Of Books and Bicycles

I’ve finished Geoff Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, and let me say, first of all, that it’s not about yoga. At least, it’s not about the poses people think of when they think about yoga. It does have something to do with the philosophy that lies behind yoga, but more on that later.

Let me say, second of all, that I enjoyed this book very much. It’s uncategorizable, which is my favorite kind of book — it’s part travel narrative, part personal essay, part memoir, and part philosophical meditation, although the more philosophical sections are short. What philosophical meditations we get are moments in the midst of the stories, moments that come out of the stories and lead back into them.

Many of the blurbs on the book mention how funny it is, but except for one or two moments when I laughed out loud, I didn’t find this book very funny. But it was so many other interesting things, I didn’t miss the humor. There are ten chapters, each one set in a different location, including New Orleans, Rome, Libya, Cambodia, the Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert, and others. Dyer tells stories about the people he meets, the parties he attends, the love affairs he has, the drugs he does — at this point you may be wondering why I like this book, since I’m a boring, stay-at-home kind of person who wouldn’t know how to find drugs if I wanted to.

But the persona here is appealing. He’s got an open attitude toward life; he’s willing to try just about anything. He’s frequently depressed and despairing, but also capable of finding moments of peace, and his meditations about himself and his life are always interesting. He’s thoughtful but also reckless, hard on himself but also forgiving.  He’s brutally honest about himself and the world:

… I looked up from my notes and was confronted, in the mirror above my desk, with the awful reality — grey hair, bulbous nose, scrawny neck — of my appearance. I have often been disappointed by my appearance, but I have never looked so utterly repulsive as I did then … “Life,” said the face in the mirror, “is taking its toll. All the disappointment and regret, all the bitterness and rage that you have tried to keep hidden, is now breaking out, eroding the last patina of handsomeness, and hope. You are no longer a handsome man. This is the fate of all those who place an undue value on physical attractiveness. You will become one of those people — one of the hundreds of people to whom you paid the bare minimum of attention simply because you did not like the way they looked.”

Maybe his attitude can be best summed up in this conclusion to a chapter spent describing a visit to Roman ruins:

… at some level I knew I had been kidding myself: that all the intellectual discipline and ambition of my earlier years had been dissipated by half-hearted drug abuse, indolence, and disappointment, that I lacked purpose and direction and had even less idea of what I wanted from life now than I had when I was twenty or thirty even, that I was well on the way to becoming a ruin myself, and that that was fine by me.

Ultimately, the book is about what to do after you realize you’re turning into a ruin. Do you despair, or accept it, or both? Dyer’s travels seems to be a response to this realization — he’s traveling as a distraction from pain, seeking out new people and new experiences to pass the time as comfortably as possible, and yet he’s aware at the same time that everywhere he goes, he finds only himself. There is no escape. Travel as distraction and escape leaves him all the more burdened with the weight of himself:

I felt disappointed, cheated. As the gloom settled I saw that I had spent the last fifteen years dragging the same burden of frustrated expectation from one corner of the world to the next.

And so the only thing to do is to try to make peace with yourself, even if only for a moment. And here we come to the meaning of the book’s title, because yoga’s true meaning is not the poses you might do in a yoga class, but has more to do with the search for insight and enlightenment. The term “yoga” comes from a word that means “yoke” or “union”; it’s really about finding unity with God or with something larger than oneself, or, perhaps, finding unity within oneself.

So, in the midst of the sometimes manic movement from place to place, Dyer is looking for a sense of unity and coherence of experience, for moments when he can just be where he is:

“What I want,” I said, “is a place where we can sit down, where we can just chat for a couple of hours before we go to Matt and Alexandra’s lavish suite. A place with nice music, comfortable seats, and nice tea, and so forth.” I went on and on about this, and as I did so I had a dim sense that I was working through something, some neurosis that refused to manifest itself plainly. And then it came to me.

“D’you know,” I said, “I have just described exactly the place we’re in. I’m already in the place I want to go to.”

“Well done, darling,” said Dazed. “You’ve escaped from samsara.”

This exchange (Dazed is Dyer’s current girlfriend) sums up the book beautifully — it’s about learning to want to be in the place you’re in, and it’s an insight expressed with a little bit of self-mockery and mild sarcasm. Dyer takes up some heavy subjects in this book, but he never takes himself — or anything else for that matter — too deadly seriously.

I think it’s time for another post on Boswell and Johnson. I’ve been marking interesting passages with post-it notes and after I blog on those passages taking them out, so when I see a lot of post-it notes accumulating in the book, that means it’s time to write about it again.

First of all, I can’t resist giving you Boswell’s description of Johnson’s extremely odd mannerisms:

…while talking or even musing as he sat in his chair, he commonly held his head to one side towards his right shoulder, and shook it in a tremulous manner, moving his body backwards and forwards, and rubbing his left knee in the same direction, with the palm of his hand. In the intervals of articulating he made various sounds with his mouth; sometimes as if ruminating, or what is called chewing the cud, sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen, and sometimes protruding it against his upper gums in front, as if pronouncing quickly under his breath, too, too, too: all this accompanied sometimes with a thoughtful look, but more frequently with a smile. Generally when he had concluded a period, in the course of a dispute, by which time he was a good deal exhausted by violence and vociferation, he used to blow out his breath like a whale.

Johnson is someone I wish I could have seen. Much if not most of The Life is taken up with accounts of conversations; Johnson, Boswell, and friends sit around and talk about literature and politics and the latest gossip (and they do love to gossip!), and while reading Boswell’s accounts of it all is great, surely it’s nothing compared to actually being able to witness these bull sessions.

Boswell describes Johnson getting angry, violent, and vociferous, but then quickly calming down, realizing he’d gone too far, being willing to make peace with whomever he was angry at. Can you imagine, Dr. Johnson getting furious with you? I’d be terrified.

And, unfortunately, I’d have every reason to be terrified of Johnson if I’d had the chance to meet him because he hated Americans (and, also unfortunately, some of the things he says about women I’m not too keen on):

From this pleasing subject, he, I know not how or why, made a sudden transition to one upon which he was a violent aggressor; for he said, “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American:” and his inflammable corruption bursting into horrid fire, he “breathed out threatenings and slaughter;” calling them, “Rascals — Robbers — Pirates;” and exclaiming, he’d “burn and destroy them.” Miss Seward, looking to him with mild but steady astonishment, said, “Sir, this is an instance that we are always most violent against those whom he have injured.” — He was irritated still more by this delicate and keen reproach; and roared out another tremendous volley which one might fancy could be heard across the Atlantick.

I don’t remember just what caused this hatred, if it has any explanation at all. From this safe distance in time I can be amused at this moment of irrationality from so rational a man, but I’m still extremely grateful I wasn’t there to witness it. Boswell describes trying his best to calm Johnson down and divert him with some other, safer topic; in fact, he fairly regularly needs to do this. Johnson sometimes seems like a man who needed a little managing.

But the extent of their regard for each other comes through very clearly. Boswell is always praising Johnson to the skies and worrying that Johnson is angry with him, and Johnson clearly loves Boswell in return and tries to reassure him, although somewhat impatiently. This is Johnson speaking:

Nay, Sir, you are more likely to quarrel with me, than I with you. My regard for you is greater almost than I have words to express; but I do not chuse to be always repeating it; write it down in the first leaf of your pocketbook, and never doubt of it again.

And here is Boswell’s justification for recording many little details of Johnson’s life:

I cannot allow any fragment whatever that floats in my memory concerning the great subject of this work to be lost. Though a small particular may appear trifling to some, it will be relished by others; while every little spark adds something to the general blaze: and to please the true, candid, warm admirers of Johnson, and in any degree increase the splendour of his reputation, I bid defiance to the shafts of ridicule, or even of malignity. Showers of them have been discharged at my “Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides;” yet it still sails unhurt along the stream of time, and as an attendant upon Johnson, “Pursues the triumph, and partakes the gale.”

And in another letter Boswell says this:

I vow to thee an eternal attachment. It shall be my study to do what I can to render your life happy; and if you die before me, I shall endeavour to do honour to your memory; and, elevated by the remembrance of you, persist in noble piety.

What a friendship! I am enjoying reading all the details about Johnson’s life, but I’m enjoying even more reading this record of affection.

I’ve found enough essays I’ve enjoyed in The Best American Essays 2006 to keep me going, although I’ve had lots of grave doubts about the overall quality of the book. My ambivalence has continued with my latest essay “Why Write?” by Alan Shapiro. I found myself irritated with Shapiro’s silly sense of humor through the beginning of the essay, until I got to one extraordinary page that redeemed the whole thing for me.

Maybe something is wrong with my sense of humor, but I found these opening sentences intensely irritating:

Some years ago, I went to a child psychologist. (If Henny Youngman had written this opening sentence, he would have added: “The kid didn’t do a thing for me.” But I digress.)

Anyway, the essay begins with the story of how Shapiro gets diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder as an adult, having been tested when one of his children was diagnosed, after which the doctor tells him that his writing can be seen as a “compensatory behavior” for his disability. In response, Shapiro says something genuinely funny:

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “I write books in order to make up for my inability to remember the names of the people I meet at a party, or because I come home from the grocery store with a red pepper instead of a tomato?”

He goes on from there to consider the various reasons he’s sought a career in writing, since, after all, the money’s no good and fame is so fleeting. After some irritatingly silly joking, Shapiro gets to a serious answer to his question about why he writes, by way of Elizabeth Bishop, and along the way he addresses the question of why we read (it’s a long passage, but a great one):

Bishop writes that what we want from great art is the same thing necessary for its creation, and that is a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. We write, Bishop implies, for the same reason we read or look at paintings or listen to music: for the total immersion of the experience, the narrowing and intensification of focus to the right here, right now, the deep joy of bringing the entire soul to bear upon a single act of concentration. It is self-forgetful even if you are writing about the self, because you yourself have disappeared into the pleasure of making; your identity — the incessant, transient, noisy New York Stock Exchange of desires and commitments, ambitions, hopes, hates, appetites, and interests — has been obliterated by the rapture of complete attentiveness. In that extended moment, opposites cohere: the mind feels and the heart thinks, and receptivity’s a form of fierce activity. Quotidian distinctions between mind and body, self and other, space and time, dissolve.

Now as far as writing goes, this passage doesn’t ring true to me, as I can’t really remember ever feeling that absorbed in my writing; or, if I have felt that way, it’s not something that has “stuck,” something I need to return to again and again. This is probably why I tend not to think of myself as “a writer,” although I do a decent amount of it. Shapiro speculates that writers may have a reputation for suffering from melancholy, not because good writing requires sadness and depression, but because after feeling the absorption and attentiveness of writing, Bishop’s “perfectly useless concentration,” their non-writing lives seem lacking and they feel haunted until they can return to that trance-like state.

This passage does ring true to me when I think about reading, however; and I like how Bishop describes both writing and reading as activities that can create this happy absorption. Bishop portrays reading or viewing a work of art as a creative act in itself and her formulation excludes nobody; everybody can interact with art and be self-forgetful for a while.

What really made me happy about this part of the essay, however, were the next lines:

Athletes know all about this nearly hallucinatory state. They call it being in the zone. They feel simultaneously out of body and at one with the body.

Yes, I know exactly what he’s talking about. Sometimes when I’m riding or hiking I feel like a truly whole human being, no separation between my mind and my body. I’m not thinking about what I’m doing; I’m just doing it. I’m just a being walking or riding a bike, wholly focused on the present moment.

And then, to add to all this goodness, Shapiro writes a passage that dovetails beautifully with Litlove’s recent post on the symbolic and the semiotic, the symbolic being straightforward language and the semiotic being the musical, poetic quality of language. Shapiro talks about how infants experience a form of the concentration he has been describing, expressing it through their babbling babytalk. Of his children as infants he says,

He or she would be talking, but the meaning of the words were indistinguishable from the sensation of the sound, and the sound was part and parcel of the mouth that made the sound, of the hands and fingers that the mouth was sucking as it sang.

In other words, the symbolic and the semiotic are one and the same.  And from there, he moves to how we as adults continually seek out this lost relationship to language, the lost connection of the symbolic and the semiotic:

No matter how sophisticated our poems may be, or how deadly serious they are about eradicating or exposing the terrible injustices around us, I still think that we are trying — by means of words, of consciousness — to reawaken that pre-verbal joy, to repossess, reinhabit what someone else has called the seriousness of a child at play. Bishop says this concentration’s useless because it is its own reward, the mysterious joy of it. It is singing for the sake of singing.

Isn’t it beautiful how this all comes together? Writing and reading, and walking and riding for that matter, are ways of finding unity and wholeness — of the body and the mind, of the adult self with the child self. The close of Litlove’s post brings it together wonderfully:

Great writers know how to tap into and express the semiotic in their works, and so what they say speaks to us at a profound level. I like to think of this layer of other meaning, beyond and within communication, as the defining characteristic of the literary. And our ability, from birth, to hear and express it, to tap into it and to play with it, is what makes us all fundamentally literary creatures, in a basic instinctual way.

I can’t let the week end, I think, without giving you some more of the wisdom of Johnson (I warned you a while ago you’d be reading a lot of him, if you stuck around here …). I’ve noticed just how often the subject of melancholy comes up in The Life; Johnson struggled with it frequently and wrote often about how to deal with it. Here is what he writes in a letter to Boswell after Boswell has complained that “his mind has been somewhat dark this summer”:

I am returned from the annual ramble into the middle counties … I was glad to go abroad, and, perhaps, glad to come home; which is, in other words, I was, I am afraid, weary of being at home, and weary of being abroad. Is not this the state of life? But, if we confess this weariness, let us not lament it; for all the wise and all the good say, that we may cure it.

For the black fumes which rise in your mind, I can prescribe nothing but that you disperse them by honest business or innocent pleasure, and by reading, sometimes easy and sometimes serious. Change of place is useful…

I know the feeling of being weary at home and weary abroad, and going back and forth and back and forth — or of being weary of busyness and weary of leisure (my school year and my summer) and going back and forth and back and forth — but what else is there to do but go back and forth and back and forth and be grateful that a change comes around every once in a while? When I think of my own state of mind, I realize that the thing I’m afraid of is not change so much as things staying always the same. It’s good to have a regular change of place or change of pace to look forward to. It’s keeping in mind that change will soon happen and therefore I ought to be content with what I have now that’s hard.

There is also this passage, a little further on:

Talking of constitutional melancholy, he observed, “A man so afflicted, Sir, must divert distressing thoughts, and not combat with them.” Boswell. “May not he think them down, Sir?” Johnson. “No, Sir. To attempt to think them down is madness. He should have a lamp constantly burning in his bed chamber during the night, and if wakefully disturbed, take a book, and read, and compose himself to rest. To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it maybe attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.” Boswell. “Should not he provide amusements for himself? Would it not, for instance, be right for him to take a course of chymistry?” Johnson. “Let him take a course of chymistry, or a course of rope-dancing, or a course of any thing to which he is inclined at the time. Let him contrive to have as many retreats for his mind as he can, as many things to which it can fly from itself.”

Now for serious depression, I don’t think this advice would do a lot of good, but it strikes me as quite right for milder cases of melancholy — it seems to me impossible to “think down” sad thoughts, but diversion more often does the trick. Johnson and Boswell talk about diversions of mind — new things to read and study — and those are wonderful, but if I want to fly from my own mind, there’s little better than doing something with my body, a walk or a ride, maybe. The worst thing is to sit there and stew.

And here’s a small touch of Boswell’s humor:

On Wednesday, April 3, in the morning I found him very busy putting his books in order, and as they were generally very old ones, clouds of dust were flying around him. He had on a pair of large gloves such as hedgers use. His present appearance put me in mind of my uncle, Dr. Boswell’s description of him, “A robust genius, born to grapple with whole libraries.”