Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine
Eric Weiner (2011, Twelve)

    Eric Weiner’s memoir of his search for the Divine is a particularly light-hearted example of the genre. His search, itself, is serious: he puts himself on the line, both in the distance he travels, and in the occasionally comic experiences that result. In the end, I think he succeeds, because he winds up asking the right questions. It helps that he begins by admitting that he needs to ask them: “We Confusionists throw our arms skyward and shout: We have absolutely no idea what our religious views are. We’re not even sure we have any, but we’re open to the unexpected, and believe--no, hope--there is more to life than meets the eye.” Surely, that’s a promising starting point.

    Raised as a ‘gastronomical Jew’, and by profession a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, Weiner is a rationalist. But there’s always the question, “...whether reason alone is sufficient for a happy, fulfilled life. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever reasoned herself to a state of pure bliss.” He’s also a compulsive reader, well versed in the spiritual masters, but always at a safe remove: “...at some point I began to suspect that I was using these books, using concepts themselves, in order to avoid having an actual spiritual experience.”

    But as a middle-aged man with a young daughter, Weiner finds that the time is right to pursue the question in person. He chooses eight particular religious practices, across a broad spectrum, from Wicca to Catholicism; some ancient, some modern; honoring one God, many gods, or no gods at all. Unlike William James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience makes up a central piece of his research, he immerses himself: he whirls with the Sufi dervishes, cross-dresses with the Raëlians, and marches outside an abortion clinic with the Franciscan monks.

    Weiner discovers similar practices across the world, things like kneeling on the floor, going barefoot, and meditating by walking. He also discovers a series of remarkable guides and teachers, people as intense and questioning as himself, who have already stepped off a particular spiritual cliff. His guide to Tibetan Buddhism in Kathmandu, for instance, is a fellow called Wayne, who left the United States in 1975. “I wonder: Is Wayne the right teacher for me? He’s not exactly what I had in mind, guru-wise. I had envisioned a wizened lama with twinkly eyes who promised secret wisdom, not a ponytailed Jewish guy who speaks in riddles.” Just the right guru, in short, for Eric Weiner.

    Though his own head is a roil of neurosis and depression, in the manner of Woody Allen in his prime, Weiner knows wisdom when he sees it. Of a Taoist monk: “His is not a bookish wisdom, or even a wisdom centered in the mind at all. The Bee Hermit is wise the way a cat is wise when it effortlessly finds the most comfortable two square feet in a two-thousand-square-foot house.” He likes the Shamanistic practitioners who acknowledge “the beauty of inexactitude, the divinity of ‘more or less.’ ... A religion that demands precision of its adherents is not only a religion without mercy, but also one that is out of touch with reality.”

    After turning and turning, not surprisingly, Weiner ends up studying Judaism with new insights. Characteristically, he studies with two teachers at the same time, with two different approaches to the mysteries they point to. One is heady and abstruse, leaving Weiner baffled but impressed; the other serves tea and cookies. “All the while, she says things that are incredibly wise or blindingly obvious--or both, wisdom being nothing more than common sense in drag.” Weiner ends up with the common-sense wisdom that faith is not so much about what you believe, but what you experience, and what you do. He could do worse, and so could we.




E-mail edition, October 2012

Fooling Houdini

Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, & the Hidden Powers of the Mind
Alex Stone (2012, Harper Collins)

    When Alex Stone was a five, he was given some magic tricks by his father, and an interest was born; more than a hobby, really, an obsession. In 2006, Stone engaged in a particularly brash piece of participatory journalism. He took his card tricks to the World Championships of Magic, where he did so poorly he was not even allowed to finish his act. He returned home in abject humiliation, exposed as a rank amateur, and wrote a piece about the experience for Harper’s magazine. That might have been that, as Stone applied to graduate school in physics at Columbia, but the hook was in too deep. 

    Fooling Houdini is his memoir of the next five years, as he went deeper and deeper into the theory and practice of close-up magic, (that is, tricks with coins and cards, as opposed to stage magic, like cutting people in half.) At the same time, he became interested in the “...connections between magic and science--especially psychology, neuroscience, mathematics and physics.” Both magic and science take an interest in what perception is, how it can be influenced and manipulated, and the joys and perils of secrecy and deception.

    It sounds like nerdy stuff, and it is, but it’s very entertainingly told. Stone freely admits that no ordinary person would spend whole days (let alone months, or years) learning to deal cards from the middle of the deck, or train his palm muscles so that he can make a silver dollar leap eight inches straight up; it’s not the usual thing to skip physics classes in New York in favor of magic lessons in Las Vegas; or to spend more on new tricks and fresh decks of cards than he spends on his rent. He doesn’t actually want to become a professional card sharp, or three-card-monte dealer, he just wants to know that he could.

    Devoting himself full-time to practicing magic, he puts the physics degree on hold, gets dumped by a girlfriend, and gets eighty-sixed from his local bar. He spends every Saturday in a seedy pizzeria getting instruction from a senior practitioner, unless he’s on the road at a convention, lecture, or seminar. “Eventually,” he says, “I had to face the facts. My hobby had metastasized into a full-blown obsession. I was a high-functioning magicaholic.”

    There are some practical results to all this. He performs at weddings and bar mitzvahs. (“It felt great when people paid me to perform. Then again, I imagine just as many would have paid me to stop.”) He gets involved in research in the psychology department of  the New School, studying ‘inattentional blindness’ and other holes in our perception; his gift for stealing the watches right off people’s wrists was evidence of the tactile equivalent of not seeing a car coming because you’re talking on a cell phone. “As with any magic trick, the mechanics are but a small part of the illusion; psychology is the secret sauce.”

    Four years after his calamitous performance at the World Championships, when Stone applies to compete at the 2010 International Brotherhood of Magicians competition, he has considerably more technical chops for the contest. He  has also become aware that he needs to polish his performance skills, which leads him to mentalism, “a branch of magic that includes telepathy, mind reading, palm reading, fortune telling, ESP, clairvoyance, and metal bending.” It’s good practice in the psychology of magic, seeing what people want to believe, and what makes them care about the performance. It also presents ethical issues--the magician is often a liar, but he’s always an honest one, while the mentalist may be tempted to let people believe he has supernatural powers.

    Never one for half measures, Stone also studies yoga, dance, screenwriting, voice, and improvisational theater. One day, on his way to clown school, he meets an actress. (He asks if she wants to see a card trick. “Sadly, this was my A-game.”) He survives the initial meeting, and accepts her coaching on his performance skills. “Kate turned out to be more helpful than any drama workshop or chapter on Stanislavsky. She showed me how to block out an act, find my light, and project onstage.” She also helps him recognize the authentic, nerdy core of his performing self, his genuine Inner Geek. 

    Writing is like prestidigitation--the harder you work, the less the effort shows. In contrast to all the people who decide to undergo extreme experiences so they can write a book, Alex Stone did impossible things because he loved to do them, and then made a perfectly beautiful book out of it. Comfortable in the realms of Harry Houdini, Isaac Newton, Martin Gardner, and Richard Feynman, he is also utterly comfortable with himself, and you’ll be glad to know him.

email edition, September 1, 2012

The Blueberry Years

The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family
Jim Minick (2010, Thomas Dunne Books)

    Jim Minick had a dream: to run a pick-your-own-blueberry farm deep in the Virginia countryside, using all organic farming methods, living in a farmhouse heated with wood from the farm. Minick was a college English instructor, and his wife Sarah a kindergarten teacher; they dreamed of homesteading, and of making enough money on blueberries to leave their jobs behind. The Blueberry Years is Jim Minick’s memoir about the hard realities of that dream, and what the blueberries taught them.
    When Jim and Sarah bought the ninety-acre farm in 1991, it had no cleared fields except the garden, and no roads to what would be the fields, but it had plenty of water and a nice old house. They were blessed, perhaps, with ignorance about how much work their vision was going to entail: after forty years, a Virginia field devolves to scrub pine, requiring chainsaws and bulldozers just to get down to a field full of roots and rocks. Their inexperience can be frustrating to read about: did they really start two hives of bees in an inaccessible location, only to abandon them? Did they really have all the plants delivered before they broke ground on the field? This meant that all the plants had to be watered by hand with buckets from the creek for a few weeks--not a promising start.

    The manuals about blueberry growing that the Minicks consult contain knowledge, but also plenty of gaps. They don’t cover organic practices, for instance, or offer any tips on getting a thousand plants into the ground in a timely way. “And really, the answers I searched for often could come only from the field itself and those of us trying to make it something blue, but I didn’t know this at the time.” He has to write his own book, in conversation with the field, which “has a history to remember, a topography to read, and a soil to taste.”

    So they figure things out. Graph paper, stakes, string. Peat, sawdust, fertilizer. Tractors, spreaders, hoes, buckets. Irrigation. Mulch: sawdust, pine straw, wood chips. A shed for weighing and selling the berries, an outhouse. And, in time, it works. Six different varieties, ripening at different times, make possible a five or six week season of fresh berries, and people come from all over to pick them.

    Minick’s sketches of the various kinds of people who come make it clear that they are one of his favorite things about the business. “They come single or divorced, widow or bachelor, coupled, gay and straight, married and not; they come celebrating their sixtieth anniversary or their honeymoon, feeding each other gentle pinches of blue.”

    But outside of picking season, it can be a lonely life. Minick makes friends with one of his neighbors, but many others display the clannish reserve of eighth-generation hill people. Seeking a social outlet, Jim and Sarah visit churches full of old people, and introduce themselves to the local hippie communes, but real connection is elusive.

    So is profit. In a good year, the field produces six thousand pounds of berries, which nearly pay the expenses, though with nothing left over for the labor. In a bad year like 2002, with a freeze and a plague of raccoons, the farm looks more like a hobby than a business.  “For the first time, we learn what ‘crop failure’ really means, not some abstraction in the newspaper, but this, an empty field, an empty cash drawer, and a row of empty buckets.”

    The decision to let the farm go is a hard one, softened by the beauty of the new farmland the Minicks are buying seventy-five miles away. They find a buyer with his own blueberry dreams, who wants what they have, though the chances are not good that he’ll maintain the field in a productive state. At the new place, Jim and Sarah content themselves with a few new blueberries. Fifty plants will surely be enough.

    The Blueberry Years is about a single farm in one county in Virginia, but, inevitably, it’s about all farming, and all food. The Minicks are just one of the thousands of farm families who ‘exit’ the farming life every year. Lyrical and down-to-earth, sweet and melancholy by turns, the book gives us a human-scale way to think about what it takes to wrest nutrition from nature, about organic and local food, and how fragile the whole system is.

A Jane Austen Education

A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me about Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter
William Deresiewicz (2011, Penguin Books)

    Lately, I have complained of memoirs in which the authors congratulated themselves on spiritual development that was not actually on view in the books. A Jane Austen Education is not one of those: the young Billy Deresiewicz is convincingly portrayed as a complete jerk, while the authorial voice is nothing of the sort, but a wise and perceptive fellow. The page-turning suspense of this memoir is finding out how that happened; the surprise is that he can actually tell us.

    It was really all a little unlikely--that an arrogant young graduate student, studying literature at Columbia, would fall under the spell of Jane Austen. She sounded so stodgy, so old-fashioned; while, Deresiewicz says, “like so many young men, I needed to think of myself as a rebel, and modernism, with its revolutionary intensity, confirmed my self-image.” He was sarcastic, self-satisfied, and a thorough pain in the neck.

    At first, certainly, Emma lived up, or down, to his expectation of being extraordinarily ordinary: “In my other classes, D. H. Lawrence was preaching sexual revolution and Norman Mailer was cursing his way through World War II, and here I was reading about card parties.” But, as he shares the eponymous heroine’s impatience with the littleness of her small-town society, he falls under the author’s judgement of that impatience: “By creating a heroine who felt exactly as I did, and who behaved precisely as I would have in her situation, she was showing me my own ugly face.” The condescension and cruelty that fall from Emma’s lips at crucial moments deserve the humiliation that inevitably follows, and the young Deresiewicz is, in sympathy and in self-recognition, duly chastened.

    So Emma teaches him the beginning of empathy, and the importance of the trivial. From Pride and Prejudice, he discovers that making mistakes is one of the chief ways we learn anything. Being wrong, gloriously, spectacularly wrong, is both a compelling plot point and one of the chief gateways to maturity and happiness--if, like Elizabeth Bennet, you’re lucky enough to be the heroine of the book, or one of her intimates. Flighty younger sisters and indolent trophy wives (like Lady Bertram, in Mansfield Park: “as lovely, energetic and intelligent as an expensive throw pillow,”) make mistakes aplenty, and don’t get to change at all.

    He’s getting a moral education, the kind of thing that has for years been deeply out of fashion in graduate schools. It is compelling, nonetheless, especially combined with lively biographical detail about Austen’s life, and close attention to her literary techniques. Her letters, her friendships, and her brothers’ military and marital careers all make up the essential background to her particular genius; through them, Deresiewicz reveals Austen’s dedication to usefulness and good character as accurate predictors and true causes of happiness.

    He’s also learning a great deal about writing itself. In contrast to “Joyce’s syntactic labyrinths, Nabokov’s arcane vocabulary, Hemingway’s bleached-bone austerities,” Austen put “everyday words in their natural order--a language that didn’t call attention to itself in any way, just rolled along as easily as breathing.”  Austen awakened in Deresiewicz an interest in the ‘minute particulars’ of daily life, and it shows in his writing.

    Deresiewicz’s candor about the callowness of his younger days is handled well; he’s neither bragging nor complaining; he can be compassionate to himself without excusing his behavior. A Jane Austen Education is a lovely book, with the delightful side benefit that it leads to more books; in this case, biographies and volumes of Austen’s letters, and of course, the immortal novels themselves. What luxury!


 July, 2012

Be Different

Be Different: My Adventures with Asperger’s and My Advice for Fellow Aspergians, Misfits, Families, and Teachers

John Elder Robison (2011, Broadway Books)

    A couple of years ago I wrote about John Elder Robison’s memoir, Look Me in the Eye.  In his second book, Be Different, Robison has written a guide for young people with Asperger’s, and their families and teachers. A little less funny than his memoir, it’s also considerably less tragic: since being diagnosed with Asperger’s at age forty, Robison has educated himself about the condition as it’s viewed by educators and neurologists, and helped to educate them in turn.

    One thing he learned was that educators were giving Look Me in the Eye to their students with Asperger’s, and using it to start conversations about their experiences. The ways in which Robison went off the rails as a teenager, dropping out of high school and even running away to live in the woods, and the fact that he recovered to become an adult capable of work and love, must come as a tremendous relief to those kids; it’s as if they were sojourning on another planet and met someone who spoke their language.

    The other thing he discovered was that professionals in the field were routinely missing signs of distress in those young people, because their behaviour was considered so odd or extreme anyway. There’s a rather staggering account, in the introduction, of Robison seeing some documentary footage of an Aspergian kid. The boy is shown with his eyes darting side to side, “...like a lone deer in a forest filled with wolves. With a pang, I recognized his look the moment I saw it. That was me, in tenth grade, at Amherst High.” But when Robison showed this scene to a therapist whom he liked and trusted, the man responded, “They call it furtive eye movement....It doesn’t mean anything.” Oh, but it does. As this was the rare human social signal he recognized without any effort at all, Robison saw that his translation needed to go both ways.

    He speaks with credibility about how to live in the social world, as one who has learned the hard way. The manners he resisted learning from his grandparents as a child, thinking them arbitrary and illogical, have turned out to be practical tools for, if not making friends, at least being someone other people can make friends with. Autism-spectrum kids may have been told all their lives to conform to illogical social rules; now someone can tell them why. “In my antisocial days, dress didn’t matter, because I was an outcast everywhere. Now, when I join social groups, I realize it’s a lot easier to fit in if I’m dressed in a style that’s at least generally compatible with that of the other people. Also, I never go out in public in my underwear.”

    I really enjoy the dry reserve of this kind of writing, and the straightforwardness. Robison, like others of his tribe, is literal-minded to a fault. When he was little, adults used to assume that he understood what they meant, rather than what they said, and his responses consequently made him sound like a smart aleck, much to his confusion. Not that he’s serious all the time: when his brother expressed trepidation at the eyes of wild animals eight feet off the ground, Robison loses no time. “‘Those are pine demons,’ I say with a serious expression. ‘Fierce fighters.’ Nothing more needs to be said.” If his brother wants to know that the eyes belong to squirrels perched in trees, he’s going to have to go find out for himself.

     In fact, comfort in natural settings is one of the strengths of Robison’s neural difference. He feels at peace there. He is attuned to the wild from long experience running around in the woods as a boy, and from hiking wilderness trails as a man. “All that time, I was aware of possible dangers, but I never felt threatened. And my confidence was justified, because nothing ever ate me.”

    He also feels at home in the logical world of electrical engineering, which led to a career building amplifiers for rock and roll bands. His similar fascination with mechanical engineering progressed from bicycle gears to Range Rover repairs. It’s not that these subjects came naturally, exactly, but that Robison was interested enough to spend hours and hours concentrating on them to the point of mastery. One of his key pieces of advice for young geeks is to find something to focus on that people will pay them to do.

    Reading Be Different, the rest of us neurotypicals (‘nypicals’, in Robison’s handy abbreviation) are eavesdropping on advice that’s not directly meant for us, but I think that’s all right. Enjoy it for the distinctive way Robison’s mind works. Appreciate his compassion for his younger self, and the ingenuity of his approach to situations he’s not naturally good at. Read it for insight into people around you whose behavior is significantly different from what you expect; it may be that their perceptions are different, too. And in our own ways, don’t we all struggle with the question of when to conform, and when to do things our own way?
   
   
Any Good Books
June, 2012