First Sentence Friday: R. John Williams

First Sentence Fridays celebrates the prose and process of new books.

About Out of Mind: Media, Meditation and the Problem of the Inner Self:

Mindfulness meditation is often presented as a simple practice of turning inward and quieting the world to discover an authentic “inner voice,” but the very idea that consciousness contains such a voice depends on a slew of contradictory beliefs about Buddhism, neuroscience, and more. In Out of Mind, R. John Williams challenges the core (and misguided) assumptions about human nature that shaped the development of modern meditation, revealing how they were informed by nineteenth-century theosophy, German idealism, Buddhist modernism, Heideggerian mindfulness, Cold War brainwashing, and even phenomena like sensory deprivation tanks. Against the notion that truth lies hidden in our brains, Williams argues that we are never sealed off from the world. Our consciousness extends beyond our own minds—into the intricate web of language, literature, art, and other people to which we are intimately connected.

Avidly: What’s the first sentence of your book? No cheating!

R. John Williams:  “A few years ago I joined a collective of scholars, journalists, and theologians at the Institute for Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, California, for a series of annual meetings.” P.S. I totally had to cheat on this, and now wish I had written a more memorable first line!

What’s something  specific you remember about writing this sentence? Where were you? When in the book writing did you write it?

I knew pretty early on that I wanted to start the book with this scene. In it, a fairly nice, academic gathering is suddenly rendered “spiritual” by a meditator who insists we all set aside our notes and observe a “moment of presence.” It’s an increasingly common practice! So that sentence felt like a fairly straightforward way to set the stage. It also spoke to the conditions under which I started researching these assumptions about human interiority.

Can you share an early draft of this sentence? Or tell us about a favorite word, something you wrestled with, some way it changed?

I rewrote this introduction so many times! Contemplating the number of drafts and different starts is a bit embarrassing. Other drafts began with, for instance, “Depending on whom you ask, the specter of an all-encompassing nowness is either our most devastating current dilemma or else the cure to almost everything.” And “What does the now look like? Not the word, but the feeling, the experience?” Neither of these is great. In fact, I feel like I am much better at last sentences than first sentences. My classes are like this too. I like to think that students feel increasingly startled and excited by how the lecture or conversation evolves. My hope is that it’s okay to start in the middle of things, including the reader’s (middling) expectations. 

Is there a writing tic you wrestled in this book? How did you manage it? Or, is there a style/voice thing you really tried for?

Oh, so many tics! And so much hair-pulling, head-scratching, and pencil-twirling to try to get around them! For instance: I overload examples, particularly when I’m making the case for something unexpected or counter-intuitive. Partly this is because, I think, challenging expectations or common assumptions requires detail and comprehensiveness. You can be breezy and terse, but it’s easier when rehearsing accepted wisdom.

But, no doubt, my overloaded details also come from various forms of insecurity and vanity. If I found a hundred examples of some totally unexpected thing, then, by god, shouldn’t I include them? Won’t my reader flounder without them? Isn’t it dazzling to see so many? Luckily, all of my best colleagues and editors have a way of gently walking me off that ledge. (Or mostly off that ledge—the book is still 465 pages long.)

Tell us one or two specific details about how you like to write: home/office/café, soundtrack or silence, favorite mug, favorite hoodie, preferred mode of pencil/pen/notebook/font/software?

My writing rituals are  basically non-precious. I can write anywhere—a parking lot, a dentist’s waiting room, at home, at the office, with music or without (I suspect many people with kids have had to figure out similarly expansive modes). That said, I can be embarrassingly obsessive. I write myself through massive drafts, exploring every possible angle, citing every possible source, cramming in every archival detail I can find.

The upshot, for me, is that I’ve never had writer’s block. Nothing ever seems final or fixed in stone, so I am always free to keep going. But the downshot (is that a word?) is that I end up having to revise, revise, revise, and then revise some more, and probably end up spending just as much time and energy on the final product as someone who requires more isolated retreats or plods painstakingly over every word.

Tell us one other thing you worked hard on in this book and are proud of!

I think the chapter I am most proud of in this book is the one on Heidegger. He is such an important thinker, and has had such an impact on twentieth-century philosophy that I was surprised to see that no one had really written about the impact he had on American psychology and, eventually, mindfulness meditation.

Of course, this is also the chapter I am most expecting to get pushback on. There’s a veritable army of Heidegger bros out there. They’re going to be completely fine with the idea that he was “misread” in his reception by humanistic psychologists in the 1960s, but will no doubt recoil defensively at the suggestion that the philosopher’s own thinking may have directly set the stage for that reception. I had enormous fun, though, in mapping out the path from Heideggerian “authenticity” to mindfulness’s “inner self”— re-creating, for instance, Heidegger’s interview with a Buddhist monk as a television screenplay or synthesizing his ideas in a kind of “primal scene.” Whether some of these playful turns will be appreciated by my readers is still an open question!

Now that it’s all written and done, what occurs to you about how your first sentence connects to the book as a whole? In the ideas, style, experience?

I think because the opening scene takes place in California, inside a Buddhist institution, with an eclectic group of professionals, and in the shadow of Silicon Valley—all of that points to a particular historical trajectory, which is what I try to articulate in the rest of the book. I wanted the larger question asked by the book (where exactly is the mind anyway?) to have some grounding in the real world. 

What’s your favorite sentence in the book? What specifically do you like about it?

“Apparently, a lot of assholes meditate.” I had to insist that this sentence stay in the book through several rounds of edits! I like that it feels both wholly intuitive and completely contrary to the expectations seemingly everyone brings to mindfulness meditation. (We all know someone who is overly-pious about their contemplative practice while treating other people with vindictiveness or back-biting disdain; we also all know that meditation will supposedly calm the soul, enhance one’s sensitivity, induce love and empathy, and so on). So to simply state the fact—that a lot of assholes are out there meditating—felt like a punchy way of getting at a deeper dilemma regarding the presumed effects of contemplative practice on the inner self.

Share the love: what’s a first sentence written by someone else (any genre!) that you think is great?

They dont get much better than the first line of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973): “A screaming comes across the sky.” It just absolutely rips open the world of the book—and the “A” itself (typically rendered large, in traditional block-style in the book’s several editions) actually looks like the formal arc of a rocket trajectory.

 And “a” screaming? Not, “a screaming sound” but a screaming? Right in that opening line we see the specter of chaos, perfectly torching—in that first-letter’s rainbow-like trajectory—all the technical progress of enlightenment knowledge. The whole book, I think, is brilliantly forecast in that single first sentence.

Order Out of Mind now from University of Chicago Press

R. John Williams has tried every kind of meditation he could find, and failed at all of them. When not trying to meditate, he teaches students at Yale University and at the Danbury Federal Correctional Facility (with the Yale Prison Education Initiative). He is also the author of The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West (Yale University Press, 2014).