Koan

I got really shit-faced at CV's sister's wedding this summer. This is partly because my first year as an Assistant Professor, commuting multiple hours a day and also trying to keep my PhD project afloat, not to mention the grading as well as the not grading -- well, my teaching year left me with a habit. Of getting home around six and slamming a bourbon.

By summer I was well aware that liquor, while perhaps not an ideal solution for dealing with stress, was at least a solution. What's stressful about CV's sister's wedding? Well, aside from the normal social phobias that an introvert feels in unfamiliar situations, I'm a little stressed out by his family. I feel at odds with what they might expect of me. You know: I don't answer his mom's e-mail, and sometimes don't even open it; I fail entirely to mail Christmas or birthday cards; I don't eat meat and his sister farms pigs. Ex-girlfriends would be around; the many fine young nieces would also be in play, encouraging everyone to hang out by the pool. In, of course, their bathing suits. Plus, weddings. Anyway, suffice it to say, drunkenness occurred, and drunken revelry ensued.

Apparently at some point in the night CV and I had a disagreement. Words were exchanged. What I remember is storming off toward our hotel room, falling off the backs of my fancy shoes, insisting I didn't need to be escorted. Upon arrival in the hotel room, I dropped my dress to the floor in a puddle, ate half a (cold) veggie dog (the other half of which I left on the sink, by my toothbrush), and promptly fell asleep.

I slept deeply and failed to hear CV knocking later, when he came to check on me. I had taken his key when I came storming back to the room (obviously, I lost mine), and he couldn't, until he fetched a hotel staff person, get in. And, because he loves me, he was really worried.

When I came to the next day, then, the first thing I noticed about CV was that he was pissed. At me. About acting all crazy and making him worried at his sister's wedding. Which made me kinda pissed, at first, since I was trying to be social, have a good time, etc. Which we discussed calmly and respectfully -- our grievances with one another. We met the family for the final family goodbyes -- I was of course horribly hungover and everyone was, rather than being shocked, making gentle fun of me, which made me like them better -- and then CV and I piled back into the car and drove home.

On the way home, we saw a turkey at a rest stop. It had apparently tumbled out of a truck on its way to be slaughtered. It was opening its mouth and making its CAW! but no turkeys were responding. It rattled its wings but couldn't fly even a little bit. It had a big red mark on its chest from the cage bars. The thing looked really freaked out. The other people there were making fun of it, calling it ugly, and tossing their keys at it. CV and I, on the other hand, looked at each other horrified and tried to figure out how to get hold of the local animal shelter.

We tried to give the turkey some water in tupperware, as if it were Coy Dog. The turkey edged toward us until distracted and frightened by a nearby father of small children. The small children were not threatening the poor distressed bird: their daddy was.

After this, I decided to become a Buddhist.

Actually, I don't really mean "become a Buddhist." I mean I decided to meditate, to practice zazen. To read books about Buddhism. I don't know exactly why. I felt that my body was craving something and trying to tell me, as it's supposed to be doing when you feel the need to eat mud or chew a pencil.

I read Mindfulness in Plain English first, because it was conveniently located on CV's shelf next to his other Buddhist books (which I did not read). This is a terrific book, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in meditating, finding out more about meditating, or anyone who needs to calm down a little, to learn to recognize your mental states, to deal with, understand, and accept them, and to learn to allow them to disintegrate. (A couple other books I read are memoirs, this and this. The first one's better than the second.)

I also made a special trip to Borders for the purpose of buying Writing Down the Bones, a famous text often recommended to writers but which I had never read because I am (or used to be) 1) resistant to reading books that tell me about how to write and 2) resistant to finding motivation in anything favored by the former Problematic Roommate #1l, as this book was favored.

But I bought the book, and read it in the early summer sitting on our porch. It was just what I needed. I've since passed the book on to my father so I can't quote from it, and I don't know if I would anyway. Basically, though, in this book Natalie Goldberg presents writing as a practice, in the same way that sitting zazen is a practice. When you do writing practice, you sit for a specified length of time and you just write. When you practice zazen, you sit and concentrate on the breath. You try not to think: you try to notice thinking, and then you return your attention to the breath. When you practice writing, you don't think, you write, and you keep writing. You stay with the action and the act -- the process. Not with what's on the paper.

This was useful for me at the time because while I did sporadically journal (mostly about how stressed out I was and how much I wished that I didn't suck), I didn't have an official repertoire of informal writing. It had gotten to be that even non-PhD-related, or "fun," writing was also full of pressure. I had very little time to give to writing, and I felt like any time so given thus had to "count." That is, no playing around, unless you know what product you're trying to get out of it.

Which is no fun at all.

The Goldberg book loosened me up, reminded me that writing is process. Even when I could only give it 10 minutes, I could give it 10 minutes. 10 minutes isn't much. And nothing much was required from the 10 minutes. All that was required was that for that small period of time I keep my fingers typing.

That was it. Nothing else. Do that, type for 10 minutes, and there you were: sucess.

(Of course, I'm wordy, so most of my 10 minute freeform sessions turned in to 30, 40 minute riffs. But never fiction, and never pressure. Just words. Remembering. Explaining.)

In a later post I may try to say more about my relationship with Buddhism -- with the difficult idea of thinking below concepts. Academics deal in concepts... the idea of seeing reality separate from them is oddly hard to parse. I want to explain about slowing down, about trying to get off any and all fast tracks. To be unresponsible. To practice writing all day long without any "product" to show for it.

But now I want to talk about stories. Buddhism has its share of parables: micro-narratives, little object lessons. But while one could easily work with this if one wrote didactic fiction*, it's difficult to reconcile the processes of fiction with the processes of zazen.

It's easy enough to see that these two are oriented fundamentally differently. In meditation (at least the Vipassana or "insight" meditation described in Mindfulness in Plain English), you want, ultimately, to see beyond self. You want to see beyond everyones' selves. You want to cultivate loving friendliness. You want to stop interpreting or judging and stop imposing your connections on the dots:

"It is pyschologically impossible for us to objectively observe what is going on within us if we do not at the same time accept the occurence of our various states of mind. This is especially true with unpleasant states of mind. In order to observe our own fear, we must accept the fact that we are afraid. We can't examine our own depression without accepting it fully. The same is true for irritation and agitation, frustration, and all those other uncomfortable emotional states. You can't examine something fully if you are busy rejecting its existence. Whatever experience we may be having, mindfulness just accepts it. It is simply another of life's occurrences, just another thing to be aware of. Now pride, no shame, nothing personal at stake--what is there is there. Mindfulness is an impartial watchfulness. It does not take sides. It does not get hung up in what is perceived. It just percieves..."

But stories -- hell, sentences -- are all about connecting dots. This is sort of getting into the territory of my earlier post about narrative. Narrative excludes things. And that can be good: removing all the clutter can reveal a pattern underneath, something you wouldn't have noticed any other way.

One conundrum, then, is moving from the writing process to the fiction. I can see an essay here or there. Prose poems. But I don't understand (yet) how the products of the process can become more like, products. (Or maybe I'm in the wrong genre.)

More perplexing is reconciling the academic part of my brain -- which also thinks it has been trained to percieve things more like how they are -- to the narrative of non-progress. I may be simplifying this (another side effect of storytelling?), but the meditation path -- the path approaching peace and fulfillment -- process over product -- keeps seeming like it's ... lazy, or at least unavailable. The academic part of my brain says: What, you want to meditate? You want to write stories? You want no money? They kick you out on the street? Then you and your ibook can hang out all you want. But you can't have velvet slacks then and you can't have dinner. And I don't think you'd like it all that much.

My academic brain also says any philosophy that allows you not to grade and lets you get out of doing things just because you don't like them... is kind of forgoing agency, no? Which is a fancy way of saying lazy. And abusive of my power.

(I lost half this post and I want to say that it was more well reasoned at the end before, though I don't know for sure that it was. At any rate, it was different, though I'm tired and can't remember how. If it doesn't make sense, then, that's why.


*Actually, I believe all narrative is, like grammar, didactic. But another topic for another time.