Category Archives: The Arts

Poetry 74: Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand by Walt Whitman

Poetry, Practice, The Arts,

Walt_Whitman

Whoever you are holding me now in hand,
Without one thing all will be useless,
I give you fair warning before you attempt me further,
I am not what you supposed, but far different.

Who is he that would become my follower?
Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?

The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive,
You would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your sole and exclusive standard,
Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting,
The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you would have to be abandon’d,
Therefore release me now before troubling yourself any further, let go your hand from my shoulders,
Put me down and depart on your way.

Or else by stealth in some wood for trial,
Or back of a rock in the open air,
(For in any roof’d room of a house I emerge not, nor in company,
And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)
But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any person for miles around approach unawares,
Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or some quiet island,
Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,
With the comrade’s long-dwelling kiss or the new husband’s kiss,
For I am the new husband and I am the comrade.

Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;
For thus merely touching you is enough, is best,
And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.

But these leaves conning you con at peril,
For these leaves and me you will not understand,
They will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will certainly elude you,
Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!
Already you see I have escaped from you.

For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,
Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it,
Nor do those know me best who admire me and vauntingly praise me,
Nor will the candidates for my love (unless at most a very few) prove victorious,
Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps more,
For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at;
Therefore release me and depart on your way.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Achilles and the tortoise

Brain, Fiction, Philosophy, Psychology, ,

“Let me show you a paradox“ said Dad. It was getting towards two thirds of the way of a long, boring train journey. They were sitting at a table in a carriage that was almost empty.

“What’s a paradox?” asked eleven-year old Laura. She was not too old to cease being almost constantly curious, but not too young for a slight note of potential detachment to be there as well.

“It’s a kind of puzzle where there’s a contradiction. If you take it one way, it makes sense, but if you take it another way, it doesn’t.”

“I like puzzles.”

“OK. This one is about a race. The race was between a Greek hero called Achilles, who being a hero of course could run fast as well as fight. And he was racing a tortoise. Who would you expect to win?”

“The hero!”

“Well, that’s what everyone else thought too. So to give the tortoise a chance they said they’d give him a head start. In fact they gave him a big head start. They worked out that the tortoise moved at about a tenth the speed of Achilles, so he needed a tenth of the distance to cover. Let’s say the race was 110 metres long, they put the tortoise at the 100 metre mark.” Dad drew a little diagram to show the set-up of the race.Achilles_and_turtle

“I still think the hero would win. Tortoises are so slow. He’d catch up with the tortoise in no time.”

“Well, Achilles did catch up pretty quick with where the tortoise was when he started. But by that time the tortoise had moved a little way forward. Not very far, but a little way.”

“Surely the tortoise didn’t win?”

“You’ll have to wait and see. Because after Achilles had caught up with where the tortoise was at first, he went a bit further and caught up with where the tortoise had been next.”

“So did he catch up with the tortoise then?”

“No, because the tortoise had moved a bit further ahead. Only a tiny bit further ahead, but still ahead. In fact, that happened every time Achilles caught up to where the tortoise had been previously. In the time it took Achilles to get to where the tortoise had been previously, the tortoise had moved ahead a little bit more.”

“But surely it got to be such a little bit that it didn’t matter any more?”

“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. Every little bit of distance, no matter how small, could be divided up a bit further. So every time Achilles caught up to where the tortoise had been, he was still a little bit ahead.”

“But that’s silly! The little bit ahead would start to be too small to notice. It would get so small you’d need a microscope to see it!”

“It would get even smaller than that eventually, but the tortoise would still be ahead of Achilles just an incy-wincy bit. So Achilles would never catch up with the tortoise.”

Laura made a face. “Is it true then? Is that what actually happened?”

“No, it’s what is called a thought experiment. You think something through and see what will happen when you think out the consequences. But it’s only when you think about it that Achilles would never catch up with the tortoise. If you got a real man and a real tortoise and got them to run a race like that, of course the man would actually catch up with the tortoise. So that’s why it’s a paradox. If you think about it one way, it’s true, but if you think about it the other way, it isn’t.”

“But how can it be true and not true at the same time? I don’t understand.”

“Well, here’s one way of understanding it. One half of your brain thinks it’s true and the other half thinks it isn’t. Our brains all have two halves: they’re called the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere thinks in terms of ideas of how things are, and works out what must be true just using those ideas. That’s like you do in maths when you work out a sum without having to count anything or relate it to real things. The right hemisphere, though, depends on the senses, and takes its ideas about what’s true from what we actually experience. For the left hemisphere, space and time are just ideas. You can chop them up as long as you want, and you just get a smaller and smaller number, regardless of whether you could actually see it or not. So for the left hemisphere, it makes sense to think that Achilles would never catch up with the tortoise. But for the right hemisphere that takes information from what actually happens, of course he would.”

“Silly left hemisphere!”

“Well, it’s not that silly. Remember you’ve got one too. In fact, half of you is the left hemisphere. It’s only silly when it works things out for itself and just assumes it’s got to be right, without consulting the right hemisphere. People get all sorts of silly beliefs that way. Like they think the world is going to end next week based on adding up the numbers of chapters in the Bible, or they can’t let go of a big plan they’ve put lots of time and money into even when it’s clearly going to fail, or they think sharks are going to come up out of the toilet and attack them because they’ve read about a shark attack in the sea.”

“That’s like serious silly!”

“Just keep consulting your right hemisphere as well as your left and you’ll be fine. Every time someone suggests a silly idea, give it a reality check.”

“So the tortoise didn’t really win the race?”

Dad shrugged. “Who knows? Apparently the race is still going on.”

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 The left and right brain hemispheres

The relationship between our brain hemispheres, like everything about the brain, is complex, and for many years scientists have been right to be suspicious of over-simplifications. Nevertheless, generalisations can be made which are supported by a good weight of evidence. My understanding of this evidence is indebted to Iain McGilchrist and his important book ‘The Master and his Emissary’. The generalisations that can be made about the role of left and right hemispheres are especially useful, because they provide both confirmation of, and further insight into, the Middle Way and the reasons for it.

The division between right and left hemispheres is not entirely one of function, but rather of specialisation. To some extent the hemispheres can duplicate each others’ functions, like colleagues in distinct but related jobs in the same office. The two hemispheres are also not entirely separated: they communicate, but the question is how much. There is also an issue of power in the relationship, with the left hemisphere tending to over-dominate the right. That does not mean that the two hemispheres are not totally dependent on each other – they are more like an unbalanced marriage in which the husband over-dominates the wife (or vice-versa). Another common misunderstanding is that there are ‘left hemisphere’ and ‘right hemisphere’ types of people, but there are not. We are all left-hemisphere dominant, just some more than others, and all varying at different times.

The specialisations of the two hemispheres should also not be over-simplified to ‘reason’ in the left hemisphere versus ‘emotion’ in the right. Rather the left hemisphere specialises in representation – that is, in holding beliefs about the world expressed in language. Those beliefs are closely related to our goals, so the left-hemisphere is also the goal-driven hemisphere. In contrast, the right hemisphere is characterised by openness to experience: whether that is experience of what is happening beyond our bodies (through the senses) or within them. It is also the right hemisphere that provides a wider, more open perspective that can connect together the representative beliefs held by the left: thus it deals in metaphor, seeing relationships between ideas that would otherwise be kept apart.

The story of Achilles and the tortoise also draws our attention to another crucial feature of the different specialisations between the hemispheres – one that Iain McGilchrist drew my attention to, but does not seem to be widely appreciated. This is the differing ways in which the two hemispheres relate to time. The right hemisphere can actually experience time passing, but the left only has representations of time as a set of sequences. It is the left hemisphere that is thus responsible for impatience, as under its charge we want to jump ahead to the next goal-related event, and are incapable of experiencing mere process. The same disposition goes for space: the left hemisphere is concerned with points in space or ways of dividing it up using ideas, but not with the experience of space itself. Hence the ‘paradox’ of Achilles and the tortoise reflects a disjunction between the left hemisphere and right hemisphere ways of understanding things, and provides us with immediate access to our own experience of being able to experience things in these two different ways.

Laura’s robust common sense in calling the left hemisphere ‘silly’ tells us something about the moral value of this information and its relationship to the Middle Way and integration. The left hemisphere, as Dad points out, is not ‘silly’ per se, but only through being over-dominant or isolated from the right. It is the over-dominant left hemisphere that gets stuck in dogmatic or metaphysical beliefs, in isolation from the right hemisphere that could provide a wider perspective on those beliefs. The process of integration thus involves bringing that wider right hemisphere perspective to bear on the isolated representations of the left hemisphere, each of which tends to be accompanied by the assumption that it has the complete picture, and each of which may be associated with goals that we are pursuing. The Middle Way is recognising that each of our left hemisphere representations is not the complete picture – in other words avoiding the delusions of certainty, whether positive or negative.

The belief about the infinite divisibility of space and time expressed by the story of Achilles and the Tortoise has many of the typical features of absolutised or metaphysical beliefs of the over-dominant left hemisphere. Infinity of any kind can be conceived but not experienced or imagined, so it is the stock-in-trade of metaphysics. It ‘makes sense’ in its own terms and can be reasoned about, but only on the basis of assumptions that are merely conceptual. In that way, the infinite divisibility of space and time is a similar absolutisation not only to the outward infinity of space and time, but also to the infinity and perfection of God, or other claims of infinite scope such as determinism. Not all metaphysical beliefs involve infinity, but one can be fairly clear that beliefs about infinity are metaphysical. Oddly enough, they are also absolute because they are not incremental: you cannot have more or less of an infinite anything, as it is either infinite or it isn’t infinite.

Such metaphysical claims may or may not be true. The universe may or may not be infinite, and space and time may or may not be infinitely divisible. There is no way we could ever find out, as we would have to investigate infinitely to do so. Like other dogmatic beliefs, the problem is thus not that it is definitely untrue, but that it is beyond experience. The paradox was first put forward by Zeno (a different Zeno from the founder of Stoicism), which is why it is known as one of Zeno’s paradoxes, and strangely enough, Zeno seems to have taken it for granted that we would take the ‘rational’ conclusion based on infinite divisibility to be the true one. For him, the purpose of the story was to prove that it was reason that tells us the truth, whilst experience is deceptive. But quite different conclusions can today be derived from the same example.

This story and commentary is one of the ones that can be found in ‘Parables of the Middle Way’.

The Lute Strings

Buddhism, Fiction, Meditation, Middle Way Philosophy, Mindfulness, Practice, ,

Another parable. See The Ship and An Acre of Forest for earlier ones.

Gaynor had now given up her early obsession with music and decided to focus on her career. In fact, it had been several years now since she had even thought about music. Instead, her focus was on the completion of this project, the approval of her boss, the likelihood of more responsibility in the next project, the need to overcome obstructive colleagues and placate demanding customers, the determination to make an impression for her ability and commitment. She had barely noticed as her relationship unravelled and her boyfriend moved on. She lived alone now, and worked.

But suddenly, like a swimmer stricken by weakness in mid-channel, she began to find herself undermined by weakness. One morning she woke up at 3am overwhelmed by despair – knowing suddenly that she was not good enough and there was no point. She could not go to work and she could not go on. She took time off, and at first her boss was sympathetic. “You’ve been overdoing it, Gaynor” she said on the telephone, “But you’re a valuable asset to the company, so you need to look after yourself. You take some time off and get better.” The doctor advised a new treatment: mindfulness based stress reduction. Really good for depression, he had said, much better than giving her drugs. So one afternoon, Gaynor found herself in a class learning how to meditate.

At first it was really annoying. The mindfulness teacher led them in a body scan and then told them to focus on the breath. For Gaynor, the body scan had just made her feel insecure about her body: it wasn’t good enough, it was full of tension. Then when asked to focus on the breath she just found it boring. She tried doing it for a few seconds, but then immediately started thinking about the office again.

In the discussion afterwards, Gaynor asked the mindfulness teacher how she could focus on her body or on the breath without getting stressed about it. To her they just seemed like new sources of stress. Why go to a meditation class and fail at doing something else, having just failed at going to work? If she tried to stop doing these things, she would float around and then just land right back on her stress points.

“Well,” the Mindfulness Teacher seemed to be searching for the right response, “have you ever played any music – an instrument of some kind?”Winged man playing the lute Durer

A sudden stab of memory at the word “music”: Gaynor and her lute, at the age of 14. That lute given to her by her aunt, and the local guitar teacher keen on the baroque, who had taught her and encouraged her. At one time she hadn’t just played music, it had seemed that music had also been playing her.

“Yes,” responded Gaynor after a pause, “I used to play the lute, but I gave it up to concentrate on my career.”

“Ah! Well, there’s a story told by the Buddha about a lute. Once there was a monk who came to him whose name was Sona. Sona had been trying too hard in meditation. Like you he was just finding it another challenge, another source of stress. But Sona also used to play the lute. So the Buddha asked him, ‘What happens if the lute-strings are too tight?’ What would you say, Gaynor?”

“You don’t get a good tone. You get distortions, and it’s bad for the instrument.”

“And what happens if the lute-strings are too slack?”

“Similarly, you don’t get a good tone. It’s out of tune.”

“So you need the lute-strings to be neither too taut nor too slack, but somewhere in between, the Middle Way. Meditation is just like that. You have to find a point in yourself where you start getting the right tone, the one that just hits the note and is in tune. You won’t do that by forcing your effort or having too rigid an idea of what you want to achieve. You have to be a bit exploratory and provisional. On the other hand you do need to have a sense of purpose in meditation, and to maintain that sense of purpose, otherwise you will just drift off.”

When she got home, Gaynor went impulsively to her wardrobe, where, under a pile of clothes and other detritus, she found her lute in its case. In excitement, she took it up and tried to tune it, but straight away one of the strings snapped. She had to make a trip to a music shop before she could go any further. But then at last she was there, with a lute once more in her hands, and with the strings neither too taut nor too slack. After a few minutes of initial clumsiness, she was amazed at how quickly her musical agility returned: the technique, the expression, the memory of the pieces, all were still there.

She played solidly for two hours, and then realised that her depression had apparently lifted. But she felt no urge to go back to work.

The next week she returned to the meditation class. In the practice, this time, she tried to tune her breath like a lute-string: neither too taut, nor too slack. For a while she seemed to find that point, then she got distracted by congratulating herself and thinking about her lute. At least she wasn’t thinking about work, she thought.

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 The Middle Way and psychological states

This story uses an analogy directly used by the Buddha to illustrate the Middle Way in relation to psychological states. The Middle Way appears not just in relation to sets of explicit views – what we might typically think of as ‘extreme’ views – but also in the assumptions we make in everyday life. If you are not an extremist, unfortunately you can’t congratulate yourself that you are necessarily already practising the Middle Way, as the kinds of states encountered by Gaynor are, more or less, the ones we all encounter, to a greater or lesser degree, on a regular basis. We are not quite hitting the Middle Way at every point where we are not optimally ‘tuned’.

However, it’s important to understand how beliefs relate to psychological states here. It is not the psychological states that are extreme, but the beliefs that accompany them. For example, Gaynor was not in an ‘extreme’ state just because she was depressed – depression may have a variety of causes, after all. Rather her depression was being perpetuated by a rigid view: in this case the view that fulfilling the goals of work and career would meet all her needs. This view was inadequate to the conditions, not because the work was bad, but because her needs were more complex than that. If she were to flip to the opposite negating view, that work was bad and she should give up work entirely, it might have equally negative effects. These views are only ‘extreme’ because they are rigid and fail to notice the possibility of a balanced and flexible judgement in between, not because they would necessarily be conventionally understood as ‘extreme’.

As a good lute-player will know, it is no good just tuning your lute once. You have to keep re-tuning it, because otherwise it will go out of tune, and similarly the Middle Way consists of a series of flexible judgements constantly re-made, all of which hit a middle point between the affirmation and denial of fixed beliefs. The Middle Way is thus a process of judgement, not a fixed belief in itself. If you had a sense of it in the past, and then forgot it, rediscovering the Middle Way can indeed be a bit like rediscovering your lute at the bottom of your wardrobe.

Meditation is an excellent context for directly experiencing the Middle Way. If you approach it with a fixed belief of the kind Gaynor had (that it was just another source of stress requiring too much of her), it will not yield any satisfaction, any more than a badly-tuned lute will provide satisfactory music. Someone approaching it with the opposite belief (that meditation was just about relaxing and having no purpose at all) would probably have an equally bad time. However, as soon as you hit on the right tuning for the lute, meditation can become much more rewarding. For a short while you may create beautiful music, but then it is very likely that you will get stuck in some other way, hanging onto a rigid belief of some other kind rather than finding the balance. Every time you manage to loosen that belief (every time you re-tune the lute), you begin to live a little more provisionally, and build up more adequate habits in relation to the world.

 

An Acre of Forest

Fiction, Middle Way Philosophy,

I am currently working on a book of 29 ‘Parables of the Middle Way’, each accompanied by commentary. I will be posting some example parables here from time to time, and any comments will help me refine them. I already posted ‘The Ship’ a while ago, and here is another one, ‘An Acre of Forest’

“In addition to the property we have discussed, your grandfather left you something you might not have expected in his will” said Mr Jenkins, looking over his documents.

“Oh, what’s that?” replied Petra, intrigued.

“An acre of forest.”Mixed-forest Oliver Herold

“An acre of forest? I didn’t even know he had an acre of forest to leave! Where is it?”

“In the Elwyn Valley, I believe, about five miles from here. It’s an odd little bit of land, and I’ve no idea how he acquired it or why. He doesn’t seem to have exploited it for timber, or anything of that kind.”

“He did love forests” said Petra. “Perhaps he just wanted to preserve it.”

“Perhaps that’s the best explanation” replied the solicitor. “Still, Mrs Dawkins, what do you want to do with it? If you’d like me to put it on sale on your behalf, I could set that in motion.”

“What sort of forest is it? Is it ranks of conifers, or are they broadleaved? Are the trees mature?”

“I’ve no idea, I’m afraid. I’ve never viewed it. We could go and look if you think that’s important.”

“Well, I don’t need to take up your time with that, Mr Jenkins. Just show me on the map where it is, and I’ll go and look by myself. Once I’ve seen it, perhaps I’ll be able to make a sensible decision.”

“Well, don’t expect too much. A single acre is not a very large area. And it may not have been well-managed so as to look its best. Here, you can see where it is marked on the map.”

Despite this premonitory warning, when Petra parked her car in what she was sure was the right place, and looked at her acre of forest, her heart immediately fell. All she could see were ranks of pines: Norway spruce of a kind that is grown all over the British uplands simply to make as fast a profit from timber as possible, of the kind that shades out all undergrowth and forms a thick mass of impenetrable dead branches under the trees. She found it difficult to believe that her romantically-minded grandfather would have bought a timber plantation just to make money, and her opinion of him began to take a plunge as a consequence.

She was about to drive off in a rage against her grandfather, when she thought perhaps she should look beyond the initial rank of pines, in case there was a clearing there or something. Also, if she was going to sell it, she’d better check what condition the trees were in and how mature they were. So, she barged her way through an initial row of dead pine branches. To her surprise, there were no pines behind the first row. Instead there was a stand of ash trees. Oh, and over there were some beeches, and there were some oaks too. A clearer way opened out between the trees, with undergrowth around her, and she found herself in a charming clearing, with wild flowers, birds singing and a squirrel scuttering off through the branches. Quite a variety of trees surrounded the clearing: sycamores, rowans, London plane… She couldn’t even identify all the types of tree.

No wonder her grandfather had bought it! Now she understood. Grandad had had an eye for the hidden and unappreciated. Her grandmother had been rather like that: an initial austere, utilitarian exterior, but when you got to know her she could be the warmest, kindest person in the world. This acre of forest was exactly the same: not just one type of tree but many. Not just ugliness but beauty too. Not just commercial timber, but beautiful mature broadleaved trees as well.

It was clear what she needed to do. She would preserve it too, and pass it on to her grandchildren as well. Her grandfather had left no particular instructions for his ashes, but now she also knew where to scatter them.

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Variation of beliefs in an individual

The acre of forest is a parable about the multiplicity of human individuals – and indeed the same point, more obviously, applies to human groups. Most of us have at least some awareness of the dangers of stereotyping a group of people, whether they are grouped by race, gender, age group, profession or whatever other criteria. However, we are far more likely to assume that if someone expresses (or implicitly shows) a particular belief, then this is essential and definitive of them. Far from it – the beliefs of a particular human individual are like the trees growing in an acre of forest. Some may resemble each other and be of the same species, but others may not.

We cannot know whether or not there is any kind of essential unity (a ‘self’) in an individual – this would be a metaphysical claim. However, we can judge from experience that multiplicity is quite likely, and that we are rarely single selves. This is perhaps most obvious in people who have conditions such as multiple personality or bipolar disorder, when we tend to regard extremes of differing belief in the same person as indicative of a mental disorder. However, it applies to a lesser degree to all of us. Nearly all of us, if we are human, make resolutions that we fail to keep, forget to answer emails, have more positive or more negative moods, and change our language to suit the company. This is not a question of pretence, masking who we really are (as if we could know who we really are), but rather of simply being innocently various.

We are perhaps most likely to take people’s beliefs as definitive when they themselves take them very seriously and believe that they are living their whole lives by those beliefs – as is the case, say, with strong religious or political beliefs. However, it is very unlikely that they are. Even a saint, deeply committed to certain religious beliefs, does not make all their everyday judgements with reference to those beliefs, but rather consults everyday practical beliefs. If St Francis needed to wash his robe, he would have made the same judgement that it needed washing whether he was a Christian, a Buddhist, or an atheist. A social belief like the correct way to greet someone is also usually the product of a particular cultural context, regardless of the religious or political beliefs in it.

When a person seems to consist only in a rank of pines, then, perhaps we should bear in mind that there may be lovely rowans behind them – or, of course, the reverse.

 

Photo by Oliver Herold (Wikimedia Commons – CC)