Category: Book Reviews

The angel, naked, tiptoes off, weary, content, maybe limping

“To discover now, after twenty-two years of Zen training, that I was still susceptible to otherworldly visions …. Ah, well.”  The narrator has written a book, Against Angels, protesting all the popular attention given to angels in recent years, and rationally discussing the facts known about angels. Now, he sees an angel.

The fictional book has enough substance to have been worth writing. It contains a section with six pictures depicting a maturing understanding of angels. The chief theme is that angels are a projection of our spiritual selves; it is important to stop seeing angels.

1. Longing for the angel. The young man looks to the sky for angels, shading his eyes from the sun. He is open to possibilities but still thinks freedom belongs to somebody else.

2. Seeing the angel. The young man is kneeling and trembling. Perched on a rock, a fierce angel stares down at him. He has seen the angel, but the beauty makes him weak and confused.

3. Wrestling with the angel. The young man stands wrestling with the angel. The wingless angel strains but has a hint of a smile. “At last! He has come to grips with the essential point. There is neither heaven nor earth, holy nor unholy, just the mysterious other, bearing down on him with all its might. He has no choice now. It is not a question of victory or defeat. As long as he is grappled by an other, he is grappled by a self. And though he may not be aware of it during their sweaty embrace, the other wants nothing more than to be defeated.”

4. Letting go of the angel. The young man sits comfortably, gazing into the distance, holding a flute. The angel, naked, tiptoes off, weary, content, maybe limping. The struggle is over; he no longer remembers who won. The light of creation shines from him.

5. No angel, no self. Both angel and man have vanished. The angel is integrated; the man has no one left to confront. He has stopped looking inside or outside. “He has hung out a shingle on his front door that says, “Vacancy: come on in.”

6. Entering the marketplace with angelic hands. The young man is middle-aged, bearded, and smiling. He holds a basket of goodies for children. He has graduated from spiritual practice, from obligations, from enlightenment. He acts for pure pleasure, the benefit of all beings. But all beings are already saved. Open his basket, you will find as much or as little as you need.

Upon seeing the angel, he allows it to teach him angelic sex, and guide him on a tour of the heavens. He learns that the sorrow of humanity is a special thing, the opposite pole of the joy of the angels, a necessary experience to understand others, to truly have love and compassion. “You can love only where you enter.” It is for this reason that when angels meet humans, the help they can offer is so limited. “Actually, our greatest service is to stand before you as clear mirrors. The compassion that a human may feel coming from us is his own mirrored compassion. The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection.”

Nothing flakey about this book. It has survived many weedings of my book collection.

Too Many Children are being Hustled off to University

I suspect that Matt Crawford’s publisher came up with the title of his book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. The title attracted and repelled me for a year before I read this book. The now largely defunct shop class was still around when I went to high school in the eighties. I learned a measure of competence in handling materials and their machines that has proved useful and satisfying over the years. This connection piqued my interest, but “soulcraft” had the distinct ring of marketing. The subtitle was even more difficult, a pitch to fans of Robert Pirsig’s famous novel on motorcycle maintenance. I would not lightly judge a poser. Fortunately, Crawford speaks with his own voice on a timely issue, the role of the trades and right livelihood in the information age.

Too many children are being hustled off to university in pursuit of so-called knowledge work. Trained in electrical work and vehicle maintenance as a youth, Crawford pursued a doctorate in philosophy. On the way he took a job that seemed ideally suited to him, writing abstracts of journal articles for a database, only to find the quota impossibly high for comprehension. After obtaining his PhD he was hired by a think tank and paid very well, only the results of their thinking were predetermined by the oil company that funded it. He left the academic world to open a motorcycle shop. To hell with economics and opportunity cost. He preferred the cognitive challenges of the trades. Historically, scientific thinking came from a close handling of materials by bright workers. Crawford explains how the separation of thinking and doing is an artificial and harmful practice that started with industrialization and advanced by Taylor at Harvard.

Crawford asserts that the separation of thinking and doing is now being applied to office work. In my years of work in corporate IT, I personally found there are some satisfactions of the manual kind that Crawford thinks are reserved for the trades. Like the craftsman, I take pride in writing code that I know will never be appreciated by anyone except perhaps another developer. I get excited when the switch is about to be flipped on for a major program I wrote. Still, it is true that the only tactile experience I get is that of the keyboard. Worse, as programs begin to write programs, lower-level coders are being phased out in favour of higher-level configurators who have little real control over their products. This shift eliminates the need to master technical skills. Computers are becoming assembly lines of thought sausages.

The problem is not technology. Crawford knows his Heidegger. We are technological beings, handy to the core. We need to feel our tools in our hands, not manage them remotely or regard them abstractly. There is a big difference between the explicit and universal nature of Ohm s law, compared to the tacit and situational knowledge of the mechanic that electrical circuits must be tight, dry and clean. He is not being anti-intellectual but rather attesting to the satisfaction and cognitive challenges of the trades. It is good advice even from an economic viewpoint. In the face of global outsourcing, one still cannot hammer a nail over the Internet.

The book is dedicated to his girls, which is nice, but the sexism in Crawfords writing is glaring. The text is masculine in almost all its pronouns. References to firefighters and chess players are stereotypical, while the one “she” plays music. Sexist jibes are considered appropriate training for young men. According to Crawford, classrooms can only contain boys prone to action using psychiatric drugs, and corporate teamwork is for girls. Call me politically correct if you must, but the sexism is too much. We should have learned by now to welcome girls into the trades rather than scare them off with this tiresome prejudice.

We are all Strangers in a Strange Land

I was impressed with Stephen Batchelor’s book, Buddhism Without Beliefs, so I read his more recent work, Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil. The earlier work was a statement of original Buddhism, relieved of the dogmas of karma and reincarnation. Suffering stems from a belief in an unchanging self or soul, driving our perceptions, desires, and actions into anxiety. Yielding up this belief takes the sting out of suffering. This simple statement smacked of truth and was a refreshing break from mystical mumbo-jumbo. Still, there were more questions. I found that practicing mindfulness of contingency frees up energy, both positive and negative. After all, if we yield up any larger system of beliefs, where do we direct our energy? Does Buddhism without beliefs hold up or fall apart? According to Batchelor, even Buddha tangled with it. He called it Mara, the devil, and lived with it all his life.

Mara, Satan, or any devil, says Batchelor is a metaphor for trying to hang on too tight, constricting the contingency of life. In Dante’s Inferno, Satan is depicted as frozen to his neck in ice. Fixations are opposite to the Buddha’s truth that there is no permanent self. We come by it honestly. All of evolution has prepared us for survival, for perpetuation of the self. In the end, it is false. Entropy will have its way. We will age and die. To deny it is to invite suffering. “Each time something contingent and impermanent is raised to the status of something necessary and permanent, a devil is created.” Batchelor recommends an attitude of homelessness. Reality is finally unfamiliar. We are all strangers in a strange land.

Buddhism seems tilted toward openness and against fixity. I think of things cosmic as a two-step, yin and yang in perpetual oscillation. Is fixity always evil? Think of the small stories we tell ourselves, things we fear and fancy that give small meaning to our lives, the tents we pitch to defy the night sky. To be fair, I have yet to find a Buddhist who denies that self exists in a practical sense, or that well-intended planning is vain. They might talk about compassion or care. Quoting a lama, care is “a keen engagement and letting go.” It is a matter of not gripping too hard, not severing out the life in things. That would be evil. Batchelor says that “Buddha and Mara are figurative ways of portraying a fundamental opposition with human nature.” If so, they both represent poles on a continuum from open to closed, neither extreme preferable. So sometimes fixity is the better choice.

If fixity is evil when we clench too hard, then how hard? What about our grand narratives, the meta-stories we tell about the destiny of our lives and the world. Our small stories tend toward more complex ones. We need them to keep faith. Is the faith misplaced? Are we just compounding illusion? Are grand narratives too hard a clenching? If so, why is it that apocalypses never happen, and why do complex social and information systems keep chugging along? As I see it, we should not stop imagining grand narratives. Rather, we should refrain from insisting on only one. Buddhism without beliefs holds up if Batchelor is only rejecting rigid beliefs, not speculative ones.

I have my own speculative grand narrative. It is not particularly consistent or inconsistent with Buddhism or other religious views. At the heart of this narrative is the dualities discussed here. Contingent and essential, small and grand, self and the world. Why do these dualities exist at all? Batchelor says the illusion of self is a function of evolution and I agree with him, but toward what? These splits, I fancy, serve a larger purpose. It is only when a thing is split that it can observe itself. Self is temporarily cut off from the world, and mind captures reality for a fixed moment like a photograph. Maybe the universe is trying to catch a photo of itself. Is entropy inevitable or contingent based on what god sees in the mirror? Who knows? I’m not fixed on it.

An Idea Inevitably Provokes its Opposite

Critical theory is a way of understanding culture. It proposes a theory to analyze literature, music, entertainment, politics, religion, and so on. It is typically interested in political change. Marxism is a classic example, but there are many other theories, e.g., deconstructionism, feminism, queer theory, and black politics.

Alienation. A core concept in critical theory is alienation, a condition of existing on the outside, in estrangement from a community or nature or even oneself.

Dialectic. The dialectic refers to the alienation or contradiction latent in all thinking. An idea inevitably provokes its opposite. For Hegel, opposites are resolved at a higher level of consciousness.

Narrative. Marx applied the concept of the dialectic to politics, with a grand narrative in which history is the struggle of the working class against property owners. According to Marx, the inevitable outcome is the overthrow of the property owners and the formation of a Communist state. Narrative is basic to the human condition, but grand narratives tend to be authoritarian. More recent theorists prefer to use small narratives to describe their distinctive experiences.

Subtext is a hidden level of narrative or meaning at which people are influenced or controlled. Marx pointed to the cultural ideology of consumerism to explain why the class revolution had not yet succeeded. Freud proposed the psychological unconscious from which repressed sexual desire influenced our behaviour. Structuralists examined how language shapes our interactions.

Structure and Totality. Subtext introduces the idea of hidden and shared structures. We may be able to define a grammar or syntax of the unconscious, e.g., universal symbols such as male and female. The systems of Marx, Freud and the structuralists propose a horizon to knowledge, limiting human claims to enlightenment. At the same time, these theories make a claim on identity, a totality, transferring authority to those who understand them. Always a risky proposition.

Difference. Post-structuralists reject structuralism and systems and emphasize the plurality of meaning. Derrida said there is no precise meaning to a word. It is better to talk about a field of meaning. Foucault rejected the idea of human essence. He described the plight of the mentally ill, homosexuals, prisoners and ethnic minorities. Lyotard coined the term, differends, intractable disputes, e.g., First Nation land claims, which tend toward marginalization of those with less power. Lyotard discussed how postmodern science – incompleteness theory, complexity theory – shows that the future is still open.

Perception. Art reflects the unconscious. Art can be used as propaganda, and it can be used to reveal ideology. Shklovsky contributed the concept of defamiliarization, the making strange of everyday objects to break fascination and perceive freshly. Defamiliarization is a defining quality of literature. Benjamin stated that original works of art have an aura, a context and history that cannot be mechanically reproduced. Barthes proclaimed the death of the author. It is readers who complete the narrative.

Evaluation. In the absence of a grand narrative, evaluations and ethical judgements can still be made on a case-by-case basis, much like our courts. Bentham prescribed “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” and rejected the Ten Commandments.

Simulcra. Technology has changed the nature of the working class. Lyotard was concerned that technology was a last attempt to eliminate difference from the world. In contrast, Haraway saw the internet as a female friendly space, and said she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. Baudrillard said we now inhabit a world of hyperreal simulcra, “signs without referents” including the Gulf War and Disneyworld. With technology mediating all our relationships, are we simulcra of human beings?

History. Is there such a thing as progress? Hegel saw an evolution toward absolute spirit. Marx insisted that communism was inevitable. Kafka believed that alienation was an inescapable metaphysical condition. Witnessing WWII violence, Adorno and Marcuse rejected what they called the Enlightenment project, while Habermas said it is just an unfinished project.

To me, the dialectic suggests a two-step. Sometimes we can take two steps forward only to take three steps back. The notion of history moving toward some grand end is suspect. We undertake projects and glimpse meaning, but anyone who thinks they know the big picture with certainty is mistaken. Both memories and hopes are tainted by our fantasies and fears. The meaning I trust is local, actual moments in space and time. Perception is an end-in-itself. The future is open.

Our Fascinations and Fears Cause us Grief Until we Finally Surrender the Self

When the Dalai Lama visited Canada in 2007 a Catholic asked if he should convert to Buddhism. The Dalai Lama replied that the man should use Buddhism to become a better Catholic. A humble answer, it seemed, but it was also a clever one. Buddhists do not wish to compete with other religions. How rare, I thought. It took some time to sink in, but the Dalai Lama’s reply also positioned Buddhism as a meta-religion, a perspective from which to understand and enhance other religions. Clever. Each new insight I get into Buddhism confirms that position is not presumptuous.

Becoming Enlightened is written by the Dalai Lama. I have knee-jerk resistance to claims about enlightenment. What is enlightenment anyway, a state of perpetual bliss? When asked what the Buddhist outlook is, the Dalai Lama says, “its view is dependent-arising, and its prescribed behavior is nonviolence”. Let’s unpack that. Dependent-arising means that all the fascinations and fears that lead us about by the nose cause us grief until we finally surrender our illusion that self has any permanence. Most pleasures we seek are rooted in suffering. I learned years ago that the only pleasure in smoking is the relief from withdrawal caused by the previous cigarette — like wearing tight shoes for the pleasure of removing them (see Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Quit Smoking). We eat and drink and shop too much to smother the stresses of daily life, mostly the jostling of other people against our wishes and egos. Year by year I lay down my addictions and discover another kind of pleasure, rooted contentment and brimming creative energy. It feels very enlightened, but the Buddhists ultimately insist on altruism, committed service to others. From this view, my enemy is more instructive than my friend, for it shows where I still cling to the illusion of a separate self. I still have a long way to go.

Reading Becoming Enlightened I am again challenged by one core tenet of Buddhism that I have always found illogical. As discussed above, we do not have a permanent self. The Dalai Lama is careful not to use the term, soul, but it seems to me that is exactly the thing he is saying does not exist. The Buddhists also say that actions in this lifetime affect our reincarnations in future lives. But if we have no soul, how can there be any personal connection between one life and the next? It seems like a contradiction.

Frustrated that Buddhism could be so right about practical things and so wrong about this metaphysical issue, I asked the question of Aardvark social search. A helpful respondent quoted Rapola Wahula, “If we can understand that in this life we can continue without a permanent, unchanging substance like Self or Soul, why can’t we understand that those forces themselves can continue without a Self or Soul behind them after the non-functioning of the body?” Ah ha, I am still tripping over the assumption of a permanent self, both in this lifetime and possible future ones. This answer turns my question on its head. Our self is just a gathering of physical and mental energies with no permanent core (“dependent-arising”). We do not require a permanent self for continuity past death; moreover, it is not until we give up the illusion of self that we can finally stop reincarnating. Heady stuff. Another one of the social search answers gently suggested my fixation on soul reflects a Christian bias. Point taken. Perhaps there is wisdom in the Dalai Lama’s advice to stick with the religion of your parents.

Becoming Enlightened is a worthy source of reflection for outsiders to Buddhism like me.

The history and future of libraries is a story of fire. Many have heard of the burning of the Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt. It may have been burned by Arab invaders or started by Julius Caesar to forestall an invasion. In Library: An Unquiet History, Matthew Battles observes that book burnings are not always fatal to knowledge. The burnings inspire the writing of other books. Also, while many books are lost over time to natural decay, scrolls blackened by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 are now being reclaimed using spectral photography. As he concludes his first powerful chapter, “the most complete ancient library accessible to us today survived because it burned.”

The pattern of burning and advancement of libraries is likewise true of the twentieth century. Book burnings were popular in Nazi Germany where incongruent thought was fatally punished. However, the need to sort one kind of book from another created “a perverse golden age for librarians”. Battles observes that German librarians attempted to redirect the Nazi idea of the Volk to promote the public nature of libraries.

Fire is a combustion of material releasing energy. No doubt librarians have made efforts to protect their collections from physical fire, but fire is also symbolic of other kinds of change. We think that information overload is a modern problem. The history of libraries could be considered a series of innovations in the face of that problem, from the pressmarks of Antonio Panizzi to Melvil Dewey’s precisely measured card catalogues. Fire also runs in the electrons of today’s digital libraries, but it is a conceit to think that they are the only ones to innovate.

Battle’s history of libraries treats many other subjects. He talks with affection of his library at Harvard. “The people who shelve the books in Widener talk about the library’s breathing – at the start of the term, the stacks exhale books in great swirling clouds; at the end of the term, the library inhales, and the books fly back.” Battles also traces the co-evolution of libraries and readers, trending toward the ideal of a universal library. Not just one big library, or the same library everywhere, but a gradual progression of libraries toward free and open knowledge for everyone.

I read Battle’s history once when I started library school, and once again when I finished. Fitting book ends. Recommended for all devotees of books, libraries, and history.

As a reader, bone and sinew, I cannot review The Book on Fire by Keith Miller, this pure, uncut fix of bibliophilia. To review a book is to claim some distance from it but having entered this story I have yet to find my way out. I am not looking. Call these words a tribute instead, borrowing liberally from its phrases, written while the spell still lingers.

“Do you love to read?” asks Balthazar, the story’s narrator. Each sentence, almost each word is an indulgence of description, a tale of all things good and bookish. It combines “in perfect quantity design and story and song.” Read it after dinner, after dessert, curled up in a blanket with a candle and tea. It has been a long time since a book has so completely taken me under its spell, childhood perhaps.

Balthazar is a book thief in a fantastical Alexandria, the legendary city with a library as its soul. In this Alexandria, children are admonished if they do not bring a book to the breakfast table. (This is not a children’s story, unless they are the sort drawn to dark fables, the sort who grow into bibliophiles.) Beggars spit on your spare change, gesturing for the paperback in your hand. There is a bookstore for every taste. The library itself is not easily found. Ask the merchants or shoeblacks where it might be found, and they will smile or murmur an enigmatic couplet. Once found, you will not be permitted entry. It is protected by a guardian caste of librarians, trained to kill an intruder with a single blow, irresistible to a book thief.

Mysterious Zeinab hides beneath her niqab. How incorrect that niqab today, but it protects secrets. She trades her body for the price of a book. Not just any book, but one from the very special collection in Balthazar’s wardrobe. With her help, he learns the way into the library. It is more than he hoped for. “We all have titles, questions swept like sodden leaves into the corners of our minds, that we have little hope will ever be answered or solved, but that we cannot get rid of. Suddenly, I found myself in the orchard of answers.” Once inside, Balthazar is reluctant to disturb the order. Instead, he becomes entranced with the youngest librarian, Shireen (a siren indeed). Her calling demands she kill him, but she too is drawn to Balthazar’s collection. Its books spare his life one Arabian night after another.

Miller slips all too easily inside, wooing the reader through weak spots for books. Be careful. The opposite of reading is burning, and Zeinab torches Balthazar’s precious book. Why?! Balthazar seeks what all readers seek, “the beautiful, annihilating book.” The Book on Fire takes the reader to the edge. Like all addictions, paradise can suddenly turn into an inferno. Reading is a dangerous art.

They hook you early, the pushers, even in pre-school. Maybe some of us have a greater weakness for it than others. It is a fierce addiction, reading, and from there it is a slippery slope to writing. Howard Engel was hooked young. Blame his parents; they read in the house. Soon he was picking his own library books and writing puppet shows. He could not be found without a two or more books on hand. As an adult, he wrote for radio then published a dozen detective novels. He was an addict of the printed word when he forgot how to read.

The Man Who Forgot How to Read is a memoir by Engel of a stroke that robbed him of his ability to read. Alexia sine agraphia is a rare condition in which the victim maintains the ability to write, but not read. A frustrating condition, indeed. He could write, but not read what he had just written. Stroke cuts into memory, threatening one’s sense of self; but Engel’s identity was fixed in reading: “I was still a reader. The blast to my brain could not make me otherwise. Reading was hard-wired into me. I could no more stop reading than I could stop my heart. Reading was bone and marrow, lymph and blood to me.” (41)

Step by step, with the help of skilled therapists and dedicated family and friends, Engel learned to read from the beginning again. Once the reading skills were working again, the writing came naturally, first another detective novel in which his protagonist suffers a blow to the head, then this memoir. Engel’s refusal to accept the status of a “former reader”, and his victory over a stroke and brain damage to achieve it, should be a siren call to those who have not yet discovered a passion for reading. Unlike other addictions, the reading vice may take some effort to acquire, but then pays off in lifelong pleasure without regret. Want a fix?

The life of Scott Nearing is a powerful story. A professor of economics, he was quickly blacklisted as a radical for his protests against capitalism, injustice and war. Out of work, he and his wife Helen established a farm in Vermont, where their self-reliant lifestyle began what came to be known as the Good Life in their books. I have previously mentioned their book, Living the Good Life: How To Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, which tells their back-to-the-land story. It was an inspiration to many, and people would visit the homestead, free to stay and help. Four hours bread labour a day, then time to write, talk or engage in other progressive activities. If there was any doubt that this was the good life, Scott lived to be a hundred years old before his death in 1983.

A good ending is essential to a good story. As Helen told it in her book, Loving and Leaving the Good Life, when Scott reached one hundred, he knew his health was failing. Their life was about honesty, simplicity, fearlessness and deliberate choices, a path outside a system they viewed as unsustainable. At Scott’s end, he was not about to seek medical interventions to prolong his life. One day he decided to stop eating. He died peacefully at home. This image of his death affected me. If I find myself in a similar situation, I thought, dying and clear of mind, I would like to make that kind of choice about my death, and face it with eyes open. It would be a good ending.

I have sometimes told others about Scott’s death. The usual reaction is, yikes, starving to death would be painful. I would brush aside that natural reaction, but LaConte’s Free Radical has given me cause to reflect more deeply. After Scott died, LaConte become close with Helen, working with her as a secretary and designated biographer. She learned that there was more to Scott’s death, more that needed to be told for people like me who felt Scott’s death exemplary. The short, inexpensive book is available from the Good Life Center. LaConte provides keen insight into the mythology that shrouds the Nearings. She adds missing elements about Scott’s suffering and the Nearing’s dependence on others, without detracting for a moment from respect for them. It completes the picture for ordinary people, essential reading for anyone interested in unconventional views about death. A sad or bittersweet ending can often be just as satisfying as a happy one.

Pico is a librarian in a city by the sea. He falls in love with a winged girl who rebuffs him because he does not have wings. Thus begins Pico’s journey through the forest, to the mountains, and into the desert seeking The Book of Flying that will give him wings.

I revelled in Pico’s fearful and lusty journey. For a time, he loses his way in the beauty of books and friends, but of course it doesn’t end there. “Who knows how long he might have stayed in that city, cozy, dousing his guilt with wine, cauterizing it with tobacco, had the city remained static. But keep characters in propinquity long enough and a story will always develop a plot.”

I’ve heard it said that The Book of Flying by Keith Miller is about the transcendence of art, and it may be so. It is a fable written as tenderly and poetically as Pico’s heart, often reminding me of A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. One of my favourites ever; it sings to the heathen in me and to the yearning for something more.