“It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.”

“… it began to dawn on me that not only was I now old enough to have a baby, I was almost too old to have a baby… So all my time was spent measuring time. While I listened to strangers and tried to patiently have faith in the unknown, I was also wondering how long it would take, and if any of it really mattered compared to having a baby. Word on the street was that it did not. Nothing mattered compared to having a baby.”

“As if I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension… It’s not that my life before the internet was so wildly diverse — but there was only one world and it really did have everything in it. Domingo’s blog was one of the best I had ever read, but I had to drive to him to get it, and he had to tell it to me with his whole self, and there was no easy way to search for him. He could be found only accidentally.”

“I suppose this was one of the reasons people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn’t just movies that couldn’t contain the full cast of characters — it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end. I knew I would forget this within the hour, and then remember, and then forget, and remember. Each time I remembered it would would be a tiny miracle, and forgetting was just as important — I had to believe in my own story.”

– Miranda July, It Chooses You

I just sat on my little futon in my little apartment and read this entire book, cover-to-cover. I can’t even remember the last time I did that. That last bit — and forgetting was just as important — made me cry.

Some notes I took during Carole Maso‘s reading at the &Now festival, which was amazing. Many of these snippets are straight from or paraphrased from her forthcoming novel, Mother & Child. Discovering a writer like her for the first time gives me so much hope, the giddiness of it feels just like falling in love.

introduction:
the still to come
the future is beckoning to us, is lonely
stay open to this appeal — Derrida, The Taste of the Secret
sensitive to formlessness
not to define it or pin it down or conceptualize it, or it will recede and vanish
the Now Point
what is really
the future is already moving through us
cannot be pre-comprehended
if we think on it too much, it evaporates
to be open to our own fear that we will end — attraction to the future
moving from the immortal column to the emphatically mortal
vulnerability
porousness
the future streams through us NOW
not one day is promised to us

mother & child:
all effort passes
if she could only verify their existence
all time, all space, rushed to her side in that tiny, indelible moment
coffins vs tables vs hair of children
a soul in transfer
the image is stabilized on the retina only at the moment of death
and the flames and the heartache
suddenly, gravely, inexplicably I feel important
the quality of the smallness
art is rehearsal for the future
how strange is that present with all the past seeping in and all the future streaming through
all was in coexistence; there was no way around it
dark matter really exists, but so does luminous matter
I can’t wait to get there
liquid water… I can almost taste it
you might as well stay here, the child says, a while longer
seeds : protected until the end of time
after the end of the world, there is another world
frozen suspended animation
the global seed vault, seed crib, at the north pole

(and, next to me, Roxi picked pomegranate seeds in her purse)

This essay by Eleanor Rosch on beginner’s mind is fantastic. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people in the field of cognitive psychology lament about how Rosch went from doing all this fabulous (and extremely well-known) work on concepts and categories in the 70′s to this “crazy Buddhist stuff.” It’s a terrible, terrible shame that so many scientists are so unwilling to even consider things that don’t fit their existing models of how the mind works, as she says herself in her introduction:

“The beginner’s mind claim, ordinary yet radical, is that we already have … basic wisdom … Thus people do not need to acquire more information, more logic, more ego, and more skills to make them wise. What they need is to unlearn what they have accumulated that veils them from that wisdom. When they do this, it is believed, they find not only what they themselves really are already but what the world actually is, and, from that vantage point, they can live a good life.

The psychological picture that corresponds to beginner’s mind (which I will also call “inner path”) teachings is of different levels of mind (or modes of functioning or ways of knowing). On the surface is the mind of ordinary concepts, emotions, desires, fears, even boredom – the mind with which everyone is familiar. Below that is the mind that is more in contact with basic wisdom and better able to see and act from it. This point may be clarified, hopefully, by a computer analogy. Imagine the ordinary surface mode of knowing as a particular computer program running on a more basic operating system. In daily life (and in psychology and cognitive science — and wisdom studies?) researchers mistake the limited surface program for the whole system. The research community keeps trying to study how the system works, but all it can see is the functioning of the program in which it, as well as the people it is studying, are confined. Every attempt to see beyond or get out of the program, either in science or religion or scholarship, is frustrated because to try to get out, one is only using the operations of the program itself. The situation would be hopeless, except that it is the operating system that supports and defines the program in the first place and the operating system that offers the escape keys that allow one to return to it.

Although this is basically a claim about psychology, two religious traditions are examined as examples because it is within religions, particularly the meditative and contemplative strains in religion, that different modes of knowing and the levels of wisdom such modes might reveal have been most clearly codified and taught. Psychology and cognitive science generally take religions to be no more than cognitive beliefs about personified deities whose purpose it is to provide illusory comfort or to explain things that science can explain better. Such an approach obscures the other aspects of religions. As people pursue an inner path, their vision of religious objects changes radically; perhaps that is why inner path teachings have historically had such uneasy relations with their parent religions. If scientists and educators dismiss everything related to religion out of hand, they may miss the chance to understand aspects of the mind that no other part of society can as readily bring to our attention.”