Dear friends,
Friday morning, January 23rd. The windchill is -18ºF as I type these words. After my early morning swim at the Y, I hear a Michigander call this “proper winter weather.” I believe Californians would call this “improper for human existence.”
How am I adapting to the Midwest, you ask?
Am I yearning for elsewhere and elsewise? The temptation is everywhere, in these harsh, frigid times when—even if you live in warmer climates—there is so much to break the heart. Or harden it. I won’t litanize the suffering here: not out of avoidance, but because no list can limn its magnitude.
🌬️
[A] story was a thing you could trust to take you somewhere else
writes Larissa Pham on page 32 of her novel Discipline, which came out earlier this week. Racing the setting sun, I galumphed over to the local bookstore in my heavy snow boots to pick up my preordered copy. At the counter, the bookseller opened the inside flap to read aloud in her British accent:
A Taut, Electrifying Debut about Compassion and Revenge
Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, she’s seeking answers—about how to live a good life and what it means to make art—through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers, and friends.
It was taut and electrifying, I tell the bookseller. I read a PDF galley copy a few months back and inhaled it, hardly breathing. I’m so excited to reread it in physical form, free of watermarks.
🌨️
Sunday morning, January 25th. The windchill is -1ºF, the snow on my early morning walk to yoga fluffy as rabbit’s fur, glittering in the dark like bioluminescence.
When I was younger, I almost never reread books. The library was an endless buffet; how could I taste all the flavors if I went back for second helpings of what I’d already tried? I thought aging, with its diminishing time horizons, would intensify my desire for new tastes. Instead, I find myself slowing down to savor the palimpsestic experience of revisiting old dishes.
Turns out, old dishes are never familiar fare, because I’ve changed. Even if the interlude between readings is two seconds—the time it takes to turn from the last page back to the first one—the story has taken me elsewhere, and changed me.
I return, altered, to begin again.
Screens tend to entice me toward speed and greed (doom-scrolling, anyone?), so I’m grateful for the heft of this hardcover copy of Discipline, the scratch of my 0.5mm pencil on its 210 pages. This feels like the right way to read a novel that, for all its suspense, contains a great deal of slow seeing and deep listening and embodied art-making. Endangered disciplines in these screen-addicted times.
🧊
On my second, slower reading of Discipline, I notice all the instances of doubling and mirroring. The past self and the present self. The original and the replica. Rocks made by geologic time and identical rocks crafted by artist hands. Fossils as “stone’s memory of the bone.” A story and its repetitions/revisions. A personhood and her memories.
How did I miss these the first time through? And why can’t I miss them now? In the thrall of this week’s rereading, I am racked by sickening doublings in news close and closer to home: another 37-year-old killed by federal agents in Minneapolis; the local university student gone missing in a T-shirt found frozen the next day. Deaths that seem utterly unnecessary, preventable with a modicum of human care from others. Lives cut cruelly short from the healing professions of poetry, nursing, learning.
Last weekend, I facilitated the opening session for an online retreat of community Dharma leaders. Exploring the retreat’s central theme, we chanted the five remembrances in Pali and English. The chant is a reminder that aging, sickness, death are unavoidable. Change comes for us all. At some point or another, we must separate from all that what we hold dear. In the face of these stark truths, something else, thankfully, is also unavoidable: our agency in every moment.
Kammassakomhi kamma-dāyādo kamma-yoni kamma-bandhu kamma-paṭisaraṇo.
I am the owner of my actions, heir to my actions, born of my actions, related through my actions, and live dependent on my actions.
Yaṁ kammaṁ karissāmi kalyāṇaṁ vā pāpakaṁ vā tassa dāyādo bhavissāmi.
Whatever I do, for good or for evil, to that will I fall heir.
Evaṁ amhehi abhiṇhaṁ paccavekkhitabbaṁ.
We should often reflect on this.
Or, as Christine reflects, on page 37 of Discipline:
We made choices every day, I thought, and the accumulation of those choices could feel like nothing, because there was so much that seemed out of our control. Then, suddenly, we were met with the consequences of our actions, so layered and inevitable that it felt like we didn’t choose them at all.
🌊
The accumulation of how we act and speak and think—how we direct our bodies and speech and heart-minds—can feel like nothing, but they might just be everything.
In a talk on “Sound and Meaning: Chanting and the Meaning of Buddhist Sanskrit,” Mattia Salvini points out that Sanskrit and Pali Buddhist texts have been composed, taught, and learned mostly through sound: which is to say, through human interaction and presence.
Prof. Salvini encourages his students to incorporate chanting in their learning of Buddhist Sanskrit. Not in a forced, target-driven way, but immersively. Steeped in relaxation and enjoyment, the learner allows for the fruits of the practice to naturally emerge. Receiving the fruits of this practice is akin to letting a ripe apple fall from the tree into your hands. There’s no need to rip an apple from the branches through gravity-defying jumps or herculean effort.
In Dr. Salvini’s view, chant—a practice that unifies body, speech, and mind—allows us to become sahṛdaya with the authors of these texts, to inhabit their heart-minds, to discover an inner resonance. A sweet gift patiently earned.
On Discipline’s publication day, I received a double dose of beauty, through Larissa Pham’s novel and through Charles Hallisey’s “Seeing Things with Words: Relishing Beauty with Buddhist Literature and Why it Matters.” Prof. Hallisey’s hybrid talk at the University of Edinburgh was a lush feast of scenes and similes and stories that invited us to understand beauty not as a thing but as a felt experience. It’s an experience embodied not in generalities but particularities—this glittering snow field, this ocean-worn pebble, this vengeful and compassionate and flawed and courageous woman named Christine, this final moment between the Buddha and his beloved Ananda where we witness not just a teacher summoning his student, but the beauty of friendship in the face of bad things: You’ve been with me in everything Ananda, don’t leave me alone now in my final hour.
Beauty brings copies of itself into being
Dr. Hallisey muses, quoting Elaine Scarry. All those scenes of extravagant, even hyperbolic beauty in Buddhist texts? (I was so bewildered by the Pure Land Sutras when I first read them fifteen years ago!) They might be a reminder that it’s a natural process for beauty to bring copies of itself into being.
In the presence of a sparkling snowfall, a lyrical sentence, a glorious meal, a stunning painting, a radiant friendship… May we revel in beauty. And then bring forth more of it.
Til the next quarter moon,
~Chenxing
