Summer is a time for reading. Although I have a list of books waiting for me that would stretch from Trenton to Belmar, NJ, sometimes I hear about something and just have to pick it up and devour it. Such was the case with How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, (Penguin, 2018), or, as I've been calling it, "The LSD Book." Michael Pollan is one of my favorite nonfiction writers, and as I'm working on an essay which might or might not tangentally mention psychedelic influences on music and art, I thought this book would provide me with a good background. It did that, and so much more.
I don't want to give away the whole book, but you can see by the subtitle I just mentioned that Pollan will be discussing how LSD and other similar drugs could be used to treat depression, anxiety, and addiction among other situations. Some folks claim it even helped them come to terms with their inevitable death (existential distress). All of that is fascinating. And well documented by Pollan, of course. We're not talking about LSD and psilocybin as party drugs here, mostly; psychedelics didn't get their illicit reputation until research money dried up in the 1960s and the drugs and the study of them went underground. For those interested in the brain science, it's here too, and it is clear enough for this Humanities person to understand.
What is especially fascinating in this book is that Pollan himself experiments with LSD, magic mushrooms, something called "The Toad," and other psychedelics, usually under the supervision of
an experienced ("sober") guide, and after conducting his usual meticulous research. (If someone said to him, "Michael, how can you make this story unique to you?" He nailed it.) As I, personally, have no desire to experiment with such substances (they are not without risk), my knowledge feels enhanced by Pollan's compelling, detailed, honest explanations of his trips. I can't imagine that he has left anything out. He details how he decides which substance to try, how much of a dose, and how he decides on the perfect guide. Surprising to me is how important the location of the trip will be. Novices are encouraged to bring items of their own into the environment and to choose music. (This is where the 'transcendence' of the subtitle comes in.) The process is fascinating before we even learn about how one becomes "one" with music or art or nature. That this kind of experience is being studied as a treatment for anxiety, depression, addiction, and other problems gives the drugs some credibility. You decide--don't believe me.
I was engrossed by this book from start to finish, and I'm pretty sure I told all the friends I encountered during my reading about it, eagerly. I read a lot, and I talk to people (lots of people), and I thought I knew a thing or two. But once I started talking about this book and psychedelics I learned so much more and had some intriguing conversations. You should read this book. If you've read any Michael Pollan before (The Omnivore's Dilemma or The Botany of Desire among others), you know that his prose sails smoothly through sparkling waters and you'll enjoy the trip (no pun intended).
Pollan is showing up all over the media and there are many interviews by reputable outlets on YouTube. Here's a short interview from CBS This Morning:
Pico Iyer chooses his words carefully. He has access to the same English language words we have, but he strings them as pearls creating sophisticated, elegant prose. Owing to his cosmopolitan background, he has a collection of jewels to enhance that pearl-string: words from other languages and accessible jargon from aesthetics and art make his writing as clear as recently Windexed glass. Even his name is elegant and unique. No extra vowels or consonants. No extra syllables.
Along with his high-brow cosmopolitan brilliance though, Iyer reveals himself as a hardcore Bruce Springsteen fan in this book. I felt that needed to be said.
The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto is an exquisite memoir from Iyer's visit to Kyoto, Osaka, and Nagasaki. In Kyoto he befriended a local woman who taught him about Japanese culture and made him aware of Easter, Japanese, and local perspectives and cultures. It's a remarkable and unexpected friendship. Iyer created the setting masterfully:a mysterious Japanese Zen Buddhism world of kimonos, tea ceremonies, monasteries, and the moon. With his descriptive language he introduces the reader to characters he encounters. There are laugh-out-loud moments, and sad, poignant experiences.
The original "The Lady and the Monk" is a folk tale that Iyer tells his Japanese friend in one of those poignant moments. The tale comes back at least twice as a kind of veiled trope. On the surface, this is a masterful piece of literature, but I felt throughout that I was somehow supposed to be reading between the lines for even deeper meaning. I was inspired to read a little about Iyer's life, and this small bit of knowledge gained two-thirds through the book enhanced my enjoyment of it. I wish I could read the book again for the very first time so that I could re-enter that curious world again as a gaijin (foreigner).
The Italian text is on the left side and the English translation is on the facing page. The translations from Italian to English are not, however, by the author, who happens to be a native English speaker. She hired a translator to move her newly-acquired Italian text into her own native tongue. Huh?
The author is Pulitzer Prize-winning Jhumpa Lahiri who wrote Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake and other books. She fell in love with the Italian language as a young traveler and twenty years after that decided to embark on a challenging experiment: she would learn Italian, really learn it, by immersing herself in Italian culture and speaking English only to her family. This involved moving her family to Rome
where she would begin to read and write only in Italian. This includes reading the classic literature in that language. Anyone who has attempted to learn a new language for a trip abroad will recognize the magnitude of this endeavor. I can get by in Germany or Austria with my limited German (mostly nouns, mostly food words), and in France with my simple French sentences and phrases. That's only one side of it, though, making myself understood. I can order Schnitzel, and waffles with chocolate, and get the water without bubbles. I can find my way through the Paris Metro, ask for the check in a restaurant, and get the water without bubbles there, too, but what if a German or French speaker is trying to make themselves understood to me? They speak fast, use tenses I haven't studied, and know way more nouns than I do. Lahiri's project is admirable.
The reason she embarked upon this journey was to learn to express herself using new words and language. As writers would say, she wanted to find a new voice. The book has an open ending, one in which Lahiri ponders which language she will use when she returns to the United States. She leaves the door open for Italian, but I think I'm hearing a possible preference for English. Either way, she anticipates a feeling of loss for the Italian language once she is no longer immersed in it.
This book was recommended reading for a writing class I took, and I used it in my own class to illustrate the power of words and the arbitrariness of the sounds we put together to form language. Lahiri has found new words for everything and learned to string them together to make a fascinating book. I wish I had thought of this idea...well, maybe not.
If you like big books full of fascinating information about genius innovators who changed the world in which we live, then this is a book for you to pick up right now. Walter Isaacson has outdone himself with this da Vinci tome. Each chapter is a treat. We may think of Leonardo as an artist, but please don't forget he was an inventor, engineer, musician, and stager of pageants. I wasn't aware of that last thing, but I was astonished at how many times it was his skills staging pageants that got him noticed by prospective employers (dukes, kings, and popes, FYI).
I picked up this book because I was working on a 3-week Lifelong Learning course on the European Renaissance. I like to include details that my students may not be familiar with, and recent information. That this book had plenty of interesting lesser-known details was no surprise given Isaacson's reputation for fine research. But it also supplied me with the compelling account of the painting, "La Bella Principessa," newly discovered in New York. Paralleling da Vinci's own penchant for combining art and science or technology, Isaacson walks us through the process for authenticating paintings believed to have been created by a particular artist. I don't want to spoil the outcome should you be convinced to read the book, but I'll just say there's a crime lab involved, and infared photography, and good old-fashioned critical thinking.
Did you know Leonardo was a pioneer of oil painting and used multiple thin layers of oil paint to create his distinctive effects? Parts of the Mona Lisa's face were created with thirty thin layers of oil paint to give her that luminous look.
Leonardo saved his ideas either in words or sketches in books we now know as Leonardo's Notebooks. these books are actually Commonplace Books, a concept used by many historical thinkers (including Thomas Jefferson and Sherlock Holmes!). These books tend to be smash-ups of ideas, and work like slow cookers for ideas and inspiration. I based my nonfiction writing course on the Commonplace Book, requiring that my students keep a designated notebook in which they add research, observations, free-writing, and ideas for their assigned Long Essay. I assure them that if they check in with their Commonplace Books daily, they will indeed be slow-cooking their ideas. Imagine my joy at reading about Leonardo's notebooks, AKA Commonplace Books, AKA Zibaldone. Isaacson spent an early chapter describing this practice. I feel validated.
Did you know Leonard invented musical instruments and played them well? He invented this Viola organista below. It sounds like a gang of stringed instruments, but it is played with a keyboard which runs a bow over the strings.
Perhaps Leonardo preferred to think of himself as an engineer or inventor, but the truth is he was a phenomenal painter. This books pages are printed on fine, heavy paper, which shows off the details of his awesome work. The book has some weight to it, literally and figuratively. It is a treasure.
We had a Nor'Easter Friday. A Nor'Easter is a specific kind of storm that travels from the southern Atlantic coast to the north and is often dangerous. This one was--I heard on the news that nine people died in this storm, and most of them from falling trees. As the windy storm circled above my home and work, there were strong wind gusts and lots of precipitation. At work I removed from my car about two inches of heavy snow, but at home, thirty minutes away, there was only rain. Lots of rain. At my top-secret seashore location, wind gusts were reported at 68 miles per hour. Talk on Facebook among local friends centered around sump pumps and lost power. I was lucky in that I did not lose power this time or find a soggy basement, but nonetheless found myself seeking escapist entertainment as a distraction. First, an Oscar-nominated movie with an element of ridiculous fantasy but good acting, and then an old-fashioned, print-on-paper, hefty, intellectually-inspiring, book. I thought of my powerless friends and hoped they took this opportunity to read a book since I think not enough people seek book-companionship on a regular basis. Some are still without power, so if they happen to have car-charged their phones, here's a suggestion I predict will take their minds off the inconvenience of the loss of electricity.
Paul Theroux, The
Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari (NY: Mariner, 2013)
Theroux begins this
journey in comfortable Cape Town, South Africa, and moves Northwest through
Namibia, across the border to Angola. As he moves north, and as I follow in my
atlas, he moves away from comfortable civilization and becomes aware of profound
poverty and despair. The border crossing between Namibia and Angola is
particularly difficult, harassing, and brutal, but Theroux
finds a guide who
helps him navigate the crooked agents and their monetary expectations. Once
across, he finds another guide to shepherd him to his hotel in Ondjiva. As he
did almost forty years earlier in The
Great Railway Bazaar in Europe and Asia, Theroux has speaking engagements along
the way which keep income flowing. In Lubango in Angola, Theroux becomes a
part-time teacher at the university: “Nothing is more satisfying in travel than
to land in a place and assume an occupation, even a temporary one, as a
teacher; to cease being a voyeur and have a purpose and routine, especially one
that involved interacting with intelligent students.” (p. 259)
Unlike in the earlier
book, Theroux is now concerned about his age. In 1975 he navigated the
obstacles of travel nimbly and with a hopeful sense of adventure. The sense of
adventure is still with him in Africa in the 2013 book, but it is less hopeful
and increasingly hopeless. He admits that. He’s preoccupied with his age (70)
and questions the wisdom of such a trip frequently throughout the book. He
takes gout pills. He is concerned about his own mortality now, and often
updates the reader about people he met along the way who died soon after. He
wonders if this will be his last big solo trip. “There was a finality in my way
of looking now, a gaze with more remembering in it.” (p. 80) At one point his
identity is stolen and over $40,000 is charged to his credit card, maxing it
out and making it useless to him. He describes the experience as demoralizing.
This book is less a
train book and more of a transportation book. There are railroad journeys in
Africa, but he sometimes connects with buses and hired Land Cruisers. One of
these Land Cruisers breaks down in a desolate bush village where there is
nothing to eat but an old woman’s leathery chicken legs covered with black
flies that she’s selling from a pail. Although he had resigned himself to going
without food, he eventually relents and consumes the chewy meat. It’s a sad
scene, but Theroux claws his way out of the funk by asking about the distant
drumbeats he hears coming from the next village. It turns out to be a four-day
festival for girls entering womanhood, and he finds a local expert to interview
and an interpreter who can translate from the local language into Italian for
him. Before the Land Cruiser is fixed he has the opportunity to go to the
village and meet some of the young women. The travel writer found an exclusive
story, but it didn’t come easy. Theroux stated that this was his purpose in
coming to Africa, to spend a night and day like that. It was rewarding for him
and it’s a compelling part of the book.
Ultimately, Theroux is
headed for Luanda, on Angola’s Atlantic Coast. He calls Luanda an ‘improvised’
city. “Going deeper into Luanda meant traveling into madness.” (p. 304) It’s
uncomfortable reading because it is such a risky place for our 70-year-old
hero. He recognizes that Angola is a rich country, rich from diamonds, gold,
and oil, but its corrupt government ignores its poor people. Although he had
hoped to travel to Timbuktu on this trip, he realizes he has had enough in
Luanda. Political issues in Mali and between Angola and Mali prevent him from
completing that itinerary. He’s not even tempted by the new Chinese-built train
to Malanje, and decides to skip additional slummy cities (he admits he hates
cities anyway and prefers rural landscapes with people in them) and head back
to Cape Town and then home: “As I grow older, the consolations of home take on
a deeper meaning.” Boy, do I know what he means. One of my writing students chose this book as her Creative-Nonfiction-which-includes-research assignment, and I can't wait to find out how this twenty-something navigates Theroux's thoughts on age.
While there are portions
of this trip that Theroux finds fulfilling, the girls’ festival in the village,
and his teaching, there are many more that he finds challenging, demoralizing,
and uncomfortable. A younger Theroux may have found these same things to be delicious challenges. He admits he often thought he might die in his last three
trips. In his last paragraph he hints at what’s coming next, a look at the poor
in the American South.
There's been a lot of talk this week about groundhogs. I have nothing against those critters, and in spring I'll be seeing many in my neighborhood. I've often said that those groundhogs rule my neighborhood. They make it impossible to grow any vegetables in my yard because they will sit on the deck and eat whatever they find. It's insulting. But enough about groundhogs. What about muskrats? Have you considered the muskrat lately?
Annie Dillard spent ten
pages describing muskrats in Tinker Creek. Her descriptions are vivid enough to
call up in my mind that mysterious animal that Fred and I saw in a pond in Cape
May Point. Our mystery animal glided rather than swam through the water, just
as Dillard described, with its little brown head above the surface facing
forward, just as she described. Her discussion of the muskrats in Tinker Creek
caused me to pull up my Cape May Point memory while I was reading, and once I
realized the memory was conjured, to recognize what I had seen was a muskrat.
Those ten pages of
muskrat talk reminded me of another memory, buried far deeper than the creature
swimming in the Cape May Point pond. Many years ago, when I was in my twenties
and my mother was well enough to sift through old things in her house, she
showed me a fur coat. I’d never seen that thing before and I was quite
surprised she owned it. She explained it belonged to her Aunt Mattie and found
its way to her even though she didn’t want it and never wore it. (Great Aunt
Mattie had no children, so many of her belongings found their way to us.) Was I
interested in the coat? She asked me this knowing I’d say no; I wasn’t about to
wear antique dead animal fur. In a last-ditch effort to find the coat a home,
she told me it was “Hudson seal.” Still no, I said, although I appreciate the
coat as a family antique. Why did Annie Dillard’s pages on muskrats bring up
this memory, I wondered, until I got to the tenth page where she writes about
muskrat pelts and their value (five dollars per pelt in 1974), and how fur
dealers call this fur anything but “muskrat,” and usually, “Hudson seal.” I
must have known once that muskrat furs were called Hudson seal, but that
knowledge was long-forgotten until I read Annie Dillard.
The muskrat pages were
part of a chapter called “Stalking,” in which Dillard describes her own
stalking of the waterborne muskrats, animals stalking their prey, and the
possibility that unseen animals were stalking her. Each chapter is built upon a
theme like this, examined from multiple angles. The themes fall in
chronological order, starting with a January day and moving through the year to
the beginning of another winter.
Throughout the book,
Annie Dillard appears as a character, or, more specifically, Dillard represents
herself via an interior monologue which braids together her environmental observations,
her spiritual and mystical thoughts, and her knowledge of nature and mysticism.
She examines her knowledge and ideas, and I think this analysis inspired me to
compare my own experiences in nature to hers. That’s why my synapses connected
to my long-dormant muskrat experiences. They were brought forth for me to
examine as she was riffing on her muskrat knowledge while stalking the “unstalkable”
swimming muskrat in Tinker Creek.
While writing a thoughtful email to a good
friend, I caught myself unintentionally copying her writing style (and admitted
it to him). Has reading Pilgrim at Tinker
Creek also influenced my thinking style?
Dillard’s observations of
nature are not all bright and shiny, baby ducks and wildflowers. She writes
about the grotesque in great detail, too: the waterbug who sucks out the
innards of a frog. The frog’s body caves in gradually and finally the eyes,
terror-struck during the process, lose their emotive quality altogether and
join the collapsed skin. The scene must be horrifying, especially to a person
who, like me, cannot remove a dead mouse from the house. Dillard gives us the
waterbug-and-frog story as one of a series of carefully-chronicled, unpredicted
observations.
Dillard often uses what
I’ll call the Second-Person-Hypothetical where a passage begins with “If you
were a…” and then goes on to describe what you as that thing would do. On page
170, she suggests that the reader is an ichneumon, a type of wasp. The reader
as ichneumon is carrying around a cache of fertile eggs and must find a
caterpillar on which to lay their eggs so that they don’t starve. If the reader
as ichneumon does not find a caterpillar host, the eggs will eat the reader
from the inside. The Second-Person-Hypothetical is an engaging device for
adding tension to the “Fecundity” chapter.
Dillard tells us she
“blooms indoors like a forced forsythia,” in winter, reading and writing in
response to and in advance of the nicer spring/summer/fall weather where she
will be observing nature. She calls upon that reading often during the book to
reinforce her musings and observations. After reading Marius von Senden’s Space and Sight, she sees color patches
in nature (p. 29). The writings of British astronomer and physicist Sir James
Jeans inspired her to think of the universe as a “great thought” rather than a “great
machine” (p. 144). Woven into the narrative, these great thinkers’ thoughts
give the reader more to ponder.
Pilgrim
at Tinker Creek relies on Annie Dillard’s interior
monologue which is a synthesis of her observations, readings, knowledge,
dreams, and acute self-awareness. The combination reveals subtly to the reader
a sense of where we are with Dillard. Our scene is revealed in small
increments, and is more vivid as a result. Would I recognize Tinker Creek? The
author is included as a character we know well thanks to her personal
revelations. Dillard-as-character fades out when the focus turns to nature or
spiritualism.
The book, another “great
thought,” is captivating from start to finish.
Falcones, Ildefonso. Cathedral of the Sea. Black Swan, 2009.
Have you figured out your New Year's Resolutions yet? Have you made a list? Do you have good intentions but a lack of energy? I have been thinking about resolutions for the past few weeks, and rather than the usual diet- and exercise-themed stuff, I think I've settled on a more general plan. I want to live more mindfully. This would cover the healthy lifestyle genre since there's always something more I can do in that department. Usually at this time of year I make noise about wanting to read more, but I already read more than most people I know. What I'd like to do in 2018 is to read more mindfully, too: take more time to select good books, savor them, look up unfamiliar vocabulary words and concepts, and understand the author's motivation for writing the book. It takes SO MUCH work to write a book that I feel I owe it to an author who has written something worthwhile and meaningful to get the most out of it. I'd also like to write more reviews of books on Amazon--those mean a lot to authors.
Speaking of books that are meaningful and worthwhile, I just finished a rather long novel which left me continuing to think about its characters and location. The book is Cathedral of the Sea and it was written by Ildefonso Falcones. In its original Spanish, it was a huge hit in Europe. The cathedral in question is Santa Maria del Mar in the Ribera neighborhood in Barcelona, which turned out to be the focal point of my two-week stay there this summer. I fell in love with that cathedral and wrote a lengthy essay about it and its main character and the barrio around it while it was being constructed and what it is like now. Our tour guide recommended this novel to us inside the cathedral, and I scribbled the title and an approximation of the author's name in my little notebook. I found an English translation in a nearby shop.
The main character of the novel is Arnau Estanyol. We meet his parents before he's born and learn about medieval customs and laws of the peasant folk and then the urban citizens when Arnau and his father move to Barcelona. Arnau is enamored of that cathedral, and it becomes a focal point for him, too, throughout his life. This cathedral, in the Ribera district, was built by and for the working class people, many of whom carried huge stones across the city on their backs from a quarry on a mountain called Montjuic.
A bastaixo depicted on the door of Santa Maria del Mar
These laborers were called bastaixos, and they also unloaded cargo from ships at Barcelona's port. Arnau spent some time as a bastaixo as a young man, and cultivated work ethic by emulating his favorite colleagues. Despite his best intentions, he finds himself with jealous enemies and challenging situations, and the novel stays compelling throughout its 751 pages. (No kidding.)
This is a book to savor and to read mindfully. There's plenty of medieval history in there, plus well-developed characters for whom the reader grows to care deeply. When I finished the book last week, I was sorry to have to leave that world created by Falcones. How often does that happen when one finishes a novel?
Here are some more of my photos of Arnau's cathedral to help you daydream about Barcelona...
