Memories, memoirs, meditation—2
Between 1968 and 1970, I lived in Chicago, where my then-husband was in law school. I hated Chicago, partly because the winters were so cold—I kept getting sick; partly because the South Side, where we lived, was then a dangerous place where women especially couldn’t walk around freely; and partly because the “Battle of Chicago” between antiwar protestors and the police during the Democratic Convention of 1968 left in its wake a miasma of hatred that you breathed in with the coal soot in the air.
Chicago Skyway with skyscrapers very faint in background
So when we finally left, and I gazed backward as we drove along the Skyway toward Indiana, I was astonished to feel a wave of nostalgia sweep over me at the sight of the city center skyscrapers receding behind us.
Just like when I visited my childhood house, only more surprising, since I had no long-standing history with Chicago: nostalgia from nowhere. But it made me see that attachment to the past can be a trap your feelings play on you, not a true, healthy connection.
Still, those feelings are there. We need to know them, if not necessarily believe in them. So perhaps the memoir is the way to do this.
Recently I tried my hand at memoir with an essay about an experience of community I had some years ago when I was quite sick. Writing about an experience is quite different from thinking—or meditating—about it, since writing forces you to formulate and organize your thoughts far more rigorously. So I figured out things I’d never have understood otherwise.
Perhaps there are two levels of experience: absolute and relative. On the absolute level there is no past, only present. But on the relative level, what happens in the past still matters. Perhaps the trick is to understand how to move between them.
Memories, memoirs, meditation—1
Recently I went to a reading and discussion by my friend Joyce Zonana. Joyce is an Egyptian Jew, born in Cairo and brought to this country by her parents in 1951, at the age of 18 months. Though she grew up in Brooklyn, her parents resisted assimilation and kept their home steeped in Middle Eastern culture. So she remained the odd one out among her Eastern European Jewish friends who insisted that anyone who didn’t understand Yiddish or eat gefilte fish couldn’t really be Jewish.
Last year she published a memoir, Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile’s Journey, about her journey to find a place she felt was home.
At the reading Joyce shared the stage with another Egyptian Jew, Jean Naggar, whose family remained in Egypt until 1956, leaving for England when she was 18. Jean wrote her memoir, Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt, for her grandchildren, whose lives were quite different from her own “perfect” childhood in the “lost world” of Egypt before Nasser.
Though their experiences of childhood and immigration differed considerably, what struck me was that for both women the memory of life in Egypt remained a cynosure, a kind of holy world—all the more striking in Joyce’s case, since she has no actual memories of Egypt. The past is the foundation of the present, Jean insisted—it never disappears. They strove to keep alive their connection to the past, making pilgrimages to Egypt as adults. Their audience at the reading was full of other Egyptian Jews, all tightly tied to each other through this common heritage.
A few years ago, I too made a sort of pilgrimage, to the house on Long Island where I grew up, which I hadn’t seen since 1976, when my parents moved out. It’s in a relatively old suburb; by now the skimpy saplings planted by the developer are huge and full, and the ticky-tacky houses have been remodeled so no two are alike. The boring little subdivision I remembered now looked like a fantasy village painted on a plate. And I felt no sense of connection to it or to the house; it didn’t seem as though I’d actually lived there.
It’s been in my mind lately, though, because my brother has been scanning his collection of photos from our childhood in that house and emailing them to me. Some set off a twinge of nostalgia. Then I thought: what’s to be nostalgic about? I wasn’t happy then.
Memoirs are big sellers. But these recent experiences made me wonder: how involved should we be with the past?
In 1996 a New York Times reporter interviewed the Burmese peace activist Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, only recently released from house arrest and living in her parents’ home. She had sold her parents’ furniture to the military junta when she needed money for food. “Did you try to get these items back once you were freed?” the reporter asked. “They had belonged to your parents.”
“My father is dead. My mother is dead,” Suu Kyi answered. “Why should I cling to their furniture?” A very Buddhist response.
“The past is like a dream and the future is ‘the not yet come.’ The only thing of any interest to anyone is now.… there is no moment other than the present one,” says Ayya Khema, a wonderful dharma teacher, in her book Being Nobody, Going Nowhere: Meditations on the Buddhist Path.
So why write a memoir? My thought is that one’s childhood, whether happy or not, banal or dramatic, retains a mythic quality—just like the origin stories of a culture—and that’s the source of our compulsion to revisit, explore, and interpret it. But how much of that is good for us?
More on reflection
I’m still reverberating slightly after a meditation retreat last week. It resonated on several levels, but what’s relevant here is that I developed a better understanding of reflection.
Based on the teacher’s instructions, it seemed that I’d actually been practicing reflection for a long time, before I ever started meditating. I described to her my process of lying on the couch and letting my mind sink, and she confirmed that this was indeed what she’d been talking about.
100-year-old water well in Argentina, lined with hand-laid bricks. Photo: Carlos Ponte
Reflection, at least in this sense, isn’t thinking. It’s like putting a question into your mind and then holding it there while looking down a well to see if anything floats up out of the shaft. The trick is learning to train your attention on the empty space inside the well, without letting your intellect fill
it up with a lot of ideas.
What eventually surfaces can be an image, a word, or a phrase. In the case of this blog entry, it was both. I sat down and reflected in order to decide what to say here, and what came up was the phrase “reflection isn’t thinking.” I starting writing that down, and the well image followed before I had finished.
Reflection is a powerful tool for me. I use it to solve all sorts of problems, not just writing problems—for example, to figure out what’s really going on when something upsets me, so I can respond effectively, or to make tough decisions. What I understand now is that although this process is related to meditation, there’s a difference, which has to do with intention. Problem-solving reflection is goal oriented. Meditation is not. I was concerned that the one might be contaminating the other. But the teacher gave me some advice that works in either case: don’t let the reflection tip over into obsession. The acid test is falling into repetition: the same thoughts cycle back over and over, and you can’t let them go. The well shaft doesn’t stay empty—it overflows.
The inside of my head
The graphic just below is not a tag cloud but a WORD cloud, generated by a site called Wordle, which is just amazing. Paste in text (or give it the url of your blog, as I did) and it presents you with a randomly formatted cloud of words sized according to their frequency in your text. Then you can redesign your cloud using the many available fonts, layouts, and infinite colors.
It’s like looking into the inside of your own head. You suddenly, literally, have a picture of what’s on your mind. How come I used the word “book” so much? Why is “really” so large? It was a surprise to see that “something” and “everything” appear a lot in these posts. I don’t like abstract words. Was I being lazy? Did I not have a clear idea of what I really meant? (Click the image for a larger, legible size.)
This blog as a Wordle
Though I initially saw Wordle as a mirror of my mind, when I looked through the gallery of clouds other people had posted, I realized that was only one possibility. You can create designs deliberately by manipulating your text, like the person whose “dog breeds” Wordle is dominated by an enormous yellow terrier. Some people make Wordle form whole sentences pointing in different directions. Others send a message, like this advocate for the food democracy movement.
After making my blog Wordle, I tried passages of work I’d done for clients, and saw that my notion of the mind mirror was actually quite limited. I’d been thinking just in terms of concepts. But the Wordle is also a graphic representation of your writing style. Some of my clients like long words, some short; the respective texts create different visual patterns.
Much meditation for me lately is about reflection—nonconceptual reflection, that is, as opposed to thinking. So here’s a completely nonconceptual way to reflect on writing.
The role of pleasure
I spent last weekend at a meditation retreat receiving instruction in a technique that uses the breath to develop concentration. It was more technical than any practice I’d learned before—structured and specific, moving from step 1 to step 4 (as far as we got in two days, though the technique itself goes to step 16). The method (called anapanasati) is designed to develop concentration, the ability to focus the mind on one particular object (in this case, the breath) and keep it there. Concentration is said to make wisdom possible (“wisdom” meaning “perception of the true nature of reality”).
I went because I’d had a brief experience of this technique that had a powerful effect on me, so I thought I should learn more of it. Whether I develop greater powers of concentration and thereby wisdom is still to be seen (and indeed, beside the point, as I explain below); but what’s relevant here is a comment by the teacher that struck me.
Concentration is hard work, he said, but this work of developing a skill is inherently joyful—more so than achieving a finished result. This is literally true, because once you get to step 3, you begin to move energy through the body, developing a physical sensation called piti (classically translated “rapture,” though a more realistic description of my experience would be “pleasure”). In step 4, you develop sukha, an emotional state translated as “contentment” or indeed, “joy.” So it is actually the process that creates the pleasure, not achieving the goal.
So it is with writing. To be totally immersed, with your whole being, in creating a form that expresses the most profound awareness you’re capable of is deeply pleasurable. I once said something like this to a woman I knew from a writing class, adding rhetorically, “What could be more satisfying?”
She responded, “A roll in the hay!”
“But that goes away the next day!” I exclaimed. “The other doesn’t.”
I realized later that she was probably just trying to show off a little. But my instinctive response made me understand my own experience more clearly. In fact, I find even writing that doesn’t emerge from the depths of my being to be highly enjoyable. The next entry will enlarge on that.
Practice and inspiration
The notion of practice is a funny combination of the mundane and the transcendent. Disciplined meditation practice leads over time to a level of skill that supports the development of wisdom, or insight into what Buddhists call emptiness, the interconnectedness of everything. And long practice of the pragmatic necessities of making a living turns out to be a foundation for writing that goes beyond mundane.
All these years, I thought I was just slogging through various writing jobs, some really interesting and some pretty boring. Turns out it was like physical exercise. Read more
The fruit of practice
Not long ago my friend Paola Corso, a poet and fiction writer, told me she wanted to set up a networking event for writers in our neighborhood. I’d love that, but I already go to too many meetings. When it came to it, I told her, I wasn’t sure I could drag myself out of the house on yet another night. I don’t even have children—Paola has two, young ones. And a job. And she already runs a writers’ series for our food coop.
I found myself singing the old refrain: “How do you do everything you do?” She rolled her eyes. “And write,” I added.
Her husband Michael Winks, a playwright, stood next to her. “We’ve been writers a lot longer than we’ve been parents,” she replied. “It’s in our blood.”
But I thought: no, it’s their practice. After years of doing, it becomes ingrained in mind and body, as necessary to the organism as eating, as routine as washing your hair. A meditation teacher once told me that at a certain point, sitting down to meditate becomes so fundamental that you don’t have to make time for it; you just do it. That’s when practice starts to bear its fruit.