Journey in Search of the Way

"I’m so glad to go from the darkness of Butcher’s Crossing to Journey in Search of the Way . Myōdō is writing about her practice in ways that I, as a non-Buddhist, non-practicing person, can connect to so intimately. There’s a wonderful distinction that Myodo makes: Christianity tells her that you have to see the rottenness of the wood you are made of so that you can purge it and move on. But she says, no, I actually want to accept the rottenness of my wood, because I’m rotten wood, and we’re all rotten wood. So where do we go from there? She’s wonderfully frank about her own life: the sexual indiscretions and terrible things that have happened to her. She describes things that shouldn’t happen to anyone, but also choices that she has made, which are not, you know, the choices of someone who was always going to be a nun. She goes in many different directions, and that becomes the material for her life. She’s not trying to perfect herself by rising above it. I mentioned that I’m a huge fan of Ursula Le Guin. The path for Le Guin went through Taoism, not Buddhism , and I’m not subtle enough to know the theological differences. But in Le Guin, there’s this sense that what Taoism teaches you to do is not exactly Stoicism , but it shares with Stoicism a notion of just accepting the world, accepting the things that happened to you, and not trying to overturn or re-narrate them, but simply to understand them. Myōdō does a wonderful job of that. It’s a perfect example of what B-Side Books can do. I couldn’t have gotten to what’s great about the book without Theo herself, who is more intimately bound up with that kind of Buddhist practice. Once she showed it to me, I thought : oh, right. I can get something out of this book without feeling like I have to be a Buddhist . I’m a little hesitant because I don’t know the history of religious and therapeutic writing. And Myōdō herself is, I think, cautious that the book is not intended to be therapeutic. It’s intended to be, like, available for reflection. She’s telling her story, and if her story resonates then… yeah. But there’s a whole history of Buddhist thought and how it entered the West. It’s been entering since, you know, Thoreau and Emerson, who were reading Buddhist stuff. So it’s come in and gone away and come back again. Maybe what you’re thinking of, and tell me if this is right, is that we’re moving beyond a model of trauma as a complete explanation for what it means to be. Like the account of trauma as status: if you have this traumatic wounding that almost functions as an identity, you’re trapped in that moment and can’t get beyond it. It’s not that we should disregard the effect of trauma in the world, but there needs to be other narratives that explain how people have terrible things happen to them in their lives, yet also find a way to narrate them. Is that what you’re talking about? Maybe that relates to the point earlier that we were discussing about Ginzburg and the quality of impersonality that she brings into her first-person writing, but how the desire to kill one’s husband springs out—that you can share the subjectivity of the text, even if you personally haven’t done any of the things in it. I’m less interested in that first-person industrial complex you’re describing than in the rise of autofiction with all its attendant complexities. I mean, people like Ferrante, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti… What they’re doing is exploring how you can make something that is fiction and true to your life at the same time. It has that sort of doubleness. I guess the analogy with Myōdō is that all these things so clearly happened to her, but she wants them also to exist in a theological, spiritual register. A great question. I’m sure I’m going to blow it. Okay, well, since I’m teaching George Eliot right now, I can answer it by way of: George Eliot has this wonderful description in Mill on the Floss where she stops in the middle and looks at the audience, and she says, ‘I realise the lives I’m describing to you are oppressively narrow, and you feel constrained by them, and it’s awful, but it’s necessary to feel oppressive narrowness.’ She doesn’t quite say it that way, but I think what she’s saying is that we feel oppressive narrowness because actually oppressive narrowness is everywhere. We’re all in our lanes. The people that you often read about in novels—like the woman who murders her husband—are maybe in narrower lanes than you, but we’re all in some kind of constrained circumstance. Yet the realisation that other people are constrained in ways akin to how we are constrained is itself something that can lift you, and actually make you feel less constrained. I feel like that’s a Myōdō insight: if you can conceive of that as a general condition, you’re able to see it in a different way. There’s this wonderful idea in philosophy of the impossibility of the “view from nowhere.” But one of the things I love about fiction is the notion of a view from elsewhere . And we don’t have to go as far as a sentient planet to get that elsewhere."