Don DeLillo's White Noise

Celebrity, Nuns, Death, Guns, Academia.

    My daughter was born in 1986, so, the year after White Noise was published.  Within a couple of years I became quite familiar with Sesame Street, going strong after its emergence in the 1970s, and one memorable learning module was "one of these things is not like the others" and children would see the picture options on the TV screen and pick. It was usually 3 out of four alike and one different. So, three animals and one flower or tree, for example. Of the nouns listed above, I think in those days I would have picked nuns, but now I add academia as "not like the others." But DeLillo sees all five as compatible. Adding the fifth, after just re-reading the novel and watching the 2023 film adaptation, I feel the rhythm of those words I've chosen to sum up the plot of the novel, and I hear more an echo of the old 1960s TV show I watched in middle school: symbols on a blackboard of man, woman, birth, death, infinity. In 1966, daughter of a psychiatrist, I recognized this show as comparatively sophisticated, perhaps intellectual. 

    After a couple of  career crises, fast forward to my mid-thirties. What did I know in 1985? Almost nothing, despite being sure of so many things. I got married for the second time, to the father of my two children, now grown. I heard about, and probably read about, Don DeLillo's White Noise but I am not sure when I read it. I was living in New York with my husband, from whom I am now separated. His brother's then brother-in-law had gone to Fordham with DeLillo and still exchanged letters with him, according to my ex. This must be the ultimate in name-dropping.

    I read the novel but I did not know that it was prescient, despite its being very funny. Although the film adaptation had to drop some of the outdated brand names. I remember them well. But I really underestimated the destructive power of celebrity, whether in popular culture or serious history. The environmental emergency really is upon us even if in a somewhat different way. DeLillo back then was still with the earlier world of Rachel Carson; we are now in a suicidal world of climate change denial. Guns are everywhere and determine how I feel about public transportation, and mass killings are many times more common in the U.S. than anywhere else other than a war zone. Russia is still a threat after communism collapsed decades ago. Celebrities now include Princes and Presidents, to various effects.

    So what did DeLillo see in the consumerism and in the academic world of his half-deluded, half-aware and hilarious Jack Gladney? The novelist's pastiche of the fear of death, a satire of the existentialists and some of the so-called postmodernists, has a core center of value, of course, without which satire is impossible- right now I cannot recall who made that observation but just being honest that it is not original. That value? Perhaps the absurdity of America itself. Irony-proof. After my recent graduate course in the novelists and critics of the modern world starting in the seventeenth century, I have some revised reflections on what America has become even as I ponder what I, too, have become in all those intervening years since 1985. I am nearer to the time of my death and moving away from the institutional spiritualities that had kept me questioning the meaning of life with some of the distracted pretentiousness of Gladney. I did not succeed in becoming the comfortable academic he became but instead mourned my foolish rejection of the original academic life I wanted. I settled for a distracted one; he achieved his rather disordered personal life alongside a kind of success. 

    Jack waits until later in his life to do a stupid thing that could well have ruined his success, a fear of success perhaps like my own or maybe it really was a fear of death that he and his wife shared. He sincerely wanted her love even though she was no threat to him or his domestic life. That was the odd truce with feminism that took place in the 1980s as part of Reagan's America. I tried to kill my ambition and he tried to kill his wife's seducer. We both failed but he is left with at least a realization of the magic of his youngest child and the rearrangement of the supermarket. His son Wilder survives a tricycle crossing of a busy highway and we know that after this miracle of survival this child will not, as Jack's wife Babette wishes, stay his same adorable self forever. He, too, will grow up in an America of the perpetually changing supermarket. I know, as I have done the same. I have lived and been one of the people who are buying incredibly useless stuff and making bad choices. This is the supermarket of toxic oil and plastic, conspiracy theories, lying would-be despots, that is, criminal celebrities who get elected President.

    I am still shopping for my spirituality, and I've learned the same lesson Jack receives from the emergency clinic nun who saves his victim's life and treats his superficial gunshot wound. In fact, I am that nun. He asks if the church still teaches the conventional answer to fear of death: we will survive in some way, with a soul, and possibly go to a heaven. She tells him that is absurd. Shocked at her seeming unbelief, he is almost angry. ""You're a nun; act like it!" he scolds. She is having none of it. No pun intended. Instead she wisely, in my view, tells him that she sees her role is to own up to her unbelief so  that people will not rely on nuns and other supposed believers to believe it all on their behalf. No need to think it through. 

The film adaptation is very true to the novel and uses great visual quotations, such as from Godard's Le Weekend and other famous films, to convey the real toxicity of the postwar "better living through chemistry" as well as the absurd simulation of a disaster after the fact. This was before 9/11, the financial meltdown of 2008, and of course the pandemic of 2020-2022 (perhaps- I'm still intermittently wearing a mask). We were not ready for any of these events even though all were predicted by expert observers. Hmmm. 

Babette's arriving at the clinic was not in the novel and it does skew the ending away from the watershed of Jack's need, presumably, to realize he cannot change her past behavior or their fears of who will die first. But the conversation with the nun is not omitted from the film, and the supermarket becomes the setting for a possible Dance of Death, and one such as Bergman would never have come up with. We no longer hold hands with Death- we have replaced our fear with distraction. We just stand in front of the automatic sliding doors.

I must get on to ordering a laptop table from Amazon. Where's my iPhone?

Haiku and Perhaps on to Haiga?

 In the midst of my doctoral courses and research I find I need time to switch codes completely. That is, I need another mode of expression beyond academic prose, as I prune and parse and try to make it clear.

I was hoping to afford the haiku writing course with Clark Strand via Tricycle magazine; I learned a great deal from his free preview. I read Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North... , and Bruce Ross's How to Haiku, which introduced me to haiga, which are haiku with little sketched pictures alongside them to accompany and capture the feeling of the poems. I want to try that. However, my seventeen-syllable efforts so far have lacked the humorous twist he finds essential to the true haiku. I thought it had to be not only seasonal or episodic but a gentle surprise at the end rather than a twist. I also adde Buddhist elements as I make my way through by Buddhist Philosophy in my directed reading this semester.

Here are my recent efforts: 

(1)

My coffee cup sits

Empty of all but shadow

Filled with my next sip.

(2) (for Thây)

Clock ticks; loving heart.

Teachers teach only so long

Restless on shelf a book falls.

(3)

On the path a mouse

Tiny crouching on the edge

Child laughs; leaps away

(4) 

Corn is high they say

Sun is low late afternoon

Taste and see- that's it.

(5) 

Right hand rests on cat

Left hand curls around tea cup

Head and hand wake up and breathe.

Footloose

Walking restores and comforts me; this has been true for years and never more so than during the pandemic, when that was my break from work in my home office, my office-at-home, and one of my modes of meditation. It was surprising, then, when I recently went through a period of annoyance and perhaps a touch of self-pity when I could no longer drive a car and no longer had one to drive. I was going to have to move from a four-bedroom house to a one-bedroom apartment without a car to run all the little errands and get the things moved that were important to me. You know, the things I randomly needed to have right at hand such that I did not want to consign them to boxes for the movers. For all the larger unwanted stuff, I learned about every donation service that picks up during the pandemic: how, and when.

However, I surmounted most of that challenge up until my adult son moved to his job in Colorado and had a car of his own to drive. Okay, where are the spiritual and financial resources I’m going to need to survive in the suburbs, this epicenter of major causes of climate change but also a way of life that hasn’t changed yet and almost imprisons the non-driver. While I had thrived in off-the-grid advocacy and enjoyed my use of public transportation, I’ve always had a driver’s license and available car (off and on) since I was 16. 

Fortunately, my devotion to public transit had drawn me to a location next to a Metro stop and a grocery store (but more as a backup to any future car repairs than true environmental puritanism). But… how did I really feel about my cart with wheels, my big backpack, and my inability to get to parks and my beloved Brookside Gardens and the many, many other places that only very technically might be reachable without a car. Like… most peoples’ jobs? 

So after a period of very unspiritual whining to myself and grumbling through the (expletive) heat, all the while making plans to join the most radical environmental and civil rights organizations I could find, I decided to do what all of us who harbor contemplative tendencies: get back to walking the talk, which, in my case, meant talking the walk.

Yes, the walk. The walking meditation walk. The long walks. The necessary walks. Braving the ugly sidewalks of Rockville Pike, an outdated highway which apparently was designed by the automotive industrial complex to discourage any attempts to use the human body directly for any sort of locomotion towards a destination. The wait at the multi-turn traffic lights is just as long on foot but much more uncomfortable. But then I remembered my personal credo: don’t just do something, sit there. (In my world all cliches work backwards).  Back home, admittedly in the air conditioning, and after sitting in meditation, I finally accepted what the inward light was telling me: it’s going to be fine once you let go. 

Would sitting quietly and practicing the presence of the Inward Light help me, and others, let go? I think about this as the busyness of the fall descends on us. 

Jarmusch, Jim. 2016. Paterson. United States: Bleecker Street Media.

Notes toward a critical essay on Paterson (2016). (Jarmusch, director; lead actor, Adam Driver).

 As I mentioned the other day to someone who asked about this film, I had to say, when they asked if it is about the city of Paterson, New Jersey, that it would be wrong simply to say it was about the city, but also wrong to say that it was not about the city. 

The film is about the many ways that art, or things very like it, create meaning in human life and make it bearable as well as excruciating with, paradoxically, utter joy in the moment. More specifically, it points to the power of poetry and even more exactly, the poetry of the image.

Paterson is a poet and a bus driver surnamed Paterson who is living in Paterson, New Jersey.  Closely tied to his location, he is widely read as to the books in his little basement office but working within the style of the Paterson poet William Carlos Williams. The unity of time is specific: it is one week in the poet's life at work, driving and writing, and at home, with his wife, Laura.

At first the relationship of Paterson and Laura seems utterly retro and as a feminist I asked: why is she a child-like housewife? Yet the film asks us to look at Paterson, the poet, as the center of an array of artists he knows or meets and who are embedded, like it or not, in an America of consumer capitalism and technology, the successor to the ruins of earlier industrialization that constitute the shabby rust belt city of Paterson. Paterson the poet has chosen security and routine in order to protect his artistic life; his wife Laura is exploring the more typical artist's pursuit of risk. She does not see herself  very well and so does not realize the risk inherent in her being incapable of focus on one medium.  Paterson has chose a hidden life; Laura dreams of a celebrity life. 

At the center of their life together is the visual. Laura fails to see her own skills, such as a good eye for design, and almost unconsciously transforms rooms and clothing with black and white shapes and graphic patterns while pursuing fantasies of a cupcake business or a stage career as a country singer with a black and white harlequin guitar (which she first must learn to play).  She paints the house, many objects, even her clothes, even her farmer's market cupcakes, in black and white designs. She is distracted by the celebrity and consumer world that her husband has rejected. 

Paterson, by contrast, refuses to have a cell phone, an alarm clock, or to photocopy his small journal where he writes his poetry daily. His quest for simplicity meets impermanence. [Spoiler alert:] This tragic meeting occurs when his journal is left where their adorable but feisty dog can find it and ... treat it as a chewy toy, completely destroying it. A photocopy of the poems might have saved them, even if  they were never to be published. The only other poets are an amateur rapper in the laundromat, a sweet and open schoolgirl who briefly shares a poem she has written, and a Japanese businessman/poet who has come to Paterson expressly to experience the city of a favorite poet, William Carlos Williams. This last encounter opens a new page for Paterson, literally as well as in his ability to live not for, but in, each moment.

Paterson combines his nightly dog-walk of their English bulldog with a pub stop. There we see his friend ,the chess-playing bartender, and a neighbor/actor, a performing star-crossed lover who literally uses drama to effect change. He performs passionately in scenes that take place before his would-be girlfriend, who is sitting at the bar, to her amused disdain.  Still, Art, of a kind, the pursuit of pattern and meaning, has affected all of them, including Paterson's seemingly superficial wife Laura. But change? In a Paterson, either the poet or the city, who seems not to change from day to day?

The poetry in this film, displayed across the screen as Paterson writes in his notebook, is that of Ron Padgett . Also from a modest background (as is Paterson, apparently) and with the same extraordinary ability to be captivated by the most minute or seemingly trivial object, Padgett and Jarmusch collaborated after having both been students (at different times) of Columbia University professor  and poet Kenneth Koch, and meeting through a mutual friend. Padgett's spare, finely wrought, deeply informed poetry is not just free verse superbly done, but a poetry of strong, image-based observation, with attention to order and meaning that is simple but also seems carefully patterned so as to delight and enlighten.

A lover, a new and absurdly designed guitar, a new notebook...there is change in the discovery of meaning. Jarmusch matches the cinematography and economy of content to lighten the impossibly weighty questions of relating art and the artful to the dreadfully ordinary. Only Paterson as poet can bring the images closer and closer to life, wonder, joy, love, relationships. Words, on a page, and shown in this film literally on the movie screen as Paterson writes them, can do that. 

(Notes dated 2/18/21; edited 7/18/21)

True Love: The Third Mindfulness Training and Radical Inclusiveness

The third of the Five Mindfulness Trainings shows Thich Nhat Hanh placing the four divine abodes, the in-dwelling places of the Buddha, into our very human lives and interpreting equanimity as inclusiveness. It's odd, because on the face of it, these are very different concepts.

                      "... I will cultivate loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and inclusiveness [equanimity],
                       which are the four basic elements of true love, for my greater happiness and the
                        happiness of others. Practicing true love, we know that we will continue beautifully
                        into the future."

This training addresses that one of the Five Precepts which deals with responsible and loving sexual conduct. As a result, dharma discussions on it are often hesitant and not very personal. And with Thay's usual optimism and hope in its tone, I find as I write this (to present to my sangha) that I am not quite in harmony with its tone. Right now in my own life, it is hard for me to think about, or believe, that I, my family, or even my country will really "continue beautifully into the future." After COVID-19, with its personal and economic tragedies unfolding but not yet fully known, the future does not look beautiful.

I am unable to retire and I need to remove myself from a very difficult marriage to someone who has already been financially irresponsible and still wedded only to his original family, it seems.  And my woes are very small compared to the millions all over the world who are out of work, homeless, ever deeper in poverty, with loss of loved ones or of their own health, I am merely looking for the luxury of retiring into a new life and a less lucrative, but more interesting, career combining some forms of teaching and spiritual direction.

Finally, this precept/training forces me to ask, as I face the failure of a relationship, what is the essence of a good one?

Well, recently, as I was browsing through The Guardian newspaper, I saw a book review that included a recent interview with the book's author, Jan Morris. I have always enjoyed Morris's work over the years, consisting of serious journalism, travel writing, and "popular" history that was praised for being scholarly and comprehensive (The Pax Britannica Trilogy, 1968-1978).  I also remember the news of her gender transition from the male James to the female Jan as a pioneering medical and psychological journey in the early 1970s (!). She is now 93, and with the publication of the memoire being reviewed, Thinking Again (2020), she looked back at the book she wrote about her transgender experience, Conundrum (1974). 

In this interview she spoke about her wife, Elizabeth, and their children. After her treatments and surgery, she returned to their house in a small town in Wales. She noted that the villagers just accepted her, at least publicly. She attributed it to something very simple: essential kindness.

And Elizabeth? At the time they had to divorce, but it turns out they have been together always. "I made marriage vows 59 years ago," she says. They reaffirmed their love in 2008 in a ceremony of civil union (the UK allowed same sex marriage later in 2014). The children always were supportive of them.

This is an example of a kind of radical inclusiveness and love of the essential person- not in contradiction of the Buddhist notion of non-self, but of the manifesting, in fact ever growing person. This helps us understand that sexual identity and sexual love exist alongside the mystery of personality and compassion. We do not become an Other nor do we have an unchanging Essence. Gender can and should be fluid when it needs to be, to express to each other who each of us really is.

True Love is transcendent of each moment yet present in each moment. It goes beautifully into a future that a 93-year-old helped me to see as having more possibility. It gives to me a new meaning to "the more things change, the more they stay the same." That cliche can have a positive meaning, In a Buddhist context, this phrase might mean that the ocean water is the same that makes every different wave, to use one of Thay's favorite metaphors. The water is still there in the waves that keep crashing onto the shore; they sometimes scare us, sometimes delight us, then always retreat to let us experience them in new ways. Include them all, and it looks like variety can create, and even enhance, equanimity.

May we be at peace in this time of pandemic.

True Happiness: The Second Mindfulness Training and the Heart Sutra

Three key passages speak to me from the Second Mindfulness Training of Thich Nhat Hanh, and all suggest the deeper truth of inter-existence:

True Happiness

I will practice looking deeply to see that the happiness and suffering of others are not separate from my own happiness and suffering...


...true happiness is not possible without understanding and compassion.


...I am committed to practicing Right Livelihood so that I can help reduce the suffering of living beings on Earth and stop contributing to climate change.


These passages are taken from one of the versions of the mindfulness trainings that appears at the Plum Village website of the Thich Nhat Hanh community, the Order of Interbeing. It sets forth for me three aspects of our interconnectedness, in order: interbeing itself, inter-feeling or deep empathy, and cooperative action. As we commit to the precept in its simplest form of "not stealing," we find we are already in deeper consideration of our vastly interconnected planet and its fate. What will life and property, all that we cling to, be worth in a warmed and less habitable world, where scarcity may create more prevalence of disease, homelessness, and tribal/geographic conflict, that is, outright war?


As I contemplated this training, I was immersed in and fascinated by the work of a Japanese artist and science teacher who had woven the 260 Chinese characters of the Heart Sutra into beautiful paintings. The gold characters were woven into images of the galaxy, the double helix of DNA, and other elements of paintings set in nature or Buddhist iconography expressing this most abstract yet image-focused sutra: the Heart Sutra. Thich Nhat Hanh has translated the sutra in a most subtle and inspiring way to show that its abstract premise- emptiness is form; form is emptiness- is not an equation of emptiness with non-being. Instead, it is simply another way of stating the truth of interbeing: that here are no separate self-entities; rather, everything inter-is.


Despite this truth of our world as one of linked biological systems, where has climate change been in our political debates? What are we stealing from future generations? Because we are in fact stealing something, namely, our sustaining earth's well-being, and it cannot be replaced by us because we cannot re-form it as it has first appeared. We can only create the conditions for its re-appearance. This hope can move us from fear and nihilism to deep understanding of interbeing, empathy, and positive action. And we must act now.






Thich Nhat Hanh, The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries. Berkeley, CA: Palm Leaves Press imprint of Parallax Press, 2017.


Paula Arai, Painting Enlightenment: Healing Visions of the Heart Sutra, the Buddhist Art of Iwasaki Tsuneo. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2019.

Reading and Post-War Trauma: Imagination, Healing, and Identity

A wonderful Christmas gift this year, and this past year's centennial of the First World War, have brought my attention to a new facet of my current research on the relationship between textual media and human identity. I received Jorn Leonhard's major study: Pandora's Box: A History of the First World War (Cambridge MA: Belknap/Harvard, 2018). As part of my interest in the eventual emergence of human rights, its normative and literary contexts, I coincidentally found in my Feedly a post about bibliotherapy and the "healing book" at The Conversation (from the Open University) and it made me take a second look at this concept.
I am skeptical of the notion that reading can induce empathy in all cases, and I'm looking into the implications of a 2018 New Yorker article- one of many in recent years on the topic- that got me thinking about it for my research, but healing is a bit different. This interesting area of inquiry involved the history of "literary caregiving" as established by one Helen Mary Gaskell and her "war library" as the effects of trauma were being make overwhelmingly evident by 1918. There is much to read on this aspect of bibliotherapy and I will be looking into limited definitions and applications of it; I am reading one of the linked articles now (Hasam, Reading, Trauma, 2018).
As Leonhard points out, the British office class was faced with the embarrassment of the "shell shock" phenomenon and some terrible, even torture-based "treatments" were applied to soldiers.
(Leonhard, Pandora's Box at 510). He does not seem to detail this development of the war library and its healing intent, but as I am discovering this subtopic as yet another outgrowth of Robert Darnton's scholarship on reading, I am adding it to the mix in my exploration of self and text and the relationship between book and body, information and the manifestation of human consciousness, and the contributions of both to the rise of human rights.