Few weeks ago I ran into the book ‘Iron and Silk’ by Mark Salzman accidentally when I was browsing on Amazon.com. The very high rating received by the book made me curious and I checked out a copy from the local library and read it. It is indeed a very interesting and well-written book, in which the author described the life and experience he had when he went to China in 1982 and became an English teacher in a medical school in Hunan for couple of years. The book was written in a very straight forward, matter-of-fact manner, without romanticizing or “chauvinisizing” things and people that must seem very exotic to western readers.
Incidentally, one day when I was checking out the local library, I saw a DVD recording of a speech he gave in 2002 when he came to the library to talk about his new book. The speech was very thoughtful and extremely well-organized. Alternating between Bach Cello Suits (played by himself on stage) and humorous stories of himself, he talked about how he became a writer and the journey of self-discovery. This is one of the best speeches I have seen so far.
A major part of the speech was about a new book he has just finished and the problems he encountered while writing the book. The book is ‘Lying awake’. It is about a nun in a monastery outside Los Angeles. For a long time since went into the monastery, the Sister couldn’t feel god and spirituality until one day she was bestowed with a miraculous gift that made her wrote beautiful verses about god and the religious life. Only it turned out later on that this ‘gift’ was actually coming from a form of epilepsy, an anomaly from a group of neurons that not only produced the seemingly majestic ability but also head splitting pain. So the central issue of the book is should she go through a surgery that will correct the brain disorder, rid her of the headache, but at the same time almost guarantee to remove her special gift as well? Or put it differently, the not so subtle issue is whether the formidable spiritual experience she had experienced before was indeed inspired by god or it was nothing but a pathological outcome of the runaway neurons? This is definitely an important issue facing everyone. Self-identify, doubt, and religion constitute most of our lives and motivate our endeavors.
The problem is that, the writing of this book is so austere. I know this is about nuns and life in a monastery but, still, I cannot get away from the feeling that these people were 2-D like. They somehow miss a third dimension. It gave me a strange dreamy feeling, like I was having a moon-walking on a desolate planet. It is a very empty feeling.
Nonetheless, the book got me thinking about the inspiration that makes a person a great artist or a great whatever in his/her vocation. A person needs to have enormous zeal to become a great person, but maybe the enormous zeal is originated from some pathological changes of a person. Such as some autistic savants who can memorize anything, or Van Gogh or Beethoven and artists alike that had extraordinary personality. In a way, we can probably diagnose them as having some brain anomalies. Whether that can be considered as ‘pathological’ is another matter, but the more philosophical issue is what will they choose if they have the option to correct the anomaly and become normal (whatever the definition of normality is) and very plain persons, say, just like you and me. Can Van Gogh still be Van Gogh if he has to care about all the mundane and trivial things that we have to take care everyday? Art is such a difficult road. We ordinary people make a living by spending time in whatever job we have, but artists make a living by feeding themselves to the audience. Maybe I can conclude that those who consumed by their passion are sick, and the remaining people are prisoners. Between being sick and being prisoned, tough choice.
