Anti-Mindfulness II - sitting around in my mental underwear.

The phrase in my title was my attempt to articulate a desire to find my tribe, which I still am searching for. I guess I need to elucidate further. The use of the word elucidate might help illuminate here. Most of the time, I have always been frustrated at what I perceive to be the imprecision of basic language and I am always searching for the perfect word to describe the concept I'm trying to convey in an effort to be as concise as possible. My best friend back in Ohio once described this as the ability to sum up some really really idiotic situation with a single word that always had him in stitches. But he seemed to be the only person who seemed to understand what I was trying to express most of the time. Most of the life I've felt misheard/misunderstood (a lot of that is tied to my relationship to my mother - which is going to remain outside the scope of this post -) and I've found myself feeling like I had to dumb down/simplify just about everything I've felt like saying most of my life. And the worst part was that when I felt the strongest emotions about a subject I often locked up completely.  

So I coined the phrase "wanting to be able to sit around in my mental underwear" to describe how I wanted to be in the company of people where I could say whatever I wanted and be fairly confident that I would be heard and understood. The reality is that I spent more time trying to find the best way to say something that I rarely actually got around to expressing my thoughts freely. 

An author who seemed to have this ability to express effectively a lot of his thoughts that were very similar to mine in terms of world view and emotional context was the late author Anthony Bourdain. I even plagiarized a quote of his to use as part of my Facebook intro:

"... my snark is never entirely genuine, nor is it completely irrelevant."

It's only occurred to me now that the snark I display is an expression of my emotion much more than it's a reflection of my intellect, which is fairly formidable if the results of certain test scores are accepted into evidence. (Now I have to take a moment to think about whether I've been more intent on expressing sympathy or empathy which threatens to take me WAY beyond the scope of this post but if I don't mention this here I'll likely forget.) But the original premise was to express my frustration at feeling unable to communicate the thoughts that were important to me at that moment.

I had a six year old violin student named Jason who reminded me of me at that age, he was also taking piano lessons as well computer coding classes and was clearly quite bright. His mom found him a challenge and noted the affinity that Jason had quickly developed for me so she asked me for some advice. I told her that he reminded me of me at that age, and to expect that he would really be excited about something, and he go on and on about something she'd not be able to comprehend, but the best way to respond to that would be to ask: "So you're really excited about this, huh? He would say ."Yeah!" and run off and be perfectly happy. She greeted me at the door the next week and immediately told me "You are a genius."

The point is that I've been able to perceive and understand some things at a level most people just don't seem to grasp. And I've spent a lot of my life trying to communicate not just the concepts but also the level of wonder that comes with such profundity. What I see now is that all these things were created - by a Creator - and it's not realistic to expect other parts of creation to understand or perceive the profundity - but the Creator will. And it follows that focusing on the profundity of the Creator is both natural and much more satisfying. 

So I'm now pondering on mindfulness being just one way of acknowledging both the Creator and His Creation, while anti-mindfulness is the denial of that Creator, and making something else the object of wonder and worship. 
 

Mindfulness - what is the opposite?

There's a new network TV series named The Irrational I decided to watch starting back in October. The main character is a psychologist who survives a terrorist act, a bombing of a church that left him with burns on over 60% of his body and scars on his face.  Given my fascination with the work of Kazuo Ishiguro it seems natural that I'm drawn to principles that are used in solving crimes in the series, particularly in that what we perceive and remember are actually quite unreliable in terms of what the reality is.

After only two episodes I found myself hoping that the show catches on. If the show does more than entertain, people might be prompted to review and reevaluate their own memories and experiences, which has become "truth" in our culture. And as people can acknowledge that their perceptions and memories have in fact always been colored by biases which are varied in origin, they will be prompted to seek a truth from outside of themselves.

My personal observations & memories are no less subjective than anyone else's so I need to examine and identify my own biases. For example, in this week's episode, they show the results of an experiment where subjects are instructed to observe in order to observe a specific question. The results are that because of fixating on identifying a specific fact, we typically completely ignore other things that occur.   I need to examine how often I'm looking just for the answer I want that I ignore answers that refute the agenda or answer other questions that need to be asked. 

My first instinct is to justify/defend; it's hard to stay in the moment. or as the character Charlie Crews (played by Damian Lewis) once said during an episode of Life:

"I wasn't in the moment.
If I'd stayed in the moment, if I'd stayed present I would have been OK but I didn't.

I was thinking about where we were going next. So I left the moment when I should have been completely in the moment which is when people usually leave the moment because the moment is just too much!

The moment is pretty much almost aways too much!

I was thinking about where we were going next."

It seems to me that the #1 enemy of mindfulness is probably the iPhone. Most people's eyes are glued to their phone 24/7, even when they're with a group of people. I've managed to resist the enemy by sticking to a flip phone. I display it proudly and tell people that I'm not going to be the guy who comes home from the beach with white marks across my chest resulting from staring at my iPhone the entire time.  This suggests that I was already aware of the inherent dangers of anti-mindfulness. 
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I started this post almost three months ago, and I've had some time to examine the concept of mindfulness. I haven't done much to practice mindfulness since then, in part because it seems to me that the real subject is what mindfulness seems to solve - and that mindfulness is not necessarily the only solution. It might be more accurate to suggest that anti-mindfulness has taken such a toll resulting in a level of stress that makes intentional mindfulness extremely difficult. 

I have no answers, yet it occurs to me that it might be to tied to appreciation of simplicity for simplicity's sake; maybe it's enough to enjoy something without feeling the need to justify/defend the emotional response. I remember a dinner night at the park during the pandemic, telling some of the people how I'd driven home after a strenuous day at work, enjoying the cool breeze with the windows, chewing on some ice, no one else on the road and the level of contentment I felt at the moment. I could see from the expressions on their faces that they were tracking the moment with me.  

As someone who appreciates cuisine, not to mention the mastery of cooking techniques, I'm somewhat bemused how some people collect restaurants like badges; they merely want to be able to say that they've eaten there even though they couldn't really identify what made that particular restaurant special. I'm *really* amused by folks who drop major coin to consume Wagyu burgers. Wagyu beef is special because of how marbled the fat is; grinding it to make a burger is like taking a piece of Venetian glass and shattering it to make a stained-glass window. But who's to say that I'm no less... frivolous by preferring to patronize "authentic" ethnic restaurants and being able to identify the unique characteristics of the eight major regional Chinese cuisines and making fun of Americanized places like Panda Inn?

Or being able to identify that like I did Saturday night that someone took a different harmonic route instead of a basic V-I from F to Bb by taking the F in the bass, sharping it to become 3 of D7 which started a V of V of V of V of V of V (D/G/C/F/Bb) chord sequence. There's a musical genius out there named Jacob Collier who IMO is destined to reshape the concept of jazz by himself because of his understanding not just of harmony but also of rhythm. Yet whenever he talks about what he does, he always does so from an emotional perspective. For example, to describe what's commonly referred to as an anticipation, Collier describes emotionally as the sense of wanting to come 'home'. 

A Pale View Of Hills

is the title of (Nobel Prize winner) Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel. I'm sure I've mentioned Ishiguro in a previous post and speculated on his success as a writer being a reflection of having to try and integrate world views with some mutually exclusive values as he was born in Japan but moved to Britain as a child. Having listened to some of his interviews, a constant theme in his works includes a conscious intent to illustrate a specific (generally undesirable) trait or combination of traits (one he typically can identify in himself - or in those around him) and intensify the impact of that trait in a central character. 

In A Pale View Of Hills, the main character is an older Japanese woman named Etsuko who married a British man she met in Japan after the war. She now lives in England and is visited by her daughter Niki shortly after the suicide of her elder daughter Keiko whose father was her first husband, a Japanese man named Jiro. The visit by the daughter prompts Etsuko to reminisce about her past, specifically about one summer involving an acquaintance she made after WWII. Through her reminiscing the reader can infer that Etsuko was born into an upper class cultured family and that she was being raised to be a violinist. Some tragedy befell the family resulting in Etsuko being raised by a family friend, perhaps a mentor, who was a well regarded intellectual/instructor before WWII. She married into the family and was pregnant with Keiko. In events not recalled, she was eventually widowed, ostensibly during WWII.

Her father-in-law (and presumably her own family) had held political views now denounced by the postwar culture, resulting in a considerable loss of prestige and standing in the community. It appears that the father-in-law, depicted as being an overbearing father to Etsuko's husband, never came to grips with this. After being widowed, Etsuko, in accordance with Japanese customs and traditions of the period, moved in with an uncle on her husband's side. This is conjecture as some of these details are actually ascribed to a remembered acquaintance named Sachiko who was also widowed with a daughter. Several motifs permeate Ishiguro's works, which include unreliable memories often exhibited through the use of what Ishiguro himself described as an ironic gap. This motif in particular can be inferred in Etsuko's recollections; we can't be sure if Sachiko is in fact Etsuko and Ishiguro himself remarked that his work was in some ways too subtle in his first novel. 

Ishiguro himself has described his first three novels A Pale View Of Hills, An Artist Of The Floating World, and what might be his best known work Remains Of The Day as having main characters being people of the generation that preceded his and how their lives were changed by WWII and how they dealt with the impact of those changes.  

If we have perceived Ishiguro's subtlety astutely, Etsuko was born into a cultured Japanese family of very good standing as it would have been regarded in pre-WWII Japan. She was a gifted violinist. The loss of her entire family led to her being adopted by a peer of her own father whom she still calls Ogata-san even after she has married his son. She gives up playing the violin. We see the behavior of giving lip service publicly to those in authority modeled in how her husband deals with his overbearing father. It would have been customary to have continued to live in the father-in-law's household after marriage, but her husband Jiro elected to move out. If we interpret Sachiko's words and thoughts to be those of Etsuko, Etsuko's future was "a few empty rooms" in the home of her uncle as a member of a disgraced family. Sachiko is depicted as a snob, driven to find a rich foreigner who will marry her and take her and her daughter away from Japan.

If we correctly attribute the thoughts, words, and actions of Sachiko and her daughter Mariko to Etsuko and Keiko, the needs of Keiko were made completely subsidiary to Etsuko's need to leave Japan. This is depicted rather indelibly in the account of how Sachiko drowns Mariko's adopted kittens while Mariko watches. Sachiko herself is remembered to have asked of Etsuko if she thinks that Sachiko is not aware of how terrible of a mother she is. This, other remembrances and interaction between Etsuko and Niki suggest that Etsuko is aware at some level that her words and behavior often contradict each other.     

Keiko never adapted to life in England. She eventually just stayed in her bedroom, venturing down to the kitchen daily to get her meals which she eats in her bedroom. She eventually moved out of the house and got a room in Manchester, where her body was eventually found after committing suicide. A brief moment of insight is suggested in Etsuko's description of the obituary, mentioning how Keiko was described merely as being 'fully Japanese' and that she had committed suicide, observing that Britons naturally associated the two ideas, perhaps because how kamikaze pilots were used in later stages of WWII. Etsuko is a sojourner in a strange land.   

Niki seems to exist to be a foil for Etsuko. She's observed her mother's behavior and is fully aware of the inconsistencies in Etsuko's words and behavior. She wants to be able to love and care for Etsuko, but finds it difficult to be around her. She's struggling to reconcile the 'sacrifices' Etsuko made to bring Keiko to England while Keiko was clearly unhappy being in England while trying to reassure her mother that these sacrifices were necessary. 

As sad as the account is of someone making extreme choices to achieve a goal of changing their circumstances, it's made even more tragic when Etsuko remarks that she is considering selling the house and moving into something smaller. This suggests that while Etsuko is constantly commenting on how much she enjoys her life, the reality is that it's still not enough, despite what it cost her to achieve it. 

I reread the work recently and was compelled to compose this, and I'm trying to figure out why. I now understand myself well enough to know that when a story/incident/account affects me in this way there's an emotional resonance, the source of which is still buried somewhere in my subconscious trying to work itself to the surface. 

There are some parallels; my sister was born in Hong Kong while I was born in the U.S. It occurs to me at this moment that Etsuko is a narcissist. My mother exhibited narcissistic behavior, though she clearly was never a snob. If anything, she was acutely aware of her own humble background and carried around a lot of shame which she bequeathed to me. I suppose that I see parallels in my own behavior and in those depicted in Niki; I was unhappy and completely unsure of what kind of goals to pursue except those that I believed were expected of me. I guess I need to let this to continue to percolate a while; I actually started this post at least three months ago. While starting another topic (which will follow shortly, hopefully) I saw that I'd never published this. So here goes.