One Time, One Meeting

Whatever else it has come to mean, at its root the word meditation means “mental cultivation.”* To meditate is to cultivate the mind. In contemporary practice, meditation is often a form of awareness training, in which we learn to calm the body, quiet the mind, and bring relaxed attention to the present moment. But Buddhist meditation is also a practice of cultivating certain qualities of mind and heart. At any given moment, the teachings tell us, we are cultivating one thing or another. What we are cultivating may be loving-kindness, compassion, or other “wholesome” states of mind. But it may also be such “unwholesome” states as fear, rage, and the impulse toward destruction.

I was reminded of these teachings while reading Townie,** an engrossing new memoir by the novelist Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog. Set in a decaying mill town in the Merrimack Valley, Townie depicts a social environment plagued by poverty, alcohol, drugs, violence, and rampant despair. Similar in tone and setting to the film The Fighter, the memoir tells a somewhat similar story: that of a bookish, sensitive lad, a “boy easily stomped,” who learns how to deal with the local thugs who beat up his brother, call his beautiful mother ugly names, and terrorize anyone weaker than themselves. Driven by his fear, his loathing of bullies, and his desire for connection with his absent father, the “weak little boy” transforms himself by lifting weights and learning how to fight, only to discover, in later years, the deep flaws in what he has wrought. Grounded in a dangerous and rather insular social reality, Townie is a tale of willful self-creation and eventual self-discovery. At its most reflective moments, it is also a mature meditation on social injustice, “all the cruelty down through the ages,” and the human suffering that engenders brutal acts of violence.

It is not uncommon for weaklings to take up weight-lifting, but in Dubus’s case the effort and the product far surpassed the norm. Shamed and humiliated by his tormentors, Dubus resolved to remake himself and become someone so formidable that “no one would even think of trying to hurt [him] or anyone [he] loved.”  Devoting himself to lifting and later to boxing, he became a defender of the weak and a scourge of the town’s drunken, violent louts. By the time he reached his majority, he had hospitalized two such men, one of whom had pushed his brother down a flight of stairs. He had taught himself how to “hurt even more the one you’ve already hurt.” And to bring himself to do such things, he had learned how to break what he calls the “invisible membrane” that surrounds another person’s body. To puncture that membrane, he explains, you had to “smash through your own first, your own compassion for another, your own humanity.”

For a time, Dubus’s self-creation served him well. It enabled him to survive in his culture. As he grew older, however, he came to realize that his rage and his impulse to violence were out of his control. He was becoming a “runaway train,” a person from whom he felt profoundly estranged. Concurrent with these realizations, he was also discovering his gifts as a writer. The eldest son of Andres Dubus II, the celebrated American short-story writer, Andres III found joy and release in his father’s vocation. By “escaping to the dream on the page,” he became more fully present in his own life. Through the contemplative act of writing he discovered ways to “see” rather than worry about being “seen,” to listen rather than talk, and to wait rather than attack. Having spent much of his life “making [himself] into a man who did not flee,” he learned to peel away the layers of conditioning he had so arduously acquired. In so doing, he discovered a new “membrane,” the “one between what we think and what we see, what we believe and what is.” And to penetrate that membrane, not by physical force but by the power of contemplative insight and the medium of the written word, became his life’s work. Having belatedly experienced the power of empathy and the practice of reconciliation, he also discovered ways to alleviate others’ suffering

Andres Dubus III’s story is as revealing as it is inspiring, not least because it verifies, in contemporary terms, the ancient teaching known as the Four Great Efforts. Simply put, the First and Second Efforts concern unwholesome mental qualities, such as fear and anger, which may or may not have arisen in our psyches. In either case, we give them no nourishment. The Third and Fourth Efforts concern wholesome qualities, such as compassion and equanimity, which have yet to arise or have already arisen. These qualities we develop through meditation. Underlying all four Efforts is the practice of mental cultivation, a process in which we can be consciously and actively involved. As Townie so vividly illustrates, we reap what we have sown. We become what we have chosen.