01 - The revolutionary comes from the future | Miranda Mellis
Experimental Practice - Episode 1
31 December, 2022
Episode description
This past September, I sat down with Miranda Mellis to discuss literary form and the relationship between Miranda’s writing practice, politics, and Buddhism. We also explore the tricky work of staying connected to one’s values in and through writing, and how creative practice can provide a kind of refuge.
Miranda is an accomplished writer working in (and at the intersections of!) multiple genres. Through her fiction, essays, cultural criticism, and poetry, Miranda probes the familiar from unexpected angles. The results are often strikingly funny, uncannily accurate, deeply melancholy, or all of the above. Her idiosyncratic thinking conjuncts at a rare intersection of uncommon kindness and radical depth, and the atmosphere created by this conjunction always makes the world feel a little more mutable.
This episode is a very special one to me because Miranda has had a profound impact on my own life and writing! When I met Miranda she had recently joined the faculty of The Evergreen State College, and I was a driftless and cynical college student ostensibly there only to knock out pre-requisites in the health sciences. How I ended up in her class has the touch of the miraculous for me, but it completely altered the course of my life. Miranda’s holistic approach to creativity and her generous curiosity allowed for both attention to the world and to the self in ways I’d all but given up on finding; I plunged right in. A decade later, what she taught me about writing and teaching as means of “waking up” (to life, to one’s surroundings, to one’s connection with the world) continue to ground my practice.
But I’ve long been curious about the foundations of Miranda’s own practice, and especially the ways that her ethics are braided into--and shape--her work: How (or why) did she start writing? What motivates her to write? How does she go about crafting the complex, politically-charged, and often surreal narratives that constitute her prose? It’s a joy and an honor to share Miranda’s thoughtful and rich reflections on these (and other!) topics.
Miranda’s novella Crocosmia—discussed in this interview—is now under contract with Nightboat Books, and is scheduled to come out in 2025. The Revolutionary is available from Albion Books and can be purchased here.
You can learn more about Miranda and her many notable publications—from books like The Revisionist and Demystifications to her remarkable meditations on pop culture in The Believer—through her website.
Audio edited and mastered by Ethan Camp. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Mentioned in this episode
The Revolutionary by Miranda Mellis
Crocosmia by Miranda Mellis (forthcoming from Nightboat Books)
The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
Édouard Glissant
Eirik Steinhoff on crisis (see The Crisis Times for an example of this approach to crisis in practice)
Cynicism and Magic by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Pema Chödrön
Naropa University (and co-founders of its literary program Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsburg)
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (description of this literary movement here)
New Narrative (I love Robert Glück’s “Long Note on New Narrative”)
Transcript
Siloh: Miranda, I'm really excited to be having this conversation with you. I talk about things you've told me in teaching settings all the time. So it just feels like a fun milestone to be able to sit down and have this conversation about your work and what you're working on.
To start out, I would like to invite you just to tell us a little bit about what you're currently working on, what projects you have underway...
Miranda: I am most currently working on a short story called “The Klein Bottle,” which is about quarantine and being sick with COVID, but is also about the emotional breakdown of quarantine. It also is in conversation with The Poetics of Space by Bachelard, who writes in that beautiful book about small spaces.
He writes beautifully about shells as homes, seashells, and he writes about drawers and kind of cellular, microcosmic kinds of domains. I think in quarantine, one of the experiences we have in quarantine, those of us who have been in quarantine, if you've been really locked into a room, which I was, it happened to be a small room--but it was a small room very full of stuff. When I got COVID I happened to be in the room that was my grandfather's writing room. He was a writer. It was a small space with very old books on the shelves and lots of dust and dead flies and cobwebs. So I spent so much time in that room just looking around because I was--you know, there's that period of time where you can't really focus, it's hard to read, and you become very cat-like. You just nap and you lie in bed and you look around. And I didn't have internet, weirdly, like I was in a situation where there was no internet. So I looked a lot at the walls, which had shadows on them, flickering shadows.
And I watched them, they were these little shadow films reflecting the leaves of the trees outside. And I listened to the sounds of other people's voices and I became very familiar with every nook and cranny of this room. And I then started feeling better and I just started reading the books in the room. So the story is sort of about that. And it speculates in its fictive way about the moment of transmission—of getting the virus and then becoming a vector for it. I'm trying to get a little granular about some of the psychodynamics of kind of the experience of getting the virus, even though you've done everything you can to try not to, and then what it's like to give it to other people and then what it's like to be kind of taken care of, but locked in a room. And in a way that can become contemplative but also very anguishing.
So that's been good because I'm just sort of processing that experience of illness and isolation—and also airports, thinking about airports. Because I'm pretty sure I got it in an airport, and I'm now feeling quite phobic, like I never want to get on another airplane ever again. So that's in progress.
And then I, as you know, have written something called The Revolutionary, which is a lyric essay and has elements of memoir and elements of aphorism and elements of poetry and elements of prose and is among other things a meditation on being with my father through the end of his life and with him as he died.
And then finally I've written this novella Crocosmia, which is, I think, mostly done.
Siloh: It seemed so to me.
Miranda: I'm really excited about it and it's been preoccupying for a while, you know? This kind of trying to respond to the omni crisis with writing, you know? And think about taking seriously the exhortation from Jameson of so long ago that we need utopias and to try to imagine how I could write that without eliding violence, and to think about the idea of a kind of fruitful or honest or integral violence--a kind of violence that, I mean, the whole crux of the thing of, how do you imagine a nonviolent assassination or something, and then this notion of imagining that the forms of those who would be the objects of the fantasy of assassination could be seen as compost and as actual material matter that could nourish something. And that whole concept of the novel is maybe some people who are inordinately harmful, profoundly harmful could really become nutrients in a different context.
That’s my way of trying to reconcile, on the one hand my incredibly violent hatred and anger for these so-called world leaders, these men who are so destructive--these heads of state. And then on the other hand, my abhorrence of violence.
I hate these violent men. Why? Because of their violence. So my violence is towards their violence, so—right? That's why I'm using this metaphor of the homeopathic violence. It's not really resolvable. And there are many examples in history of these things going wrong and making things worse, but there are also examples of the opposite. So it’s really a profoundly difficult question.
Siloh: Your description of your quarantine story, which sounds amazing and I can't wait to read--it just evokes this porosity in your work, the ways that writing is also a way of being in the world. Or being in relation and having this intense curiosity, this rigorous creative curiosity about one's conditions. But I'm really interested in the tension between that pull towards violence or towards justice and also your profound sensitivity and compassion.
And as your student and friend and fan, I've always been really curious about how Buddhism figures into your thinking or the ways that writing may be an extension of a spiritual practice for you. I don't know if that's fair to say, but I would just be curious to hear if that rings true for you or how your work with Buddhism or your practice plays into your creative work.
Miranda: Yeah. To go back for a moment, before I take that up, to what you said before about kind of writing as a way of being, or maybe even we could say like a style of thinking or something like that: Yes, that porosity, that kind of recognition of or openness to the ways that storytelling and sense-making seem to arise out of experience and start to take the form of ideas for poems or stories. That certain experiences and assemblages of your life or configurations or encounters can already start to lend themselves to that as you're experiencing them.
And not in a way that separates you, maybe even unconsciously a little bit. Certainly in the midst of all my COVID drama, I wasn't thinking about writing a story about it, but it nonetheless, you know, I was thinking about that Bachelard book, you know? [Laughs] And my own observations were--I wasn't exactly writing because I was far too tired, but I was thinking about what I was seeing and experiencing and then that, as soon as I started to get more energy, just kind of wanted to turn into writing and note-taking.
And that seems to me like…there's something maybe particular about the way that writers have this kind of style of thinking, you know what I mean? That the things that arise can have already start to have this narrative potential, you know, even unconsciously.
And as for the other question--maybe it's not even disconnected because I think, I mean, in a very concrete, sort of basic way, the practice of meditation is a practice of observation, right? And so I started meditating pretty young. And you know, my mom was chronically ill. She was disabled. And she died when I was in my twenties. And that experience led me to look for what, how could I even make sense of this? And by happenstance, a friend of my mom's--a dancer--when I was 14, she took me to a Dharma talk. She was a Buddhist. I remember this was in San Francisco in the eighties, and I remember listening and it was one of those kind of moments, you know, human moments, where you're like, “Finally I'm hearing something that makes sense.” And I don't remember exactly what the content of that talk was, but I do remember that feeling of, okay, something is clicking into place here, you know, about phenomena, about the nature of things. A metaphysics or something that can allow me to do more with what's happening than just suffer it.
In fact, it might have even been on the four noble truths. If anybody would come out and say, “Here is a sense-making philosophical system, the first tenet of which is that life is constituted of suffering,” then immediately, of course, I would move towards that because that seemed to be absolutely my experience, you know?
But I don't really remember. Anyway, I think that kind of learning to observe, to kind of witness, to let go of thoughts, to understand that there's an involuntary production of language going on, and to start to disidentify with that is one way of starting to have a “life of the mind.” Like it's one way--life of the mindful instead of a life of the mind or something.
And then developing patience, which that practice, the contemplative practices, they take you, as you know, into really wonderful spaces, but it takes discipline and patience, and it doesn't happen quickly.
And so that's true about writing too, right? You can get really absorbed and have this kind of powerfully stabilizing, powerfully imaginative, richly analytical experience, but not right away! I think you can develop that, of course, through writing itself--or through any discipline. It doesn't have to be through any kind of contemplative practice per se, but I think they do probably nourish each other.
And for me, I think they were both very related in that I was really writing a lot at the outset and also seeking those wisdom teachings for the same reasons because of my despair about my mother. And then that became my subject for a long time. Many of the stories that I wrote and many of the poems were really circling around, always around, these questions of illness and death and loss and my mother and who she was. Even this chapbook The Revolutionary is still, it's like I'm still, you know…[laughs] only now it's more about my father's death, but it's like death, death, death, death, death.
And even Crocosmia is in some ways about death, you know? So maybe that's the connection between spirituality and writing—death! [Laughs]
Siloh: It seems based on my reading of both the chapbook and the novella that you've most recently written that there's also something there about abandonment, I think--or like one's duty to the world and one's duty to one's self or one's close relationships, and how those things may not always align or be the same.
Miranda: Yes, and that I feel like I'm grappling with much more recently, explicitly in both in that chapbook The Revolutionary and in Crocosmia. One, in a nonfiction way, asking these questions about who the revolutionary is, revolutionary subjectivity, and why they're willing to do what they're willing to do and what the effects of that are on the immediate family.
And then in Crocosmia, through the fiction of exactly that abandonment where the daughter--I mean, it's really grandiose in a way, it's like this messianic story, right?--where the daughter loses the mother because the mother is saving the world. And the relationship with the daughter has to be sacrificed.
And the daughter is that figure that you're talking about. So it's kind of a split--you could say a split consciousness. But the daughter is that figure who would, in a way, rather have her mother back than have the world be saved. And so there's that sense of kind of--it's very exaggerated, of course--but there's something, and you could even say possibly Judeo-Christian that’s there. [Laughs.] In that mythology, in the Christian mythology, the son is sacrificed, you know? In this one, the mother sacrifices her relationship with her daughter. She sacrifices, in a way, herself. And the daughter is left to pick up the pieces and try to make sense of it all. And that's definitely redolent of my relationship with my mother for sure, who was a revolutionary—and the sense that she sacrificed everything. And that's not the whole truth, right? That's an aspect. That is something that becomes allegorical material to work with. It has truth in it. It's not the entire truth.
It felt as though she did that, that she sacrificed everything to try to save the world, you know? Including her health. But there are many contingencies--many, many, many factors. And it's so complex, as you say, and as you know, each individual body and all its complexity, ancestral and otherwise. Like how and why it becomes ill when it does--how one person can withstand so many traumas and so many difficulties and not get sick. And another can. I mean, these things are so complicated and genetic…but also environmental and psychological as well as social and political.
But I reduce it down because I'm still trying to unpack the kind of extremity of it all, you know? Because it's one thing to grow up with a mom who's disabled and sick and needs care, and then to grow up with a mom who also did the kinds of things that my mom did politically, which was to engage in clandestine underground political activism. And the extent to which that kind of work was a joy for her and a pleasure for her, I think that's there, you know, and the extent to which it was also very dangerous and stressful. I can't know all of that.
There are stories that I can hear from people she worked with who are still with us, and their perspectives, but it's very partial. I guess what I'm saying in this roundabout way is it's not that her life or my life or your life or anybody's life is a fiction, but it's sort of like, how can you understand a person who is not here to give an account? And even if they were, it would always be partial. And you kind of are patching together something: a story. I guess you decide to make sense of the important relationships in your life when you're left on your own to try to make sense of them because the people aren't there anymore, in accordance with the ways in which you've been affected by them.
And then that becomes the emphasis. And how much it has to do with that person is a different question, you know? It’s something very different to say, “I'll write a biography of a person and I'll do all the research I can and I'll find out as much as I can about them, and I'll tell their story with as much faithfulness to who I understand them to have been…” than to say, “I’ll make a fiction which is working through the prism of my own experience of how I've been impacted by this relationship.” [Laughs.]
And that's the glory of fiction, right? It's like, it doesn't have to be faithful or documentary or, you know….it's a dream. It’s like having a lifelong dream about my mother. [Laughs.] I never stop dreaming about her, you know?
Siloh: You write really beautifully in The Revolutionary about the revolutionary as a character who's a time traveler, bringing the future to the present (ideally), or living in the present towards the future. And in that ideal future, their behavior ceases to be revolutionary and just becomes ordinary. But in the context of what is considered normal, it's otherworldly. It lives as if, you know, something was possible or true that isn't. I feel like there's that quality in your writing, particularly your fiction, of intense willingness to speculate--or to say things that feel so true, like crystal clear, but are embedded in this narrative structure that enables that kind of clarity--like the absurdity of living in a context that is destroying the habitat and the ways that that is normalized, and how that's so dislocated in your writing.
But the narrative structure of your work is so, I would say, ecological as well, all of these parts fitting together and being subverted in any singular focus--prismatic in structure. I would love to hear about your process of creating those shapes.
It’s probably not just one thing all the time, but maybe there's a recent example of starting with a seed of an idea and shaping the structure of narrative from that.
Miranda: Yes. Well, I think that idea that you mentioned about the time traveler is relevant to this question, because that kind of notion or idea or conceit is also present, as you say, in The Revolutionary, as this idea of how we know that what is perceived as kind of radical in one moment in time--when it's no longer perceived that way, if it's an instance of historical change that is in the direction of revolutionary change, then you know that it's achieved its goal. This notion of that revolutionary being from the future is also present in Crocosmia. And it's present in the concepts and the story, but also in the structure, I think--in the narrative form.
And that wrestling with time is always there, right? In storytelling, in writing, even at the level of just syntax, of tense. You’re always wrestling with the subjunctive, as well as the past tense and the present tense, and the question of like, what is the “now” and who's speaking. And even if you have a fixed tense, and it is in the past tense as most narratives often are, or usually it seems like, there’s still the question of, when you're in the consciousness of characters, that they're thinking in the present moment of their temporality or when they're thinking forward to possible things, because consciousness is moving between tenses and temporality.
So you always have to kind of struggle with that when you're writing and it's hard, I find. It's hard especially if you're interested in kind of trying to prefigure, to work prefiguratively. That's the word that came to mind when you were speaking.
The revolutionary comes from the future. They are prefigurative in their embodiment, in their activity, in their way of being, in their insistence on a different world. And that's maybe distinct from prefigurative art or prefigurative writing, right? That the person who lives as that time traveler, which is what I would say my mom and my parents and the community I grew in was like--living collectively, and living not solely in a theoretically anti-capitalist way, but actually living in the day-to-day in this mode of opposition, collectively.
And so maybe in some ways growing up around that, while also still existing in the larger sort of social-economic system of capitalism, creates a disjunctive experience of a kind of doubleness, the kinds of things that people experience when they migrate, when they immigrate or when people live through wars and all of these different kinds of experiences where there's a sense of doubleness, you know--different temporalities intersecting or kind of traversing. And so maybe in some ways then it feels sort of like growing up the way that I did and feeling very much--even in San Francisco in the seventies and eighties--very much the outliers, my siblings and I. And nobody else seemed to live the way that we lived. [Laughs.] Even in that kind of cultural time and space of so much counterculture and things like that, none of my friends in school or anything, none of the kids I knew had that kind of household.
Siloh: Their parents weren't militants?
Miranda: Well, they didn't live collectively. They lived with their mom, or their mom and dad, that was it. Maybe their grandma or something like that. They didn't live in a house full of organizers. And so maybe in some ways that sense of doubleness of living in the time of the future being fought for and aspired to in the household while also living in the kind of consensus time of U.S. post-sixties coming into Reagan, moving into neoliberal capital time has just formed this sense of writing--it's hard to find something like what you might call a sense of naturalism or realism for me. I just don't know what that is, you know what I mean? [Laughs] Like I just don’t cellularly know what that is because it's just always multiplicity, you know? But nonetheless, I'm interested in telling stories about the world.
Siloh: I know, that's the challenge! It's like being somebody who thinks about a hundred things at the same time, but wants to give a reader some experience that feels approximately cohesive…in its disjointedness. For me at least.
Miranda: Yeah. I was thinking recently when I was working on this story about quarantine. I was like, what I think I want to do is just write in as ordinary a manner as I can possibly manage, while also staying interested. Of course, there's no reason to do it if you're not interested. And that's been kind of fun to take as an approach, you know?
Siloh: What does that look like for you? And maybe how does it differ from…
Miranda: Maybe it differs in like--well, for one thing it's easier to do with short stories because there's just less to manage, and it's sort of like a short story can just be a kind of gesture and there's less chronology to manage. So I think what it looks like right now is that there's a kind of psychological chronology.
It's the experiential chronology that is imitative or mimetic of the days of the quarantine. And that arc of the illness has a natural chronology, because you know, the illness is acute and then it gets better, and then it gets worse, and then it gets better, and then it gets worse, but not as bad.
And then the arc of it to my great good fortune, and obviously this is tragically not the case for everybody, is that I did get better. Some people don't and they get worse and it stays with them. And that's a different kind of time. I mean, the time of illness, you know. There's something about illness that is like, you know, for some people it’s like what does it mean to even call it illness if you're chronically ill, right.
It's kind of like, “Is this illness, or what is this? Because this is just my state of being, this is where I'm at, you know. This is my physicality, this is my somatic experience.” But I think if you get ill and then you get better, there is something very oddly--like I found that getting ill in this way felt like a homecoming?
It was so weird. I mean, it was so painful and upsetting, all of it. But there is something like…
I'm speculating, maybe you can say something about this, Siloh. But I'm speculating about this, and it's a new thought, about the ways in which sometimes getting sick can be this way of going home. It’s kind of a weird thing to say. And it's a problematic thing to say because some people don't get to get well. So I don't know where to go with that. I just know that when I….I’ll put it this way, it's sort of like certain kinds of ordeals force you to route through and confront things that you otherwise have been possibly repressing or bracketing. And it can take the form of an illness, a death, a breakup, a move, you know, these kinds of things where you really--it's inescapable. You have to face fear, you have to face anger, you cannot not face it, you know? And maybe that is what I mean when I say coming home. And then when you, if you come through it, if you can come through it, because you have support or whatever, it's like something, maybe then it's like coming back again in some way. Coming back to what, I don't know.
Siloh: It reminds me of what Eirik Steinhoff, another important mentor of mine at Evergreen and your partner, said about crises as this kind of opening. Thinking about what is possible at a turning point, and what porosity being physically vulnerable enables.
Miranda: Yeah. And the revelations and realizations that can come with getting what we don't want. If we're supported enough. I mean, I think there's just a crucial difference between the kind of trauma of getting what we don't want, without the support to recover from it, and not.
For example, what are the times in our life when kindness becomes incredibly important, it becomes everything. Nothing else matters. Kindness and care is all that matters--and what that teaches us about, when the heart is just hungry and in so much need in a way that we can forget about in other times, and become almost callow about. And then the sense of what it means for so many people to be in situations where they don't have the support. That they might be in that state of absolute vulnerability and need without the most important provisioning of kindness, you know? Shelter, safety. I mean, when you're in isolation and you can't leave the room, you rely on others. Your dependency is brought home to you. You need others to bring you food, water. You need their kindness, you need their care. And in some ways, you know, I think as children, if you're well taken care of, you can take that for granted.
But when you become an adult and you're used to providing for yourself and being autonomous, it's something else to be reminded of your dependency.
Siloh: Is it in Crocosmia that you speak of the miraculous as ordinary? Does that come up in Crocosmia or was it in The Revolutionary? I can't remember. But you say something about that and I was just struck by that. It's something I think about--not trying to take for granted the ordinary. To see the miracle in it. In terms of the experience of going through something, that does provide this kind of tidy narrative scaffold upon which to explore things that are less clear-cut and tidy themselves.
Miranda: Yeah, that are even chaotic. But that there could just be something in there, even if it's just an image or some kind of punctum, something that strikes you of your own experience or something you witness that gives you so much to think about and work with. Like that sense that I felt when I was going through my isolation. And when I realized, just because all I could do was lie there and think because I didn't have energy to read for a while, and then I also didn't have access to internet or whatever, that I realized the hunger for kindness was so physical.
And I was surrounded by it, it wasn't that I was missing it, you know, it was more that I could almost physically take it in like food. And that heightened quality-- that's sort of what I wanted to write about in this story because I think we can talk about compassion and kindness--and we should--but it's really quite something when you feel compassion is almost like a palpable physical substance that you feel in yourself and you feel coming from others. That notion of heart opening, there's a deliciousness to that and I think a clarity--you know, like an ability to see others clearly.
I think it's hard to always see each other clearly. Don't you think that? I think often it can be hard to see each other.
Siloh: Yeah. This brings me back to what you'd said about meditation and mindfulness practice or contemplative practice. I think in academic circles, there is this sense that clarity is sharp, potentially mean and cutting. Certainly not just in academic circles, but I think that one thing that I really learned from you as a teacher is what kindness lets you see, you know, when you kind of let that seed take hold of seeing the potential in something. That seeing clearly isn't just cutting things down, but actually seeing what's there and its richness.
Miranda: Yeah. That's really heartwarming to hear. Thank you for that. That's very gratifying. I think that's so insightful, too, that we're kind of trained to think of clarity as criticality--problem identification, problem solving, taking things apart. And maybe we do need that. We need that quantitative or calculating kind of clarity or something technical, but the kind of clarity I'm talking about is that somebody can feel as if behind some kind of veil or something like that. And then with compassion, the veil can lift and you can sort of see--I don't know, it's like as if some person or being is disclosing itself. And I think that connects with the ability to cherish and value and care for, right? And not dismiss. Whether it's a tree or a forest or an animal, or a person, a relative, a friend, a stranger, it becomes impossible to dismiss the life and the autonomous mysteriousness and vitality of that, you know?
Siloh: Yeah. It's a different kind of doubling, or holding conflicting things. Because writing is so intensely critical and as you discuss, there's this tremendous amount of intellectual complexity, and structural and narrative complexity, that you have to grapple with to write something--anything. And especially something that doesn't hew the lines of what's expected of a traditional narrative. But the source of compassion, I think, needs to first also get turned on in one's self in that process. Being able to hold kindness in order to create something that also cohabitates with that critical thinking. Or can be born through it.
Miranda: Yes. Yes. Having that generosity in patience. That's interesting. It's like all these ethical dispositions that we think about as operating in relationships in the social, as being applicable to the creative process and to writing itself. The very same virtues of patience, courage. All these things you're describing. And then also, the otherness of what you're making, right? Which is another part of what we've studied: Glissant and the poetics of relation and opacity. The opacity not just of the other but the otherness of your own writing and of your own self. And the not knowing of it, of your own “Don't know where this is going, don't know exactly what this is.” And even maybe when it’s complete, I may not know, I can only enter into a relation with it, and stay kind of faithful to it or something. And in the same way that Glissant would say, “I don't require the other to be legible and recognizable and apprehensible in some familiar way for me to honor and be in relation and offer and be offered mutual reciprocity.” Without any fantasy of completeness and assimilation and all of that, you know, it seems very, very applicable really to writing. “Poethics.”
Siloh: Yeah, I think even just on a practical level of being able to finish or write something. I think sometimes that, for me, really seeing my narrator as somebody different than me, the person who walks around in the world when writing non-fiction even--especially I think, actually. Are you familiar with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Pema Chödrön's teacher, kind of brilliant and controversial Buddhist leader? I found this book at the library called Cynicism and Magic, which was early lectures at Naropa transcribed, and the Q and A’s were phenomenal at the end of each chapter. And one of the lectures was about poetry and writing. And I think something that I've struggled with is feeling like, as I kind of lean into learning more about mindfulness and the “illusion” of this reality in a way--what that means about pursuing a career in writing or putting things out there in the world that are solidified and kind of exist as a text.
And a student asked a question, or an attendee of the lecture, about ego, like the student had this dilemma, like, “I feel like when I'm most saying what I want to say I'm writing from the place of ego.” And Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s response was that it sort of doesn't matter whether you're writing from “ego” or “not ego,” if you're saying something very accurate and specific to your experience. You don't have to grasp to get people to relate to it--you'll find that people just kind of do, and that there's something really beautiful in that. Which was completely not what I was expecting to find in there. But that just kind of has been circling in my mind as you've been speaking.
Miranda: You know I went to Naropa. Did you know that?
Siloh: I did not know that!
Miranda: Yeah. I transferred there as an undergrad. So I went there 2000-2002. I was there when 9/11 happened actually. So I am familiar with those archives that you're talking about. And also of course with Trungpa Rinpoche, who's one of the co-founders along with Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsburg. And I did the writing and literature program there. I think the kind of syncretic--maybe the syncretic weave of Tibetan philosophy, Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, which I don't know if this is still the case, but when I went there, Naropa was the kind of, I think really the only college in the country where you could study Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and Tibetan Buddhism. It was to my knowledge the only Buddhist college in the country. But that syncretism between that and the writing lineages, which include not just New York School and Beat, but also what Anne Waldman would call like kind of outlier and magpie modes of writing, and also deep ecology, feminist writing, LANGUAGE poetry, you know, so many--New Narrative--so many intersecting lineages being considered and taught there and kind of dipped in the medium of Buddhism and kind of worked with alongside.
People doing this, this kind of, Mādhyamika, studying the syllogistic debate form of Tibetan philosophy: this kind of rigorous dialectics that lead to undoing clinging and conceptuality…right alongside working in these literatures of the contemporary, you know?
And then of course at that college there’s also psychology programs and that kind of response to the question from the student about writing from the ego. That makes sense to me that [Trungpa Rinpoche] would respond that way. Also, I think that the framework of ego, id, superego is coming out of the very, very specific western image and theory of mind, right? That particular division. And I think the Tibetan philosophical--I mean I'm no expert on this, but--tradition has, you know…you could say like if there's three parts to the mind in the western psychological, there’s probably ten thousand in the Tibetan. It’s so much more intricate and complex and the psychology is, you know, much older--much, much older--and the basis of a practice of observation of the mind over thousands of years. So I think in a way the notion of “an ego” or “the ego” is a little bit of a bludgeon or something. It's like, what do we mean when we say that? Are we talking about competitiveness? Are we talking about desire? Are we talking about narcissism? Are we talking about strong sense of self? Are we talking about ambition? And then are we talking about, from moment to moment, which of these things might be arising and why? Depending on a given conditions, whether it's the presence of a certain kind of relationship or a pattern of from childhood, right?
Do you see what I'm saying? So how do you even respond? One way to respond would be to say the ego is not a problem. It's just not, you know.
Siloh: It's hard to get away from.
Miranda: You just need it, that would be the psychoanalytic view, you know? You have to have it. But I think that it gets confused for competitiveness. And for ambition, you know, and then it becomes confusing because it's imprecise, you know?
Siloh: Yeah. On that note of kind of competitiveness and ambition, especially in literary spaces, I feel like you've always modeled for me this really intense kind of collectivity in your writing practice and in the way that you engage with writing community. I would love to learn more of your thoughts about the practical work of being a writer in this situation that is so highly competitive. What you do to stay grounded in your work, or what kinds of challenges you kind of face--maybe both in terms of relationship with the work and just the logistics of having time and energy and all the other things that are needed to do that kind of thinking and creating?
Miranda: I think that it's helpful to identify as a reader, first and foremost, especially when you're an emergent writer and you're aspiring and you're coming up and you're finding your way. It will give you breathing room. And at the same time, to have a kind of devotional attitude to your practice as a writer.
To sort of say--not to say religious--but to sort of say that the way that some people would get up every morning and pray, you'll get up every morning and write, you know, because that is what you need. You know, first and foremost, that is what you need. I don't think it's super important to know why, you know. It's a drive. And you know that you'll start to really go awry if you don't. Some people are called to take robes, to go into seclusion or to live monastically to spend their time in meditation and prayer. And if they don't do that, it's not gonna be good. You know what I mean? [Laughs.] They need to do that. And you, I think we all have to figure out what we need to do, you know, and then pretty soon if we just kind of honor that and cleave closely to that then it just becomes something that you can rely upon. And something that you don't allow yourself to get too far away from, or you do—and then you find out what happens to you. You know what I mean? [Laughs.] And it isn't good.
Siloh: Yeah! Try for yourself and see what happens. I feel like that's Pema Chödrön’s thing always. It's like, don't take it at face value. See what happens.
Miranda: Exactly, trust your own experience. I mean, that's the thing that has made exploring and studying Buddhist teachings for so many people even possible, is the emphasis that from the Buddha and on down, that, “Don't take my word for it. I'm not propagandizing you. Here’s these practices. Find out for yourself.” And then if it's not for you, not a big deal because it's not about getting acolytes, you know, it’s—"These practices are liberatory, aren't they? Well, go see. And if they are, they are. If they aren't, they aren't.” Which then means it can become an art for each person who’s pursuing it, who's thinking with it. And of course, one can always begin to go in more formal directions, and deepening, and there are teachers who can guide on that. And you can take vows and take precepts and study those things and let them inflect and influence your life. And that is, in my experience, quite beautiful. And, you know, when we talk about taking refuge, that can get deeper and deeper over time, that sense of what that can mean, you know?
Making a living is how do you kind of bring together questions of real refuge--like actual sanctuary: material home, a roof over your head--with that other sense of refuge, you know, that you find in your own practice and in the community of practice in friends and so on.
Seems like there's a doubleness there and I guess I feel like your drive and your need….My father used to say, “Seize your evil desires and bind them unto God.” That was one of his common proverbs. We have these drives and so on, and we don't know exactly where they come from and they're particular to us, but they also are particular to our economic system and our culture. And there's energy in it. And you sort of want to harness it and not be harnessed by it. So maybe having a bit of a philosophical detachment, which is part of what I mean by remembering that being a reader is a beautiful identity to claim, and I think allows for some of that philosophical detachment, you know? Like, you can't really fail at being a reader, you know what I mean? [Laughs.] And out of being a reader comes being a writer, and having a refuge of a practice. And then out of that comes all sorts of things. But I think if you're trying to take refuge in a kind of commercial definition of success, then you might not find refuge there. You could try. One could try, but I'm not sure, I mean, it's…
Siloh: There's certainly a difference between a spiritual groundlessness that's fruitful and honest and clear eyed, and the groundlessness of being kind of materially precarious. But it does strike me that trying to seek grounding and spiritual grounding in the ambition of being a materially successful writer is just as much maybe a hollow pursuit as like trying to seek kind of ground in like this false sense of spiritual stability--that things are gonna stay the same, and that there's clear good and bad, kind of like all of these dualities that give us a sense of security just as humans.
Miranda: Well put, yeah, right. That's it. It's like when the teachings say things like, you know, “Your house may burn down but don't let it burn you down.” You know, or these extreme things, you know, they’re not playing around. They do mean you don't have control. Your plans will not go the way you think they will. Things will go wrong. Everyone you love will disappear. Everything is impermanent. Loss and suffering are inherent to life. All of that is true. [Laughs.] So I think you're right. I think we--maybe it's like part of the sense the dualism that is the inheritance of Western Cartesianism or something that makes it hard to take that on board or something, you know, to kind of take on the truth of that, that these things are linked, that they're inseparable.
Siloh: Just as a human. [Laughs.]
Miranda: As a human. Yeah, as a human. But it just feels like a really tall order to ask people to be able to practice that non-attachment and that insight into impermanence when they don't have shelter, when they don't have enough nourishment and support, when it just feels like…That's too much to ask. There's a kind of extremity to it. I remember once reading this anecdote of a famous elder Buddhist teacher, and she was receiving students, and these two men came up to her and said--these business men--and they said, “You've given up everything, you know, you have nothing. How do you manage this?” Because she had no material possessions or belongings or anything like this, and was dependent on, I guess dana you know. And in the story she just laughs and she says, “I have everything. You know, it’s you have given up everything.” She reversed it. She basically was like, “No, look at you. You are the ones who…I actually have everything. You have nothing.” You know what I mean? She didn't say it like that, but it was something along those lines, a thunderstruck moment. This clinging and grasping and this worrying and holding on to the material. In their case, like the business man thing, you know, to be engaged in endless profit seeking was from her perspective to lose everything, to give up everything that really mattered, you know?
Siloh: Yeah. And the doubling--this feels like a perfect place to end, because like that doubles also with--there's no admonition against building things, creating a livable life or a structure that can hold you. And that's not something that we can always teach ourselves how to do, and that having a teacher gives you that ability to create something, whether that is a framework or a way of being in relation to yourself that enables that openness, or the ability to write something that feels like it needs to be written.
You've certainly been somebody who's kind of opened that up for me, so I'm so grateful. Those teachers can also be the things that we read. As we wrap up, do you want to tell readers (or listeners) where they might find more of your work and anything that you have coming up on the horizon?
Miranda: Yes, I have that chapbook that you and I have been discussing, The Revolutionary, coming out from Albion Books as a chapbook. And Crocosmia, the novella, I think also probably coming out in the next year or two. And you can go to my website and you can see links to my book Demystifications, which came out last year from Solid Objects, and some other books that are linked there.
Siloh: Perfect. I'll make sure to link the website. Thank you so much Miranda. This was a real joy.
Miranda: This was so fun.
About Miranda
Miranda Mellis is the author of Crocosmia (forthcoming, Nightboat Books); The Revolutionary (Albion Books, 2022); Demystifications (Solid Objects, 2021); The Instead, a book-length dialogue with Emily Abendroth (Carville Annex, 2016); The Quarry (Trafficker Press, 2013); The Spokes (Solid Objects, 2012); None of This Is Real (Sidebrow Press, 2012); Materialisms (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2009); and The Revisionist (Calamari Press, 2007).
Her stories, poems, and essays have appeared in various publications including Harper’s, The Believer, Bomb, Conjunctions, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, McSweeney’s and elsewhere. She has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction. She has been an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Millay Colony. She was a co-founding editor of The Encyclopedia Project with Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz and currently teaches writing, literature, and environmental humanities at The Evergreen State College.
Her website is mirandamellis.com
About Siloh
Siloh Radovsky writes essays and creative nonfiction. Her work, which often focuses on care, illness, and subculture, has been published in Entropy, PANK, Teen Vogue, Identity Theory, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book of linked essays exploring family mental illness alongside her own subcultural coming of age. She has a B.A. from The Evergreen State College, and an M.F.A. from UC San Diego, where she also taught writing.
Siloh is invested in interdisciplinary thinking and creating, making unconventional literary forms accessible, and helping writers write the things they want to write, in the ways they want to write them.