Unsolicited advice, to you or to me.
When you think too hard about someone, I swear they can feel it (unconsciously).
I say this from experience and not because I have read about mirror neurons, which actually are a conduit for contagion with other people’s behaviors and feelings when you are in their close proximity; I posit that you don’t need to be in any kind of proximity. Nor do you need to be playing a round of golf to improve your golf game; you merely need to imagine that you are playing a game of golf.
That said, it is possible for unconsummated desires to wreak as much havoc as realized desires do; and so, remember this when you want to achieve something (or wreck it): thinking it is half – maybe all – the battle.
And if you are warring with yourself, your self will win ... this is why, when dark clouds hover over you, you must look through them and find the sun. And when the path is clear, walk it.
Part II: Intention
If that came off a little creepy, let me unpack it. This is a new thing I'm learning: not to toss a zip file of ideas out there with a rock star title and hope for the best (in life or in print), but to stick around and make sure my intention is understood. Intention and understanding don't always have to match, by the way. Observing can be an art of its own, and as long as it doesn't muck up the intentions of the source material, it has its own validity. But if we're talking about being human, not an art project, the person I am and the person you see are striving for harmony with each other.
I'm willing to take the riches / excess / success / business self help genre(s) and chuck every character and convention and the whole lot of related books into the sea uninspected, but for Steven Covey (who would agree with me anyway, about contemporary success literature). He has some sharp insights, so listen up. In
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (note the word "effective" rather than successful, wealthy, powerful, admired, etc.), he frequently drifts into metaphor and fable but presents all stories as real life anecdotes, so I'm inclined to think he's reworked some Zen parables and thrown them into the mix. It's a brave book which opens with an admission of failure: his words of encouragement to his academically and socially flailing teenage son were not helping, he realized, because his perception of his son was that he was inadequate, and regardless of intention, that's what he was communicating.
The opening segment, "Inside-out" is plenty illuminating all by itself. Don't play the game, he says. I'll give you one especially packed paragraph:
Many people with secondary greatness – that is, social recognition for their talents – lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you'll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently. As Emerson once put it, "What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say."
Part III: Reality
Recently I discovered what's known as the
Monster Study. We've done worse things to humans in the name of science, and for lesser reasons. But I don't like it anyhow. Dehydrated pocket version: a psychologist gave a bunch of children speech impediments by repeatedly telling them they had those impediments already. I wonder what else you could give someone by expecting it, or insisting on it? The possibilities are endless, and include
success.
Now split yourself in two: 1. your introspective analytical self, and 2. your inner five year old, who hears what person #1 has to say, and trusts it. Speak thoughtfully.
Part IV: Imagination
and where the snake eats its tail.
Although it may never occur to us to apply it medicinally, all this is instinctive to artists & writers. We think things into existence for fun.
I wrote this
for a Powell's Books contest in 2004 (and it is
not fiction, by the way!). Initially it was written in the style of
House of Leaves, with a million progressively derailing footnotes. Here's the housebroken, prose only version (still a house of mirrors).
Conjuring Holden Caulfield
Some teen magazine once polled
their readers: “If you could go on a
date with a fictional character, who would it be?” Sassy,
I think it was. Whoever—Holden
Caulfield, of course, won by a landslide.
Reading The Catcher in the Rye
is better than most dates. Lots of people in books are better than real people,
since we never have to do their laundry, they never tire, and they’re eternally
young.
Tibetan Buddhists have a word for a
person imagined into existence by intense visualization: a tulpa. If someone
taught a weekend class on how to make tulpas, book lovers would sell it
out. Finally, we could bring our desired
partners to life. But since we can’t, we
become writers (or painters, or musicians, or sculptors…). We submerge our deepest longings in works of
art, then stand back and watch them come alive—not as we had envisioned, but
rather as children do—to terrorize us.
We nurture them as infants and then we lose control. They barge into our bedrooms in the middle of
the night screaming. Forget sleeping,
ever again.
Last summer I read Mark
Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Its
aim is to gradually lead you into a state of panic mimicking that of its
characters, who become lost inside a house that is a morphing mirror of their
psychological failings. It ensnared
me until I felt empathetically confined and, worried, began to read more
urgently. I suspected that I didn’t have to find my way out of the
house; eventually I would come to the end of the book and resume the safety of
real life—the sooner the better.
But at the height of my discomfort,
a footnote read my mind: “This is what happens when you hurry through a maze:
the faster you go, the worse you are entangled,” then: “If one reads too
quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.” Convinced the footnote was
actually reflecting me, I dropped the book and ran to the bathroom mirror,
where I found, as always, myself (I don’t know what I expected to see—a
footnote? Some had to be read in a
mirror, and they were popping up all over the place by then. The book could have installed itself in my
apartment, like a computer virus, for all I knew. Soon footnotes would appear on the backs of
cereal boxes, in my mailbox, on post-it notes, in my diary…).
I peered around the corner: the
book, sprawled on the floor uncomfortably, was still alive. I picked it up and kept reading. It was 3 a.m., and I was no longer alone in
my apartment. The book was
thinking. Seated next to an open window
with a light curtain, I flinched at every tiny sound. It’s the book, I thought. Nobody’s out there. But I felt I was being watched. And that feeling swelled until I, imagining a
gun at the back of my head, leapt out of my seat once again. As I flung the curtain open a man expertly
ducked his head out of view. There truly had been someone outside my window,
quietly watching me.
There is a traditional Zen parable
that goes like this: a student of a Buddhist monk is told to meditate on an ox
and does so for days on end with no result.
He protests, only to be told to resume the meditation. Finally, outraged, he attempts to come out of
the small structure in which he has been meditating, but cannot because his
horns are too big to fit through the doorway.
And so we puzzle over fiction
(where does it stop and where do we begin?) until the question marks begin to
breathe. Inside each book is a life,
brought into crisper focus by each reader until freed of the confines that
drive mere humans to the creation of fiction in the first place. We don’t think it into being so much as it
uses our reading it as a vehicle for escape, which it has been hungering all
along.
Allegedly, a disproportionate
number of “haunted” houses contain teenage girls. The theory is that their
hormonal turbulence enables their emotions and desires to become physically
manifest. So at sixteen, had I known this and meditated on Holden Caulfield
long enough, I might now be married
to him.
But I didn’t know, and so I keep
reading.
(now you can go back to the beginning and just loop this post. If you're one of those "life imitates art" types .. )
