One thing that I have been interested in for a long time is the kind of tone that philosophical discussion takes. If philosophy is a kind of practice, then questions of tone, and questions of how we actually engage with each other, questions of the kind of rhetoric that we employ, questions of how we treat each other when engaged in discussion, all matter profoundly. Michel Serres, one of my philosophical heroes, writes of a Greek vase that depicts two people, sitting opposite each other and engaged in lively debate. But when you look more closely, you see that underneath their chairs lurk two hideous little monsters just waiting to pounce. How, Serres asks, can we manage to engage in debate, without letting those monsters crawl out from under the chairs to sow discord? And so much discussion and debate – both inside and outside of the academic world – seems to give these mischievous demons free rein. But for the past few days, those particular monsters do not seem to have been much in evidence, and I have been remembering again that there is a kind of delight to be had in philosophical discussion in the company of friends.

One thing that this brings to mind is a little footnote in that I came across in John Cage’s book Silence. I love footnotes in the same way that I love those curious little pictures in the margins of medieval manuscripts: they are little sideshows where things can happen that are often more interesting than the main text itself. Anyway, the footnote concerns the early translator of Zen to the West, D.T. Suzuki:

An Indian lady invited me to dinner and said Dr. Suzuki would be there. He was. Before dinner I mentioned Gertrude Stein. Suzuki had never heard of her. I described aspects of her work, which he said sounded very interesting. Stimulated, I mentioned James Joyce, whose name was also new to him. At dinner he was unable to eat the curries that were offered, so a few uncooked vegetables and fruits were brought, which he enjoyed. After dinner the talk turned to metaphysical problems, and there were many questions, for the hostess was a follower of a certain Indian yogi and her guests were more or less equally divided between allegiance to Indian thought and to Japanese thought. About eleven o’clock we were out on the street walking along, and an American lady said, “How is it, Dr. Suzuki? We spend the evening asking you questions and nothing is decided.” Dr. Suzuki smiled and said, “That’s why I love philosophy; no one wins.”

John Cage, Silence. p.40

The idea that, when it comes to philosophy, no one wins, is one that requires a little more scrutiny. I do think that there are better and worse philosophical arguments – philosophy is not just a matter of me saying “well, I think A,” and somebody else saying, “well, I think B (or not-A)”, and then leaving it at that. Philosophy, that is to say, is not a free-for-all. And yet, at the same time, what I think characterises genuine philosophical discussion – or what characterises the kind of philosophical discussion that I think is worth having – is a kind of shared inquiry, a kind of mutual exploration of the world and of our place in the world in which we are no longer concerned with winning or losing, but in which we are guided instead by that wonder which Aristotle said was the beginning (and maybe – who knows? – the end) of philosophy.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

I had to admit that he had a point. Of all of the people I knew and counted amongst my friends, of all the people I had ever met, this particular friend seemed to have the most impressive knack of causing trouble. And yet, of all the people I knew, he was also one of the kindest and the most generous, one of the people whose company I enjoyed the most, and one of the people who cared most passionately about others and about the world.

When it comes to our virtues and our shortcomings, it does not seem to me as if we are dealing with the kinds of things that can be counted up, so that we can be given a final mark on how we we are doing in our lives. There are two reasons for this, I think. Firstly, it is because our acts of thoughtlessness do not cancel out our acts of kindness, nor do our acts of kindness cancel out our acts of thoughtlessness. It was true that this particular friend was trouble, but it was also true that he was immensely kind and generous. Neither of these facts excluded the other. But there is another reason as well, and that is that those things that we notice most of all are frequently all those things that go wrong: the words that we speak out of turn, the unkind thoughts, the clumsy acts that we later regret. What we don’t notice are the everyday kindnesses, the moments of ease, the small acts of generosity. These things are not invisible to us because we are gloomy or ungrateful, but because they have kind of natural ease to them. What we notice are the bumps and the ruts and the knocks, the things that break with the flow of our lives. We don’t notice when people manage to get by with each other in a crowded street, stepping out of each other’s way, or letting each other be; we notice the rare times when people snarl or snap or come into conflict with each other. The virtues, that is to say, appear quietly, and without fanfare – so quietly, in fact, that it takes a degree of attention to notice them at all.

No doubt it can be useful to notice the things that go wrong, the acts of clumsiness, the words we should really not have said. But at the same time, it can also be useful to notice that this is not the whole story, to recognise that our life is not an examination, that we are not going to be given a final mark, and that even if it were, we might already be doing rather better than we realise.

Photo: Stock Exchange  

The idea of cosmopolitanism is, in fact, one that has always attracted me. As a writer, I find many of the books that I love come not from the traditions of English literature, but from beyond. And I might even be tempted to see my engagement with Buddhism over the years in this cosmopolitan light, as a kind of broadening of the possibilities of thinking and acting. As a philosophical notion, cosmopolitanism dates back to the time of the ancient cynics. When Diogenes was asked where he came from, he did not say that he was a citizen of Sinope, but he said instead “I am a citizen of the cosmos”, so scandalising the Athenians by refusing to identify first and foremost with the polis, with the city-state. I am not sure if Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book Cosmopolitanism is going to scandalise anybody in quite the same way; but at the same time, it is a persuasive exploration of how we may be able to live together with each other, how we may be able to practice ethics, “in a world of strangers.” Appiah, a philosopher at Princeton, explores the implications of cosmopolitanism with the kind of fluency and charm that is all too uncommon in philosophy books (for those who have not read the book, he can be heard over on the Philosophy Bites podcast site).

One of the crucial claims that Appiah makes is that cosmopolitanism involves the recognition of both difference and universalism, and thus treads a kind of middle path between relativism on the one hand, and moral absolutism on the other. Making the case for universalism, we could say that we all have a shared biology, and that this shared biology sets many of the parameters for the kinds of beings that we are and the kings of things that we do. The folks who live over there (wherever “over there” happens to be) may seem to be pretty funny, but when you look more closely, they are pretty funny only within the bounds of this shared biology. They too, like us, get up to the same kinds of things: they are born, they raise their children, they fall in love, they talk about how best to do philosophy or how best to cook vegetables, they grow old, they die. Nevertheless, although there is much that is shared, the differences between us are not negligible. We live – depending on where we are, how we are brought up, and what influences have borne upon us – according to different modes of life. These two are not in contradiction: one of the human universals is that we creatures capable of living according to different modes of life. It may be that one frog (for example) goes about its life in much the same way as another frog. But human beings are not like this. The universal fact of human suppleness is something that leads to the fact of difference. It is not quite true, as Sartre claims, that our existence precedes our essence; but at the same time it is not quite false either. And so, it is also the case that that the people over there (from our perspective) are, in fact, pretty funny; although the corollary of this is that we (from their perspective) are pretty funny as well.

One of the crucial points that Appiah makes arises from the tension between universalism on the one hand and difference on the other. We can sometimes think that moral conversation is about securing agreement, and that only on the basis of agreement can we find ways of living together. If we could just exercise our reason with sufficient vigour, the argument goes, then we could see through all the different moral issues that afflict us, we could talk things through, and we could find a way of living harmoniously side-by-side. The bad news, however, is that this goal is one that is rarely reached, and that the differences that divide us are such that there is perhaps little chance of reaching this kind of moral agreement. But, on the other hand, the good news is that we do not need moral agreement to live with each other. Often, we get by, even when agreement is lacking.

That is to say, conversation about matters of right and wrong and so forth is not so much a way of getting to a final judgement; but instead it is – at its best – a means of helping us to find ways of putting up with each other. I might also add the reverse, and caution that conversations about matters of right and wrong are often dangerous precisely because – at their worst – they can lead us to believe that we cannot or must not put up with each other, leading as much to division as to harmony, as much to discord as to amity. In a world where differences will never be fully resolved, the dream of ultimate moral agreement is one that can cause untold damage. When we forget Diogenes’s challenge for us to remember that we are not just citizens of Sinope, or of wherever it is that we come from, or when we give in to the temptation to stake our identify upon one particular region out of the vast sea of conditions – the ten thousand things – out of which we have been born, it is then the problems start. And this is something that Appiah hints at, although he is not explicit on the point: we are, all of us, already citizens of the cosmos. I do not mean this in a vague and mystical sense. What I mean is that we are born out of an enormous range of conditions, that we are all of us multiple, and that to stake one’s identity, once and for all, upon a single flag, creed, nation or ideology is to close one’s eyes to the vastness and the complexity of this sea of conditions.

Yesterday, as I was walking down the street and seeing so many thousands of people all rubbing shoulders with each other, I was astonished that I didn’t see a single snarl. Thousands of people, putting up with each other. Perhaps it doesn’t seem a very elevated goal. Perhaps it seems ordinary. But such ordinariness is well worth preserving.

Biophilia, love of the world: this is not something spiritual or abstract or even particularly elevated. Instead, it is that sense that we can have, living beings that we are, of being alive, that immersion in the world of the senses where birds sing and light slants, and the path beneath the feet unfolds, the everyday, ordinariness of it all. And on that evening it was, for a few moments, so unutterably beautiful that the clamour of the various dramas in which I had been immersed for the day subsided. So I stood for a while admiring the blackbird, then I thanked it (it seemed the only polite thing to do) and made my way home.

It is remarkable how such a simple thing – an evening walk, a bird in a tree yelling its head off – can manage to cut through so much mental entanglement, can revive you when you are tired, can bring an almost immediate sense of well-being. And it occurred to me that evening that one of the things about the world is that it is largely indifferent to the human stories that we weave. We may be, as I have said before on this blog, storytellers by nature; but nature itself is not story-like. And because the stories that we weave can so often be limiting, can so often trap us, or can so often simply go over the same old ground, again and again, this attention to the world can loosen the bonds a little, can give us over to a kind of thinking that can help us find new paths and tracks through the world.

For me, there is a kind of Lucretian peace that can be found in attention paid to the world; and it is for this reason that frequently I find in scientific understanding a kind of stillness. On the other hand, I often find that religious dreams and ideas simply generate further clamour that adds to an already clamorous world. It is the tendency of projecting what are parochial human dramas onto the universe as a whole that depresses me most about a good deal of religious thought. This tendency seems to me to be both a discourtesy paid towards the universe, and also a denial of the true astonishment of living.

In these moments of astonishment at being alive, there on the road home, in these moments when the human dramas that we are caught up in find themselves in abeyance, there is a kind of bodily, living sense of being immersed in the world that breaks with all the dramas that we carry around in our heads. What I find most fearful about religion is this: that in its hunger to make everything conform to human stories, it might eliminate all those oases in which we can have respite from a kind of clamour that is entirely of our own making.

Some of the ideas have been developed over the years here on thinkBuddha.org, so thanks for all of your help. I’ll post again here when the book is published.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

All of which makes me think of something that happens at times on silent meditation retreats. You are sitting in the meditation hall, and you see somebody across the way who has such an air of profound calm and poise that it is frankly intimidating. Ah, you think, if only I could be like them. Then, at the end of the retreat, you find yourself sitting next to them during the final meal, when the silence has come to an end. ‘How was your retreat?’ you ask tentatively.

‘Oh,’ they say, smiling ruefully through a mouthful of something wholesomely organic, ‘it was truly terrible. I was all over the place…’ Then they proceed to tell you about the dramas that were being played out beneath the cool, unruffled exterior. Which just goes to show, you never can tell.

Anyway, thanks to the folks at Psychologies magazine for the mention, which I greatly appreciate. And I’d like to welcome any Psychologies readers to the site. I hope you enjoy your visit.

Image of Nichiren calming a storm: Wikimedia Commons

But speaking personally at least, I’m pretty much convinced that my own mind is really not that spiffy at all. OK, so it can perform a trick or two when it needs to. It’s not without its uses. So far it has managed to get me by. But at the same time, when I take a cool and dispassionate look at it, it seems a fairly shoddy affair. Any mind that does not accurately file important information about where I last left my glasses, or that seems to so stubbornly resist the tidy logic of the word-order of German sentences, is clearly not as spiffy as all that.

So it is nice to know that it is not just me. Gary Marcus’s Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind is a useful corrective to starry-eyed pronouncements of some philosophers. Marcus’s contention is that the engineering of the mind is much more ad hoc than we are often prepared to admit. Sure, it can do some smart stuff. But much of the smart stuff that it does is due to kluges, in other words, shortcuts and Heath Robinson-style fixes, and the kind of slapdash engineering that would make you queasy with unease if the mind were, for example, a car or an airplane.

In his book, Marcus draws on a large body of research in psychology to explore the various kluges that lie behind those everyday things that minds do – remembering, believing, choosing, generating language, experiencing pleasure, and (alas!) malfunctioning – and by the end of the book he has built up a picture of the actual workings of the mind that would be a useful corrective to any idealist philosopher. Or, for that matter, any idealist Buddhist.

My own interest in the kluginess of the mind is closely related to my Buddhish tendencies. When I started out meditating some fifteen or so years ago, I did so out of the vain (in both senses) hope that I might thereby manage to upgrade my mind to something a bit spiffier. I’d read all kinds of books about Buddhist sages who had minds perfected by the long practice of meditation, and I gave myself fifteen or so years to do the same. But from the very start, things didn’t seem to turn out quite as I had hoped. When I sat down on the cushions and directed my mind to simply following the coming and going of the breath, I found that I was even more feeble at performing this kind of simple task than I might have feared. My mind wandered off before I had even counted ten, or five or even two breaths. This was dispiriting stuff for a beginner, but I persevered out of the hope that one day I would triumph.

As the years went by, however, I began to realise that it doesn’t really work like this. Sometimes I managed to rein in my mind’s tendencies to wander a little, and sometimes I didn’t. But the more I got to know my own mind, the more I had a sense that it was both tricksy and fundamentally recalcitrant. And although certain approaches to Buddhism present the kluginess of the mind as a problem to be surmounted, I became increasingly sceptical of the possibility of the mind overcoming its own haphazard nature, and increasingly convinced that the mind – or my mind at least – was klugey through and through. Not only this, but the more I looked at what people in general were like, the more I came to the conclusion that it was not just me, but everybody was saddled – for better or worse – with a mind irredeemably afflicted by kluginess. Even the most accomplished Zen master may sometimes forget where they have left their glasses. A decade of meditating in a solitary cave in the Himalayas is no guarantee against fallacious beliefs.

Alongside this growing awareness of the fact that we are all irredeemably klugey has come a different attitude to meditation. These days, I no longer think of meditation as a kind of upgrade, replacing my gimcrack, shoddy, not-quite-fit-for-purpose mind with one that is sleek, shiny and new, one that functions with a cool, unruffled grace. Instead, it seems to me that the reason meditation is both useful and fascinating is that it is a way of exploring directly this kluginess of the mind, of recognising the slips and the fudges and the shortcuts, and of finding ways of living with them. It is not, that is to say, a means of perfecting the mind, but instead as a kind of empirical practice that acts as an antidote to the fantasy that there could ever be such a thing as a perfected mind, and that finds what could be called practical kluges for living as best we can with the klugey mind.

With this shift in attitude has come something else, as well: instead of finding meditation frustrating, I have found myself increasingly intrigued by the kinds of things that my mind does. Sitting there on my cushions, my mind does what it always has done and always will do: sometimes it remains with the breath, sometimes it gets tangled in obsessive thoughts about German word-order, sometimes it drifts off to wonder about what I should have for breakfast, sometimes it dozes, sometimes it rumbles away with irritation, sometimes it is as raucous as a cage of monkeys… And this, when it comes down to it, is the deal. But the way I see it now, this is not the occasion so much for self-recrimination as for curiosity. Perhaps it is only by recognising how deeply klugey the mind, and by giving up on the idea of perfection, that it is possible to be a little more understanding of ourselves and of others, a little more aware of the ways in which we can move and the possibilities that are open to us, a little less sure of ourselves, and a little wiser in how we respond to ourselves, to others and to the world.

The article, unfortunately, said nothing about wisdom, whether ancient or otherwise, and was instead an whirlwind tour of various undeciphered scripts: the Indus valley script, Linear A, and so on. It was an interesting enough article (I’ve been interested in the Indus Valley ever since, almost twenty years ago, I shared an evening meal in the Salt Range of Pakistan with a scholar who worked on the Indus Valley civilization), but what took my attention was something rather more peripheral: the question of why the copy writer for the New Scientist decided to talk about ancient wisdom. Why not ancient foolishness? Or – given that the content of all these various bits and pieces of texts is still unknown, and thus it is far too early to tell if what we are dealing with is wisdom or with foolishness – simply ancient writing.

Here there is something interesting. Why – almost without being able to help ourselves – do we locate wisdom in the past like this? Why do we assume that there is a connection between the deep past and deep wisdom?

The idea that we live in an age of decline is such a common complaint that we almost take it for granted. And the evidence seems to be that people have repeatedly succumbed to this idea in very different times and in very different places. Two and a half thousand years ago, over in China, Confucius looked back to the past and the great sage-kings Yao, Shun, and Yu, and – wondering what had gone wrong – thought “My, wouldn’t it be good if rulers today could be like them?” These days, now that Confucius is himself an ancient, we look back at him and think, “My, wouldn’t it be good if sages today could be like him.” Meanwhile, in India, certain early Buddhist texts make the same complaint: things aren’t what they used to be. The world is already in a state of decline. And today Buddhists look back and say to themselves, “Well, folks back then were really pretty splendid… We’re just not up to it.”

It appears that the ancients are much more magnificent figures than we ourselves are or ever could be. And such dreams of magnificent ages of wisdom located in the deep past are seductive. When we succumb to them, we might even allow ourselves to think (but perhaps not to admit too freely) that back then, if we had been around, we’d probably have been magnificent too. But then we shrug. What can we do? We are necessarily the children of our age.

Whilst I think that this tendency to overestimate our forebears is largely unhelpful, I do however think that there is a connection between wisdom and the past, although it is not necessarily the connection that we might think it is. Wisdom – or the kind of everyday wisdom that is worth wanting – may not have been any more prevalent in the past; but wisdom may turn out to depend upon some sense of the past. Here I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin’s definition of wisdom: counsel woven into the fabric of everyday life. Stories, accumulated experiences, attention to the world… these are the things that we weave together into the fabric of our lives to find counsel. The forgetting of the past does us no favours if we cherish wisdom (as philosophers claim they do); but this does not mean that folks in the past were in general any more or less wise than we are now. And if they seem so, the reason is probably that they are, in a very real sense, fictional characters. Failing to see this leads us into the trap of thinking that way back then, everything was somehow suffused in a holy and unworldly glow. This, in turn, can lead on the one hand to a kind of dismal perspective on the present, and on the other hand to unreasonable expectations of what the limits of human possibility might be.

Let me suggest a corrective to this nostalgia for the wisdom of the ancients. Whilst the stories are full of such starry-eyed stuff, if we turn to more mundane documents, we find that the picture looks rather different. In terms of the traditions of Buddhism, the Vinaya texts – texts that relate to the monastic code of conduct – act as an invigorating corrective to such dreams of golden ages long gone. Take, for example, the Vinaya’s accounts of sexual practices amongst the monastic community. Here we find that, far from being paragons of wisdom and virtue, some of the ancient Buddhist sangha were up to all kinds of things: from masturbation, to sex between monks and nuns, to sex between monks and monks and nuns and nuns, to rather more inventive behaviours, such as copulation with monkeys, corpses and decapitated heads.

“Now at that time, a certain bhikkhu living in the Great Wood at Vesālī, having befriended a monkey with food, engaged in sexual intercourse with it. Then, dressing early in the morning and carrying his bowl and outer robe, the bhikkhu went into Vesālī for alms. A number of bhikkhus wandering on a tour of the lodgings, went to the bhikkhu’s dwelling. The monkey saw them coming from afar and, on seeing them, went up to them and wiggled its rear and wiggled its tail and offered its rear and made a sign. The thought occurred to the bhikkhus, ‘Undoubtedly this bhikkhu is engaging in sexual intercourse with this monkey.’ So they hid off to one side.
“Then the bhikkhu, having gone for alms in Vesālī, returned bringing almsfood. The monkey went up to him. The bhikkhu, having eaten a portion of the almsfood, gave a portion to the monkey. The monkey, having eaten the almsfood, offered its rear to the bhikkhu, and the bhikkhu engaged in sexual intercourse with it.

For those with an interest in the full details, the admirable Access to Insight translation project, from which the extract above comes, has the relevant passages (complete with illustrative stories and forensically detailed semi-legalistic analyses).

The above, needless to say, is not one of the stories that is read out to inspire the faithful in Buddhist centres across the world. But texts such as this are important because they act against any tendencies we might have towards romanticism. If things were really that great in the old days, one has to wonder why the compilers of these texts went to such trouble to document things such as this. The pious might protest – unconvincingly, I think – that the compilers were making up hypothetical cases to simply cover all bases and all possibilities. But the texts certainly present themselves as accounts of actual happenings and responses within the monastic community to such happenings; and whilst it is always wise not to approach texts too naively (are monkeys really that knowing?), and to be aware that there may be many things going on here other than just reportage, such accounts of bawdy behaviour certainly take the shine off the idea of the wisdom of the ancients just a little.

This, I think, is no bad thing. If we allow ourselves to be seduced by stories of incense-perfumed ancients who drift around soft smiles, beaming out rays of light that reflect their perfect virtue, then we are at risk of finding ourselves aspiring to a kind of wisdom that is – and never has been – possible. In aspiring to something that is essentially make-believe, we might find that we overlook those things that may help us to attain to a degree of actual wisdom, here in the world, the kind of wisdom that may make us, for example, refrain from doing things with monkeys that we ought not be doing or that we might later regret. In realising that the ancients, as we ourselves, were as often as not stumbling around, trying and often failing to make sense of things, frequently baffled and confused, often misguided, sometimes downright cruel, we might be able to re-read the past and, in this endeavour, find ways of going about the real work of weaving what counsel we can find, both in the past and in the present, into the fabric of our lives.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps. There are many things that I simply fail to understand. But I want to sidestep this charge, and ask what I think are some interesting questions about interpretation. Such questions are particularly pressing when it comes to classic texts such as the Heart Sutra. I am struck, on leafing through some of the commentaries written on the Heart Sutra, by two things. The first is the air of certainty that so many commentators have, the boldness with which they say: the sutra means this. The second is the curious fact that these various commentators do not seem to agree on those things about which they seem to be most certain. This raises the question of who has the right interpretation.

Of course, this in turn assumes that there is such a thing as the right interpretation, and I’m not sure that this is the case. There may, however, be wrong interpretations – or, at the very least, interpretations that don’t get us anywhere. To interpret the Heart Sutra as a manual for troubleshooting your broken computer, for example, will probably not do much either to help you fix your computer or to enhance your understanding of the Heart Sutra. But even when we have done away with these kinds of unhelpful or unenriching interpretations, it is hard to find our way to the interpretation that really nails the text. Could it be that the very thing that calls for interpretation is the fact that the text is uninterpretable, in the sense that whatever meanings may be found in the text are not there on the surface, but need to be drawn out?

It might be helpful to imagine a sliding scale of interpretation. At one end are relatively unambiguous things, for example the zookeeper’s cry of “Run! The lions have escaped!” Of course, this could be interpreted in various ways. It could, for example, be a piece of zookeeper performance art… But my bet is that most of us, when hearing this as we stroll through the zoo, would have the sense to run and hide in the café. The café is a good place to hide, because they have coffee there. And cakes. The doors closed, over a steaming mug of coffee and a slab of cake, it is possible to debate the finer points of interpretation in relative comfort. And, whilst discussing these points, it might happen that a lion strolls pass the window, or a doctor rushes to the aid of the zookeeper who has had his mind addled by workplace stress, so clarifying the situation a little. Often, that is to say, we have neither the need nor the leisure to indulge in long processes of interpretation and, when it comes to lions at least, it pays to err on the side of caution. This, then, is one end of the spectrum. At the other end are are rather more ambiguous and – it has to be said – rather less urgent utterances. For example – oh, you know – the claim that form is emptiness and that emptiness is form. You need more than one slice of cake, I feel, to untangle the interpretive knots in texts such as these.

Texts that are richly interpretable such as the Heart Sutra generate whole traditions of interpretation that seek to bring out the hidden meanings, to make the texts themselves utterly clear and lucid. And whilst these traditions are often interesting in their own right, they tend not to converge on single meanings, but to diverge. Various Buddhist commentators may agree that the Heart Sutra is saying something really important; but they may well disagree on what this really important thing is. This absence of convergence suggests that there is not, in fact, a single hidden meaning in there that – with sufficient thought, meditation, discussion, coffee, cake or whatever – can be drawn out. Not only this, but traditions of interpretation tend to also to deaden us to the sheer liveliness of texts like this. Sinologist Stephen H. West talks about the way that texts such as the Heart Sutra can easily become swallowed up by their own traditions. Traditions of interpretation strip texts of their obscurity, and replace them with clear, lucid meanings; but in doing so, they also strip texts of a lot of their power. As West suggests, it may be by saying “bu” to these traditions, or by wu-ing readers off the straight-and-narrow with new and idiosyncratic approaches, that we can free classic texts from a kind of imprisonment.

Here it might be possible to suggest an answer to the question of what it is that makes a classic text in the first place. My hunch is that successful classics are all, in a sense, uninterpretable, in that they do not give us a single, clear and unambiguous meaning. And it is for this very same reason that successful classics are texts that that give rise to interpretations, that ask of us that we interpret them nevertheless, that bug us, gadfly-like, into making some kind of sense of them. And this, I think, is why the Heart Sutra is worth reading. Not because it tells us unambiguous truths about deep sources of wisdom; but because – like many other classics besides – it is, in its refusal to be pinned down, richly generative of new thoughts and new possibilities.

(Image courtesy of AlohaOrchid )

I look up from my book, and see the sunlight glinting on the reservoir as the bus turns onto the road into town. Get real, I think. What a strange thing to say. I think about this for a few moments more, then I go back to my book.

Get real: this imperative is one that you meet with a lot. Lately I’ve been keeping my ears tuned for it, or for variants of the same thought: from grim-faced politicians who talk about facing up to contemporary realities, to the poster for a new novel about one of the 10,000 kinds of misery possible in human life, written by a writer who, apparently, “tells it like it is.” And it seems to me that in all of these related imperatives there is something that looks very suspiciously like a world-view. Getting real, in this sense, is clearly not about noticing the light glinting off the reservoir. If anything, it is about putting such things to one side, and turning one’s attention to these 10,000 kinds of misery. Getting real is, it seems, about putting to one side all reasons to be cheerful, and staring long and hard into the dark heart of existence.

Except that, even in saying this, I fear I am guilty of the same world-view: how easily the words “the dark heart of existence” came to mind! And to be sure, there is a great deal of suffering in the world, and any responsible perspective on life must, I think, pay heed to suffering. Yet at the same time, this “get real” attitude, an attitude that sees suffering as at the heart of things, and that takes it as the fundamental condition of existence, is one that I am not convinced by. Life, this idea leads us to believe, is essentially something tragic; and if there are to be such things as peace, calm, happiness, joy, pleasure, kindness, generosity and any of the other things that might make life worth living, then these are things hard-won, snatched from the jaws of suffering. They are pinpricks of light that never fully illuminate the darkness of the stage on which we move.

No doubt this is a compelling story: tragedies often are, not least because tragedies have heroes, and we sometimes like to imagine ourselves as heroes. But, susceptible as I admit I sometimes am to such tales, when it comes down to it, I’m just not convinced. Life is not, at root, tragic. It is not, at root, anything at all. Tragedy – and its reverse, the assertion that, despite appearances to the contrary, we live in the best of all possible worlds – is a matter of interpretation, a matter of the kind of storytelling we do. And whilst I think storytelling is an essential part of what it is to be human, the desire to tell stories about life in general is one that impoverishes our sense of the world, and that dulls us to the complexity of things. The “get real” attitude may even be one that manages to close us off to suffering: because if we see suffering as a fundamental condition of existence, rather than something that happens, in certain times and in certain places, under certain conditions, then we can find ourselves almost overwhelmed, despairing of ever being able to respond, or shrugging our shoulders and saying “Well, what do you expect? It’s a tragedy, after all…”

So the next time I hear the words “get real”, I’ll try to ask myself this: what kind of story am I being cajoled into accepting? And in what sense, if any, is this story real?

The answer, however, is simple: that the world is a fantastically interesting place, and many of those bits of paper – not all, alas, but certainly the bits of paper that I am interested in – are a means of exploring this interestingness of the world. Indeed, many of the bits of paper that I have been reading – the one example that stands out in the last month is Edward O. Wilson’s wonderful Biophilia, a profoundly moving book the relationship that we human beings have with the natural world – have been richly satisfying and insightful.

In my dealings with Western Buddhists – and sometimes in the discussions on this blog – I have sometimes been surprised by how little time people have for bits of paper. There can sometimes be a tendency to dismiss ‘book learning’ as something somehow undignified and inferior. Sometimes the message seems to be this: throw out your books, burn down the libraries, empty your head and just sit in silent meditation!

But this seems to me to be a shame, if only because it cuts us off from so many rich sources of knowledge about the world and about ourselves, from so many fresh perspectives, from so many thoughts that we don’t yet know how to think, from so many questions we have not yet begun to ask, from so many paths that might lead us into seeing afresh the sheer poetry of the world.

The idea that we have to choose – either sit in silent meditation or labour over dry and arid tomes – is, I think, mistaken because our minds are not organs dedicated to performing only one particular task. There are different ways of thinking, and different ways of using the mind. Aristotle knew this, back in the day, when he saw that there was a difference between theoretical knowledge, practical wisdom, and that tricky-to-translate term poiesis – the kind of activity brings things forth things like books, perhaps, or blog posts, or even cakes (actually, as I write this, I’m not sure that the scholars would be with me when it comes to the cakes, but I’ll let it stand).

It is good, of course, to be aware when things are becoming unbalanced. I have met many scholars who could have done with a bit of meditation to loosen them up. I have met many meditators who could have done with a well-chosen book to really engage their critical faculties. And I have met both scholars and meditators who could have done with a bit more social contact, or with a drink down the pub, because meditation and scholarship are both activities that lead – when left unchecked – to unhealthy levels of weirdness and eccentricity.

And perhaps this is the crux: whilst there is much insight to be had from both meditation and scholarship, these are means to an end, and the end is the transformation of the relationship that we have the world. There is a wonderful passage in Michel Serres’s book The Troubadour of Knowledge where he says (and I am paraphrasing with a kind of wild abandon here) that one should read everything, one should swallow the dictionary and whilst one is at it the thesaurus, the encyclopedia and the rest of the library to boot… But then, when one has done this, one should leave the library behind, go out into the hills, walk through the woods, drink wine with friends, take a boat across the high seas. When this happens, you start to forget all the things that you have once learned. This knowledge that you have acquired over the months of labour amongst books and papers and documents begins to sink into your bones and into the body. And one day you wake up without a thought in your head, and all of that reading (most of which you can no longer bring to mind, or have no interest in bringing to mind) begins to at last bear fruit. And the same goes, I think, for meditation. This is advice to myself, masquerading as advice to others: it is good to meditate; it is good to read; but what is really good is to live with wisdom and sensitivity.

In the book Hofstadter develops an astonishing – but, I think, rather convincing – view of the self (or even of the “soul”): not as some kind of non-material or spiritual entity beamed down from God (remember Him?) knows where; but instead as something that arises out of the world, something that is fluctuating and changing yet nevertheless semi-stable, and something that is impossible to locate in a single place within the cranium, but that is smeared out across the world; in our own heads, certainly, but also in the heads of those who we know, of those whom we have encountered. My self, that is to say, is not so much a thing, as it is a mass of self-reflexive, loopy patternings. I can’t really do justice to Hofstadter’s deep and subtle arguments here, but the book is well worth reading and it has got me thinking about the seriousness with which we take our own existence.

Let us say, just for the sake of argument, that Hofstadter is right, that our precious selves or souls are hallucinations hallucinated by hallucinations, bootstrapping their way merrily into existence. What might this mean for all of our loves and passions and hopes and fears, these things that seem so important to us? Does it render these things unimportant? Does it mean that we should somehow do our best to do away with this hallucination? Well, not exactly. And for two reasons. Firstly, because this seems to be one hallucination that we are stuck with. And secondly, because it is a hallucination that may make ethics – you know: niceness, friendliness, those things that make this hallucinatory life of ours worth living – possible. There’s a nice line in the Mallika Sutta which reads, “Though in thought we range throughout the world, we’ll nowhere find a thing more dear than self,” and which goes on to say, in a piece of analogical thinking of which Hofstadter would no doubt approve, that “since others hold the self so dear, he who loves himself should injure none.”

Perhaps, then, we might conclude that the trick is not to try to jettison the idea of the self, but instead to not take ourselves so seriously. And yet this, too, doesn’t seem to ring true. Part of the strange loopiness of the hallucination of the self is that we cannot find a place to stand outside the self from which we can not take ourselves seriously. In Being and Time Heidegger talks about how we are beings for whom our own being is always an issue: taking ourselves seriously is simply a part of the deal. Can you imagine anybody taking themselves more seriously than the celebrity interviewee who claims that they “don’t like to take themselves too seriously”? And, besides, taking ourselves seriously – and, by extension, taking the selves of others seriously – may be another of those things that makes life worth living.

But if this ol’ self of mine is a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination, then I’d like to go at least some way to acknowledging the fact. So let’s add a further loop, and say that perhaps it’s not a matter of doing away with the hallucination, nor is it a matter of not taking the hallucination seriously (both of which, I suspect, are neither desirable, nor perhaps possible), but it instead a matter of not taking quite so seriously the inevitable seriousness with which we go about our existence. Call it a kind of second-order irony, if you like.

How might this work? Let us say that you are waiting for the train, and the train is an hour late. You find that you are becoming restless and grumpy, to the extent that you are snarling at the other passengers. Then you think, “Hey, I’m a hallucination hallucinating a hallucination! Why so grumpy?” And with this bracing thought, you prepare to jettison the hallucination altogether. Here, however, you come up against a brick wall. Hallucination or not, you are still there pacing up and down, and the train is still ten minutes late. There’s nowhere, outside of the hallucination to go. You’re stuck with it.

So, instead, you try first-order irony. “Ach,” you say, “I take my life so seriously, but it’s only a hallucination. Why the seriousness? Why the glum face? Why don’t I just laugh a soft laugh (tinged, perhaps, with a poetic hint of melancholy), and stop worrying?” But this doesn’t seem to work either, because you find that you are either getting deeply serious about the fact that the train is late, or you are getting deeply serious about something else – perhaps about whether your soft, ironic laugh is tinged with precisely the right amount of melancholy, or about how great you are because you are not taking things seriously at all (are you?), whilst the other passengers are huffing and puffing. You are stuck not only with the whole hallucinatory shebang, but also with the fact that you are deadly serious about it, and can’t for the life of you find a way to undo this seriousness.

Along comes second-order irony and says “Ach and double ach: here I am, confused wee mammal that I am, getting steamed up about trains and lateness and my precious self. How quaintly earnest I am, that all of this should matter so much to me! How curious and wonderful it is to be tangled up in an existence so loopy and so strange.” And in this second-order irony, I think – if we give up all aspirations to break out of the endless looping circles of the hallucination, if we recognise that our lives matter to us and cannot but matter (and that the lives of others matter in the same way, and cannot but matter) – there might be a little relief from the frustration at the lateness of the train, a way of soothing our tendency to snarl at our fellow passengers, and a little more room for creativity, for pleasure and even for joy, here within the heart of a hallucination that has never mattered more.

The Polish elephant is not, however, alone. Although the moralists like to imagine the animal world marching in and out of the ark two by two, the reality is simply not like this. As Jonathan Balcombe points out in his wonderful book Pleasurable Kingdom, the animal kingdom at large is a pretty sexy place, what with thick-billed murres (a kind of seabird) having their wicked way with clumps of vegetation, masturbating reptiles, lesbian hedgehogs (I kid you not), gay fruit bats, dolphins with sex toys, and bonobos being pretty much up for anything at all. Even the otherwise unimpeachable Bodhicattva, the thinkBuddha cat – despite having been neutered – has a more than slightly alarming affection for my meditation blanket, although to preserve the delicate sensibilities of my readers, I will not go into details here. Let me just say that when he and the blanket are together, I prefer to leave the room.

Certain kinds of moralists like to claim that homosexuality is unnatural; but our elephant friend in Poland, as well as the increasing evidence from the biological sciences documented by Balcombe, suggests that this is simply a load of nonsense. But behind this idea that homosexuality is unnatural lies another load of nonsense, and that is the idea that “natural” and “unnatural” are moral categories in the first place. After all, infanticide is a fairly natural kind of behaviour, but (thankfully) not many of these same moralists advocate such a practice. Not only are “natural” and “unnatural” pretty much dead-in-the-water as moral categories, I suspect that they are not very useful categories for any purpose. Wouldn’t it be better to view all behaviour naturalistically, and to start from there?

Michal Grzes may fulminate, the moralists may get hot under the collar, but such arguments do not stand up. If we want to talk about morality in relation to sex, then it would be better to start from a different viewpoint. And a good place to start might be this: by developing a robustly naturalistic view of what we are, and on that basis by seeking to diminish the harm that we cause ourselves and others.

Anyway, I really should go and rescue that meditation blanket. Shoo, Bodhicattva! Shoo!

I said that I would like to see the sculpture, if at all possible; but when I said this, Damianus looked uncomfortable. ‘There is,’ he said, ‘a problem.’ He went on to explain that the sculpture belonged to his household (mata rumah): it was dangerous for others to see it. ‘I know that you do not believe these things,’ he said, ‘but we say that if strangers who are not members of the household see this sculpture, they fall sick or die. Or when they leave their plane will crash. Or their boat will sink. Or,’ he added with a shrug, ‘perhaps not. Who knows?’ Damianus hesitated for a few moments. Then he said, ‘As you do not believe, I will let you see it, and perhaps you will be fine. But I would like you to sign a disclaimer first.’

A disclaimer?

Yes, said Damianus. If I was willing to absolve him of all consequences, and to put on paper that I had been fully warned, then he would let me see the walut. Did I want to go ahead?

I myself hesitated for a few moments. Then I thought better of it. No, I said. Thank you for the kind offer, but I would prefer not to.

It was not that I believed that there was some kind of mystical power invested in the walut. It was not that I really thought that the ancestors would wreak their revenge upon me if I dared to poke my nose in places where my nose should not be poked. Nor was it only a matter of cultural sensitivity – the hunch that Damianus really would rather not have shown me the sculpture – although this was no doubt a factor. So why did I refuse? After all, there are many who would have simply diregarded Damianus’s warnings and would have been none the worse for it. And certainly, in terms of my view of the world, I have no truck with what Carl Sagan has termed the “demon-haunted world”. There are, I am pretty certain, no such things as demons, spirits, ghosts, ghouls or non-corporeal ancestors: not, at least, outside of our own minds and thoughts and dreams. And yet something just seemed wrong about the idea of signing that piece of paper.

I was thinking about this again the other week when I read a review in New Scientist of Bruce Wood’s book Supersense: Why we believe in the unbelievable. The book explores the paradox that, even though we may have given up on the demon-haunted world, the demon-haunted world has not given up on us. Our brains are still the same old human brains, however rationalist our credentials. We may not say that we believe in spirits and ghosts and so forth, but our brains are still attuned to thinking in these ways, as human brains always have done. When, a couple of years back I was doing some initial research for the novel I am currently working on, I held in my hands the guitar that used to belong to the painter Francisco Goya, it was with a quivering and quite non-rational reverence, as if I had in my hands something almost holy. Conversely, as Hood points out, most of us would shrink from wearing an item of clothing that belonged to a mass-murderer. We might know that the guitar is just wood, that the clothing is just cotton or wool: and yet the human mind simply does not apprehend the world in this fashion.

If Hood is right, then all of us, from the most hard-nosed of champions of reason, to the most otherworldly of shamans and priests, have one foot in the demon-haunted world. And if this is the case, then this is something that we need to come to terms with. There is a kind of rationalist bravado that hopes that we might be able to dispense with the whole lot of it, to throw out the spirits and gods and ancestors in one fell swoop; but there are good reasons for thinking that this bravado is misguided. If we are stuck with the demon-haunted world, then I think we need something less dramatic than bravado. Perhaps a kind of irony born out of the recognition that the mind will continue to conjure such extravagances, even if we know that there is no rational ground to believe in them.

This puts a rather different slant on the interminable science vs. religion debates. The challenge for the hopelessly irreligious is this: to recognise that the demon-haunted world is here to stay and that we all move in a world haunted by countless non-corporeal spirits. We simply are the kinds of beings who swear at dumb machines when they break down, who find ourselves willing the traffic lights to change when we know that there is no possible causal connection between our willing and the changing of the lights, who relate to the world in countless ways that cannot be called rational. But, conversely, the challenge for the hopelessly religious is this: to admit the possibility that the entities in which so much faith is put, the spirits and saints and gods, are born not out of the world, but simply out of the ordinary, everyday, functioning of the human mind. And in recognising this, perhaps it might be possible to take both rationalism and religion a little, well…, a little less seriously.

It’s impossibly utopian, of course, but might there not be some kind of convergence here? What if the rabbis and priests and monks were able to say, “These otherworldly beings of which I speak, and in which I cannot but believe – they are born only from my mind; and yet I believe, because I cannot do otherwise”? And what if the rationalists were to put their bravado to one side and say, “I do not believe, of course; and yet were I to find myself in a foxhole, I would probably pray along with the rest of you, not because there are any grounds for thinking that anyone is listening, but because I have a human mind, and I cannot do other than this” ?

And what if they were then all to say, “Ah, what does it matter? Let’s go and grab a bite to eat”?

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there…

Such a perspective lent my idea of meditation a kind of pioneering bravado, what with all of that clinging to frightful, no-man-fathomed cliffs: the meditator as Tintin, fearless boy-reporter setting out to search for truth in foreign lands, facing untold dangers along the way. The only problem was that, when I started to take a closer look at what was going on in my experience, when I sat on the cushions for any amount of time, hoping to find Gerard’s cliffs to which I could excitingly cling, hoping to find a clear and unambiguous drama, the territory I had set out to explore seemed to be rather more shadowy, ambiguous and mist-shrouded than I had hoped. Things seemed to slip through my fingers leaving only ambiguities upon ambiguities, shadows upon shadows. I wanted revelations and breakthroughs and profound bursts of wisdom to interrupt the everyday, and what I got was a sense that the mind is a slippery thing, hard to pin down, impossible to grasp, sometimes (it seemed, it still seems) hardly there at all, sometimes chuntering on in its own sweet way without any obvious sense or purpose, and without telling me what it was up to, always subverting my attempts to get to grips with it, to map it. And if I couldn’t even get clear on the territory, if I couldn’t even track down some cliffs on which I could bravely hang, then things began to look pretty bleak for an aspiring boy-reporter of the inner life.

I don’t know for certain when things changed. It took several years. But little by little, as I became more frustrated at the seeming absence of any clear plot or drama or even any clear territory on which such an adventure might be played out, I started to notice instead those things that I had hitherto dismissed as distractions form the story I was telling myself: the equivocations and the uncertainties and the slips; the way that the mind goes its own sweet way, often as obscure in its inner workings as is the pancreas; the flickering of awareness that came and went, never quite resolving into a plot or a story. And the more I noticed these things, the more the business of sitting on my backside on a cushion for stretches of time, doing nothing much, began to make sense to me. Of course, it wasn’t any longer Tintin in Tibet: there were few cliff-hangers, there was nothing much in the way of an adventure (and Snowy and Captain Haddock were nowhere to be seen). No longer a heroic quest; more a matter of a kind of closeness to the business of living. To the ordinary, everyday business of living.

But then, I’m from Norfolk. What do I know about mountains…?

Normal service will, I hope, be resumed soon. Some time, I anticipate, after I have worked my way through the remainder of the pile of student work that is awaiting marking…

One thing that I am thinking about lately, and also noticing when I manage to make it to my meditation cushions, is what a downright curious thing experience is. For most of the time, it can seem as if there is nothing more blindingly obvious, nothing more directly in front of our noses, than experience. We know we are having it when we are having it (so we tell ourselves), and we know what kind of experience we are having. Even if we are not experts in anything else, we act as if we are experts when it comes to our own experience.

However, when you start to pay attention to this seemingly obvious thing, it begins to slip between the fingers. One fun thing to do is to ask yourself questions like the following: What am I experiencing now? How do I know that I am experiencing what I am telling myself that I am experiencing? Is my experience continuous or is it momentary and atomic? Do I experience all the senses together, or do they have different rhythms? Do I have a single experience, or multiple experiences? What do I experience at the fringes of my visual field? Do I have an experience of myself? If so, what is this experience?

The more I ask these kinds of questions (whilst on the meditation cushions, but also whilst on the bus, whilst sitting on the railway station, whilst idling away time with the cat, and so on), the more perplexing it all seems. Trying to catch hold of experience seems as successful as sitting by a pool on a full moon night, and trying to catch the moon’s reflection in a net: whenever you think you’ve got it, it eludes you. The idea of “getting hold of” experience or of “grasping” experience seems to immediately push it out of reach.

Image: Hiroshige (again!), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

As I’ve noted on this blog before, and as the archaeologists know, if you want to know what people really get up to, you don’t ask them (particularly if you are an archaeologist, because the people in question are almost always not in a fit state to answer), but you do sneaky things like poking through their rubbish bins. Similarly, if you want to know what people are really interested in, then perhaps instead of asking them to account for themselves, and facing the inevitable spin that comes from this self-accounting, you can just see which words and topics come up most often when they actually go about the business of writing and speaking.

And so here is a word-cloud, looking rather like an elegant concrete poem, of what I’m interested in here at thinkBuddha.org (or at least, what appears at the moment on the front page of thinkBuddha.org). The words the crop up more often are larger and more prominent, whilst the ones that are less common are smaller, in the same way that in medieval paintings the important figures loom large, whilst the less important ones are diminutive. The image, by the way, is clickable, so you are free to study it at your leisure.

Now for a bit of analysis. It appears that I’m somewhat interested in Buddhism, although (worryingly for some) I also seem to be interested in errancy. Consciousness figures highly, somewhat on a par with wandering, and I also like stories (between these three things – consciousness, wandering and stories – there may, methinks, be a connection…) And thought seems to also be something that I think about rather a lot.

Best of all, however, is the word that was boldly emblazoned across the middle of the image, giving me at last a precise and unambiguous answer to what this blog is about: SOMETHING.

That’s right, folks. What concerns me, above all else, is something. Reassuring, no?


Images created by Wordle.net are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License

For some, of course, this clamorousness seems something of a problem: What is the real Buddhism? Which are the authentic teachings? Which is the true word of the Buddha? But these are, I think, the wrong questions. It is possible to see life (or Buddhism, or philosophy…) as a search for the golden key that might unlock some treasure-chest of ultimate mysteries, or that might open a door to some inner chamber of final meanings; and if this is the perspective that we have, then it is clear that (unless we are good at picking locks!) only one key will do. There are certainly plenty of folks out there who claim to have just such a key. But if life isn’t like this, if it is not a matter of unlocking mysteries (either because they are not there in the way that we think they are, or because they are not held under lock and key in the first place), but is instead a matter of finding a way, of navigating through the seas of existence, then the question of authenticity becomes less urgent. Instead we can afford to be more pragmatic. Not what is the real Buddhism? or What is the one right path to take? (is there ever such a thing, outside the thought experiments of the philosophers, as a single right path); but instead, Is this helpful?

This pragmatic question has three salutary effects. Firstly, it demands a return to a kind of empiricism: to know whether something is helpful or not requires that we pay attention. Secondly, it places a responsibility upon us, so that we are no longer surrendering our faculty of thought to the idea of higher authority, but instead patiently thinking through the implications of what we think and do. And thirdly, it leads to a kind of fluidity, unanchoring us from the heavy and monolithic forms of dogmatism, and allowing us to move more freely again.

There is a beautiful simile in the Lekha Sutta that alludes to this fluidity of movement. There are three kinds of people, the text reads. Firstly, there are those who are like inscriptions on stone: what is written (and here the specific context is that of a discussion of anger, but the image is far too good to waste!) remains written forever. Secondly, there are those who are like inscriptions on soil: what is written remains for a while, but is then effaced. And thirdly there are those who are like inscriptions on water: what is written passes as soon as it is written, leaving behind nothing more than swirls and eddies and currents.

Wandering, waywardness and errancy are much underrated. For most of my education, errancy was considered as something to be stamped out, something to be avoided at all costs. In the classroom, back at school (and even now, in the conference room) it was always better to be silent than to be wrong. But errancy is absolutely central to thinking, which tends to dessicate unless it allows a certain kind of wandering; and wandering, as Michel Serres writes in The Troubadour of Knowledge, “includes the risk of error and distraction”.

No wonder, then, that the drive for efficiency, for the fastest route between two points, for absolute inerrancy, has led to severe consequences in the education system in the UK. As the Guardian newspaper reports on the recent Cambridge review of education, “Learning that requires time for talking, problem solving and exploring ideas is sacrificed for […] a ‘memorisation and recall’ style of learning”, leading to the decline of “natural curiosity, imagination and love of learning.”

To err may be human, perhaps. But perhaps this should not be understood as a complaint about all that is wrong with us. Instead it could be seen as a recognition that we are creatures who are continually questing, who have curiosity born in us from the very beginning (unless it is killed by our education or our circumstances or the manufactured stultifying stupidity of certain parts of the media), who are capable of bringing about newness, of creating, precisely because we are capable of wandering. “No learning,” Serres writes, “can avoid the voyage.” What if errancy wasn’t a fault, but was instead the lifeblood of learning, of knowledge and of creation?