go for a walk, or coffee, or nothing at all, I say fine — no work today.  If that extends to a week, then so be it.  Like the wild animals living so oddly but comfortably in the gamekeeper’s house on the Serengeti Plain, Writing stays friendly to me so long as I let him come and go as he pleases. If he doesn’t want to stay in the house he walks out and I do something else like read a book or go to the movies.  I never, ever grab Writing by the neck and say you sit back down here and go to work.   I would never treat a friend like that, nor would I treat a tiger like that.  So why treat the thing I love as much as my creative drive like that?

I believe people get writer’s block a lot of the time because they panic when the flow stops.  Then they run around the house shutting the doors and windows, trying to keep their creativity inside and at work.  Bad idea.  I do think that if they were just to get up and walk away from their work for however long, a lot of their problems would solve themselves.  Some of you might say yeah but I’ve been blocked for six months — what about that?  I’d posit that it’s likely some of the block, maybe not all, is because you are scared and trying to close all your windows.  Which in turn has scared your Writing and made IT panicky.

A Reality Engine

From The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self by Thomas Metzinger:

The conscious brain is a biological machine—a reality engine—that purports to tell us what exists and what doesn’t. It is unsettling to discover that there are no colors out there is front of your eyes. The apricot-pink of the setting sun is not a property of the evening sky; it is a property of the internal model of the evening sky, a model created by your brain. The evening sky is colorless. The world is not inhabited by colored objects at all.

It is just as your physics teacher in high school told you: Out there, in front of your eyes, there is just an ocean of electromagnetic radiation, a wild and raging mixture of different wavelengths. Most of them are invisible to you and can never become part of your conscious model of reality. What is really happening is that the visual system in your brain is drilling a tunnel through this inconceivably rich physical environment and in the process is painting the tunnel walls in various shades of color. Phenomenal color. Appearance. For your conscious eyes only.

…Nor must your eyes be open to enjoy color experience. Obviously, you can also dream of an apricot-pink evening sky, or you can hallucinate one. Or you can enjoy an even more dramatic color experience under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug, while staring into the void behind your closed eyelids. Converging data from modern consciousness research show that what is common to all possible conscious sensations of apricot-pink is not so much the existence of an object “out there” as a highly specific pattern of activation in your brain. In principle, you could have this experience without eyes…

…it is not clear what counts as a whole experience: Are experiences discrete, countable entities? However, the flow of experience certainly exists, and cognitive neuroscience has shown that the process of conscious experience is just an idiosyncratic path through a physical reality so unimaginably complex and rich in information that it will always be hard to grasp just how reduced our subjective experience is. While we are drinking in all the colors, sounds, and smells—the diverse range of our emotions and sensory perceptions—it’s hard to believe that all of this is merely an internal shadow of something inconceivably richer. But it is.

Emerge

William Lamson is “a Brooklyn based artist, interested in photography, sculpture and performance. Using inexpensive materials and simple structures, he creates visuals that are mesmerizing and, in one word, playful.” An exhibition of his work will run from May 22 through June 21 at Pierogi Brooklyn.

From NPR’s Daily Picture Show blog.

[Thanks Scott!]

Knocking

I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside!

~ Rumi

An Actual Window

From “Natural Happiness,” by Paul Bloom, The New York Times Magazine (April 19, 2009):

Many studies show that even a limited dose of nature, like a chance to look at the outside world through a window, is good for your health. Hospitalized patients heal more quickly; prisoners get sick less often. Being in the wild re­duces stress; spending time with a pet enhances the lives of everyone from autistic children to Alzheimer’s patients. The author Richard Louv argues that modern children suffer from “nature-deficit disorder” because they have been shut out from the physical and psychic benefits of unstructured physical contact with the natural world.

…You might think that technology could provide a simulacrum of nature with all the bad parts scrubbed out. But attempts to do so have turned out to be interesting failures. There is a fortune to be made, for instance, by building a robot that children would respond to as if it were an animal. There have been many attempts, but they don’t evoke anywhere near the same responses as puppies, kittens or even hamsters. They are toys, not companions. Or consider a recent study by the University of Washington psychologist Peter H. Kahn Jr. and his colleagues. They put 50-inch high-definition televisions in the windowless offices of faculty and staff members to provide a live view of a natural scene. People liked this, but in another study that measured heart-rate recovery from stress, the HDTVs were shown to be worthless, no better than staring at a blank wall. What did help with stress was giving people an actual plate-glass window looking out upon actual greenery.

Body-Mind Connection

“Dancers from Moses Pendleton’s troupe, Momix, contemplate the green mind. The troupe turns ideas into action as they form their bodies into the first of several images created for this issue.”

A Free and Active Space

From an interview with Ann Lauterbach, “From the Periphery,” by Celia Band, Poets & Writers (May/June 2009):

In The Night Sky I write about being able to see best from the periphery as a kind of poetics. It’s easy to become romantic and idealize these kinds of abstractions, but I do think it’s pretty clear that when you’re in the center, you can’t see very far, and when you’re outside the bubble—whatever bubble it is—you see more clearly. The margin can be a free and active space. And in American poetry, there are hundreds of centers—everywhere you look there’s another center.

…I reject the idea of the muse because I’m not as interested in inspiration as I am in the riddle of making something. A poem is for me much more of an invitation to find form. Once the words are on the page, I have a conversation with them: “How can I help you become a poem?” A poet has to become the most generous and the most critical reader—it’s like being a really good parent. I might say to some of the poems in Or to Begin Again, “You can’t go there!” But they responded, “Yes, I can.”