Book Reflection: Zen Master Raven

It has been a while since I've written a "book reflection", so it might be worth my while explaining what they are again, before I get stuck into this one. It's a bit of a gonzo book review - I'm ostensibly reviewing a particular book, but I'm really just talking about myself and using the book as a medium. Sometimes my "book reflections" are more focused on the book than they are on me, sometimes they're more focused on me than they are on the book. Sometimes (well, probably more often than not), they just reveal me to be a bit of an opinionated jerk. Such is life. Now, onto this reflection:

I've just started reading this book for the fourth or fifth time. I've kind of lost track. And it's not like I've had the book for years and I come back to it after I've had a chance to forget most of it, I'm actually reading it consecutively. I get to the end of the book, think "that was nice", and then flick thorough it the way one does when one has finished a book one enjoyed... and then I just end up going back to the beginning and starting it again. 

Zen Master Raven: The Teachings of a Wise Old Bird, by Robert Aitken, was an early purchase for trying out a new Kindle. I had just bought an eBook reader for the first time, and I was picking up a bunch of books from different genres to play with my new toy. One recommendation lead to another, and Zen Master Raven ended up being one of my first purchases.

It was the first book I have read by Robert Aitken. I’ve since picked up a few more of his books – also on the Kindle. It’s become something I do at doctor’s surgeries and other places where I know I’m going to be waiting around for an interminable period of time: I read Aitken. I find his writing undemanding and yet stimulating. It doesn’t seem to matter that I’m hovering in some limbo where I could be interrupted at any moment (but will probably be kept waiting for another half an hour). I think his writing style is just pitched at the right level of easy-going conversation about deep and meaningful things.

It has also put me in a bit of a weird spot when I find one of his books in print in a bookshop (which has happened a couple of times but is, I’ll admit a rare occurrence). Part of me wants to buy the book because I enjoy his writing and don’t have any hard copies of his books. The rest of me doesn’t want to buy a book when I already own a copy. It’s a strange side-effect of owning a Kindle: you both own and don’t own the books at the same time.

If I ever did stumble across a print version of Zen Master Raven again, I probably would buy it (even though I won’t go out of my way to get one, because I already own the book), simply because it has become one of my favourite books and I’d love to be able to lend it to people who might enjoy it.

It’s an odd bingdingle of a book – a collection of fables written for grown-ups by a retired Zen Buddhist priest. It’s surprisingly hard to say what the book is, as I have no idea what genre it might belong to. I can only really tell you what it’s (sort of) about.

Raven (a bird), after talking to a number of Zen masters, finds a teacher in the form of Brown Bear (a bear – these aren’t people with critter names, they’re critters). After studying with Brown Bear for a while, he becomes a Zen teacher himself, and establishes a Zen community in Tall Spruce forest, where creatures as diverse as moles, badgers, woodpeckers, wolverines and porcupines come to sit together for zazen around the Assembly Oak and ask Raven questions about Zen (as well as life, the universe and everything).

These short fables aren’t really fables, as there isn’t much of a plot to them, they’re more conversations. They fit in perfectly well with a lot of traditional Buddhist literature (especially within the Zen schools) which basically consist of Monk X asking Master Y a question and getting what appears to be a ridiculous answer in return. In these stories (often featuring in books of koans), the answer is meant to challenge the assumptions behind the question – and the assumptions you brought to the table when you read the koan in the first place. Once your frame of reference has shifted, the answer isn’t ridiculous at all.

That’s what these fables in Raven are – short conversations in which the meaning shifts around depending on where your understanding happens to be at the time. In addition to other works by Aitken (including commentaries on koans), I’ve been reading books by other Zen teachers, and I swear that every time I re-read Raven, I’m picking up something new. I’ll notice that a character isn’t being treated the way I originally thought, but rather he’s been pushed to realise he’s got the wrong end of the stick. I’ll notice that an answer given to a question I originally read one way is actually quite profound for completely different reasons.

And because I’m underlining things that make me smile, or make me think, or just really appeal to me at the time, I’m coming across things I underlined on my first reading that now mean something different to me – or which were so of that moment in time that I can’t remember why I underlined them in the first place.

The stories and characters are the kind of thing we would normally regard as being “for children” – but they aren’t really. It’s not that they are unsuitable for children – the language isn’t beyond kids and it’s not not for children – it’s just that the stories make very little sense if you aren’t studying or practicing (or at least reading up on) Zen. You could read them to children, but I don’t know why you would. I expect most children would find them boring, confusing and utterly pointless. And those who did enjoy them would probably look back on them as an adult and realise they had missed the point entirely.

I expect I’ll look back on them in my old age and realise I’ve missed the point entirely.

I guess what they really are is koans for Westerners – for those of us who grew up with stories of Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Br'er Rabbit. The trouble with the “serious” koans in the “serious” koan collections is they come from another time and place and culture. Half the time you miss the subtleties of what’s going on, because someone needs to explain the undercurrent. These tales belong to a more familiar cultural milieu, so it can challenge your view of things without needing to explain what’s going on first.

The reason why I’ve read the book so often is because it’s perfect bed-time reading. I like to read something short and “devotional” before I go to bed. It’s a longstanding habit from my days as a devout Christian, when I used to read actual devotionals. I really love the genre and format of devotionals. They are complete works – you read one short page of text and you’ve read the whole thing, so you can just put down the book after that page and not get suckered into reading another one “just to see what happens next…” They often have a little bit of a story, and maybe also a few lines of verse, and they leave you with a thought. Sometimes it’s a warm fuzzy thought (“God is looking out for you”), sometimes it’s a challenging thought (“are you making the most of your time on this earth?”). At no point is it such a demanding thought that you’ll be lying awake at night trying to nut it out.

I’m not a great sleeper, but I do notice that I sleep better after reading a devotional than I do after I’ve read almost anything else. Zen Master Raven’s tales give me the same “hit” as a devotional. They’re short and complete, and it doesn’t matter if I’ve been up late fussing about things I should have dealt with hours ago, I can still fit in one or two tales to help settle my brain before turning in.

Oh, and it also fits in quite nicely with my fledgling collection of books with bears in them. In addition to Brown Bear, Raven’s teacher, there is also Black Bear – a student of Raven who is slowly working out what it’s all about.

One of my favourite lines in the book belongs to Brown Bear, and I’ll leave you with it:

Owl said, “What are Right Views?”
Brown Bear said, “We’re in it together, and we don’t have much time.”

Bothersome booths

I wanted to find a tongue twister about booths for something I was doing, but I couldn't find one, so I wrote my own:

Bartha bought a brace of booths - a blue booth and a brown booth - but both the blue booth and the brown booth were bothersome, and she bemoaned buying both bothersome booths.

Don't teach students to write poetry

I love poetry.

I love reading it, and I write it occasionally. I've never published anything (unless you count my out of office messages, which are usually either in poetry or short story form, and the occasional blog post), but one day I might - you never know.

I sometimes write poetry in a free-form diary-type stream-of-consciousness crap, and I sometimes write "proper" poetry - sonnets (Shakespearean, Italian and Spencerian), ballads, terza rima, trochaic tetrameter... The whole nine yards. I do it because I can, and I just love the game of it.

However, most importantly, I do read it. I borrow and buy collections and anthologies. In the past two months I've re-read Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, read Chris Riddell's anthology Poems to Live Your Life By (which I found flummoxing - something I'll explain at another point) and Henry Treece's The Haunted Garden, and I've started on a collection of animal-themed haiku.

My love of poetry was formed in school - but not in English classes. Oh, no. English classes always had either exceptionally dire poems designed to teach poetry or decent poems that were dissected until they made your head hurt and you grew to hate them. And then they would make us write poetry.

Now, I wrote poems all through my schooling years. If you had asked me, in school, what I was going to be when I grew up, I would say "astronaut", because I was an idealist with little grasp of reality. But I would have also have sworn that I would make a living from writing poetry somehow. Note the comment made about being an astronaut.

Heck, I even won a poetry competition in high school (it was just one of the minor categories, but it counts).

And yet, I still say you shouldn't teach kids to write poetry in English class. No good comes of it. It just so happens that I was a poetry nut, which is why English classes didn't put me off poetry for life - otherwise there's every chance they would have.

I love poetry because I took private Speech lessons (what used to be called "Elocution" in the old days), and we read poetry.

We didn't study it. We didn't dissect it. We didn't get a steady dose of poems chosen specifically for school students. We read real poetry - the kind that used to be popular back in the days when poetry was the equivalent of rock music. Shakespeare, Coleridge, Tennyson, Poe. And we read it to read it.

That may sound strange, "we read it to read it", but that's what we did. We would read through dozens of the poems, pick the ones we love best, and read them out loud with all the nuance and passion that we could muster. Along the way we also picked up things like symbolism, rhyme scheme, major literary movements, history and the lives of the poets - but it was real and it was raw and we read poetry for the pure thrill of reading it.

All of that good stuff soaked into my brain and spilled out of my fingers. I write poetry because I read so much of it that it's in my blood. It comes out, if it's in you.

And really, that's what you need. The average poetry lesson in English class seems to be designed to tick a box and get something horrible out of the way, but poetry is like an infusion - you have to steep in it, get it to soak into you. Read the good stuff for the sake of reading it and for no other reason than that. Let people find what they love and what they hate. Let them read it out loud and read it quietly to themselves.

Then, if it seeps in deep enough, it will pour out of them. It's the only way it can be any good (even if it's terrible).

Book Reflection: You’re All My Favourites

You’re All My Favourites, by Sam McBratney, illustrated by Anita Jeram.

You may remember Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram from the classic 1994 picture book, Guess How Much I Love You (which is available in three thousand different iterations), or, as I know it best, Weißt du eigentlich, wie lieb ich dich hab? I read the book in German before I found a copy in English, and I’ve read the German version a few times but I’ve only read the English version once.

You’re All My Favourites, however, I have only read in English. Quite frankly I think I’d like it better if it was in German. It’s a nice enough book with a nice enough story (such as it is), and I’m sure there are kids out there who regard it as one of their favourites. I just thought it was lacking some of the pizzazz of the book with the hares. It’s not as playful.

There’s a nuclear family with a mother, father and three baby bears. The three siblings all wonder whether or not their parents like the other kids better than them – maybe the other two are the “favourites”? And, of course, by the end of the book, their parents reassure them that they are all their favourites. It’s a nice little book with a nice little message, and parents will no doubt jump at the chance to have a picture book that explicitly reassures small children that their parents don’t have a favourite (which is, of course, not at all true – although the same kid isn’t always the favourite kid).

And therein lies the rub, I think. I feel like this book was written specifically to give a message. Like those books that are designed to teach kids that pooping is perfectly natural (I still wonder why we need so many of those), or that blended families are “okay”. It’s not really a story, per se. That’s probably why it’s not as charming as Guess How Much I Love You, which had a lovely little story.

Also, don’t give this book to a kid who actually knows anything about bears. That whole nuclear family scenario is completely inaccurate for the species. It’s not unheard of for a bear to have three cubs, but two is more common, and the father certainly doesn’t stick around to help raise the kids. In fact, there’s an excellent chance he will try to kill them if he sees them, so it’s probably best if he’s out of the picture.

Book Reflection: Maudie and Bear

Maudie and Bear, by Jan Ormerod and Freya Blackwood.

Now, this book I loved. I read this book twice in one evening because I finished it, and then wanted to dive straight back into it again. I think I read it at least six times on the first weekend after I borrowed it, and I've gone back to it a few times since. I love it now, as a grown up fan of picture books, and I would have loved it as a child, when I used to deep dive into books like this and spend hours pouring over the pictures.

I think I loved this book from the moment I saw the bear riding the bicycle on the front cover – but not just because bears and bicycles are two of my favourite things. There was something highly evocative about the picture, and the book kept that magic going throughout the whole experience. There’s something entirely timeless about this book. It was published in 2010, but if I had found it back when I was a child in the 1980s, nothing would have seemed out of place to me at all. Maybe that’s why it appeals to me so much – because it feels like a book I did read and love when I was a child, even though it isn’t one.

The book is a collection of short stories (not something I often get to say when talking about picture books aimed at five-year-olds), which each feature lovely little vignettes about a girl called Maudie and the bear who appears to be her primary caregiver. It's unclear what the exact relationship is for the bear and Maudie, but if you replaced "bear" with "grandpa", the entire book would still make perfect sense. Not that a girl being cared for by a bear doesn't make perfect sense.

The book seems to me to be a bit like an alternate reality version of Little Dee – a comic strip by Chris Baldwin in which a lost girl is adopted by a kindly bear named Ted. It also has some similarities with the television programme Bear in the Big Blue House, which also features a kindly bear as the gentle head of the household (he spent his time patiently wrangling characters who were a lot like young children as well).

In Little Dee, the bear and his makeshift family (which includes a runaway dog and a vulture, for some unfathomable reason) live in a cave in the woods. In Maudie and Bear, the girl and her ursine guardian live in a lovely Federation style house in what is clearly an Australian country town. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say somewhere in Victoria, although I’ve seen houses and buildings like that in Queensland, New South Wales and Tasmania.

The book never actually tells you or shows you where it is set, but I know that style of architecture so well that I can’t imagine the book could be set anywhere but “here”, if you know what I mean. Plus, there’s a scene in which a lorikeet is sitting on Bear’s head and a couple of currawongs are on the ground in front of him.

But, even without the birds, the illustrations are still so evocative of “place” that the book is endowed with a kind of magic realism that makes it seem perfectly natural that this is an Australian country town in which talking bears wear hats, rake leaves, wash floors, ride bicycles and raise human girls. Every now and then I find a book where I feel like I could take a vacation in the artwork – just jump into the pictures Mary-Poppins-style and have a lovely time there for a while. This is one of those books.

And the stories are all lovely, too. While Maudie could do with pulling her head in occasionally, the relationship between the girl and the bear is just charming. I particularly like the way Bear “thinks about” Maudie’s temper tantrum by leaving her to it while he has a cup of tea and a piece of cake. I would actually recommend this book for fathers, grandfathers or uncles of young girls. It’s exactly the kind of book that a kindly male role model should share with his three-to-five year old little girl.

This is one of those library finds that I wanted to buy for myself, but it's a little out of print at the moment (apparently the publishers aren't sure if it's worth reprinting - I would like to say to them that it most definitely is). Copies are currently selling for $80 in the few bookshops that have them at present, and while I can honestly say this is currently one of my favourite books, I don't love it that much.

I did track down a copy in German for less than $40, though, so that will be fun when it arrives. But the title of the German book is Marrietta und ihr Bär, which seems wrong to me. Bear isn't Maudie's bear - he's just Bear. And Maudie is as much his Maudie as he's her bear.

And I Fancy Myself a Poet

The call to write
Hits me now and then
And I fancy myself a poet.
A dozen notebooks
Or more
Filled over the years
(Well, partially filled)
With jottings that never see the light of day -
And probably never will -
Because I fancy myself a poet,
But I never assume
Anyone else will.
Is poetry a career or a vocation
In this day and age?
Or just an affectation?
Does anyone really read poetry now,
Apart from posers like me
Who fancy themselves poets?
And is a poet one who writes
Or one who is read - who publishes?
And yet, for many years now,
I've fancied myself a poet.

- "Karuke"

Book Reflection: The Great Bear

The Great Bear, by Libby Gleeson & Armin Greder.

On first reading, I did not like this book. I thought the illustrations were ugly and kind of disturbing, and I thought the plot was perfunctory and kind of depressing.

However, I was willing to concede that I hadn’t exactly given it the best of reading environments. I had been gathering books in my library for a display that had the theme “Religion and Philosophy”, and I was specifically looking for children’s books and picture books which could fit the theme (however loosely).... and I may have picked up a couple of books featuring bears while I was at it.

I’ll admit that the bear books were picked up more for me than for the display. One of them (which I will review later) had nothing to do with religion or philosophy at all, but The Great Bear looked like it might have a tangential connection to the theme, so I quickly read it to see if I had collected it for the display after all. A quick reading while standing next to a pile of books that I’d dumped on someone else’s desk wasn’t the best treatment, so I wasn’t sure if the book itself was perfunctory or just my treatment of it.

So I took it home and read it “properly”. As I read it, I realised that the illustrations were from the perspective of the bear (a dancing bear in a travelling circus who was used to people poking her with sticks and throwing rocks at her), so it made sense that they would be ugly and kind of disturbing. I started to think it was really quite clever.

But then, the plot was both too deep for most children, and not deep enough for grown ups. And half-way through the book the illustrations stopped being from the perspective of the bear, and the story stopped using words entirely – it’s like Gleeson and Greder set up one method of story telling but switched to another half-way through. And in the end I felt a bit let down by the whole thing (even though I’d come around to thinking the illustrations, while still ugly and disturbing, were also interesting and nuanced).

So, on second reading, I did not like this book. I wouldn’t buy it for any children I know, and I wouldn’t buy it for myself. But I might recommend it to an artist friend of mine who likes things I don’t like. She’d probably really enjoy it.