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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

I should have thought

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , , , on 3 December 2025| Leave a Comment »

Many years ago, when I was still an undergraduate, I traveled from eastern Iowa to the North of England to study English literature at the University of Leeds, a so-called “redbrick” university in West Yorkshire. There I lived for a year in a village on the outskirts of that soot-laden city in a hall of residence built in 1865 from Yorkshire gritstone. Most of my fellow residents were English, but others hailed from such faraway countries as Ghana, South Africa, Iceland, and Rhodesia.

Sometimes in the evenings I would walk down the hall to have a chat with my friend Asmundur (“Asi”) Jonsson, a husky, deep-voiced, older student from Keflavik. Asi smoked an ornate Meerschaum pipe. Sometimes, after I’d offered up a fresh opinion—or, no less likely, a callow misperception—he would sit back in his chair and patiently puff on his pipe as he formulated his response. “I should have thought,” he would finally say, and proceed to address whatever I’d said. More than once, his views differed from mine. I have long since forgotten our opinions, but I recall his opening phrase as vividly as I do the sweet fragrance of his tobacco. I had never heard it before and have rarely heard it since.

“I should have thought” is a verbal phrase cast in what grammarians call the conditional past tense. It places the action, in this case having a thought, in a time prior to the present, before a subsequent event has occurred. In this instance, the subsequent event is the voicing of a different or contrary opinion. For example, were Geoffrey to observe that “I’ve heard that it’s better to brush your teeth first, then floss afterward,” Nigel might reply, “I should have thought it was the other way around.” As this innocuous exchange illustrates, “I should have thought” provides a vehicle for polite disagreement. But even when engaged in more charged conversations, especially those concerning politics and religion, this now rare usage can serve to open the conversational space, establish an appropriate distance between conversationalists, and set a distinctive tone.

In contemporary American life, we have grown accustomed to living in cramped conversational spaces, where there is often little room for a variety of perspectives or a divergence of views. If one participant says something the other finds erroneous, ill-informed, or otherwise objectionable, the conversation may soon be abruptly over. Or worse, it might escalate into an angry confrontation.

By contrast, “I should have thought” expands the conversational arena to accommodate multiple, differing, and opposing views. And it opens the possibility of a “both/and” rather than a “right/wrong” or “either/or” resolution. Even views that stood in polar opposition at the beginning of the conversation may, by its end, prove compatible and even complementary.

By the same token, “I should have thought” widens the emotional distance between the participants in a conversation. It establishes an appropriate space between them. As the Zen teacher Norman Fischer has observed, in any relationship between two people, two components are ever present: their connection and their essential solitude. The two participants may be intimately connected by such bonds as family, friendship, country, or affiliation. At the same time, each has a private inner life that the other has no way of knowing. In the Japanese martial arts, an appropriate combative distance (known as ma-ai) is strictly maintained. Analogously, an appropriate distance in conversation honors both the speakers’ interconnection and their respective solitudes. And, as Fischer puts it, it also creates “[a] space charged with openness, silence, and mystery.”

And that is not all. In its very formality, “I should have thought” forges a link between contemporary usage, which tends to be casual and all too often careless, and the long history of the English language. Asi’s first language was Icelandic. He learned English in a school, where the old rule regarding “should” rather than “would” was still taught and enforced. According to that rule, “should” must be used when speaking in the first person. However archaic, Asi’s locution conjured a linguistic universe in which the observance of such fine distinctions imparted precision to ordinary speech. By extension, it also heightened the beauty and dignity of a conversation.

Today, no one I know would say “I should have thought,” except perhaps ironically or in a role-playing context. The phrase would come across as a pretentious affectation. But might there not be other ways by which the space, distance, and tone once created by that turn of phrase could be re-imagined, if only as a welcome alternative to the rude interruptions and abrupt dismissals, the in-your-face confrontations, and the unnecessary misunderstandings that afflict contemporary American discourse? I should have thought so.

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A chair in snow

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , , , , on 24 February 2025| 1 Comment »

One afternoon not long ago, as I was walking in a local gym, I watched a student shooting hoops in an unusual way. On the fingertips of his right hand, he held a basketball. In the palm of his left, he held a cell phone. After taking a single-handed shot, and before the ball had even hit the backboard, he turned his attention to his cell phone. Repeated over and over, his toggling had a rhythm of its own. But it also divided his attention, which could not have been good for his game. And, unwittingly, he was repeatedly flouting a cardinal principle of Zen practice.

In Japanese Zen, that principle is known as ichigyo zammai, which means “doing one thing at a time.” As Zen masters ancient and modern have often reminded us, by giving full attention to whatever we might be doing we not only develop our powers of concentration. We also cultivate the grounded, peaceful state of samadhi: an equanimous, non-reactive, and natural alignment with the flow of reality. “Combust yourself entirely,” a familiar Zen saying, encapsulates this root tenet of the practice.

In classical Japanese poetry, the practice of ichigyo zammai undergirds that most familiar of Japanese poetic forms, the haiku:

A solitary

crow on a bare branch—

autumn evening.

— Basho

In this miniature word-painting, the duality of subject and object dissolves in the meeting of poet and crow. Rather than utilize the crow as a metaphor or symbol, Basho amplifies the bird’s singular presence. What might have been an act of ego-centered observation becomes a moment of life-centered, selfless contemplation.

In Western poetry, which tends to regard encounters with the natural world as occasions for moral, metaphysical, or psychological reflection (“I wandered lonely as a cloud”), there is no exact equivalent of the Japanese haiku. But a parallel may be seen in a sub-genre of lyric poetry known in German as the dinggedicht and in English as the “thing-poem.” As those labels suggest, poems of this kind concentrate on a single thing. And often the poet establishes, in Martin Buber’s famous formulation, an “I-Thou” rather than an “I-It” relationship with the object at hand.

In Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther,” for example, the narrator’s consciousness merges with that of a panther confined to its cage. In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish,” the narrator’s sporting, anthrocentric frame of mind morphs into one of reverence and awe. And in the poems of such Zen-trained American poets as Gary Snyder, W.S. Merwin, and Jane Hirshfield, the narrators typically treat their objects of attention with deep respect and disinterested regard.

Such is the case in Hirshfield’s poem “A Chair in Snow,” where the narrator contemplates a snow-covered chair, focusing on the quiddity, or “whatness,” of her subject. After observing that a chair covered with snow ought to be like any other object “whited / & rounded,” she distinguishes it from all other snow-covered objects primarily by virtue of its function:

more than a bed

more than a hat or house

 a chair is shaped for just one thing

 

 to hold

 a soul its quick and few bendable

 hours

 

 perhaps a king

 

 not to hold snow

 not to hold flowers

For Hirshfield, there is something melancholy in this scene. “[A] chair in snow,” she notes, “is always sad.” Presumably, this sadness stems from the chair being isolated and out of place in an alien environment. But the chair’s stark displacement is also an essential component of its singularity.

As a young woman, Jane Hirshfield spent eight years in Zen training, first at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California’s Ventana Wilderness and subsequently at the San Francisco Zen Center and Green Gulch Farm. In 1979 she received lay ordination in Soto Zen. Reflecting on those early, intensive experiences, Hirshfield, now in her seventies, has remarked that they have influenced her life and work ever since. In its concentration, its intimacy with its subject, and its spirit of inquiry, “A Chair in Snow” vividly confirms that claim.

Beyond that, Hirshfield’s poem represents a quality of sustained, one-pointed attention that is growing increasingly rare in our culture, where millions of people experience their smart phones as vital appendages and frequent scrolling-and-swiping as a necessary, if not obsessive, activity. As Chris Hayes, in his book The Siren’s Call (Penguin, 2025), has noted, attention has become a commodity, which the titans of social media compete to manipulate and otherwise control. And the fragmentation of attention is fast becoming the norm.

To those pernicious social trends, the daily practice of ichigyo zammai offers a potent antidote. By their very nature, the twin disciplines of doing one thing and concentrating on one object at a time settle the restless mind and calm the anxious heart. And for those young people I have observed jaywalking across busy streets, their heads bowed and their eyes fixed on their cell phones, this venerable practice might prove as life-preserving as it is timely.

—

To read the full text of “A Chair in Snow,” see

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56174/a-chair-in-snow.  

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Menmitsu and the art of writing

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , on 3 April 2024| 1 Comment »

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If we wish a houseplant to flourish, we provide it with water, nutrients, and light. We set it near a window. But should we wish the same for ourselves, for those we love, and for humanity in general, what are the counterparts of those necessary conditions? What practices, activities, and qualities of mind contribute to human flourishing?

In his timely new book The House We Live In: Virtue, Wisdom, and Pluralism, an ambitious endeavor to forge a pragmatic, “flourishing-based” ethic for our pluralistic, multicultural society, the Zen priest and psychologist Seth Zuihō Segall identifies multiple “domains of flourishing.” These include “relationships,” “accomplishment, “aesthetics,” social acceptance, “meaning,” and “whole-heartedness.” Exploring the last of those “domains,” Segall invokes a practice from the Soto Zen tradition.

Known as menmitsu-no-kafu and translated by Segall as “whole-heartedness,” this practice might most simply be characterized as giving full attention to whatever one is doing, be it driving, chopping vegetables, or listening to a friend. But, as Segall explains, the practice also entails “exquisite, careful, considerate, intimate, warm-hearted, continuous attention to detail.” And, in contrast to those meditative practices prescribed for self-pacification and self-improvement, menmitsu is directed outward rather than inward: toward the benefit of others rather than oneself.

Traditionally, menmitsu is taught by Soto Zen instructors and practiced within the confines of a temple or Zen center. There, ordained monastics and committed Zen students learn to embody menmitsu as they engage in their everyday activities: “donning their robes, sweeping the walkways, refolding their bowing cloths, assembling and disassembling their eating bowls, lighting incense, and so on.” All are to be done with “exacting, meticulous attentiveness.”

 As Segall readily concedes, not all of us are “called to the same degree of attentiveness” or prepared to practice menmitsu in every aspect of our lives. At the same time, Segall suggests, “we could do well to take a page” from this integral dimension of Zen practice. Practiced in excess, menmitsu can look like OCD and feel like hypervigilance—and, if one is married, drive one’s spouse to distraction. But, practiced thoughtfully and with moderation, menmitsu can indeed enhance our lives and those of others around us.

For my own part, I have found it most productive to apply the principle of menmitsu primarily to those daily activities I most value and enjoy, including formal Zen meditation; studying and practicing the classical guitar; reading and re-reading great literary works; cooking; conversing with friends and family; and, most centrally, the craft and art of writing, which can embody menmitsu in at least three ways.

To begin with, the practice of literary menmitsu can begin with the choice to write with a pen or pencil rather than a keyboard. However archaic handwriting has become in the age of the iPad, writing by hand is not only a sensuous, intimate way of “getting the better of words,” as T.S. Eliot once put it. Handwriting also promotes precision of diction and meticulous attention to detail. “Writing maketh the exact man,” wrote Francis Bacon. And if that maxim is true of writing in general, it is even more so with respect to writing, slowly and deliberately, by hand. For decades, I required students in my literature courses to write daily précis and responses in their own hands on 4 x 6” index cards, as a way of precisely comprehending the poems and stories they were reading and forming their own interpretations. I was seldom disappointed.

Second, I have found that scrupulous observance of the time-honored conventions of English grammar, rhetoric, and usage sorts well with the practice of menmitsu. Evolved over many centuries and exemplified by such masters of English prose as Jonathan Swift, George Orwell, and Scott Russell Sanders, those conventions promote clarity, concision, eloquence, and force. Beyond the basic “rules” taught in English 101—the avoidance of dangling modifiers, comma splices, faulty parallelisms, and the like—literary menmitsu can be practiced by observing such fine points of usage as the difference between “anxious” and “eager” and such grammatical details as the use of the possessive pronoun before a gerund (“his running for president” rather than “him running for president”). Fussy as such distinctions may first appear, collectively they can make the difference between lucid, accessible prose and an indigestible verbal paella.

 Last and most important, literary menmitsu can be practiced by keeping one’s intended reader uppermost in mind. If I aspire to be “careful,” “considerate,” and “warm-hearted” when composing a poem or letter or essay, I can do my readers a favor by recalling the dictum attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “Easy writing makes damned hard reading.” Writing well, in my experience, is an exacting labor, not only of love but also of respect for the majesty, beauty, and ancestry of the English language and the sensibilities of one’s potential readers. A mode of “flourishing” rich in discovery, reach, and invention, the practice of literary art can also be an expression of compassion and a concrete, lasting embodiment of menmitsu.

Seth Zuiho Segall, The House We Live In: Virtue, Wisdom, and Pluralism (Equinox 2023), 102.

Photo: Aaron Burden

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And yet, and yet

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , on 20 March 2024| 9 Comments »

ISSA 2

In 1973, the writer and Zen practitioner Peter Matthiessen and the field biologist George Schaller undertook an expedition to the High Himalayas in hopes of sighting the elusive snow leopard. Before departing for the Tibetan Plateau, Matthiessen consulted with his Zen teacher, Eido Shimano Roshi, at Dai Bosatsu Zendo. Drawing upon a fundamental Zen teaching, Eido Roshi advised his student to “expect nothing.” By adopting that attitude, Matthiessen would enable himself to be open and attentive to whatever he encountered. Rather than regard his expedition as a means to an end, he might treat the experience as an end in itself.

Eido Roshi’s advice may well have been sound, given Matthiessen’s slim chances of sighting so rare a creature as the snow leopard. As a guideline for living, however, “expect nothing” might best be viewed as a wise maxim to bear in mind rather than a practical motto to live by. We human beings, it’s fair to say, are hardwired not only to expect but also to hope for and fear specific outcomes. Should we attempt to banish our expectations, we are more than likely to fail. As a realistic alternative, however, we can resolve to take note of our expectations as they arise, acknowledging both their presence and their largely speculative nature. And we can endeavor to remain cognizant, moment by moment, of the ongoing tension between the time-honored wisdom of Zen and the recalcitrant realities of human nature.

Nowhere is that tension more concisely expressed than in this haiku by the Japanese poet and Buddhist priest Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828):

             tsuyu no yo wa

             tsuyu no yo nagara

             sari nagara

                        –

            The world of dew

            is only the world of dew –

            and yet, and yet

The first two lines of this haiku allude to a central tenet of the Buddhist tradition, articulated in these verses from the Diamond Sutra:

            Think in this way of all this fleeting world:

            As a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,

            A dewdrop, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,

            A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

Through a concentration of metaphors, these verses remind us that all conditioned things are subject to change. All are impermanent. What we may conventionally view as solid and lasting is no more permanent than morning dew. The image of a “world of dew” evokes this foundational premise of the tradition in which the poet-priest Issa was trained.

“The world of dew” also reflects a cardinal principle of Japanese art and poetry.  According to this principle, known as mono no aware, the transience of the things of this world is both a locus of their pathos and a source of their beauty, whether those transient things be cherry blossoms, bubbles in a stream, or our own brief existence on this planet. Beautiful, ephemeral things are moving and beautiful because they are transient. A visual artist as well as a poet, Issa was steeped in Japanese cultural traditions, and as his haiku demonstrates, his aesthetic was deeply aligned with the convention of mono no aware.

But Issa was also a husband and father who had experienced profound losses in his life, including the deaths of his first wife, several of his children, and, shortly before writing the present haiku, the loss of his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to smallpox. Introducing his haiku in his travel journal The Springtime of My Life, he recounts that devastating experience:

Her mother clutched her cold body and wailed. I knew her heartbreak but also knew that tears were useless, that water under the bridge never returns, that scattered flowers are gone forever. And yet nothing I could do would cut the bonds of human love.

In popular iconography, Japanese Zen is sometimes viewed as a meditative version of samurai culture: a practice marked by “detachment” and the stoic repression of feeling. Contrary to that popular conception, authentic Buddhist practice—and the Zen-based practice of haiku—foster direct engagement with external realities, particularly the realities of impermanence and death. Rather than turn away, practitioners are admonished to make those realities objects of contemplation. At the same time, the practice also encourages continuous awareness of (and non-attachment to) one’s changing moods and feelings, however pleasant or painful they may be.

Hence the last line of Issa’s haiku. Occurring just after the “turning” characteristic of the haiku form, the repeated phrase “and yet” acknowledges the emotional dimension of his present experience: the upwelling of grief triggered by the death of a child. And though it leaves much unsaid, this repeated phrase leaves little doubt as to its meaning.

“The deepest feeling,” wrote the American poet Marianne Moore, “always shows itself in silence; / not in silence but restraint.” As silent and restrained as a poem can be, Issa’s haiku is all the more piercing for its reticence and all the more affecting for its restraint. If you would live wisely, it seems to say, expect nothing. And yet, and yet.

    —–

Image: Kobayashi Issa

Her mother clutched her body: Sam Hamill & J.P. Seaton, The Poetry of Zen (Shambhala, 2004), 172-3.

Marianne Moore,  “Silence,” in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (Macmillan, 1972), 91.

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