Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh in Washington, DC, September, 2003

“Peace,” writes Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, “is made of peace. Peace is a living substance we build our lives with. It is not only made of discussions and treaties. To infuse our world with peace, we must walk in peace, speak with peace, and listen with peace.”

As so described, peace is more than a noble goal. It is a practice for everyday life. Peace is to be cultivated not only by imagining a peaceful world, as John Lennon did, but also by walking, speaking, and listening in ways that embody a peaceful spirit. In Thich Nhat Hanh’s school of Vietnamese Zen, these practices are known as “walking meditation,” “loving speech,” and “deep listening.” Diligently pursued, these practices can, in Thich Nhat Hanh’s words, “help heal the wounds that divide our nation and the world.”*

Walking meditation is common to most forms of Buddhist meditation. It can be done in a variety of ways, ranging from slow to fast, formal to informal. Known in Japanese Zen as kinhin, walking meditation serves in part to provide relief between long periods of sitting. In principle, at least, kinhin also provides a bridge between the stillness of zazen (sitting meditation) and the activities of everyday life. By practicing kinhin, we bring the concentration and awareness engendered by zazen into our bodily movements. Later, we can bring those same qualities into all aspects of our daily lives.

Walking meditation, as taught by Thich Nhat Hanh, incorporates the traditional aims of kinhin but adds another dimension, namely that of cultivating a peaceful body and mind. As Thich Nhat Hanh often points out, when we are anxious or filled with anger, we print the earth with anxious or angry steps. By practicing walking meditation, we can be kinder to the earth, and we can also cultivate peace within ourselves. “To lessen the unpleasant feeling brought about by anger,” he observes, “we give our whole heart and mind to the practice of walking meditation, combining our breath with our steps and giving full attention to the contact between the soles of our feet and the earth.” By so doing, we reclaim our calm, allowing us to look directly at our anger and ascertain its cause.

In similar fashion, the practice of “loving speech” enables the practitioner to use words in ways that do no harm and may actively promote a peaceful resolution of conflict. Thich Nhat Hanh quotes the Vietnamese proverb, “It doesn’t cost anything to have loving speech.” What it does require, especially when people are in conflict, is a clear and balanced mind. Those in conflict are advised to practice conscious breathing and refrain from speaking until their equanimity has been restored. Only then are they in a position to practice “loving speech.”

For Thich Nhat Hanh, that practice consists of saying “only loving things.” This guideline is easily misconstrued, especially by newcomers, as merely repressing anger or making nice. But as defined in the stern teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, to practice loving speech is “to say the truth in a loving way, with nonviolence.” It is to “tell the deepest kind of truth,” using “the kind of speech the other person can understand and accept.” Far from being an exercise in avoidance or self-repression, loving speech is a difficult practice, demanding not only a steady mind but also honesty, care, and tact on the part of the speaker. Simply put, we must think before we speak, and we must engage the compassionate heart as well as the analytic mind.

Loving speech is, of course, only one side of peaceful communication, the other being “deep listening.” This practice, suggests Thich Nhat Hanh, has “one purpose: to help the other person suffer less.” To that end, the practitioner is enjoined to give wholehearted attention to the other person’s words, bringing non-judgmental awareness to whatever is being said, however accurate or inaccurate, true or false it may be. That isn’t easy, and to some it may prove untenable. To support the practice, Thich Nhat Hanh recommends the verses, “Breathing in, I know that I am listening in order to make this person suffer less. / Breathing out, I remember the person in front of me suffers very much.” Should that measure fail, he advises the practitioner to postpone the conversation, lest harm ensue. “We have to renew ourselves,” he warns, “before continuing. It is important to know our limit.”

In a world scarred by violence and rent by deep political divisions, the integrated practices of walking meditation, loving speech, and deep listening may appear naive, utopian, and far removed from the corridors of power. But such was not the case in September, 2003, when Thich Nhat Hanh came to Capitol Hill to speak at the Library of Congress and offer a three-day retreat. Nine members of Congress, eleven family members, and nine clergy attended the retreat, which focused on loving speech, deep listening, and the resolution of conflict. However idealistic Thich Nhat Hanh’s effort may appear, its limited success kindles a spark of hope. Even in Washington, it confirmed, entrenched opponents can learn the practice of peace.

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*Thich Nhat Hanh, Calming the Fearful Mind: A Zen Response to Terrorism (Parallax, 2005), 63. Subsequent quotations are also from this text.

**Thich Nhat Hanh’s retreat was entitled “Leading with Courage and Compassion.” See http://faithandpolitics.org/?q=thich_nhat.

Packer’s question would be pertinent in any season, but it is especially so in the present season, when the usual holiday tunes are in the air, and what we are hearing is so well-known as to seem banal. Like it or not, here comes The Little Drummer Boy again—he and his drum. Given the familiarity of the old songs, is “fresh listening” possible? And if so, how shall we go about it?

As a general rule, Zen teachings would urge us to set aside our social conditioning and merely listen. So what if we’ve heard “Let it Snow” or “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” a thousand times before? Can we not put our preferences in abeyance and listen with “beginner’s mind”? Can we not become a child again?

Perhaps we can, but in my experience such efforts are only intermittently successful. Layers of conditioning block the way. As an alternative, I would suggest in this instance the way of the Western scholar rather than that of the Eastern meditative practitioner. Rather than try to wipe the slate clean, we might make the oft-heard song an object of historical study and disinterested contemplation.

Many possibilities suggest themselves, but one in particular stands out. If you are a parent, you may know the “traditional” carol “Good King Wenceslas” all too well. It is often the first tune assigned to children who are learning to play an instrument.  What is the carol’s provenance, we might inquire, and what is its cultural history? Of what does it consist, musically and thematically?

Published in 1853, “Good King Wenceslas” is at once a Victorian Christmas carol and a retelling of a medieval Czech legend. The carol recounts a good deed done by Wenceslas I (907-935), who was not in fact a king but a duke of Bohemia, noted for giving alms to widows, orphans, prisoners, and the poor. In 935 Wenceslas was assassinated on orders from his brother. Shortly thereafter, he was declared a saint and martyr, and the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I conferred on him the “regal dignity and title.” Today King Wenceslas is the patron saint of the Czech Republic.

In the manner of a ballad, “Good King Wenceslas” depicts the king regaling himself on the feast of St. Stephen’s Day (December 26). Turning aside from the festivities, he observes a peasant gathering fuel in the bitter cold. This sight prompts the king to summon a page and to depart with meat, wine, and pine logs to the peasant’s forest home. Along the way, the page complains of the cold, and the king instructs him to follow in his regal footsteps though the snow. Warmed by the sainted king’s steps, the page completes the journey, and the compassionate errand is accomplished.

The lyrics of “Good King Wenceslas” were written by John Mason Neale (1816-1866), clergyman, hymnist, and warden of an English alms-house. An amalgam of narrative, dramatic, and didactic elements, Neale’s text features a brief dialogue between the querulous page and the generous king, and it ends with a simple homily, in which Christian men are exhorted to share their wealth and thereby “find blessing” for themselves.

Given its content, “Good King Wenceslas” might have been set to a solemn tune. As it happened, however, Neale and his collaborator, Thomas Helmore, chose a thirteenth-century spring carol entitled “Tempest adest floridum” (“It is time for flowering”). In its original version, this lively Swedish carol portrayed lusty clerics disporting with local virgins. A later version, modified for churches and schools, portrayed the clerics praising the Lord with pious conviction.

In keeping with its mixed origins, the spirit of “Good King Wenceslas” is both energetic and restrained, dancelike and ceremonial. The carol’s energy derives chiefly from its underlying rhythm, which consists of units of two syllables, the stress falling on the first. Known to prosodists as trochaic, this aggressive rhythm can be heard in the opening line:

GOOD King / WEN-ces- / LAS looked / OUT

At the same time, all of the verses end on stressed syllables, with two such syllables in every other line:

WHEN  the / SNOW lay / ROUND a- / BOUT

DEEP and / CRISP and / E- / VEN

Sung as half-notes, the terminal syllables impart a stately feeling. Together with the trochaic rhythm, this recurrent pattern creates a pleasing tension between exuberant celebration and regal restraint.

To be sure, not everyone has found the union of moral fable and virile carol a happy one. The composer Elizabeth Poston, editor of The Penguin Book of Christmas Carols, dismisses “Good King Wenceslas” as “the product of an unnatural marriage between Victorian whimsy and the thirteenth-century dance carol.” The dance measure of the original, she contends, “sounds ridiculous to pseudo-religious words.”

Zenshin Philip Whalen

“The elbow,” Zen teachings tell us, “does not bend outward.” As a longtime Zen practitioner, I have heard that saying more than once, but in recent years it has come to seem ever more germane.

That might have something to do with my growing older. On certain mornings, the elbow is not the only bodily component that doesn’t want to bend outward—or inward, for that matter. But a reminder that elbows do not bend outward can be of benefit to all of us, regardless of age, not least because it returns our hyperactive minds to a physical reality. Beyond that, the saying might also provide a countervailing motto for the twenty-first century, particularly as it pertains to the tempo of our activities, the volume of our consumption, and the realism of our view of life.

If you are a musician or lover of music, you know how important tempo is to musical performance. Every musical composition, it might be said, has its appropriate tempo. In classical music, such terms as lento and adagio indicate a range of possible tempi, but the range is not all that wide, and even within it, one tempo is likely to feel more suitable than another. Played too slowly—or, more likely, too fast—the piece being performed will not be fully realized and may well be sorely compromised.

What is true of musical performance is also true of the most mundane activity, be it raking leaves or attending to e-mail or unscrewing the lid of a jar. Each has its appropriate tempo; each can be nearly effortless if performed at that tempo. But to the extent that we devalue common chores or do them by rote, we may give scant attention to the pace at which we’re working. Ignoring the inherent tempo of the task at hand, we may be unwittingly bending the elbow outward.

And as with the pace of our daily activities, so with the volume of our daily consumption. On many late-model cars, we can now monitor the correspondence between our car’s speed and our consumption of energy. As the one goes up, so does the other. But there is no such gauge to monitor our personal consumption, and if you have ever practiced “mindful eating,” as Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh advises us to do, you may have noticed how great the volume of food on a supersized plate can come to seem, once you have begun to eat slowly, silently, and with full attention.  And the same might be said of the volume of acquisitions in our closets, storerooms, and basements, once we stop to examine it.

In this time of austerity, Americans been consuming less and saving more. We have become more mindful of our economy’s fragility and our own economic limitations. But even as we’ve scaled down our consumption of material goods, many of us have ramped up our consumption of information. In his book The Information Diet (O’Reilly Media, 2011), Clay Johnson notes the consequences of trying to bend that particular elbow outward: cognitive problems, lost time, lower productivity, forgetfulness, and the consumption of false information. As a counter-measure, he advocates an “information diet,” in which we keep track of the amount and kinds of information we are ingesting. “A healthy information diet,” he suggests, “means measuring your intake in hours, and placing some limits on yourself, and making the most of your information-consuming time.” For himself he prescribes a “cap of six hours a day of total, proactive information consumption.”*

Insofar as Clay Johnson is advocating mindfulness of conditions and limitations, his attitude parallels that of Zen practice, which also endeavors to reconnect us with our actual lives. And nowhere is that aim more evident than in the line of inquiry that Zen calls the Great Matter of life and death, where opportunities for self-deception abound. All of us know we will die, but few of us can bear to face that fact. As Sarah Creed, a hospice nurse, reports, “ninety-five per cent of those who come into hospice understand that they are dying, but one hundred per cent hope they’re not.”** Yet even here, as in our everyday activities and our habits of consumption, realism is possible, and the image of the unbending elbow, taken as an object of contemplation, can be a valuable emblem. In his eulogy for the poet and Zen priest Zenshin Philip Whalen (1923 -2002), the Reverend Myo Lahey reported that Whalen, who joked that he had “flunked hospice twice,” coped with his condition by noting, “hour after hour, that the elbow does not bend outward.”*** By so doing, he embraced the reality of his waning life.

Cloisters of Lisbon Cathedral

“There is this cave / In the air behind my body / That nobody is going to touch: / A cloister, a silence / Closing around a blossom of fire.”* So wrote the American poet James Wright (1927-1980) in his poem “The Jewel.” Wright’s images are enigmatic, in the way dreams are, but their import is clear. They evoke a place in the self that is silent, luminous, and inviolate.

“The Jewel” appeared in Wright’s third collection of poems, The Branch Will Not Break, in 1963. Fifty years on, it is an open question whether the space envisioned by Wright is still to be found—or whether it is much valued in contemporary culture. On one side, there are the incursions of the State, the illicit wiretappings of the Bush years being the most obvious example. On another, there are the watchful eyes of the multinational corporations, whose databases abound with information once considered private. No less disturbing, at least to some of us, is the widespread, voluntary relinquishment of personal privacy to the social media. As the psychologist and media analyst Sherry Turkle has observed, the Internet has proposed itself as the “architect of our intimacies.” And for many people, especially the young people Turkle has interviewed in her research, the disclosure of once-private feelings by means of Facebook or Twitter has become integral to the establishment of those feelings. It is not enough to feel at loose ends on a Saturday morning. You must publish that feeling to the wide world and await a virtual response.

As both an astute social observer and the mother of a daughter who spends much of her life online, Sherry Turkle views the erosion of personal privacy with concern. Citing Mark Zuckerberg’s pronouncement that privacy is “part of the discourse of the past,” she urges a return to older norms of privacy, such as she knew in her youth, and a relearning of the “virtues of solitude.”** Unless I miss my guess, the first of those objectives is already out of reach. It would require a societal shift of attitude, a turning back of the modern tide. But where the reclaiming of solitude is concerned, change is not only possible but readily at hand. And toward that end, the great contemplative traditions, Zen included, have much to offer, both in general outlook and in concrete daily practices.

To begin with, the posture of meditation provides both sustenance and a sense of personal sovereignty. Sitting in an upright, relaxed position, cross-legged or on a chair, we nourish and renew our minds and bodies. We open the channels of breath and energy. And by adopting this posture, not only on the cushion but periodically throughout the day, we also restore our stability, physical and emotional. Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh recommends that as we sit, we recite the verses, “Aware of my stability, I breathe in / Enjoying the stability, I breathe out.”  By so doing, we become “masters of [our] minds and bodies” and “are not pulled hither and thither by the different actions of body, speech, and mind, in which [we] might otherwise drown.”***  Well established in mindful awareness, we can freely choose whether to speak or act or go online—or divulge private information about our lives.

Beyond the restoration of stability, meditative practice also opens a private interior space, where thoughts and feelings can arrive, abide, and run their course, unhindered by judgment or repression. As Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, puts it, meditative space “doesn’t do—it allows.” It “allows objects to come into being, to function, to expand, to contract, to move around, and to disappear without interference.”**** For those unaccustomed to prolonged sitting, one of those “objects” might be the impulse to do something—anything—beside sit still: to ”tweet” or “text” a friend, or otherwise reconnect with the outer world. Within the openness of meditative space, however, that impulse can be allowed to announce itself, make its case, and gradually dissipate, precipitating no immediate action. Later on, having gained some insight into our mental activities, we can indeed reconnect with other people, perhaps at a deeper level than we would have, had we merely obeyed a passing impulse or indulged a habit of connectivity.

And should we continue to reclaim the “virtues of solitude” through meditative practice, we may also find ourselves connecting vertically as well as horizontally, which is to say, connecting to what the Zen tradition calls sunyata, or absolute reality. Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat Roshi has likened that experience to sinking a taproot deeply into the soil, even as we sit. By giving full attention to the flux of our experience, we eventually reconnect with the ground of being, the realm of non-duality. Having deeply experienced that connection, we may wish more than ever to reconnect with others, but we will bring to our encounters more than our ego’s usual striving. We will bring the wisdom of liberation, or what one school of Zen calls silent illumination.

Autumn in Kyoto, Japan

In his essay “Reading Oneself,” the writer and teacher Sven Birkerts describes the experience of encountering a long-forgotten page of his own prose. As Birkerts tells the story, he agreed to read the book manuscript of a student whom he had taught many years before. When his former student arrived at their meeting, she brought both her manuscript and Birkerts’ written evaluation of her work, which she had saved from her days in his course. Typed on the Selectric II he was using at the time, Birkerts’ prose seemed foreign to its author:

And suddenly there’s this feeling, I’ve had it before—more and more in recent years. I am reading something I’ve written and I not only don’t recognize the sentences—they’ve gone from me—I also don’t quite map to the mind that produced them. It’s very much like catching your shopwindow reflection for a split second before you realize it’s you. Almost always, the shock is negative. I look like that? With these sentences it’s the opposite. My eyes catch sight of what my hand did. Reading, I actually admire the images, the figures of speech, the confidence of the rhythm. Not the rhythm I would write in now. But I feel it as distinct.

For Birkerts this encounter with his younger self was comparable to contemplating an old photograph. “The looking,” he observes, “is mainly about taking in the differences.”*

Birkerts’ anecdote vividly illustrates what many people feel in later life: the long trajectory of one’s experience, the felt discontinuity between one’s earlier self and its present manifestation. But Birkerts’ story also illustrates a mental faculty that Henri Bergson, in his Matter and Memory (1896), defined as “contemplative memory.”** Contrasting this faculty with “motoric” memory, which a musician employs when playing a piece by heart, Bergson identified three distinguishing components of contemplative memory.

First, the process is spontaneous: memories arise unsummoned, often in the form of images. They are not the result of an act of will. Second, the remembered experience is clearly seen as having occurred at a time and a place in the past. It has a date, and it is unrepeatable. And last, what is most prominent in the remembered experience is the difference between then and now. Conditions were different then, and so were we, and in remembering the experience, we are not reliving it. Rather, we are viewing the past from the vantage point of the present. When we do so, and when the previous two elements are also present, we are exercising “contemplative” memory, which Bergson regarded as the purest form of memory.

As even a few minutes’ reflection will verify, few of our memories are so pure. In Sven Birkerts’ case, the presence of a tangible document—a datable, typewritten page—kept him, as it were, on the contemplative track. He had little choice but to view the object of memory as a thing of the past. But in everyday life, the process of remembering is likely to be far more capricious, selective, and faulty. If the remembered experience is emotionally charged, we are more likely to be engulfed by it than to contemplate it in a spirit of disinterested inquiry. If it is a painful memory, we may find ourselves engaging in what psychologists call “therapeutic forgetting.”  And if the memory has a moral dimension, we may enlist it in the service of self-vindication, or self-glorification, or self-abasement. We may make it means to an end, serving the ego’s insatiable needs.

In Zen, as in other meditative practices, we train ourselves to do otherwise. By sitting still and following our breath, we also follow the flux of our experience. Almost certainly that experience will include passing thoughts, many of them memories or fragments thereof. Some of those memories may be fond. Others may be wrenching. But whatever they happen to be, we train ourselves to acknowledge them without dwelling on them, or analyzing them, or allowing ourselves to be swept away. In the language of the classic texts, we open ourselves to the “ten thousands joys” and the “ten thousand sorrows.” But even as we contemplate the past, we remain grounded in the present—in our upright, stable posture, our full awareness of breathing. In this way we cultivate an intimate but balanced relationship with what we remember. And over time, this way of relating to the past becomes a way of being, which we carry from the cushion into our everyday lives.

So it was with the poet and Zen practitioner Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), who visited Kyoto, the former capital and cultural center of Japan, in 1690.  Mindful of the city’s illustrious past, he wrote one of his most celebrated haiku:

Even in Kyoto

how I long for old Kyoto

when the cuckoo sings***

In this poignant haiku, Basho records a moment of awakening, prompted by the cuckoo’s two-note call. Acutely aware of what is present, Basho is also aware of his longing for what is not. What is present is the Kyoto of 1690; what is absent is the storied, glorious city of earlier centuries. Bringing contemplative awareness to bear upon his present state of mind, Basho acknowledges the arising of a universal human feeling. Bringing contemplative memory to bear upon an image from the past, he evokes the transitory nature of all conditioned things.

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*Sven Birkerts, The Other Walk: Essays (Graywolf, 2011),  114-115.

**Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (Zone Books, 1988), Kindle edition, 201.

*** Matsuo Basho, Narrow Road to the Interior and Other Writings, edited and translated by Sam Hamill (Shambhala, 1998),  155.  Kyo nite mo / Kyo natsukashi ya / hototogisu.

Wilde was speaking of Shakespeare, who, in Wilde’s view, revealed more of himself in his plays than he did in his sonnets. Over the years I have often recalled Wilde’s maxim, and I have had occasion to test it against my experience, both as a teacher of imaginative writing and as the author of poems, essays, and a verse novella. And by and large I have found Wilde’s notion to be true, though perhaps not in the way he intended.

During my tenure as Professor of English at Alfred University, I taught an advanced writing course called Dramatis Personae. In this course each student created a character—a mask, if you like—and wrote from that character’s’ vantage point throughout the semester. The first assignment was a dramatic monologue; subsequent assignments included familiar letters, diary-entries, and first-person narratives. By mid-semester, if there were fifteen students in the room, there were also fifteen characters, and toward the end of the course the students artfully combined their characters in scenes and stories. The final assignment was a valediction, in which the students bid farewell to the characters they had inhabited for the past three months.

As might be expected, Dramatis Personae drew students interested in theater and psychology as well as imaginative writing. With few exceptions, they took to the work with gusto, crossing boundaries of gender, age, and ethnic background. Among their more memorable creations were a concert pianist who placed a marble bust of his mother on the piano during his concerts; a nineteenth-century American Indian maiden; a feisty, teen-aged boy from the inner city; a seasoned, outspoken journalist with reactionary social views; and a harried suburban woman modeled after the author’s mother. Perhaps out of deference, no one ventured to create an English professor, though one did create a venerable tree and managed to write from that standpoint.

To a contemporary reader, Dramatis Personae might sound like an early version of Second Life. But in spirit and purpose the course differed fundamentally from that online phenomenon, insofar as the intent of Second Life is to project one’s present self into an “avatar” and live a life more exciting than one’s own. For if Dramatis Personae served, in part, as a training ground for potential poets, playwrights, and novelists,  it also provided a setting in which to cultivate—and often to demonstrate—imaginative empathy. Rather than foster self-concern, the course encouraged self-forgetfulness. Rather than promote the making of fantasies, it sponsored a difficult realism—that of seeing others as persons in their own right, rather than as figures in one’s private psychodramas.

Practice what you preach, my mother used to say. And in the spring of 1991, after teaching Dramatis Personae for nearly two decades, I discovered a way of obeying that proverbial imperative. At the time I was immersed in the study of Irish history in general and mid-twentieth-century Ireland in particular. And early one morning, I found myself dwelling in Ireland in the 1940s and writing in the voice of a middle-aged American lexicographer, down on his luck, who had come to Ireland to heal his wounded psyche:

             I can’t begin to say what brought me here,

            Unless it be the Irish predilection

            For whiskey and horses, both of which entail

            A certain loss and a less-than-certain gain.

Thus began a blank-verse monologue of some nine hundred lines, later entitled “The Word from Dublin, 1944.” Over the next two and a half years, this monologue would be followed by five more of similar length, in which my unnamed lexicographer meditates on Irish history, his “bungled” personal life, and his violent century, exploring such themes as loss, dispossession, and reconciliation. In time, this sequence of monologues would become my book Midcentury,** which is at once a verse novella and a book-length meditation. Apart from its integrated themes, what holds that book together is its “mask”—a narrator whom the Irish poet Patrick Chapman, in his review of Midcentury, likened to an Irish storyteller and described as “a man of our own time, slightly at odds with the ways of the world but human and recognizably one of us.”  And yet that all-too-human storyteller never lived. From first to last, he was a persona, a fictive presence whose voice and vision gave coherence to otherwise disparate events.

Rowan berries by Moor Lane

Now that the leaves are falling, and the hills are splashed with color, I’m reminded of an autumnal poem by the twelfth-century Japanese poet Saigyo:

INSECTS ON AN EVENING ROAD

On the road with not a soul

to keep me company

as evening falls

katydids lift their voices

and cheer me along

Uchigusuru

hito naki michi no

yusare wa

koe nite okuru

kutsuwamushi kana

In these lines the poet Saigyo, who was once a samurai and became a wandering monk, portrays himself as a solitary traveler. He takes comfort in the song of the kutsuwamushi, or giant cricket, which is known in Japan as the “bridle-bit insect” because its clacking sound resembles that of a bridle-bit in a horse’s mouth. Heard from a distance, the song of the kutsuwamushi makes pleasant company.

Saigyo was not the first Japanese poet to relish the sound of singing insects. As the Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn observes in his essay “Insect-Musicians” (1898), night-singing insects occupy a place of honor in Japanese poetry, ancient and modern, where they are often associated with autumnal melancholy. “With its color-changes,” writes Hearn, “its leaf-whirlings, and the ghostly plaint of its insect-voices, autumn Buddhistically symbolizes impermanency, the certainty of bereavement, the pain that clings to desire, and the sadness of isolation.” Like his forebears in the Japanese poetic tradition, Saigyo finds solace in the song of the kutsuwamushi, which assuages his loneliness and draws him closer to the natural world.

Something similar occurs in “Song,” a poem by the Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney (b. 1939):

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.

Between the by-road and the main road

Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance

Stand off among the rushes.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect

And the immortelles of perfect pitch

And that moment when the bird sings very close

To the music of what happens.

In the first stanza of this poem, Heaney contemplates two trees with resonances in Irish legend. In Celtic mythology the European rowan, whose leaves and berries turn red in autumn, is known as the Traveler’s Tree. It is said to offer protection to the traveler. It is also associated with druidic culture, being the wood of choice for magician’s staves, divining rods, and magic wands. Encountering the rowan, Heaney also encounters the alder, from whose wood the ancient Celts made ritual pipes and whistles. In Irish folklore, the trunk of the alder is thought to conceal doors to the supernatural. In some Irish legends, the first man came from the alder, the first woman from the rowan.

As Heaney dwells in this place of origins, contemplating the intersection of human, natural, and supernatural worlds, his attention turns to language and music. In the phrase “the mud-flowers of dialect,” he suggests an organic connection between human speech and the local terrain, the flowers of human dialect and the mud from which they’ve sprung.  Likewise, in “the immortelles of perfect pitch,” he evokes an intimate connection between the sounds of the natural world and human musicians with absolute pitch, who can reproduce those sounds without external prompts. And in his closing line, he recalls the legend of Finn Mac Cool, who challenged the warriors of the Fianna—accomplished poets, all—to name the finest music in the world. The music of the lark over Dingle Bay, suggested one.  The laughter of a young woman, suggested another. The bellowing of a stag, suggested a third. No, replied Finn Mac Cool. The finest music is “the music of what happens.” The function of the songbird—and perhaps of the poet—is to “sing very close” to the reality of that music. Or, as Heaney has said elsewhere, to “stay close to the energies of generation.”

“Nature,” writes the American essayist Edward Hoagland, “seems to me infused with joy. Even the glistering snow is evidence, though burdensome by March, and October’s dying leaves, parched by an internal trigger before the first frosts, turn gratuitously orange, red, and yellow, as beautiful as any plumage.“ To close the gap between the mind and the energies of generation, the alienated self and the joyous natural world, is an aim of the contemplative writer and the Zen practitioner alike. And it is also a general human desire, especially in our time, when so many people live lives remote from the rhythms of the natural world. Not everyone can express that desire in exquisite verse. But any one of us can restore the unity of self and nature. We have only to step outside, collect our minds, and listen to the music of what happens.

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(1)  Saigyo, Poems of a Mountain Home,  tr. by Burton Watson (Columbia, 1991), 79.

(2)  Lafcadio Hearn,  Exotics and Retrospectives,  in Lafcadio Hearn, Elizabeth Bisland, The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (Macmillan, 1922), 62.

(3)  Seamus Heaney, Field Work (Faber, 1979), 56. To listen to Seamus Heaney read “Song,” go to http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/heaney/song.php.  For a discussion of the poem in relation to print and electronic media, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/aandc/gutenbrg/exchange.htm.

(4)  Edward Hoagland, “Small Silences,” Sex and the River Styx (Chelsea Green, 2011), 29.

Photo by Jonathan Billinger

Waiting room in the Eye, Ear, Nose, & Throat Hospital, New Orleans, 1907

Imagine, if you will, that you have just arrived at your local hospital for a routine test. Anticipating a wait, you have brought a book. After checking in at the reception desk, you seat yourself in a plastic chair and open your book.

Very soon, however, you discover that you are unable to concentrate, because you are being bombarded by the sounds of daytime TV. Muzak you could handle, but not the dialogue of a soap opera, which is keeping you from reading the words on the page. You can’t enjoy your book, but you can’t leave either. For a while you contain your frustration, but when it becomes intolerable, you go to the reception desk to complain. There you learn that the hospital keeps the TV on because most patients want it on. A survey indicated as much. So you return to your seat, humbled and disgruntled.

Most of us, I suspect, have had an experience of that kind. Whether it be the aural abrasion of someone yakking on a cell phone, sharing a private conversation with everyone in the vicinity, or, in today’s airports, the drone of CNN transforming human pain into entertainment, the ambient racket in public spaces grows louder and more continuous by the day. Quiet spaces, even in formerly quiet places, are becoming ever more difficult to find. Apparently many people prefer—or are willing to tolerate–a cacophonous environment. But what, if anything, are the rest of us to do?

One obvious solution is to shut the distractions out. Earplugs can sometimes do the trick, as can the earphones of an iPod. If that doesn’t work, it may be possible to stop the noise, or have it reduced, by complaining to the appropriate authority. Those measures failing, we can occupy ourselves with our BlackBerries or some other electronic device, if we have one. Or we can hunker down and wait it out, nursing our sense of separation, our fantasies of moral superiority, our low opinion of those who are disturbing our peace.

There is, however, another option, which on first hearing might sound counter-intuitive. That option, simply put, is to be present for the sounds we so abhor: to listen to the noise with openness and full attention, as one might listen to a string quartet by Mozart. For some that task might be challenge, and a pointless one at that.  But for those who can manage it, the exercise can illuminate the nature of suffering and foster some useful discoveries.

Three years ago, the writer and Zen teacher Roshi Joan Halifax slipped and fell on a bathroom floor, shattering her upper femur. Transported to Toronto Western Hospital, she learned that her injury would require immediate surgery. As it happened, however, her surgery was delayed, and for the next thirty hours Roshi Joan lay in the Emergency Room, tied to a gurney. Although she was in pain and had lost a great deal of blood, she engaged in a Tibetan Buddhist practice known as tonglen, in which the practitioner breathes in the suffering of others and breathes out a healing calm. Aware, as she put it, of the “numberless beings who streamed through the doors on a busy Friday the thirteenth weekend,”* she practiced tonglen in their behalf. Rather than resist her surroundings, she opened herself to the suffering of those around her.

Roshi Joan Halifax has been practicing Zen meditation and working with the dying for more than forty years. Not all of us can follow her example. But with a little effort any one of us can anchor ourselves in conscious breathing and resolve to take in what the thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen called the totality of our experience. If we happen to be sitting in a hospital waiting room, that totality might include the presence of daytime TV. But it will almost certainly include the presence of anxiety—the anxiety of people who are there because their health or that of their loved ones is in question, if not in jeopardy. Daytime TV can be an anodyne, distracting the anxious mind by giving it something to do. Viewed in that way, its presence becomes understandable and even benign, if not uniformly desirable.

And should we turn our awareness inward, we might also examine our own habits of mind, particularly the propensity to extract, or attempt to extract, the good and the pleasant from the whole of our experience. As Alan Watts observes in The Way of Zen, one of the aims of Zen practice is to “see through the universal illusion that what is pleasant or good may be wrested from what is painful or evil.” ** Opening ourselves, at once, to the bad and the good, the pleasant and the painful, we may at last divest ourselves of that illusion, while also cultivating a more compassionate heart. “Hospitals are houses of great suffering,” observed Roshi Joan a few days after her surgery. “They are also places where acts of kindness and patience are boundless.”***

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*Roshi Joan Halifax, Upaya Zen Center Newsletter, June 18, 2008.

** Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, Kindle edition, 115.

***Upaya Zen Center Newsletter, June 23, 2008.

             1. Use short sentences.

            2. Use short first paragraphs.

            3. Use vigorous language.

            4. Be positive, not negative.

“Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,” Hemingway later declared. “I’ve never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides with them.”

To anyone familiar with Hemingway’s prose, the first three rules will come as no surprise. However, the fourth might give the reader pause, insofar as it connotes an intentionally optimistic outlook. Was the author of A Farewell to Arms promoting the power of positive thinking? Was Papa urging us to put on a happy face?

Probably not.  What Hemingway was advising us to do, at least as writers, was rather more technical than that. He was admonishing the writer to pay attention to what is present, not what is absent, and to render the present reality in the most direct way. Don’t say that a stomach cramp is less than pleasant. Say that it hurts.

Ernest Hemingway was not a Zen practitioner, but by and large, Zen teachings accord with his rules. Zen is famously a practice of few words—or none at all. And the heart of the practice is mindfulness, which Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh defines as being present for the present moment. Practicing seated meditation, we do not focus on what is missing in our immediate experience. We attend to what is present, be it a physical sensation, a transitory feeling, a passing thought, or a state of mind. And time and again we return to our breathing, which is unmistakably present and brings us back to the present moment. For some practitioners, the use of minimal language (“in/out,” “deep/slow”) serves to support the practice of conscious breathing.

Yet, as Hemingway well knew, the English language runs athwart the purpose of being positive, abounding as it does in negative nouns and verbs, prefixes and suffixes, adjectives and adverbs. Most words ending in “-less” (homeless, speechless, clueless) describe an absence, as do words beginning with “in” or “un” (inarticulate, insubstantial, unwholesome, unprepossessing). Beyond that, rhetorical devices such as litotes, a form of understatement that indicates what is not there (“I’m not partial to Brussels sprouts”) and antithesis (“I had a wonderful evening,” quipped Groucho Marx, “but this wasn’t it”), call attention to what is missing.  Most conspicuously, the subjunctive mood (“had we but world enough, and time”), tempts us at every turn to state what might have been, or might yet be, rather than what is.

As with human language, so with the human mind. “Is it just that humans are wired,” asks Roshi John Sutherland, “to yearn for the thing that isn’t there?”* The answer is almost certainly yes, whether the object of attention be our selves or the world at large. Who among us hasn’t looked in the mirror and noted a shortfall or two? And given the present state of the world economy, the unending violence in unstable foreign nations, and our own dysfunctional government here at home, who can be blamed for focusing on what is lacking rather than what is present? If we are indeed to be positive, both in Hemingway’s sense and in the more conventional sense of being optimistic, how should we go about it? Where should we look for enabling models?

One place might be James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), a pivotal work in Hemingway’s development and the primary model for his debut collection of stories, In Our Time (1925). In his pioneering work Joyce set out to portray the moral, emotional, and spiritual “paralysis” of Great Britain’s second city. To that end he employed what he called a “scrupulous meanness” of style, void of verbal excess. Focusing, respectively, on childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life, Joyce depicted repressed, lower-middle-class lives, straitened by economic hardship, constrained by a narrow nationalism, and oppressed by a culpable religious hierarchy. Yet if Joyce’s style and content are largely negative, his stories’ impact is quite the opposite. Their extraordinary concentration and economy of means have a bracing effect, leaving the reader feeling more exhilarated than depressed. Their realism is life-affirming.

Much the same might be said of Zen meditation, which also brings a concentrated mind to bear upon realities, some of them unpleasant. Sitting still for forty minutes or more, we become intimate with our memories, fears, fantasies, and expectations, our habitual judgments of ourselves and others. We may also meet what Carl Jung called our “shadow” self, the one we hide from the world. Such encounters can be disturbing, but if we are paying close attention, we may also notice that what we are encountering is, in the language of Zen, empty of a separate self. It arises, abides, and dissipates, like contrails in the sky. And if we sit for days on end, as happens in a meditative retreat, we may also discover that facing realities feels better than the alternative. It tests our moral strength, and it reminds us, concretely and irrefutably, that we are alive, in flux, and inextricably connected to other living beings. I know of no surer way of being positive.

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*Joan Sutherland, “The Whole Way,” The Best Buddhist Writing 2010, ed. Melvin McLeod, Kindle edition, 25.