‘The Darkness Calms Down in Space’
A podcast is not many journalists’ favorite medium. Why? You can’t search it. If you know that a person has said something in a podcast but you have no time code to tell you when in the tape that comment popped up, you’re left scrubbing back and forth, trying to find the quote you need.
So it is that I’m looking forward to the release today at noon of the transcript of a new podcast conversation with Ezra Klein at The New York Times. He’s talking with the author George Saunders who, at 62, is out with a new book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain from Penguin Random House.
The book is based in Saunders’ 20 years of teaching at Syracuse University on the Russian short story–which, of course, is a thing that most of us leave behind after Chekhov crosses our curriculum reading lists in the first two months of our MFAs.
I was hastened along in my own abandonment when I was at the Asolo Conservatory of Professional Actor Training. I discovered that the company’s press department had described a Chekhov play we were doing in rotating rep, The Cherry Orchard, as being about “those zany Ranevskayas in rollicking old Russia.”
Bad PR about literature and theater, however, is not my point, you’ll be glad to know.
What Klein talks about with Saunders in the new exchange soon to be mercifully captured in a transcript is based on a 2013 Syracuse convocation speech Saundersr gave in which he told the graduates, “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
“It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.”
I know, I know. “Oh, God, Porter’s doing something about kindness.” Makes you want to run screaming out into the street. #MaskUp, please.
There’s a curious point here, though–aside from the fact that any time you can hear Saunders talk you should do so. In his conversation with Klein for today’s new audio, Saunders says, “All we have is the possible control over the mind state that we find ourselves in.”
And I’ve been reminding myself of that a lot in pandemica, as it were, because I’ve found myself involuntarily researching a lot of bad moments in my life. I don’t know what about the coronavirus’ visitation has made this so pervasive. But I keep thinking of times in my life when I was astonishingly naïve, fell on my face, walked into walls, acted rashly, acted stupidly, didn’t act at all and should have, acted out and shouldn’t have. It’s maddening, although of course curiously entertaining at times, too–a weird “Your Greatest Screw-Ups” series. I wish I could say it was a mini-series but this show seems to have a lot of seasons to it.
This mind state, as Saunders would put it, is one I could probably do better at controlling, he’s right. But what’s striking about it is that it frequently is a tour of moments that were bad because I wasn’t as kind as I could have been–and often to myself, not just to others.
Tactical Kindness
Any of hundreds of psychological and emotional inputs go into this stuff, of course, and the navel gazing–like the proverbial buck–stops here, don’t worry, I’ll spare you the early-life experiences, it’s safe to keep reading.
But to put this into a wider context, you start to notice what a short supply of kindness there seems to be in our current upheavals and ordeals. And not, maybe, in the most obvious ways of thinking that one major political party demonstrates more cruelty than the other, or that one way of behaving in public during a pandemic is kinder to your fellow humans than another.
Saunders talks about the “monkey mind,” familiar to us all, and how when he’s at work on his writings, it quiets down. “A concentration on a task and a related reduction in rumination,” he says. By focusing on a paragraph, he says, he can find (as in meditation) that “the thoughts die down” and “the self-creation” of your monkey mind stops chattering away. In my case, that parade of pratfalls turns the corner and I can get off the self-reviewing stand for a little while.
There’s a wonderful title from a 1986 work of electronic music composed for the Japanese movement ensemble Sankai Juko by Yas-Kaz and Yoichiro Yoshikawa: Shijima (The Darkness Calms Down in Space).
“Something else happens or rises up in that space,” as Saunders says, whether in meditation or writing. And while I’m not looking for a writing-as-therapy point here, I do think there’s something to be taken from Saunders’ talk of looking for the myriad energies and attitudes that tend to seize our minds. If we sort them, we might find more self-awareness. This might be a quality, as he notes. of what writers do. We become more aware of things because we have a way to step out of the noise. And then we can be kinder.
If such an idea could be brought to a bigger stage, to a cultural or societal scale, we’d be better for it. Just on the most simplistic level, think how much easier it is to talk about some group or movement staging a “day of rage” protest about something than it is to think of that same group or movement having a “day of standing down” and just giving everybody a break about whatever cause or purpose or big idea they’re usually up and down the street for.
It turns out that Saunders is going for the local perspective rather than the national (or international) one. The quick way to get this in personal terms is to look at the thing we all know about how rude and hateful someone may be in various social media when she or he wouldn’t dream of saying such vulgar things to you in person.
And in writing, as Saunders says, there’s an ability to make the usual chatter calm down. We can set aside the blather of the political fight, or the battle for a vaccination appointment, the heresy of rejecting a life-saving mask as some kind of “freedom.” When that pre-determined scrum evaporates, maybe what’s left is a chance to think more kindly before it all catches up with us again.
I said earlier that I’m not looking for the therapeutic interpretation. And I’m still not. I don’t think this is Kumbaya, I think it’s tactical. I’m not sure we need a hug as much as we need to treat people decently and watch for them to do the same for us. And in writing, we may have an advantage, a way to work at this, something less accessible to others for whom the darkness just never calms down in space.
Do you feel in touch with something more spacious when you work? Does it leave you with any more mental room when you stop before your monkey mind cranks up again? In that space, do you ever glimpse kindness, a potentially tactical response to the noise? Is it possible that the biggest point may not be what we write but what we do with the dynamic it creates?
About Porter Anderson
@Porter_Anderson is a recipient of London Book Fair's International Excellence Award for Trade Press Journalist of the Year. He is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, the international news medium of Frankfurt Book Fair New York. He co-founded The Hot Sheet, a newsletter for trade and indie authors, which now is owned and operated by Jane Friedman. Priors: The Bookseller's The FutureBook in London, CNN, CNN.com and CNN International–as well as the Village Voice, Dallas Times Herald, and the United Nations' WFP in Rome. PorterAndersonMedia.com
Good morning, Porter. Yes to all of your questions. Maybe that is part of why I write, I control the environment of my characters, I can cry with their hurts, yet find a place for them to heal. And Saunders, I have been reading about this newest work, did read Lincoln in the Bardo, though I must admit, sometimes he was beyond me, but I still hung on. The title of his newest work is enough to make me read it. Kindness. In Bardo, Lincoln is bereft and wandering, so are the souls. I am trying for that feeling in my novel, the voice of the dead mother still haunting. It’s tricky stuff. And I am fortunate to have my children safe and living their lives despite all of this. Thanks for THIS kindness, Beth
Hey, Beth,
Thanks so much for the (kind!) comment, much appreciated. And yes, the ability to gain some control of a context in writing is important and often a relief.
Your comments on trying to capture a sense of being bereft are very familiar, too. I’m a great fan of Camus and I’ve always felt he struggled to communicate what it is to feel bereft — which, in some interpretations, is what’s going on in “L’Etranger” (“The Stranger”). We take it quickly to the realm of existentialism but that feeling of being at loose ends, wandering, directionless, bereft is actually experienced, of course, on a much closer, more despairing level than the philosophical existentialist discussion positions it.
You are indeed fortunate to have your family safe. There will be a time when people will say that they were grateful to make it through the pandemic. In retrospect, I think we’ll learn more about the dangers and close calls all around us.
Thanks again!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Your post led me to some old college books about human psychology. I’d been searching for something from a Life Span Development class about what people often do when facing their own mortality, and that is that we stand back and assess. Did we live the life we wanted to live? Are we regretful or glad, in most, for our choices? While I wasn’t able to find exactly what I was searching for, I can still make the point I was formulating: My guess is that the pandemic has pushed many of us into that space of assessment, as lifespan and mortality have felt less within our control.
While I wasn’t able to quickly lay hands on the old Life Span Development notes (no pun intended), I did stop to absorb a hearty graph on the growth of the mind. Henry Gleitman writes about this while addressing the changes seen throughout childhood:
“Human infants are not like bees and birds, who can acquire little beyond what nature build into their brains. But no more are they like learning robots or recording devices, who will simply copy everything to which they are exposed. Rather, cognitive development involves the interaction of innate capacities and biases with the kaleidoscopic information in the world outside. Thus far, we know only fragments of how this internally given and externally given information come together to yield the competent and knowledgeable adult. Perhaps the central challenge in the field of cognitive development is to understand the interactive position so as to learn why, though infants are wise indeed, they are not wise in the same ways that adults are wise.”
There’s a gift there, to my mind, and it’s that there’s a continuing relationship between innate capacities and “the kaleidoscopic information in the world,” but we may be in a period of the latter overwhelming the former. We desperately need to stand away from the noise of reality sometimes, to think about what we’ve seen, to engage our capacity for well-rounded logic and skepticism, for empathy and being able to imagine another person’s perspective. Which brings us to kindness.
Storytellers are often gifted with the ability to shut off the outside world for a while in order to go deep, to reach into the primordial subconscious ooze and find a thing, examine it from all sides, use it to tell a story or inform a character. It’s like a waking dream, but instead of crafting with raw non-sense, we can actually sort and order and make meaning from what we find.
This is a bit meandering, apologies, but I’ll try to tie this all together with this: We don’t often take or have the time to scrutinize our lives, to go deep. If the effect of an era with heightened uncertain mortality is to open ourselves to self-critique and in doing that we’re able to see other perspectives, that’s a gift indeed. Many in our world struggle right now with that kaleidoscope of stimulation; going inward may be a dusty ability for some. Add to that that the stimulation is often coming at folks in the form of outright lies, and there’s some trouble for us all. I hope that more people realize that the intersection of the outside world with innate abilities is what delivers us our humanity. Keep a door open and a light on, and a space for the possibility of awakenings. It’s the kind thing to do.
Hey, Therese,
Sorry not to have managed the kindness of a quick response! An unexpected project hit on Saturday and ate up all the oxygen in the weekend and the week … and here I am now, a week late, answering, my apologies.
I think what you’re saying here is very telling, especially in the question of researching your life when faced with mortality.
And assuming that this is happening to more than a few of us, then — if I follow you correctly — it’s an unusual chance for many of us to do this kind of life research on ourselves brought on not by old age but by the circumstances of an unusual immediate threat. I like that concept.
But I like it not just because it points to the chance to do this kind of self-evaluative work and the associated kindness but because — if this tendency toward self-rumination in the pandemic — is a wide enough trend then it also indicates that on some psychological level, more people than we might think are taking the danger of the pathogen seriously.
One of the hardest realities — and one of the cruelest — is that so many in this country have refused to take the danger of the coronavirus (and now its variants) seriously. With more than half a million Americans dead from it, you have to wonder what WOULD make these people take a threat seriously. If the virus was a missile attack, would they watch their neighbors’ houses be blown up and still say that the missile attack was a hoax? That’s what they’re doing as virus-denialists.
But if it were possible to know that many of them were experiencing this tendency to review parts of their lives, as you rightly point out is normal when we come close to an idea of mortality, then it would mean that in some parts of their psyches, they were cognizant of the danger and reacting to it in traditional psychological and emotional ways.
Complex stuff, but the option for kindness, which includes an admission of the lethal reality on the ground, is always going to be preferable.
And you’re right that our chance to explore that in the peculiar aesthetic safety of being writers is a blessing, and a kind one.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I put is this way: The way you feel inside is how we will feel as readers.
I use a different word than kindness to describe the lifting, calm spirit that we may find in a story: goodness. When there are acts of goodness in a tale, we feel hope.
Also true in life. Like you, Porter, I have come up against my shortcomings in the last year. The cure, I’ve found, is not trying harder but slowing down and forgiving myself—sometimes, anyway—for being human.
In doing so, I’ve found it easier to listen and walk in the moccasins of others. Who would have thought that accepting my faults would help me to connect more to others? But there it is.
Good post, my friend. I hope to see you soon.
Nice, Don,
“The cure, I’ve found, is not trying harder but slowing down and forgiving myself—sometimes, anyway—for being human.”
That seems like a powerful act of kindness toward oneself. (Formal meditation is slowing down taken as full path…for the time allotted anyway. It is instructive for the whole.)
And inverting that–or is it reversing that?–speeding up, driving harder, can stir up the opposite of kindness. I find driving myself hard gives rise to emotions and actions destructive to myself and others: resentment, impatience, distance, wild mind etc.
So I sit … as in, down.
I take issue with Porter’s view and Saunders’ that writing cuts monkey mind. If we listen to it, it still cranks away…though as you say it can be directed towards goodness in the work. The thousands of synaptic choices writing demands pull our thinking mind out of the present moment…ironically, even when writing about it.
I am still working on the balance there.
Being good to others in the work and to myself and others by not relating to it as a drug.
Hey, Don,
Apologies for being so late getting back. (Oddly, this year has been incredibly busy from the get-go, and hasn’t slowed down. Not always sensibly busy, either, just nonstop.)
I really love your work on self-forgiveness, and it’s interesting that you, too, have been bumping into shortcomings. I do think that Therese is on to something with her look at the subtle effects of a culture-wide encounter with mortality. I also find that I’m on some kind of reconaissance mission, looking at how things have come out. (Is there such a thing as a developmental edit of your own life?)
I do know exactly what you mean about finding some patience, empathy, kindness for others. I’ve been glad to find it, though dismayed at times to see the kinds of things others need so much. It’s an age in which you keep asking how if one person has bought into or even promoted some very dark idea and message, what’s the difference in that person and the person who didn’t buy into it? If we could get a better handle on what makes the difference, we’d know a lot more about how to support healthier dynamics.
And yes, we’re long overdue for a dinner and one of our great talks — here’s to our vaccinated future!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Lovely post, Porter. I was just thinking of St. Maximilian Kolbe, what he wrote to his brothers from Auschwitz to encourage them. I’m paraphrasing: Let nothing distress you…may only the love of God triumph. Isn’t that just beautiful?
My word this year is “encourage” and I think it is much needed in times like these. The writing has saved me from dwelling too much on the here and now, instead lifting my mind more to the eternal.
Take care and be well.
Hi, Vijaya —
Late getting back to you here, but I wanted to thank you for reminding me of St. Maximilian and his amazing kindness. Did you know that he’s the patron saint of journalists? Quite a remarkable man.
We should remind each other of him on August 14, his day. They have his cell preserved at Auschwitz, you know. I haven’t seen it, myself, though I’ve been to Buchenvwald.
Thanks for the generous reference, and for going after encouragement, which, yes, is sorely needed in so many places and situations. Save some for yourself, too. :)
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Great post, Porter.
I realize this is going to sound crazy, but I wonder if the simple terms of kindness (Porter) and goodness (Donald) are bigger than they seem. So big, in fact, they are the core of our being.
Let me explain . . .
I’ve been ghostwriting a memoir for the better part of 2020. While it’s not my story to tell, I wrote every word, and feel the author has something important to share. He’s been abducted by aliens for sixty years–since he was seven. No joke.
His take on the reason aliens show interest in mankind? To help us be better people. To teach us kindness, generosity, empathy, forgiveness, patience, love, and all the stuff packed into goodness. I’m not kidding here, guys.
What if their message holds truths? What if we are ruining our planet, ourselves, and each other with bad stuff? What if changing our mindset is not only important but vital to our very existence?
I realize this just got a little nuts, so I’ll stop now. Porter, your post hit home, and you are right. We are capable of MORE. Looking inside is the best place to start.
Hugs,
Dee
If anyone wants to help us learn kindness, generosity, empathy, forgiveness, patience, and love, deal me in, Dee.
Lovely, moving, and a wonderful baseline for how we move and engage in the world. Thanks, Porter.
Porter, Thank you for this. See also, Viktor Frankl. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Evermore important to embrace this since the pandemic, but has always been a guidepost for me.
sb
Porter, I’m thrilled that the podcast will be available to read. To your question, everything quiets down when I write. I’m in another place, focused on other people and their problems. But when I’m not in that safe-room, the isolation sticks me with looking at myself. In a way, it’s a micro/macro scenario, with America finally looking squarely at the long-festering rot under the rug. Being in that process with ourselves is painful, but valuable. In fact it give me hope. I honestly believe that people are much stronger and braver than they know until they get tested. Kumbaya, right? But I’m an incurable optimist, so there you go!Thanks for this.
Hello Porter. Thank you for raising this issue. Years ago, I delivered a talk to Unitarians on the subject. My goal was to pry off the chokehold that religion has had on kindness, at least in the west.
I based my talk on science research results that argued in favor of expanding the concept beyond the notion that kindness stops where our genetic connections to others ends. It isn’t just family/tribe but even strangers that we (well, most of us) will help or risk ourselves for. Why? Because, in Darwinian terms, it improves the general odds of being helped in the future by others. In other words, of surviving.
On the personal level of experience, I think of kindness in terms of the Pleasure Principle. Being kind is a demonstrable source of pleasure. You don’t have to be a God-fearing this or that to have the experience: who doesn’t feel good as a result of helping someone else?
How this might relate to the monkey mind or to tactics as a writer I’m not sure. But It’s behind a novel I’ve written, and will be central to the next. Kindness shouldn’t be restricted to the realm of Good Deeds. It actually seems more like a survival instinct enhanced by pleasure–like sex.