Finding Peace in the Eye of the Storm
Thursday August 7, 2008
A few weeks ago, just before I left Birmingham, a friend of mine asked if she could interview me for a soundscape project she is working on with artist Marc Silver (see the link here). The project is called Eye of the Storm and will be based on around one hundred interviews with various folks on the subject of their experiences of peace and chaos in the contemporary world. So over a pint of Guinness in the Rainbow pub in Digbeth, Birmingham, the microphone running, we chatted about peace and chaos.
We are accustomed to being told that the greater framework in which we live is that of chaos and disorder, that it is all uproar and hubbub and unrest, and that if we are to find anything in the way of peace, it is against this backdrop; and to some extent, it seemed as if the initial questions for this project reflected this assumption. We all know, because we have been repeatedly told, that we live in dangerous times. We are surrounded by horror, misery and distress. The world is not a kind place. This is not only the story that is fed into our homes every single day by the news media, but it is also one that can seem to be demanded by the most tough-minded and reasonable views of the world. Take Richard Dawkins, for example, in peculiarly Schopenhauerian mode:
The amount of suffering in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to say this, millions of animals are running for their lives, whimpering with fear. Thousands are dying from starvation or disease or feeling a parasite rasping away from within. For most animals the reality is struggling, suffering and death
But I wonder. How much is this Schopenhauerian vision a conclusion that is demanded by the evidence, and how much is it a cultural view of the world? It always seems as if it is much more tough-minded and grown-up to see the world as struggling, suffering and death, but this is more a literary trope than anything else, even if it is a particularly persistent one: the trope of the heroic individual who looks boldly into the screaming pit of horror that is existence, and who does not flinch or take refuge in easy consolation.
In the face of the prevalence of this picture of the world, any alternative view can seem to be a species of the kind of absurd optimism parodied by Voltaire in his Candide. At the end of Voltaire’s book, the ever-optimistic Pangloss explains why – after endless horror, captivity, the loss of his nose through syphilis and other such miseries, he still maintains that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire rightly satirises this Panglossian view as one that is unsustainable in the face of the world’s miseries. But this alone is no reason to assume the Schopenhauerian position. To see everything as suffering and misery seems to me to be as much an error (an error to which certain kinds of Buddhists are also prone) as its opposite.
There is a middle way to be struck. The world is a place of both horror and delight. And peace, where it exists, is not to be found beyond the world (because the world, as far as we know, is all we have) but within the world. It is not then a matter of escape, but of cultivation. And so Candide’s decidedly Epicurean answer to Pangloss at the end of Voltaire’s book could equally well be an answer to those who claim that the world is nothing but chaos and horror:
“All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.”
That such cultivation is possible, that we can (and sometimes with very little effort) open up spaces of peace in the world, suggest that the Schopenhauerian view is in need of some modification.
Image: Early photograph of a tornado. Wikimedia Commons
thinkBuddha is three!
Tuesday July 29, 2008
It is three years since I first put together a few scattered thoughts and started out on writing this blog. When I started thinkBuddha, I had no idea what purpose there might be in blogging, except for a hunch that thinking out loud can often achieve things that thinking in the privacy of one’s own head cannot. This hunch has been borne out by experience. Thinking, it seems to me, is a social activity more than it is a solitary activity. I have an increasing mistrust of those philosophers and sages who rely – or who claim to rely – merely upon their own resources, and as I have written here before, for me the defining moment in the history of Buddhism is not the story of the Buddha’s awakening beneath a tree, but is instead the moment when, after hours and hours of patient discussion, a spark jumps between the Buddha and his follower Kondanna, and the Buddha cries out, “Kondanna knows! Kondanna knows!” I like to think that it is not only at this moment that Kondanna knows what the Buddha is talking about, but it is also at this moment, for the first time, that the Buddha really knows.
The German philosopher Franz Rosenzweig calls this thinking that happens in conjunction with others ‘speech thinking’: a kind of thinking that is open to possibilty, that never knows in advance where it is going, that is divested of spurious claims to absolute authority, a kind of thinking in which uncertainty is not a fault to be exorcised, but a means to asking further, more interesting questions. I like to think of blogging as a kind of speech thinking. And, as another year comes to an end, I am grateful to have enjoyed the company of so many thoughtful folks to think along with. Thanks to you all.
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Too Many Books?
Monday July 28, 2008
I have a postcard that a friend gave to me of a host of little characters making themselves busy in an enormous library. One stands precariously upon a ladder, two sit with their noses buried in books on the library steps, one simply gazes up at the enormous piles of texts. And above the picture is the caption, ‘There’s no such thing as too many books…’
Normally I would agree; but over the last two weeks, I have been beginning to wonder. Just over a week ago, we moved house from Birmingham to Leeds (or, to be more precise, to Pudsey), and as we were lugging endless boxes of books from house to removal van and then from removal van to house again, it occurred to me that possibly, just possibly, there might be such a thing as too many books. And is it my imagination, or is a box of philosophy books somehow heavier than a box of novels?
We moved the weekend before last, and then last Thursday I took myself off to Paris on the Eurostar to see the truly magnificent Tom Waits performing at the Grand Rex. Now that I am back home, a semblance of order is beginning to emerge in the new house. The bookshelves are now up, most of the books are unpacked, and as the memory of lugging all those heavy boxes begins to fade, once again, I am telling myself that there is indeed no such thing as too many books.
When my ISP gets round to connecting the broadband in the new house (which inexplicably takes up to ten working days), I’ll be set up to work once again, and will be able to blog more regularly. Until then, when I need to get online I’ll be found lurking in Cafe Latino in Leeds, making use of their free wi-fi and partaking of their very tasty banana loaf as I check my emails on my battered old laptop.
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The Uses of Uncertainty
Tuesday July 15, 2008
Just a quick post, this, to let you know about the publication of Vol II, No. 2 of The Pragmatic Buddhist, from the Center for Pragmatic Buddhism. I’ve got an article in this issue on Buddhism and the Uses of Uncertainty – a more extended version of my argument in my post here on the Ocean of Existence, about the role of uncertainty in the ethical life. There are also in the same edition articles and book reviews from Jim Eubanks, Wayne Hughes and William Perkins, and the publication is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Death, at Intervals
Tuesday July 15, 2008
Whilst on the subject of literature, I also can’t resist recommending José Saramago’s Death At Intervals
Death at Intervals is about a country in which human beings, for a period of several months, simply stop dying, something that, although it initially is a cause for celebration, before long leads to uproar and unrest. Then death re-emerges, but instead of coming to collect people without warning as she always has done (death, in this book, is a she, and she signs her name without a capital letter), she sends out letters a week in advance, so that people can put their affairs in order. As a result, the arrival of the postman in the morning becomes an occasion for dreadful anticipation. But then, one day, a letter gets unexpectedly sent back to her, unopened, and death sets out to find out what has gone wrong.
Saramago beautifully skewers the many ambivalences we have in relation to death – and thus in relation to life as well. Whilst doing so, he does not provide us with any answers nor does he settle for the soft option of drawing a moral from the tale (I am increasingly convinced that the ethical task of literature is to provoke ethical questioning, rather than to provide us with a nugget of moral teaching to take home and display upon our moral mantelpiece). But Saramago is also very, very funny, and the end of the book is so charmingly unexpected that the moment I finished it, I wanted to turn to the person next to me on the bus and tell them to buy themselves a copy.
Some Books I Love
Friday July 11, 2008
Still busy getting ready for the move, so this will just be a short post. My local branch of Waterstones bookshop is doing a display over the summer about local authors, and have got in touch to ask me to recommend three of my favourite books, and to write a bit of blurb about each. After a bit of thought, I came up the following list. I’ve included the blurb that I sent to accompany my recommendations as well, just for the sake of it.
Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities.
It is said that half of the world’s population now lives in cities. Calvino’s slim collection of dreams and fables and tall tales is perhaps the sanest guide there is to life amid the endlessly proliferating sprawl. Should be required reading for all town planners.
Lucretius. On the Nature of the Universe.
An extended poetic meditation on absolutely everything, Lucretius’s book is an exquisite love-song to the material world. My idea of utopia is of a place where, instead of a Gideon Bible, in every hotel room there is a copy of On the Nature of the Universe.
Tove Jansson. Comet in Moominland.
A comet appears in the sky and the world is threatened with destruction. A philosophical muskrat pronounces that the end is nigh. And Moomintroll and friends set out to the Misty Mountains to consult the astronomers. Jansson’s book is a reminder of the fact that, even in the darkest times, there is much value in friendship, and in the baking of a good cake.
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Writing Tools
Friday July 4, 2008
If it’s been a bit quiet over here for the last few weeks, at least it is for good reason: in a couple of weeks, I move up to Yorkshire, after almost seven years in Birmingham. We’ll be living in Pudsey, half way between Leeds and Bradford, and I’m looking forward to a change of scene; but at the same time, moving always takes more time and energy than you would anticipate. So I’ve been preoccupied with packing things into boxes (books, books, books…), applying for jobs further north (curse those Microsoft Word application forms) and so on. I should be properly installed up north by the end of July, and then I’m off on holiday in August; so it may be a quiet summer here on thinkBuddha. We’ll see…
On top of the whole business of moving house, I’ve been trying to get some writing done. And here, amid the many distractions offered by a life that is currently in transition, I have been relishing the wonderful piece of software that is JDarkRoom. JDarkRoom is inspired by the Mac program WriteRoom (see the link here), and is, in essence, very simple. It is a full-screen text editor that offers a distraction-free writing environment. It is only when you actually use such a thing that you realise how distracting using a standard word-processor actually is, with all of the bells and whistles, not to mention all the other things that may be open at the same time on your desktop.
JDarkRoom, on the other hand, just provides green text on a black background (although you can change the colours if you like), a few keyboard shortcuts and that’s it. Writing in text files allows you to concentrate on the content and structure of what you are writing, rather than on fancy formatting. I am astonished by how effective it is as a writing environment. If you are fed up with the way your mind flits around whilst writing on your PC, JDarkRoom is the tool for you. Hell, it’s almost as good as using a typewriter. And not only is it a pleasure to use, reducing both distraction and eyestrain, and allowing for a calm and concentrated space in which to write (and one should, to paraphrase the great Leonard Cohen, choose the rooms one writes in with care), but it also feels pleasingly retro with that green on black.
If you ever go to an author event or reading, during the questions somebody will almost inevitably ask the writer what they actually write on: ‘Do you use a pen, a typewriter or a computer?’ I don’t know why this question is always asked, but it is. But, just for the record, this is what I use to write at the moment: jDarkRoom coupled with LaTeX to typeset and structure my documents – which makes writing and editing a pleasure and also produces documents of aching beauty (although it is regrettable how many in the humanities insist on MS Word documents for submissions). To these two, you only have to add the wonderful JabRef for managing citations, and Zotero for collecting bibliographic information from the web, and you have something close to writing heaven. These days, I hardly have to open MS Word (or that lumbering great beast Open Office) at all, aside from filling in those pesky job application forms…
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