Mindfulness and Art

 

The creative writing text from which I am currently teaching advises that anyone who aspires to be a writer must develop “mindfulness”: meaning they must always be alert to exactly what is happening around them, mentally recording every sight and sound.

I think this is exactly wrong. And depressing. Real writers are incapable of doing this. Real writers are usually incapable of earning a driver’s license, because they cannot pay attention to what is happening around them. They live in their imagination.

The author gives an example to demonstrate her point, a “flash” essay chronicling a writer’s morning on her balcony watching a neighbour watering her plants. Only mildly interesting, not worth the time to read it: my primary impression as a reader is of self-indulgence. This is someone who thinks a thing is of immense importance simply because it happens to her.

“Realism” in art is a blind alley. 

Shakespeare is partially to blame for this misunderstanding. In Hamlet, he refers to art as “holding the mirror up to nature.” People assume this is a mandate for “realism,” for describing things just as they appear to our physical senses. Isn’t that what nature is? The physical world?

But of course, we do not need a mirror to see nature in this sense. We can look at it directly. Were this the point of art, there would be no point to art. 

Shakespeare here, as is clear in context, means “human nature.” Art holds the mirror up to our souls. “The play’s the thing/ With which to catch the conscience of a king.” Art shows truth, not mundane sense perceptions. Art should be unlike everyday life. Art is the escape from that. Art also should not be “self-expression”; it is the escape from self. 

Art should be vivid, not “realistic.” 

Consider Kafka’s short story, “Metamorphosis.” Has he ever had the opportunity to carefully observe what it would feel like to be a giant bug and to have many small legs that are difficult to control? Or crawling on the ceiling? Yet it is intensely vivid; we can imagine being Gregor Samsa ourselves. That is vividness, not realism. A thing is vivid if it appeals to the imagination.

Consider too fairy tales—the most enduring and popular of all literature. They never give authentic-sounding sensory detail. Some modern authors have tried to rewrite them in realistic terms—and the results are unreadable. One does not want to hear Cinderella contemplating a hangnail, or searching the prince’s palace for a toilet.

Sometimes verisimilitude to a common actual sensory experience helps make a passage vivid; usually not. Sometimes precise physical description is a means to this end; usually not. Certainly art should not editorialize or comment on the side; it should be visual, it should speak in images, not ideas: but that is not the same as sense perception. “Image” is the preserve of the imagination, not the senses. Art speaks through symbol and example, not discursively.

This is all also a misunderstanding of the originally Buddhist concept of mindfulness. Western materialists always reverse the meaning. This Western “mindfulness” is really emptying the mind of all thoughts--mindlessness. Anyone who aspires to be an arhat must learn to shut out what is going on in front of their eyes, and see instead with the mind’s eye. That’s why you sit still with your eyes closed. You shut out sensation, including the sensation of breathing or any ambient sounds, in order to ponder your memories and your imaginings; what Buddhism calls the “storehouse consciousness.”

Perhaps it is best to illustrate as a poem:

Mindfulness

The rain pings like loose change on the Chivas Regal sign across the street
Like the climax of a spaghetti Western
Heard through a drive-in speaker.
I do not know the dog sleeping mindfully at my feet
The karmic pinball machine has thrown us together for this moment
For reasons beyond comprehension.
The confused yellow butterflies of August 
Are grounded by the mild turbulence.
They do not tumble after one another.
The dog body wakes, raises his head
And stares at their absence.

Smile or Die

"Mother told me to always smile."

You often hear the advice that you ought to have a positive attitude.

Advice to face the world with optimism is often, in small matters, no doubt good advice. We should meet anyone new with a smile, assuming their good intentions. To do otherwise is prejudice. But that is not the whole truth. Ronald Reagan used to say, “trust, but verify.” Former US Defense Secretary Mattis went further. “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody that you meet.”

This “positive attitude” business easily segues into the current postmodern idea that truth is subjective: talk of “narratives” and “my truth,” and the idea that you can create your own reality.
It goes further back than that, of course—“the power of positive thinking,” beloved by so many salesmen. “Think and grow rich.”

But being unrealistically optimistic is as harmful as being unrealistically pessimistic. The goal should not be optimism or pessimism, but realism.

An example from modern history: the Munich Agreement. Chamberlain was the determined optimist, and insisted on assuming good intentions.

Chamberlain’s approach was wildly popular, and Churchill’s was not. Churchill was dismissed as a warmonger.

This suggests that unrealistic optimism may be a more common human problem than unrealistic pessimism. People naturally WANT to be optimistic, and to believe good things will happen. Nobody WANTS to be pessimistic. And so this is the side on which we are more likely to err.

This is why we need to streetproof children, for example. The instinct is to be too trusting.

Other examples of unrealistic optimism leading to disaster can be easily found in history. The story of the Titanic is that same story. The story of Austria-Hungary starting the First World War by invading Serbia. The story of Japan bombing Pearl Harbor. Both were obviously over-optimistic about their own abilities. So was Germany in invading the USSR in WWII. Or Napoleon in invading Russia the previous century. So was the US in going in to Vietnam, or Afghanistan, or Iraq. Probably every economic collapse ever has been caused by a preceding period of unreasonable investor optimism.

Canadian history? Laurier promised to solve the Manitoba Schools question with “sunny ways.” Everybody bought it at the time. The actual result: no more French or Catholic schools in Manitoba.

Unrealistic optimism is a recurring theme in the Old Testament: a prophet appears and warns of disaster to come, unless the government’s direction changes. And he is ignored as an annoying pessimist. And disaster comes. You’d think we’d been told this often enough to have learned the lesson.

The same theme is in the Greek: Cassandra and Laocoon in the Iliad. Nobody wants to hear anything upsetting.

Unrealistic optimism would seem to be the greater human danger, not unrealistic pessimism. But the real danger is unrealism. Realism is the proper goal.

The notion that we can critically affect by our own attitude whether good or bad befalls us, also has the awful side effect of ending up in blaming the sufferer or victim whenever someone does encounter trouble. It must be their own fault; they had the wrong attitude. If a woman is raped, she must by her attitude have deserved it. And the Jews must have provoked Hitler somehow.

Pushed a little, believing that we can control our own destinies with the right attitude also amounts to assuming godlike powers.

Which is close to Eve’s fatal error—“you will become as Gods.” Or Lucifer’s.

I say not “smile,” but “pay attention.” Look, listen, discern, and decide. This, use an often misused Buddhist term, is the true “mindfulness.”