JUNG AND BUDDHA: SELF AND NO-SELF

ARCHAIC PENELOPE

It’s my waiting that creates you.
The tapestry I weave,
unraveling you in dreams,
is your secret map.

How you try
to read over my shoulder!
You are too close,
thinking you are too far.

Here’s a seaweed-dripping cave
and a sea-nymph’s bribe:
immortality, but nothing else
will ever happen in your life –

and you pick mortality,
that beautiful blood flower –
while above the ledge of bones,
the Sirens unriddle all.

At the cold mouth of the earth,
the dead greet you, arms of mist –
like an echo of the future
in their shroud of finished past.

Days slide off the loom of hours.
The moon sets, mottled with regrets
like a lamp with islands of dead moths.
Again you think of home.

Wreathed with horizons,
you want me
to stroke your neck,
stiff from looking ahead;

weary of women
opening like shores,
you want my body to lead
into the body of silence.

You beg to know
how the story ends –
and it is I
who tie you to the mast.

Oriana © 2014

**

THE INNER PENELOPE


What Penelope weaves in Homer is a shroud for the father of Odysseus. To me, that part always seemed unsatisfying. A shroud, yes, but it should be a shroud for Odysseus himself, and the weaving the story of his life? Weaving was often a metaphor for fate (and what is fate if not god stripped of personality? an “overmind” that designs your life, but couldn’t care less if you suffer or rejoice?)

Scholars suggest that Penelope was originally a fate-weaving goddess (as was Circe).  Assuming that there is such a thing as a personal CEO in charge of the sense of self and continuity of one’s life story, could the archaic Penelope be the Jungian “Self”? Spelled with the capital letter, the Self, like Being (not to be confused with being), has been defined in so many ways that Penelope the fate-weaving goddess, before she was demoted to Ideal Wife, could very well be the Self, the central organizer of memories and creator of a person’s sense of “this is what I am, this is what I stand for.”

Some Jungians have suggested that Jung wanted to say not Self, but God, an infinite consciousness (hence one of the definitions of Self as “the image of god within man), but was too cowardly to do so. After all, he wanted to be recognized as a scientist. And besides, Jung was always changing the definitions of his concepts. He may not have consciously recognized the Buddhist principle that there is no permanent self but rather a constant flow: each moment we are “born again” and vanish again into the emerging new now, but he behaved in a fluid, fluent way that points to a self (or selves — a person can have several) as a process.

I once mentioned Jung on Facebook. The response was “Jung? LOL!” Nevertheless, I find some Jungian cognitive gropings to be of value, at least in terms of leading to more discussion. “Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation,” Wallace Stevens observed — a statement that reminds me of Jung’s faith (some would say dogma) that nothing that happens is just an accident. “There are no accidents.” If so, then everything is connected with everything else — a perfectly acceptable idea that doesn’t violate our modern worldview. Jung’s theology of the Self tried to be the theory of everything. Perhaps we can find something of interest while exploring that black hole that seems to devour all definitions except that of flow: you can’t step into the same self twice. The self is a river that keeps on flowing.

Some think of the self (it seems rather silly to capitalize it; besides, in German all nouns are capitalized) in terms of memory. It’s that unreliable witness, memory, that gives us a sense of continuity. Odysseus constantly reinvented himself according to the listener, but a certain core of experience remained: adventures at sea. Lots of travel. A longing for home.

IF MEMORY IS WHERE WE LIVE . . .

But if memory is where we live, we must remember that memory evolves, a reconstruction involving things that never happened. People are known to steal from their other people’s stories, without realizing it. As we change over time, our memory changes; one can’t step into the same self twice. Furthermore, memory is contaminated by language, the explainer and confabulator.

Still, Jung’s definitions are so vague that we can stretch “self” to be an ongoing process that marries unconscious processing to consciousness. It’s a neural process, of course. Jung himself stated that the psychology of the future will be neither Jungian nor Freudian, but will stem primarily from brain research. At this point neuroscience recognizes the subjective sense of a continuous self that results from the activation of certain brain regions (“I sing the body electric”), but the whole question of consciousness remains murky. Some say we will never understand consciousness by using consciousness — the brain is just too complex to understand itself.

All we can say is that no convincing answers will come from either philosophy or theology (by the way, Freud used the word “Soul” — die Seele — all the time; Jung, embraced by New Age followers, reminded us of the Cosmic Soul, Anima Mundi). Ah, the soul! A lovely concept, formless, naked, totally elusive — still, a noun rather than a verb. Still, who doesn’t love Emperor Hadrian’s Animula, vagula, blandula? So we turn either poetry or religion for a “momentary stay against confusion” — illusory as it may be. 

bronze head of Emperor Hadrian, found in the Thames, now at the British Museum

We must patiently (Penelope again!) wait for the researchers to do their weaving and unweaving. Hallucinogenic drugs are being studied again, albeit on a small scale. But a lot of what we know about brain function comes from study of the impact of brain injuries — sadly, warfare and accidents can be counted on to produce much material. Brain diseases are another unfortunate source of clues. An Alzheimer’s victim living in an eternal now, knowing nothing of his or her former self; a schizophrenic who thinks he’s Jesus; a veteran whose brain injury makes him a stranger to his family — these damaged individuals make the need for brain research all the more urgent.

The brain! All this bewildering buzzing activity, only to be buried in the mud. ~ Virginia Woolf

MULTIPLE SELVES?

Neuroscience also suggests that there is no single self, much less Self, but rather several selves (seen as patterns of activity), each with different needs and priorities. The Jungians like to think of “subpersonalities” as musicians, and the Self as an orchestra conductor. This immediately brings to my mind a number of distinguished silver-haired conductors.

But outside of the Jungian circles, the multiple selves, or competing neural networks, are seen more as squabbling committee members — or even as unruly children. As a Facebook friend wrote, those are not mature adult selves, but screaming two-year-olds; let’s try to construct a meta-self to bring them to order.

Kelly McGonigal explains multiple selves as follows:

We are a collection of selves that have different agendas, different personalities, different preferences, different priorities, and we shift back and forth among these different selves. You invoke a certain version of yourself through the quality of your attention.

There are these collections of neural networks that represent different aspects of the self. I think it's so fascinating to think that the self is a process—all these different processes we are good at make up the self we think we are. The mind is always generating, composing, or constructing music, let's say, like an ongoing symphony with themes that come into play; sometimes it's the same old themes that repeat, but the music keeps evolving in a new way. This generative ongoing process that in a way is always the same, yet also always new.

“No self” does not mean that there is nothing, rather everything is always changing. It isn't so much a denial, but to believe that some part of you is unchangeable or fixed would be particularly discouraged from a Buddhist point of view. I like that idea, and it's something you can work with scientifically. It's consistent with neuroplasticity and epigenetics: the idea that everything that happens to you influences what gets expressed.

THE SELF AS A FICTIONAL CHARACTER IN NARRATIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Narrative psychology is a school of thought of obvious interest to any writer. Writers realize how a narrative keeps changing as the creative process unfolds. It turns out that we are all “authors” when it comes to our life story. We construct that story to try to get at pattern and meaning, at who we are and what our life has been about. A narrative psychologist helps the client overcome the rigid vision that only one story could be written about the person’s life. The therapist reveals other perspectives, and richer, more complex stories. Even having the client write in the third rather than first person tends to change the tone of the story toward more compassion.

Nietzsche’s “There is no truth, only perspectives” could be changed here to “There is no self, only different plots.” It’s not what happened, but what we remember and how we choose to tell the story. The telling evolves anyway; the therapist tries to nudge this evolution toward a story that benefits the client.

NO-SELF, OR GOING WITH THE FLOW

I remember my bitter disappointment when I began to read books on Jungian psychology. I liked the valuing of the introvert dimension and attention to the second half of life. What disappointed me was the idea of “individuation” and the “Self,” as I first understood it (before I knew that late in life Jung was deeply influenced by the Eastern tradition). I felt I was “individuated” enough — perhaps even excessively individuated. What I craved was less self and a greater sense of connection with others. I wanted community, belonging.

At the same time, my most common recurrent dream was of being in a house or a large apartment where I was about to move in, along with a congenial family. I liked those people and their well-behaved children. I liked the beautiful dining room that promised pleasant meals together and family warmth. But as I kept on exploring the new house or apartment, to my joy I’d find a room somewhere to the side, isolated, apart, a room I’d instantly claim as my own private space. Usually, just before waking, I’d encounter a threat to my exclusive possession of this special room, and felt I'd do anything to keep it.

So I wanted — and still want — both a great deal of quiet solitude and just the amount of emotional and social connection that didn’t intrude on my privacy. I wanted the best conditions for creative work without becoming a recluse.

Since I felt so keenly the isolation of the self, I became fascinated with the Buddhist idea that there was no such thing. The separate, permanent self was a delusion. As I've already remarked, you can’t step into the same self twice. I loved it.

I’ve also always wondered about god’s reply to Moses: “I am who I am” (Sum qui sum — so compact in Latin). Neuroscience suggests that perhaps the answer anyone could give is “I'm becoming who I'm becoming.” I think that constant becoming fits with the Buddhist teachings. It’s the flow. 



BUDDHA: NO SELF, OR ANATMAN

By the way, for the sake of precision, let me quote something on no-self by the Buddhist author, psychologist and evolutionary biologist David Borash:

“Anatman (“not-self”), for example, means that no one has an internal self that is distinct and separate from the rest of the world. Similarly in ecology, organisms and environments are inextricably inter-connected. Also, Anitya (“impermanence”) refers to the fact that all things are temporary and eventually return to the non-living world. Anitya has parallels with evolution, in that not only is every individual organism’s time on earth temporary but also organisms ebb and flow across time.”

As for any predestined “meaning of life,” let me quote Borash again:

“Both Buddhism and biology (and also existentialism) teach that there is no inherent meaning to life. We simply are, and that “we” or “I” or “you” or “he” or “she” is merely a temporary aggregation of matter and energy, destined (or doomed) to collapse back into the stuff of the world. Therefore, if we want to make our lives meaningful, we should not look to some outside deity, but rather to our own actions. In the final chapter, I develop what I call “existential biobuddhism,” which adds existentialism to the convergence of biology and Buddhism, emphasizing that there is no such thing as “the meaning of life” outside of how we mindfully decide to live.”

TRUSTING THE UNCONSCIOUS COGNITIVE PROCESSING

The essence of heroism is self-trust. ~ Emerson
 
I was also becoming more and more familiar with the experience of the creative process. There was no denying that the best, most “inspired” writing came from the unconscious. You only needed to “seed” the process — maybe write just one sentence or one line of a poem. Then what worked best for me was to walk away from the project and engage in some mechanical activity like sewing or housework. Unbidden, the words would come.

I also came to see that a lot of what emerged this way wasn’t really anything I could call “original.” Much of it was collective knowledge: something I’d read or heard or witnessed. I wasn’t a strictly separate self: my mentality drew heavily on the collective psyche.

I don’t mean to set up an unbridgeable gulf between Jung’s “Self” and Buddha’s “No-Self.” Impatient reader, I hear you complain that I misunderstand what Jung meant by the Self. The definition that makes most sense to me is that the Self is the integrated psyche, including both the personal and the collective unconscious. That’s fine with me as long as we understand that we are talking not about a “thing,” but about an ever-evolving activity — multiple neural activities taking place simultaneously, changing over time.

The experience of the creative process taught me to trust the unconscious, to “go with the flow.” In poetry, that flow has often meant verbal music. The sound of the words led me.

ORPHEUS TAUGHT ME

the first rule of survival:
When lost, follow the music.
I walked in a great city
as in a rain of April light,

the streets and squares
dissolving into glass and gleam.
I walked along the riverbank,
my compass the idea

that if I follow the music,
I will remember the sea.
Springtime, the city in torn veils,
train whistles thin

harmonicas of mist,
I nudged the larval chestnut leaves,
carved eyelids of a chrysalis.
From sticky lips of lilacs

I sipped a fugue of rainbows.
I squandered splendors.
How could I have known
where I was going?

Only the music knew.
Across cloud-heavy continents,
under the fog
-unraveled bridges,

the river waits,
and I begin to flow.


~ Oriana © 2014

CAN WE AT LEAST PARTLY DIRECT THE FLOW?

I think I’m really not interested in the quest for the self anymore. Oh, I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you’re older, I think, is that you really must make the self. It’s absolutely useless to look for it, you won’t find it, but it’s possible in some sense to make it. I don’t mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and to choose the self you want. ~ Mary McCarthy, The Art of Fiction No. 27

In youth we simply don't have enough control over our life -- we are too tossed by the hunger to be loved and valued. We are told to conceal that hunger because no one likes a needy person. As soon as we drop wanting anything from someone else we stop suffering — but we don’t yet know that principle. We don’t have enough money — youth is generally the time of lowest earnings. We are too insecure, not yet having any accomplishments to point to. What a privilege, to be able to grow older and wiser.

Still, let’s try to evaluate if Mary McCarthy is right. We can certainly increase valuable skills, and the increased self-confidence will create an “upward spiral” of benefits. Craftsmen are generally emotionally strong: they know they are good at something, and thus valued (not least by themselves) for something. And personality traits can be broken down to skills — or lack of them. Some people have learned to how to control anger, and some haven’t. Some are good at soothing themselves and staying cool in times of distress; others panic.

After I made the decision not to be depressed, I was so astonished by the results that I started casting around for what else I could decide that would significantly improve my life. After all, I had witnessed my own power to change — but not being depressed only brought me up to normalcy.  

(A shameless digression: I just remembered one of the steps that led me to drop depression. In a book, I came across the statement: “You can practice being strong, or you can practice falling apart.” I instantly chose to practice being strong. It was a life-changing choice — after decades of chronic depression alternating with more acute episodes.)

(shameless digression continued: Note that the statement in the book spoke about PRACTICING being strong. It didn’t treat being strong as a fixed trait: you either are and are not strong. Instead, it was a behavior. I always understood that a behavior could be learned.)

*
 
I was very impressed by the decision not to be angry made by both Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela. Obama noticed that young Afro-American men tended to be angry, sometimes to the point of making a kind of career out of anger. Since people don’t like to be around angry persons, that anger was an obstacle to success. Obama’s strategy was refuse to sound or act angry. He decided to speak in a controlled, rational tone. It reminded me of another man I knew, who said that all of his success in life followed his decision never to raise his voice.

And Mandela famously said that when he left the prison, he left behind all anger and resentment at having been imprisoned. Otherwise, he said, he’d always be in prison, always carrying the prison within.

But anger and raising my voice were not my problems. Resentment about having been cheated of the life I wanted disappeared when I made the decision not to be depressed. I had good impulse control, and could keep promises to myself. I wanted to become a calm person, but typical meditation like counting breaths didn’t work for me (I suspect that people who succeed are already calm — maybe genetically or maybe because they’ve had a secure childhood, or both).

And then I read something in my notebook which I must have read several times before, always delighted by it, but not otherwise affected:

“How did you cross the flood?
— Without delaying, friend, and without struggling did I cross the flood.
But how could you do so?
— When delaying, friend, I sank, and when struggling, I was swept away. So it is by not delaying and not struggling that I have crossed the flood.”

This time I wasn’t merely delighted. In my mind I exclaimed, “That’s it!” Not delaying and not struggling. Above all: not delaying. After all, the greater the delay, the greater the agony, since the undone is a thorn in the mind.

This time the meaning of the “flood” was personal: the whole practical side of life. “I resent anything that takes me away from my desk,” a friend said, and I instantly identified. Intellectual work is easy for me. It gives me pleasure. It’s what makes life worth living. But shopping, ordering online, driving to new places, making appointments, renewing prescriptions, filling out forms, paying the bills, doing the taxes — talk about resentment!

I even found myself developing a phobia about picking up mail: the unending  bills and demands. “I’ll open it in the morning,” I thought. But another day would come, with its own burden of mail, and the old envelopes still lay unopened. I realized that unless I acted I’d become one of those people who are too scared to open their mail, and let heaps of it accumulate, unopened, for months. So I decided to get rid of mail right away: either by recognizing it as advertising and instantly tossing it, or by opening it and paying the bill, or otherwise acting on it without delay.

And it turned out to be easy. By not delaying I wasn’t turning mere unopened envelopes into dragons. By taking action right away I didn’t have the thing hanging over me, intruding on my thoughts and draining my energy. If the task was large, not delaying also made it possible for me to divide it into smaller, more doable units. And if I learned to wipe away coffee spills with no difficulty, I could learn to wipe any spills in my wash-and-dry life.

As Mark Twain said, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” Once we’ve started, the flow takes over.

And yes, immediately there is resistance from within. After a lifetime of maintaining a self-image constructed around the contrast between the Intellectual Princess and the Nervous Immigrant, some backward region in the brain absolutely balks and asserts that this is the holy core of my “unique self” . . . It says the angst  dealing with a brutal medical receptionist is the “real me.” But that neural network will be transcended. Without delay. And by not struggling. By knowing that there is no “real me” — just a succession of me’s that have the power to change.


*

Leonard:

It’s my understanding that "I am that I am" can also be translated as "I will be what I will be.”

Oriana:

Yes, I've read that too -- I think the more liberal rabbis hold that view. Still, I could never quite get the gist of it, regardless of the tense. I know if I answered that way, in either the present or future tense, I'd be called a smartass. In any case, the Old Testament writers and editors were very clever here, refusing to have god label himself, keeping all options open. Too bad that the rest of the OT narrative doesn't live up to that level of sophistication (though I rather like the idea of angels coming down to mate with women and producing giants -- that kind of totally archaic level along with something more evolved, starting with the Tree of Knowledge, rather than simply the Tree of Life.)

Sandy:

In 12-step meetings, the chaos is often referred to as 'My Committee', and an attempt is made to develop a meta-personality to chair a meeting of screaming two-year-olds.
 
Oriana:

I like this a lot. A meta-self, yes, as a kind of ideal. The meta-self will be also be evolving with time, but once we drop the idea of IS in favor of EVOLUTION, of PRACTICING, life becomes easier. I experienced that when I dropped the idea of depression as a feeling, and saw it as a behavior -- and a behavior can be changed. Best of all, the desire to engage in this behavior was suddenly gone to the point of the behavior becoming impossible. I read a discussion of ending alcoholism in very similar terms -- the craving is no more.
 

 Tenthousandthings, Michael Divine

*

Michael:

The last year has been the first in memory when I haven't been obsessing over the Self, that pursuit toward knowing myself. And it occurred to me while reading your post why that is.

I have a slightly different take on what Jung meant by individuation--in my opinion having little or nothing to do with individualism but a settling into our place in humanity, where our connections, or tethers, are firmly attached. Thus, when individuated, we are more firmly part of, or participatory in, community, in family, in the processes of life. It's a coming home.

I'm home. Finally. And concerns about the Self have gone away I think, because I have arrived at Self. It's a beautiful place to be.

I'm glad you posted again. I hope you don't give up. I understand about low readership and that must be frustrating. If you do continue, please know that I appreciate your work and commitment to understanding and broadening our world.
 
Oriana:

I’ve given up on trying to pin down what Jung meant by either individuation or Self — he rarely defined anything clearly, and his views were constantly evolving. In his old age he even admitted that we are different psychological type at different stages of our lives. So we never step into the same river twice not only because it’s never the same river, but also because we’re never the same self. And by self I don’t mean just the ego, but the totality.

I suppose that you don’t mean: I have arrived at the Self, so now my personality is fixed, and ten-twenty years from now my habits, interests, values, my whole outlook, will remain exactly what they are now. But possibly you mean the kind of shift that I experienced regarding my poetry and poetic ambitions — how I came to see myself as posthumous, and that feels so much more peaceful. Obsessing about anything is awful, and while I used to call poetry “my glorious obsession,” the cost in terms of suffering and damage to health was too high. I don’t entirely preclude a return to poetry, but I know it’s unlikely. I'm quite happy with the essay.

I suppose that as with religion, people interpret Jung as they wish, some seeing community, others individualism, etc. I prefer not to conceptualize the self (capitalizing it seems at least slightly ridiculous) as a noun. If it exists at all, then only as a verb, a process. But that’s OK. I no longer have a need to claim that I am extremely introverted. I’ve come to realize that it depends on the context, and factors such as my energy level at the moment.

Will this blog continue? I’d rather not make predictions. I have another venue now, so my own need to continue the blog is not very strong. Now and then, a new blog post may happen, probably not as often as in the past.



THE HEAVEN OF NO DESIRE

MALAGUEÑA

Jasmine like blossoming moonlight
has taken captive the blue dusk.
I am fourteen, fifteen, sixteen,

the radio plays Malagueña.
Boats wait in that other twilight,
palm trees spread their black fans.

Years later at a wedding,
a middle-aged mariachio
sings Malagueña with such passion,

the guests fall silent as in a cathedral.
Few comprehend the lyrics,
but the meaning soars

in the arches of the vowels, held
so long they span constellations.
Maybe it never really ends –

life driven by desire
for a different life. You never
stop waiting, never,

a famous actress said in her old age –
she who we thought possessed
all we ever wanted to have.

The music cannot be undone.
It casts the human voice beyond
blue, into pure indigo –

not star jasmine, sparse
petals, but the full-moon
white narcotic flower –

as the lights on the pier
sink shimmering shafts
into the ocean’s dark love.

~ Oriana © 2012

Confused reader, I know that the title of the post is “the heaven of no desire,” while this poem speaks about the inevitability of desire. More shall be revealed.

I remember talking a friend about a woman we both knew -- let’s call her Betty -- and my growing frustration with Betty, who had admiringly promised to give me a poetry reading, but was ignoring my emails, or else wrote long, overly intimate ones detailing the storms of her messy love life, with not a word about the reading. I carried on about how I got no respect. My friend smiled: “You are suffering because you WANT something from her.”

The correctness of this shone like a million stars seething in the desert night sky. I decided to reach for the Buddhist cure: drop the desire. “There is nothing I want from Betty,” I began saying in my mind. After about a dozen repetitions, there was indeed nothing I wanted from Betty. Restored to calm, I carried on without resentment.

Within a day or two, I got an email from Betty -- still not about the reading. I waited a while, then answered it briefly. A longer email followed, with more love troubles. Again, I answered briefly and not right away. Then two more emails, still with no word about the reading -- obviously she never really intended to invite me -- but now the tone was respectful, ingratiating even. Again I kept aloof, she got the message, and that was the end of that “learning experience.”

I never forgot this miraculous cure, and the formula “There is nothing I want from X” became one of the best tool in my mental stress-management kit. “X” varied over the years. At one point it became “There is nothing I want from America.” At another, “There is nothing I want from po-biz.” Sometimes it took a lot of repetition, but it always worked. Well, almost always. (More shall be revealed.)


MARK DOTY’S “HEAVEN”

Primed by the my experience of the “heaven of no desire,” I fell in love with this part of Mark Doty’s poem called “Heaven”:

. . . I have a friend who sometimes sells
everything, scrapes together enough money
to get to the city, and lives on the streets here,

in the park. She says she likes waking
knowing she can be anyone she wants, keep any name
as long as it wears well. She stayed with one man
a few days; calling themselves whatever they liked

or nothing, they slept in the park
beneath a silver cloth, a “space blanket”
that mirrored the city lights, and the heat
of his dog coiled between them would warm them.

I knew, she says, I was in heaven.
Isn’t that where those beams washing
and disguising the stars have always called us:
the anonymous paradise, where there isn’t any telling

how many of these futures
will be ours? It was enough to be warmed
by steam blurring the café windows, to study
how grocers stacked the wet jewels

of produce and seem fed -- though the wine flush
would brighten everything, and dull the morning
of working a thankless block. She held out her hand
enough times to catch a torrent,

though little was offered but the sharpening chill
of the street lacquered by rain, perfected
and unyielding. It’s a little easier
for a woman to panhandle; that’s why

my friend needed the dog. Sometime,
when the weather turned, she’d go back home,
at least till spring. Longer,
maybe. But not before arriving at afternoons

when she wanted nothing, whole nights
without desire, since everything passing
was hers. Though she could not participate
in the mortal pretense of keeping anything;

that lie belonged to the privileged,
who hurried along the sidewalks
just outside the stone boundaries of the park.
And though they tried to warm themselves with it,

they still required those luxurious,
frost-tipped pelts, the skins ripped and tailored
out of their contexts. She knew she could lie there,
with her stranger, with the living animal between them.

~ Mark Doty, My Alexandria

**
One morning not long ago I woke up at perfect time to see, in my west window, the full moon about to set. Then, out of an east window, I watched the ice-blue of dawn sky enlarge its crevice in departing night clouds. I thought: not only am I posthumous; I am in heaven.

It was the heaven of no desire. The stranglehold of desire for fame (the true f word in the poetry world) was gone. I was gladly harvesting the poems I already had, using them mainly for my essays. As for the desire for great love, I have already had my share. I wanted my own life and not Prince Charming. And I had my own life, the quiet life that I loved. I didn’t want another life. I have indeed learned to count my blessings.

I proceeded to the computer and wrote these reckless words to a friend:

<< I've had this succession of insights:

1) I'm posthumous -- great love is behind me, poetry is behind me, writing jobs and teaching jobs are behind me -- basically all active life is behind me and all that was to happen has already happened; only writing the blog continues to have its surprises

 2) being posthumous, I realized I am in heaven, since, to my astonishment, I've managed to drop desires -- my remaining desire is to cultivate desirelessness

3) My first task is to love myself. Service to others will follow from that. >>

I should have known that the second “insight” -- “I am in heaven” -- would be an instant challenge to the gods, who’d quickly show me otherwise. And sure enough, within a few hours of my “heaven hubris,” an eruption of insanity followed -- more medical insurance craziness that I thought was behind me now. A new obstacle emerged! More phone calls to make, new bad options to choose from.

And it was impossible to say, “There is nothing I want from the insurance company.” Obviously, I wanted coverage.

Once this storm subsided and I resigned myself to the idea of “greed before health” -- the insurance company’s greed takes precedence over the patient’s health -- a new disturbance trespassed on my heaven. About twenty noisy teens gathered in the open garage across from my house to hold an advance New Year’s party. I knew this could go on into the wee hours. Again, it was impossible to say, “There is nothing I want from these young people.” Obviously, I wanted quiet.

My first happy surprise was that after I tremulously begged the teens to be more quiet and suggested they close the garage door, they did just that! And they dispersed before midnight.

The following day, the insurance problem was resolved in my favor. 

And my friend replied that she too was in heaven! She got there by remembering that she was loved -- and therefore was not suffering due to clinging attachment to any one person. This reminded me of a similar moment in a stormy on-off relationship with a certain man. During the second serious “off” period, I became involved with someone else, who was nourishing me with the loving attention and affection I was starved for. Then man #1 -- more handsome, more intelligent, better educated -- called. It was a tense conversation. Suddenly I remembered: “I am loved.” And instantly I calmed down. Softness entered my voice, and, in response, the voice on the other end. We ended the conversation in a relaxed and cordial way.

I think the secret is feeling secure when you remember you are loved -- or whatever else makes you feel emotionally secure. Then you don’t have any overwhelming needs. You don’t need anyone’s approval because you are already loved. And you don’t scare people away the way needy persons do. A needy person is likely to be perceived as a “hungry ghost” or even a vampire. It’s a vicious circle: the more intense your need to be loved, the less likely you are to be loved. This is the paradox of “Be happy, and the beloved comes.”

So yes, not having a grasping need is certainly the key to heaven, but there isn’t only one way to get beyond grasping.

Let me also tackle the obvious. I realize that the Buddha had a brilliant insight: drop the desire, and you no longer suffer because of it. I’ve experienced the wisdom of that psychological discovery on more than one plane. What I don’t know is whether the Buddha thought a young and anatomically correct person was actually capable of dropping desire, especially in the realm of Eros. I certainly would not dream of saying to anyone with youthful levels of sex hormones that happiness is easy: just drop desire; there is nothing you want from him/from her. Actually, you want everything, which is a dreadful mistake.

Let me clarify: certain kinds of desire are not especially age-dependent, but when it comes to eros (which means “yearning”), biology has the upper hand, and I mean the brain’s “here we go again” wiring for falling in love, madly, the amphetamine rush of mental mingling, and not just simple (?) lust. And even the most “pure” of those love circuits are still mixed up with hormones. Affection, no, but erotic love, yes, always, and in women maybe even more so. As I used to say, “You can’t separate soul from hormones.” On top of all the other crazy complications.

But even here there may be a solution, one my mother tried to teach me, and in vain. She said, If a man you desire is making you suffer, start repeating He’s not for me, he’s not for me. Someone better is coming. Likewise, if a job is not coming through, start repeating, It’s not for me, it’s not for me. Something better is coming. Now and then I remembered my mother’s wisdom when it came to jobs and “things in general.” But I never managed to remember it when it came to love objects. Hormone levels had to come down first.

Enough of that. Let me share a poem that commemorates the shattering of my early dreams, and the birth of the “greater dream”: to become a writer. And I have indeed become a writer! Not a famous writer, but once I managed to drop the desire for fame, I was filled with wonder at simply having a vocation and the ability to do what I love doing. It’s an unfailing source of joy.

RAINBOW OF FIRE
December 29, 1999

A sunset rainbow like a door of fire
opened the eastern sky.
To the west, fiery clouds
and the ocean with its million mirrors.

But the rainbow was unfinished,
an ascending fragment.
Beyond it, like a faint echo,
another red-shifted arch.

It was California winter,
our season of rain and roses.
I remembered a double rainbow
in full splendor, a jeweled gate

when I was a young girl
about to leave my homeland.
Now I watched a rainbow of fire
divide the darkening millennium.

Was the promise of the first
rainbow fulfilled? No. But from the ruins
a greater dream had been kindled: 
unfinished, an ascending fragment.

And I understood
why people burn their diaries.
Who wants to read about yourself
as a victim of passion?

No, something greater — a sunset
rainbow, a covenant of fire
at the end of a thousand years!
My imagination would not let it go.

But the dusk deepened. The rainbow
faded. I looked toward
the fading ocean, and knew at last
what the surf was saying.

It said everything, but mainly 
amen, amen, amen.


~ Oriana © 2013

**


The poem ends with acceptance, which creates a relative security and freedom from overwhelming needs. With acceptance, even a nightmare becomes an interesting experience. Perhaps instead of dreaming of “heaven” we should give thanks for the “difficult ordinary happiness,” as Adrienne Rich puts it. For me that happiness involves continual astonishment at what happens next. Not a boring minute in Oriana’s life! Amazingly enough, it’s true. 

ADDENDUM, SEPTEMBER 4, 2015

Need I say that the "greater dream" also got shattered? I had to settle for a more modest level of accomplishment — and for those flashes of great beauty that are perhaps the only grace amid the sorrows and disappointments. Seeing a sunset rainbow is one of those flashes. And that is enough.

THE WILL TO BLISS REVISITED

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

A pigeon flew in through a window

on the fourth floor and got trapped

in the sheen of the long corridors

in the large building where we lived.

My father caught him and handed

him to me. I held the bird tight

to my chest, then leaned over

the sill and handed him to the sky.

He dropped, a dead stone –

then wobbled, the wings

found again the art of the air –

and the pigeon wheeled

above the wide yard.

Flew away like the years.

But I still feel it beat,

that heart against my heart.

~ Oriana © 2012

My earlier blog entry, http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2011/06/will-to-bliss.html, I discussed happiness in terms of acting rather than thinking (“think less”). Recently, I have come across the work of Daniel Kahneman, succinctly summarized by the science writer Jim Halt:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman-book-review.html?_r=1 and a fascinating youtube video of Kahneman himself, explaining the experiencing self versus the remembering self: http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html

Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics. Surprisingly, he is a social psychologist. He “merely” showed that the model posited by classical economics, that of rational decision making by a supremely rational consumer and investor, simply does not hold up. (And I thought that everyone already knew that the stock market, for example, was totally “psychological” rather than rational; it was one of the first things I was told about capitalism: the euphoria, the crashes, the panic. I wasn’t told this by Marxists, but by patriotic Americans.)

If I were to summarize Kahneman’s findings as simply as possible, I’d say: we have two thinking systems and two selves.

TWO THINKING SYSTEMS:

System 1 is “fast thinking,” or intuition: effortless, largely unconscious, making snap judgments based on memory and emotion. It’s the equivalent of “parallel processing” in computers. System 2 is “slow thinking”: deliberate, conscious, analytical, laborious, rational (though not exempt from bias), step-by-step sequential (like “serial processing”), and painful. Your body is flooded with adrenaline – hence the dry mouth and dilated pupils. You can end up with a tension headache from using the slow System 2 thinking. It requires attention to boring detail, and who wants that? The IRS, that’s who. You can’t deal with an IRS audit on a purely intuitive basis: you have to document your income and expenses. It’s much more fun to trust intuition – to make snap judgments and jump to conclusions – even if intuition is right only half the time. Fortunately, when expertise enters the picture, e.g. medical training, the correctness of intuitive judgment improves.

One of the surprises of my life came in my teens. My father taught theoretical physics and advanced mathematics at the University of Lodz. One time, in my frustration over mathematics, which to me was the ultimate in slow, laborious System 2 thinking, and in particular with a monstrously complicated equation that was part of my high school homework, I asked him, “How come you know so quickly how to simplify an equation?” He replied: “Intuition.” A lot of training on top of a genetic gift for a certain field can shift slow thinking into fast thinking, the groaning and plodding into joyful intuitive leaps.

In a way, it’s like learning to ride a bicycle or drive a car. At first, we are in mind-body system 2: it takes a while to gain competence, and the learning process can be pretty uncomfortable. Once competence is achieved, we are – oh joy! – on automatic, unconscious of how we do it, freed to enjoy the sun and the wind, the trees and flowers.

Rather than engage my slow System 2 thinking, let me simply quote from Jim Halt’s review of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking: Fast and Slow in the New York Times, November 27, 2011:

System 1 (intuition) uses association and metaphor to produce a quick and dirty draft of reality, which System 2 draws on to arrive at explicit beliefs and reasoned choices. System 1 proposes, System 2 disposes. So System 2 would seem to be the boss, right? In principle, yes. But System 2, in addition to being more deliberate and rational, is also lazy. And it tires easily. (The vogue term for this is “ego depletion.”) Too often, instead of slowing things down and analyzing them, System 2 is content to accept the easy but unreliable story about the world that System 1 feeds to it. “Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is,” Kahneman writes, “the automatic System 1 is the hero of this book.” System 2 is especially quiescent, it seems, when your mood is a happy one.

I love cooking. I do it intuitively. A recipe serves merely to inspire me and give me a general direction. But why not toss leaks into the soup? What about dried shiitake, chopped into small pieces? Or, in the last moment, add a dash of cayenne? My intuitive soups turn into epics. Baking, on the other hand, takes measuring and timing. Long, long ago, when I was young and foolish and ignorant of where my true talents lay, I tried baking. I’m not saying my cheesecakes weren’t delicious – it was just that they were not fun to make. After repeated experience of realizing how much I hated baking, I decided: “never again.” Life is too short to do what you dislike doing – if you don’t absolutely have to do it.

Thus, in a recap of my previous blog entry, I advocate following your bliss: the more you can run on intuition, the happier you will be. And the happier you feel, the more likely you are to trust your intuition. In writing, the more you surrender to the unconscious process, the greater the enjoyment. It’s really somewhat unnerving to say it (I still perceive myself as an intellectual) that the less you think (using the slow System 2, that is), the happier you are.

TWO SELVES

These days we are always nagged to “be in the moment.” The Power of Now has sold millions of copies. Being primarily a poet of memory, I resent that. For me, it’s the “power of back then” – which, through the magic of writing, becomes the “eternal moment.” I understood early on that “what really happened” doesn’t particularly matter, and in any case cannot be captured; what matters is what we remember.

In addition to positing two systems of thinking, Kahneman posits two selves: the moment-by-moment experiencing self and the unreliable narrator, the remembering self. Again, to quote Jim Holt:

It is the remembering self that calls the shots, not the experiencing self. The remembering self exercises a sort of “tyranny” over the voiceless experiencing self. “Odd as it may seem,” Kahneman writes, “I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”

What Kahneman does not discuss is the importance of forgetting. Forgetting is one of life’s great blessings. And it’s our remembering self, the forgetful, inaccurate narrator, who lets details just drop away, so we remember what happened according to how meaningful it is to us in the present. Our present understanding changes the past. (Milosz discusses this in terms of the existentialist “philosophy of freedom” – again, see my past entry,  http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2011/06/will-to-bliss.html )

Some forgetting is of course unfortunate. The poem below makes me wish I’d written down the name of the village. But without my failure to remember, this poem would have not been born.

FORGETTING
Mazury region, former East Prussia

In the forest near the lake we found,

half buried in the sand,

a weather-scarred plaque

with the name of a German village.

We stared at the steep fence

of the Gothic alphabet.

Around, like a prayer for the dead,

the long shush of wind in the pines.

I repeated the name of the vanished

village like a spell.
I thought we’d always find
that greenest of all the lakes,

that path crowned with tall pine

where we sheltered in the rain. 
He put his jacket around me.

The needles shone with drops,

a forest of crystal. But I forgot

the spell – the lake nameless
among a thousand lakes,
the evenings hyphenated

with gold dashes of the fireflies.

The village weathered into silence –
the memory of a forgetting
I would remember all my life.

The name started with an A,
as in always, and ended

with an N, as in never.

In between, forest and wind –

the dead keening for the dead

in the amber forgetting of pines.

~ Oriana © 2012

**

Ultimately everything will be forgotten. We too will be forgotten. But, as the souls of trees told me in another poem, it’s not important to be remembered, only to be beautiful. 

Sarah (from Pietrusza Wola, Carpathia)

Interesting, yes. Of course it is also the remembering self that produces the phantom limbs – and the experiencing self which enjoys the real limbs, right now...and maybe this enjoyment doesn't involve awareness of  'the self', or need to.

I don't think Buddha neglected the remembering self – I think it was precisely this that he was saying did not exist in any permanent, reliable way. Which of course is no impediment to enjoying it.  He certainly saw the power of it, the reality of it. Confusing it with a stable truth or permanent foundation is the problem.

I am not sure about the narrative aspect of musing on experience – that it has to be like that – I'm a total introvert too, but I like to muse on it not in terms of story, or film, but in moments, maybe moments of selflessness too – they do get recorded somehow... when associated not with, say, films, but with objects...

Oriana:

I agree with everything you say – the experiencing and the remembering selves are entangled in a complex way. It’s a dance – a complicated tango, incessantly changing.

I too sometimes do my remembering simply by reviewing moments and images. But even if it’s just images, it’s never like looking at a photograph. I’m aware that remembering the images – or just having it drift by the mind’s eye, for some unknown reason – means creating that image according to what the meaning is now. Some details are automatically enhanced, others omitted.

I’m not saying that this is a conscious process, because we want to remember X but not Y, though that wish may play a role. And that creative aspect of memory fits my broad definition of narration. The type of therapy that interests me most is narrative therapy – how you tell a particular story, and how merely doing it in the third person leads to a gentler, compassionate treatment of the protagonist.

And yes, Buddha probably did acknowledge the remembering self – perhaps the only self that exists, but is constantly in flux as our memories change. No permanence to anything, no. And Proust too comes to mind – how a bit of cake can evoke a train of (some say much too detailed and thus unreadable) memories. 

The art of writing is to a great extent the art of omission. Simplify, simplify, simplify! What threatens to engulf us is the too-muchness of everything. How delicious to be still and close one’s eyes for a moment, and let something drift into the inner sight. It's Proust, but it's also Wordsworth, with his "emotion recollected in tranquility." May we always have the tranquility it takes for a rich inner life.

On a somewhat different note: I find that the remembering self functions defectively during depression. It functions in the service of depression. Thus, positive memories are blocked (at one point I was challenged to write down ten good things that happened to me; after being literally unable to recall a single good thing, I finally managed to come up with three, a tremendous victory!), while negative memories come up in enhanced color. After committing myself to not being depressed, I could track my recovery by counting the number of positive experiences I could recall. I wasn’t suddenly flooded with remembered happiness. It took time. 

Now, thank goodness, I can even ponder a disastrous experience like my summer nightmare caused by hyaluronic acid injections that were supposed to help my knee pain (my left knee was first wrecked in an accident, and then seriously harmed by a knee surgery that’s soon stopped being performed). Even though this came on top of all my other medical disasters, and could lead to a serious “Why me?” session, I can now reflect on the experience, seeking a blessing in the curse (“In every blessing a curse, in every curse a blessing” – those little mottoes come handy). Without the distortion of depression, I find my remembering self to be downright wise, or at least capable of learning.

But I also have no doubt that the interplay between the experiencing and the remembering self is quite complex, and it is only at times that we can tell “the dancer from the dance.”

Charles:

You summed it up in the last paragraph better than Daniel Kahneman and Jim Halt combined. A beautiful blog.

Oriana:

Thank you. Yes, for me the ultimate value is beauty. That doesn’t mean a dismissal of the remembering self in favor of the experiencing self. In fact I love to re-experience beauty by calling up the images and experiences (e.g. suddenly seeing a coyote pack run along a hillside, or, while hiking on Hurricane Ridge, seeing an eagle fly at eye-level with me just feet away). When I consider the remembering self, it’s not just about selective narration; the experiencing self comes into play as well, as if revived. I don't feel I have full control of what I see with the inner eye, "that inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude," as Wordsworth put it ("I wandered lonely as a cloud"). When I was depressed, that inward eye was the nightmare of solitude, flashing back moments of pain, or projecting suicidal imagery. But that is in the past. How astonishing to know that it won't happen again. How do I know? I "just know." My System I knows it, my intuition, so it's that bone-deep knowledge. It is astonishing. As I keep saying, my life has become a continual astonishment.