Interview with Ruth Ozeki

The part of my interview with Ruth Ozeki relating to the Buddhist aspects of her magical novel, A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING, may be found at http://buddhistfictionblog.wordpress.com/category/currently-reading/

The part of the interview focusing on literary questions will be published separately, tba.

Toward an Enlightened Aesthetic 3

Last night I viewed a documentary about Mel Brooks.  He said his comedy comes from knowing how much we each love ourselves.  Comedy always requires a disjunction of some kind, so I think, implicitly, comedy must also come from our not being aware of how much we love ourselves -- or, perhaps at times, from how much the universe seems not to agree with our opinion of ourselves.

So what does this have to do with an enlightened aesthetic? 

Lately, I've become aware, for myself, of the truth of Brooks' insight.  There is that tenderness for ourselves in ourselves that no one else can match.  When we are babies, we know automatically how precious we are, how nothing really matters except me.  But then we grow up, and we are often socialized to believe, not just that we must share with others for practical purposes, but that there is something wrong with the basic belief I am really what is important.  In the end, the love we have for ourselves is also the love we have for the rest of creation, since we are that creation.  And if we cannot love ourselves, that flow of love gets cut off at its source and violence, either of thought or of deed, is the result. 

So the writer who knows this -- the writer who is in touch with this aspect of being human -- will see not only the comedic elements in it but also the tragic.  Self-hatred is, indeed, the origin of pretty much all of what we call evil in the world, and a wise writer sees how that arises. 

Don't Destroy that Journal!

I am reading Lawrence Shainberg's 1995 memoir, AMBIVALENT ZEN for the third time.  I probably won't read it all again -- just browsing this time, finding sections that catch my eye.  It's laugh out loud funny -- and I did remember that.  It's also a lesson in how to turn angst and confusion and pain into art.  The key, I think, is in allowing the reader to know you, the author, in all of your weaknesses.  For me, as someone who did Zen with the same ambivalence -- wondering why, oh why it had to hurt so much, but not knowing any other alternative to relieving my suffering -- I know how hard it is to bring half-conscious thoughts and assumptions to light and put them in words.


But there is one section of the book I forgot and now read with dismay:  where Shainberg destroys years of personal journals.  I do understand his logic -- his idea  that this kind of navel-gazing wasn't ever going to bring him self-understanding -- but I wonder if he ever regretted it.

I have never, thank God, burned any of my journals, and recently I went back and looked at some that are from several decades ago.  I read them with new eyes, and with an eye to solving the personal dilemma that motivated them.  And it worked!  I had told myself a story about this traumatic event living at a Buddhist temple in Japan decades ago, and I saw how my need to believe everything happened a certain way kept me trapped in the suffering.  Without those journals, which allowed me to experience the past (and myself) with new eyes, I would have remained stuck in the story my mind had created about what happened then. 

So, the moral is, don't ever destroy anything you write -- especially not anything personal.  You may never look at it again, but do you really want to deny yourself the possibility that what you wrote will be useful in the future?

Pondering Dogen and Proust

Recently I interviewed the novelist and Zen Buddhist prist, Ruth Ozeki, on the occasion of the publication of her new book, A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING.  I made a commitment to myself to turn the recording of our conversation into an edited, publishable transcript as quickly as possible, but I got caught up in a way I didn't expect.

In the interview, we discussed generally the many quotations by the Zen Patriarch Dogen, and, glancing back through them a couple of evenings ago, one in particular caught my attention:

"Thus, the self, setting itself out in array, sees itself:  This is the understanding that the self is time."

And I realized I knew exactly what Dogen meant:  we are not in time, or experiencing time, but we are time -- and when we touch the "eternal moment," we discover that it is not just another type of moment but that it embraces all moments, all of what we are as eternal being.  There is not one thing called  "me" and another thing called "time."  When we know ourselves as time, we know nonduality.

The other author whose work sets the tone and is quoted in Ozeki's novel is Proust.  And so, reading this Dogen quotation, I felt moved to go back and read the end of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, and see if Proust's illumination was the same as Dogen's.  But this took the whole evening because, unlike Dogen, Proust didn't just say it pithily in one sentence.  No, he went on and on, page after page.  And my evening passed with no more work on the transcript.

So today, I was thinking about this, and I realized that the reason Proust took so long to get to the point was that writing was an exploration for him:  when he experienced something new and didn't know quite what, in order to find out, he had to write about it.  And then I realized that my process is exactly the same as his!  In fact, I've often thought of my spiritual practice to be writing, although, having read Proust when I was much younger and more academic in my approach to writing, the similarity never occurred to me.  

After my interview with Ms. Ozeki, we were speaking more casually, and she asked me what my spiritual practice was.  And somehow, being asked this by a Zen priest who is also a writer -- and a much more accomplished one than I -- I completely forgot that for years I have considered writing to be my practice, and a very valuable one that has illuminated many spiritual questions I have grappled with.  Instead of saying this, though, I heard myself reply with an embarrassed laugh, "I don't have a practice."  Then I added hurriedly,  "But I did, in Japan."  And I imagined Ms. Ozeki to be thinking, but to be too polite to say, "But you were in Japan decades ago!"

Well, now I can answer, "My practice is the same as Proust's."  And who can question that?  

Toward an Enlightened Aesthetic 2: Fact vs. Fiction

Ask writers of literary novels -- as opposed to genre fiction or potboilers -- whether fiction is "truer" than nonfiction and they will inevitably say yes.  Granted, what "truer" means might differ from writer to writer.  For some, it means that serious fiction portrays emotional truth in a way that non-fiction cannot.  Others might maintain that fiction presents truths about life and death through the stories it tells.  While non-fiction tells specific truths based on specific facts, fiction portrays universal truths.

But if fiction does all this, why, then, is it losing popularity in contemporary culture?  Many people -- some of them very intelligent --think of fiction as a way to escape, not as a way to learn about themselves, others, and life itself.

This has to do, I think, with the literal nature of contemporary thought.  We want to see facts and figures: these are the "truths" we can trust.  Many educated people think they are wasting time when they read fiction.  "Maybe when I retire I'll have time for that," they think.

Spiritual awakening does away with literalness because one understands once and for all that language -- both natural and symbolic -- is just invented by the mind.  And then the time comes to look for deeper meaning, beyond language.  That is where art, including fiction, makes its contribution.

Good art gives us the sense of the essence of life:  What are we doing here?  What is life really about?  What do we really crave?   What causes us to become this or that kind of person?  And we learn compassion, for ourselves and for others.  We glimpse a world in which we are not really separate from others -- we know our oneness because we recognize ourselves in the characters we read about who have very different lives from ourselves. 

Toward an Enlighted Aesthetic

Enlightenment means realizing our nature as vastness, limitlessness, and, yes, emptiness.  Emptiness, I realize, has a bad name, but it is the source of all creativity.  When we move into the space where we are empty of our own egoistic concerns, our own ideas of right and wrong, our own cultural prejudices, we can find empathy with others who do not share our perspective.  Good fiction and poetry can do this for us, but first, the creators of such work have to come from that place themselves. This is why truly great literature is, by definition, spiritual. 

Fiction and Unconditional Love

"The nonfiction writer has to express the spiritual message in a structure and style that satisfies the demands of artistic integrity while the fiction writer struggles to enfold a nonintrusive  message within a believable narrative." 1

Really?  Is this what a fiction writer does?  Not the best ones, anyway.  And maybe that is why, even though I help edit the Buddhist Fiction Blog, I wonder about whether a work of fiction can or should teach Buddhism, Christianity, or any other "ism," however "nonintrusive" the message aims to be.   

When I think about really good literature, it taps that in me which understands what it is to be human.  It taps the universal love we all share by making us feel that the characters are like us -- even though, if we met them on the street, we might want to walk the other way.  But with a good book in hand, we can suspend our needs for safety and status and allow ourselves to empathize:  even if we are in a loving relationship, we can know how it is to love in a hopeless way; even if we have never been to war, we can know how a soldier might feel; even if we have never been hungry, we can know how that man who hasn't had a decent meal in a month might be suffering.  And we can also know joys we have never experienced.

But the total is more than the sum of its parts.  We can know all of this because we tap into the unconditional love we all, at bottom, are.  A novelist helps us to understand the message of Christ or the message of Buddha by giving us the experience they point to -- an experience for which religious "messages" are a poor substitute.

1 Philip Yancey, in Introduction to The Best Spiritual Writing 2012, ed. by Philip Zaleski.