In 2016, poet Ross Gay set out to document a delight each day for a year. Shortly after he completed the resulting essay collection, The Book of Delights, his friend asked him if he planned to continue his practice. Recognizing delight’s potential endlessness, Gay decided to turn his yearlong exercise into a lifelong project.

Five years later, he began The Book of (More) Delights, demonstrating that the sources of delight are indeed limitless—and that they multiply when attended to and shared. For Gay, delight serves as evidence of our interconnectedness, and it is inextricable from the fact of our mortality. With characteristic humor and grace, he chronicles his everyday encounters with delight, from the fleeting sweetnesses of strangers to the startling beauty of the falsetto to the unexpected joys of aging.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and Insight Meditation Society cofounder and teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Gay to talk about the relationship between delight and impermanence, how he understands faith, and how delight has restructured how he pays attention.

James Shaheen (JS): The last time we spoke, you had just published a book on joy. How do you think about the difference between joy and delight?

Ross Gay (RG): I’m starting to feel like among the definitions for delight is something like the pleasant evidence of our connection. It’s occasional—a hummingbird lands very close to you, and you feel delight. But joy feels like it’s always there, and you can enter into it.

In a way, joy feels like the connection itself, and delight feels like the little bells—the little reminders that, oh yeah, there’s this fundamental connection here. So that’s how I think of it: delight is more occasional; joy is more ever-present and waiting.

“Delight is more occasional; joy is more ever-present and waiting.”

JS: In your practice of noticing delight, you write that you’re not being optimistic; you’re just paying attention. Do you think delight has shaped or restructured how you pay attention?

RG: Absolutely. I feel like just by doing this practice, I’ve built a kind of reservoir of things that now I know delight me. Instead of just, “Oh, that’s happening,” it’s like, “Oh yeah, this is another thing that I love.” I find myself arguing with the notion of delight as optimistic in part because in this practice, I don’t mean to diminish the fullness and complexity of life.

What I mean to do is attend very fully. And in attending very fully, I’m also attending to what is astonishingly beautiful. I’m not looking at the bright side of things; I’m just trying to look at everything.

JS: Right. Often what you’re fully attentive to is what we might otherwise take for granted, and in your work, the everyday becomes unfamiliar and new. You describe this as being “perpetually wonderstruck.” Can you say more about the relationship between wonder and delight? 

RG: It might be the case that while I’m doing this practice, I’m alert in a certain kind of way to what’s going to delight me. It’s starting with a question: I wonder. I wonder what’s going to delight me. And I wonder too if that experience of not knowing what’s going to delight you prepares the ground of not knowing. In a way, the vocation is to not know. Maybe there’s a first knowing, which is like, “Something’s probably going to delight me,” but the not knowing is like, “I don’t know what it is.” That practice of not being sure feels connected to wonder, which to me feels like a fundamental unknowing.

It’s an opening question: What do we love in common? What is beautiful? What is given to me? These are questions that can bring us closer to one another and help us acknowledge our connection, which then further makes that connection possible. They grow [the connection] that they witness.

JS: You’ve said that the most interesting thing about us as humans is that we die and we change. How do you see our mortality as an occasion for joy?

RG: There’s something really moving about walking down the street and seeing whoever is walking toward me and being like, “Oh, yeah, you too will die. We’re both going to be dead.” It’s an interesting ground to operate on, where there’s a shared fleetingness of things. If we can get a handle on that and be less afraid and more curious, it also seems to me to be another ground of sharing: to be witnesses of how fleeting this whole thing is. It offers a possibility for a different kind of generosity.

This also comes back to the fact that we are not one thing. We are many things, and in fact, we are many things in the process of becoming many more things. And that feels to me like a kind of faith—a kind of faith that also inclines me to feel tender toward someone when I can hold that, oh yeah, we’re changing. I don’t know what I’m going to be tomorrow or next week. But I also don’t know what anyone else or anything else is going to be tomorrow or next week. And although it’s a kind of groundlessness, it also feels like a potential for sweetness.

Sharon Salzberg: You write that delight can be occasioned by faith—faith in each other and our capacity for “radiant, unpredictable, sloppy, mycelial, transgressive care.” So how do you understand faith?

RG: This feels like a lesson for me regularly, and maybe it’s part of the practice of delight. To write a delight every day requires a kind of faith that there will be a delight every day, which I think comes from practice. The faith actually follows the practice—the practice has provided the evidence that you can have faith. Maybe faith and delight arrive together. They have a connection to one another.

In one essay in the book, my friend Kate’s cat gets lost. Every time I see a sign on a telephone pole that says “Lost Cat,” I’m like, “Oh, man, that’s a bummer. You’re never going to see your cat again.” In a way, I have faith in a certain kind of universe, and my faith in that universe compels me to contribute to that universe, which is to say that when I say, “Oh, bummer,” I’m not looking around for anyone’s cat. And if my friend’s cat gets lost, I’m not helping them out. I’ve been an asshole on account of that.

My friend Kate, on the other hand, has faith in this other kind of cat-rescuing universe. It’s a beautiful story, actually. Her cat got lost, she put up signs, and at dawn, when she went to the place where her cat got lost, which is behind a strip mall in a murky, swampy area, there were people out there calling her cat’s name. And she got her cat back.

That’s the kind of faith that she gave me. But I needed a reason to have that faith. Often, these things are given to us by other people. Someone has to teach you that when you put signs up, people will actually try to take care of you.

♦

Listen to the full conversation at tricycle.org/podcast.

The post Limitless Delights appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

For the past sixty years, Meredith Monk has been expanding the possibilities of the human voice. A pioneer of extended vocal technique and interdisciplinary performance, she has created collaborative performance pieces that stretch the limits of music, inspiring figures from Björk to Merce Cunningham. Her most recent work, Indra’s Net, draws from her decades of Buddhist practice and explores themes of impermanence and interdependence against the backdrop of our ecological crisis.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Monk to discuss the relationship between her art and her meditation practice, the importance of listening fearlessly, and art as a bodhisattva activity.

James Shaheen (JS): So Meredith, you’re celebrating your 80th birthday this year, and you’ve been performing since you were a child. Over the course of your career, you’ve composed and performed for figures ranging from your own teacher, Pema Chödrön, to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. How did you first come to music?

Meredith Monk (MM): My mother was a singer on the radio in the 1930s. She did solo performances on music shows like the Prudential Family Hour, and then she became a jingle singer and recorded commercials. My grandfather was a bass-baritone who came from Russia and had a concert career in New York, and my great-grandfather was a cantor in Russia. I’m a fourth-generation singer, so music was just like breathing for me. I was singing at a very young age, reading music before I could read words. But I had to find my own way. I could have followed the same path as a singer, but I knew that I liked making things, and I wanted to make my own work.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): You’ve compared making art to jumping from the edge of a cliff, and you say that being an artist is learning to tolerate the fear of the unknown. Can you say more about the relationship between your art and this space of not knowing? How do you work with mystery and uncertainty?

MM: I’m terrified every time. There are two different ways of thinking about making art. Some people have a more product-oriented approach, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But my way has always been to try to start from zero and to try to learn to tolerate the unknown. It’s hard every time. After sixty years of making work, I still feel incredible fear, and then I say to myself, “Be playful, Meredith,” and I just start. From there, it’s a bit like being a detective. A little clue will come up, and then I get interested in that. Little by little, the curiosity takes over, and the fear is less present. At a certain point, the piece makes itself known, and there’s this magic birth of an entity. Then it just becomes so miraculous. I’m so grateful to be doing something that affirms mystery and magic in this world. To remember that you can’t see everything or hear everything or label everything is a wonderful thing.

JS: In an interview with Tricycle several years ago, you spoke about fearless listening, or listening with all of your being. What have you learned from listening fearlessly?

MM: I’ve always thought that art requires being open to listening, and my art always has a lot of space and quiet and stillness. Each piece is another world, and you are trying to say to it, “Make yourself known,” and it’s coming through you. This is similar to the meditation process of just letting things come without expectations.

I think listening fearlessly applies both to making a work and to performing. I believe performing is a prototype of the possibility of human behavior because we’re so in tune with each other. If one person is having a hard night, you can tell by the first note that comes out of their mouth. [As performers] we know each other so well. Live performance is really such a generous and vulnerable act because anything could happen. We could fall on our faces!

SS: You’ve written that the experience of creating is as close to meditation as anything you can think of, particularly the combination of focused attention and relaxation that both require. Can you say more about the connection between your meditative practice and your creative practice?

MM: The processes are so similar, and it’s just a matter of how much time each process takes. The creative practice takes longer. Your consciousness is not as heightened as it is in meditation. But in performing, it really is. In your lifetime, there are a handful of performances where you are truly one with your material. There’s no you. You’re absolutely pinpoint-focused, and at the same time, you’re relaxed and open to what’s going on in the moment. That’s the beautiful thing about performing. It’s so present. You’re in nowness. In those performances, the judge or observer in your mind that’s going “You’re flat” or “You’re slow” is not there. All that voice is saying is “Wow,” in the best sense of the word. It’s kind of a miracle.

“I believe that art can be an affirmation not only of the artist but of all of us as human beings.”

I wrote a piece called “Hocket,” which is a duet. In a hocket, the performers throw notes back and forth, and the notes make a melody. It’s like a moving meditation. If even one thought comes into your mind, you’re off. That’s an example of how now you have to be. You’re just in your body. You’re one with your body and the material.

SS: You describe making art as a bodhisattva activity, where the inner transformation that results from dharma practice flows into the work, and the work in turn becomes an offering. Can you tell us about that transformative process?

MM: In these late years of my life, I’m more aware of how much my practice has gone into my work. As a young artist, I didn’t think of the two in such an integrated way—I felt that I had my art practice over here and my dharma practice over there. Little by little, I’ve come to see how the dharma practice is a kind of ground or a foundation that underlies every piece I work on. In the time I have left on earth, I want to make art that has a healing aspect to it.

Once, at a retreat, a woman said, “I’m a painter, and I’m afraid that if I meditate, then my art won’t be good anymore because it comes from my pain and my neuroses.” But I’ve found that my practice has made my art grow more. I think it’s a myth that we have in the Western European tradition that you have to cut off your ear and suffer for your art and that neurosis is what feeds the artwork, and I really don’t believe that.

Of course, there will always be dark aspects of my work too. I feel that it’s very important that art has sadness as well as joy, and that it reflects this world that we’re living in rather than saying that everything is great. I don’t think that that is good art. A work of good art has the richness of the different centers of our being and a full range of emotion. I believe that art can be an affirmation not only of the artist but of all of us as human beings. Hopefully, it’s a prototype for our possibilities and the richness of our experience.

The post Acts of Dharma appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

According to the recently released COVID Response Tracking Study, Americans are the unhappiest they’ve been in fifty years. With the pandemic, mass shootings, and ongoing environmental catastrophes, it can be easy to feel like we’re always in crisis—and to believe that the world is coming to an end. But journalist Emma Varvaloucas believes that this pessimism runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, and if we want to build a better future, we have to change how we relate to the news.

Previously the executive editor at Tricycle, Varvaloucas now serves as the executive director of the Progress Network, a nonprofit media organization dedicated to countering the negativity of the mainstream news cycle. Through amplifying stories and statistics that often go unnoticed, the Progress Network aims to serve as an antidote to doomscrolling and to offer a more constructive take on current events.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Varvaloucas to discuss the dangers of cynicism, how her Buddhist practice informs how she engages with the news, and what can happen when we actually pay attention to what’s going right.

James Shaheen (JS): You currently work as the executive director of the Progress Network. Can you tell us more about the organization?

Emma Varvaloucas (EV): The Progress Network is a nonprofit media organization focused on paying more attention to what’s going right. It launched in October 2020 in the lead-up to the 2020 election and in the midst of the acute part of the pandemic. It might seem like a strange time to launch such an organization. But we felt that this was exactly when the United States needed something like the Progress Network.

We’re locked in a zeitgeist of negativity and cynicism right now. There are certainly many reasons for us to feel that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But there’s actually a lot of evidence for the opposite. There are many indicators that we’re building a world that’s going in a constructive direction, and a lot of people just don’t know about them. The media isn’t giving us a lot of opportunity to pay attention to these stories.

JS: The mission statement for the Progress Network states that pessimism “can focus the mind, but it can also become a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading people to detach and despair rather than galvanizing us.” Can you say more about the dangers of pessimism and the feedback loops it creates?

EV: It’s similar to the Buddha’s teachings on anger: holding on to anger is like holding on to a hot coal; you end up burning yourself. This is true of anger that inspires activism. At a certain point, the anger is going to burn out. Like anger, pessimism can be a really strong force. It can push people to action in the short term. But it’s not going to bring us to the future that we want to see. It’s just too easy to drop from pessimism into cynicism. Often pessimism is built on us-versus-them arguments rather than arguments for creating a better society that make sure that we’re not going to give up along the way.

JS: How does the feeling that we’re constantly in crisis change how we perceive the world and relate to the people around us?

EV: Feeling like we’re constantly in crisis makes everything seem urgent. When everything seems urgent, it flattens the distinction between urgency and importance. Everything gets mixed up because everything seems equally terrible. This prevents dialogue from happening—and it prevents us from thinking through important questions. Are we choosing a way that’s going to lead to more problems down the road? Are we choosing a cure that is worse than the disease?

JS: Before working at the Progress Network, you were steeped in the Buddhist world. How does your Buddhist practice inform how you relate to these questions and to this cycle of pessimism?

EV: I believe that the mindset with which you approach something completely changes how you react to something: how you see it, how you understand it, and how you digest it. This is why focusing our attention is so important. If you continually focus on everything that’s going wrong, all you’re going to do is gather more evidence for why that’s correct. This is going to feed into the cycle of cynicism. And then when you do encounter something that actually might be more neutral or even good, it doesn’t even enter your awareness.

But if you’re coming at it from a fundamentally different framework, then you’re opening up your field of inquiry. You’re allowing reality to come to you. You’re seeing what’s out there rather than imposing a preassumed story about what’s going on. I see this as a fundamentally Buddhist mindset. It’s an inquiry: you’re looking, you’re paying attention, and you’re asking. Every day when I wake up and I read the news, I want to prevent myself from falling into thinking, “Here we go again, the same old stuff.” That Buddhist mindset of keeping nonreactive open awareness definitely helps. This mindset is embedded in the framework of the Progress Network.

JS: People might be surprised to know that the Progress Network tends to avoid headlines that focus on hope. Why is that?

EV: We try to avoid the term “hope” altogether. We’re not trying to convince you that everything is fine. Not everything is fine. We’re not even trying to tell you that the scales are tipped toward better and not tipped toward worse. No one really knows. What we’re trying to put out there instead is that there are facts that we’re just not paying attention to. At the end of the day, you can decide if you think the scales are tipped in one direction or the other. We’re just here to show you some stories you hadn’t heard about and to offer a different way of approaching things.

We’re focused less on seeing the glass as half full and more on ditching the arrogance and the surety that we know the outcome of the future—and that we know that the future is going to be bad. Our attitude is that we try to remain with what is going on rather than being absolutely positive that things will turn out badly. Because we just don’t know. It’s a humble optimism.

JS: The mission statement of the Progress Network states that “the present feels almost unbearably messy, but these are the times to reshape the world.” Can you say more about this? Why are these the times to reshape the world?

EV: If you’re not going to do it now, when are you going to do it? I think that people sometimes are waiting around for things to be simpler or easier to understand. They probably won’t be. We’re living in an age where there’s information coming at us from left, right, and center. We’re dealing with things that we’ve never had to deal with before. We have to be willing to dive into the mess. You can’t look at the mess and be intimidated and just say no. If we don’t jump in, someone else is going to jump in for us, and we’re going to end up in a future that we haven’t taken part in at all.

♦

Listen to the full conversation here.

The post An Antidote to Doomscrolling appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

For 50 years, Pico Iyer has been traveling the globe, seeking out sacred sites from the hidden shrines of Tehran to the funeral pyres of Varanasi. Iyer believes that travel can help us confront questions that we tend to avoid or bypass when we’re at home, forcing us out of our usual routines and bringing us into contact with the “crisscrossing of cultures.” In his latest book, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, Iyer investigates how different cultures have understood the notion of paradise, recounting his travels to places of religious conflict as far flung as Jerusalem, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, and Ladakh.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Iyer to discuss the risks of the commercialization of paradise, the power of not knowing, and how we can find paradise in the midst of impermanence.

James Shaheen (JS): To start, what is the half-known life?

Pico Iyer (PI): For me, the half-known is the source of everything essential in life: when we fall in love, when we’re terrified, when we have an epiphany. We can’t begin to explain these things, and yet they determine our lives much more than the things that we seem to be on top of. We might tell ourselves we’re masters of the universe, but I think we’re really servants of the universe. I almost imagine us living inside a tiny lighted tent in the middle of a vast darkness under the stars. We steady ourselves by holding on to the little that we know. But really, we’re defined and shaped by this vastness we can’t begin to understand. And so I suppose the book is a call to humility and a reminder to address the things we can’t hope to know because that’s where the substance of our life takes place.

JS: The second half of the title is “In Search of Paradise.” What is this notion of paradise that we’re searching for?

PI: Like happiness or peace or calm, paradise is not found by looking for it. Instead, it comes upon us, or we put ourselves in the right place where it can visit us. In fact, our notions of paradise can often keep us from paradise. Paradise, by definition, has to be open to everybody. This is at the heart of Mahayana Buddhism. And so the notion that I have a paradise that excludes you is already an expulsion from paradise. I was writing this book in response to an ever more divided world in which each group has its own, often strict notion of the paradise that awaits them but that excludes almost all of us. And so in that sense, to think that you know what paradise is and that other people don’t know is a great obstruction, which is why I’m happier to say I don’t know. It’s what we don’t know that really brings us together more than what we know.

At the very heart of this book is the framework that His Holiness the Dalai Lama describes in his book Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World. My sense is that he has witnessed so much violence and dogmatism perpetrated in the name of religion that he wants to rescue us from some of the doctrines or imprisoning notions that religion can bring. He’d like to take us back to a human reality of responsibility and kindness and interdependence where, freed of our notions of paradise, we can see that we belong to everybody else.

JS:  In the book, you write at length about your travels to Varanasi. Can you say more about what your time in Varanasi taught you about paradise?

PI: Urban India can be like a psychedelic Hieronymus Bosch painting with all the world and its contradictions put together, and nowhere more so than Varanasi. There are bodies burning and people performing Hindu ceremonies and everything in human existence compacted in a very small space. I’m a Hindu of Indian descent, but I didn’t know what to do with Varanasi’s chaos and intensity.

One day, as I was walking down to the ghats by the Ganges River, suddenly there appeared two monks in Tibetan robes. One of them said to me, “Isn’t this glorious? Isn’t this wonderful? This is what life is all about. This is human existence.” Both of them were just exulting in this human swell. It was like a wake-up call: Don’t run away from this reality. This reality is where we have to find our paradise. This is what we have to work with. And this is what I have to train my eyes, my mind, my soul, and my being to appreciate as the best possibility I can find.

One thing I found in Varanasi was that the City of Death is a city of joy. As devout Hindus are carrying dead bodies to be burned by the Ganges, they’re not despairing. They’re in a state of exaltation and gratitude that they have the chance to commit the decaying body to the holy waters.

E. M. Forster said, “Death destroys a man but the idea of death saves him.” In other words, we have to make our peace with death. And so Varanasi, the City of Death, seemed the appropriate place for me to find what I could trust as a viable paradise, not on the far side of reality, but right at the heart of it.

I suppose my feeling is not just that paradise has to be in the middle of life, but it also has to exist in the face of death. I don’t trust a paradise that writes death out of the equation because, as the Buddha taught, death is the one inarguable fact of life. During the pandemic, living so close to death made me ask, How do we live in this world of uncertainty? This was the koan that the pandemic presented to us, but it’s also what life presents to us. This state of uncertainty is the only home that we have on Earth—and therefore the home we are obliged to make comfortable. How can we turn the life we know, with all its difficulties and its impermanence, into the best kind of paradise we can have here on Earth? It’s almost a pilgrimage into real life. How can we affirm life and throw our arms around it, even as so much is falling away?

JS: At the end of the book, you say that you decided to stop seeking out holy places and instead let life come to you. Can you tell us more about this decision?

PI: That was the culmination of the book. Six miles from the mad intensity and carnival of Varanasi is Sarnath, where the Buddha delivered his first discourse. When I was in Varanasi, the Dalai Lama was giving a series of talks in Sarnath on Shantideva’s The Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. I went to go hear him speak, and it struck me that the bodhisattva, by definition, is somebody whose life project is to walk away from paradise back toward the rest of us to help us in any way she can. Once, when I was sitting in on an audience that His Holiness was having with a Korean man, the Korean man was so moved to see the Dalai Lama that he said, “You will go to the Pure Land!” The Dalai Lama replied by quoting the First Dalai Lama and said, “I don’t want to go to the Pure Land. I want to serve where I am needed.” And of course, the Dalai Lama lives that in every breath.

To go to Sarnath in the middle of the chaos of Varanasi and hear about the bodhisattva committing himself to return to the real world was really the lesson I needed to hear. It taught me that paradise is the place we find when we’re no longer longing for paradise. And so I was so grateful that in the great Hindu holy city, I chanced to hear a Buddhist teacher reminding me, “Don’t look anywhere other than right here, right now, for whatever you want to find.”

♦

Listen to the full interview below.

The post Let Life Come to You appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We often hear about the Buddhist teaching of no-self. But what does it actually mean to live without a self? In his new book, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self, scholar Jay Garfield argues that shedding the illusion of the self can actually make you a better person. Drawing from Buddhism, Western philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience, Garfield explains how the notion of self is not only wrong but also morally dangerous. Once we let go of this illusion, he contends, we can lead healthier and more ethically skillful lives. In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Garfield to talk about the ethical perils of the self illusion, the freedom that can come from moments of selflessness, and how we can let go of our selves to reclaim our humanity.

James Shaheen (JS): Your new book is Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self. Can you start by sharing a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Jay Garfield (JG): A central doctrine of Buddhist philosophy is that we don’t have selves, or that we are selfless persons. That doesn’t mean that we don’t exist; it means that we exist in another way. We don’t exist substantially or intrinsically or independently; our existence, like the existence of everything else, is interdependent, conventional, and constantly changing. In the book, I try to draw the reader’s attention to what we instinctively take ourselves to be and then to reconstruct what we actually are in order to refute that innate misconception without falling into nihilism and without failing to construct any kind of positive account of our own identity as persons.

JS: You write that the illusion of the self contributes to an attitude of moral egoism that obscures our own identities from us. What are some of the ethical consequences of a belief in a self?

JG: This is where the rubber meets the road. It’s one thing to think abstractly about the metaphysics of bodies and minds and persons. But it’s quite another to think about who we are and how we ought to think about our interactions with other people, particularly in ethically charged situations—and most of our lives are ethically charged in one way or another. In game theory, rationality is defined as the disinterested pursuit of our own immediate self-interest. In other words, I’m rational if I adopt a strategy that makes sure that I’ve got more chips at the end of the game than anybody else, and I’m irrational if I undertake behavior that takes other people’s utility into consideration when that utility doesn’t affect my own. That’s a recipe for a very narrow kind of egoism whereby the first thing I’ve got to do is care about myself. Everything we do, we do because we rely on our interactions with others and what others have done for us. And anything that could possibly increase our own happiness is something that should also be increasing the happiness of others, or we fail to recognize our profound interdependence. When we focus on the self as an independent, substantial thing different from everything else, that gives us permission to take our own narrow self-interest as motivating and to ignore the demands of morality. That’s an extraordinarily pernicious thing, and I think that it has visible and obvious consequences in our culture. It generates a kind of competitiveness, a view of life as a kind of zero-sum game, and it also justifies some of the worst aspects of consumer capitalism including income inequality, racism, and other forms of oppression. I believe that a lot of inequality is honestly traceable to the self illusion and to the way that this self illusion is not only accepted but endorsed and encouraged.

“If you’re a character in a play, your existence and your reality depend upon all the other characters.”

JS: You suggest that we are persons rather than selves. What do you mean by “person,” and how is a person distinct from a self?

JG: A person is in some sense a substitute for the self. That is, it’s a more realistic way of thinking about our identity than the self is. Persons are constantly evolving sequences of psychophysical processes, interpreted as real through the social, political, and biological conventions and ways of behavior that we have. I argue that persons are more like roles than like actors. Now, that doesn’t make them unreal. Hamlet is a real role. But Hamlet can be played by Sir Laurence Olivier or by Benedict Cumberbatch, and we don’t suddenly have two different Hamlets. We’ve got the same role, and it’s a role that’s constituted by a whole set of conventions: by norms of the theater, by scripts that have been written, by ways Hamlet has been played in the past. As persons, we’re governed by complicated sets of conventions and interpretative practices. We exist only because those practices exist. As biological members of Homo sapiens, we’re responsible to genetics. As persons, we’re responsible to culture and to others, and we are constantly changing, open-ended phenomena, not isolated, self-existent phenomena. We are part of a spatial, temporal, and social complex, not standing outside of it in a dualistic relation. We’re interdependent with one another, and so our domain of concern includes all other persons, just as if you’re a character in a play, your existence and your reality depend upon all the other characters in the play. We couldn’t have Hamlet as a one-character event. We need Ophelia and Polonius and all these other characters to make the role of Hamlet possible.

JS: You write that persons live on the “cusp of fact and fiction,” poised between the biological, the psychological, and the social. What does it mean to live on the cusp of fact and fiction?

JG: Fact is cognate with factory, and it refers to things that we make. Fictions refers to things that we make up. It’s easy to forget that fictions can constitute kinds of facts. It’s a fact that Hamlet is a fictional Danish prince. When I think about fictions, I think of things that humans bring into existence. Among the things that humans bring into existence are human beings, or persons. We’re brought into existence by the network of social and biological conventions in which we participate, by the narratives that we construct for ourselves and that are constructed by others around us. So the social, the biological, the factual, and the fictional all come together in personhood.

JS: So how does seeing ourselves as persons rather than as selves inform how we can live a moral life?

JG: Once we see that we are not solo improv stand-up players but rather members of a vast improv collective, we recognize that the only way that I can succeed is if we succeed. The only way I can be happy is if we’re happy. And the only way my life can be meaningful is if our lives are meaningful. I think the recognition that our identity is co-constituted and the only kind of identity that we have is interdependent allows us to respond to others with gratitude, with care, and with friendship. And that’s the moral attitude that I think we ought to be encouraging. No matter how egoistic we may be, I think each of us will find that we’re happier when we shed our egoism and discover that the world is full of sources of happiness, and most of them aren’t me.

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Listen to the full interview from our podcast series Tricycle Talks here: 

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James Shaheen: You’ve spoken about the tension you experience between being a Buddhist and being a poet. In fact, you said that you plan to stop writing at some point. Do you think you might actually stop writing one day?

Ocean Vuong: In the contemporary context that I live in, being an author means doing publicity and touring. Those are things I feel are very antithetical to being a successful, or rather a skillful, Buddhist. I think of the eight winds. The tree must stay firm in the eight winds, and it’s really hard when you enter spaces and there’s a worshipful attitude to them. I joke and say that if I were to assess myself, I would say I’m severely overrated because there’s so much praise out there. And there’s also criticism. But I realized that for me, the work is finished. So if my work is finished, the writing is complete, why does the praise still live on? I’m very skeptical of that. I’m suspicious of that energy, and I’m very wary of that because to me, making a book is akin to sending a raft downriver. You have to stay on the shore to live your life. You can’t live on the raft. I think I’ve seen a lot of my peers live on that raft, and that raft starts to chip away and before you know it, they’re neck deep in the river, and it’s a struggle. It’s a big shock when that raft goes away. And so for me, there has to be a difference between living and making. You make something, you send it downriver, but you have to stay on the steady ground of the shore. That said, I haven’t found a way to do it well. If I ever do, then I hope I can still write, because I love this. This is the only thing that I can do really well.

JS: That’s what I wanted to ask about, the act of writing itself. It seems to me that when we do something really well, we have to get out of our own way.

OV: Absolutely. I think we are really conductors of energies. I’ve talked about this when people have asked me about the themes and subjects in my books. When I wrote my first book of poems, right away my peers and editors and even teachers would say, “Well, now what are you going to do? You already wrote about the Vietnam War and American violence,” as if I should now write about Mars. But there’s this capitalistic anxiety to reinvent yourself, to kind of see the book as an ultimate and finite container of ideas. That’s akin to this market anxiety of “Now better tasting,” “Now with a brand-new look.” We see this all the time when we shop. But I wanted to have a different approach to my work in seeing the books as conductors. They’re conduits of the same energy. They are material manifestations of conductors, and every book actually carries the same themes and obsessions, but with a different medium, a different approach.

♦

Listen to the full interview from our podcast series Life As It Is featuring Sharon Salzberg here.

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