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Reading

100 Poems by Seamus Heaney

I was totally unfamiliar with Heaney before picking this up. But I’m glad I chose this volume.

It works well as an introduction to him. The 100 poems have been selected from across his career, and are arranged chronologically; the idea is that, by reading it start to finish, one gains an appreciation of his development as a poet. This arrangement, as his daughter explains in a short note, had always been an idea of Heaney’s, but one he never got around to. His family selected the poems a few years after his death in 2013. 100 is a good number, I think, it makes for something a lot less overwhelming than a collected works. It is a slim volume, less than two hundred pages.

I haven’t finished it yet, and so I’m still busy with the early Heaney, in which there is a strong pastoral element. The poems are often about fields, harvests, bogs, picking blackberries:

‘At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking.’

I’ve been reminded of Yeats, at times, which is maybe is glib to say since they are both important Irish poets, but I mean this in the sense of the poems often reading like parables, and in their often short-story-esque appreciation for character:

‘His brain was whitewashed kitchen
hung with texts, swept tidy
as the body o’ the kirk.’

But I find Heaney different from Yeats in that he feels a lot closer to direct human interaction, less abstract and ethereal. The people in his poems talk to one another while ploughing fields, digging. The parable-esque quality doesn’t come from mysticism but from a sense of taking a naturalistic scene and trying to strip it down to its essence.

Question

How would we behave or think differently if we had chosen this?

I’ve just started reading Hannah Murray’s memoir, The Make-Believe, which is absolutely stellar. I’ll say more about it when I’m finished. But, for now, I found this passage really interesting (it comes from a scene at a culty course on ‘energy healing’):

’Siobhan said that, as Spirit, each of us had a book, in which we wrote down everything we wanted to experience in the physical. These books were the Akashic Records – a term I had come across in my spiritual readings without knowing what it meant. I thought of everything I had experienced up until this point, at twenty-seven years old, and I thought of my little Spirit self scribbling and scribbling away so enthusiastically, not knowing what it was letting itself in for. It felt funny, and painful at the same time, to realise I must have wanted to experience so much, including all the hard stuff, the dark stuff, the pain.’

Now, I don’t think I believe in Akashic Records, but I think they offer a brilliant thought experiment. What if you had been a spirit and chosen, ahead of time, every single thing you experience over your life? What if, whatever life problems you were dealing with, had been willingly selected?

As a thought experiment, it reminds me of Nietzsche’s idea of ‘Eternal Return,’ which, as I remember, goes like this: a demon appears to you and tells you that everything you have experienced up until this point, your whole life, you will repeat again and again. His claim is that a person who truly loves life, will embrace this demon as his saviour.

Treating the concept of Akashic Records this way also reminds me of some of the framing about social contract theory – that there has, of course, been no democratic gathering at which every person in a society agreed to iron out the terms and conditions under which they might live together; but that it is a useful fiction to behave as if this has happened.

Of course, if we try to take the hypothetical Akashic Record instructively, there is a simple objection. Which is that we can choose things and be wrong. If we are wrong about things, it is okay to change our minds. If we chose, as a ‘spirit,’ to experience grief and suffering and so on, what’s wrong with admitting the mistake? Probably, in the context of the hypothetical, we’d be likely to choose wrong too – joyous, free-floating blobs of white light probably tend more towards the naive than the realistic. Or, at least, this is the way I imagine it.

But I think there’s nevertheless something useful here, even if it’s only continuation bias.

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Reflection

Beginner’s mind.

I mentioned the concept of beginner’s mind in the last issue but I didn’t really explain what it means. I’m not sure I’m qualified to do so. I have a few things to say about it anyway.

I would like to be able to quote a neat definition from Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, but as seems to be the case for most books about Zen, such a thing is hard to find.

‘The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind,’ Suzuki says, and this ‘is the secret of Zen practice.’

He offers the example that if we were to recite a sutra only once, ‘it might be a very good recitation,’ but that if we practiced it many times, we would be likely to lose our ‘original attitude towards it.’ But what precisely is this ‘original attitude?’

The primary characteristic seems to be that it is open, without limit – as his more famous quote goes: ‘In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s there are few.’ He describes this attitude as being against, at least, 1) discrimination; 2) achievement; 3) the self. Therefore:

‘There is no need to have a deep understanding of Zen. Even though you read much Zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind. You should not say, “I know what Zen is,” or “I have attained enlightenment.” This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner.’

I think it is difficult to overstate how strange it is, that in the beginning of an introductory book to Zen, written by a Zen master, we are told we don’t need to achieve a deep understanding of Zen. You would find it extremely strange if you were training to be an accountant, and at the beginning of the IRFS textbook, you were told it was not necessary to understand accounting deeply.

Except, maybe the idea of beginner’s mind doesn’t seem so strange; it is fairly well known post- Alan Watts and the other more famous Suzuki (D.T. Suzuki). It has also often been applied to writing.

Just as in meditation, with writing, you must come back to literally sit over and over again; you start off distracted, and must allow your thoughts to settle and so on, and the actual act of writing doesn’t necessarily get any easier no matter how many times you do it. ‘No matter what you’ve achieved the day before,’ Dani Shapiro says in Still Writing, ‘you begin each day at the bottom of the mountain.’

This is all well and good, except that there is an important difference between thinking like a beginner and actually being a beginner.

My experience with Zen books in general, like Suzuki’s or like The Gateless Gate, is that they are quick to devalue seniority, and especially hierarchical seniority. There is, for example, a koan about an illiterate guy working in the rice shed who advances to the position of master ahead of all the highly-trained acolytes. Zen is essentially anti-authority, because, as the saying goes, ‘If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.’

But from reading more of the koans in The Gateless Gate, these cases of a nobody advancing suddenly, by the freshness and openness of their perspective, does not seem to be the norm at all. If there is a norm across koans, it is of the acolytes who train in a temple for many years, without finding enlightenment, and that, after they give up, they come across it entirely by hazard; by the sudden sound of a pebble swept into a shoot of bamboo, say, as in the case of Master Xiangyan, which is recorded in the Shobogenzo.

The giving up is important. It reminds me a lot of the line Raymond Carver popularised from Isak Dinesen, that we should write a little each day without hope and without despair.

But, in the koans, this giving up typically occurs after having acquired knowledge. This is where I think the idea is most appropriate to writing.

A true beginner, whilst they might have wonderful ideas, is unlikely to write well. There are exceptionally few writers who turn out masterpieces as beginners, in their early 20s, say. The examples that come to mind for me are Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell and some of Keats. Novelists do not come to mind. It makes sense that the examples should be poets. Poets feel a bit like mathematicians in the sense that, unlike other academics, mathematicians often make their discoveries very young, and then it’s all downhill from there. As Fitzgerald writes in a letter to his daughter, Scottie:

‘The talent that matures early is usually of the poetic, which mine was in large part. The prose talent depends on other factors – the assimilation of material and the careful selection of it, or more bluntly: having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.’

Of course, Fitzgerald is best known as a novelist, rather than a poet (though he did turn out a few poems) – but what he says makes sense especially for his first novel, This Side of Paradise. It is a novel which is consistently beautiful and consistently disordered (as the critic Edmund Wilson said of it in the novel’s first review, since reproduced in Shores of Light: ’This Side of Paradise commits almost every sin that a novel can possibly commit: but it does not commit the unpardonable sin: it does not fail to live’).

But as to ‘an interesting, highly developed way of saying it:’ novelists, and I think most people in most professions, produce their best work later in life. To write a novel, some level of technique and knowledge is required. In other professions, this fact is more obvious. We would never assume that someone with no medical background, trying open-heart surgery for the first time, would do a good job. With writing, though, we have to account for the bias against its learnability and teachability. While writing is actually both learnable and teachable, there is no qualification or threshold of knowledge at which point one ‘becomes’ a writer. I think that this can obscure the way in which we think about the beginner’s mind as applied to writing.

As far the ‘boundless’ possibilities of beginner’s mind are concerned – having models to refer to, i.e. having studied lots of other novels, creates further possibilities in the writer’s mind. It is difficult to imagine that, without having ever read a novel, that anyone could turn out something worthwhile. Basically, if you have read a thousand novels, rather than one, you have more possible forms to choose from. The trap to be avoided, of course, which is what the Zen-inspired writing guides are getting at, is to be fixated on only a handful of successful models.

We might then say, that the key, rather than only thinking like a beginner, is to first become an expert, and then to think like a beginner.

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See you in two weeks,
Blake