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.



BODY HEAT: THE NON-PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

Mary Dineen: Iris
 
“The question of the self: ‘who am I’ not in the sense of ‘who am I’ but rather ‘who is this ‘I’ that can say ‘who’? What is the ‘I,’ and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the ‘I’ trembles in secret?” ~ Jacques Derrida
 
All I’m willing to divulge is that certain events made the identity of my ‘I” tremble in secret. As did the reading about a dream I had a long time ago.

BODY HEAT

I browse through the journal I kept 

in 1988. Boring, my witty remarks,
my vivid writerly details;

a student essay I quote,
“The Underclothes at Hawthorne
Disaster Wing Thriftstore, Inc.”


I flip the pages, find
my “Los Angeles airport dream”: 
We stand at the window and wait

for the plane from New York.
It crashes into the terminal!
Woozy from the impact, I get up.

Robert is gone – vaporized.
Only his duffel bag is left.
I grope it, hoping it’s still warm

from his body. Moments later
I think, “I’ll call Andrew.”
In the journal I write,

What a marvelous dream!

Except I’d never exchange 

Robert for Andrew. Never.

*

Now I shudder. No jets had yet
plunged into buildings. Ignorant
dream, how could it not know

that Andrew was to be
my Disaster Wing?
My long letters to him,

stormy knots of clouds,
signed: “Love always.”
I still can't believe it:

to Robert I said,
“Andrew is my prince –
you are my reality.”

*

Only the body knows.
Only the hands make love.
My songless Orpheus

committed suicide.
The same autumn Robert
got married, a Catholic

convert, a metal crucifix
over his marriage bed.
I put away the journal.

One image lingers: in the void
of the demolished airport,
I touch my lover’s duffel bag.

I stroke the bag’s whole length, 

seeking the last trace

of someone lost – a ghost even

of his body heat –
That’s the sole detail
I have saved –

it’s what remains for me
of that year, not of Our Lord,

but of our groping blindness.

~ Oriana © 2013

The poem describes my experience quite accurately. In my twenties and thirties, I kept a journal on and off, mostly off.  Like a lot of people who journal, I never read it. One time I did try reading it, and found it boring -- all those forgotten, meaningless details that had nothing to do with my new “older and wiser” priorities! And all those attempts to be clever and funny -- who did I think I was writing for? Posterity?

And then it happened: browsing, I landed on the page that recorded my dream about a plane flying into the building of the Los Angeles airport. I was the sole survivor, touching my vaporized partner’s duffel bag all over, seeking some trace his body heat still clinging to the bag. I was thunder-struck. The dream came back as if I’d just had it, never mind the many years in between. How could I have forgotten one of the most powerful dreams I ever had?

Worse, how could I have made this cruel remark to the man who wasn’t my Prince, not the one I fantasized about every night? I still can’t believe it . . . except that the memory, once resurrected, would not go away. I can only plead that it was the innocent “cruelty of youth” -- not meaning to hurt another, but not having lived long enough to have acquired more compassion and understanding of life and love.

I’m horrified by what came out of my mouth in the guise of “honesty” -- back then honesty was on everyone’s lips, the highest value, far ahead of kindness. I plead I “wasn’t yet me”; that was my immature self, not my more enlightened later self, chastened by having experienced not only more personal suffering, but also by understanding how much others suffer.

Wiliam Blake: Job

*
 
THAT EMBARRASSING YOUNGER SELF 

Ray Carver has a poem about this dilemma of having to own one’s younger self:

THE AUTHOR OF HER MISFORTUNE

I’m not the man she claims.  But
this much is true: the past is
distant, a receding coastline,
and we’re all in the same boat,
a scrim of rain over the sea-lanes.
Still, I wish she wouldn’t keep on
saying those things about me!
Over the long course
everything but hope lets you go, then
even that loosens its grip.
There isn’t enough of anything
as long as we live. But at intervals
a sweetness appears and, given a chance,
prevails. It’s true I’m happy now.
And it’d nice if she
could hold her tongue. Stop
hating me for being happy.
Blaming me for her life. I’m afraid
I’m mixed up in her mind
with someone else.  A young man
of no character, living on dreams,
who swore he’d love her forever.
One who gave her a ring, and a bracelet.
Who said, Come with me. You can trust me.
Things to that effect.  I’m not that man.
She has me confused, as I said,
with someone else.

 ~ Ray Carver

*
I discussed this poem with my students. Half of them said, No, he is no longer that man. The other half kept saying, Yes he is. What a cad.

We concluded that he both is and isn’t the same person. Legal cases regularly bring up this paradox: Your Honor, yes, twenty years ago my client did commit a crime, but he is now a “changed man,” a pillar of the community, president of an important charity, a loving husband, father of three fine boys. What good would it serve to put him in prison?

I still don’t have an answer to that question.

*

TO BELIEVE AS THE HANDS BELIEVE

As for my poem, written the same day I found the dream in my journal, it too provoked a debate. Or rather, not so much a debate as a round of condemnation from friends, with me as the sole defense attorney. Now, my friends were not saying, Your younger self is morally despicable. They were saying that this is a bad poem. It’s badly written: the two men create confusion. “Why don’t you remove the other man from the poem and make it a beautiful love poem?” my most romantic friend suggested. Others seconded that.

It would have been easy to transform this darkly realistic poem into an idealistic one: my one true love, even beyond death. I knew that from a purely esthetic point of view, a shorter poem would have worked: I browse through the journal, find the dream but omit any mention of the idolized “Andrew,” leave out further developments concerning Robert and Andrew, and quickly proceed to the ending. Everyone praised the ending.

But I wanted to retain the duality. For me the poem was about that duality, including the duality of past and present, and the older self’s new understanding of the dream in the light of a more mature understanding of love. No, I was no longer that ruthlessly “honest” young woman, and could now say with Tony Hoagland:

What we’ve learned is mostly
not to be so smart --

to believe
as the hands believe,
in only what they hold. 

**

The other matter that interests me is the strangeness of memory. If I hadn’t written down the dream, and then rediscovered the description years later, the dream, which I now see as one of the most powerful dreams I’ve ever had, would be forgotten with the rest of the details. The poem would not exist. The unexpected vehement condemnation that the poem drew further burned it into my memory. “This is the worst poem of yours that I’ve seen,” one person said.

On a dare, I decided to read the poem in public the next chance I got. But in the last minute I lost my nerve. In any case, “you have the right to remain silent.” But the emotional storm assured that I’d never forget the once-forgotten dream or the circumstances in which the “bad” poem was born.

**

I’ve often reflected that I wrote my “Polish poems” just in time, when my childhood memories were still relatively fresh, and those full-throated Carpathian roosters were crowing, casting splendid echoes. The negative side of communing with the past through poetry was that this selective recall perhaps became more important than it should be. Accused of having created an unreal and folkloric Poland, I could not deny the charge. The Polish countryside had become a holy land to me. Any lost homeland becomes that.

I had poems about Warsaw as well, presenting it as a magical city. When I was in my teens, it really was a magical city to me, but I also knew the other side that my older self fully remembered as well. My most perceptive readers picked up the darker undertones anyway (not to mention that the darkness was at times in full view, since my maternal grandmother was an Auschwitz survivor). They also assured me that the poems “go beyond the country”: those rooster-crowed villages, the wheat fields and the old farmer turning into an oracle, telling me I’d never go crazy, had an element of the eternal.

But there was yet another aspect to having written those poems: sometimes I felt I carried too much of the past with me. Because of the poems, I wasn’t able to forget, and forgetting may be memory’s wisest gift. We daily step into Lethe so we may be free of the old life and ready for the new. Or, as another dream told me, “Every three years I burn my diaries / to make room for new books.”

*





THE CLOUDS ARE NOT ALONE

Yet just recently I had an experience that confirmed that not even writing a poem is guaranteed to preserve an experience or insight: it’s perfectly common to forget having written a particular poem, even a good one. Some poets say that it’s best to put away a new poem until you no longer remember it, so a year later you can read it, astonished: This is good!  I wrote this? Me of little worth and no account? (the Book of Job has a way of coming to my mind when poetry and po-biz intrude on my field of being)

I’ve learned to look at the “used” side of my recycled paper: now and then I find a poem I entirely forgot I ever wrote, and decide to keep it. But the last time I did that, I knew the striking and beautiful poem was not my own. The author’s name wasn’t on the page. I instantly emailed the poem to my Salon, with the question, “Does anyone know who wrote this poem?”

The same night, the author was found. It was one of the members of the Salon. She emailed me: “OMG, this is my poem!” She was astonished, and admitted to having recognized the piece not right away, but only half-way through it. She had entirely forgotten having written it, just as I had forgotten having read it. Here it is:

THE CLOUDS ARE NOT ALONE

A Navaho man said the rain is our ancestors
Our bodies, with so much water when we die

evaporate generation after generation
into clouds made of ancestors raining down

all those evaporating beings farther and farther back
through the dinosaurs and more

Everyone who came before rains on me
The tides from the moon are in all of us

with our waters pulling each other closer and farther
while the stars smash away, create worlds

Poems travel at the speed of light
from the page to my eye

from scraps of language written down
Sappho’s love pulses across centuries

~ Janet Baker © 2013

**

How could she forget having written such a fine poem? How could I forget having read it?

It’s not that mysterious. Apparently neither of us took the time to properly encode the memory. Not reinforced through deep attention, strong emotion, and/or repetition, the memory became inaccessible.  Life rushes on, and both of us simply . . . forgot. The poem would be lost utterly if not for the lucky accident of the recycler rescue.

The chance nature of this incident creates a sense of both adventure and peril. Hooray, a poem that deserves to live is now resurrected. But how many excellent pieces have gotten lost? Legion.

Here was a poem that celebrated the idea that the ancestors are still linked to us, nourishing us. I remembered Rabbi Steve at the Interfaith Panel on the Afterlife (http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2011/12/immortality-of-influence.html), saying that before life ends, a person needs to shed all the love s/he has received so it can be recycled. But the same could be claimed for knowledge and wisdom. All, all must be recycled. As Janet’s poem claims, “Everyone who came before rains on me.” 

Jaded reader, you may shrug and say that this has no doubt been said before in some other way; aren’t there too many poems out there already? The sites that offer a “poem of the day” choke with unending material; the Internet overflows with hundreds of thousands of poems. True, but how many of those poems are worth reading? Let’s be generous: maybe ten percent. At the same time, for various reasons, many truly excellent poems never find an audience. They slide into oblivion without a sigh, sometimes forgotten even by their author.

This is sad because poetry can be more powerful than any other kind of writing. I wouldn’t  have this belief if not for the repeated experience of someone from the audience approaching me after a reading, deeply moved, thanking me for having made him or her see something in their life in a new light. All good poets seem to have those tales of being thanked by tearful strangers; it’s what keeps poets from feeling useless.

Whenever I do a reading, I imagine that in the audience there is one person for whom a certain poem is meant. I can’t predict which poem and which listener, but experience has tended to confirm my belief that at least one person will be touched in a special way. And that’s also what makes the fickleness of memory and the loss of good poems so sad: the gift is not given, and the person who’d be ready to receive it remains untouched.

Not long ago I happened to be that person in need of a gift. Browsing at random through a book I received from a stranger, I came across these famous lines:

Loafe with me on the grass . . . Loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want . . . not custom
       or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

This was not trendy in Whitman’s time, and he had to self-publish. Imagine if it had been lost.     

TRUST ME: CREATIVE MEMORY

Igor Morsk

Because -- answered the foreigner, staring through half-closed eyes at the sky, against which black birds, anticipating the evening cool, were silently silhouetted -- because Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it. So the meeting will not take place  ~ Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

How do great writers create such compelling scenes and characters? Their secret is vivid details (Gustave Flaubert:“Le bon Dieu est dans le detail” -- “God is in the details”) Anton Chekhov put it this way: “Don't tell me the moon is shining: show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

Why does Bulgakov’s passage seem so “real”? Because of what one is tempted to dismiss as “irrelevant details”: the half-closed eyes, the sky, the silhouettes of blackbirds, the anticipated coolness of the evening. These serve not only to delay the humorous passage that follows, making it all the more funny, but also to ground it in the world -- or maybe to create a world we can see in our minds and believe in. 

Anna Goryacheva, Bulgakov’s communal apartment neighbor, alleged to have inspired the character of Annushka

*

In “Entrance,” Rilke shows that it takes very few details to create the world!

ENTRANCE

Whoever you are: when evening comes,
walk out of your room
where everything is known.

Your house is the last one before the infinite:
whoever you are.


With your eyes, which in their weariness

barely free themselves
from the worn-out threshold,

you lift very slowly one black tree

and place it against the sky: slender, alone.


And you have made the world.
And it is huge

and like a word ripening in silence.

And as you seize its meaning with your will,

tenderly your eyes let go. . . .

~ Rainer Maria Rilke (The Book of Images, trans. by Edward Snow)

Place one slender black tree against the sky -- “and you have made the world.”

(Shameless confession: I’m so reluctant to leave my study that actually I’d like to try Kafka’s advice instead: just sit there and wait for the world to come to me and roll in ecstasy in my feet.)

THESE TRUTHS AND CONFESSIONS

Typically, though, poets and writers aren’t as minimalist as Rilke in their creation of the world. Most like to bestow on the reader a proverbial “wealth of details.” Let’s take a look at how Philip Levine uses details to create:

THE TWO

When he gets off work at Packard, they meet
outside a diner on Grand Boulevard. He's tired,
a bit depressed, and smelling the exhaustion
on his own breath, he kisses her carefully
on her left cheek. Early April, and the weather
has not decided if this is spring, winter, or what.
The two gaze upwards at the sky which gives
nothing away: the low clouds break here and there
and let in tiny slices of a pure blue heaven.
The day is like us, she thinks; it hasn't decided
what to become. The traffic light at Linwood
goes from red to green and the trucks start up,
so that when he says, "Would you like to eat?"
she hears a jumble of words that mean nothing,
though spiced with things she cannot believe,
"wooden Jew" and "lucky meat." He's been up
late, she thinks, he's tired of the job, perhaps tired
of their morning meetings, but when he bows
from the waist and holds the door open
for her to enter the diner, and the thick
odor of bacon frying and new potatoes
greets them both, and taking heart she enters
to peer through the thick cloud of tobacco smoke
to the see if "their booth" is available.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were no
second acts in America, but he knew neither
this man nor this woman and no one else
like them unless he stayed late at the office
to test his famous one liner, We keep you clean
Muscatine, on the woman emptying
his waste basket.
. . .
“And the lovers?” you ask. I wrote nothing about lovers.
Take a look. Clouds, trucks, traffic lights, a diner, work,
a wooden shoe, East Moline, poached eggs, the perfume
of frying bacon, the chaos of language, the spices
of spent breath after eight hours of night work.
Can you hear all I feared and never dared to write?
Why the two are more real than either you or me,
why I never returned to keep them in my life,
how little I now mean to myself or anyone else,
what any of this could mean, where you found
the patience to endure these truths and confessions?

~ Philip Levine

I love the sudden switch to F. Scott Fitzgerald and "no second acts in America." Bringing in a real person, a famous writer, a colorful and tragic figure, lends further reality to the poem.

I also love

The two gaze upwards at the sky which gives
nothing away: the low clouds break here and there
and let in tiny slices of a pure blue heaven.

These are exactly the “irrelevant details” (but note how charged with symbolism; note “heaven” rather than “sky”) that create a sense of reality.

The ending feels inevitable (I mean this as a high compliment): these two are now more real than you or me. Anna Karenina is certainly more real, Gatsby is more real, Huck Finn is more real, Jean Valjean is more real . . . the list could go on.

It's done with details. And by letting us into someone else’s mind. In this case, Levine lets us into the woman’s mind. He tells us what she thinks, and we are hooked: she becomes real. She’s now more real, this “second act” Norma Jean (let’s name her after a glamorous, tragic actress; why not) than Levine himself.

CRYPTOMNESIA: A BREW OF HIDDEN MEMORIES

Demanding Reader, do I hear you protest, But Oriana, you still haven’t told us where those “vivid details” come from.

I think the best answer was given by Carl Gustav Jung over a century ago, during a time when most mental illness was labeled “hysteria” and mental patients were treated with cold baths, an improvement on the cruelties of the past. (Those who saw “The Dangerous Method” may remember that the special cold-water bathtub had straps so the patient couldn’t escape.) Amazingly, Jung explained hidden, appropriated, false and fragmentary memories in a way that makes sense in the light of modern neuroscience. His explanation also accords with Freud’s position, now validated, that cognitive processing is unconscious.

Let me quote from one of my own blog post, a great favorite of mine: what pleasure it was to research the material and write it!

http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2012/10/jung-in-land-of-dead.html

In 1902, Jung published his doctoral dissertation, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena.” He diagnosed his cousin Helly (disguised as “S.W”) as suffering from hysteria, a broad term used to explain a great variety of unusual symptoms -- in this case trances, fainting spells, and changes of voice and personality meant to represent different spirits. The medium, however, was not an actress consciously putting on a performance. The “spirits” emerged from her unconscious, which had absorbed and transformed material found in books, but no longer consciously remembered.

Jung cited an analogous case described by Théodore Fluornoy. Fluornoy’s medium described her past lives on earth as a member of a noble family in India, as well as her past lives on Mars. She even spoke “Martian,” which Fluornoy recognized as glossolalia (“speaking in tongues” -- ululations which do not correspond to any known language). The French psychiatrist was able to demonstrate that his medium’s tales could be traced to what she’d read, but later apparently forgot.

In 1905, Jung wrote an essay on cryptomnesia as a source of creativity. Works of art did not arise out of nothing; they were novel transformations of previously absorbed information or memories of actual events. In Richard Noll’s words, “new combinations of memories . . . or previously learned material are the wellspring of creativity.”

IDEAS ARE A COLLECTIVE CREATION

Cryptomnesia also accounts for cases of unconscious plagiarism. Jung found Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra to be strikingly similar in places to passages by Justinius Kerner. Jung contacted Nietzsche’s sister to find out if the philosopher had read Kerner; she confirmed that Nietzsche had read Kerner in his youth. I don’t suppose anyone really cares if a giant like Nietzsche unconsciously (or even consciously) plagiarized an obscure spiritualist author, but I was pretty stunned when I read about it. True, ideas do not arise out of nowhere, but are a collective creation more than we like to admit. We may stand on the shoulders of giants, but those giants may have stood on the shoulders of dwarfs. 

These days we are aware of the related phenomenon of “false memories.” In a sense, most of our memories are false, if they were to be compared to a videotape recording. No one is shocked anymore if a psychologist states that most things we remember never really happened, or at least they didn’t happen the way we say they did. Memories are only partly based on actual events and partly on what we have absorbed from books and movies and the stories told to us by others. The unreliability of court witnesses is legendary. Human memory is continually constructed rather than recorded in an unchanging form. We don’t necessarily consciously lie about our past; we select, embellish, and “confabulate,” according to the meaning that particular events have for us now.

(end of quotation from Jung in the Land of the Dead)

Memory is excitingly corrupt in its effort to make a coherent story. ~ Patricia Hampl

 

“YOU COME FROM ANOTHER CULTURE”

But let me get back to the critical importance of DETAILS. When I was a beginning poet, a late bloomer at 26, I gave a sheaf of poems to a young man I was dating. The next time he saw me, he said, “Those poems were a revelation to me: you come from another culture.”

I glory in the fact that I didn’t say what seemed obvious: “I thought you already knew that.” I was beginning to grasp the reason why those who knew me still didn’t quite “get it” that I came from another culture. People tended to assume that my childhood was just like theirs, complete with Mr. Rogers and the Howdy-Doody and the rest of the alien (to me) universe of the American popular culture. My poems supplied the missing details of a different childhood. Now that other world from which I came could become more real.

But another smart young man at the Beyond Baroque workshop took me to task for those “magical Polish poems.” “You present an unreal, folkloric country,” he said. John Guzlowski later called this a “golden memory,” citing his mother’s tales of the woods near Lvov as a lost paradise, their purity a contrast to the fallenness of America.

Compassionate Reader, please imagine several pages of response to this which I ended up deleting. Let me just say that there are many reasons why recall is selective, and recall after a great loss is particularly so. Childhood memories are bittersweet at best, and we keep that diffuse gold of forest sunlight just in order to survive. And details that get repeated become easier and easier to access.

Eric Kandel
 
Forgetting does not mean that the brain erases memories. It means that the access to them is difficult, sometimes impossible. For instance, I never manged to recall the name of an abandoned village in Mazuria, a name that I vowed to remember all my life, a magic word would allow me to enter the imagined past.

FORGETTING
Mazury region, former East Prussia

In the forest near the lake we found,
half-buried in white 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,


crowned with the tallest pine
where we sheltered from 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 golden dashes of the fireflies.
The village weathered into silence – 

a 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, April Snow, © 2011

Yes, the motorcycle rider existed, and the lake, the pines, the plaque, the rain. Not that they had to exist. Nor can I name that place, but that doesn’t matter either. It turned out that I didn’t need that password. Out of the great nowhere of the trillions of bits of information in my brain, one day I thought about that Mazurian summer. I remembered the rain, the bleached wooden plaque, the whiteness of the fine sand in a ribbon of beach (isn’t it mysterious how memories, like  thoughts, arise?). Detail by detail, I created a world. 

Vladimir Kush, The Walnut of Eden
##

Special thanks to Mikhail Iossel for the opening quotations.

THE WISDOM OF NO CHOICE

BIGHORN SHEEP
Never Summer Range,
Colorado Rockies

On the slopes of Specimen Mountain,
between patches of eternal snow,
a dozen ewes and lambs.
Horns even on the watchful females,
but the lambs not skittery –

one stops in the saddle of the pass,
stares at me like a child.
Then, near wind-twisted, green
island of krummholz, four rams –
triangular faces between

spiral galaxies of horns.
this is their acropolis,
this plateau of cloud and stone.
I crouch, creep up
until I can see the fused rings –

If only I could come
closer yet –
if they’d sniff my hand,
lick sweat off my skin.
Being human is exile.

I stir, collect my pack.
they grow agitated.
pressing through dense branches,
the fifth ram, the biggest,
steps out.

He walks over to another ram,
waiting, frozen in profile –
he surveys me again, then slowly
lowers his great scrolled head,
and they retreat. 

I too retreat, descend.
Behind me, the sky
pulsing with good luck;
before me, the great bells
of the thunderheads. 

The wind parts the grass,
combs it close to the ground.
I gather a few threads
of the coarse wool.
At least we are granted

glimpses, wisps
among thickets and thorns.

~ Oriana © 2013

**

I have had my glimpses. There is something sublime about suddenly encountering beautiful animals in the wild. Now that I’m pondering visits to orthopedic surgeons, do I wish I could repeat that hike? No. Been there, done that. And thinking of the joggers I passed by during my leisurely sunset stroll the day before -- the usual panting and pained gasping, the usual contorted faces -- I felt almost blissful thinking that this self-imposed torment would never be mine: I had no choice in the matter. This morning again I woke up feeling wonderfully posthumous. There was nothing I felt I had to accomplish, nothing to strive for.

I did, however, need to fill out a lengthy application. The deadline was still far-off, but I knew from experience that if I didn’t do it as soon as possible, I’d be haunted by the darn thing, my energy drained from more enjoyable thoughts and activities. So I decided to give myself no choice: I’d do it right away. Not tomorrow or next week. I closed those options. I filled out the application; it turned out to be quite easy and took less time than I expected. As someone observed, we don’t procrastinate because the task is difficult; the task is difficult because we procrastinate.

With no choice except doing it, I sat at my desk and did it. Now when I happen to glance at the large envelope waiting to go off into the mail, there seems to be something like the smile of the Cheshire cat about it.

As a brilliant neuroscientist I knew in Warsaw said, “We try to avoid a minor discomfort now, and end up suffering a much greater discomfort later.” 

IT’S WONDERFUL, ESPECIALLY IF WE HAVE NO CHOICE

Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist nun and writer, has a book called THE WISDOM OF NO ESCAPE. Sometimes just the title can cause a moment of insight, as happened with a different book, Susan Nolen’s Eating, Drinking, Overthinking. I didn’t have to read the book. Simply seeing Overthinking next to Eating and Drinking made me become aware that my overthinking was an addiction -- and an addiction can be overcome.  That “title satori” was a minor step on my way to a major satori about depression. Minor but important.

But back to The Wisdom of No Escape. Our first impulse is to try to escape even a minor discomfort, Pema Chodron states. Of course we have an aversion to pain. But if we put up with it and even get curious about something that appears unpleasant, we will gain, Chodron promises. If we close the door to escape, we may end up in a larger space.

Right in this life, we all get to experience heaven and hell and resurrection. And hell, major or minor, is sometimes a prerequisite of resurrection. Or, as Sartre said, “Life begins on the other side of despair.” When there is no escape, with luck we’ll eventually get tired of despair and being to move forward.

And sometimes life does it for us: escape is no longer possible. There is no choice. And that’s when something amazing can happen: we become quite happy with what we have. In The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen describes a crippled man’s reaction to the question about his happiness:

And this holy man of great directness and simplicity, big white teeth shining, laughs out loud in an infectious way at Jang-bu’s question. Indicating his twisted legs without a trace of self pity or bitterness, as if they belonged to all of us, he casts his arms wide to the sky and the snow mountains, the high sun and the dancing sheep, and cries, “Of course I am happy here! It’s wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!”

WHY “QUITTERS” ARE WINNERS

Sartre famously said that freedom is found in commitment. By closing the other options, we are free to concentrate on our choice. (Not that it’s easy to know what we want since the human brain contains multiple minds that often compete -- but that’s a separate issue.)

Heidi Halvorson explains that most of us want to “keep our options open”:

Given the choice, would you prefer to make an iron-clad, no-turning-back decision, or one you could back out of if you needed to?

People overwhelmingly prefer reversible decisions to irreversible ones.  They believe it’s better to “keep your options open,” whenever possible.  They wait years before declaring a major, date someone for years before getting married, favor stores with a guaranteed return policy (think Zappos), and hire employees on a temporary basis (or use probationary periods), all in order to avoid commitments that can be difficult, or nearly impossible, to un-do. 

People believe that this is the best way to ensure their own happiness and success.  But people, as it turns out, are wrong.

Why does keeping our options open make us less happy?  Because once we make a final, no-turning-back decision, the psychological immune system kicks in.  This is how psychologists . . . refer to the mind’s uncanny ability to make us feel good about our decisions.  Once we’ve committed to a course of action, we stop thinking about alternatives.  Or, if we do bother to think about them, we think about how lousy they are compared to our clearly superior and awesome choice.
**

After quoting so much, I thought, might as well be hanged for a sheep than a lamb -- let me be totally shameless, and quote from an earlier blog post:

Again I want to quote that crucial passage from James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code:

Extraordinary people display calling most evidently. Perhaps that’s why they fascinate. Perhaps, too, they are extraordinary because their calling comes through so clearly and they are so loyal to it . . .  They seem to have no other choice . . . Extraordinary people are not a different category; the workings of this engine in them are simply more transparent. (p. 28-29)

“Extraordinary people are not a different category”; it’s just that they have clarity about their vocation and a great loyalty to it. And this brings me to another article:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/strategic-thinking/201206/why-quitters-win

The title is misleading. By “quitters,” the author, Nick Tasler, means people who can commit oneself to one option and eliminate the rest. To use an extreme example (mine, not his), Frank Lloyd Wright also loved music. But he didn’t try to be both an architect and a piano virtuoso. He chose his path early and persisted. Architecture is a kind of frozen music – but we don’t need to go that far. He made his choice, and became extraordinary.

Here we come back to the finding that less choice is better, and no choice may be best (depending on the matter at hand). REDUCE OR ELIMINATE CHOICE. Keeping options open is not only stressful, but virtually guarantees failure.

But how can we know if option 1 is the best if option 2 looks yummy also, and option 3 has its seductive angles as well? If the pull of a single option is not that distinct, we have to make a leap of faith. I hate to confess how many times I simply tossed a coin . . .  but even that is better than sitting half-dressed at the edge of a bed, like a woman in a painting by Edward Hopper. Should she put on the red dress or the blue one? (Do I hear someone say, “But Oriana, she is trying to decide if life is worth living!” – Listen, I know what it means to be a woman. She can’t make up her mind about what to wear. The problem is that it all looks good. It’s the cumulative microtrauma of trivial choices that makes women so exhausted.)

Decisiveness: the ability to choose one thing, one course of action, while “quitting” others. Eliminating the stress of choice. To quote from the article:

The inability to make what Harvard ethics professor, Joseph Badaracco, calls “right vs. right” decisions can be a fatal strategic flaw. An otherwise talented manager who can’t bring himself to focus on one customer segment at the expense of others (but what if they want to buy, too!?!) winds up taking his team in circles, and his career into a rut.

At the heart of strategic thinking is the ability to focus on one strategy while consciously quitting the pursuit of others. Choosing what we want to do is easy. It's choosing what else we want to do that we are nonetheless going to quit doing that is the hard part—to build the school by stripping funding from the hospital; to develop this product while shutting down production of that one. As David Packard (of Hewlett-Packard fame) once said “more companies die from overeating than starvation.” The same truth applies to our careers and personal lives.

**

In the Western world, people certainly die from overeating rather than starvation. But I’m not sure if I agree with the statement “choosing what we want to do is easy.” For some people it is, for others it isn’t. Perhaps the author should have said: “choosing what we most want to do.” But even then . . . Try asking someone, “What’s the most important thing in your life?” People I know would sooner discuss their sex lives (or lack of them).

I do agree, though, that paying the price of focusing – sacrificing other attractive things and activities – may be even harder. Not particularly for me – once I have clarity, it’s relatively easy for me to be single-minded. But I’ve known people so immersed in a dozen attractive activities that they are always in a rush, frantic, unable to do anything at the level of excellence.

We live in a manic, multi-tasking, short-attention span culture. My most important motto is DO LESS. The less you do (but the more thoroughly you do it, and the more you enjoy doing it), the more you will accomplish.

Why? For one thing, you’ll be eliminating a lot of choice-making, possibly the primary source of stress in modern life. The future belongs to the decisive – the “quitters,” those who quit doing too many things.

Arguably the foremost problem in life is that we “can’t have it all.” Once we accept that, the rest is . . . well, not exactly easy, but doable. As one visual artist told me, “When you concentrate on one small thing, something huge begins to unfold.”   

NUNC DIMITTIS

Back now to today, the lovely overcast “no sky.” I’m pondering something recently posted by Max Flumerfelt: “Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” Knowing who you are and what you want to say is not easy for the reason I mentioned near the beginning: our brain contains multiple minds with competing priorities. Information overload makes focus (or we can call it style) even more difficult. I remember when I wanted to know all about astrophysics, and the history of great ideas, and art, and theater, and all the names of plants and animals, and . . . and . . . and . . .

Soon I was on the road to nowhere, my twenties largely lost due to trying to travel in too many directions at once. Yes, I picked up all kinds of sundry facts, a small portion of which did make way into my writing. Only later I realized that no, there is no time to read The String Theory and The New Yorker, see all the great plays and movies, and write in all the genres besides. And then there were long letters to friends to be written. Alas, all kinds of wonderful things simply had to go if I was to accomplish even one thing at the level of excellence. Anyone can choose between good and bad; it’s the choice between good and good that drives us to despair.

Life begins on the other side of that despair (Sartre again). The wisdom of “less is more” finally dawns. We grasp mortality, as mortality grasps us. A few years before her death, my mother started saying, “That’s not important,” dismissing most of the things of the world. It took me a while to  understand this. I think of myself as a late bloomer, but look! I didn’t have to turn eighty before understanding how little time is left, and how selective we have to get, how many doors we have to close. And as the doors close, what remains is infinitely precious.

I know I flatter myself by calling myself posthumous, above a life of distractions and straining to please (including pleasing my perfectionist self). And I admit that I can’t recall the specific moment when I had my “posthumous” satori. I remember the moment of the my big satori about depression, but not the moment when the sweetness of being posthumous first registered.

But being a writer, I can imagine it. I am in Europe, roaming in the streets of an ancient town. I walk into a lovely old church, shivering with pleasure at finding myself in the cool twilight of that stone building that rightly continues the tradition of Neolithic sacred places. But out of the silence, voice, above me in the choir. The singers are rehearsing “Nunc dimittis.”

How can I, a committed atheist (that was another closing of a door, and what a burden fell away from me), imagine an important moment taking place in a church? Because I take from religion whatever is beautiful. Buddhism or Catholicism, it’s all my heritage -- but I swallow nothing whole. I select.

And I select “Nunc dimittis”: now you let your servant depart for my eyes have seen salvation. This needs translation so that it would have a personal meaning: now I let go of the busy and distracted life, of striving, of trying to please. What writing may come will come without effort, both out of the moment and out of the past. Now my eyes see the path of Less so that something larger may emerge.

And now I walk out of the church into the hum and rush of the streets, but with a beautiful silence within me. 

Steve:

THE LIFE YOU MIGHT HAVE HAD

Hear the word of Lachesis, daughter of Necessity. . . .
let he who draws the first lot have the first choice,
and the life he chooses shall be his destiny.
                                                ~ Plato, Book 10, The Republic

Cries of seabirds lifting like needles
from tissues of mist. The brocade
of breaking sea. The faintest discernment

of salt. The silk of your breath spun
into cloth in early morning air.
The loom of the mast, the shuttle of the sail,

the quiet design of the harbor. The stone
of a house set like a gem in a fabric
of hills. The shimmer of lambent late

afternoon light. The weave of the lover’s
lavish touch. The rise and fall
of flesh, petals in a night-blue bay.

If only you had paused when Lachesis
spread the patterns of life like pieces
of quilt. If only, when she asked you

to choose, you had recalled the tangled
knots of the world, the groans of discontent,
the torn tapestry of your last life.

You might have asked for less,
settled for a gown of dreams—
for this, the life you might have had.
 
**

Oriana:

Ah, that gauzy dream life poem! Thank you for this engauzement! And dear old Plato with his gorgeous nonsense, as some Victorian remarked.

Some case might be made for choosing a “challenging” life, but nobody would choose, before birth, the horrors that do happen to someone after all: early-onset Alzheimer’s, for instance.

For me the alternate life was, for decades, what it might have been like if I’d stayed in Poland. It was easy to see myself having a ball as a student at the University of Warsaw, the city a succession of blossoms: lilacs, then chestnut trees, then linden trees. And after the lush summer in the countryside, a return to the golden autumn in my favorite parks. And love, love, love. One child more likely than two. And then vagueness, fog, Decembers when sometimes it's dusk all day -- and the knowledge that of course there’d be suffering, just different. When you change countries, you change problems.

In terms of personal happiness, I have little doubt that I would have been happier. I don’t know if it’s evident, since I never wanted to sound like a kvetch, but I suffered a great deal as result of my displacement -- as happens to most immigrants. Some stay bitter for the rest of their life. When I first met those unhappy immigrants, I swore not to become like them. Of course soon enough I was devastated and growing more and more bitter. I caught myself at the last moment, I think, not wanting to lose it all.

But is happiness the right criterion? Many people have asked me, “Would you have become a poet?” Possibly, but as a completely different person, probably one who’s more intent on playing with the language. I might be experimental, avant-garde. I had a gift for that, apparent already in childhood.

In any case, eventually I realized that it’s pointless to spend time imagining that other potential life, making myself miserable that way, rather than making the best of my real life. It seems almost surreal how long we can stay wedded to a doomed dream rather than commit to reality. 

Cathedral in Sandomierz, Poland


SELF-IMPOSED LIMITATIONS (THE PATH OF RENUNCIATION?)

Charles:

I think this blog has more wisdom than any other.

Favorite line in “Bighorn Sheep” is
"The wind parts the grass,
combs it close to the ground."

Love the so many pearls of wisdom starting with: We don’t procrastinate because the task is difficult; the task is difficult because we procrastinate.

This blog is so great. I think you and I intuitively have many self-imposed limitations to limit choice. That's exactly why we can get ahead in the world.

More people die from overeating than from starvation is also a truism.

“It’s the choice between good and good that drives us to despair” is another favorite.

Oriana:

Yes, the choice between good and good, and bad and bad -- those are the heartbreakers. But especially the choice between good and good -- that in-your-face announcement that you can’t have it all. Recently that has been hitting women more: that realization that you can’t be a super-dedicated professional and a super-mom too. Come on, hire a nanny. But in this country, it’s disapproved of. “Here you do everything yourself,” I was told.

I like your choice of favorites. Those are mine as well. Thank you.

One of my recent surprises was the gain in strength and focus once I closed the door on “theist doubt” (wondering if god exists after all -- not a Judeo-Christian god or any other man-invented god, but some unknown “real god”). Until then I didn’t even realize there was that dribble of energy going into the question, like precious water from a leaking faucet.

Long live self-imposed limitations! Facebook is a huge enemy of focus. And even quality newspapers and magazines, full of fascinating stuff that will nevertheless be forgotten almost instantly, since it doesn’t fit the framework on the ongoing major project. Fascinating, yes, and I could spend all day reading those articles, and not accomplish a thing.

When in doubt, there is a tool one can use: “red light, green light.” Before plunging into an activity, ask yourself: Does it serve my purpose? If yes, it’s a green light for go; if no, it’s a red light for stop. Soon all you are asking is “Green light? Red light?” After a while, you don’t even ask. You instantly know if it’s a green light or a red light.

Before I knew the red light/green light technique, I used to bypass intellectual distraction by saying to myself, “This is from Satan.” I’m not kidding. It served me well.

Now, nobody is on the path 100% -- except under deadline pressure. Of course now and then I too stray into the New York Times, say. But how shallow those articles seem after a stretch of concentrated work. And you know you’ll be going in all directions at once and not getting anywhere. Or, to change metaphors, we are dying of intellectual overeating, not of starvation.

*

I already hear a chorus of voices asking, BUT DON’T YOU BECOME TOO NARROW?

And I can joyfully and with 100% certainly shout back, “No!” The paradox of focusing in depth on any subject is that a whole infinity opens up. You narrow down, and get to something huge. Cultivate one garden, and you gain the world.

But if you don’t focus on anything coherent, all turns into dust. You are not building anything.

ONE BRAIN, MANY MINDS

Sarah:

Yes, it's all interesting... I wonder though in what sense you mean 'many minds'... I find that the most interesting - the thought that there may be 'many minds' within one brain, but I am not sure how you are defining mind here. You mean self-contained wholes, within a whole?

I am reading about the extended mind at the moment, in my PhD stuff, and inclined more and more to think that our minds are pretty much where we draw the lines (and how much choice in that matter we have is debatable, but the illusion of choice is necessary - the illusion of free will, and control - and also, limitations on the choices are necessary, as you point out.

I think it's maybe not a question of too much choice but of not bringing enough of the organism into play when we decide. If everything is on the one level, say the rational level (but not necessarily) then we have no real grounds to choose one thing rather than another - we can create arguments for anything. If on the other hand we bring all of our resources into play - it seems to me that our choices are 'automatically' reduced by our own 'whole organisms' (again, that's where we draw the line).

If we can live this way there is a lot more peace - eventually it seems you do not have to 'choose' anything, or if you do, that's because a problem has risen in the internal communication, and we can only 'think' or only 'feel'...when it all comes together there is usually a single outcome.

Oriana:

I am somewhat premature in speaking of “many minds.” Neuroscience isn’t quite there yet. I suppose you're getting at something like a "whole-brain response." In terms of traditional evolutionary neuroscience, that would include the reptile brain (survival), mammalian brain (attachment, at least in social animals), and cortical brain. This is an oversimplification that goes back at least thirty years, as if there existed little communication between those layers of the brain. Perhaps we need to include the extensive nervous system of the heart and the intestines as also a kind of "mind" (a word impossible to define precisely, but then the Catholic Encyclopedia is unable to define "soul").

I suspect that there are several “minds” within the cortex itself -- or call these subpersonalities. And perhaps the talk about "the highest self" and "inner child" and so on also has validity, but I doubt we'll ever be able to establish the coordinates of each realm, not to mention constant change and flow. All we know is that under stress we become more survival-oriented. As for subtleties such as my having a somewhat different personality when I speak Polish, forget it! I even have different moral values when I shift to Polish. As Ewa Parma said, "If you had stayed, you'd still write, but as a totally different person." Not sure about "totally," but sure about "different." (What would remain the same, I think since it feels like the core of my being: the love of books and ideas; the love of beauty.)

How do we integrate the many minds, the many subpersonalities? Your idea of listening to our whole being and not just to the rational mind is quite appealing, and when I seem to make a choice but my body shows discomfort I certainly “listen to the body.” But for me the integration is more about “being on the path” and not straying into every attractive direction. Then indeed there is hardly any need to choose: you keep on going.

So I am back to SELF-IMPOSED LIMITATIONS. When motivation is intense, I hardly notice the limitations, nor do I need to put any energy into enforcing them. There is also the question of building the habit of working. When Heraclitus said that “character is destiny,” by “character” he meant “daily habits” -- at least that’s what some scholars say, and that makes sense to me. Some people manage to accomplish things by manic fits and starts; I am the plodding type. (True, nobody sees me as plodding, since I have a relatively high level of animation when I am with people; but I know what I am like in private.)

I have certainly tried the opposite of limiting choice: hey, let the mind stray wherever it wants to. Hours and hours of browsing. It feels good while I’m doing it! I have a broad intellectual foundation and everything interests me, so I can flit from one article to another, from one intellectual blossom to another. I can’t complain about being bored! But afterwards: EMPTINESS.

The opposite is focused work. The kind of work doesn’t matter; it’s the focus that matters. I’m tempted to say: don’t worry so much if it’s the right goal; the important thing is to have a goal. Have something small and manageable planned for today, and something larger in mind as the overarching goal (that one can be somewhat vague; it will keep evolving toward clarity). “We manage best when we manage small” ~ Linda Gregg. The big goal doesn’t have to be fully known.

Doing something with concentration is not as easy as browsing. But afterwards, a feeling of accomplishment, of having done something and gotten somewhere. I’m tired but happy. I think of what I have written and smile to myself. And I know I will sleep well.
I noticed this already when I was leaving my childhood years. Playing began to bore me. And it puzzled me: why did work feel so much more satisfying than play? I don’t know if that true for everyone, but I know that my brain thrives on focus. 


*

Not that I feel “completely in control.” I’ll never forget the day when a neighbor gave me a newsletters for families of Parkinson’s patients. My father was dying of Parkinson’s, a slow, macabre death. I started reading 
“research news,” and became so fascinated that poetry couldn’t offer me anything that day, or in the following days. Soon I was spending my weekends at the UCSD Biomedical Library. I dropped poetry and gave myself to my new passion, which soon branched into hormones. And when I read a lot about something, I begin to write about it, so a new career opened up. For eight years I stayed away from poetry -- I, who once believed that poetry was such a strong addiction, there was no quitting it.

And then I saw “Shakespeare in Love,” with its divine passages from Romeo and Juliet. And I was a poet again, my “second coming.” Then came the blog and prose captivated me. So I know that if the attraction is strong enough, my brain decides for me. Resistance is futile. But ever since I became a writer, one thing held steady: I kept writing. The form and content have changed, but writing has remained the center of my life.