Parched is the first book that I've read from the genre of autobiographies involving the struggle against addiction and alcohol. I'm happy that this genre exists, because people need to know that others who suffer the disease and have mostly overcome it are out there. I also thought it was rather ironic that this was one of my first books to read in South Korea, where alcohol is not only dirt cheap, but also a way for colleagues to connect with one another. The other unrelated but interesting background circumstance is that I read this book in conjunction with the Way of Korean Zen which has a drastically different voice. Comparatively, the vulnerability in this narrator seems much more human than the hardy insistence on psychological resilience in that one.
The narrative begins with the woman just waking up and already having a hangover, trying to remember what happened before she blacked out. She seems chipper enough, though she realizes that she has a problem but didn't know where to start doing something about it. I can somewhat relate to that in my past bouts of depression, but my troubles have never been mixed with substances so I can only imagine what it's like. She packs and prepares for the road quickly, because there's going to be a family reunion, and that starts off on a chapter or two where she recounts many memories from her childhood involving her family.
While I didn't have nearly as many siblings, I related to fighting with my one sibling for almost no reason other than the fact that we were supposed to coexist within the same house. Then there was the way one parent was more attentive and forgiving than the other one, but maybe that happens in all families. Her style of writing is very talkative, and it's like she's in front of you having a conversation with you - haha - over a drink. I have never met her, but I imagine that her speech would be peppered with all sorts of hand gestures and lively body language. The way she uses words reveals a kind of personal charisma that makes sure that I can't help but like her.
She also seems to really value people, because every time she mentions someone, she never has anything bad to say about them and seem truly grateful for their existence in her life. This is true even of the people who she would make fun of because they may have been somewhat unkind to her in some way at some point. She mentions everyone, even a few former lovers. She never quotes these people, though. There were also religious quotes beginning almost every chapter, but the ones I agreed with the most were the nonreligious ones - the words about fighting one's own mind, and the ones about the way it's much harder to love someone through one's actions than to entertain the idea of love. This was a foreshadowing of what Heather's salvation was going to be - part of it will have to do with Christianity.
Her sense of humor is somewhat dark, but not as dark as Kurt Vonnegut's. She didn't see millions of people die in a senseless war, but she still knows what poverty is like, what it is to consistently need a comfort object or substance, and the long unforgiving hours of retail labor. So she makes allies in that way, sometimes relying on friends to survive. I did laugh out loud several times when reading. I may have related to the sense of humor also because she spent a few years in Boston, which is where I grew up. It's true that if you're in the right neighborhood, there are plenty of bars, which would make it tough for an alcoholic to go several hundred yards without being tempted by the poison. The idea of substance abuse because a person is spiritually unfulfilled is not new, but I also thought there were other forms of salvation than religion.
The way it ended didn't seem all that interesting to me. I'm glad she found her happiness and became clean, but in terms of the story, it just felt too mundane. Of course her friends realized she had a problem, but she wouldn't listen. Of course her family had to eventually corner her and stick her into a rehabilitation program. She found that because she sometimes blacked out, she wouldn't remember appointments and bits of conversation she had said, so that upset a lot of people. It was like writing this book was her way of purging herself psychologically - to discover when it began and how it progressed, which was part of defeating it. Fortunately for the sake of the book as a whole, the way everything ended didn't really take away from any of the earlier moments in the autobiography - it was still very readable, very relatable and pleasant.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
This historical fiction novel is sweet. Vonnegut tells his tale through Billy Pilgrim, and the narrator's voice is very soothing, despite the horrendous happenings that it describes. Of course war is a terrible thing, but it feels muted through this voice. I imagine that the muted effect is from several factors: it was told in third person, Vonnegut's severely dark but very funny sense of humor, the time travel and the episodes with the Tralfamadorians. A reader can't help but like Billy Pilgrim for his perceived ineffectualness, and then pity him for his bad luck and all the memories that made up his life.
Every time someone or a group of people dies, Vonnegut writes, "So it goes." It becomes this stark deterministic acceptance of death, like it's something that just happens so it's nothing to become upset about. Even when Billy Pilgrim is put into situations where he must be angry at some point, and describes the characters around him in negative terms, it doesn't seem like he's blaming them. It's like the war removed him from any emotion except heavy depression, and it's probably mostly post traumatic stress disorder that the narrator sounds so numbed all the time, but it makes the story seem even more believable and objective.
I'm not so sure that this novel is scary enough to be antiwar. Yes, it tells about the people dying, all the sufferings and indignities that people suffered at the hands of people in power, who almost randomly decided that one group of people are unforgivable, so another group of people go to kill them for deciding the first group of people are unforgivable, but the book doesn't decry anything. Everyone in the book seems rather stupid, including all the people in power who decided all these random things, and maybe the book decries their stupidity and stupidity in general, but there's no anger in it, no outrage. Taking a step back, I'm not sure why I assume anger and outrage should be in an antiwar book - maybe that's because those two emotions are what I'm used to from people who claim to stand up for a cause.
Anyhow, the time travel and Tralfamadorians illustrate his inability to tell reality from his imagination at the end, but he doesn't even seem to mind. Reality is as unreal as any science fiction book in his mind, apparently, and not even a well written science fiction book, since the series that Krout wrote was to be found in a porn shop decorating the window and helping it pretend to be a legitimate bookstore. His juxtaposition of that scene with digging up and burning bodies is very transcendental and Buddhist, even - the idea that people are just bodies, whether they are dead or alive. That is also true of the Tralfamadorian idea that people who ever lived will always go on living in some form or another.
Other war books and movies speak of the act of war removing the humanity from a person. Maybe it's because Billy Pilgrim wasn't a real soldier - he never actually killed anybody, and that's why it doesn't seem like his humanity was ever removed. He feels very detached from everything - "unstuck in time", as he says - but his telling of this story reveals that he's still very much human despite not feeling the same as he did before, despite being completely unable to relate to anyone except for others who were in the war and not seeking glory, like O'Hare. He's broken, dead inside, but still human.
It was an easy read. Vonnegut uses such simple language. I would say the only difficulty in reading this book is that, after hearing his numbed voice in my head for hours at a time, I would lift my nose away from the book and feel his numbness for a while even after having closed the book. That's the only thing that prevented me from finishing the book in a jiffy, because it made me feel temporarily as dead inside as Vonnegut had been feeling for decades after the war, probably all the way up to his death a few years ago. So it goes.
Every time someone or a group of people dies, Vonnegut writes, "So it goes." It becomes this stark deterministic acceptance of death, like it's something that just happens so it's nothing to become upset about. Even when Billy Pilgrim is put into situations where he must be angry at some point, and describes the characters around him in negative terms, it doesn't seem like he's blaming them. It's like the war removed him from any emotion except heavy depression, and it's probably mostly post traumatic stress disorder that the narrator sounds so numbed all the time, but it makes the story seem even more believable and objective.
I'm not so sure that this novel is scary enough to be antiwar. Yes, it tells about the people dying, all the sufferings and indignities that people suffered at the hands of people in power, who almost randomly decided that one group of people are unforgivable, so another group of people go to kill them for deciding the first group of people are unforgivable, but the book doesn't decry anything. Everyone in the book seems rather stupid, including all the people in power who decided all these random things, and maybe the book decries their stupidity and stupidity in general, but there's no anger in it, no outrage. Taking a step back, I'm not sure why I assume anger and outrage should be in an antiwar book - maybe that's because those two emotions are what I'm used to from people who claim to stand up for a cause.
Anyhow, the time travel and Tralfamadorians illustrate his inability to tell reality from his imagination at the end, but he doesn't even seem to mind. Reality is as unreal as any science fiction book in his mind, apparently, and not even a well written science fiction book, since the series that Krout wrote was to be found in a porn shop decorating the window and helping it pretend to be a legitimate bookstore. His juxtaposition of that scene with digging up and burning bodies is very transcendental and Buddhist, even - the idea that people are just bodies, whether they are dead or alive. That is also true of the Tralfamadorian idea that people who ever lived will always go on living in some form or another.
Other war books and movies speak of the act of war removing the humanity from a person. Maybe it's because Billy Pilgrim wasn't a real soldier - he never actually killed anybody, and that's why it doesn't seem like his humanity was ever removed. He feels very detached from everything - "unstuck in time", as he says - but his telling of this story reveals that he's still very much human despite not feeling the same as he did before, despite being completely unable to relate to anyone except for others who were in the war and not seeking glory, like O'Hare. He's broken, dead inside, but still human.
It was an easy read. Vonnegut uses such simple language. I would say the only difficulty in reading this book is that, after hearing his numbed voice in my head for hours at a time, I would lift my nose away from the book and feel his numbness for a while even after having closed the book. That's the only thing that prevented me from finishing the book in a jiffy, because it made me feel temporarily as dead inside as Vonnegut had been feeling for decades after the war, probably all the way up to his death a few years ago. So it goes.
The Way of Korean Zen, by Kusan Sunim
This book took a very long time to finish. It's not for the casual reader, because it has a very authoritative and stark voice. The material is aimed at those who are truly interested in Zen Buddhism, and all other readers may find it a bit dry and textbook-like. The book is divided into two parts: the first illustrates the history of the ideas of Zen Buddhism, along with tales of men who have lived their lives according to these ideas, and the second part talks in detail about the ideas themselves.
I bought this book during the first part of my stay in South Korea as an ESL teacher (refer to my other blog Lily Internationally) and I have to say that these ideas really helped me to accept more ideas in the Korean culture than I could have without this book. After all, Zen Buddhism is about changing oneself to attain enlightenment. Changing oneself often involves accepting oneself, which indirectly leads to the acceptance of many situations and people in one's surroundings as well. Judging by the author's English name, I dare say that the original must have been in Korean, which explains the somewhat awkward language at times, and why it seems so dry as well.
The chapters on the history of Buddhism and the life of a monk in Korea were necessary because, whenever an aspect of culture travels some place else, it changes. That is also true of Buddhism - you would not find the same Buddhism in India as in China, nor in China as in Korea. Or even between South and North Korea. Korean Zen Buddhism relies heavily on the Buddhist community, where if you become a monk, the only people you would interact with from that day on - except to beg for alms or to lecture about Buddhism - are other Buddhist monks. They also eat only vegetables, and no meat is allowed. It is a life based upon discipline: all activities are purely utilitarian, including sleeping and waking, meditation, copying texts, cleaning and traveling.
Aside from the Spartan lifestyle, the other reason this book may be a bit dry is because it's meant to be a user manual of sorts for those interested in becoming a monk or nun, to live their lives for this religion. It doesn't lie - becoming a monk or a nun, having to give up all that a layman is used to and dedicating one's life to the study of attaining enlightenment, is not easy. There are instructions on how to meditate, and it distinguishes between focusing on hwadu (which means mental and spiritual silence) and the mind (we assume that this means one's thoughts and sometimes mental noise) as well as the Buddha (which means the deity, as well as a person's purest soul).
There are plenty of metaphors and poems to illustrate the author's points, and those can be hard to understand at times. The idea here is similar to the reason I write, where if you see a situation in a certain way - and poetic verse is kind of like portraying a situation and rearranging it as a puzzle - then it may be easier for you to understand, and therefore accept. Or even the other way around, accept and therefore understand. Most of these poems use natural scenery and events in nature to illustrate the point, which makes for beautiful pictures in people who have a versatile third eye. It also tries to say that reality is often made of circumstances that people cannot change, and therefore the only thing that a person can change is his or her mind. In that way, a person's perception becomes an adaptive tool instead of a defense mechanism.
That being said, I am nowhere near agreeing with everything that was said in this book. For example, it emphasized the soul over one's body, and I feel that a person should take care of her body first, because otherwise hunger and illness get in the way of a person taking care of one's soul. It also encourages people to give up their families and lives to become Buddhist monks or nuns, and I tend to think that a person should be able to adhere to a faith while still living their own lives. There's also the not eating meat - meat is delicious. Of course there can be substitutes for the protein like beans and tofu, but it's not the same. Anyone who's ever enjoyed barbecue can tell you that. Also, there is no discourse on how to become a nun, or actually anything about being a religious woman in this book at all - women just exist as wives who prevent believers from being faithful to Buddhism, like distractions.
I agree with cultivating a strong mind which can accept reality. However, this book would probably not convince me to go to a Buddhist nunnery and try that life, because enlightenment and being detached from the world doesn't seem to be worth it to me. However, if you are interested in Buddhism - and particularly Korean Buddhism - you should still read this book to see if this cultural viewpoint of this particular faith suits your idea of happiness and or enlightenment. It's an informative read.
I bought this book during the first part of my stay in South Korea as an ESL teacher (refer to my other blog Lily Internationally) and I have to say that these ideas really helped me to accept more ideas in the Korean culture than I could have without this book. After all, Zen Buddhism is about changing oneself to attain enlightenment. Changing oneself often involves accepting oneself, which indirectly leads to the acceptance of many situations and people in one's surroundings as well. Judging by the author's English name, I dare say that the original must have been in Korean, which explains the somewhat awkward language at times, and why it seems so dry as well.
The chapters on the history of Buddhism and the life of a monk in Korea were necessary because, whenever an aspect of culture travels some place else, it changes. That is also true of Buddhism - you would not find the same Buddhism in India as in China, nor in China as in Korea. Or even between South and North Korea. Korean Zen Buddhism relies heavily on the Buddhist community, where if you become a monk, the only people you would interact with from that day on - except to beg for alms or to lecture about Buddhism - are other Buddhist monks. They also eat only vegetables, and no meat is allowed. It is a life based upon discipline: all activities are purely utilitarian, including sleeping and waking, meditation, copying texts, cleaning and traveling.
Aside from the Spartan lifestyle, the other reason this book may be a bit dry is because it's meant to be a user manual of sorts for those interested in becoming a monk or nun, to live their lives for this religion. It doesn't lie - becoming a monk or a nun, having to give up all that a layman is used to and dedicating one's life to the study of attaining enlightenment, is not easy. There are instructions on how to meditate, and it distinguishes between focusing on hwadu (which means mental and spiritual silence) and the mind (we assume that this means one's thoughts and sometimes mental noise) as well as the Buddha (which means the deity, as well as a person's purest soul).
There are plenty of metaphors and poems to illustrate the author's points, and those can be hard to understand at times. The idea here is similar to the reason I write, where if you see a situation in a certain way - and poetic verse is kind of like portraying a situation and rearranging it as a puzzle - then it may be easier for you to understand, and therefore accept. Or even the other way around, accept and therefore understand. Most of these poems use natural scenery and events in nature to illustrate the point, which makes for beautiful pictures in people who have a versatile third eye. It also tries to say that reality is often made of circumstances that people cannot change, and therefore the only thing that a person can change is his or her mind. In that way, a person's perception becomes an adaptive tool instead of a defense mechanism.
That being said, I am nowhere near agreeing with everything that was said in this book. For example, it emphasized the soul over one's body, and I feel that a person should take care of her body first, because otherwise hunger and illness get in the way of a person taking care of one's soul. It also encourages people to give up their families and lives to become Buddhist monks or nuns, and I tend to think that a person should be able to adhere to a faith while still living their own lives. There's also the not eating meat - meat is delicious. Of course there can be substitutes for the protein like beans and tofu, but it's not the same. Anyone who's ever enjoyed barbecue can tell you that. Also, there is no discourse on how to become a nun, or actually anything about being a religious woman in this book at all - women just exist as wives who prevent believers from being faithful to Buddhism, like distractions.
I agree with cultivating a strong mind which can accept reality. However, this book would probably not convince me to go to a Buddhist nunnery and try that life, because enlightenment and being detached from the world doesn't seem to be worth it to me. However, if you are interested in Buddhism - and particularly Korean Buddhism - you should still read this book to see if this cultural viewpoint of this particular faith suits your idea of happiness and or enlightenment. It's an informative read.
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