On Tuesday, at the Applebee’s in Harlingen, TX, I’m going to get up and sing John Lennon’s “Imagine” in front of a group of mostly strangers. It started out as kind of a joke in my sangha (meditation group). One of the things I think is cool about going to a church is the singing with other people, and it’s not just a select group of good singers that do it, but everybody in the congregation, for mutual connection and uplift out of the workaday mind. Well, I wanted to sing in the sangha, too. Why not compile a Buddhist hymnal? There are many great numbers with a Buddhist philosophy: “Let It Be.” “Give Peace a Chance.” “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” We were all calling out the names of songs and laughing and occasionally breaking into a line of song to illustrate. Someone mentioned a certain plaintive number from “Hair,” the disappointed-in-love ballad called “Easy to Be Hard.” Several of the other people there didn’t know the song, so I started singing it from the beginning, because I could. As a teenager in the 1970s, enthralled with 1960s culture, I played that record over and over and over. And even though I hadn’t really thought about it for 35 years, I still remembered most of the words, enough to get well advanced into the song. I can’t say for sure whether the sangha was impressed with my long lyrical memory (or my audacity), but I know I felt relaxed and happy. Confident, not of having noteworthy talent, but of my right to exhibit my averageness.
“Let’s have a Buddhist karaoke group!” I said. “Let’s buy a karaoke machine and use it for a Buddhist Karaoke Night Benefit!” I was kidding, but I also meant it. “I’ll buy the machine,” I said. “When we’re not using it, we could rent it out to other organizations.” Yes, yes, they said, go for it. (Kidding?)
We shall see! One step at a time. I found a venue. I went last week to reconnoiter, learning that the quality of singers varies widely and the crowd doesn’t heckle. The worst-case outcome is that only the two or three closest tables give only polite applause for a few seconds. The best-case is more enthusiastic applause from the half the bar that’s paying any attention and a few hoots of approval from across the room. There are many quirky song choices, not all latest-hit numbers. An eastern-inflected Beatles number, for instance, would fit in just fine. I’ve announced the event on my Facebook page: world debut of the Buddhist Karaoke Circle (which may turn out to consist of just me). I’ve chosen and practiced a song.
I’m going to do it. Tuesday. My little dare to me. My little achievable project to cultivate fearlessness and joy. Not just mine, but for all sentient beings. Imagine!
Monday, August 1, 2011
Sunday, February 6, 2011
David Small's Stitches is now out in paperback. I'm using it as a text in three classes, Intro to Creative Writing, Intro to Creative Nonfiction, and Graduate Nonfiction Workshop
.
It's a great book for teaching what I want to teach--thematically rich composition, moral complexity, subtlety of the narrative focus and voice, plot structure, suspense, characterization, tone: it's all there and all working beautifully. And people like the book. And I like it, which is a bonus in teaching. Teaching a text I don't like is tolerable for one semester, maybe even two, but after that I can't stand the rereading.
Anyway, so, I loved Stitches, let's have no mistake about that. Nothing but praise for the design and the execution. And, I largely share what I take to be the author's moral assessment of the characters. The parents have clearly not done a good job of parenting: the failure to give their son appropriate medical attention is appalling. "Neglectful" and "cold" are a generous description of the mother; many people if not most might call her abusive, though perhaps her methods aren't way out of line with cultural norms: David is shouted at and slapped when he runs off to play where he was told not to, losing his shoes in the process.
Make no mistake: I do not approve of the mother's behavior. Small shows her slamming around the house in resentful silence for days on end; I don't think it's right to give little children a punitive silent treatment for more than a very brief time, though what constitutes brief I shall leave as an exercise for the reader. (I don't favor hitting, but a parent has to have some means of indicating disapproval in moderation. Though maybe a childless person shouldn't pontificate too long on the subject.)
I don't believe the author intends us to read this narrative in the simple way some people like to read: identifying wholly with the boy and having zero compassion for the mother, investing 100% of their empathetic imagination in his perfect innocence and her perfect contemptibility. Look: the boy calls out for his mother's protection against a roughhousing older brother and against his harsh, unstable grandmother; doesn't that mean she must have provided him some degree of maternal protection on some occasions? In fact, we see David's mother's spontaneous impulse to shield him from her own mother's menace, and, by a short imaginative hop requiring only a one-link chain of inference, we realize that as bad as David's childhood may be, his mother's was likely worse on the average day.
Even the grandmother is handled with some measure of compassion in the narrative. She is discomfitted when her grandson can't understand her country speech, and does a pained double take when David asks what a crucifix is and she realizes the extent to which her daughter has rejected the religion of her childhood. David then wounds her deliberately when he says "Mama says people who say 'ain't' are stupid!" The grandmother's had a pretty hard life, but--let's have no mistake about this--I think it's worth calling her "evil" if we're ever going to use that word at all for assessing people's behavior. But the evil grandmother is portrayed not as someone animated by an inexplicable force of unprovoked malice and consciencelessness (like the evil people in much popular culture and a certain brand of politics); she's a damaged person, like David, like his mom. If David's misdemeanors--joyriding, truancy, etc.--are mitigated by the suffering and mistreatment he endured beforehand, aren't the felonies of the mothers mitigated by their suffering and mistreatment too? Not excused, mind you. We can understand and pity without necessarily forgiving. I think it hurts to be evil. Maybe there are a few exceptions--joyous psychopaths--somewhere, but not in this book.
There's only one place where I can't quite go along with what I take to be the book's assessment of the characters. I sort of feel I'm kicking over the pedagogical traces even to say this. Shouldn't I keep my own attention on form and technique, leave the students (at least the undergraduates) to work out their moral reactions free from my influence? What do you think of the characters, class? What do you think David Small thinks? Yes, by all means bring your own life experience to bear, but remember to keep coming back to the details of the text....
No, I can't help it. Listen: I think the psychiatrist did a wrong thing. I don't consider it wholesome to start therapy with a 15-year-old by saying "Your mother doesn't love you." What a dangerous, potentially injurious thing to say, even if it were definitely true and the shrink definitely knew it to be true. But I also don't think he had any very good grounds for making that assertion. How long could he have spent with the mother at that point, a couple hours? What arrogance, to be so certain about another person's inner life! And, yes, I think there is an element of Freud-inflected, mother-blaming misogyny there. The mom and shrink probably made mutually poor impressions on each other at their initial interview; the mother thinks psychotherapy is "throwing money down a hole." And, whew, that reminds me: the parents were paying for this. The Small couple paid for a shrink three times a week to reinforce David's worst feelings about his mother. Yeah, the therapy made David feel better about himself, but at his mom's expense. Oh, so, turns out it's the (male) shrink whose love is supposed to be true! Well, it's pretty easy to love someone for only an hour at a time, when you're getting a good salary, and you never have to take that teenager home with you and bear full responsibility for them, bailing out of jail and so forth.
Granted, we know that David's mother certainly didn't love him in a uniformly good or effective way. Granted she made consumer goods and partying a higher priority than nurturing him as she should have done; but it's ridiculous to suppose she didn't care whether her own son had cancer: she was in denial about the lump in his neck, is the reasonable explanation. Do you think love is a blanket of kindness, settling evenly over every interaction with the loved one and (especially in the case of parents) smothering every more self-centered desire? I have loved and I have been loved. I am not a parent, but I have parents, and I am here to tell you that love is not a blanket of kindness.
David, if you read this, I loved your book.
.
It's a great book for teaching what I want to teach--thematically rich composition, moral complexity, subtlety of the narrative focus and voice, plot structure, suspense, characterization, tone: it's all there and all working beautifully. And people like the book. And I like it, which is a bonus in teaching. Teaching a text I don't like is tolerable for one semester, maybe even two, but after that I can't stand the rereading.
Anyway, so, I loved Stitches, let's have no mistake about that. Nothing but praise for the design and the execution. And, I largely share what I take to be the author's moral assessment of the characters. The parents have clearly not done a good job of parenting: the failure to give their son appropriate medical attention is appalling. "Neglectful" and "cold" are a generous description of the mother; many people if not most might call her abusive, though perhaps her methods aren't way out of line with cultural norms: David is shouted at and slapped when he runs off to play where he was told not to, losing his shoes in the process.
Make no mistake: I do not approve of the mother's behavior. Small shows her slamming around the house in resentful silence for days on end; I don't think it's right to give little children a punitive silent treatment for more than a very brief time, though what constitutes brief I shall leave as an exercise for the reader. (I don't favor hitting, but a parent has to have some means of indicating disapproval in moderation. Though maybe a childless person shouldn't pontificate too long on the subject.)
I don't believe the author intends us to read this narrative in the simple way some people like to read: identifying wholly with the boy and having zero compassion for the mother, investing 100% of their empathetic imagination in his perfect innocence and her perfect contemptibility. Look: the boy calls out for his mother's protection against a roughhousing older brother and against his harsh, unstable grandmother; doesn't that mean she must have provided him some degree of maternal protection on some occasions? In fact, we see David's mother's spontaneous impulse to shield him from her own mother's menace, and, by a short imaginative hop requiring only a one-link chain of inference, we realize that as bad as David's childhood may be, his mother's was likely worse on the average day.
Even the grandmother is handled with some measure of compassion in the narrative. She is discomfitted when her grandson can't understand her country speech, and does a pained double take when David asks what a crucifix is and she realizes the extent to which her daughter has rejected the religion of her childhood. David then wounds her deliberately when he says "Mama says people who say 'ain't' are stupid!" The grandmother's had a pretty hard life, but--let's have no mistake about this--I think it's worth calling her "evil" if we're ever going to use that word at all for assessing people's behavior. But the evil grandmother is portrayed not as someone animated by an inexplicable force of unprovoked malice and consciencelessness (like the evil people in much popular culture and a certain brand of politics); she's a damaged person, like David, like his mom. If David's misdemeanors--joyriding, truancy, etc.--are mitigated by the suffering and mistreatment he endured beforehand, aren't the felonies of the mothers mitigated by their suffering and mistreatment too? Not excused, mind you. We can understand and pity without necessarily forgiving. I think it hurts to be evil. Maybe there are a few exceptions--joyous psychopaths--somewhere, but not in this book.
There's only one place where I can't quite go along with what I take to be the book's assessment of the characters. I sort of feel I'm kicking over the pedagogical traces even to say this. Shouldn't I keep my own attention on form and technique, leave the students (at least the undergraduates) to work out their moral reactions free from my influence? What do you think of the characters, class? What do you think David Small thinks? Yes, by all means bring your own life experience to bear, but remember to keep coming back to the details of the text....
No, I can't help it. Listen: I think the psychiatrist did a wrong thing. I don't consider it wholesome to start therapy with a 15-year-old by saying "Your mother doesn't love you." What a dangerous, potentially injurious thing to say, even if it were definitely true and the shrink definitely knew it to be true. But I also don't think he had any very good grounds for making that assertion. How long could he have spent with the mother at that point, a couple hours? What arrogance, to be so certain about another person's inner life! And, yes, I think there is an element of Freud-inflected, mother-blaming misogyny there. The mom and shrink probably made mutually poor impressions on each other at their initial interview; the mother thinks psychotherapy is "throwing money down a hole." And, whew, that reminds me: the parents were paying for this. The Small couple paid for a shrink three times a week to reinforce David's worst feelings about his mother. Yeah, the therapy made David feel better about himself, but at his mom's expense. Oh, so, turns out it's the (male) shrink whose love is supposed to be true! Well, it's pretty easy to love someone for only an hour at a time, when you're getting a good salary, and you never have to take that teenager home with you and bear full responsibility for them, bailing out of jail and so forth.
Granted, we know that David's mother certainly didn't love him in a uniformly good or effective way. Granted she made consumer goods and partying a higher priority than nurturing him as she should have done; but it's ridiculous to suppose she didn't care whether her own son had cancer: she was in denial about the lump in his neck, is the reasonable explanation. Do you think love is a blanket of kindness, settling evenly over every interaction with the loved one and (especially in the case of parents) smothering every more self-centered desire? I have loved and I have been loved. I am not a parent, but I have parents, and I am here to tell you that love is not a blanket of kindness.
David, if you read this, I loved your book.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
In Franz Wright's remarkable poem "Robert, Cat" a man feels his cat bestows "unqualified forgiveness." This may just be the speaker's persona, of course, not the author's view, but I feel like disputing it anyway, since lots of pet owners do hold this notion that animals have feelings that are just like ours, only deeper, purer, unsullied by ulterior concerns. The thing is, we really don't know what animals' mental states are like. Maybe Robert the cat doesn't even have any clear memory of having been mistreated by the speaker, if, indeed, he ever even had any sense of mistreatment in the first place. Heck, I can't even count on my own spouse bringing the same frame of reference to any interaction that I bring to it, so how can you make that assumption in an interspecies relationship?
If I step on a fire-ant nest in the yard, and get bitten, I don't harbor any feeling of resentment toward the individual biting ants. I don't think, "You little bastard, you're the one who did me wrong." In my head, a vague sense of menace and annoyance surrounds the whole anthill, but that's it. Suppose tiny robot servants carefully plucked just the "guilty" ants from my body and saved them in a separate petri dish, I would have no feeling about those ants that was different from any other fire ants.
That's why I've always thought hell was such a crazy idea. That a supposedly omnipotent being would bother to punish such comparatively insignificant consciousnesses at all, let alone infinitely, is preposterous. Or to love them, either, in any but the most abstract and not especially gratifying way.
Nope, hell is invented by humans, for humans, in a paroxysm of masochism or hate.
I'd put the whole Wright poem up here, but I don't want to run afoul of copyright. It's worth a look.
If I step on a fire-ant nest in the yard, and get bitten, I don't harbor any feeling of resentment toward the individual biting ants. I don't think, "You little bastard, you're the one who did me wrong." In my head, a vague sense of menace and annoyance surrounds the whole anthill, but that's it. Suppose tiny robot servants carefully plucked just the "guilty" ants from my body and saved them in a separate petri dish, I would have no feeling about those ants that was different from any other fire ants.
That's why I've always thought hell was such a crazy idea. That a supposedly omnipotent being would bother to punish such comparatively insignificant consciousnesses at all, let alone infinitely, is preposterous. Or to love them, either, in any but the most abstract and not especially gratifying way.
Nope, hell is invented by humans, for humans, in a paroxysm of masochism or hate.
I'd put the whole Wright poem up here, but I don't want to run afoul of copyright. It's worth a look.
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