George Saunders On Mindfulness, Accountability, and 3 Drugs for Your Suffering – The Marginalian

Here is the mathematical logic of the spirit: If love is the quality of attention we pay to something outside of ourselves and hate is a cover for not understanding ourselves, then patriotism – another word for kindness – is mainly a matter of deepening our awareness and sharpening our attention to both sides of the skin that binds the membrane itself.

George saunders – whose wonderful novels and essays are a kind of jungle gym to play with your thinking hard and sensitive enough to increase the fluency of perception called empathy – explores this similarity between the precision of his mind and the size of the heart in a wonderful interview. The Daily.

A practicing Buddhist and writer whose primary theme is worldliness, Saunders sees parallels between Buddhism and writing as tools of kindness honed through awareness and mindfulness:

We have thoughts and they create and govern us. Those thoughts about us are wrong. Both Buddhist practice and writing, have the opportunity to travel, Oh, those are just brain farts. They're just automatic, and I didn't create them, and I'm not sure I want to take ownership of them. At the same time, they affect my body. So you have to be clear long enough to see them as separate from who you really are.

Kindness, he realizes when he re-thinks his 2013 old meditation on the subject, is something bigger and simpler than goodness – the silence of that “monkey mind” long enough to consider what is most useful to another in a given situation. (There are few things better in this culture of ideas painted on one's skin than seeing someone change their mind or change their opinion in public.)

Literature, Saunders notes, can silence our ordinary thoughts enough to invite “more empathy, more participation, more patience,” bringing about “increasing changes of consciousness on the part of the writer and the reader” — changes about letting go of the fist of matter and conviction that is oneself and holding onto the world with an open palm. He points to three awarenesses that we must ultimately acquire in order to wake up from the fundamental illusions that keep our lives stuck, that stand between us and grace:

You are not forever.

You are not the most important thing.

You are not separate.

There are Buddhist precepts, but they are also the rewards of good books – something Saunders captures well in her presentation of the collected stories, essays, and poems of one of her favorite authors, Grace Paley:

A great writer who imitates, on the page, the dynamic power of the human imagination probably comes very close to portraying pure empathy.

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The world needs no representation: it's there, all around us, all the time. What you need to be better liked. Or maybe, what we need is to be reminded to love it and to be shown how, because sometimes, being busy as we try to keep living, loving the country slips our mind.

Showing us what his life's work was like, whether Saunders saw it or not — we remain naive in our being, the shoots that don't see that they bloom. Two decades before he came to the question of grace directly, he shone a brilliant light on its substratum – the relationship between storytelling and selflessness – in his 2007 essay collection. Integrated Megaphone.

Considering that story is a pillar of neurocognitive identity, the story we tell ourselves about who we are comes to shape who we are, who we become in relation to the world. This fundamental vulnerability of consciousness, Saunders sees, can be exploited and exploited, but it is also what gives storytelling its transformative power:

At first, there is a blank mind. Then that mind finds sense in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind is wrong, the mind of the world. By confusing an idea with the world, the mind creates a theory and, after creating a theory, it feels inclined to act… Because an idea is always just a projection of the world, whether that action will be disastrous or beneficial depends on the distance between the idea and the world. The function of the mass media is to provide these simulacra of the world, from which we construct our ideas. There is another name for this structure of simulacra: storytelling.

The point, of course, is that under the mind that the world itself is made of, just as under the person – the formation of ideas from which we build our knowledge of reality – the soul, that free and loaded word that we use to grasp something great and pure: the first basis of life. In our culture, there is no greater courage than disarming ready answers and facing the world as a naked soul, empty as a question; to find instead of saying who we are and what this is – this short burst of wonder and grief we experience before we return our borrowed star to the universe, wasted if lured with conviction, wasted if shorn with grace. Saunders offers a simple, yet very difficult solution:

Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to stay confused forever. Anything can happen. Stay open, forever, so opening hurts, then open another, until the day you die.

A great writer's gift to the reader is not better answers but better questions, a greater tolerance for uncertainty, a way to turn confusion into grace, and at the same time a way to see the world clearly to love it more deeply. I find Saunders' kind words about Grace Paley to work well in her writing:

Reading Paley will, I predict, make you better understand the idea that love is attention and vice versa.

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What did the author leave behind? Scale models of perception and thinking.

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Paley's model advises us to suffer less for loving more – to love the world more, and to love each other more – and then gives us a more direct way to love more: to see better. Once you really see this world, you'll think better of it, he seems to say. And then it gives us a way to see better: let the language sing, sing accurately, and remove from the ordinary things, and look at the wonderful truth that knows how to do it.