The awesome new online Buddhist magazine, Prapañca Journal, included one of my India stories in their second journal on the theme of “Four Protections.” It’s about modern-day austerity, the search for new adventures in testing limits, and the kind of privilege you have to have to seek out testing experiences.
It’s called “The Luxury of Masochism.” Please read it and let me know what you think!
13.
The rats that had been running through the maze,
their brains watched by a scanner overnight,
showed the same patterns repeating from their days.
The researchers concluded that they might–
no, must–have been dreaming of the hunt
through wooden walls, and not the cheesy treat
that waited for them. Even a mere rodent’s
neural pathways are shaped by what they seek.
It isn’t news. It shouldn’t be a shock
to anyone who ever took a test,
or fell from a high place on a rock,
or lost a rotten tooth, or played a sport,
or showed up late and frantic, or got undressed
and went out shopping in their boxer shorts.
Earlier this year, I made a goal to write 30 sonnets in 30 days. Then I set them aside and didn’t think about them for months. I’ll post a few more over the weeks.
I’m planning my fall classes, and one of the books I’ve planned for the Wireless World class is James Paul Gee’s book on video games and literacy. I’m curious what my students will think about it. It’s an accessible topic that I think they’ll be eager to discuss; however, the writing style of the book is definitely academic. It’s a style I’m very comfortable reading, but one that students are likely to find dense and confusing.
And yet, I am curious and eager to talk to students about it, because it’s an interesting way to act out the processes in the book. When you start playing a complex video game, you need to learn a new “language,” in a sense. It’s designed to be a little puzzling, because that reminds you to pay attention. Video games are fun because they’re challenging to learn. The same thing, I think, can be true of a piece of writing that uses challenging vocabulary and structure. You can get a sense of accomplishment from it, but only after overcoming the sense of frustration you feel at the early levels.
Consider how we learn to use a new gizmo after we open the box. Some of us will dig for the instruction book and make sure we’ve read every page so we know what we’re supposed to do with it. Others will start pressing buttons. The only other option is a non-option: after poking slightly at one or the other way to learn about it, we’ll give up and the gizmo will sit unused.
Really, these are the simplest ways we can respond to any learning situation. We can try to inherit the knowledge, unearth the knowledge, or abandon the knowledge. So a student is reading a book for class and notices an unfamiliar word that the writer seems to be using a lot. The student can reach for a dictionary and try to inherit the knowledge. This would be the same case if they asked someone else to explain it, or tried to find a simplified summary of the book. The student can also take a guess at the meaning of the word, then read forward with that guess in mind. Each new use of the word either confirms what the student thinks it might mean, or contradicts it, so the student might have to go back and re-read with another guess in mind. Or they can give up.
There are benefits to both kinds of honest attempts. I think sometimes we rely too much on inherited learning. We want to know what the outcome is going to be before we try. Of course, we need both, especially with the range of situations. I wouldn’t want a world where pilots-in-training get no book learning, just the opportunity to try and see what works and what crashes. But I also wouldn’t want a world where nobody learns from experience.
But perhaps we rely too much on inherited learning when trying to develop Buddhist practices. I know people who read a lot of books about meditation and the Buddhist traditions in the world, trying to perfect the concept of Buddhism before they’re willing to test out the teachings for themselves. We need to risk a little, to take some steps that might be failures, in order to really learn.
Last weekend was Indian Independence Day, and the local India League of America had a big celebration for it. As I planned to go, I decided to wear something in orange, since it’s one of the colors of the Indian flag. But the only orange t-shirt I own is this one, from Woot! shirts:
The event was in a giant expo hall, cavernous and noisy. People crowded through the aisles and booths in a manner equally fitted to a Delhi bazaar as a suburban American weekend. My friend Shriti and I swerved our way through the crowds.
We’d glanced at the booth of a local Hindu temple, looking at the books and pictures they had on display. As I turned to walk on, an old Indian man stopped me and looked at my shirt. “This is a very good shirt,” he said. I thanked him and started to move on, but he spoke some more. “Many companies these days will tell you lies through marketing. They tell you that their products are nutritious. It’s very bad, this dishonesty.”
I shrug and smile in agreement. I could have explained, “See, there’s this video game, and an evil robot tells you you’re going to get cake if you finish. But there really isn’t any cake.” But I figure if he wanted to think I was taking a stand against, say, Vitamin Water, I’d accept that as a valid interpretation of the shirt.
My article, “Ghost Crossing” appears in Elephant Journal. My first article for them. Enjoy!
Here are two photos, if you want to picture the place I describe.
But first, a story from Toledo. Ohio, not Spain.
The department of creative writing was taking a visiting poet to dinner at a middle-eastern restaurant called Beirut. The dinner was arranged by one of our professors, Sharona Ben-Tov Muir, and right now I can’t remember the visiting poet. Sharona had just completed a book of poems about her father, who had designed weapons for the Israeli army. She’d reserved a smaller table, thinking few of the grad students would show up, but when we all showed up to the restaurant and waited outside, she went to the managers to request a table for twenty. She came back and ushered us all in. “It was no problem,” she said. “They’re nice Arab gentlemen.”
A few years after that, I began teaching in Dearborn, Michigan, home to the largest concentration of Arab-Americans. I hear Arabic spoken among groups of teenagers in the student union, take roll in classes where Zainab is as common a name as Jennifer, decide between pizza and falafel in the food court. As banal as the word “nice” is, I have to agree with Sharona: Arabs are nice people.
Of course, any characteristic of a diverse group of people has exceptions. That’s what diversity is. There are Arabs who are sort of jerks. Also there are Arabs who are not Muslims and Muslims who are not Arabs.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear that Sharona and the manager of Beirut Restaurant had a certain cooperative rapport. They both live on American soil, both with a long history in a foreign land. Together they can recognize that the wars in their homelands haven’t been good for either of them, that there’s no sense in harboring animosity or directing it at peaceful civilians in America. They have common ground; they’re in it together.
When I’ve seen the debate over the Cordoba House–the proposed Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan–I wonder how unusual my life experience is. A sentence caught me off-guard in Stephen Prothero’s (generally excellent) book God Is Not One: “Most Europeans and North Americans have never met a Muslim, so for them Islam begins in the imagination, more specifically in that corner of the imagination colonized by fear.” I paused when I read that and asked, “Really”? There’s no citation for it in the book, and in my experience it’s a little rare that I go out in Detroit or Dearborn and don’t meet a Muslim or two. You might as well have told me “Most Americans have never seen a sunflower” or “Most Americans have never met a person wearing glasses.”
But it may be right. Maybe Detroit is just that strange. I still can’t fathom, though, making an argument against building an Islamic center on the basis of knowing Muslims through their characterization on 24 rather than talking to them. Some of the arguments against building the mosque are arguments of extent–“too soon,” they say. But in the words of Morrissey, how soon is now? At what point will people stop associating an entire demographic group with their isolated members’ most abject act? Seven years? Twenty years? Fifty years? They say the space in Manhattan is “sacred ground,” but (a) it was a Burlington Coat Factory and (b) what better place for prayer and worship than sacred ground?
As a Buddhist, I know that Islam is not particularly close to my viewpoint and practice. But that doesn’t matter; we’re in this together. I recognize that 9/11 was horrible for all of us. Think of it from the perspective of a mainstream American Muslim: you see an act of terror unfolding in your own country. You’re shocked and appalled. Then some wackjob from Afghanistan shows up on your TV, telling you that he just won a great victory for your people, that you should be proud of what he did. But you don’t feel proud. People in your own country start treating you like an outsider, even more than before. You fear that you’ll get blamed for acts you didn’t do, acts you don’t approve of, acts that your family left another country to escape.
I know it’s a white people cliche to defend a position by saying “Some of my best friends are…” And I’d probably be overstating the case if I claimed “best friends”–I meet Muslims on a regular basis but I can’t say I have any on speed-dial. However, I think we miss the significance of “friends” if we don’t use them to become wiser. So I won’t defend myself or any ignorant views by claiming to have Muslim friends, but I will say that because I have Muslim friends, I want to help them prosper and be happy. When I imagine who will worship in the Cordoba House if and when it is finished, I imagine the people I know in Dearborn, the families, the students, some liberal, some conservative, some speaking English at home, some speaking other languages. Just like America.
In debates about Muslim issues, when we distinguish between mainstream American Muslims and the radical fringe, sometimes people will defend conflating the two, saying, “Why don’t mainstream Muslims stand up and denounce radical terrorism?”
But again, my experience leaves me feeling puzzled about this. Because the mainstream Muslims I meet do denounce terrorism. Have you ever asked a Muslim what they think about terrorism? Why don’t you?
The defense continues, “Why don’t we see mainstream Muslims denouncing terrorism in the news?” I always wonder if this argument is claiming that mainstream Muslims should take a TV news station hostage and force them to report their denouncement of terrorism. News stations report what they want to report, and if it bleeds, it leads, so you might see more violent Muslims than peaceful Muslims on the news. And yet… I don’t watch a whole lot of TV news, but off the top of my head I can remember two times seeing an American Muslim telling a reporter that they do not support terrorism, one in an interview with Barbara Walters and the other with Jon Stewart.
All of us need to improve our skills at listening to each other. Instead of assuming what American Muslims want, we should take time to listen, and be present for the real people who are here with us, rather than the phantoms we see in our nightmares.
Once upon a time, I had friends on the Internet. It seemed the cultural consensus at the time was that this was kind of a nerdy thing to do, a sign that you didn’t have enough fulfillment in your “real life” that you had to seek out invisible friends in “cyberspace.”
I had a conversation last night at a Meetup/Tweetup/Mashup and I realized how much this has changed. We don’t talk about “cyberspace” anymore as if there’s a separate “real life.” When a small portion of the public were Internet users, I would have one group from that set of “Internet friends” and another group of “real life friend.” And the RL friends would often poke a little fun at me and ask why I would think of someone I’d never met as a friend.
But I think I was always a little bit aware that the distinction wasn’t so sharp. The potential for shallowness of Internet friendship was also present in other friendships. I started college as a theatre major; groups of people working on plays together would develop remarkably intense friendships, as night after night they stepped into the roles of lovers or family. Then, after the play was over, we’d swear we’d be friends forever. A year later, we’d forget each other’s names. If this was how “real world” friendship worked, I didn’t see why any other friendship would be real or fake. I dropped my theatre major and became a literature major, studying great people who expressed themselves through writing. Why couldn’t true friendship grow out of writing?
This division has largely disappeared from my life, and maybe from life in general. There are no longer two distinct sets of people, or two distinct types of activities. in short:
1. Almost all of my “in-person” friends have become connected to my Internet sphere. I can’t think of the last time I participated in a friendly activity that wasn’t organized, to some extent, through social media.
2. “Online friends” haven’t stayed online friends; even those few I haven’t met in person are as tied to my in-person network as anyone else is.
Every friendship begins somewhere, but in the past we’ve over-estimated the importance of that beginning point. We ask couples “Where did you meet?” as if that interaction essentially defines everything that comes after it. So the old way of thinking would say the fruit of a friendship that germinated with “She sat next to me in Poli-Sci” or “He worked in the office across the hall” is essentially different from one that germinated with MySpace. The friends I make through the Buddhist temple aren’t limited to discussion of Buddhism, and likewise, the friends I make online aren’t limited to become anything else.
But then at these tweetups and meetings of the Detroit International Social Meetup (you should totally join us if you’re in Detroit) I have a set of friends that I made at in-person meetings that I found online. They aren’t online friends who’ve become real, as in, “We chatted so much online that we finally had to meet in person.” They’re also not in-person friends that I got to know well before deciding to trust them in my online network.
Being a person means being both a mind and a body. A rich interaction with someone comes from sharing the mental/rhetorical/expressive side of things as well as sharing physical space and resources. There are no longer two sets of friends, one for conceptual discussion and one for personal activities. I’m glad I don’t have to choose.
Like many people, I’m disappointed and discouraged by the news stories about Shirley Sherrod’s forced resignation over remarks posted by conservative bloggers out of context. I worry that we’re learning not to listen to each other; rather than making the effort to pay attention to another person’s viewpoint, we habitually seek through their words to find significant ammunition to be angry about, words that we can blame them for, and if that takes selective misreading, many of us are way too willing to do so.
As a writing teacher, I ask my students to explore a topic in depth, to rethink their thoughts through writing. I believe that the writing of educated adults can and should show complexity. In my classes, I call this “specify and subordinate.” Rather than a stand “pro” or “con,” when you use “specify and subordinate” you demonstrate a specific extent on the spectrum between them. To do this, we have to create an awareness of how a logical person could believe the opposing side. It means saying things like, “I’m not saying that X; however, Y.” or “If it is true that X–and I’m not sure it is–then Y.”
When I heard the edited version of Sherrod’s remarks, I felt it was clear that she was establishing a background to lead up to a greater point. She was talking about her first reaction to a situation, her habitual response, as a strategy to lead to the revelation that her habitual response turned out to be wrong. She was going to talk about a learning experience.
As a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, I cultivate habits through meditation that attempt to cut through the habitual responses. I’ve seen, through inward reflection, the many ways that my previous responses have been short-sighted and ignorant. To understand these lessons and explain them to others, sometimes I need more than a sound-bite. I need to be able to convey in depth, “I used to believe X, but now I believe Y.” That relies on someone listening to the beginning, middle and end of my message.
I worry that the case of Shirley Sherrod will scare people away from that kind of honest introspection. People will be afraid to say on the record, “I used to believe X” because the “X” can be taken out of context, presented as a complete sentence, ridiculed and admitted as evidence. Instead of learning from our mistakes and talking about the ways we’ve learned from our mistakes, we’re going to plow forward with the idea that we’ve never made mistakes, that our reasoning has never been faulty.
And instead of paying attention to people who see things differently, to truly understand what mistakes they have made and how they learn from their mistakes, we’ll only look for ways to prove them wrong.
I truly hope we can create a better world than that.
When the telephone was invented, The New York World condemned it in an editorial. “Of what use is such an invention?” they asked. Why would someone want to speak to someone who isn’t there? Of course, history proved that people would find many uses for it, perhaps not what Bell or The World ever could have imagined. So when I learn about new technology, I kind of want to be on the right side of history. Perhaps what it takes is to make sure the question is a question instead of a dismissal. If The World had asked, “What uses will people find for a telephone?” they may have started to see the banal and wonderful things we do with a phone.
It’s with this in mind that I approached the practice of tweeting. Instead of dismissing it with the question, “Why would anyone want Twitter?” I decided to explore with honest curiosity… “Why do people use Twitter?” Instead of a dismissive “Who cares about my tweets?” I decided to ask, “If there is someone who cares about my tweets, who is that?”
I can’t say I’ve pinned down an answer. But I’ve had some fun trying. It seems that Twitter is a game of attention. As I spend my meditation practice on a quest to understand what attention is, what it does and how to use it, I think that mindfully exploring the question of Twitter has had deep implications.
The Diamond Sutra says, “Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world: a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream.” A bubble or a cloud is not, in essence, a complete and separate thing. But I think it would be a misreading of the sutra to say that Buddha meant we should not pay attention to these phenomena as they come up.
People who use Twitter sometimes complain about other people’s tweets, particularly when there are a lot of them at once. This only is a problem if we think of the tweets as having weight, having an essence, being a thing. But like all phenomena in this world, they’re bubbles.
We can think of communications in two ways: an inbox or a stream. Twitter’s overwhelming if we think of it as an inbox, of a demanding pile of messages that are gathered into a backlog until we can catch up with them. But Twitter isn’t designed to be that, and it doesn’t work like that. It works like a stream; rather than trying to track down what passed in the stream yesterday, to pay attention you see what’s in the stream right now. The stream is useful not because every message gets attention from every reader, but because there are always messages and always readers.
I was about to say that new technology is moving toward more streams and fewer inboxes, but then I thought of television. My view of television has changed from a stream to an inbox. Rather than watching what’s on right now, when I go to watch I look for what’s in my lineup of things to watch–and that allows me to pay a different kind of attention to it. So maybe the answer is that we learn there are many more kinds of attention, and the more we know about them the more we know how to use them.
The book I’m reading now, Teaching Writing Online by Scott Warnock, is probably not particularly interesting to anyone who’s not, well, teaching online writing classes. But it does make me think of something relating to most of what we do online.
One of the tricks in an online class is to make sure it’s not an individual channel for each student; that the students are aware of the opportunities to learn from each other, and to prove themselves to each other, not just the teacher. He has some specific ideas I’m definitely going to use in the fall.
And maybe this is a good way to think of all our leadership roles–teaching Buddhism, organizing communities, blogging, publishing. The goal to promote your own viewpoint and control the experience, but to facilitate people’s ability to learn from each other. As technology makes more networking possible, there will be more and more knowledge spread through the infrastructure–but more need for leaders who can guide and encourage healthy peer-to-peer sharing.
And maybe this is another way to think of the Buddha–not as an idol we have to revere, but as the one who brought together the Sangha, the community of Buddhists, and the teachings we receive from one another are as important as the source.