A short note today, but first a pitch: the good folks at Amazon (ha!) and Random House are running a promotion on the e-book edition of Everyone Knows How Much I Love You this week. For the price of a subway ride, more or less, the novel can be yours. If you’ve wanted to read it—or gift it to a friend—or just want to throw an extra sale my way—you can do so for less than three dollars, until Sunday the 19th, right here.
Anyhow. Around the first of the year, I began a forty-day meditation course led by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. On Day 29, after instructions to follow my breath and my body’s sensations and the sounds in the world, after working with emotional reactivity and loving-kindness and observing my darting thoughts, the course encouraged me to think about thinking itself. To “become aware of awareness itself.”
Just at this time, I caught the Guggenheim’s Alex Katz show in its final days. I’d gone, like most people, for his famous flat billboard-style portraits of his wife and their artist-friends, but I found myself most compelled by his late work, large abstract paintings of light and water:
Ocean 9 (2022) - Alex Katz
In the wall text, Katz comments, “Now in some of the things I paint, I leave out the thing and just paint the sensation.”
Which is to say, his subject is no longer the water he sees, but the seeing itself. “The now,” he clarifies.
We see this self-referential turn across artistic disciplines. Poets write poems about poetry; novelists fill their novels with writers writing novels. The downtown dance of the sixties and seventies investigated movement; the era’s sound artists made songs about sound.
It’s easy to dismiss all this as insularity, navel-gazing, proof that a form has exhausted itself. Post-modernism as claustrophobic box.
But perhaps there is something more than a closed loop going on here. Perhaps a medium is best investigated—best illuminated—with its own materials.
Or maybe by taking as her subject the very tools with which she works, the artist delivers us, directly, to the present moment. You are reading a novel, you are watching dance, you are seeing a painting, these works remind us. You are doing this, right now.
Which brings me back to my meditation course. Mindfulness, secularized, is often sold as an optimization device, a way to be productive. But if we don’t want to use mindfulness in this way, if we don’t want to use it at all—and if we are not practicing Buddhists, seeking the spiritual plane—then what are we doing, sitting on our ragged couch pillows?
Maybe our job is to think about thinking.
Maybe to witness your own thinking is to catch yourself in the act of being human. Like trying to glimpse the back of your head in the mirror, you have to do it quickly, with a certain blurring of vision. There. There! That’s me, aware of my own awareness. Doing that human thing.
So I sit, like a fisher with her net, ready to catch the first silvery thought that floats through the pond of my mind.