Dolma’s Neighborhood

I'm no longer using this Vox.   You can find me either at A Mindful Distraction (on Vox) or at Dance of the Mind (on Wordpress).  See you there!

Sorry to go back several books, but I've been reading Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death (and following Dreyfus' lectures) and found the correlation between the Karamazov brothers and Kierkegaard's levels of despair fascinating. 

Kierkegaard says that all human beings are in despair (which seems a lot like Buddha saying all life is suffering).  This takes three forms:

1. There are those who don't know they are in despair because they spend their lives distracting themselves by doing geometry alone in their rooms (as Pascal complained about Descartes), playing computer games, being chatty, absorbing themselves in sports, work, hobbies, etc. - you get the picture.  That's Dmitri.
2. The second level is a negative despair which arises from individuals trying to negate one conflicting aspect of themselves: either the divine (soul, etc.) or the material.  (In antiquity, Plato pushed for the negation of the material in favor of the soul and Lucretius pushed for the negation of the soul in favor of the material.)   That's Ivan.
   
3. The third level is a positive despair which arises in individuals who recognize that both the soul and the body must be synthesized, but for the life of them can't figure out how to make it happen.  (According to Kierkegaard, it is impossible to achieve this integration on our own volition).  That's Alyosha.

When you really start digging into Buddhism, you realize that Buddha didn't say all of life is suffering.  Life is suffering when we get caught up in desire.  But desiring not to be desirous is still desire.  And wanting to be enlightened is desire and so will not deliver enlightenment, only more suffering.  It is possible to transcend the suffering if we follow the "middle path".  Anything willful will simply create more suffering because will is desire.  We have to allow the way out to arise spontaneously without clinging to one side or the other. 

It seems to me that this is what Kierkegaard is saying - but in a far more abstract Judeo-Christian way (especially since the split in we Westerner's is so large thanks to our Greco/Judeo-Christian orientation which cannot be synthesized.) 

But I must keep reading...

Mother Night

I finished reading Mother Night today and really enjoyed it.  I couldn't put it down last night. But it didn't really strike me in any strong way so I'm very interested to see what other people got out of the book.  I think the moral Kurt Vonnegut introduces in the beginning of the book is excellent - "we are what we pretend to be" and I thought that fit quite nicely with MatchPoint.

A few quotes I highlighted;

The experience of sitting there in the dark, hearing the things I'd said, didn't shock me.  It might be helpful in my defense to say that I broke into a cold sweat, or some such nonsense.  But I've always known what I did.  I've always been able to live with what I did.  How?  Through that simple and widespread boon to modern mankind - schizophrenia.  (p. 179)

Totally agree with this.  It's become the way of the civilized world to separate reality from pretense.  (We think the pretend is just pretend but it isn't.  It has an effect.)

And just a little further down the page...

...Krapptauer's sort of truth would probably be with man kind forever, as long as there were men and woman around who listened to their hearts instead of their minds.

Beautiful.  The Nazi's think it is a compliment but it isn't.  I'd just maybe say it differently.  I don't think it is people's hearts that make them so narcissistic and racist.  It is warped thinking - brainwashing.  Not heart!  If people listened to their hearts more, there would be far less bigotry and hatred in my opinion.  But I still thought this was very cool.  We know what Vonnegut is saying even though the people listening to the eulogy do not.

I had taught myself that a human being might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair. 

That's a result of the schizophrenia.  Or maybe as Kristen says, Kitsch?

Very cool book.  Glad it was recommended.  Interested to see what other people think.

(I've already started Slaughterhouse Five.)

I bought two books tonight:  Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.  I went to the bookstore specifically to get Vonnegut's book and caught out of the corner of my eye on another shelf, Le Guin's which had been recommended to me several years ago by Nacho of WoodMoor Village Zendo.  I've just read both introductions and found something interesting...

Mother Night

Vonnegut writes of Campbell in the Editor's note to Mother Night:

To say that he was a writer is to say that the demands of art alone were enough to make him lie, and to lie without seeing any harm in it.  To say that he was a playwright is to offer an even harsher warning to the reader, for no one is a better liar than a man who has warped lives and passions onto something as grotesquely artificial as a stage.

And, now that I've said that about lying, I will risk the opinion that lies told for the sake of artistic effect - in the theater, for instance, and in Campbell's confessions, perhaps - can be, in a higher sense, the most beguiling forms of truth.

The Left Hand of Darkness

LeGuin writes in the intro. to The Left Hand of Darkness:

...Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists.  It is not the business of novelists.  A novelist's business is lying....Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, to speak it, to serve it.  But they go about it in a devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There!  That's the truth!

They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies.  They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology and so on.  This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalizable region, the author's mind.  In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers.  We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon.  Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed. 

Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society as ever trusted its artists?....

I talk about the gods; I am an atheist.  But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar.  Distrust everything I say.  I am telling the truth.

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie.  Psychologically defined, a symbol.  Aesthetically defined, a metaphor....

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these word, this novel; and Genly Ali would never have sat down at my desk and used my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination."