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I am taking a break from His Dark Materials, by Phillip Pullman, on which I will publish a post very soon, to uncharacteristically ask you a favor. If you read my blog, even on occasion, and enjoy it, will you please take the time to follow me? My blogger stats tell me that lots of people are reading, or at least stopping by, but the follower numbers don't match up. I appreciate the readership, but will you show me a little follower-love as well? I promise I'll pay you back with more, better book reviews, and weirder, deeper commentary than ever before.

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East of Eden, Steinbeck

East of Eden

John Steinbeck

1952

USA

Are people inherently good, or are they evil? What about individuals? Can we change our destiny, or are we in fact “born this way” and unable to change? That’s the question John Steinbeck tackles and (I think successfully) answers in his epic and entertaining novel, East of Eden. I could write 20 pages or more on this book, but with respect for your time, dear reader, I won’t. Just know that to get the real deal, though, you should read it yourself, and then write your own report in the comments section, to which I will happily reply.

East of Eden follows two sets of brothers – Adam and Charles and, later, Adam’s sons, Cal and Aron. The Biblical story of Cain and Abel provides a framing device for these two separate but very much connected tales. In case you forgot, Cain and Abel are the brothers from Genesis who each made offerings to God, but God preferred Abel’s gift over Cain’s, prompting Cain to kill his brother in a fit of jealousy. When he’s questioned about Abel’s whereabouts, Cain answers with the famous line, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The story is important not only because it’s echoed in the relationship between the brothers, but also because it’s discussed at length by several of the characters, and used by them (and by Steinbeck) to make sense of the world.

The problem with the Cain and Abel story, for the characters in East of Eden, is its deceptive simplicity. If Cain was just a bad person, then he could not have helped killing his brother, and where is the instruction in that? Also, why does this story remain one of Christianity’s most popular, told again and again when so many others are forgotten?  The answer, according to Lee, an amateur philosopher and Adam’s servant in East of Eden, hinges on one particular word. Whether or not God promises Cain, before he murders his brother that Cain “shall” rule over Abel, or commands him, “thou shalt” rule over him, or whether he offers this as one out of many options, “thou mayest,” makes all the difference in the world, according to Lee. “Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.” In other words, we have freewill. We can’t escape the fact that we’re shaped by our own natures, which may tend toward the light or the dark, but we do not have to be slaves to our natures. With intention and acceptance, Steinbeck says, we can overcome them.

Some have complained that Steinbeck’s treatment here is heavy-handed, too obvious. Indeed, his message is not shrouded in metaphor and literary invention like so much of what we take to be good literature. And yet, despite how obviously the author tries to serve us his meanings on a platter, it’s still possible to miss them, because though his writing isn’t particularly subtle, the things he’s writing about are. If acceptance of the simultaneous existence of both good and evil – in each of us – were easy and unproblematic, there wouldn’t be wars and killing and crime. In reality, the grey area is troublesome, and freewill creates a lot more complications than either of the false paths of obedience or fatalism. The quest to find comfort in a middle way between extremes is what drives all of us, then, since the time of Cain and Abel, to Steinbeck, to now, because whether we like it or not, in-between, “both/and,” sometimes but not always is the nature of the world. We don’t live in Eden, but we don’t live in Hell, either. To live fully, we’re going to have to accept this middle ground for what it is – not great, not terrible, but true. Life isn’t simple, but we may as well embrace the paradoxes, Steinbeck tells us, with an open, active mind, and a bottle of ng-ka-py. 

Just Kids, Smith

Apologies for my absence, dear readers. I know you must be missing me. I’ve missed you, too. Fear not, I have been reading, just not writing so much (unless wedding vows count?), because I’ve been so gosh darn busy! In the past month and a half I got married, traveled around Colombia, packed all my worldly possessions into a U-Haul, watched my husband graduate from medical school, and drove across the country with said U-Haul and husband. Whew! It was a mighty big May and early June. Still, being the gal I am I squeezed some reading in here and there. Here’s the first of several (uncharacteristically condensed) analyses of what I took in, reading-wise.

Just Kids

Patti Smith

2010

USA

This is a beautiful true story of love, friendship and art in New York City. Smith’s memoir about her relationship with the artist and photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, is inspiring on multiple levels. Even though, of course, there was some pain involved in their romance, which developed into a lifelong friendship (otherwise, how could there be a book? and how could there be a romance?), what stands out as unique is the respect these two people showed for each other and for each others’ art over a lifetime. It reminded me how absolutely invaluable a true believer is to any artist, and how lucky and amazing it is when that believer is also an artist him or herself. We are all lucky that Patti and Robert had each other: it seems likely that the rest of us would not have had their art if they didn’t.

I’m not at all familiar with Smith’s other work, but I learned quite a bit about it by reading this book. I guess she’s a poet and a singer? Her personality comes across as very sober and serious; she’s certainly not the kind of jovial, playful author I’m usually drawn to. And yet, over and over again I found myself intensely impressed by her dogged pursuit of art for art’s sake, and of her faith both in art and in herself. The fact that Smith believed in what she was doing even when no one else, or at least very few people (there was always Robert) did reminded me of the importance of maintaining my faith in myself. Smith was doing totally weird, unmarketable things. She didn’t have a “platform,” or any connections (aside from those she cultivated, seemingly haphazardly, while living at the Chelsea Hotel), and she wasn’t a businesswoman, but she eventually made a living making the things she cared about. It wasn’t always easy and it wasn’t always pretty, but Smith’s story reminds me of the importance of integrity in art, and gives me hope. It would be great if I could make a living at making the things I love, but for now every person who reads and is moved is payment enough. I hope that’s you. If not, pick up Just Kids. That should do the trick. 

Cocaine [An Unauthorized Biography]

Cocaine [An Unauthorized Biography]

Dominic Streatfeild

2001

England and USA

“Over 50 percent of all American crime over the last 75 years has been blamed on drugs, because drugs are the single most convenient scapegoat for a society that is unable to blame itself.”

            I didn’t need to read this book to know that individuals alone don’t create reality, but that systems made up of multitudes of individuals do. I did need to read the book, though, to learn the specifics behind one such system – that of the production, sale, and use of cocaine and, more specifically, the state of affairs in South America today because of it. I needed to know that because I’m going traveling in Colombia soon, and before I read this book I didn’t even know who Pablo Escobar was. I am much better informed now.

            Cocaine [An Unauthorized Biography] begins with the Incas, who found the leaf of the coca plant, chewed with an alkaloid to activate the stimulant, extremely useful in developing and sustaining their incredibly advanced civilization. From here the book goes on to document the lengthy history of cocaine in the West, from  its discovery by Freud, then other doctors as a “cure” for morphine addiction, to the birth of crack and the narco states in Colombia, Peru, and Beliz, and every step in between. At every point the author consults the primary sources – drug traffickers in the US, England, and South America, historians, doctors, and DEA agents. This is a biography in the fullest sense of the term, and cocaine has had a long life and varied life.

So what’s the takeaway of these 499 pages on cocaine? Mostly Streatfeild’s purpose is to inform, and at first I found his casual, intimate tone at odds with this ambition, but I soon came to understand why the author chose to relate his findings in such a personal, and often humorous, way: the results of his study are astounding, bizarre, horrific – in short, too much to bear alone. After reading the information Streatfeild collects, as well as what he experiences and observes while doing it, the reader finds that she, too, is now responsible for figuring out what it all means.

While Streatfeild withholds his judgment until the end of the book, the massive amount of suffering linked to the “success” of cocaine compels him to eventually take a stance. His thesis, inevitably, is that cocaine is not good for the world, but not for the reasons you think. Streatfeild is no anti-drugs crusader proselytizing about the “evils” of the drug. Instead, he argues that cocaine should be legalized, positing that if it was legal coke’s price would go down, thus lessening the allure of selling it and slaking the frenzy of corruption and violence that has in our time surrounded its production. The “war on drugs,” according to the author, has been misguided at best, idiotic and corrupt at worst. Streatfeild accuses the American government and international agencies of everything from “helping” poor South American farmers by offering loans with outrageous interest rates to switch from growing coca to far less lucrative crops, to dumping a species of fungus engineered to attack coca plants (but later found to mutate and attack other crops as well) on Peruvian coca fields, to, through the Contra scandal, effectively creating the crack “epidemic” in the US. He doesn’t make these accusations hastily or in anger and, once the evidence is presented, the reader, at least this one, finds it hard to disagree with him.  

If you want a simple story about how drugs are bad, drug dealers are evil, and the government has your best interests at heart, you should look elsewhere. If you want in-depth reportage that gets closer to the complicated nature of the reality of drugs and the "war" against them, then this book is for you.

The Chronology of Water, Yuknavitch

The Chronology of Water

Lidia Yuknavitch

USA

2010

At times I wanted to hate this book because it was a memoir that reminded me of me, and I didn’t get a book deal. And no one gave me an award. No, my dad didn’t abuse me, and my mom wasn’t an alcoholic, and I’m not a swimmer. But they did do some pretty messed up things to each other when I was a kid, my parents, and I was a basketball player, and I was an angry, drunk, numbed, death-seeking girl, too, just like Lidia Yuknavitch. But nobody gave me a book deal and I don’t write whole paragraphs that consist of nothing but “goddamn it” and if I did no one would give me an award for it.

I guarantee you.

I wanted to hate it because everybody loved it. And because I’ve loved women, too, you know. You’re not the only bisexual crazy girl out there. You’re not the only fucked up one. And I wanted to hate it because she claims that writing saved her, when half the time it feels like writing, this guilt I have about not-writing, or the shame I have about how bad the writing I do get down actually is, is what’s pushing me further towards the death-drive. How I would just chuck it all and forget about it if I could, if I thought there was anything else. And I wanted to hate it because it was sad and scary and tortured and not even in a pretty package like a novel, just all hanging out there, like real life.

I wanted to hate it but I couldn’t because of the truth and ache of it. Because of chapters like “Distilled,” where she relays the story of her second marriage in what amounts to one long sentence “distilling” the essence of an 11 year relationship, beauty, pleasure, and pain all mixed up in every phrase. And then, from the chapter “Conversion” onward, things get better. That’s when I started to really like it. Okay, I’ll be honest; that’s when I started sniveling with gratitude, sobbing into my roll of toilet paper while I sat outside on an unusually sunny day under a cloudless sky. Because I already know things are fucked up, that people are awful, that we do horrifying things to one another and to ourselves. I’m well versed in that, thank you. Didn’t need somebody else’s memoir to tell me that; I’ve got my own (unpublished) one all about it. What I wanted, what we all want, is the redemption. The moment things start to turn around. And that’s here too. Love, and peace, and “resuscitation.” If this author, this Yuknavitch woman, can accept that a new chance at life is what’s happening to her, maybe I can too. The hard part is it’s not something you accept once and then be done with; happiness – “learning to live on land,” as Yuknavitch puts it – is something you have to come to terms with again and again, every day, until you die, and maybe even after that.

So this book is a memoir, not a novel, and I’m okay with that now. I’m okay with the mess of it particularly because the overarching metaphor of water, swimming, drowning, and floating holds the thing together so, well, fluidly. It seems natural and obvious and perfect. Unlike life, and yet exactly like it, too.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, trans. Thurman

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Padma Sambhava

Translated  by Robert A.F. Thurman

Tibet

8^th or 9^th century

What did I think The Tibetan Book of the Dead would be like? Well, not like what it is, that’s for sure. Yet if I had to say in a general way what I thought before reading it I guess I expected it to disclose some secrets or insights about what happens when we die, and it definitely does do that. According to The Great Book of Natural Liberation Through Understanding in the Between, as it is known in Tibet, dying is extremely weird, scary, and dangerous. Unlike in Christianity, where it’s what you do before you die that determines what will happen in the in-between (and if you’re Protestant, like I was, then there are only two possibilities) in Tibetan Buddhism the real work of deciding the fate for your next life begins after you’re physical body is dead. That’s not to say that what you do before you die doesn’t matter; it does, but mostly because it either prepares you, or leaves you dangerously unprepared, for what comes after. 

Though Tibetan Buddhists believe that life is “boundless,” and that, since we do not come from nothing and therefore cannot become nothing, our lives must go on in some form, they are nonetheless quite worried about dying. Indeed, because the in-between stage, when a being passes from one life to another, is so fraught with choices, Tibetans are probably even more concerned about death than we are. Thurman tells us, “But the core of Buddha’s discovery was the essential reality of freedom – that underlying the lived reality of existence is the immediacy of total freedom, especially freedom from suffering, from bondage, from ignorance. This essential freedom can be realized by the human mind as its own deepest and most true condition. This realization makes it possible for freedom to prevail over the habitual suffering of personal experience. So the realized individual is thenceforth held apart from suffering; not held in anything, but held out of binding patterns” (14). The death point is one of the opportunities to separate oneself from suffering, but it is also a time and place where “binding patterns” are more comforting and tempting than ever before. Enlightenment realization doesn’t just happen. One has to condition herself in order for non-suffering to become reality. How to do that?

The Great Book of Natural Liberation has a few suggestions. The first, naturally, is to prepare for death during your life. This means, among other things, practicing personal mind control. “In order to create something, first you have to imagine it. And imagination can be extremely powerful in life-between reality,” as well as in this life (14). If one is practiced in imaginative meditation, then he will be better able to deal with the powerful images his mind presents to him in the in-between, and be more prepared to fend them off with calculated ideations of his own.

The second part of the book is the readings and prayers that the living read to the deceased person in order to help them navigate through the six realms of the in-between and make the best choices possible. “For at the death point every being, especially a human being, has the ideal opportunity to discover real freedom from addictive habits, delusive perceptions, and misleading conceptions. Therefore, in Tibetan culture it is considered important to help a loved one through the actual process of death, to avoid distracting and frightening places such as hospital emergency rooms, and to arrange circumstances where the assistants can stay with the body at least for some hours” (120). Though in our culture crying and showing our sadness over death is expected, in Tibetan and other Buddhist societies this type of behavior, at least around the dead person, is frowned upon because it distracts the deceased from the crucial work of navigating the in-between, and may make them cling to the life they’ve left, which is counter-productive in the quest for enlightenment or, if complete freedom cannot be attained, then the best possible rebirth in this or another realm.

The deceased needs her full concentration at the death point because as she traverses the in-between realms beautiful and terrifying images of deities, light, and demons will appear to her. What the prayers in the Book of Natural Liberation remind us is that all of these – pleasant and terrifying – are emanations of our own mind, and it is our reaction to them that will determine our next phase of being. One thing I found really interesting about the translation I read was that while the author described the images of the Buddhist deities and figures in precise detail, he also mentioned again and again that if one was from a different religious background then they should practice becoming comfortable with the gods, angels, and demons from their own tradition, as the images that will appear to you are those that are already in your mind.  So if you’re Christian you will want to spend time visualizing and becoming comfortable with the distressing imagery in the book of Revelations, as well as with the comforting spirit of Jesus Christ as, according to Thurman, these figures can help you find your way to a place of peace and liberation rather than fear, aversion, and clinging when you realize that they are merely images from inside you, and not real in any other way.

I’m very glad I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I feel I have a stronger understanding of Buddhism itself, and have plenty of new ideas about death to process. But I also recommend the book because its central message is one that is useful well before we die, and can be summed up in a single question which I would like to remember to ask myself, and answer honestly, when my mind begins to attack me in my waking, daily life: Is this (problem, image, fear, worry) real, or is it all in my head?

The Portrait of a Lady, James

The Portrait of a  Lady

Henry James

England 1881

“It appeared to Isabel that the unpleasant had been even too absent from her knowledge, for she had gathered from her acquaintance with literature that it was often a source of interest and even instruction.”

            I think I’m the only one who still reads/loves Henry James. Okay, maybe they still teach The Turn of the Screw in undergraduate courses (they did in mine, anyway) but I’ve yet to meet anyone else who loves the lengthier psychological novels as much as I do. I don’t know what it is, exactly. I guess I like the feeling of time travel, the sense that I’m sitting next to an English gentleman overlooking the sloping fields and tailored gardens of a country house, or, in the case of The Portrait, that I’m wandering among the ruins of Rome under the particular gleam of an Italian sun. Of course there’s also the fact of getting into someone else’s head that I like, and James’ psychoanalysis is so expansive. His omniscient narrator explores the mind not only of Isabel (the “Lady” in question), but also of her friends, family, and acquaintances over many years, so that by the end one feels that she understands these people better than they understand themselves. Why do people do the things they do? James wants to know, and so do I.

           

In The Portrait of a Lady James tells the story of Isabel Archer, a young American who travels to England to visit her aunt and uncle, and has her life inexorably altered by the events that happen there. The question under scrutiny, or one of them, at least, is what difference does money make to a young woman’s happiness? Her cousin Ralph, among other men, admires her sense of adventure and originality: “She was intelligent and generous; it was a fine free nature; but what was she going to do with herself? This question was irregular, for with most women one had no occasion to ask it. Most women did with themselves nothing at all; they waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish them with a destiny. Isabel’s originality was that she gave one an impression of having intentions of her own.” Realizing, however, that Isabel would not likely be able to fulfill her intentions, given that she was poor, Ralph convinces his dying father to leave the girl a fortune, thereby, he supposes, setting her free from the obligation of finding a husband.

The question now becomes what will make Isabel happy? The results of his social experiment, however, turn out to be not at all what Ralph imagined. Presumably free from the danger of being taken advantage of due to her poverty, Isabel is now “made use of” for her money. It’s a complicated story, the details of which don’t emerge until the end of the novel, but the upshot is that Isabel becomes so focused on not following society’s edicts that she swings in the opposite direction, marrying a poor man in order to set him “free.” The match turns out to be a bad one. Still, there remain plenty of opportunities for Isabel to rearrange her life to better suit her own happiness. She could follow the example of her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, for example, and live apart from her husband for most of the year. She could, the narrator and Isabel’s friends suggest, leave him altogether. She could accept the offers of other suitors who could also take care of her. But Isabel does none of this. It’s almost as if she has acquired a taste for the misery she never knew in her younger life. Suffering, for Isabel, seems to be the sign of a higher nature. It is Isabel’s desire to be free from the scrutiny and expectations of those who wish her well which holds her captive. It is, in essence, her own mind which causes her suffering. In this sense, the tale is as modern and relatable today as it ever was.

One wants Isabel to be a feminist heroine, but James does not allow that wish to be fulfilled. Even with plenty of avenues for escape, Isabel returns to her cruel husband and a life she appears to hate in Rome. So is there no hope for woman, according to James? Are we doomed, not only by societal circumstance, but by our own perverse natures? I don’t think so. In the guise of a secondary character, Isabel’s friend, Henrietta Stackpole, James suggests not. This lady, a traveling journalist, is a mix between Mrs. Touchett who, while completely in control of her own life, is too cold for Isabel’s tastes, and Isabel, who bends to her husband’s every whim. Henrietta is sensible yet caring. And though Isabel is disappointed by her friend’s eventual decision to marry an Englishman, it seems to me the most logical and happy marriage of all. But, of course, logic and happiness does not for a good novel make. And, by extension, perhaps not for the most interesting, or “original,” life, either.