PLEASE ENJOY YOUR HAPPINESS by Paul Brinkley-Rogers

Brinkely-Rogers was a 19-year-old member of the US Navy in 1959 and his ship was the USS Shangri-La. It roamed the Western Pacific and one of the ports it periodically stopped in was Yokosuka, Japan, where a major US naval base is located. While in port there, Rogers meets a bar girl who, seeing him carrying a book into the bar, asks him what he is reading. Turns out it's a book of poetry (Dylan Thomas) and from there a relationship blooms. Yukiko (not her real name, which Rogers never reveals) turns out to be literary herself and teaches him much that he doesn't know, not only about literature but classical Japanese cinema and more. She believes in him, tells him he must go to college, get an education, and become a writer. He credits her with the fact that he did do all that -- although the writing turned out to be reporting for various news outlets as he traveled the world. 

Yukiko is more than ten years older than Paul and her history is a history of the trauma of Japan at the end of the war. She was born in Manchuria at the time Japan occupied it and was repatriated after the war but lost both her child and her father. She subsequently lived in Hiroshima and had a relationship with a gangster (yakuza) but we never learn her whole story, as Rogers himself did not know it. 

 

But the center of the story is their relationship. It is chaste -- she seems to want it that way and he doesn't ask why. But it is also passionate. Now, decades later -- the book was published in 2016 -- Rogers has only Yukiko's letters to refresh his memory of their time together, but they are enough to recreate their love from so long ago. 

The memoir evokes not only the youth of Brinkley-Rogers but a whole era. On the Shangri-La, ironically, are atomic weapons -- weapons such as were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki fourteen years earlier. Paul and Yukiko are aware of the irony of their love, and that of many other service members who in fact consummated their relationships and perhaps married their Japanese girlfriends -- girlfriends they would never have met but for the war and American victory. 

Later in his life, Paul returned to live in Japan as a reporter for a couple of years. He tried to find Yukiko but couldn't. But what he knows is that his life was fulfilled because of the encouragement of a bar girl he met by chance when he was still a teenager.

And we, as readers, can experience a long-ago time and its mark on one of those who lived through it thanks to Brinkley-Rogers' efforts.

INTO THE HEART: ONE MAN'S PURSUIT OF LOVE AND KNOWLEDGE AMONG THE YANOMAMA, by Kenneth Good, with David Chanoff

This is probably the best memoir I've ever read. Right from the start, we are there with Kenneth in the Amazon rain forest as he learns to adapt to a life utterly unlike anything he has ever experienced. We read greedily because we want to know how Kenneth makes it through his trials (We know that he does make it through them because the dust-jacket unfortunately tells us so.)

Good is an anthropology PhD student when he goes to the Amazon to study “Protein capture” among the Yanomama (sometimes called Yanomami), a tribe that was, in the 1980s, mostly uncontacted by the outside world. There were the occasional boats coming down the river with malaria medicine for them and sometimes a researcher or two, but most of the tribespeople had never seen anything but rain forest. They didn't wear clothes and lived communally in one large dwelling, with each family having its own hearth.

We see Kenneth as he gradually adapts to the sub-tribe he has chosen, and they to him. He begins by building a hut a short walk from their communal home but then moves closer and finally moves into the dwelling itself. (It would be a stretch to call it a house because it doesn't have walls.) Meanwhile, a little girl especially likes him and after Kenneth has been there a number of years (with absences to obtain more supplies – he doesn't eat their food – and renewal of the permit he needs to be legally in a protected area of Venezuela), he is betrothed to this girl. When she finally has her menses, it is time for them to be husband and wife in the traditional way.

But Kenneth's long absences are a huge problem. An unattended woman is considered fair game by other men in the community and his wife, Yarima, suffers from this. After a particularly long absence because of trouble getting another permit and funding to continue his research – Good is continuing to research the Yamomama  even as he integrates into the community – the decision is made to leave and return to the States.

The description of how Yarima first encounters what we take for granted in this complex world of cars, supermarkets, clothing, and so much else is fascinating. But then again, the whole book is fascinating. I credit the co-author with helping make the book such an exciting read because I have read more than my share of anthropological writing and it is boring in the extreme.

Unfortunately, I already knew what happens after the events in this book because I had read Kenneth's son, David's book, written after he became an adult. (See the post here, "Writing a Memoir for the Best Reason.") It's best to read this one first.

THE RAZOR'S EDGE by Somerset Maugham

Note: Spoilers herein!

I read a review that said that THE RAZOR'S EDGE is about the ways people find happiness. Now that I think about it, I suppose that's right. There is Larry, who is seeking -- I won't say "Truth" because he doesn't really know what he is seeking until he finds it -- but he is only one character, and arguably not the main one. The other characters seek wealth, attention from those who "matter," accumulation of things -- all in their own ways trying to find satisfaction

But Larry is the one we are concerned with here. He is the one who is not happy to live an ordinary life, and thus the one that no one understands. He tramps around Europe and bumps into this or that wisdom and finally ends up in India with Advaita saints. He finds what he is looking for and since he no longer needs to be "somebody" (unlike all the other characters),  he goes back to America with the intention to become a taxi driver.  

Does he get enlightened? He describes his illumination to the narrator (a fictional Maugham): "I had a strange sensation, a tingling that arose in my feet and traveled up to my head, and I felt as though I were suddenly released from my body and as pure spirit partook of a loveliness I had never conceived." (See my extended quotation on my other blog, miracleofawakening.blogspot.com.)  Is this a dissolution of the self? I'm not sure. The rest of the extended account sounds like it is written by someone who merely imagines what enlightenment must be like. That is, all these wonderful experiences occur to the self. This is the one thing that people who imagine what getting enlightened would be like can't conceive of: that the person who wants this disappears!

Advaita in THE RAZOR'S EDGE

I read Somerset Maugham when I was young but probably never got around to "The Razor's Edge." At least I don't remember reading it. It's more sophisticated than I recall Maugham being: a novel disguised as a memoir. But the topic is what drew me. 

It centers around a man, Larry Darrell, who goes to India to find peace after being traumatized in World War I. Here's a passage from the novel -- a conversation between Larry and the narrator after Larry has returned from India:

"He listened to me with his eyes fixed on my face in a meditative, unblinking gaze that suggested to me, I don't know why, that he was listening to me not with his ears, but with some inner more sensitive organ of hearing. It was queer and not very comfortable."

The Gaze. 

This passage occurs about half-way through. I'll have more to say when I've finished.

Favorite Memoirs and Novels about Spiritual Awakening

I was delighted with the response to my comments about literature in my BATGAP interview last week. https://batgap.com/ (In a day or two, I expect my interview will migrate from the top of the page, but it's interview #550 if you want to take a listen.)

Many people on the Facebook BATGAP page recommended books that are important to them, so if you're on FB, you might want to take a look. I want to post my own list of some of my favorite spiritual memoirs and novels here.

Note that this list does not include any of the hundreds of books that include biographical elements but are mostly commentary on what awakening/enlightenment is.

NOVELS ABOUT PEOPLE TRYING TO GET ENLIGHTENED (OR AT LEAST FLIRTING WITH IT)

Consolations
Sally Wolfe

Breakfast with Buddha, and Lunch with Buddha
Rolland Merullo

A Tale for the Time Being
Ruth Ozeki

Enlightenment for Idiots
Anne Cushman

Special Karma
Merry White Benerza

MEMOIRS

Ambivalent Zen
Lawrence Shainberg

Enlightenment Blues
Andre van der Braak

Turtle Feet
Nokolai Grozni

Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home
Natalie Goldberg

Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye
Marie Mutsuki Mockett

NOVELS NOT EXPLICITLY ABOUT ENLIGHTENMENT BUT WONDERFULLY SPIRITUAL

Beautiful Ruins
Jess Walters

The Hours
Michael Cunningham

In the future, I'll try to add a one-sentence summary of each book, but meanwhile you can Google them or find them at one of the three places I review books: here, the Buddhist Fiction Blog, or Goodreads.

Please feel free to comment. Especially if you've read any of these books, I'd like to hear your impressions.

We realize the essence of life when faced with death

I came across an article by James Wood in the November 27, 2017 issue of The New Yorker that speaks to what is gradually becoming, for me, a new way of looking at literature. It begins with a summary of a short story by Luigi Pirandello, "A Breath of Air," which I'm going to summarize even more briefly than Wood did: a man who has had a stroke lies in bed at home and realizes that everyone around him has changed, but when he asks them about it, they all deny that anything is different. Finally, he understands that the other family members are embodying the spring which has come; he, having been near death, is the only one who can feel the pulsing life brought about by this change.

I had a similar experience after my stroke last year. It seems we can realize the essence of life when we are on the verge of losing it.

Woods goes on to the main topic of his article: a novel -- Reservoir 13 -- by a young British writer, twice short-listed for the Booker Prize, Jon McGregor.  His new novel takes place in a village in northern England but is really about nothing except life -- how life manifests in every way. Who would read such a book? I suppose I would because I have ordered it.

Am I looking for another Beautiful Ruins? Of course. I am always looking for another such masterpiece -- and trying to comprehend how this can be done in words -- how a writer can lead us into what is essentially a transcendent experience through language.

Contradictions in Memoir

As I read Diane Rehm's memoir, which I mentioned in a previous post, one thing I notice is how ready she is to admit inconsistent thoughts and feelings. In truth, we are filled with such inconsistencies, but often we are content to tell ourselves that we feel what we want to believe we feel or, more simply, what we feel most of the time.

Actually, though, our minds are a jumble of thoughts, which tumble into consciousness willy-nilly. This fact may not cause so much trouble were it not for our belief that it shouldn't be so -- that we should be consistent. 

I used to teach English to college freshmen, the main curriculum of which, I'm sure many remember well, is how to write a composition. Mostly, this means a paper that makes an argument leading to a valid conclusion. I would often write things like, "Contradiction?" or "How does this follow?" in the margins of students' papers. They were supposed to learn how to be consistent. If a student was arguing for gun control, announcing that he had two guns under his bed was acceptable only if he explained why in a way consistent with his main thesis. But suppose he both loved and hated guns? There wasn't much room to write a paper about that -- and yet, wouldn't that be much more interesting?

So, partly, this desire to be consistent, or the belief that one should be, is the result of people like me  training young minds to avoid the actual contradictory nature of experience -- especially internal experience. But it is also the result of the need for identity. We want to take a stand, to have a point of view, because it helps define us in ways we want to be defined and seen by others.

This may be one reason it is so hard to write an honest memoir. We always thought we were such-and-so kind of person, but when we sit down to write, lots of thoughts and feelings that contradict our images of ourselves begin to bubble up. What we do with that determines whether we have a memoir worth reading.