On Pandemic Writing, Journeys Within, and Creative Possibility

Reflecting on the writing I’ve been doing during these pandemic days, I think back to last spring, when Kyoto Journal asked me to contribute a piece about the pandemic and the Japanese idea of ma (negative space with creative potential). In my brainstorming notes, I wrote: silence, periods of stillness as part of our journey, bardo. Intrigued by the connection between bardo, the pandemic, and ma, I decided to explore further.

For years, I’ve been researching and writing about the Tibetan Buddhist notion of bardo, which is the journey from death to rebirth as well as any period when our ordinary reality is suspended—like now, during COVID-19. Bardo is considered to be an interval with tremendous potential, a time when we can break through to new perspectives. In what ways, I wondered, could the pandemic bardo hold this kind of creative possibility? I then remembered a trip I took one fall to my Tibetan mother’s hometown of Darjeeling. I was researching a novel and planned to meet with monks at a local monastery but when I arrived, I was told they’d “gone to the cave” until spring! Recalling this got me thinking more concretely about what can happen when we leave behind our usual lives and enter an alternate reality. 

The essay I wrote for Kyoto Journal, In the Cave, explores how the pandemic has propelled us into a different kind of existence. I reflect on “bardo and caves [and], more than thirty years since moving to Tokyo,…the Japanese concept of ma, a between-space that allows for something new.” I consider what insights we might gain while “in the cave,” and whether we can keep them with us when we go back to normal life. 

After “In the Cave,” I turned to the theme for the next three installments of my Catapult magazine column. A number of ideas came to me, but my mind kept circling around to one of my obsessions: objects and the stories they hold. My fascination has grown during the pandemic—is this because, with so many more hours than usual at my desk, I’m spending an unprecedented amount of time gazing at the objects in my study? I’m more interested than ever in objects’ real (and imagined) histories; the doors that objects open to worlds past and present, individual and collective.

In the end, I wrote about a Tibetan turquoise necklace my mother gave me when I left home, a saddle rug I inherited from my Tibetan great-grandfather, and a copy of Montaigne’s Essais I inherited from my father. How a Tibetan Turquoise Pendant Keeps Me Close to Home is about the stories the necklace evokes: my mother’s journey to America from India at nineteen and my grandparents’ sadness that she never returned to Darjeeling, my own departure from home, and my children’s leave-taking. While writing My Great-Grandfather’s Saddle Rug Helps Me Remember a Tibet That’s Gone, I studied the saddle rug, which is on my study floor, and reflected on its mandala design. Meditating on a mandala, it’s believed, we can access its inner geography; contemplating the saddle rug drew me into my great-grandfather’s story—his travels in Tibet by pony, his friendship with the Thirteenth Dalai Lama—and my journey to Tibet in the 1980s. My brainstorming notes include: journeys within when can’t travel without; Tibetan belief that visiting place in your mind as authentic as going there physically—don’t have to leave your study!

My Father, Montaigne, and the Art of Living explores what I learned from my father, and Montaigne, about how to live well. I write about what Montaigne calls an arrière boutique, a “back room” where we’re free to muse and create. His was the tower at the chateau his family owned near Bordeaux, looking out over fields and forests, with turtle doves (I imagine) murmuring in the eaves; mine is my study here in Tokyo, looking out on momiji maple trees and old temples, with children shouting and laughing on the playground of a nearby school. The arrière boutique is also the mind, I realized, and this insight echoed and was deepened by what I’d found through writing about the pandemic, bardo, caves and creative possibility. 

Montaigne was a great believer in the value of seeing things from a range of perspectives. In her wonderful biography, How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne, Sarah Bakewell says Montaigne urged us to “wake from the sleep of habit.” She writes, “Habit makes everything look bland; it is sleep-inducing. Jumping to a different perspective is a way of waking oneself up again. Montaigne loved this trick, and used it constantly in his writing.” 

By disrupting my usual life, the pandemic has awakened me more fully to the dimensions of creative possibility. It’s made me aware that “essay” comes from the French essayer (to try, to test, to experiment) and that when I begin writing an essay, I’m entering the cave, my arrière boutique, to see what I’ll discover.

Ann Tashi Slater ’84 is a Tibetan American writer who recently finished her first memoir. Her essays, stories, and interviews have been published by The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Catapult, Tin House, Guernica, AGNI, Tricycle, and others. She speaks and holds workshops in the U.S., Asia, and Europe, at Princeton, Columbia, Oxford, The American University of Paris, the Asia Society, and The Rubin Museum of Art. A longtime resident of Tokyo, she teaches literature at Japan Women's University. Visit her at www.anntashislater.com.

Photo Credit: Barry Sutton