Marilynne Robinson on conventional mind and deep mind

The November/December issue of Poets & Writers magazine featured a cover story on Marilynne Robinson. Her most recent books are the novel Lila and the essay collection The Givenness of Things. The piece gave much focus to her writing process. One of the photos was of a window in her home study that she sits near while writing long-hand in a hardcover notebook. Line-by-line, first sentence to last, she writes her books without revision. Let me say that again: without revision.

While I can’t relate to the “without revision” aspect of Robinson’s writing process, I can relate to her distinction of conventional mind and deep mind. Here is a section from the cover story:

“I tell my students that you have a conventional mind— a front-office mind, I call it—that basically deals with the business of living in the world. It’s what pays attention to things that are, in themselves, perhaps trivial. And then you have a deeper mind that you are very much surprised by, that has its own obsessions that you would not anticipate, that has its own favorite words, that has memories you can’t believe you remember. You can’t trust the superficial mind to give you something that’s original. But you can trust the deeper mind. That’s where you really live, where your truth is.”

I often think of this shift from writing with the front-brain mind to the deeper mind as “jumping the track,” and I can feel it when it happens. I’m not sure I thought about two levels of mind before I started writing, but they are there and not tied to writing. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote about the shift from superficial to shallow in his bestseller Flow. Greek philosophers called the two levels of mind ratio and intellectus. Ratio is the kind of knowing that emerges from intentionally working your brain; it is all about reasoning and logic. In contrast, intellectus is the kind of knowing that emerges from leisure, from stillness and contemplation; it is passive and receptive. We need both, of course, for a full life.

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On another note, Relief Journal published on its blog an interview between me and Lisa Ohlen Harris, friend and their former creative nonfiction editor. (I’ve written about Lisa's wonderful books on this blog a couple times before.) The interview is mostly about the writing process and the role of community in writing. Please take a look; I’d be honored if you did. Here’s the link.

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[Photo: taken of a portion of the November/December issue of Poets & Writers]

The humbling exhilaration of new thoughts

I'm currently reading a book that a friend recommended to me. For the purposes of this post, it doesn't really matter what the book is. It's been hard work to follow substantial portions of the book, high above my head as they are. If only I'd read more Shakespeare. If only I'd traded an organic chemistry class in college for a bit more philosophy. There's the option, of course, to close it once and for all, but there have been enough eye-opening, mind-expanding, silent-wow moments so far that I'm keeping going. I'm wondering how thinking these new thoughts would ripple backward, if that were possible, to change old thoughts, past sentences I may have written, or words I may have spoken. And then there's the ripple forward to thoughts, sentences, and words yet to come. Oh, the humbling exhilaration of it! I'm wondering what's exhilarating you of late, in a humbling sort of way?

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[Photo: yet another picture from my recent trip to Brooklyn, this of a crazy patio set embedded in an overgrown corner lot as seen through a chain link fence, with the addition of my finger over the top of the lens. I thought there was something mysterious but lovely about this scene.]

One lifetime isn't long enough

It would take lifetimes to do all I want to do. I’m just finishing a new online class; the stack of books to read grows; the list of books and essays I dream of someday writing grows; there are so many publications to which I’d like to subscribe and have the time to read. Multiple careers still intrigue me. Life is so exciting in this way. I worry I’ll never get it all in—and I won’t. Nevertheless, it makes me happy that I think this about life. Watching the news can be so horribly depressing, but then I look at the stacks of books and think of the host of ideas represented, consider emails from friends about what they’re up to and interested in, and enthusiasm wells inside me. With all that we’re told is going wrong in the world, is that enthusiasm based on escapism or naiveté or could it be an awareness of an alternate reality, one in which truth, beauty and goodness, faith, hope and love are alive and well, a reality that the news correspondents aren’t paid to report on, that the viewing public would find of little interest, that doesn’t influence the course of history—or does it

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[Photo: taken several years ago at an exhibit at the American Swedish Institute - sorry it's not too sharp. I don't know who Hilma Berglund is but I'm sure we're kindred spirits.]

For your weekend reading pleasure

For your weekend reading pleasure, here are links to some pieces I've enjoyed the past week:

"This Blessed Place: The faithful fiction of Marilynne Robinson" by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell at America. Just this week I finished reading Lila, the latest novel by Marilynne Robinson in her Gilead trilogy that also includes Gileadand Home. Each of the three novels has left me with a profound sense of having entered a place that operates with a different sort of economy and grace than what we usually expect to encounter in life or on the page. I think this is even more true for Lila than the other two. As O'Donnell writes in this piece, "They posit a community of people who take their faith seriously and strive to live by it; they depict a fallen world, full of common sinners in need of redemption and in whose lives the operation of grace is evident at every turn; and they reveal the luminous beauty of that world, shot through with the goodness of the God who loved it into being and continues to care for it, in ways both large and small." Read this piece by O'Donnell and then if you haven't already read this trilogy, consider putting it high on your reading list.

"Mad Men: The Imperceptibility of Change" by Alissa Wilkinson at Christ & Pop Culture. I've been watching Mad Men throughout its seven seasons. Lots of people think it's full of so much debauchery that it's best left unwatched. I can understand that opinion and have felt that way myself at times. But my husband and I have stuck with the series, not only because it's been a fascinating cultural study of the era in which we grew up, but more so because we've come to care about the characters, particularly Don Draper and Peggy Olson, as obviously the show's creator does also. It's the genius of good fiction to be able to trigger empathy. As the series moves towards its last handful of episodes, the question on the table is, What will happen to these characters? In this piece, Wilkinson speculates on whether Mad Men will end as tragedy or as comedy. It's worth a read even if you don't watch Mad Men, because she provides a framework for thinking about other narratives, for thinking about life.

"Consider the Oven" by Sheryl Cornett at Art House America. Sheryl is a friend of mine and she just published this piece about making do. She tells of finally getting a new range in her kitchen after cooking on a make-shift out-of-code oven in her garage for 5 years, her tight-budget response to the breakdown of her initial range. It made me think about how wonderful it felt last fall when I finally had our dryer fixed after going 3 years hanging clothes on the line because it just always seemed there were more important places for money to go than the dryer. If you've ever had to or tried to "make-do", you'll resonate with this essay written in the spirit of gratitude.

"A Convention for the Bookish" by Dani Shapiro at The New Yorker. Last week, I attended the annual meeting of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), which was here in Minneapolis. I heard figures of between 12,000 and 15,000 people attended (with those kinds of numbers, is it any wonder writers get so many rejections?). Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion and Still Writing, wrote this piece about the three-day event. "It’s a familiar lament that books are dying—that the fast-paced and attention-starved digital age is killing our impulse to read and write the old-fashioned way—but it was impossible to feel anything but buoyant optimism about the future of letters when traversing the streets and skyways of Minneapolis."

"The Fear Exemption: Clutching at any appearance of control" by D. L. Mayfield at Books & Culture. While at AWP, I bought a copy of On Immunity: An Innoculation by Eula Bliss at the Graywolf Press table. It's a book I've wanted to read ever since it came out last fall. In this piece, Mayfield reviews On Immunity, sharing her personal parenting fears in the process, fears to which anyone who has raised a child can relate.

And finally, since Finding Livelihood launched this week, here's the first review I saw pop up, written by Carrie Ann Lahain, a prolific book reviewer, and also a post about it from the book's editor, the lovely Jessica Snell.

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You can order Finding Livelihood from: 1) the publisher, Kalos Press; 2) Amazon; 3) Barnes & Noble; 4) me (ask if you want it signed); or 5) any bookstore.

[Photo: taken along a walking path one spring day several years ago; no flowers like this are up here yet this year.]

On reading, Wright’s Surprised by Scripture

A friend at church, a philosophy professor at a nearby university, has gathered a group of women to read together through N. T. Wright's new release, Surprised By Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues. It's a book of essays that posits that assumptions about what the Bible does or does not say don't necessarily match the reality of what it actually does or does not say, particularly as related to contemporary issues.

The chapter we talked about last night was about faith and science and the widespread tendency to be unable to hold both in our brains at the same time. Blame it on Epicurus, the third-century BC Greek philosopher who spread the word that the gods, if they even existed, were so far removed from any earthly care or concern that we were essentially on our own. Blame it on the separation of church and state, which has shaped our way of thinking, here in the U.S. more so than in Europe, to such an extent that it seems impossible to imagine we’re part of a reality that includes it all, heaven and earth, in a dynamic, interactive, and mysterious present. Blame it on lots of things, but let’s do something about it.

The women in the room all read the chapter with an eye toward how it informs their lives and their work. Teachers thought about the classroom; parents thought about the raising of their children; those with a political spirit thought about voting decisions and acts of citizenry. I thought about my writing and how Wright’s words encourage me to keep writing in the vein of looking for signs of God's presence in the quotidian, of imagining layers of reality, of exploring the interplay of divine and human.

“Judaism and Christianity classically…celebrate and explore the mysterious interpenetration of heaven and earth," writes Wright. Each of us left with minds and hearts excited to further celebrate and explore that mystery.

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[Photo: taken of Wright's book, conveniently placed next to stacks of a journal that speaks of mystery on a quarterly basis.]

Work that brain

A new study published in the Archives of Neurology on January 23 reported a strong association between cognitive activity and beta-amyloid deposits in the brain. Beta-amyloid is the protein that destroys brain tissue in people with Alzheimer’s disease. Study researchers from the University of California in Berkley found that cognitive activity throughout a person’s early and middle life had a direct impact on the degree of beta-amyloid deposits. The more cognitive activity, the fewer deposits. The kinds of cognitive activity reported in this paper are well within the reach of everyone, such as reading, writing (including writing letters and emails), going to the library, and playing games. Although genetics certainly plays a role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, working your brain to slow or prevent its development is an option for everyone. And it’s free!

Previous research, including the Nun Study, which I wrote about in Just Think, has demonstrated an association between cognitive activity and the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease, but this is the first study to identify a physical explanation for what is happening in the brain as a result of cognitive activity.

In an interview with Science Daily, one of the paper’s authors, William Jagust, MD, said, "There is no downside to cognitive activity. It can only be beneficial, even if for reasons other than reducing amyloid in the brain, including social stimulation and empowerment....And actually, cognitive activity late in life may well turn out to be beneficial for reducing amyloid. We just haven't found that connection yet."

What Art Does

The University of Minnesota's Weisman Art Museum re-opened earlier this month after being closed for a year due to an expansion project. My husband and I went to the public reopening event to check out the new galleries.

I saw a mother holding hands with her young son (maybe 7 years old?) and overheard her say to him: "That's what art does. It makes you go 'huh?' And then you stop and think."