Some albums need to be lived with for a while. Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever doesn’t really wow in the first listening. The music is less powerful than her wildly successful debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? but sometimes music that doesn’t quite awe you in the first listen turns out to be the music you can live with. Eilish’s Happier Than Ever may not be particularly happy, but its music can be played while brewing a cup of coffee or while sipping the result. It’s sweeping-the-house music, and that’s not a bad thing. Happier Than Ever makes me think of all the pieces of art that we consider iconic today that may not have impressed their viewers at the opening show. Meaning sometimes deepens with time, and the things that embrace the zeitgeist often fade into obscurity, while the stranger things linger. I’d put my bets on Eilish’s stranger things.
In When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go, Eilish created a voice so original and a sound so forceful, you couldn’t help but sit up and listen. Happier Than Ever is more of a lullaby, music you can safely play in the background. It lends itself well to a physical record, one you put on the turn table and leave until the needle pops free.
Eilish takes on the traumas and difficulties fame, celebrity, and success, but I feel that her attention to these themes weakens the album. We’ve heard these ideas before, elsewhere.
Yet, it’s not shocking that Eilish would tackle the challenges of fame and success in her music given the confessional nature of her work, but there’s always the risk of losing your audience. How many people can “buy a secret house” when they’re 17.
What made Eilish’s work so powerful in her first album was its bold, brazen, and straightforward relatability. Anyone who has ever been an angry teenager, or a sad teenager, or a lonely one, or a confused one could relate to When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? but the subject matter of Happier Than Ever is a tougher sell. We’re in Britney Spears’ “Lucky” territory, and I hope our culture doesn’t repeat its sins.
And yet, fame or no fame, who hasn’t dreamed “about a new career / somewhere in Kauai where I can disappear”? Is it just me, or do most people not realize how small the islands of Hawai’i are, and that Kauai is one of the smallest? It’s impossible to be anonymous in Hawai’i, even if you’re not famous. But I digress.
Fans of Eilish will perhaps initially gravitate toward the song “Therefore I Am” which is most reminiscent of the work on her debut album. It’s good. Really good. I can see the temptation to fill another album with 12 to 13 hits just like it.The fans would be pleased, and likely the critics too.
But Eilish doesn’t do this, and this decision makes me respect her artistic integrity all the more.
Any artist worth their salt will tell you that they don’t want to spend the rest of their lives singing their greatest hits, or trying to replicate them. It’s why I distrust artists like Jeff Koons, who strike a formula that works and then never change it. Yes, a stainless steel balloon dog is beautiful, but when you’ve iterated through every balloon animal at the party, what remains but lobby art and a sound investment?
Andy’s Ear. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Eilish isn’t content giving us another version of Where We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go. She’s not trying to please the investors, and not necessarily trying to please us, either.
In Happier Than Ever, she takes the creative freedom she’s been given by her own success and does the brave thing. She experiments. She slows down the pace. She goes acoustic! In “Male Fantasy,” the stunning acoustic song that closes the album, we get the sound of Bon Iver, but subject matter that is anything but Iver. There’s a delightful tension between the dreamy acoustics, soothing vocals, and the lyrics that admit to distracting oneself with pornography and a return to therapy.
If Happier Than Ever is the golden ticket any artist wishes she could have, a free pass to make the music you want with the knowledge that the momentum of your fame will carry you through, then I think Eilish used it well. Here’s the artist at her studio, revealing new directions and possibilities, while revisiting old successes. Here she is whispering, speaking, and sometimes shouting into the microphone. In one song, she throws back to the 50s. In another she throws back to herself.
Some might be inclined to say Eilish changed. She’s blonde now. She posed for Vogue. She’s gone acoustic. I don’t think she’s changed at all. In Where We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go, Eilish put her messiness on full view. In Happier Than Ever, we see the rough edges of her artistic process, and the head-spinning way that success can interrupt that process. Eilish isn’t giving us a polished version of her debut album, and for that I’m grateful.
I find Happier Than Ever irresistible. I want to put it on the turntable and listen to it again and again. I want to dance to it alone in my living room or while cooking breakfast. I want it to be the background to the party I might have had when I was younger and when people actually hung out in person. An impossible party, in the era of COVID and social media. In “NDA” Eilish sings about buying that house, but confesses that she hasn’t “had a party since I got the keys.”
If I could ever buy that house in Kauai, I don’t think I’d have a party either. But I’d probably dance to Happier Than Ever with my family in the living room.
Nine Perfect Strangers, the new Hulu series directed by Jonathan Levine, has its flaws. Nothing much happens, but perhaps that’s the point. And despite nothing much happening, I found myself riveted, wasting away a lazy Sunday afternoon intrigued by all three episodes. Nine Perfect Strangers is based on a book by the same name by Liane Moriarty. I don’t know if I’ll keep watching the Hulu show, but I sure as hell will be reding the Nine Perfect Strangers book. Subtletly is lost in television, and I’m curious to see what has been lost in translation from the book.
The nine perfect strangers who arrive at the wellness retreat (called Tranquillum) are there to escape from their pain, high-pressure jobs, and addictions, but Masha, the guru and resort founder, played fabulously by Nicole Kidman, is not ready to let them get off so easily.
We are introduced to the cast of characters in the opening episode. Through clever plot sleight of hand, we find that the nine perfect strangers are more diverse a crowd than one would expect to find at a pricey wellness retreat. A middle class family has been given a substantial discount. They are mourning the suicide of their teenage son. An influencer couple with trouble in their marriage tries to have sex in the resort’s various romantic settings, but they fall short of their goal. We later learn that the husband who drives a Lamborghini won the lottery. A former football star turned pain killer addict, is permitted to indulge in his addictions (unorthodox for a retreat to encourage addicitve behavior), but he finds that the pills mysteriously don’t work for him on the resort. A famous writer who can’t sell her next bestseller encounters enough material for ten books while hanging out at the pool, the breakfast table, and the hot spring, but can’t bring herself to write down a single thing—though she admits to considering the psychodramas between the people at the resort good “material.” Another man, who may or may not be a journalist or spy is an asshole to everyone, while simultaneously seeming to be the only person capable of exhibiting real emotions (in the opening episode, we see him trying to make up with his ex, and showing real vulnerability).
While watching the show, I kept wanting Nicole Kidman, who plays the role of the director of the expensive wellness center on which the show is set, to levitate, or invoke ghosts, or murder someone. I expected something to happen, anything. There’s a visually striking scene where Kidman strokes a hauntingly beautiful goat with yellow eyes, and another where she stands at a rugged cliff’s edge overlooking the sea, seemingly about to fall or fly. Yet, nothing much happens on Kidman’s expensive and luxuriously-appointed resort, and perhaps that’s the point. She may or may not have given her guests micro-doses of illegal psilocybin, but everything that seems to happen doesn’t involve transcending space or time. Perhaps that’s the dissappointing outcome of all wellness retreats. They may promise to exorcize demons or leave you feeling or looking younger, but they can’t turn back time or undo the ravages of mortality, death, and violence.
Instead of retreating, the nine perfect strangers are forced to suffer through a series of wellness treatments (which are, of course, based on real-life wellness treatments; the ways that people are willing to torture themselves are manifold). Guests are given smoothies specially tailored to their metabolism, they fast, are invited to dig their own graves and lie in them, are taken to a garden to forage for their own food, are taught to meditate, are invited to take “forest baths,” and indulge in pool time, hot springs, and acupuncture, but they don’t seem to understand the real treatment, which ultimately has nothing to do with any of the more familiar treatments on offer.
Wellness retreats have become another mode of consumption in American culture, places where the wealthy go to retreat from the scourge of everyday life by blatantly avoiding those scourges. There are digital detox retreats that take away your digital devices and retreats to detox from drugs. There are retreats for yoga and for ayahuasca. What’s fascinating about the retreat in Nine Perfect Strangers is the fact that Masha, the guru and guide, won’t let her guests avoid their pain.
Returning to the Earth. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Yes, they have to turn over their cell phones and drugs, and yes, they are forced to endure more and more ridiculous wellness rituals as the show progresses. But slowly, Masha, guides each guest towards encountering their demons and their worst fears. The family who has lost a son is forced to face the stark reality of their son’s suicide, and come to terms with their own buried self-blame. The addicted football player is forced to face the limitations of his own self-medication when his drugs stop working. The social media influencer, coming to rekindle the sexual spark in her marriage is pushed into more uncomfortable psychic terrain by Masha, who asks her to consider instead why her husband doesn’t love her anymore.
People go to wellness retreats to feel “well,” but the twist in Nine Perfect Strangers is that maybe we don’t feel uncomfortable enough. The path to healing is perhaps not the alleviation of pain, but the embracing of it, and what it has to teach us.
I don’t have patience for the weekly trickle of episodic television, so I’ll be reading the Nine Perfect Strangers book to get my answers about how the show turns out. Either way, I’m not here to offer spoilers. But it’s pretty clear that things aren’t going to end well. People unprepared to confront their own pain are unlikely to confront it well.
Transcendent experiences can be occasioned through many means, through recently, the use of artificial means, namely drugs, to change one’s consciousness has become a rather popular topic of discussion. Yet, I can’t help but feel that artificial means of changing one’s consciousness feels a little like exerting brute force upon a process that ought to be slower, and perhaps involve a little more work than just taking a pill. Michael Pollan in This is Your Mind on Plants writes, “Psychedelic compounds can promote experiences of awe and mystical connection” but he is quick to note that “drugs are not the only way to occasion the sort of mystical experience at the core of many religious traditions—meditation, fasting, and solitude can achieve similar results…”
Drug-induced transcendent experiences feel quintessentially American and capitalistic. We Americans want everything fast. We want fast delivery. We want fast food. We want fast cars. We love guaranteed results or we want our money back. And so it is no surprise to me that so many of us would want our transcendent experiences come to us as easily as swallowing a pill.
I’ve had a handful of transcendent experiences in my life—and the most meaningful ones have taken place when I was completely sober. They were almost always occasioned by nature, sometimes in solitude, and sometimes communal. I have experienced awe and transcendence while hiking, surfing, rock climbing, and while sitting alone in the desert.
There’s something about hostile natural environments that have the potential to occasion these experiences, though I don’t think hostility is necessarily a prerequisite. I have had these experiences while meditating in my living room as well. Though I think there is something to be said about the fact that discomfort, or rather, moving outside of one’s comfort zones, makes a change of consciousness or transcendent experience more likely.
Nature is not the only avenue available through which one can attain transcendence. Profound meditation is another. Oliver Burkeman in his remarkable book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals discusses the ways in which communal rhythms can also occasion transcendent experiences. Burkeman draws from his research to explain that “synchronized movement, along with synchronized singing, has been a vastly underappreciated force in world history, fostering cohesion among groups.” And these experiences are not limited to singers. Burkeman explains: “as dancers know, when they lose themselves in the dance, synchrony is also a portal to another dimension—to the sacred place where the boundaries of the self grow fuzzy, and time seems to not exist.
I’ve experienced this sacred loss of self while synchronizing my body to the rhythms of the ocean while surfing. The feeling of traveling with the energy of the ocean, which itself has often traveled thousands of miles to reach the shore, while also surrounded by kindred spirits who have the same goal, can indeed result in transcendence.
Bread of the Angels. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood
According to The Cut, “Transcendence is a fundamental part of the human experience. Since the dawn of our species, people have been losing themselves in ritualistic prayer, song, and dance.” Interestingly, transcendent experiences seem to occur on a spectrum. In this conception of transcendence, I needn’t discount the state of flow I experience while surfing or writing an essay, nor necessarily distinguish it from the profound state of awe I have experienced while paddling over waves on the north shore of O’ahu, or while watching the sun set over Half Dome in Yosemite National Park.
Transcendent experiences have the quality of reminding us that we are not the center of the universe. It is one thing to know that one is not the center of the universe; it is another thing entirely to feel it. It is perhaps why I can read David Foster Wallace’s essay and commencement speech, “This is Water,” and can understand its truth intellectually, but don’t always feel it.
Wallace asks his listeners, who are recent graduates, to remember the importance of humility when it comes to some things they believe are absolutely true. “Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth.” Wallace concludes that an education’s purpose is ultimately to teach us how to choose what to pay attention to when we “construct meaning from experience.”
Transcendent experiences are perhaps a quality of experience no different than ordinary life, always accessible and present, if only we are able to shift our state of mind. There is enough beauty, and love, and wonder, and awe at the end of the period as there is in the whole universe, as much in a single moment as there is in all time and space. And so, in order to construct a transcendent experience, perhaps the perquisite is simply this: it demands that we pay complete attention, that we be completely present.
Either way, I don’t want to discredit those who have experienced transcendent states while under the influence of drugs. I have read the research and these experiences do seem to provide deep states of peace to those in hospice care and to individuals experiencing mental illness. Psilocybin appears to have profound effects on those who may be struggling. Yet, there’s something about the idea of transcendence through a pill that strikes me as being a little off. It feels a little like forcing open the gates of consciousness with a crowbar, rather than patiently doing the work and waiting for it to unfold. A pill might be able to get you to pay close attention, but doing the work of paying close attention itself can also do the same.
Being a self in a body in time is difficult. I don’t want to put down anyone’s method for making their way through mortality, or for achieving altered states of consciousness. I just think that it’s a symptom of our culture that the easy way is written about and popularized, while the harder ways go seldom explored.
Perhaps the greatest irony of consciousness is that only by settling into the self fully can the self finally transcend itself in place and time. Plants might be able to help us get there. But so can art. So can nature. So can singing. So can surfing, or swimming, or hiking. So can just breathing.
I probably have about half as many abandoned books on my bookshelf as I do books I finished reading. Of these abandoned books, there are books that represent my ambitions: a whole shelf of rock climbing books describing lines I’ll never try, a shelf of classics of which I can’t quite bring myself to get past the first chapter (hello War and Peace), books started-because-everyone’s-reading-them, but abruptly abandoned because I couldn’t quite figure out why everyone was reading them.
The reality is that we only have so much time. We are all mortal, after all. Averages vary, but depending on where you look, the time it takes most people to complete a single book varies from between three hours to six hours. I read a little faster than that, but assuming you read two hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, that’s only about 730 hours of reading time in a single year, which adds up to about 121 books a year. Most people aren’t so committed to reading every day for two hours. The reality is that most people will struggle to finish one book a week (I know I do), and many struggle to finish even one book a month. Assuming you could finish about one book a week, at around 52 books a year, that still means that in your lifetime, assuming your lifetime is 80 years, you’ll only have room for about 4,000 books—and that’s being ambitious.
4,000 felt like a familiar number. That’s when I remember that I just finished reading Oliver Burkeman’s wonderful book (which also managed to fill me with deep existential dread and also relief). Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. In the book, Burkeman offered some similar calculations. He concluded that at best, most of us will only get about 4,000 weeks to live.
To Turn Another Leaf. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood
Given that there are so few weeks and likely so many fewer books I’ll be able to read in a lifetime, I suddenly find myself re-assessing which books I’m choosing to read. If each choice is indeed so precious, how could I not carefully consider which books I choose to read? Shouldn’t I more carefully select which books I’ll read in my limited span of time? Suddenly reading the latest Stephen King release doesn’t feel so pressing.
The beautiful and damning thing about reading is that it can’t be forced or sped up. I may be a fast reader, but reading War and Peace or say, a book about immunology is still going to take me longer than, perhaps, reading the Hunger Games. Burkeman writes that “reading something properly just takes the time it takes.” But given the pace of modern life and our easy distractibility, “we’re unwilling to accept the truth that reading is the sort of activity that largely operates according to its own schedule.” That’s because thought moves at the speed of thought—which is sometimes slow and sometimes fast, and sometimes full of interruptions. In this case, I stopped reading to write this essay, but I could have just as easily stopped because I got a phone call, or had something more pressing to attend to.
Given that I have such a limited span of time to read, it only makes sense to abandon books that aren’t working out for me.
And so, when I find that a book’s own schedule equals what appears to be close to infinity, I abandon the project. Unlike a university literature class, one of the distinct pleasures of reading books for pleasure that you don’t have a deadline, and that you don’t have to finish the assignment. There’s no essay at the end, either (unless you’re me, but if you’re me, you’re a distinct breed of monomaniacal).
My propensity to abandon books is perhaps why I’ve never been a good member of book clubs. The second a book comes along with a deadline, I stop wanting to read it. And yet, months or weeks later, long after the deadline has passed, I’ll sometimes find myself curious again.
I have abandoned many books, and I have picked up books I’ve abandoned months or even years later. For this reason, I won’t explicitly list the books I’ve abandoned here. I don’t want to doom them to hell, but rather choose to keep them in purgatory. There’s always the sense that I’ll get back to them, when the time is right.
The White Lotus’s first season is finally complete. I trust much will be written about the show as a commentary about the gulf forming between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else in America. But we know this by now. In America, there are those who serve, and there are those who never serve at all. Perhaps class in America is less defined by whether you are served (we are all served in some capacity), but by whether you have ever had to have a service job in the first place. While The White Lotus is an excellent and disturbing satire about the subtle and not-so-subtle frictions between the service staff at a luxury resort and the people who can afford to spend a night there, it is also a commentary on the political situation in Hawai’i, and about how tourism can be a kind of cultural violence.
I live in Waikiki. The White Lotus hit home for me in uncomfortable and familiar ways.
There is a scene in The White Lotus where Nicole, a CFO of a tech company, and Quinn, her son, walk through the resort, each lonely in their own bubble. Nicole looks fabulously detached in her hat and sunglasses and jewelry, armored by the symbols of her wealth, and Quinn is literally detached, absorbed in his video games and cell phone. The scene made me laugh, because it was familiar. I didn’t realize how familiar, though.
Over the weekend, while walking to the beach for my morning surf session, I saw the exact same scene unfold, but this time, in real life—here was the mother in a bright sundress, hat, and sunglasses, fabulously detached, while her son walked beside her absorbed in his phone. Life sometimes imitates art, and art sometimes perfectly represents life.
The story line that disturbed me the most was that of Kai, a local man who becomes romantically entangled with a Paula, a girl invited to the resort by her wealthy friends (the Mossbacher family). We come to understand that Paula is not particularly wealthy herself, and so inhabits a liminal and uncomfortable position at the resort. She is invited, but not paying the bill.
Kai tells Paula about how the resort was once his family’s land, stolen by powerful interests. His family cannot afford the lawyers to take the land back from the resort. Kai’s story puts a personal face on the story of Hawaii’s overthrow.
Many visitors to Hawai’i do not know how Hawai’i became a state. It’s interesting that even The White Lotus doesn’t go there, choosing to tell the story metaphorically, through Kai.
In 1893, Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s queen, was overthrown by a group of businessmen. The queen was imprisoned in her palace, and what followed was the loss of Kanaka Maoli culture, language, and the dispossession of local people from the land to which they had been connected for centuries. You can read about it in Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, which is as good a history of the overthrow you’ll find. The overthrow did not happen so long ago. It is easy to forget that for many local people, the era of the overthrow dates back to when their own grandparents were children. The Officer of the High Commissioner on Human Rights for the UN acknowledged that Hawai’i is a “nation-state that is under a strange form of occupation by the United States resulting from an illegal military occupation and fraudulent annexation.”
According to Jordan Kalani Harden’s University of Oregon undergraduate research, the profits of Hawaiian tourism “do not directly, if even remotely, benefit the Native Hawaiians whose land continues to be seized and commodified.” The state of Hawai’i depends upon tourism as the foundation of its economy. Many Kanaka Maoli want this to change. Waikiki, one of the top tourist destinations in the state, was once rich farmland of taro fields. Before the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, local people would have tended these fields freely, paying tribute to the King or Queen in food and fish and other forms of exchange. Today, local people experience a far different fate. According to the Harvard Law Review, “the lands of the Hawaiian kingdom unjustly enriched the United States when the Kingdom was overthrown… the wealth accrued due to the possession of this land has continued to unjustly enrich those governments.”
Today many local people work in the service industry of Waikiki, as kitchen workers, entertainers, drivers, cleaning staff, and more, barely making enough money to afford rent and put food on the table (food costs in Hawai’i are the highest in the nation because the state gets most of its food shipped in). Others work in construction, making new buildings to be purchased by foreign and mainland wealth (I’m not above this criticism; I have a mortgage here; I moved here from the mainland several years ago). The White Lotus touches upon the perverse cost of food in Hawai’i in a brilliant scene where the Mossbachers pile their plates up high from the breakfast buffet while two local men stand across the room, their eyes wide with horror and anger. And it’s the lucky people here who have jobs. Others have succumbed to addiction and homelessness and the ongoing trauma of colonization.
Waha’ula Heiau. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Paula seems to understand something of Kai’s situation when she finally sees the perversity of watching Kai perform a hula for tourists on land that was once his. When I first saw the hula performed at the Royal Hawaiian, I felt some relief to see traditions being carried on in what I had understood was once a sacred site. But Paula is right. For whom is the ritual performed? There is a perversity in what was once a sacred ceremony being performed as a dinner act.
Paula has a terrible idea to help Kai reclaim his land. She urges him to steal some valuables from the safe of the family with whom she’s staying. In The White Lotus, Kai’s last role is that of a burglar.
Of course he gets caught. The show doesn’t have to let us know what happens next for us to know what happens next. That Kai loses his job and will likely end up in prison is a given. In the meantime, his capture leads to celebration and even sexual reconnection for the elder Mossbachers. The story is about White people, after all, not about Kai or his family’s plight.
More alarming is Paula’s mistaken activism. Paula sends Kai off to put his body and future in danger, while she enjoys herself on a dive boat. And when things go wrong, she cries and reads books about colonialism, but you don’t get the sense that she’ll be any more deeply affected. In The White Lotus, it is impossible to correct colonial violence within the capitalistic framework.
But it is also impossible to correct colonial violence in real life. Harvard Law Review proposes that “courts should recognize a restitution remedy for Native Hawaiians seeking their rights to these lands.” Yet, who are Native Hawaiians, exactly? Blood quantum laws define who gets these benefits, yet these definitions continue to dispossess many Kanaka Maoli who may not meet the strict definition (Hawai’i is the most multicultural state in the nation). This definition is convenient and efficacious for the American government because it significantly limits who qualifies for land restitution and reduces the government’s debt with each succeeding generation.
Kai isn’t the only local who suffers erasure in The White Lotus. Lani, another local woman who gives birth in the hotel manager’s office, also never returns to the show. By the end of the show, the local bodies have all but disappeared, except in abstract. Quinn, the Mossbacher son starts paddling with a group of local men, and we see them in silhouette.
What happened to Kai in The White Lotus made me sick to my stomach, but the show isn’t about Kai. It’s about the tourists, and the hotel manager. Hawai’i becomes another backdrop to tell a White story.
While special places in Hawai’i have indeed been used by Kanaka Maoli as places of healing, Hawai’i as a whole is often romanticized as a healing destination. In this perverted schema, Black, Brown, and Indigenous people are typecast as healers, there to serve and perform “healing rituals” on visitors. The White Lotus perpetuates these ideas through some brilliantly portrayed scenes that take place in the resort’s spa.
Given the history of erasure, it is no wonder that local Hawaiian groups are very uncomfortable with tourism, visitors, and outsiders, especially during a pandemic.
‘Aina Momona, “a community organization dedicated to achieving environmental health and sustainability through restoring social justice and Hawaiian sovereignty” recently asked visitors to “stop traveling to Hawaii during a pandemic” on Instagram. The group asked visitors to respect “our land, our people, and wildlife.” Recently, there was extreme backlash on social media when tourists posted photos of themselves touching an endangered monk seal. It should go without saying, but when visiting Hawai’i, don’t touch the wildlife. That being said, even The White Lotus camera gets too close to a sea turtle for my own comfort, and I found myself shouting at the screen.
How does one travel to Hawai’i given tourism’s erasure of native Hawaiian bodies and culture? Listening to Kanaka Maoli is a good idea. Perhaps it’s not the best idea to travel during a pandemic, especially given the recent toll the Delta variant spread has had on limited island resources, particularly medical resources. One of Honolulu’s hospitals literally has no ICU beds.
In times of prosperity, the solution won’t be so easy. Perhaps responsible tourism would include researching accommodations and ensuring that the hotel is locally owned? Perhaps it would include committing to eating locally farmed and grown food while visiting, and visiting restaurants committed to sourcing from local farmers? Perhaps it would involve traveling in a manner that “leaves minimal trace,” choosing to bike or bus, rather than renting a car, and minimizing impact on natural resources by not touching wildlife or corals? Perhaps it would involve asking visitors to respect their limits should they choose to hike (tourists have to be rescued off trails all the time; the trails are more dangerous than many think)? Perhaps it could include entering any space with respect and humility, especially the ocean, and wild spaces? Perhaps it would involve volunteering while visiting? Perhaps it would involve not touching or entering any space one hasn’t been invited to enter or touch? I write these things because they represent an ideal for how I’d like to live my life here. But it’s difficult to live ideally.
Tourism has an immense impact on Hawaii’s natural resources, and on other resources like food and water. During the pandemic months, the ocean got clearer and cleaner. Kewalo Basin Harbor turned deep turquoise. Fish returned to the reefs, and the health of the ecosystems improved. I saw a sting ray while surfing in Waikiki. Rare monk seals were reported to be frolicking in the often crowded beach of Hanauma Bay. The island belonged to the locals and to the animals again. There was something beautiful about it all. A recent newspaper article in the Star Advertiser reported that since Hanauma Bay’s re-opening, the fish population in the reef has begun to decline again.
The White Lotus is a problematic show. It begins and ends with White people. But it’s a somewhat uncomfortable mirror—and that’s something.
According to ProPublica, the government still owes native Hawaiians millions of dollars for the unauthorized theft of ancestral lands, but to this day, many locals struggle with poverty, homelessness, their families scattered across the globe because access to well-paying jobs is limited, and food and housing in Hawai’i is expensive. Some of this is because of Hawai’i’s isolation. Some of it has to do with bad policy. And some of it has to do with the fact that wealthy people buy vacation homes here and tourists come with big mainland dollars, inflating the cost of everything for the local people. With home prices averaging close to $1 million, most locals can’t afford to own a home in their native homeland.
Americans don’t know how to be good guests. People leave trash on Waikiki beach all the time. I find myself cleaning up all the time.
The White Lotus certainly raised more uncomfortable questions for me as well.
The show ends with Quinn, the Mossbacher son, deciding to stay in Hawai’i. We last see him paddling out to sea in an outrigger canoe. But this ending is not without its problems. On the canoe, Quinn is “dead weight.” But his dead weight serves a function. The paddlers say they become stronger by carrying him. Quinn’s idealization of the islands is problematic, and the idealization of Quinn’s role in the canoe is also somewhat problematic. His own vision of the landscape will always be mediated by his view of it as an outsider, his position as “a rich white kid having this experience on the backs of the other guys,” as Mike White, the show’s writer, explains in his interview with Vulture.
You cannot visit Hawai’i without respect for the complexity of what it means to visit. You cannot move here, either, without facing that complexity.
I moved here. I am a transplant. My reasons for moving to Hawai’i are complex. My family comes from other islands that have been affected by American governmental policies (Cuba, Puerto Rico). I have been an outsider everywhere I have lived, and have never felt at home anywhere but here in Hawai’i where I am most an outsider. All of this is to say, my connection to Hawai’i is incredibly complicated. I moved here and I have a mortgage. But I don’t own a second home here, and I honestly think second homes should be heavily taxed. Second homes put an immense strain on local resources, not to mention, the planet, and second homeowners are seldom as connected to the local communities as those who live here.
Quinn leaves his family to stay in Hawai’i. Perhaps the most shocking moment of the show for me, was the frightening and sad moment I saw myself in Quinn. I may not have come from a wealthy family, but I was perhaps not so different from Quinn as I would have liked to believe in the earlier scenes of the show. Sure, I don’t want to paddle to Fiji, but paddling on a canoe and paddling on a surfboard are not so different. This spark of recognition is what I think makes the show genius.
I still struggle with what it means to be a good immigrant to Hawai’i. I try my best.
Quinn says he wants to live in Hawai’i because it is real here. But real isn’t always easy, and it isn’t always beautiful. There is a darkness and deep sadness in Hawai’i. There is deep anger and pain. People might come to Hawai’i to heal, but they forget that fire made this land.
Fire creates and destroys.
Healing is easy. Passing through the fire, much harder. As I write this, I hear a man chanting. The swell is rising, beautiful and dangerous, and from the sound of it, I think he’s by the sea. I don’t think he’s performing for tourists.
I was first introduced to Jack Whitten’s “Ghost Paintings” in the stunning new book, Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art, edited by Robert Cozzolino. Well, I should say I was not quite introduced to the paintings, but rather, gestured toward them. In a book about ghosts, Whitten’s paintings were the most prominent ghosts of all—as in, they were there, but also not-quite there either.
You can’t see Whitten’s “ghost paintings” too clearly in Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art. There’s a fuzzy photo of them in the gallery at Whitten’s Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego exhibition, in which the paintings themselves are each about the size of a nickel in the photo. However, you can visit the website of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and find a better quality reproduction there. ArtForum reproduces others as well, noting that this was the first time the pieces were ever published. Likely the last, at least for now.
The “ghost paintings” are reminiscent of early photography, where double exposure sometimes produced ghostly figures. Michelle Kuo in ArtForum described the series as a “haunted take on screen printing.” But Whitten’s “ghost paintings” are more haunting than the process by which he arrived at them. They remind me a little of the work of Francis Bacon, whose ghostly faces of torment are both present and not, rendered, and not-quite rendered. The sense of torment is further reinforced by the fact that Whitten names some of the pieces after lynchings.
Why don’t Whitten’s wonderful “ghost paintings” appear in Supernatural America, a wonderful book filled with some of America’s most haunted art? According to Robert Cozzolino’s footnotes, “Hauser & Wirth Gallery strictly policed these works in this exhibition. A representative (I was not allowed contact with family members) blocked potential loans, forbade any reproductions of Whitten’s work, and wanted control of design and even writing… according to representatives from the gallery, Jack Whitten’s family does not want him associated with the supernatural.”
Few paintings are given so much power, they are not even allowed to be sold. This makes this work fascinating to me.
In 1964, shortly after Whitten created his “ghost pieces,” he displayed them in his studio. Cozzolino quotes Whitten, who explained in the Brooklyn Rail that he had to put the pieces away because “it got too freaky.” The paintings, Cozzolino writes, “caused visitors to see things.” Whitten wrapped them in plastic and stored them away. It was only until the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego put on a retrospective of Whitten’s work that they emerged again for public view. The curator of the retrospective, Kathryn Kanjo, named them “ghost paintings.”
These reactions don’t feel trivial. Certain pieces of art seem to be imbued with more power than others. How art is imbued with power varies within cultures and times, but in modern day America, the power is invoked through monetary exchange. Whitten’s “ghost paintings” are unique for their time and place. The dealers don’t seem to want to sell them. The family doesn’t want them shown. Their power feels derived from a deeper place, an older one—one where art’s power was born from religion, human faith, fear, and taboo.
The very fact that the paintings were forbidden and hidden—and even seemed to alarm the painter himself, only intrigues me more. Cozzolino writes: “The images haunted Whitten.” They also introduced Whitten to new processes for creating art, a “process of absence.” Whitten created the pieces by wiping away excess paint to form abstractions that teetered on the edge of representation, almost forming faces, but not quite.
The mind is a meaning-making machine, it confronts abstraction like it confronts everything else, striving to fashion sense out of the inscrutable. The “ghost paintings” offer a striking balance between pure abstraction and form.
Whitten is known for his innovative use of new media to create textural abstract painting. In the Brooklyn Rail, he described his process as “linking ancient mosaics with contemporary process painting.” But for me, it’s Whitten’s writing that fascinates me most deeply of all. The titles of his paintings guide the viewer toward making meaning.
Abstract artists like Wassily Kandinsky evade meaning, even in the naming of their work. I stand before the abstract paintings of Kandinsky much like I stand before the writing of Gertrude Stein. Where there is no music, I see a musical stave, and where Stein gave me music, I see a painting.
Whitten’s “ghost paintings” invite interpretation, and the names he gave his paintings push the viewer into uncomfortable confrontations with America’s haunted past. One of his ghost paintings is called “Head IV Lynching,” which you can find at ArtForum. Another work is called Birmingham 1964. It looks like a face has been burned into torn tinfoil. You don’t need to know the biographical notes that Whitten was Black, involved in the Civil Rights movement, and was born in Alabama to see the political resonance of his work. (The New York Times reports that Whitten met Dr. Martin Luther King in 1957).
Supernatural America is a book about literal hauntings, and figurative ones as well. The editors write: “America is haunted. Ghosts from its violent history—the genocide of Indigenous peoples, slavery, he threat of nuclear annihilation, and horrific wars—are an inescapable and unsettled part of the nation’s heritage.”
A ghost may be a visitor from another realm, but a ghost is also the evidence of trauma. Whitten himself writes that his inspiration for the “ghost paintings” came from a memory from his childhood of a “ghost image in a window” of a Black man about to be lynched by a White mob. Before the mob could reach the man, lightning struck the window, burning the man’s image onto the glass. Whitten explained that during the height of the worst violence of the Civil Rights movement, he reported that he “started seeing these faces in everything.”
For Whitten, meaning was never abstracted away from the process. He writes: “When the spirit enters the painting: I stop working on it. The painting is a resting place for the spirit.”
Abstraction has, for me, represented art’s subversion to capitalism. Art was once in service to the divine through religion, and while it didn’t take long for wealthy patrons to use art to display their own wealth, for centuries art retained its connection to the divine, the esoteric, the spiritual, the humane. But today, art has become something simpler: an investment to be put in a storage unit, a commodity so ephemeral it has become a form of cryptocurrency itself. Yet, Whitten offers the potential for abstraction to be something more. Whitten explained: “for me, abstraction is essence.”
Whitten, like Rothko, offers a spiritual kind of abstraction. Abstraction with a soul.
Whitten explains: “There is another spectrum that isn’t coming from that regular spectrum we know, it’s coming from some place else, an inner light. Rothko discovered that. Rothko’s paintings are an advanced way of thinking about light and color, like another level of consciousness, and it took me years to get to that. In the Rothkos you are witnessing a light literally coming out of that man.”
It is every person’s job to find a way to that light.
Hamnet. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
When I read about Whitten, I feel some recognition and affinity. When I was learning how to paint the face, I found myself shocked to find within my own abstractions, moments of figuration. They felt like apparitions. I called them my visitors. Shakespeare came. Virginia Woolf followed. Then Arthur Rimbaud. The writers that had forged my imagination as a teenager returned to me in painted form.
Things of the supernatural occupy neither the realm of matter nor the realm of spirit. They occupy both. I realized that I could also occupy two worlds—the world of images and paint–and also the world of words.
Jack Whitten spoke about the spirit in the Brooklyn Rail. His mosaic paintings were inspired by Byzantine mosaics, which are among some of the most beautiful pieces of medieval art. They are beautiful because they remain alive. Candlelight hits them and they flicker into being. Whitten started laying down paint like mosaic tile. About his process, Whitten wrote, “if I want to push that more into the notion of the spiritual, I can, which I like to do because there is a deficiency of it now.”
For Whitten, painting was always a means to get to something else, and “that something else exists off in a more meditative, contemplative, and spiritual domain.” Before he died, he explained that he thought of art as an “antidote” to the evil in the world.
As Covid-19 case numbers climb, as a pandemic of ignorance and hate proliferates virulently online and off, as California burns, rivers run dry, and the planet keeps on getting hotter and hotter, the thought of art as “antidote” sounds just about right.
In his very rare and very out of print book, Mysticism and Philosophy, Walter Terence Stace categorized the features of mystical experience. Whether a person was a mystic, a nun, a monk, a Buddhist, a Christian, a Sufi, lost in meditation, or lost on psilocybin, mystical experiences exhibited certain key characteristics. These characteristics included an awareness of the unity and interconnectedness of all beings and often included the actual unification of the self with the universe. Mystical experiences involved the transcendence of time and space, and appeared to happen outside of time and outside of space altogether, or within infinite space. A person would often be filled with the sense that everything was imbued with consciousness or presence. Mystical experiences are by their nature paradoxical and ineffable, but despite the obliteration of logic, they also seemed to bring about a kind of epistemological certainty in their truth, accompanied by a sense of sacredness, reverence, deep peace, joy, and even love. And so, while reading Be Here Now, by Ram Dass, a work of art on paper that is more mystical experience than literary artifact, more an object to be encountered rather than a book to be read, I found myself thinking about commonalities I’ve seen in various mystical texts I’ve read.
Mystical literature often describes the crossing of rivers and waters to attain transcendence. I don’t think this is trivial. I had to cross several oceans myself to have my first mystical experience, and I have to agree with W.T. Stace’s categories about the features of mystical experience. I also understand that everything gets lost in transcription and translation and so I won’t write here of what I found in my own mystical perigrinations for fear of sounding too maudlin or mad. Ram Dass says you can’t force it, that you have to be really pure to get there.
And so I have to empathize with Ram Dass, who tries to put into words and images his own encounters with the mystical. If the highest achievement of mystical literature is its ability to create a mystical experience in the reader, then I’d have to admit that Dass failed on that front—for me, at least.
But back to that river.
The Mycelium: The Interconnectedness of all Beings. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood
Ram Dass illustrates transcendence as existing on the other side of the ocean of illusion and attachment. Once that final river or gate has been crossed, a person is free and the “divine mother” awaits. In the Purgatorio, in order for Dante to enter Paradiso, he had to cross a river that would cleanse him of his earthly attachments. And in the ancient Pearl poem (which I write about here), the pilgrim observes the divine parade from the bank of a river he is not permitted to cross because he hasn’t died yet. Ram Dass writes about crossing the Van Allen Belt, a fire that will cleanse you of your attachment. Dante crossed through similar fires, but they were there to purge him of his desire for all the women in Florence. The narratives about transcendence are fascinating in their specificity, and remarkable in how the process of the transfiguration (baptism by fire or water) renders them almost banal. Mystical experiences begin in the specificity of an individual narrative and end in generalities. This is why they are so difficult to write.
Sometimes a work of art touches “pure idea” and “gets so essency you feel you are touching god.”
Who is Ram Dass?
Ram Dass was once Richard Alpert. He was a professor at Harvard University. In Be Here Now, he writes of his time as a professor. “In a worldly sense, I was making a great income and I was a collector of possessions. I had an apartment in Cambridge that was filled with antiques and I had very charming dinner parties.”
The story that follows is like so many stories of spiritual awakenings. Richard Alpert felt like something was missing from his life, even as he enjoyed wealth, success, admiration, fame, and adoration. Eventually, Richard Alpert meets Timothy Leary, an eccentric professor who occupies a closet at Harvard not far from his exuberant corner office. Timothy Leary introduces Richard Alpert to psilocybin. What follows is a banal travelogue that takes us into Alpert’s experience on magic mushrooms, which, like most accounts of drug use involve such extraordinary paradox and maudlin sentiment, that the account provides no real meaning in the reading. Dante and the Pearl poet also struggled with putting their mystical experiences into words, opting to transform the experience into poetry and metaphor, apt vehicles for the ineffable.
In his peregrinations, Richard Alpert discovered a place within himself of immense wisdom and knowledge. There was a problem, though. He couldn’t stay there. After yet another trip that left him feeling depressed, Richard Alpert would find himself back at Harvard doing lectures, or reading books, or raking the leaves, and every second he did these things, he felt the veil being drawn down. There was the place where Richard Alpert Knew, and there was the place where he was just Richard Alpert.
Anyway, Richard Alpert and his friends, being the scientists that they are manage to distill the active compounds in these mushrooms, and they basically invent LSD.
So eventually, Richard Alpert decides that he’s going to take his very powerful LSD to India and try to find a monk or holy man who maybe can explain to him how he might be able to stay in contact with the place within that Knows what it Knows.
In India, Alpert meets a Californian, who takes him all over, and encourages him to meditate. One night, while peeing under the stars, Richard Alpert suddenly has a feeling that he is in the presence of his dead mother. The next day, the Californian takes Alpert to see his “guru.” When he meets the guru, he doesn’t think much of him. He’s just this bald man lying under a blanket in the middle of a monastery, surrounded by grown men who are touching his feet. Richard Alpert is a Harvard man, a man of science. He has no intention of touching the blanketed man’s feet. But some time later, the guru pulls Richard Alpert aside. The man says: “You were out under the stars last night… you were thinking about your mother.”
In this moment, Richard Alpert’s rational brain dissolves and he breaks down weeping at the feet of the man under a blanket.
Richard Alpert gives this man a very high dose of his LSD he made at his fancy school. Nothing happens. But something happens to Richard Alpert. He becomes Ram Dass.
That’s not the whole story of course. To understand the whole story, you’ll have to read Be Here Now.
What follows his story is a work of art on paper that is somewhat ineffable, and incredibly unique. Yogis surf waves. A nautilus hangs over “a gravitational field of time and space.” Ram Dass reminds you, gently that you are the guru.
He writes, “As you find the light in you, you begin to see the light in everyone else.”
You don’t need to be a mystic to access the mystical. The mystical can be love, can be achievement, can be poetry, or art, or a flower.
Oliver Burkeman’s new and fascinating book, Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, arrived in my life just in time. What intrigued me about Burkeman’s book is that it didn’t promise to offer another productivity hack that would help me finally organize my finite time on this planet (to my detriment, I’d already found a productivity hack that worked, thank you very much…more on that later). The book offered something else—a philosophical inquiry into life’s brevity and an attempt to reframe the whole concept of productivity.
Burkeman writes that the “modern discipline known as time management—like its hipster cousin, productivity—is a depressingly narrow affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect morning routine…” And yes, discipline matters, to some extent, but Burkeman argues that modern concepts of time management fail to address the point of all this productivity. “The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”
I say the book arrived just in time. Several months ago, I felt like I had finally managed to manage my time. I had just discovered an excellent organization app called Notion, which allowed me to create not one, not two, but as many calendars as I desired (I settled on three: one for my personal commitments, one for work commitments, and one for various other miscellaneous deadlines and tasks). The application also allowed me to create various checklists. Within weeks I had a checklist for everything. There was the checklist of household chores, the checklist of books I planned to read and books I needed to read. There was the checklist of articles I’d been hired to write. There was another checklist of reviews and articles I wanted to write for this blog. And then there were checklists for self-care, checklists for things I wanted to do and things I needed to do for my health and sanity. I created a meditation checklist. The benefit of all these checklists is that they made me incredibly efficient. The problem with all of these checklists is that they made me incredibly efficient.
One Sunday, after I had checked off all my work commitments, books, and self-care rituals, I found myself finally free of all the tasks and check boxes. My partner and I wandered through an avocado forest not far from our condo. Our dog bounded ahead on the trail, her face radiating pure joy. I felt it, too—her joy, her unencumbered freedom. Where was the space on my checklist for hikes in the woods? I could make one for that, too, but when I sat down to make that checklist, I realized that turning our walk into a box to check off took something essential away from the walk itself. Somehow, by turning the walk into a task to accomplish, I made it less meaningful. I decided not to add hiking to any of my checklists.
This is not to say that I didn’t feel a little bit accomplished from checking off boxes. And I had lots of boxes. Boxes for my morning meditation. Boxes for my morning surf. Boxes for articles I needed to write and books I needed to read and floors I needed to sweep.
By transforming everything in my life into a task to accomplish, I’d turned my life into a task. I’d become a taskmaster. Somewhere along the line, I felt like I’d missed the point of all this efficiency.
And so, when Burkeman writes: “The problem isn’t exactly that these techniques and products don’t work. It’s that they do work—in the sense that you’ll get more done… and yet paradoxically, you’ll only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result,” I found myself nodding wildly like a bobble head doll. Ever since I’d found my effective time-management solution, my anxiety had increased significantly.
In the weeks since I managed to manage my time, I felt like I’d become a machine for checking off boxes and getting things done. The problem was that there was no box for joy or happiness or inner peace, and no amount of checking off boxes was going to get me there.
And here, I’ll pause to acknowledge that time management is a problem born of privilege. Most low-wage workers don’t have the freedom to manage their own time or the privilege to fret over the kind of checklists I’m writing about. For the single mother trying to work two jobs, while also raising her children, cooking meals (some, hopefully healthy), and maybe also getting five minutes to take a shower and maybe some sleep in the process, time management is a joke. If we’re going to have a serious conversation about time management we need to have a serious conversation about the fact that most people in America don’t have the time to read a book called Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. In order to have that conversation, we’ll need to talk about making sure people make a living wage with benefits and health care from one job. This means that companies will need to do more, and that we’ll need to ask more of the companies we buy from.
But for those who have the privilege of managing their own time, the burden of managing that time weighs heavy. Those who have the privilege of managing their time are also most likely in a position to make things better for those who cannot. Those who can manage their time should feel an immense responsibility.
I know I do. The immense responsibility often translates into more and more ambitious plans, and more and more checkboxes.
The problem of too much ambition threads itself into everything I do. For example, this blog. I didn’t just want to write a blog where I reviewed books, culture, and art, I wanted it to be successful. I wanted it to be good. I wanted to write the kind of reviews that maybe someday would be worthy of a Pulitzer Prize. And this ridiculous ambition wasn’t just limited to my personal career goals, it also translated into my recreational activities as well. During my morning surf, I didn’t just want to surf waves, I wanted to surf big waves.
Burkeman writes, “we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.”
Ambition can push you further than you otherwise would go in the limited time you have, but it can also leave you chasing the next big thing, always aiming for the next highest goalpost. Somewhere along the path of trying to reach another thousand readers, or surf a wave one foot higher than the last, the pure joy that brought you to the task can slip away.
Ambition can leave you feeling dissatisfied and ungrateful, and this is no way to live.
Burkeman’s book is less about time management as another theory to be implemented than it is a book about the philosophy of time itself as experienced in a body that will someday die. Burkeman explains, “this is the maddening truth about time…the more you struggle to control it, to make it conform to your agenda, the further it slips from your control.” Time management felt a little like learning to meditate. The more I tried to think about not thinking, the more I thought about thinking.
The more we try to manage our time, the faster time slips away, the more anxious we get. We get more done, but we live less.
Gold Leaf. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
The more I think about the metaphor between time management and meditation, the more I think I’m onto something. The first noble truth of Buddhism holds that suffering is a fact of life. The second noble truth identifies the cause of suffering, which is desire. Desire may be the root of all suffering, but ambition may be a close cousin. Burkeman argues that we become slaves to productivity because even when we make enough money to survive, we just come up with new things to need and want, and new schemes for how we can work harder to attain these things.
Perhaps Burkeman’s most fascinating point is that as people who are well-off get more done, they apply this same logic to their companies and projects, cutting costs and striving for higher levels of efficiency. “This means greater insecurity for those lower down, who are then obliged to work harder just to get by.”
Burkeman is a wise writer. The argument that follows flows like water. We use time management as an escape from choice. Time management promises to help us fit everything into the checklist and promises to help us shuffle around our responsibilities to ensure that we get everything (or mostly everything) done. Choice is something quite different. Choice requires that we acknowledge that we can’t do it all in our finite time on this planet. Choice requires that we decide to prioritize the right things. Time management is less about getting it all done, and more about our unconscious wish to fill our lives with more meaning.
There is another problem with living life checklist to checklist. Burkeman explains that, “our days are spent trying to ‘get through’ tasks, in order to get them ‘out of the way,’ with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get around to what really matters.”
Lately, I’ve been having problems with one checklist in particular. I wanted to meditate every day, and I created (yet another) checklist to help me stay on track with the goal. I found that when I sat down to meditate, all I could think about was the box I’d be able to check off when the bell rang. Meditation is antithetical to this kind of future-based thinking. In order to meditate, you need to be able to be here, right now.
As I read Burkeman, I realized something would have to change.
I realized I was going to have to divorce myself from my checklists. I winnowed my calendars down to one: the one with all my deadlines. I spent an afternoon thinking less about checking off boxes and more about my deeper intentions. Instead of setting pomodoro timers, I let my mind wander a bit. I thought about the things that bring me joy and happiness, and thought about how I might weave them more organically into my life.
I may not have gotten as much done, but the important things got done anyway. I took time to hug my partner and play with my dog. I was also happier. I finally meditated, really meditated, and felt fully the weight of all the boxes I’d been trying to check. It felt a whole lot like suffering.
Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals is a fascinating book, one worth reading. In the spirit it inspired in me, I decided not to check it off my list. I’ll admit I still have a few chapters to savor and read. I don’t think I need to give you a whole summary of the book to convince you it’s worth reading. Either way, I’ve written enough. It’s time to go take my dog for a walk in the sunshine.
Very few books require a legal disclaimer, but Michael Pollan’s This is Your Mind on Plants includes a lengthy legal warning on its copyright page. Among other things, readers are warned that “this book relates the author’s investigative reporting on, and experimentation with, the opium poppy plant…and mescaline. It is a criminal offense in the United States and many other countries…to manufacture, possess, or supply…” these plants in any form with few exceptions. The exceptions include government-sanctioned research, medical prescription, and “in the case of peyote…as permitted by the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments.” The publishers assert that the book is not “intended to encourage you to break the law and no attempt should be made to use these plants or substances for any purpose except in a legally” sanctioned way. But, if you grow poppies in your home garden, and want to continue to grow them without fear that your personal F.B.I. agent will come knocking on your front door to raid your ornamental garden, you might want to do yourself a favor and stop reading this article now. While in our heavily-litigated society, I often take such warnings in measure, the warning in this case may not be entirely without merit.
Pollan’s This is Your Mind on Plants is composed of three longer essays. In simple terms, one is about the opium that can be found in decorative poppies, the second is about addiction and coffee, and the last is about mescaline and its religious uses among native Americans and its appropriation by White people. Each essay is fascinating in its way, but the most beautifully crafted one is Pollan’s reprint and expansion of the article he wrote for Harper’s Magazine. In the essay, Pollan explores the simple and common poppy growing in many American gardens. When Pollan wrote the essay in 1997, the government seemed committed to a campaign to make Americans believe that the poppies growing on their front lawns were somehow different than the poppies growing in Afghanistan for opium. They weren’t. Poppies contain opium, and the boundary between their legality and illegality in America comes down to epistemology—namely, whether a person growing the poppy knows it contains opium and whether the person intends to extract opium from the poppy. Whether the person has actually performed the extraction, or just knows how to do it, seems to be a matter of legal discretion on the part of prosecutors. Pollan writes about a legal case where a person was arrested and his assets seized based on the fact that he had written about how to perform an extraction. The fact that he happened to have poppies on his property was used as damning evidence. Of course the potential for corruption, civil rights violations, racial profiling, and the like are immense given a law so seemingly vague.
In his 1997 Harper’s essay, Pollan omitted whole pages he had written. In these pages he tells how one might make a mildly narcotic tea from one’s own poppies. In This is Your Mind on Plants, Pollan doesn’t omit anything. He also writes about a deeper sadder irony. While the D.E.A. was threatening ornamental poppy growers with arrest, (and actually arresting at least one), big pharmaceutical companies were promoting their opioids across America, a campaign which would lead to a very real and devastating opium crisis in America. A writer censored himself for fear of getting his assets seized for merely writing about the opium in ornamental poppies, while big pharmaceutical companies down the road were actually producing drugs based on that same opium, that would lead to death, addiction, and real harm. The man arrested for his ornamental poppy “operation” ended up losing everything, ultimately living in the street. The fact that a victim of the American war on drugs appears, on the surface, indistinguishable from a victim of the opioid epidemic is telling.
The American war on drugs has always be been arbitrary in nature. Crack cocaine (which was more commonly used by Black individuals) is a drug for which one could face heavy jail time, while cocaine (which was more commonly used by White individuals) has typically garnered shorter sentences and less-damaging penalties. One drug dealer gets life in jail, while another becomes rich because she works for a pharmaceutical company. The regulation of controlled substances is one of the more unfortunate infringements on personal liberties currently taking place in America. (I qualify my statement only because laws against abortion in the American south are far worse.)
Hamilton Morris, the creator of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, a brilliant and entertaining documentary series on Vice, often makes the point that plants shouldn’t be illegal. Incidentally Hamilton’s Pharmacopiea makes for excellent companion viewing while reading Michael Pollan’s This is Your Mind on Plants. Hamilton Morris (the son of Errol Morris) travels the world to try various mind-altering substances and engage with the cultures that find them sacred. Each episode is a brilliant self-contained documentary in itself, and it’s a delight to see the next generation of filmmakers forging contuining traditions of excellence.
Pollan (and many native elders) argue that White people should avoid using peyote (largely because it is increasingly rare to find in the wild and because many native elders believe White use is cultural appropriation), but Hamilton Morris speaks to a native elder who believes that those narratives stem from the laws of White men attempting to tell native people what they can and cannot do. I found it noteworthy that Hamilton didn’t consume wild-grown peyote, and that there is a strong case for White people making the conservationist decision to avoid eating wild-grown peyote, due to its rarity and to preserve its use for Native Americans. As far as farm-grown peyote goes, native elders should obviously be able to give it to whomever they want to give it to, and perform their ceremonies for whomever they choose.
Michael Pollan, like Morris, seems to be among a growing number of Americans that believe that the American drug war “with its brutally simplistic narratives” serve less to protect Americans and serves as a tool to promote the incarceration of Black, brown, and Indigenous bodies. The American drug war, even when observed from the most charitable of readings, is at best a mechanism of control intended to keep people working and consuming in our late capitalist system.
Pollan writes that these laws are arbitrary at best, and deem illegal the drugs with “the power to change consciousness in ways that run counter to the smooth operations of society and the interests of the powers that be. As an example, coffee and tea, which have amply demonstrated their value to capitalism in many ways, not least by making us more efficient workers, are in no danger of prohibition, while psychedelics—which are no more toxic than caffeine and considerably less addictive—have been regarded, at least in the West since the mid-1960s, as a threat to social norms and institutions.”
We live in a culture where we have been divorced from the natural world. We don’t grow our own food and often don’t even know where our food has been grown. Engagement with nature is often relegated to a weekend excursion in the woods at best. Nature is recreation, not where we live and find transcendence. Pollan writes: “I’ve come to appreciate that when we take these plants into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways possible.”
For generations, psychoactive drugs have been used as medicines to heal, and new research reveals that they have immense potential to help alleviate anxiety at the end of life, help people who are depressed, and even help those who are addicted to alcohol and other substances. “A pharmakon can be either a medicine or a poison; it all depends—on use, dose, intention, and set and setting. (The word has a third meaning as well, one often relied on during the drug way: a pharmakon is also a scapegoat, something for a group to blame its problems on.)”
Pollan doesn’t write his essays to deny the existence of addiction. He openly admits to having an unhealthy relationship with coffee, and there are certainly people for whom use of psychadelics can be incredibly damaging (individuals with family history of psychosis or serious mental illness are one such group). Pollan’s essay on the poppy plant doesn’t detract from the terribly damaging effects of opium on individuals and society. Pollan explores the multiplicity of relationships that humans can have with mind-altering plants, sometimes abusive, sometimes healing, and sometimes transcendent and religious. For the government to deem all uses save just a few limited cases abusive feels perverse.
William Shakespeare was also keenly aware of the ways in which people could abuse all things, not just drugs, but love, and hate. In Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence walks through his herb garden where various medicines and poisons grow—the ones that can put our protagonists to sleep in small doses, but in larger doses, kill them.
Shakespeare Death Mask. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood
Friar Lawrence says:
O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities:
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give,
Nor aught so good but strain’d from that fair use
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometimes by action dignified.
Within the infant rind of this small flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power.
Is Lawrence to blame for the death of Romeo and Juliet? Is love? Is hate? Shakespeare would argue none of these, but rather all of them, but only when they are “straind from that fair use…stumbling on abuse.”So, too with plants. So too, with anything in this life.
