Rage Before Peace

Washington Square Park, NYC

As I’m writing this, there have been twelve straight nights of protests ignited by the murder of George Floyd (plus a few centuries of slavery, torture, racism, disenfranchisement, hatred). The collective pain and suffering has been so acute that there has been an enormous, and necessary, receding of everything else. The brokenness of seemingly every system has become plain to most people (at least I hope this is so; it’s likely arguable), except the most recalcitrant, racist and unseeing. The video of George Floyd is a vortex, a portal into untold stories of oppression and violence; I wept when I saw it. Other images have been on replay in my mind, including the thuds of police batons on protesters’ bodies, humans against humans, a 75-year-old activist lying on a sidewalk as blood pools from his ear, the bizarre footage of Trump with the upside-down bible in front of St. John’s church; this last image is remarkable to me for how surprising I found it, in spite of how in keeping it is with this president’s cartoonish rhetorical tendencies. I don’t know how I can still be surprised, but there it is (the problem of calling him cartoonish, however, is that it elides just how malevolent and destructive he is; the effect of his words and actions has reached the deepest level, while “cartoon” keeps him only on the surface).

We now find ourselves in a world so inflamed that we are in a literal portrait of hell; except that we were always here. Ages and ages this has been curdling and roiling just under the surface, held by a vastly racist network of systems on one side and something (wrongly) called politeness on the other. Say nothing, look the other way, don’t ruffle feathers, keep quiet in your corner. Now there is a gaping rent in the entire fabric through which all the due rage, suffering and unhappiness—the sprawling and intricate inequality—is escaping, no longer willing to be held under.

This cataclysm was perhaps inevitable; now it certainly seems necessary, if we’re ever to forge something better (though there are plenty of people, rightly cynical, who feel that better will never come). The collective howl is so extraordinary, so vociferous and pain-filled that there is something symphonic about it. A raging, thumping, bombastic series of cries and protestations that is coming in tune with itself. The process has been volatile, but what else is there? For the society that has been so dead asleep, so gleeful in its hierarchies or seemingly unaware of them, the alarm bell is now sounding without the option of a snooze setting.

The denial of anger runs deep. So, too, the denial of truth. What has changed everything is the simple and ubiquitous cell phone video—video taken by people with the courage to record. A story of a man held down by his neck for eight minutes until he died, right there on a public street, is no longer just a story when there is live footage of it. And not just still-photography, either, but the animated approach of death, Floyd’s voice as he said he couldn’t breathe, someone telling him to get up as if he wasn’t pinned to the ground by a terrible knee. Somehow story can be denied, but this is harder to do with moving images and actual voices (I listened last night, however, to a professor of criminal justice, who was once also a police officer, talk about how jurors can watch a video that clearly shows a murder by police and still come away saying it wasn’t murder). Similarly, the 75-year-old man who was shoved to the ground was originally described as having “tripped and fallen” until the video showed otherwise. As much as we can rail against the sometimes overwhelming nature of technology and its intrusions, it is people brave enough to use that technology who have unveiled what has always been in front of us and made our current moment possible.

And here’s the thing of this current moment: we’re suspended in it, carried in a stream so powerful that it will hopefully finally force people to let go, of old ideas, old habits of thinking, old biases, and embrace something else (each other? this is too much of a leap and simplistic maybe). Which reminds me that this is all unfolding when we’re in our separations and isolations, in our masks, and yet there are now millions of people, shoulder to shoulder, making a demand for change. And change happens whether or not we orchestrate it—it’s an energy and inevitable force of its own; now there is an opportunity for all of society, every facet, to be aligned with it.

What I'm Reading

I do this: I read multiple books at one time, and I think I always have, or since university at least (and maybe that’s the genesis—reading various textbooks at once). I like the sense of freedom, and juxtaposition, how the books speak to each other, in a way, though it has to be said that in this case, each one is very distinct. It’s possible, too, that COVID is influencing my reading—well, I’m sure it is—or at the very least it forms a background against which the tone of each book is highlighted (for instance, I very specifically turned to Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning last week). Since the shut-down, I don’t actually have more time for reading, as the level of care-giving has risen, though it seems imperative, more than ever, to make the time. My initial restlessness and lack of concentration (or rather the concentration on many other things that were deeply important) has begun to be replaced by a desire to think, read and write. So this is my current (not quite finished) reading rotation.

Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity is a fascinating look at death practices around the globe, and in particular the corporeal aspects, as in what gets done with the body after someone has died (which also leads to the provoking question, in a few of the cultures she examines: does the body left behind in some way have life? I found this very interesting and unexpected, that the question of an afterlife in certain regions involves keeping the physical body in a kind of stasis, protected as much as possible from decay).

I found a used copy of Lewis Hyde’s classic The Gift a while back, long before COVID, and I’m utterly surprised by it, also. For those of you who’ve read it, you already know it’s a book about creativity, but also something more; it is an entirely unusual investigation of creativity. The first part of The Gift is a scholarly examination of gift practices, using the lens of folk and fairy tales, indigenous histories, and mythologies, to illuminate not simply the process of gift-giving or the why, but the energy and mechanics that enliven what passes from one person to another. He uncovers what is almost a set of rules for that energy, or if not rules exactly, tendencies. Hyde is setting up the reader to then understand creativity, which functions as a gift.

Claudia Casper’s The Mercy Journals is a bit of an echo of the times we’re in, as it’s set in a dystopian future (though the cause of the chaos and emotional isolations is environmental, rather than specifically viral). I’m enjoying it immensely (and there is a troubled character who is a contemporary dancer, who I can’t help but like). There is certainly something to be said for reading dystopian books during this particular moment in history.

I had started Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and somehow got pulled away from it. The good part of that, I suppose, is the re-discovery. In fact, it’s the sort of book to come back to and write about with some depth, which I think I will do. I loved her book Flights, which won the Booker International Prize (this is a prize for books in translation and each year the long-list is a bonanza of amazing, intelligent reading). Drive Your Plow was likewise nominated. It was published in Polish in 2009, and then translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2018. I discovered, too, that there is a film adaptation of the book (called Pokot), though it seems unavailable for streaming at the moment; hopefully that will change. At any rate, the novel, which is a murder mystery that doesn’t play to the tropes, has me thinking a lot about the experience of reading layered, meaningful, intensely thoughtful work and how to describe the mystery—not the functional one in the story—that seems to be in the spaces and margins. And how vital that experience of reading work like this seems. The writers I love, and this applies certainly to Tokarczuk, do a lot of combining and drawing on disparate fields of study and thought, and there is the combining, too, of concrete and more nebulous aspects (in this case, death is a literal and recurring event), the lived world and the dream world, or aspects of the real that verge on dreams or something archetypal or mythological in feel. In Drive Your Plow, Tokarczuk folds into the narrative not only the question of who is murdering hunters, but also feminism, animal rights, astrology, the poetry of William Blake and ageism, to name a few of the larger aspects.

I’ve also re-read Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, as many people are at the moment (among his wonderful observations of a time of terror, he touches on the psychology of not knowing when something will end, which speaks, in a small way, to our current situation) and Susan Sontag’s journal, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh (this is a great book to read in the small hours of the night if I happen to wake up, as her entries are already fragmented within a continuous flow of her ideas and the content isn’t the Holocaust or a dystopian world).

Anxiety in the Time of COVID

I ordered this Buddha months ago and didn’t imagine that it would make its arrival during a time when its box would have to sit in quarantine for a few days or that its presence would resonate so much.

I have an abiding interest in anxiety. I used to have anxiety disorder, and OCD as well, which began in early childhood (is there anxiety that doesn’t begin there, in some way?). I use the past tense not because I’m entirely convinced of it but because it doesn’t feel right if I use the present. I do still experience anxiety, mildly, but then more acutely, especially as of late, but it’s so radically different and mostly ephemeral that I consider the disorder part to be in the past (years of lifestyle and diet changes, plus heaps of meditation have been more effective than I can say). Regardless, I have a deep interest in the thinking mind, which is so often, for so many people, the anxious mind.

And this time, the one of COVID, is excellent for the study of anxiety; because wow. Every emotion, actually, seems heightened to the point of the surreal.

I can attest that each day here is a ferocious mix of being alive, gratitude, fear, sadness, anger, peacefulness, all of it on rotation. I saw the Instagram post of a friend who has a history of addiction and she talked about the full gamut of emotion, including swearing, picking fights with her partner, fear and anger, but also joyfulness and everything in between, how some of the feelings are reminiscent of the rawness of being newly sober.

Maybe a positive effect of this virus is that some of us are confronting, and possibly integrating, their shadow and the shadow side of our existence, what it is to be human. This seems to me sorely needed. As much as meditation has been so vital to me, and my teachers and fellow practitioners a lifeline, there is something about meditation communities as a whole (and this runs the spectrum from Buddhism to yoga to secular mindfulness practices) that gets in my craw a little, which is a misunderstanding of how we’re supposed to treat the stuff of our emotional lives. By “stuff” I just mean all the phenomena, whatever we experience, the full range. I notice sometimes an ingrained habit of rejecting and repressing what is negative, a denial especially of anger, but also anxiety, even as the teaching at the core of many Eastern philosophies is one of acceptance and integration. This is at work inside of Jungian theory, too, the need to acknowledge shadow content, the full “seeing” of both our light and dark selves (and by extension the light and dark sides of how we perceive the exterior world). But what I notice in meditators sometimes, and the western Buddhist community (and this is unavoidable, really, because everything contains its opposite), is a smoothing over of legitimate wrinkles and maybe even a vague competition to see who appears the most “together” and calm—the least wrinkled. No one wants to slip up and reveal the colourful, fiery array of experience underneath.

Perhaps a function of this virus (not that I’m claiming to know), now that we are all saturated in anxieties, whether they belong to us or to other people, is that it has become universally more difficult to ignore what is prickling or dark or molten. I wonder if there’s a prior belief at work that to acknowledge difficulty is to lack gratitude, but real gratitude includes all aspects. It’s perfectly okay to be in this situation and not feel joy. A fake smile doesn’t seem helpful to me. Maybe a better state to cultivate is something like peacefulness, though not at the expense of allowing the full emotional range, including all the feelings we find untenable, and chief among these are anger and fear. We have to acknowledge that these states exist in the first place, in order to let them go.

Oh, shame, too. This can seem to be a lot of work: untangling (which is really just witnessing) all those shame threads and allowing them to dissolve away. Many of us grew up in families and cultures steeped in shame; and we were taught to be deeply ashamed of well-earned anger and rage, as well as that background murmur of nameless anxiety that is the soundtrack in many human minds.

When I was ten years old I was placed in a hospital, in an oxygen tent, for three days, because I was having an anxiety attack. In rural Nova Scotia, at the the end of the seventies, there wasn’t much of an awareness of childhood anxiety disorder—anxiety was the very last conclusion the doctors came to. I wasn’t given any sort of treatment, just released from the hospital with the words to my mother, “Something scared her.” The only available response to that seemed to be distraction, and so I was taught to neglect unlikable feelings, hiding the anxiety away from myself rather than investigate it. Question it. I recall being asked what had scared me, but, of course, I couldn’t articulate what was going on. Anxiety is a nebulous territory, lacking edges and borders and sometimes even a name. It can be hard to see. Its root is often a field of experiences and impressions, not always a single event. Even a single traumatic event would fall against an already existing background of mental formations. So I couldn’t say what was going on, especially because I was only ten—how to account for that wordless, unshakable fear, the one that stole my breath and caused me to think unequivocally that I wasn’t getting enough oxygen? There is nothing more primal than that.

For people with anxiety, COVID is an especially potent enemy (though it’s not really an enemy, of course, just another life form doing its thing; maybe we should call it a teacher), because it’s not only invisible but can cause difficulty with breathing. The virus moves so stealthily and quickly that it has covered an entire globe. It travels by air literally—drifting on currents and boarding planes to cross oceans and jump security checkpoints. Its network has the vastly intricate pattern of our own blood vessels and neural pathways. We recognize it even if we can’t see it, we know its gregariousness and naked desire to spread. It appears to have our own predilection to be unsatisfied.

The thing about the emotional low points that many of us have been experiencing, or at least glimpsing, is that those of us who are sequestered with partners, children, relatives, roommates, etc. are having the experience of those emotions in front of other people. We are replete with witnesses; overrun with them, in fact. Which can feel rather raw, and further complicates the aspects of shame already present. Even asking for a figurative time-out reveals the need for it.

I attended sangha via Zoom the other night and it was amazing how well it worked. Meditating this way, seeing everyone in their own habitat, was incredibly effective and even joyful. But during the night, as with so many people right now, my dreams were vivid, difficult and seemed endless. When the sun rose and I finally got up, I felt better, and it strikes me that the relaxation of the night before served as a portal to an anxiety that needed to be witnessed. Pulled into the light. I clearly identified too much with the story of it, though, and wrestled, but eventually I was able to relinquish it and the need to control everything.

This is the background for so many of us: the need to arrange external events so they look more like something we would prefer or at least recognize. The practice then is one of letting go, over and over and over, each time the anxiety (and the shame about the anxiety) comes up. It occurs to me, also, that perhaps I was repressing the anxiety during the previous day because I wanted, frankly, to be alone with it.

Which brings me to something that has been tremendously helpful. I don’t know about you but I have rarely journaled so much in my life; I haven’t always ascribed to the use of journals—I’ve kept them on and off since age ten, but I’ve always had notebooks where I’ve used a looser format of drawings, diagrams, scribblings, notations, especially about books I’m writing. COVID-time, however, has given me a renewed sense of the usefulness of detailed journaling and, to sort of paraphrase Julia Cameron, signal one’s location to the universe.