inventing mindfulness
An interviewer once suggested to Julio, speaking of his earlier stories: “you seek [buscas] a provocative effect more than anything.” “Provocative effect” okay, Julio tells her, but he doesn’t care for the “the verb “to seek” [buscar]. “I would tell you, I would repeat Pablo Picasso’s famous phrase: ‘I don’t seek [busco], I find [encuentro].”1
Until I saw it through Julio’s eyes, I had always understood Picasso’s famous phrase as arrogance. Now I hear it as just the opposite. The seeker would take credit for the effects he makes. But the finder has the humility to know that it isn’t about him, it is about the overall disposition of things that allows him to trip across an effect [Ù78].
Julio refuses to characterize his work as the search for a predetermined object. Here he’s the opposite of Horacio Oliveira who tells us that “searching was my symbol.”2 Instead, Julio tells us that he “finds”; finds without searching. He just happens upon the effects he produces.
To produce, as Julio sees it, is “to happen upon.” And with this, he defines his work as invention—in the oldest sense of the term, not as a feat of originality, but as a discovery, a coming-upon. For invention comes to us from the Latin word inventio which was, in turn, the translation of the Greek word heuresis which meant, simply, “to come upon, or discover [Ù4, 63, 67].” What state of mind facilitates this? How can we do this at home?
The question matters because invention isn’t just something that Julio does, inviting me passively to witness the process. It’s something he invites us into—something he tries to infect us with.
To illustrate this state of mind, I’ve invoked the difference between driving full speed on an Interstate toward a predetermined and fixed destination and wandering without fixed destination along back roads [Ù19]. But this difference is only helpful if we relieve the latter of its connotations of laxity or slackness. The pertinent attitude can be difficult to grasp if we think too fixedly in terms of the opposition between attention and distraction, rigor and laxity, as we are taught in school.
I think that the word “awareness” or “mindfulness,” in the Buddhist sense that connotes an awakening of our faculties to what is all around us, best grasps it. For it is true that Julio’s invention (“I don’t search”) seems to reject “attention”, by which term we usually mean a concentration or focusing (both connoting a narrowing of scope) of our mental energy on one object. But he also seems to reject “distraction”, if by that word we mean something like a lapse in our perceptual and intellectual apparatus.
For a Buddhist, “mindfulness” or “awareness” suggest a radically expansive, simultaneous operation of all our sense organs (and for a Buddhist, there are six, not five, of these; the sixth being mind).3 With such a mental state, concentration on a particular object, such as the rhythm of our breathing, does not preclude awareness of the surrounding world or of the internal field of thought and feeling. Nor does the absence of concentration on a particular object preclude deep perception of particular objects. On the contrary, with mindfulness, perception is deepened in relation to each particular object, and its range is expanded in relation to the general field of possible objects.
This is the state of mind in which we suspend searching so that discovery, or invention, can be fully awakened. And buddha means nothing else.
1 Julio Cortázar, Cortázar por Cortázar, with Evelyn Picon Garfield (México: Universidad Veracruzana, 1978), p. 17.
2 Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Pantheon, 1966), Ch. 1, p. 7. In Spanish: Rayuela [1963] Barcelona: Edhasa, 1984), Ch. 1, p. 12.
3 Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (New York: Broadway, 1999), p. 23.overy, or invention, can be fully awakened. And buddha means nothing else.