On a quiet, sunny afternoon, I sat on a bench outside the Birmingham 8, a beautiful relic of a theater on Old Woodward, intermittently scribbling in my journal and staring perhaps a breath too long into the faces of passersby. A vague breeze lazed along, taking the edge off the July heat until, almost out of nowhere, it picked up and caught the corner of an odd paper sticking out the edge of my notebook. And then it caught the rest of them. As if out of some bad movie, the downtown Birmingham sidewalk was littered with torn-off scraps of paper, folded sheets of loose leaf, New Yorker daily calendar cartoons, all tattooed with my cramped, left-slanted handwriting in various colors and stages of clarity.
And I was scrambling after them.
Picking up on my panic, an older couple and two middle-aged women abandoned their iced coffees to help me, gathering up my worthless treasures as they spewed into the street, under cars, around corners. When we were pretty certain we’d retrieved them all, my rag-tag group convened around me, presenting their armfuls of scraps as nobly as the magi might have offered their gold, frankincense and myrrh.
“What are you writing?” one of the middle-aged women asked, squinting to pick up a word or two from the pages in her hands.
“Oh, it’s just…” I faltered, feeling immediately guilty that these people might have been under the impression that they were collecting something other than the masturbatory musings of a twenty-something malcontent. “It’s nothing. I’m not a writer.”
The old man cleared his throat. He raised his eyebrows, looked meaningfully at their armfuls of chicken-scratched papers, at the journal I still had tucked under my arm, at my apparently not-important-enough purse left on a bench half a block away.
“Are you sure?”
I am not often called a liar by complete strangers; even less often do I agree with these precocious unknowns. But, as I embarrassedly tucked away the stack of pages, planning to sort through them later in a less-public setting, I felt like a politician who sings the praises of heterosexual, romantic, marital love while tap-tap-tapping his foot in a bathroom stall. My actions had betrayed me.
In “In Search of Lost Time,” Proust grapples with this very same question of identity, though he approaches it from the other direction. Robert Pippin examines Proust’s development into a writer in the essay “On ‘Becoming Who One Is’ (And Failing): Proust’s Problematic Selves”: “For a very long time, though, Marcel is a writer who does not write or writes very little as he struggles to understand how a writer lives, how one responds to and tries to understand the people around him ‘as a writer would’ and struggles to find out whether he can ever become in reality, however much he actually writes, ‘a real writer.’” However, Pippin goes on, “You cannot write by imitating the essence of writing.” Pippin argues that, for all Proust’s hemming and hawing and self-identifying as a writer, he does not actually become a writer until he acts, until he starts to write. (And I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that he goes on to become one of the best writers in history.)
The play between who we pretend to be—who we say we are, who we honestly believe ourselves to be—and who we actually are—who our actions and reactions reveal us to be—is an ever-entertaining back-and-forth, where the actions and reactions triumph every time. Pippin explains: “…reports of self-knowledge are very likely not reports of mere inner facts, gained by some special access the subject alone has (as if one could discover whether one had a writerly essence or not). The relation between such beliefs and their expression in actions is much tighter than this; the latter turns out to be crucial to the truth of any such former claim, and such truths often turn out different from how a provisional, prior expectation would have it.” The insufficiency of our inner intentionality creates a gap between the self we can explain and the self we are publicly required to be; where our internal narrative might allow us to digress on any subject ad infinitum, the world compels the public self to end those digressions, to cut off the inner monologue—to act. That little leap to action past the sum of all our explicable reasoning is where our selfhood lies. Therefore, it is only in acting—necessarily in ways we cannot fully explain—that we simultaneously reveal and discover who we are, as Proust does with respect to his writing, his love, his achievements. “He is sure he is not in love with someone and is then devastated by some slight or neglect or indifference; he is sure the attainment of some goal is crucial to happiness, yet finds himself indifferent to acquiring it.” Selfhood becomes less “I think, therefore I am” and more “I act, therefore I am.”
While this understanding of selfhood can be strangely reassuring for its simplicity—how many late-night phone calls would be spared if we simply judged people on the merit of their actions, rather than on the rationalizations of those actions?—it also forces us to face some harsh truths about ourselves. For instance, Ella and Levent recently went on a cruise in Alaska, and I promised I would water their plants in their absence; I like to think of myself as the kind of friend you can count on to water your plants while you’re away. But, as happens so often, that illusion I had of myself was shattered; I was Proust, telling himself he was a writer without actually writing, telling himself he wasn’t in love while pining after his lover’s attentions. I completely forgot about their plants until I received a text on the night they returned to Detroit: “Did you neglect our plants because we’ve been neglecting you?” Ella was very light and flippant about it, but I did not like what I had discovered about myself. I am not the kind of friend you can count on to water your plants while you’re away.
This gives rise to the great inconvenience of the actions-as-self school of thought. Words are quick and easy. Especially for the Internet generation: we are constantly boiling down our existences to a few choice phrases for social networking sites, for eHarmony.com, for personality quizzes, for first dates and self-aggrandizing blogs (heh). We know what to say, or at least what we are supposed to say, to project the image of the self we think we are. But action—action is difficult. Action is slow. Action is deliberate. Action requires long patience and great discipline. If we believe that the making of a person is in her actions, we arrive at the Aristotelian concept that character comes out of habit, and that excellent character comes not just out of excellent thoughts and excellent ideals but out of a habit of living excellently: “the normal excellence of long accomplishment,” as Jack Gilbert writes. And to change one’s character, to change one’s self—this is not the result of a few self-help books or the repetition of self-esteem boosters in the mirror every morning. As Don DeLillo writes about becoming a novelist in a letter to David Foster Wallace:
“…all of this happened over time, until eventually discipline no longer seemed something outside me that urged the reluctant body into the room. At this point discipline is inseparable from what I do. It’s not even definable as discipline. It has no name. I never think about it. But there’s no trick of meditation or self-mastery that brought it about. I got older, that’s all. I was not a born novelist (if anyone is). I had to grow into novelhood.”
Any change in selfhood begins with acting differently, practicing new habits until they are ingrained into our nature, until they become part of who we are, something we no longer have to think about. My breach of friendship with Levent and Ella cannot be mended with an apology, though I promptly gave one for lack of anything better to do—the words, almost meaningless, came so quickly and easily. But the real work lies ahead of me: because I want to change, because I want to become the kind of friend you can count on to water your plants while you’re away, I must start acting like that kind of friend. I must grow into that kind of friend, as DeLillo grew into novelhood, as Proust grew into a writer. The shift is long and boring—not the performance but the rehearsal; “not the marvelous act” but “the evident conclusion of being,” to pilfer again from Gilbert. The making—and, by the same token, the changing—of a self takes time and great effort.
In keeping with Proust’s preoccupations, we learn best the importance of action, of habit, of time in the context of romantic relationships. Through our sexual trysts and star-spotted forays into love, we can see most obviously how very poorly we understand our unwieldy selves. Spend three minutes on Match.com: “I am a hard working, independent and fun loving guy. I love good times, laughing with friends, hanging out and sports”; “I’m a pretty easy-going guy”; “independent, artistic, confident, thoughtful, adventurous and down-to-earth individual.” Not only do we use practically the same words to describe ourselves, the words themselves are meaningless—too quick, too easy.
While the inadequacy of self-knowledge is highlighted by Internet dating sites, it is by no means confined to them. For instance, I was on a date recently talking about the philosophical underpinnings of “Watchmen.”
“Yeah, I’m a bit of a philosopher myself,” my date said. “It’s one of the most interesting things in life.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “Did you study it in school? Who do you like to read?”
He thought for a minute, swirled his beer around in the glass, smiled to himself. “No, nothing like that. I guess I more just like to think about things, you know? Like, find the hidden meaning in the things, what’s going on behind the scenes.”
“Yeah, I get that,” I said. “Like what?”
He was quiet again. “Well,” he said after a while, “I guess just ‘Watchmen.’”
He wasn’t lying on purpose. He really self-identified as a lover of philosophy, really believed he thought it was “the most interesting thing in life.” But, as he had only one example to demonstrate this idea he held about himself, it could not possibly be true. If you actually think something is “the most interesting thing in life,” you devote more energy to it than the duration of a movie based on a graphic novel. The point is that you can be anything for the length of a Saturday night. You can be attentive, you can be well-dressed, you can be interested in golf, you can be a flight attendant or an Olympic medalist: “The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment” (again, Gilbert). But what do you do on Sunday? Who are you on Tuesday afternoon? It becomes painfully obvious in the dating world that, when people are not lying on purpose, they are lying by accident. The real discovery of a person—both of oneself and of another—takes nothing but time, time, time. Time to see their habits, their behavior, their “beauty/That is of many days” (Gilbert again). Time to let their actions betray them.
Consider the film “(500) Days of Summer.” (As they say: spoiler alert.) Summer, the apparent fulfillment of main character Tom’s romantic ideals, remains adamant throughout their relationship that she does not want a boyfriend, that she does not believe in love. “I’m not looking for anything serious,” she tells Tom on their very first date. I became very engaged with the movie at this point. The “I don’t want a relationship right now” excuse is so compelling because, though we use and accept it like currency—sometimes we even believe it about ourselves—it is never, ever true; who does not want to be in love, to be loved by someone we love, in that deep, life-affirming, exciting way? There is a great exchange at the end of the film, months after Tom and Summer have broken up and Summer has married someone else, when Tom admits that he doesn’t understand. How could she get married when she didn’t even believe in love?
My heart broke for Tom just then, still clinging to words when Summer’s actions were all the evidence he should need. In a better movie, she would not have answered because no further explanation is necessary; in marrying another man, her true self is revealed. Instead, Summer (whose character, even in its poorly developed condition, is completely detestable) garbles some stupid line about “just knowing” about the man she married, but the takeaway is the same. Of course it was never the case that she didn’t believe in love; she just didn’t love Tom.
As we bump up against the limits of our self-understanding, the concept of selfhood shifts from the way we privately define ourselves—I am not a writer, I am a good friend, I am not in love—toward the way we actually show up in the world—I write, I break my promises, I am deeply affected by another’s behavior. Of course, as soon as we get any grasp on a sense of self, time lurches on and more information is revealed: “Any settled piece of self-knowledge or presumed fixed commitment or ego ideal is…always, necessarily, provisional, in constant suspense, always subject to pervasive doubt,” Pippin writes.
It is an unreasonable demand, then, for a stranger to ask me, as casually as he might ask me for directions to the freeway or coins to feed his parking meter, if I am a writer. I responded, I think, in the only appropriate way. After thanking the old couple and the middle-aged women for their help and shoving the loose pages deep into my purse, I sat down again outside the Birmingham 8 to continue intermittently scribbling in my journal and staring perhaps a breath too long into the faces of the passersby.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The Milbeck Wedding
Milbeck and JW got married last Friday. One of my favorite moments was at the rehearsal when the minister fake-presented "Mr. and Mrs. Jon Wilcox" for the fake-first time. Milbeck's mom shook her head vehemently and turned to me, the nearest person to her in the near-empty pews: "That's not what he's supposed to say. Her name is not 'Jon.'"
I nodded in agreement. "Mrs. M," I said, "you are preaching to the choir."
For the real thing, the minister correctly presented "Mr. and Mrs. Jon and Erin Wilcox," though even that sounded strange. The wedding was perfect, not least because Milbeck looked like a Greek statue carved out of alabaster marble--the curve of her arm, the crook of her nose, the ripple of her back all beautifully draped over or exposed by her floor-length gown. The Spartan aesthete was only spoiled by a smile that her face seemed barely able to contain. She was smiling like that during the entire celebration, and I wondered if it didn't make her cheeks hurt after a while.
I had the distinct honor of being asked by the bride and groom to read something during their ceremony. Milbeck approved a piece I had written a while ago about a game of Taboo we played together. Games of Taboo, of course, I know something about; but it is tricky to write about love. Especially this kind of love, this marital, final, this forever kind of love, this love I have only ever read about in books. The weight of the day increased in my mind, cutting a deeper line between my world and Milbeck's. She was embarking on an adult decision, starting a whole new life with new needs and new problems and new considerations that I can't understand from this side of the fence, and it made me feel very young and puppyish. And the reading only exacerbated my concerns: of our group of friends who attended the wedding, I alone remain chronically single a year after graduation. I would be betrayed by my words, by my stories about parlor games and my quotes lifted from this poem that Adam sent me when I appealed to his expertise on the subject. What do I know about love?
On the Monday before the wedding, Milbeck came over to visit. She stayed until 2 a.m., to talk and sip tea and watch YouTube videos of people injuring themselves in hilarious ways. And it quieted me a bit to be reminded that, while Milbeck is crossing over into this uncharted territory, her marriage would not make me completely irrelevant in her life: she still needs to talk about dance and gossip about our friends and watch YouTube videos of people injuring themselves in hilarious ways. While I still felt young and puppyish, I was proud to throw in my two cents during their ceremony.
This is what I read:
About a year ago, I was playing Taboo against Erin and Jon in their old apartment in Kalamazoo. Before the game started, my partner and I honestly thought we stood a chance. Taboo, if you’ve never played, is all about communicating creatively and effectively, about getting your partner to guess the word on your card without using one of the prohibited terms. For instance, on the Taboo card “disco,” the forbidden words are “hustle,” “ball,” “mirrored,” “dancing” and “fever.” We were the verbal sort, my partner and I, and we thought we could explain our way out of anything. Sure, Erin and Jon had been dating since high school; sure, they were engaged to be married; sure, they lived together. So what? We had language on our side.
Of course, the trick to Taboo is that it’s not about language at all. My partner and I were never going to beat Erin and Jon. In fact, there’s not a person in this world with whom I could beat Erin and Jon in a game of Taboo. They’re just too quick, their shared world too vast—like all happy couples, they are forever referencing a particular event in the kitchen earlier that week or a peculiar habit of one of their relatives. They truly share their lives, in the deepest sense. But there was one moment in that game when it was no longer about our vast inadequacy in the face of the Taboo tornado that is Jon and Erin. There was a moment—brief, small, understated—when I got a glimpse of what it must be like to know, to love, your Other. Jon was guessing, and Erin prompted him with clues.
“Shaquille O’Neal!” Erin said.
“Meatloaf,” Jon answered.
No hesitation.
No explanation.
Next card.
My partner and I lost by about thirty points.
Now, there’s a story linking Shaquille O’Neal and meatloaf that Erin and Jon told us later that night, but, for considerations of common decency, it’s not one that I can repeat here. Anyway, the point is that it’s not about stories. Over the past five years, I have gotten to know Erin and Jon both individually and as a couple. I could tell you a million stories about why I think they’ll be happy together forever. Because Erin makes a mean vegetarian chili. Because Jon sings All-4-One to Erin in the car. Because Erin is so beautiful, so smart and artistic and full of electric curiosity about the world. Because Jon…well, because Jon draws funny comics. Because, two Christmases ago, they celebrated their engagement in our friend’s basement with ridiculous hats and cheap sparkling wine. But these are only words that, to borrow from David Foster Wallace, “barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny part of” their love at “any given instant.” A laundry list of reasons why I think they’ll always be together is too bogged down by its own logic to carry much weight in matters of the heart. But I know—I know—Jon and Erin’s love for each other is something more than a million little stories. It is something quieter, something more elusive, something more enduring: not the “marvelous act” but the “amazed understanding”; not the “month’s rapture” but the marriage; not the exception but the “beauty that is of many days.” I know this because, when Erin peers coquettishly from behind the bill of her cap and murmurs, “Shaquille O’Neal,” Jon will always, always whisper softly back: “Meatloaf.”
I nodded in agreement. "Mrs. M," I said, "you are preaching to the choir."
For the real thing, the minister correctly presented "Mr. and Mrs. Jon and Erin Wilcox," though even that sounded strange. The wedding was perfect, not least because Milbeck looked like a Greek statue carved out of alabaster marble--the curve of her arm, the crook of her nose, the ripple of her back all beautifully draped over or exposed by her floor-length gown. The Spartan aesthete was only spoiled by a smile that her face seemed barely able to contain. She was smiling like that during the entire celebration, and I wondered if it didn't make her cheeks hurt after a while.
I had the distinct honor of being asked by the bride and groom to read something during their ceremony. Milbeck approved a piece I had written a while ago about a game of Taboo we played together. Games of Taboo, of course, I know something about; but it is tricky to write about love. Especially this kind of love, this marital, final, this forever kind of love, this love I have only ever read about in books. The weight of the day increased in my mind, cutting a deeper line between my world and Milbeck's. She was embarking on an adult decision, starting a whole new life with new needs and new problems and new considerations that I can't understand from this side of the fence, and it made me feel very young and puppyish. And the reading only exacerbated my concerns: of our group of friends who attended the wedding, I alone remain chronically single a year after graduation. I would be betrayed by my words, by my stories about parlor games and my quotes lifted from this poem that Adam sent me when I appealed to his expertise on the subject. What do I know about love?
On the Monday before the wedding, Milbeck came over to visit. She stayed until 2 a.m., to talk and sip tea and watch YouTube videos of people injuring themselves in hilarious ways. And it quieted me a bit to be reminded that, while Milbeck is crossing over into this uncharted territory, her marriage would not make me completely irrelevant in her life: she still needs to talk about dance and gossip about our friends and watch YouTube videos of people injuring themselves in hilarious ways. While I still felt young and puppyish, I was proud to throw in my two cents during their ceremony.
This is what I read:
About a year ago, I was playing Taboo against Erin and Jon in their old apartment in Kalamazoo. Before the game started, my partner and I honestly thought we stood a chance. Taboo, if you’ve never played, is all about communicating creatively and effectively, about getting your partner to guess the word on your card without using one of the prohibited terms. For instance, on the Taboo card “disco,” the forbidden words are “hustle,” “ball,” “mirrored,” “dancing” and “fever.” We were the verbal sort, my partner and I, and we thought we could explain our way out of anything. Sure, Erin and Jon had been dating since high school; sure, they were engaged to be married; sure, they lived together. So what? We had language on our side.
Of course, the trick to Taboo is that it’s not about language at all. My partner and I were never going to beat Erin and Jon. In fact, there’s not a person in this world with whom I could beat Erin and Jon in a game of Taboo. They’re just too quick, their shared world too vast—like all happy couples, they are forever referencing a particular event in the kitchen earlier that week or a peculiar habit of one of their relatives. They truly share their lives, in the deepest sense. But there was one moment in that game when it was no longer about our vast inadequacy in the face of the Taboo tornado that is Jon and Erin. There was a moment—brief, small, understated—when I got a glimpse of what it must be like to know, to love, your Other. Jon was guessing, and Erin prompted him with clues.
“Shaquille O’Neal!” Erin said.
“Meatloaf,” Jon answered.
No hesitation.
No explanation.
Next card.
My partner and I lost by about thirty points.
Now, there’s a story linking Shaquille O’Neal and meatloaf that Erin and Jon told us later that night, but, for considerations of common decency, it’s not one that I can repeat here. Anyway, the point is that it’s not about stories. Over the past five years, I have gotten to know Erin and Jon both individually and as a couple. I could tell you a million stories about why I think they’ll be happy together forever. Because Erin makes a mean vegetarian chili. Because Jon sings All-4-One to Erin in the car. Because Erin is so beautiful, so smart and artistic and full of electric curiosity about the world. Because Jon…well, because Jon draws funny comics. Because, two Christmases ago, they celebrated their engagement in our friend’s basement with ridiculous hats and cheap sparkling wine. But these are only words that, to borrow from David Foster Wallace, “barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny part of” their love at “any given instant.” A laundry list of reasons why I think they’ll always be together is too bogged down by its own logic to carry much weight in matters of the heart. But I know—I know—Jon and Erin’s love for each other is something more than a million little stories. It is something quieter, something more elusive, something more enduring: not the “marvelous act” but the “amazed understanding”; not the “month’s rapture” but the marriage; not the exception but the “beauty that is of many days.” I know this because, when Erin peers coquettishly from behind the bill of her cap and murmurs, “Shaquille O’Neal,” Jon will always, always whisper softly back: “Meatloaf.”
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Lost, slot machines and Snoopy
Every Wednesday since January—with a few exceptions close to finals—my friend Kimmy and I curled up on her couch with a bag of white cheddar popcorn and Diet Ruby Red Squirt to watch Lost, the modern masochist’s show of choice. If classical television can be critiqued for its ease, for its quick, laugh-tracked solutions to uncomplicated problems in neat, half-hour time slots, Lost is the perfect answer. It simply makes no sense at all. I feel completely ridiculous even talking about it: black smoke monsters and deity-like figures and people talking to ghosts. Usually, when writers ask us to willfully suspend our disbelief, it is with the aim of revealing some greater truth about the human condition. We accept “Star Wars” to learn about the strength of friendship and family; we accept “A Wrinkle in Time” to learn about remaining true to oneself; we accept “Harry Potter” to learn about parental love. In Lost, I accepted that pushing a button controls the delicate balance of life on Earth only to be insulted by sloppy time travel stories and narrative cop-outs that have people choosing possible death and certain loss of their closest friends because of a little unhappiness in love. My faith has been shaken, to say the least.
And yet I keep going back. The cost is great, the pay-off virtually nonexistent, and yet I eagerly await the final season, which begins next January. A stronger person would walk away, would not allow herself to be so enchanted with the unbelievable chaos created by lazy storytelling. I am not—along with my ten million fellow Lost viewers—one of those stronger people.
We Lost faithful, however, are not the only victims of this game. My friend Ben, who has long since given up on the series, recently confessed a love for the movie “Donnie Darko,” a movie I find insufferable. He has watched it over and over, picking up the nuances he may have missed in previous viewings, though he admits the movie itself offers little value as a story. What he gets out of “Donnie Darko” and what I get out of “Lost” are the same: a delight in deciphering complication for complication’s sake. Different drink; same poison.
Jonah Lehrer writes about our sweet spot for this “complication for the sake of complication” in his book “How We Decide.” He describes the case of a Parkinson’s patient treated with dopamine agonists, which imitate the activity of dopamine in the brain and alleviate some of the symptoms of Parkinson’s. This particular patient lost all her money, her home and finally her family to slot machines. Instead of disengaging in the randomness of the slot machine that our brains don’t have a chance of deciphering, Lehrer explains, our dopamine neurons become obsessed. We are enthralled by random outcomes precisely because we can’t figure them out. (Ergo, “Lost” is more interesting to us than “The Brady Bunch,” and “Donnie Darko” is more rewarding than “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.”) While most of us can keep the impulses dictated by our dopamine receptors in check (at least outside the realms of cult cinema and popular TV), the surge of chemicals that the Parkinson’s patient experienced when she played the slots created an overwhelming bliss, much stronger than what an undrugged brain would experience, setting her up to develop a gambling addiction. The pleasure she felt was so intense she thought it was worth the cost of losing everything.
While the case of the gambling Parkinson’s patient is an extreme one, our compulsion to find order in chaos—sometimes against our own best interests—extends subtly to more mundane activities. In his book, Lehrer quotes the neuroscientist Read Montague: “People enjoy investing in the stock market and gambling in a casino for the same reason they see Snoopy in the clouds…When the brain is exposed to anything random, like a slot machine or the shape of a cloud, it automatically imposes a pattern onto the noise. But that isn’t Snoopy, and you haven’t found the secret pattern in the stock market.”
In some circumstances, we are well advised to practice caution when imposing our own understanding of causal relationships and developmental narratives on entities—like the stock market and the slot machine—that do not adhere to such rules. But I have to take issue with Montague’s belittlement of seeing Snoopy in the clouds. Despite its problematic application in the gambling and financial worlds, the ability to create a story from chaos—to “impose a pattern onto the noise”—embodies the magic of being human. When we are confronted with a random assortment of glowing dots in the night sky, we see astrology, mythology, the Big Dipper. When we are confronted with a gushing stretch of water, we see “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “Moon River,” “The Bear.” When we are confronted with puffy white masses of frozen crystals, we see Snoopy.
Our pattern-seeking tendencies are most important when we use them to string together our own tales. Who can think of his existence as a smattering of discrete, unrelated happenings? Sartre grapples with the disconnect between the randomness of experience and the relative coherence of identity in his novel “Nausea”: “Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked onto days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition. …That's living. But everything changes when you tell about life…” When we live, it is all noise, cacophonous and disjointed, birds chirping and vague creaks in the semi-darkness and vocal cords vibrating. When we tell about life, we organize the sounds into a story: it is dawn, someone is walking on the wood floors of an old house and whispering our names. Whether we tell our friends or our families, our journals or our therapists, our dogs or ourselves, we understand our lives only in terms of beginnings, middles, endings, character development, protagonists, antagonists, themes, punch lines; all of a sudden, a million tiny coincidences merge into something coherent, something meaningful. Former classmates become lifelong friends, kisses become love, childhood fancies become life’s passions. In the telling, we try to make a storybook out of a clusterfuck.
The problem, then, seems to lie in determining which parts become the storybook—the friends, the love, the life’s work—and which must remain clusterfuck. Trying to infuse every classmate, every kiss, every fancy with storybook meaning gives rise to the same troubles as chasing after a pattern in the stock market, plus a whole world of heartache. In “Leaves of Grass,” Walt Whitman offers consolation for cases of unrequited love, when the failure of the clusterfuck to conform to the storybook can be especially debilitating:
Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)
The search for the storybook, the attempt to impose a pattern on all that noise—for Whitman, the telling is the end in itself. The "coming in" and "going out" of that person was not random and meaningless because “…out of that I have written these songs.” Because he himself gave the coming and going a meaning. It doesn’t matter at all to Whitman that Snoopy’s not actually there in the clouds; it is reward enough to be able to see Snoopy. A small comfort for the heartbroken, sure, but I think it’s one we have to believe.
I look a little bit more kindly now on my Lost addiction. Maybe it will all turn out to be an elaborate red herring, and deciphering it as futile as trying to find the internal rhythm of a slot machine; maybe we’ll make some sense of it in the end. Either way, it is training for life, where we have to make sure that “the pay is certain one way or another.” In life, no one explains who the man threatening to kill Jacob is or why Charles Widmore and Benjamin Linus are rivals or how the hell you move an island in space and time with what appears to be a pirate-ship steering wheel. No, we are left very much to our own devices. Which include, fortunately, a propensity to see Snoopy in the clouds.
And yet I keep going back. The cost is great, the pay-off virtually nonexistent, and yet I eagerly await the final season, which begins next January. A stronger person would walk away, would not allow herself to be so enchanted with the unbelievable chaos created by lazy storytelling. I am not—along with my ten million fellow Lost viewers—one of those stronger people.
We Lost faithful, however, are not the only victims of this game. My friend Ben, who has long since given up on the series, recently confessed a love for the movie “Donnie Darko,” a movie I find insufferable. He has watched it over and over, picking up the nuances he may have missed in previous viewings, though he admits the movie itself offers little value as a story. What he gets out of “Donnie Darko” and what I get out of “Lost” are the same: a delight in deciphering complication for complication’s sake. Different drink; same poison.
Jonah Lehrer writes about our sweet spot for this “complication for the sake of complication” in his book “How We Decide.” He describes the case of a Parkinson’s patient treated with dopamine agonists, which imitate the activity of dopamine in the brain and alleviate some of the symptoms of Parkinson’s. This particular patient lost all her money, her home and finally her family to slot machines. Instead of disengaging in the randomness of the slot machine that our brains don’t have a chance of deciphering, Lehrer explains, our dopamine neurons become obsessed. We are enthralled by random outcomes precisely because we can’t figure them out. (Ergo, “Lost” is more interesting to us than “The Brady Bunch,” and “Donnie Darko” is more rewarding than “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.”) While most of us can keep the impulses dictated by our dopamine receptors in check (at least outside the realms of cult cinema and popular TV), the surge of chemicals that the Parkinson’s patient experienced when she played the slots created an overwhelming bliss, much stronger than what an undrugged brain would experience, setting her up to develop a gambling addiction. The pleasure she felt was so intense she thought it was worth the cost of losing everything.
While the case of the gambling Parkinson’s patient is an extreme one, our compulsion to find order in chaos—sometimes against our own best interests—extends subtly to more mundane activities. In his book, Lehrer quotes the neuroscientist Read Montague: “People enjoy investing in the stock market and gambling in a casino for the same reason they see Snoopy in the clouds…When the brain is exposed to anything random, like a slot machine or the shape of a cloud, it automatically imposes a pattern onto the noise. But that isn’t Snoopy, and you haven’t found the secret pattern in the stock market.”
In some circumstances, we are well advised to practice caution when imposing our own understanding of causal relationships and developmental narratives on entities—like the stock market and the slot machine—that do not adhere to such rules. But I have to take issue with Montague’s belittlement of seeing Snoopy in the clouds. Despite its problematic application in the gambling and financial worlds, the ability to create a story from chaos—to “impose a pattern onto the noise”—embodies the magic of being human. When we are confronted with a random assortment of glowing dots in the night sky, we see astrology, mythology, the Big Dipper. When we are confronted with a gushing stretch of water, we see “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “Moon River,” “The Bear.” When we are confronted with puffy white masses of frozen crystals, we see Snoopy.
Our pattern-seeking tendencies are most important when we use them to string together our own tales. Who can think of his existence as a smattering of discrete, unrelated happenings? Sartre grapples with the disconnect between the randomness of experience and the relative coherence of identity in his novel “Nausea”: “Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked onto days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition. …That's living. But everything changes when you tell about life…” When we live, it is all noise, cacophonous and disjointed, birds chirping and vague creaks in the semi-darkness and vocal cords vibrating. When we tell about life, we organize the sounds into a story: it is dawn, someone is walking on the wood floors of an old house and whispering our names. Whether we tell our friends or our families, our journals or our therapists, our dogs or ourselves, we understand our lives only in terms of beginnings, middles, endings, character development, protagonists, antagonists, themes, punch lines; all of a sudden, a million tiny coincidences merge into something coherent, something meaningful. Former classmates become lifelong friends, kisses become love, childhood fancies become life’s passions. In the telling, we try to make a storybook out of a clusterfuck.
The problem, then, seems to lie in determining which parts become the storybook—the friends, the love, the life’s work—and which must remain clusterfuck. Trying to infuse every classmate, every kiss, every fancy with storybook meaning gives rise to the same troubles as chasing after a pattern in the stock market, plus a whole world of heartache. In “Leaves of Grass,” Walt Whitman offers consolation for cases of unrequited love, when the failure of the clusterfuck to conform to the storybook can be especially debilitating:
Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)
The search for the storybook, the attempt to impose a pattern on all that noise—for Whitman, the telling is the end in itself. The "coming in" and "going out" of that person was not random and meaningless because “…out of that I have written these songs.” Because he himself gave the coming and going a meaning. It doesn’t matter at all to Whitman that Snoopy’s not actually there in the clouds; it is reward enough to be able to see Snoopy. A small comfort for the heartbroken, sure, but I think it’s one we have to believe.
I look a little bit more kindly now on my Lost addiction. Maybe it will all turn out to be an elaborate red herring, and deciphering it as futile as trying to find the internal rhythm of a slot machine; maybe we’ll make some sense of it in the end. Either way, it is training for life, where we have to make sure that “the pay is certain one way or another.” In life, no one explains who the man threatening to kill Jacob is or why Charles Widmore and Benjamin Linus are rivals or how the hell you move an island in space and time with what appears to be a pirate-ship steering wheel. No, we are left very much to our own devices. Which include, fortunately, a propensity to see Snoopy in the clouds.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
The Amazing Adventures of Jost in Ann Arbor: Coraline and her Rabenmutter
It’s all good and fun for me, as a twenty-three-year-old, to watch or re-watch movies that are meant for children. To see Beauty and the Beast and Anne of Green Gables and The Sandlot from my safe perch on this side of adolescence; to delight in Finding Nemo and The Incredibles as a child might, but with the sophistication of knowing everything turns out OK in the end. I can laugh at the moments that once frightened me, and I can wonder at the timelessness of truly great children’s movies that legitimately awe “children of all ages.” Movies like that can make us feel like kids again, in the best possible way.
Coraline is not a movie like that.
That’s not to say Coraline doesn’t make us feel like kids again. It does. Probably more authentically like kids than the aforementioned movies and even our own water-colored memories can allow. Coraline’s world is not a bumble-gum-flavored flashback to childhood as adulthood minus the mortgage payments, when the greatest care in life is staying up half an hour past bedtime and the greatest dream is eating ice cream for breakfast. No, in Coraline, Henry Selick explores the darker side of childhood: the fear, the sense of non-belonging, the pervasive powerlessness. Perhaps it’s the 3-D effects, but the film reaches across the border of voting age and wrestles us back, strips us of our driver licenses and ages of majority and forces us to see the world, once again, the way we did when we were children.
In most respects, that is how I watched Coraline—not as a twenty-three-year-old reflecting fondly on childhood but as an eight-year-old terrified about surviving it. There was, however, one issue over which my adult-self maintained agency enough to express skepticism: the evil figure of the Other Mother. In Coraline’s real world, she is unhappy because her parents—both her parents—are neglectful, hypocritical and self-absorbed, constantly typing away at their individual laptops on a blog about gardening, when in fact, as Coraline points out, neither of them even likes dirt. But in the Other World, where everything seems to be perfect—attentive parents, interesting neighbors, a mother who cooks—it is the Other Mother alone who is perpetrating this vast manipulation, the Other Mother alone who needs to steal Coraline’s soul and sew buttons over her eyes. In fact, in one scene, the Other Father plays the piano with his hands in robotic gloves to make the music the Other Mother knows Coraline wants to hear. He is literally a pawn in the Other Mother’s scheme, trapped under her spell like everyone else in the Other World. In real life, the behavior of Coraline’s parents is the same; somehow, in the Other World, this equal behavior translates her mother into a vindictive witch and her father into a hapless peon.
Had I seen this movie as a child, it would have reinforced my ideas about my own mother, about motherhood in general. I would have nodded in wide-eyed, fearful understanding at the unmatched power of the Other Mother, of her ability to bend anyone and anything to her will and her evil end. When I was young, my mother was the task-master in our house. She enforced bedtimes, homework rules, TV restrictions, nutrition requirements. Her word was law and, when the law rubbed up against our child-like desires of ice cream for breakfast and staying up another half hour, she was the villain in our imaginations. I don’t ever remember calling my father “unfair” because I don’t ever remember him making any rules. His answer to any of our requests was meaningless until we heard Mom back it up or, more likely, overturn it. Over the years, their dynamic has evolved so far past a joke that now, when my siblings or I have a question, my father only answers, “Why are you asking me?”
I thought this was a quirk unique to my family until I studied the Grimm fairy tales in college. In particular, my professor focused on the German phenomenon of the “Rabenmutter”—the bad mother, the “raven” mother who does not stick around and raise her baby birds. Now, the term is used in Germany to refer to women who are pushing for maternity leaves and daycare options so they can return to their jobs after their kids are born. In traditional fairy tales, which originated hundreds of years ago, this figure shows up again and again: the evil stepmothers in Cinderella, in Snow White (where she seems to double as the witch), in Hansel and Gretel (where she also doubles as the witch who tries to eat them). What we have here are centuries upon centuries of storytellers with mommy issues. And Coraline, for all its modern sensibilities—I mean, her parents are bloggers who practice shared parenting—embraces the same stereotype. Not only are Coraline’s mother-figures portrayed as having an inherently evil agenda, the story assumes that the mother, the woman of the household, wields all of this unchecked, uncontrollable power. And this is the exact story we tell ourselves when we describe our sexist views toward women, particularly mothers.
First, the Other Mother’s reason for creating a fantasy world for Coraline is to steal her soul and sew buttons over her eyes. The rationale was never explicitly laid out in the movie, but presumably the Other Mother requires a steady stream of children’s souls to survive. Taken in a literal sense, the affliction of feeding off children’s souls is unique to the plot of this story. Taken figuratively, however, the sexist undertones of the Other Mother’s evil plan become apparent. Although it does not map directly onto the Rabenmutter tradition, the Other Mother’s impetus shows up in our cultural criticism of motherhood. Particularly when they are older, we might view our mothers as clingy, suffocating, needy—metaphorically draining the life out of their kids. My former boss was loathe to answer a phone call from his mother and would labor, in detail, over every inconvenience she imposed upon him. I myself am no stranger to bemoaning the seemingly ridiculous demands of my mother—no shoes by the back door; you’re not wearing your hair like that, are you?; why don’t you come home this weekend? But it stands to reason that our mothers—particularly stay-at-home mothers like mine—would like to keep in touch with their children after they leave the house, to keep tabs on the fruits of their 18-plus years of labor. While the actual consumption of children’s souls might fairly be construed as an unworthy end, its inspiration is a misunderstood tendency of moms who want to stay involved in their children’s lives.
Second, both Coraline’s real mom and her Other Mother call all the shots in their respective households. They are the holders of the power, their husbands mere servants to their desires, and so all the unpleasantness of being a responsible parent falls on their shoulders. In this way, fathers are allowed to remain innocents, almost children themselves, in the minds of their own children. I could have written this subtext into the movie—my father has cornered the market on passive-aggressive. For instance, when my mom is gone for a day or two, or even a few hours, the whole house starts to atrophy the moment her car pulls out of the driveway. The recycling piles up by the back door, newspapers and magazines are strewn haphazardly between the kitchen and the den, and my dad will hunker down and watch Star Wars or any episode of the Bourne series for hours, one right after the other. When my siblings and I were young, these were fun little vacations without having to go anywhere, when we could stay up too late and eat ice cream in front of the TV. Then, in the few hours before my mother returned, there would be a grand sweep-up, a frantic purging of evidence of the time we had spent outside the rules—pizza boxes, dishes, empty bottles, newspapers, all secured to their rightful places. All very explicitly for my mother’s benefit. As a result, my mother was demonized in our eyes, and my dad came off looking like the fun one, more of an older brother than a dad. Of course, those Lost Weekends were hardly a sustainable way to live. Sooner or later, the pizza boxes and newspapers have to be taken to the curb, the dirty dishes have to be cleaned. Why did we have to blame my mom for that? It was a function of latent sexism embedded in our history and perpetuated by the Grimm fairy tales and movies like Coraline.
Lastly, consider the actual sins of Coraline’s parents. They have just moved to a new house and are up against a deadline for their blog. Coraline is angry because her parents are completely absorbed in their writing; they haven’t had time to unpack, and they don’t spend any time with her. They may not be playing the role of model parents at this point, but you can’t help but feel for them. In one conversation out of Coraline’s earshot, they reassure each other that there will only be a few more days before they publish—they want to be finished as much as Coraline wants them to be. Oddly, Coraline seems most peeved that it is her father, not her mother, who cooks dinner for them every night, which they eat together. One of the first zings of the Other Mother was her emphasis that she had cooked their multi-course meal, not the Other Father. Is Coraline’s mother such a better cook than her father? Why is it not enough that one of her parents cooks dinner—that her father cooks and her mother cleans, as they explain to her? It is this manifestation of sexism in the film that resonated most with me because it is closest to the version I subscribe to.
While I never insisted that my mother, instead of my father, cook dinner (though she usually did), I have found that I expect much, much more of my mother than I ever would of my father. This is, in part, because my mother is much, much more appeasing than my father. For instance, I brought home one of my favorite films, a collection of shorts called Paris, Je T’aime, over Christmas break. My friend Quinn gave it to me for my birthday, and I hadn’t seen it in almost a year. Even though she doesn’t like reading subtitles, my mother gave it a chance and even liked a couple of the shorts including the last, which was one of my favorites. However, I became so frustrated with her when, during my favorite short in the film, she kept clucking her tongue and releasing growls of disgust at the base of her throat. The scene was basically a monologue of a French man telling another man how he felt immediately connected to him, even though he had never seen nor spoken to him before. The French man keeps going on and on while the other man sits in silence, speaking only to ask for a light for his cigarette. In the end, it turns out the silent man is an American and speaks only conversational French—the poetic ramblings about mystery and other-worldly connections are lost on him in the foreign tongue. I love that treatment of misunderstanding, or our struggle to communicate, and it disappointed me that my mother could only scoff at the fact that the love story was between two men. But look how much farther she had reached beyond my father! How warped were my expectations when I begrudged my mother for not coming an extra inch when she had already traveled a mile!
A critique of the Rabenmutter complex may not have been the overt or intended message of Coraline, but it sits there as uncomfortably as one of the YFZ women in the Lisa Ling interviews. So much of the movie is forward-looking—the special effects, the strong female lead, the realistic portrayal of childhood—that Coraline’s expectations of her mother seem intensely outdated, almost abrasively so. However, as much as I hate to admit it, the storyline works in the movie because the classic tale of the absent mother, the evil stepmother, the Other Mother obviously still resonates with us as a culture. We've reached a point in which we can take children seriously in cinema, yet women still remain a sinister, scheming mystery. Still a force of evil that not even the most advanced 3-D glasses can help us see clearly.
Coraline is not a movie like that.
That’s not to say Coraline doesn’t make us feel like kids again. It does. Probably more authentically like kids than the aforementioned movies and even our own water-colored memories can allow. Coraline’s world is not a bumble-gum-flavored flashback to childhood as adulthood minus the mortgage payments, when the greatest care in life is staying up half an hour past bedtime and the greatest dream is eating ice cream for breakfast. No, in Coraline, Henry Selick explores the darker side of childhood: the fear, the sense of non-belonging, the pervasive powerlessness. Perhaps it’s the 3-D effects, but the film reaches across the border of voting age and wrestles us back, strips us of our driver licenses and ages of majority and forces us to see the world, once again, the way we did when we were children.
In most respects, that is how I watched Coraline—not as a twenty-three-year-old reflecting fondly on childhood but as an eight-year-old terrified about surviving it. There was, however, one issue over which my adult-self maintained agency enough to express skepticism: the evil figure of the Other Mother. In Coraline’s real world, she is unhappy because her parents—both her parents—are neglectful, hypocritical and self-absorbed, constantly typing away at their individual laptops on a blog about gardening, when in fact, as Coraline points out, neither of them even likes dirt. But in the Other World, where everything seems to be perfect—attentive parents, interesting neighbors, a mother who cooks—it is the Other Mother alone who is perpetrating this vast manipulation, the Other Mother alone who needs to steal Coraline’s soul and sew buttons over her eyes. In fact, in one scene, the Other Father plays the piano with his hands in robotic gloves to make the music the Other Mother knows Coraline wants to hear. He is literally a pawn in the Other Mother’s scheme, trapped under her spell like everyone else in the Other World. In real life, the behavior of Coraline’s parents is the same; somehow, in the Other World, this equal behavior translates her mother into a vindictive witch and her father into a hapless peon.
Had I seen this movie as a child, it would have reinforced my ideas about my own mother, about motherhood in general. I would have nodded in wide-eyed, fearful understanding at the unmatched power of the Other Mother, of her ability to bend anyone and anything to her will and her evil end. When I was young, my mother was the task-master in our house. She enforced bedtimes, homework rules, TV restrictions, nutrition requirements. Her word was law and, when the law rubbed up against our child-like desires of ice cream for breakfast and staying up another half hour, she was the villain in our imaginations. I don’t ever remember calling my father “unfair” because I don’t ever remember him making any rules. His answer to any of our requests was meaningless until we heard Mom back it up or, more likely, overturn it. Over the years, their dynamic has evolved so far past a joke that now, when my siblings or I have a question, my father only answers, “Why are you asking me?”
I thought this was a quirk unique to my family until I studied the Grimm fairy tales in college. In particular, my professor focused on the German phenomenon of the “Rabenmutter”—the bad mother, the “raven” mother who does not stick around and raise her baby birds. Now, the term is used in Germany to refer to women who are pushing for maternity leaves and daycare options so they can return to their jobs after their kids are born. In traditional fairy tales, which originated hundreds of years ago, this figure shows up again and again: the evil stepmothers in Cinderella, in Snow White (where she seems to double as the witch), in Hansel and Gretel (where she also doubles as the witch who tries to eat them). What we have here are centuries upon centuries of storytellers with mommy issues. And Coraline, for all its modern sensibilities—I mean, her parents are bloggers who practice shared parenting—embraces the same stereotype. Not only are Coraline’s mother-figures portrayed as having an inherently evil agenda, the story assumes that the mother, the woman of the household, wields all of this unchecked, uncontrollable power. And this is the exact story we tell ourselves when we describe our sexist views toward women, particularly mothers.
First, the Other Mother’s reason for creating a fantasy world for Coraline is to steal her soul and sew buttons over her eyes. The rationale was never explicitly laid out in the movie, but presumably the Other Mother requires a steady stream of children’s souls to survive. Taken in a literal sense, the affliction of feeding off children’s souls is unique to the plot of this story. Taken figuratively, however, the sexist undertones of the Other Mother’s evil plan become apparent. Although it does not map directly onto the Rabenmutter tradition, the Other Mother’s impetus shows up in our cultural criticism of motherhood. Particularly when they are older, we might view our mothers as clingy, suffocating, needy—metaphorically draining the life out of their kids. My former boss was loathe to answer a phone call from his mother and would labor, in detail, over every inconvenience she imposed upon him. I myself am no stranger to bemoaning the seemingly ridiculous demands of my mother—no shoes by the back door; you’re not wearing your hair like that, are you?; why don’t you come home this weekend? But it stands to reason that our mothers—particularly stay-at-home mothers like mine—would like to keep in touch with their children after they leave the house, to keep tabs on the fruits of their 18-plus years of labor. While the actual consumption of children’s souls might fairly be construed as an unworthy end, its inspiration is a misunderstood tendency of moms who want to stay involved in their children’s lives.
Second, both Coraline’s real mom and her Other Mother call all the shots in their respective households. They are the holders of the power, their husbands mere servants to their desires, and so all the unpleasantness of being a responsible parent falls on their shoulders. In this way, fathers are allowed to remain innocents, almost children themselves, in the minds of their own children. I could have written this subtext into the movie—my father has cornered the market on passive-aggressive. For instance, when my mom is gone for a day or two, or even a few hours, the whole house starts to atrophy the moment her car pulls out of the driveway. The recycling piles up by the back door, newspapers and magazines are strewn haphazardly between the kitchen and the den, and my dad will hunker down and watch Star Wars or any episode of the Bourne series for hours, one right after the other. When my siblings and I were young, these were fun little vacations without having to go anywhere, when we could stay up too late and eat ice cream in front of the TV. Then, in the few hours before my mother returned, there would be a grand sweep-up, a frantic purging of evidence of the time we had spent outside the rules—pizza boxes, dishes, empty bottles, newspapers, all secured to their rightful places. All very explicitly for my mother’s benefit. As a result, my mother was demonized in our eyes, and my dad came off looking like the fun one, more of an older brother than a dad. Of course, those Lost Weekends were hardly a sustainable way to live. Sooner or later, the pizza boxes and newspapers have to be taken to the curb, the dirty dishes have to be cleaned. Why did we have to blame my mom for that? It was a function of latent sexism embedded in our history and perpetuated by the Grimm fairy tales and movies like Coraline.
Lastly, consider the actual sins of Coraline’s parents. They have just moved to a new house and are up against a deadline for their blog. Coraline is angry because her parents are completely absorbed in their writing; they haven’t had time to unpack, and they don’t spend any time with her. They may not be playing the role of model parents at this point, but you can’t help but feel for them. In one conversation out of Coraline’s earshot, they reassure each other that there will only be a few more days before they publish—they want to be finished as much as Coraline wants them to be. Oddly, Coraline seems most peeved that it is her father, not her mother, who cooks dinner for them every night, which they eat together. One of the first zings of the Other Mother was her emphasis that she had cooked their multi-course meal, not the Other Father. Is Coraline’s mother such a better cook than her father? Why is it not enough that one of her parents cooks dinner—that her father cooks and her mother cleans, as they explain to her? It is this manifestation of sexism in the film that resonated most with me because it is closest to the version I subscribe to.
While I never insisted that my mother, instead of my father, cook dinner (though she usually did), I have found that I expect much, much more of my mother than I ever would of my father. This is, in part, because my mother is much, much more appeasing than my father. For instance, I brought home one of my favorite films, a collection of shorts called Paris, Je T’aime, over Christmas break. My friend Quinn gave it to me for my birthday, and I hadn’t seen it in almost a year. Even though she doesn’t like reading subtitles, my mother gave it a chance and even liked a couple of the shorts including the last, which was one of my favorites. However, I became so frustrated with her when, during my favorite short in the film, she kept clucking her tongue and releasing growls of disgust at the base of her throat. The scene was basically a monologue of a French man telling another man how he felt immediately connected to him, even though he had never seen nor spoken to him before. The French man keeps going on and on while the other man sits in silence, speaking only to ask for a light for his cigarette. In the end, it turns out the silent man is an American and speaks only conversational French—the poetic ramblings about mystery and other-worldly connections are lost on him in the foreign tongue. I love that treatment of misunderstanding, or our struggle to communicate, and it disappointed me that my mother could only scoff at the fact that the love story was between two men. But look how much farther she had reached beyond my father! How warped were my expectations when I begrudged my mother for not coming an extra inch when she had already traveled a mile!
A critique of the Rabenmutter complex may not have been the overt or intended message of Coraline, but it sits there as uncomfortably as one of the YFZ women in the Lisa Ling interviews. So much of the movie is forward-looking—the special effects, the strong female lead, the realistic portrayal of childhood—that Coraline’s expectations of her mother seem intensely outdated, almost abrasively so. However, as much as I hate to admit it, the storyline works in the movie because the classic tale of the absent mother, the evil stepmother, the Other Mother obviously still resonates with us as a culture. We've reached a point in which we can take children seriously in cinema, yet women still remain a sinister, scheming mystery. Still a force of evil that not even the most advanced 3-D glasses can help us see clearly.
Friday, January 16, 2009
The Amazing Adventures of Jost in Detroit: Benjamin Button, Rickey Henderson and the ball of yarn
When I was young, I sometimes became anxious, as children do, about the oppressive limitations of childhood. To quiet my restlessness, my father used to tell me the parable-like tale of a little boy who lived a hard life. He was born very poor, and his mother was very sick, and he had to work very hard. Because he was in such an unfortunate state, an angel came to the boy and offered him a ball of yarn that represented his life. Anytime he was going through a rough patch, he could pull the yarn and the little boy would immediately be transported to a happy time.
“The boy…didn’t want to see his mother suffer through…her illness, so he pulled the…yarn until when she died,” my father, never a proficient storyteller, would sputter, gesticulating desperately with his hands in a misguided attempt to compensate. “The young man didn’t like, you know, getting his heart broken was painful for him, so he pulled the yarn until…his wedding day. As a man, he didn’t want to…he couldn’t…bear to see his wife go through the…pain of having a child, of childbirth, so he pulled the yarn to after…to after his daughter was born. He hated his job, so he, you know, pulled the yarn until his retirement. When he was done pulling the yarn, he was, you know, he was a very old man, close to death, and he realized he had only…experienced…a few minutes of his whole life. It was lost to him.”
“But couldn’t he just roll the yarn back up?” I asked.
“No,” my dad said. “It didn’t work that way.” He got a little teary-eyed at this point. “The man had…wished his whole life away.”
I remember thinking, at first, that the story didn’t quite make sense; if you could unravel a ball of yarn to make your life speed up, you should be able to wrap it back up to make it go in reverse. Then I remember being so happy, so thankful that I was still a kid, that I didn’t have to worry about wishing my life away because it was all still ahead of me. Then I realized that was not strictly true—that I would never be in preschool again, that I would never be five years old again, that it would never be yesterday again. To be honest, the story of the boy and his magical ball of yarn made me prematurely sensitive to the unforgiving passage of time, an affliction I don’t expect to outgrow. The condition is exacerbated by the holiday season, when I come home and see—have coffee with, drink a beer with—the ghosts of my past, those bits of my life that I can’t quite ravel back up and live again.
It always leaves me feeling a little melancholy.
The spectacle of Christmas itself is an exercise in the elusive nature of memory and our failure to recapture it. My family takes Christmas very seriously. There were always an obscene number of packages under our tree, ornaments enough to wilt the branches of our fake evergreen, food enough to last about a week into the new year. However, since the death of my mom’s father a few years ago, Christmas has gone on steroids. Instead of tastefully petering out as her kids outgrew the excess of the holiday season, my mother now seems to produce more presents for under the tree, more ornaments to hang, more food for when our relatives come.
“Grandpa always loved Christmas,” she says as justification. “He always made Christmas perfect.”
Now, my grandfather used to do Christmas right: an egg nog toast when everyone arrived at his home, sparkling grape juice for his grandkids while the grown-ups had other sparkly drinks, presents dispensed Santa-style by the tree in the basement. And my mom does his memory justice. But the growing extravagance is a bittersweet reminder that our over-the-top Christmases become more over-the-top because Grandpa’s Christmas is just a memory. As we handle that delicate memory year after year, it becomes less and less like its original self and more and more like a fantasy of what it was; an apt example of my father’s melancholy point that, try as we might, we just can’t roll that ball of yarn back up to be the way it was before. That somehow, because we change, the memories themselves change with us. Hence, more gifts, more decorations, more food. Like Proust’s water-colored reflections of his childhood in Combray, my mom emulates Christmas as she remembers Christmas: perfect.
Fortunately, this also means that my mother has been able to project her own ideas about Christmas into the festivities. Now Christmas is perfect as she sees perfect. Charades have become a tradition, as have the three different types of potatoes she makes (yes, for one meal). While it is unspeakably sad that we cannot re-roll our balls of yarn for another of Grandpa’s Christmases, those recollections now inform and enrich my mother’s efforts as she forges a holiday of her own. Loss is at once sad and happy—it is devastating to long for the past but necessary for our development of our future, better selves to let it go.
My maturing relationship with Ceej, my best friend from high school, paints the quasi-Hegelian theory of loss as a catalyst for growth. I was anxious to start college, to leave my childhood home and catapult myself wholly into my brave new world. In doing so, however, I did not leave a lot of room for Ceej, one of very few strings tying me to my past. We went from being completely wrapped up in each other’s lives, from spending every weekend together and wheedling away the wee hours of the morning talking in my car outside her house so that we wouldn’t wake her parents, to less-than-monthly phone calls. Since then, we’ve worked out a system—there are e-mails for momentous occasions, spontaneous phone calls at odd hours. Most importantly, though, over holiday breaks from school, I drive up to her house and knock on the kitchen window where someone in her family is invariably eating or preparing food. Ceej and I will sit on the white leather couches in the living room for hours, talking and sipping tea and looking at her mother’s paintings, largely oblivious to the swarm of family members who pop in and out during the holidays.
This year her father interrupted us. “Just like old times?” He speaks quickly and in a thick Cyprian accent, so it took me a moment to agree.
“Just like old times,” we confirmed.
That’s not true, of course. Ceej and I will always share something—maybe our history, maybe our interests, maybe our natural curiosity—which is why we can talk for hours on only two or three occasions per year. But it will never be just like old times, when we drove around with absolutely nowhere to go simply to be in each other’s company. When we shared our poems and short stories, our thoughts on our favorite books (our real favorite books, not the ones we read later on), and all the other intense awkwardness of being seventeen and not knowing what the hell is going on. Our relationship will never be the same because we aren’t the same. We aren’t teenagers anymore. We have a valuable friendship, one that has grown beyond circumstance and developed with us, sturdy in its malleability. Hard to lament the passing of the relationship limited by our high school years when this is what we have in its stead. Future from past; growth from loss.
On my birthday this year, I caught a matinee of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Kimmy, a friend from law school. The film follows the opposite lives of Daisy—who ages regularly, young to old—and Benjamin—who, curiously, ages backward, old to young. The theme of loss permeates the story. First, the tale was being told by a woman to her dying mother as they were waiting for Hurricane Katrina to rip through New Orleans. The characters kept repeating this mantra, this idea that “nothing lasts.” Daisy is a professional dancer, that most tenuous of callings, whose career is cut short when a car hits her, breaking her leg. (Benjamin even narrates a series of what-ifs that would have allowed the taxi to miss her by a second.) Daisy later laments the fleeting career of the professional ballerina: “Dancing is all about the line, the line of your body,” she says after stumbling out of a step in her studio. “After a while, you lose the line. And you can never get it back.” In the same scene, when Daisy and Benjamin are at last the same age, when they are both achingly beautiful and achingly in love with each other (nice casting, by the way), they admire themselves in a mirror. The moment, I guess, they would’ve pulled their yarn to arrive at. “Stay just like that,” Benjamin says. “I want to remember what we look like right now.” Because, of course, their brief bliss must end: she grows older, he grows younger, and what they have is lost. In this movie, everything—New Orleans, dancing, love—everything seems egg-shell delicate, chance brushes with happiness dripping in its own demise. Milan Kundera wrote that “Happiness is the longing for repetition,” but these characters get no such solace. Like real people, Daisy and Benjamin seem to lose everything that is important to them, and they don’t get it back.
I cried through the entire movie.
Then, because I could, I watched it again.
In most movies, the love story at least would transcend the rules of frail contingency and pervasive loss. However, due to the unusual circumstances of Benjamin Button, these characters couldn’t even share the indignity of growing old together; their relationship is forever locked up in that young-love ideal of dancing in the living room and eating dinner in bed. Over a decade after Benjamin leaves Daisy so she can find a more suitable father for their child, he returns to see her. She is pushing sixty, and he is, physically, somewhere in his twenties. At first, she acknowledges his wisdom in leaving her to establish a normal family, and she dismissively wonders aloud why he has returned. Later, though, Daisy visits Benjamin in his motel room. They sleep together one final time, agreeing that some things do, in fact, last. But what lasts is so little that it hardly seems worth the trouble: their “Good night, Benjamin,” “Good night, Daisy” routine after she wordlessly dresses and leaves. Their love, their happiness as they know it, are gone forever. They were good and elusive and precious, and now they are lost.
Somehow, for all the benefits of letting go the past to bravely face the future, I find myself dwelling obsessively on the sweet sadness of losing things that cannot be reclaimed. As people, I think we need this ontological melancholy, a feeling of unhappiness that cannot be assuaged by its role in a development toward something better, that no number of “Everything happens for a reasons” can lessen. Happy moments, in order to be thought of as happy moments, are necessarily fleeting, elusive, unsustainable. Delicate. Happiness is longing for—but never getting—repetition. Not the actual experience, but the memory. My grandpa’s Christmases are precious because we will never have them again. My teenaged friendship with Ceej is dear because it couldn’t last. It is a deep tragedy that we cannot re-ravel the yarn, but goddamnit, loss—and that longing, that tantalizing nostalgia it breeds—is what makes life so beautiful. In the first season finale of Mad Men, Don Draper describes nostalgia as the “pain from an old wound,” when, instead of marketing Kodak’s new, round slide projector for its innovative technology, he pulls on a more crucial truth. “It’s not called the Wheel,” he tells Kodak, rejecting the company’s own advertising concept. “It’s called…the Carousel.”
We like the pain, the longing, the incurable aching; we are nostalgia junkies. My father cries at the end of Return of the Jedi every time. Every time. At the end of Father of the Bride too. And ET. During Thanksgiving dinner, my Uncle Nick and I both got a little misty—to the obvious discomfort of my Oma and Ota—when he described Berkeley Breathed’s final Sunday strip for the comic “Opus.” (Steve Dallas, at last looking affectionate, is reading the final page of “Good Night Moon,” where the penguin is pictured cozily snuggled into his bed. Not only is Breathed pulling on over thirty years of drawing Opus in the funnies, he also evokes the memory of a beloved childhood bedtime story. Homeboy knows how to tug at the heartstrings.) Nothing lasts, everything ends, and we love-love-love to be sad about it.
In real life, however, pain from an old wound does not have the same romantic allure as it does in the funnies. Over Christmas break, my college friends and I got together, all of us, for the first time since we graduated. I had just seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (twice), and the thin scrap of what lasted there—that “Good night, Benjamin,” “Good night, Daisy”—was echoing in my head. We already had closed the chapter on what had brought us together—dancing, that temperamental mistress—and I was afraid to find out how little had survived among us. Because, the thing is, there is no ache for my friends, no nostalgia, no pain from an old wound. I miss them like you miss your favorite fruit when it’s out of season; it’s gone right now, but you know it’ll be back in a few months. So during New Year’s brunch this year, sitting around a table with all of them, with Pong and Shiny and Seal and Fattie, with Milbeck and JW and Foot and Bitchy…
I can explain it best with Rickey Henderson.
Rickey Henderson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame this week. He holds the lifetime records for stolen bases, runs scored, and most home-runs hit by a lead-off batter. He is also, apparently, one of the most annoying personalities to grace Major League Baseball. David Grann wrote a compelling piece about Henderson a few years ago for The New Yorker. In 2005, Rickey Henderson was forty-six years old and playing in the Golden Baseball League—the pond scum of the independent leagues and a far, far cry from Yankee Stadium, where he played from 1985-89. The consensus within the sport was that Henderson should have been resting on his laurels and awaiting an inevitable induction into the Hall of Fame. But that is not Rickey Henderson’s style.
Instead, he was attempting to crack into the MLB again, which had unceremoniously ejected him in 2003. Grann’s story reeked with the tragic finality of a great baseball player’s refusal to accept the end of his career. He had lost his touch, his ability to read the pitcher and steal bases—he had lost the line, as Daisy would say. His Golden League coach, Terry Kennedy, former MLB catcher and the son of another former MLB player and manager Bob Kennedy, could sense Henderson’s loss of confidence: “I remember at the end of my career I began to doubt my ability,” Kennedy said. “I knew what I wanted to do, but my body wouldn’t let me do it. And I called my father and said, ‘Dad, did you ever start to think you weren’t good enough to play this game?’ And he said, ‘I did, and once you do you can never get it back.’”
In the story, Henderson talks a great deal about simply wanting another opportunity to play in the majors. Forget the money (he was once the best-paid player in major league baseball), forget the limos, forget the self-dubbed “walking record” title—he just wanted to be there again. “People always ask me why I still want to play, but I want to know why no one will give me an opportunity,” he told Grann. “It’s like they put a stamp on me: ‘Hall of Fame. You’re done. That’s it.’ It’s a goddam shame.” And I realized that Henderson’s story isn’t one about loss, much as everyone wants it to be. His coach, his fans, even his family were telling him to give up the ghost, to let his past go and get on with his life. But I don’t think Rickey Henderson was chasing the ghost of his former self: Rickey the Hall-of-Famer, Rickey the egomaniac, Rickey the record-shatterer. In fact, I doubt Henderson himself ever harbored such delicate illusions about himself.
Yesterday, two days after he was elected into the Hall of Fame, a fifty-year-old Henderson told The New York Post: “I believe today, and people say I’m crazy, but if you gave me as many at-bats that you would give the runners out there today, I would out-steal every last one of them…they can always ring my phone and I’ll come on down and help their ball club. That’s how much I love the game.” Delusions about outmaneuvering men half his age aside, doesn’t this sound like a man who just wants to play baseball again? He doesn’t need money; he doesn’t need prestige; he’s not trying to roll back his ball of yarn to be the baseball player he once was. He still is a baseball player, if not in the majors than in the Golden League. Because some things, it seems, do last.
On New Year’s Eve, my friends and I went to a bar in Waterford where Shiny worked until five in the morning. Tired from too much dancing and drinking, we went back to her house around three. The others went to bed, but Seal, Fattie, Milbeck, JW and I stayed up for a while, sipping water and giggling deliriously in Shiny’s basement. Milbeck and JW were snuggled up the same blanket when Milbeck burrowed down so that we couldn’t see her, an amorphous mass growing out of JW’s side. Slowly, she started wiggling back up to visibility, her bald head thrashing in slow motion, dancing in the fluorescent light coming from the sink. JW made birthing noises, grunts and cries that announced his fiancée’s re-arrival into the world. When the ordeal was over, JW raised his left index finger into the air and declared in a British accent: “That’s the ticket!” I collapsed in laughter.
At that moment, there was no raveling or unraveling, no past or future, no memories and no loss. The late-night electricity, the nonsense-joke, the pain, the comforting knotted pain in my stomach—it had happened a hundred times before and it had never happened before. I understood, all at once, the good-night ritual between Benjamin and Daisy: not nostalgia but transcendence. Not a delicate memory but a commanding presence. Not loss—resilience. My friends and I, on New Year’s Eve, were not chasing the phantoms of a fragile friendship; we are, whether in the majors or the Golden League, still very much us. In their tired eyes I find a reflection of myself as I always wanted to be, a reflection of myself as I still want to become. The experience is too encompassing to be good or evil, too pervasive to be either happy or sad. It is as simple and crucial as loving the game of baseball.
We lose the line. We lose loved ones and childhood and the knack for stealing bases. And all our losses create holes in our lives, tiny bubbles sizzling in a glass of golden champagne, tickling our lips when they touch. For what are a million losses when we have some thing—the love of another, a passion for baseball, the sensory ruckus of toast and pancakes and scrambled eggs and orange juice in the cold light of wintry mornings—just some thing that lasts?
“The boy…didn’t want to see his mother suffer through…her illness, so he pulled the…yarn until when she died,” my father, never a proficient storyteller, would sputter, gesticulating desperately with his hands in a misguided attempt to compensate. “The young man didn’t like, you know, getting his heart broken was painful for him, so he pulled the yarn until…his wedding day. As a man, he didn’t want to…he couldn’t…bear to see his wife go through the…pain of having a child, of childbirth, so he pulled the yarn to after…to after his daughter was born. He hated his job, so he, you know, pulled the yarn until his retirement. When he was done pulling the yarn, he was, you know, he was a very old man, close to death, and he realized he had only…experienced…a few minutes of his whole life. It was lost to him.”
“But couldn’t he just roll the yarn back up?” I asked.
“No,” my dad said. “It didn’t work that way.” He got a little teary-eyed at this point. “The man had…wished his whole life away.”
I remember thinking, at first, that the story didn’t quite make sense; if you could unravel a ball of yarn to make your life speed up, you should be able to wrap it back up to make it go in reverse. Then I remember being so happy, so thankful that I was still a kid, that I didn’t have to worry about wishing my life away because it was all still ahead of me. Then I realized that was not strictly true—that I would never be in preschool again, that I would never be five years old again, that it would never be yesterday again. To be honest, the story of the boy and his magical ball of yarn made me prematurely sensitive to the unforgiving passage of time, an affliction I don’t expect to outgrow. The condition is exacerbated by the holiday season, when I come home and see—have coffee with, drink a beer with—the ghosts of my past, those bits of my life that I can’t quite ravel back up and live again.
It always leaves me feeling a little melancholy.
The spectacle of Christmas itself is an exercise in the elusive nature of memory and our failure to recapture it. My family takes Christmas very seriously. There were always an obscene number of packages under our tree, ornaments enough to wilt the branches of our fake evergreen, food enough to last about a week into the new year. However, since the death of my mom’s father a few years ago, Christmas has gone on steroids. Instead of tastefully petering out as her kids outgrew the excess of the holiday season, my mother now seems to produce more presents for under the tree, more ornaments to hang, more food for when our relatives come.
“Grandpa always loved Christmas,” she says as justification. “He always made Christmas perfect.”
Now, my grandfather used to do Christmas right: an egg nog toast when everyone arrived at his home, sparkling grape juice for his grandkids while the grown-ups had other sparkly drinks, presents dispensed Santa-style by the tree in the basement. And my mom does his memory justice. But the growing extravagance is a bittersweet reminder that our over-the-top Christmases become more over-the-top because Grandpa’s Christmas is just a memory. As we handle that delicate memory year after year, it becomes less and less like its original self and more and more like a fantasy of what it was; an apt example of my father’s melancholy point that, try as we might, we just can’t roll that ball of yarn back up to be the way it was before. That somehow, because we change, the memories themselves change with us. Hence, more gifts, more decorations, more food. Like Proust’s water-colored reflections of his childhood in Combray, my mom emulates Christmas as she remembers Christmas: perfect.
Fortunately, this also means that my mother has been able to project her own ideas about Christmas into the festivities. Now Christmas is perfect as she sees perfect. Charades have become a tradition, as have the three different types of potatoes she makes (yes, for one meal). While it is unspeakably sad that we cannot re-roll our balls of yarn for another of Grandpa’s Christmases, those recollections now inform and enrich my mother’s efforts as she forges a holiday of her own. Loss is at once sad and happy—it is devastating to long for the past but necessary for our development of our future, better selves to let it go.
My maturing relationship with Ceej, my best friend from high school, paints the quasi-Hegelian theory of loss as a catalyst for growth. I was anxious to start college, to leave my childhood home and catapult myself wholly into my brave new world. In doing so, however, I did not leave a lot of room for Ceej, one of very few strings tying me to my past. We went from being completely wrapped up in each other’s lives, from spending every weekend together and wheedling away the wee hours of the morning talking in my car outside her house so that we wouldn’t wake her parents, to less-than-monthly phone calls. Since then, we’ve worked out a system—there are e-mails for momentous occasions, spontaneous phone calls at odd hours. Most importantly, though, over holiday breaks from school, I drive up to her house and knock on the kitchen window where someone in her family is invariably eating or preparing food. Ceej and I will sit on the white leather couches in the living room for hours, talking and sipping tea and looking at her mother’s paintings, largely oblivious to the swarm of family members who pop in and out during the holidays.
This year her father interrupted us. “Just like old times?” He speaks quickly and in a thick Cyprian accent, so it took me a moment to agree.
“Just like old times,” we confirmed.
That’s not true, of course. Ceej and I will always share something—maybe our history, maybe our interests, maybe our natural curiosity—which is why we can talk for hours on only two or three occasions per year. But it will never be just like old times, when we drove around with absolutely nowhere to go simply to be in each other’s company. When we shared our poems and short stories, our thoughts on our favorite books (our real favorite books, not the ones we read later on), and all the other intense awkwardness of being seventeen and not knowing what the hell is going on. Our relationship will never be the same because we aren’t the same. We aren’t teenagers anymore. We have a valuable friendship, one that has grown beyond circumstance and developed with us, sturdy in its malleability. Hard to lament the passing of the relationship limited by our high school years when this is what we have in its stead. Future from past; growth from loss.
On my birthday this year, I caught a matinee of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Kimmy, a friend from law school. The film follows the opposite lives of Daisy—who ages regularly, young to old—and Benjamin—who, curiously, ages backward, old to young. The theme of loss permeates the story. First, the tale was being told by a woman to her dying mother as they were waiting for Hurricane Katrina to rip through New Orleans. The characters kept repeating this mantra, this idea that “nothing lasts.” Daisy is a professional dancer, that most tenuous of callings, whose career is cut short when a car hits her, breaking her leg. (Benjamin even narrates a series of what-ifs that would have allowed the taxi to miss her by a second.) Daisy later laments the fleeting career of the professional ballerina: “Dancing is all about the line, the line of your body,” she says after stumbling out of a step in her studio. “After a while, you lose the line. And you can never get it back.” In the same scene, when Daisy and Benjamin are at last the same age, when they are both achingly beautiful and achingly in love with each other (nice casting, by the way), they admire themselves in a mirror. The moment, I guess, they would’ve pulled their yarn to arrive at. “Stay just like that,” Benjamin says. “I want to remember what we look like right now.” Because, of course, their brief bliss must end: she grows older, he grows younger, and what they have is lost. In this movie, everything—New Orleans, dancing, love—everything seems egg-shell delicate, chance brushes with happiness dripping in its own demise. Milan Kundera wrote that “Happiness is the longing for repetition,” but these characters get no such solace. Like real people, Daisy and Benjamin seem to lose everything that is important to them, and they don’t get it back.
I cried through the entire movie.
Then, because I could, I watched it again.
In most movies, the love story at least would transcend the rules of frail contingency and pervasive loss. However, due to the unusual circumstances of Benjamin Button, these characters couldn’t even share the indignity of growing old together; their relationship is forever locked up in that young-love ideal of dancing in the living room and eating dinner in bed. Over a decade after Benjamin leaves Daisy so she can find a more suitable father for their child, he returns to see her. She is pushing sixty, and he is, physically, somewhere in his twenties. At first, she acknowledges his wisdom in leaving her to establish a normal family, and she dismissively wonders aloud why he has returned. Later, though, Daisy visits Benjamin in his motel room. They sleep together one final time, agreeing that some things do, in fact, last. But what lasts is so little that it hardly seems worth the trouble: their “Good night, Benjamin,” “Good night, Daisy” routine after she wordlessly dresses and leaves. Their love, their happiness as they know it, are gone forever. They were good and elusive and precious, and now they are lost.
Somehow, for all the benefits of letting go the past to bravely face the future, I find myself dwelling obsessively on the sweet sadness of losing things that cannot be reclaimed. As people, I think we need this ontological melancholy, a feeling of unhappiness that cannot be assuaged by its role in a development toward something better, that no number of “Everything happens for a reasons” can lessen. Happy moments, in order to be thought of as happy moments, are necessarily fleeting, elusive, unsustainable. Delicate. Happiness is longing for—but never getting—repetition. Not the actual experience, but the memory. My grandpa’s Christmases are precious because we will never have them again. My teenaged friendship with Ceej is dear because it couldn’t last. It is a deep tragedy that we cannot re-ravel the yarn, but goddamnit, loss—and that longing, that tantalizing nostalgia it breeds—is what makes life so beautiful. In the first season finale of Mad Men, Don Draper describes nostalgia as the “pain from an old wound,” when, instead of marketing Kodak’s new, round slide projector for its innovative technology, he pulls on a more crucial truth. “It’s not called the Wheel,” he tells Kodak, rejecting the company’s own advertising concept. “It’s called…the Carousel.”
We like the pain, the longing, the incurable aching; we are nostalgia junkies. My father cries at the end of Return of the Jedi every time. Every time. At the end of Father of the Bride too. And ET. During Thanksgiving dinner, my Uncle Nick and I both got a little misty—to the obvious discomfort of my Oma and Ota—when he described Berkeley Breathed’s final Sunday strip for the comic “Opus.” (Steve Dallas, at last looking affectionate, is reading the final page of “Good Night Moon,” where the penguin is pictured cozily snuggled into his bed. Not only is Breathed pulling on over thirty years of drawing Opus in the funnies, he also evokes the memory of a beloved childhood bedtime story. Homeboy knows how to tug at the heartstrings.) Nothing lasts, everything ends, and we love-love-love to be sad about it.
In real life, however, pain from an old wound does not have the same romantic allure as it does in the funnies. Over Christmas break, my college friends and I got together, all of us, for the first time since we graduated. I had just seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (twice), and the thin scrap of what lasted there—that “Good night, Benjamin,” “Good night, Daisy”—was echoing in my head. We already had closed the chapter on what had brought us together—dancing, that temperamental mistress—and I was afraid to find out how little had survived among us. Because, the thing is, there is no ache for my friends, no nostalgia, no pain from an old wound. I miss them like you miss your favorite fruit when it’s out of season; it’s gone right now, but you know it’ll be back in a few months. So during New Year’s brunch this year, sitting around a table with all of them, with Pong and Shiny and Seal and Fattie, with Milbeck and JW and Foot and Bitchy…
I can explain it best with Rickey Henderson.
Rickey Henderson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame this week. He holds the lifetime records for stolen bases, runs scored, and most home-runs hit by a lead-off batter. He is also, apparently, one of the most annoying personalities to grace Major League Baseball. David Grann wrote a compelling piece about Henderson a few years ago for The New Yorker. In 2005, Rickey Henderson was forty-six years old and playing in the Golden Baseball League—the pond scum of the independent leagues and a far, far cry from Yankee Stadium, where he played from 1985-89. The consensus within the sport was that Henderson should have been resting on his laurels and awaiting an inevitable induction into the Hall of Fame. But that is not Rickey Henderson’s style.
Instead, he was attempting to crack into the MLB again, which had unceremoniously ejected him in 2003. Grann’s story reeked with the tragic finality of a great baseball player’s refusal to accept the end of his career. He had lost his touch, his ability to read the pitcher and steal bases—he had lost the line, as Daisy would say. His Golden League coach, Terry Kennedy, former MLB catcher and the son of another former MLB player and manager Bob Kennedy, could sense Henderson’s loss of confidence: “I remember at the end of my career I began to doubt my ability,” Kennedy said. “I knew what I wanted to do, but my body wouldn’t let me do it. And I called my father and said, ‘Dad, did you ever start to think you weren’t good enough to play this game?’ And he said, ‘I did, and once you do you can never get it back.’”
In the story, Henderson talks a great deal about simply wanting another opportunity to play in the majors. Forget the money (he was once the best-paid player in major league baseball), forget the limos, forget the self-dubbed “walking record” title—he just wanted to be there again. “People always ask me why I still want to play, but I want to know why no one will give me an opportunity,” he told Grann. “It’s like they put a stamp on me: ‘Hall of Fame. You’re done. That’s it.’ It’s a goddam shame.” And I realized that Henderson’s story isn’t one about loss, much as everyone wants it to be. His coach, his fans, even his family were telling him to give up the ghost, to let his past go and get on with his life. But I don’t think Rickey Henderson was chasing the ghost of his former self: Rickey the Hall-of-Famer, Rickey the egomaniac, Rickey the record-shatterer. In fact, I doubt Henderson himself ever harbored such delicate illusions about himself.
Yesterday, two days after he was elected into the Hall of Fame, a fifty-year-old Henderson told The New York Post: “I believe today, and people say I’m crazy, but if you gave me as many at-bats that you would give the runners out there today, I would out-steal every last one of them…they can always ring my phone and I’ll come on down and help their ball club. That’s how much I love the game.” Delusions about outmaneuvering men half his age aside, doesn’t this sound like a man who just wants to play baseball again? He doesn’t need money; he doesn’t need prestige; he’s not trying to roll back his ball of yarn to be the baseball player he once was. He still is a baseball player, if not in the majors than in the Golden League. Because some things, it seems, do last.
On New Year’s Eve, my friends and I went to a bar in Waterford where Shiny worked until five in the morning. Tired from too much dancing and drinking, we went back to her house around three. The others went to bed, but Seal, Fattie, Milbeck, JW and I stayed up for a while, sipping water and giggling deliriously in Shiny’s basement. Milbeck and JW were snuggled up the same blanket when Milbeck burrowed down so that we couldn’t see her, an amorphous mass growing out of JW’s side. Slowly, she started wiggling back up to visibility, her bald head thrashing in slow motion, dancing in the fluorescent light coming from the sink. JW made birthing noises, grunts and cries that announced his fiancée’s re-arrival into the world. When the ordeal was over, JW raised his left index finger into the air and declared in a British accent: “That’s the ticket!” I collapsed in laughter.
At that moment, there was no raveling or unraveling, no past or future, no memories and no loss. The late-night electricity, the nonsense-joke, the pain, the comforting knotted pain in my stomach—it had happened a hundred times before and it had never happened before. I understood, all at once, the good-night ritual between Benjamin and Daisy: not nostalgia but transcendence. Not a delicate memory but a commanding presence. Not loss—resilience. My friends and I, on New Year’s Eve, were not chasing the phantoms of a fragile friendship; we are, whether in the majors or the Golden League, still very much us. In their tired eyes I find a reflection of myself as I always wanted to be, a reflection of myself as I still want to become. The experience is too encompassing to be good or evil, too pervasive to be either happy or sad. It is as simple and crucial as loving the game of baseball.
We lose the line. We lose loved ones and childhood and the knack for stealing bases. And all our losses create holes in our lives, tiny bubbles sizzling in a glass of golden champagne, tickling our lips when they touch. For what are a million losses when we have some thing—the love of another, a passion for baseball, the sensory ruckus of toast and pancakes and scrambled eggs and orange juice in the cold light of wintry mornings—just some thing that lasts?
Monday, November 17, 2008
The Amazing Adventures of Jost in Ann Arbor: Religulous, Dred Scott and Eugene Onegin
I woke up this Sunday morning to my cell phone announcing a text message from Adam: “12:30?” Without even sitting up in bed, I texted back a confirmation. Today, there was no need for hesitation; today, there was no room for miscommunication.
Today, we were going to the opera.
I read Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin during my Russian literature phase in high school and, to refresh the story, I leafed through it again at Dawn Treader during my Friday afternoon walk. The weekend before, a friend of a friend in the music department said that she would be performing in the opera at the Power Center, and I became preoccupied with the idea of it. Of all of it—of remembering the story, of reliving that time in my life. Most importantly, of returning to the opera. I lay in my bed this morning feeling those clear, commanding voices reverberating in my flesh, envisioning the conductor’s white hands flutter like choreographed moths from the pit.
I love—love—the opera.
When I finally sat up, believing that nothing could elate me further, I thrilled down to my very toes at the picturesque outdoor scene. It was snowing. Through my black-paned windows, the naked trees were already lightly frosted; patches of a snowy coat, like the first tufts of a teenage boy’s facial hair, had started growing on the roof of the Dean’s house across the street. Through my other window were the Gothic steeples of the Law Quad looking typically stony-cold, softened only slightly by the sparse accumulation of white dust. The pine tree outside the Lawyers Club was firm, tall, correct; flourishing not in the incubation-like warmth of spring but now, during this cold, grey, oppressive season. Opera and snowfall—I could want for nothing more.
A love of opera, along with a child-like love of snow, must be presented slightly tongue-in-cheek, but only to obscure the unseemly earnest experience of emotion that the true lover of opera feels during a performance. I fall in love when the characters fall in love; I fly into rages and burst into tears right along with them; and when someone dies, as someone inevitably does, I die a little too. To be honest, I was a little worried about attending Eugene Onegin with Adam for just that reason. I am taken by opera in a way I am not taken by anything else. I am completely engaged, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, like the true-believer child who sits on Santa’s lap at the mall; I don’t quite know what to do with myself. I sometimes forget to exhale, and I’m often physically sore afterwards from maintaining a rapturous, quiet, still-waters-run-deep attentiveness for three hours straight. Near the beginning of this performance, Adam nudged me meaningfully when Tatyana’s older sister Olga tells her to get her nose out of her books and enjoy their party. I nearly jumped out of my seat; I had forgotten he was there. I had forgotten I was there, sitting in a seat in an audience among other people—such is opera’s effect on me. I don’t know if he noticed my surprise, but he didn’t try to get my attention for the rest of the show.
In some respects, my more-than-appreciation for opera is a little embarrassing. As Wayne Koestenbaum admits in his book The Queen’s Throat: Homosexuality, Opera, and the Mystery of Desire, “Opera has always suited those who have failed at love.” Part of the reason I love opera so much, I’m sure, is that I’m so bad at love. In real life, love is complicated, hazy, difficult to recognize and nearly impossible to articulate. In opera, love is simple. People fall in love immediately, whole-heartedly and without question. They know exactly what it is, and then they spend the better part of three hours quite literally screaming it from the rooftops.
In Eugene Onegin, opera-love strikes twice. First, at the beginning, Tatyana falls in love-at-first-sight with Eugene Onegin, only to be turned away for her provincialism after she bears her soul to him in a letter; then, at the end, Onegin falls in love-at-second-sight with the now-cosmopolitan Tatyana, only to be turned away for her sense of duty to her husband, though she admits she is still in love with Onegin. As operas go, unrequited love is a relatively realistic take on the beast. However, what enchants me about opera-love, what distinguishes it from any love I’ve felt myself, is still present: the love itself is never subject to any scrutiny. It takes other factors, like one lovers’s blindness or the other’s sense of duty, to cause the drama, to get in the way of its realization. The love itself always remains pure, absolute. For the story to be a tragedy, the love between Onegin and Tatyana has to be real. Unrealized, but real.
In non-operatic life, love would rather self-destruct than wait for something else to destroy it. Any therapist worth the paper his diploma was printed on would have stopped the orchestra and drawn that sharp line between love and infatuation for both Onegin and Tatyana. Even to the modern layperson, their immediate declarations of love ring false. This afternoon, people in the audience laughed at the abrupt, romantic epiphanies of both the lovers—I can guarantee that those were not comedic points for Tchaikovsky. But that is what is so refreshing to us opera-lovers, us failures at love: opera makes love simple. Personal, intense, unarticulated, all-consuming. thunderclap love—love as it should be, love as it can’t be. Love sung at a superhuman volume, so we can’t talk over it, in a foreign language, so we can’t talk about it. Love with all its ecstatic, orgasmic pleasures and none of its sober, doubtful pains. Opera gives us a love like that.
If opera is indeed the refuge of those who have failed at love, I sometimes fear that law serves a similar purpose for those who have failed at literature. While we were having coffee a few weeks ago, Adam described an article about how important it is that lawyers read literature to better understand law. Benji, who has done some short-story writing in the past and who fosters a pretty severe infatuation with Vladimir Nabokov, disagreed: “If I were to read literature, it would just make me miss the kind of writing I’d rather be doing.” He was joking, but I, too, on my more cynical days, suspect that people come to law school because they couldn’t hack it—or were afraid to try to hack it—as novelists. His comment and my intermittent cynicism embody a fairly common misconception about the interpretation of law, namely, that its understanding is something wholly separate from the understanding of literature. That there is something purely objective about law, something disembodied, free from the subjective pitfalls of literature, that we can read and unfailingly understand. That legal writing is somehow suspended in time and space because of its eternal truthfulness, and that literature is simply so many words poured out on a page. Upon any sort of reflection, we quickly realize that the Constitution, for its numerous virtues, is just so many words on a page, subject to all of language’s quirky turns and ambiguities. And it’s shorter than any novel ever written. So if you’re having a hard time dissecting Crime and Punishment, imagine gleaning those kinds of complex ideas from a document with about one-one-thousandth of its exposition. While we’re probably not going to crank out the next Ulysses in the course of our law careers, people come to law school because they do have some aptitude for literary interpretation, not because they have failed at it.
Of course, both the conception and the purpose of the Constitution are wildly different from those of any novel. In the law, we come together to try to agree about how we are going to live together; in literature, we, both as writers and as readers, are driven into our own ideas, into an artistic moment that, by definition, is experienced alone. However, they say good literature stands the test of time, and I would venture to say that good law does as well, and probably for similar reasons. For instance, we read Ulysses today very differently than people did some eighty years ago, but that doesn’t make it any less valuable a literary work, any less apt a description of a particular worldview. Reading literature fine-tunes our abilities to understand context and historical considerations, to understand language as a “revealing of the world,” as Heidegger would say, instead of some pure formula to uncover truth. Similarly, good law articulates a philosophy or idea that we either still agree with or that agitates some anachronism, some misunderstanding on its face or in its application that forces us to better define our terms—both are beneficial. Some of the most scorned decisions of the Supreme Court, while legally passable, could arguably be chalked up to poor understandings of words like “liberty” and “fundamental rights”—Dred Scott happened, Bowers v. Hardwick happened, Plessy happened not because of bad legal reasoning but because of bad literary skills. Literary criticism isn’t going to get us the whole way there because literature plays a very different role in society than law, but it’s a tool that must be taken into account. In the article Adam recommended, Robert Pippin concludes that “Literature can help us understand the normative assumptions, the ‘felt necessities,’ behind the law and its practice at a time, but there is little that reading or appreciating can do on their own about such necessities.” Law, then, does not reject literature but mixes and mingles with it, benefits and is benefited by it; law is not a failure but an extension of literature.
A similarly symbiotic relationship exists between atheism and belief, and it starts with the parallel false premise that atheism is a rejection of belief, or that atheism is for those who have failed at belief. Over fall break a month ago, I went to see Bill Maher’s movie Religulous about the various absurdities of the three major religions, capitalizing on certain gems like a Disney-World-esque Holy Land in Florida, Jews for Jesus, and Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor defending his born-again status by pointing out that he didn’t have to pass an IQ test to be elected to Congress. After putzing around these less-than-fully-developed philosophies for a while, the film degenerates into a Kierkegaardian nightmare in which Maher preaches the virtues of uncertainty with such fanatic conviction that I wondered if he watched the clip after he filmed it. Atheism has always bothered me because it exhibits the same sort of religious certainty in its uncertainty as religious fanatics demonstrate in their various gods. After I vented my disgust with Maher specifically and atheism in general to Adam a few days after I saw the movie, he sent me this quote from Zizek: “Atheism is a miserable and pathetic stance of those who long for God but cannot find him.”
The problem with Maher is that he is not content with this longing for but not finding God—he has made God out of his godlessness and yet remains adamant that he has no God. He has found absolute certainty in uncertainty. Annoying for its inner contradiction, yes, but it ultimately reconciles well with Kierkegaard because Maher has taken up his own absolute, his own religious moment, in his doubt. However, we cannot simply reject God or superstition, brandishing instead the sword of reason, and claim that we are free of irrational belief. A belief in reason—which is, we must remember, a socially constructed phenomenon that has taken many different people to many different conclusions throughout history—is still just that: a belief. To call it otherwise can be horridly irresponsible because it blinds us to its limitations. I’m happy to say that our President-Elect illustrates a sensitivity to this tension in The Audacity of Hope (which I stole from Benji and have been reading in ten-page increments whenever I feel like chucking my law books out the window):
The best I can do in the face of history is remind myself that it has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty…I’m reminded that deliberation and the institutional order may sometimes be the luxury of the powerful, and that it has sometimes been the cranks, the zealots, the prophets, the agitators, and the unreasonable—in other words, the absolutists—that have fought for a new order. Knowing this, I can’t summarily dismiss those possessed of similar certainty today—the antiabortion activist who pickets my town hall meeting, or the animal rights activist who raids a laboratory—no matter how deeply I disagree with their views. I am robbed of the certainty of uncertainty...
We can still be atheists, Maher, but we cannot pretend that our choices and our truths are completely unencumbered by thousands of years of history bearing down on just what we think “reason” is. I would venture that “reason” is a better choice than “Jesus” to make decisions, to explain our actions, to make sense of our world, but we cannot call it an absolute. It is, after all, just our belief. Like Obama, we are “robbed of our certainty of uncertainty,” and I think that’s the only sane place to be.
I have tried, so hard, to tease out support for my opera-love, that disinterested emotion with all of the pleasures and none of the pain that comes with the real thing. As so often happens, I have completely doubled back on myself and arrived at some odd, seemingly contradictory conclusions—law does not work without literature, atheism does not work without belief. We do not exist only in an ethical, explainable world; the particular infuses every moment. To be a good lawyer, you have to embrace literature; to be a good atheist, you have to embrace belief. And to be a good opera-lover, it turns out that you have to be a little bit in love—with all its pleasures and all its pains—yourself.
And I loved—loved—Eugene Onegin.
Today, we were going to the opera.
I read Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin during my Russian literature phase in high school and, to refresh the story, I leafed through it again at Dawn Treader during my Friday afternoon walk. The weekend before, a friend of a friend in the music department said that she would be performing in the opera at the Power Center, and I became preoccupied with the idea of it. Of all of it—of remembering the story, of reliving that time in my life. Most importantly, of returning to the opera. I lay in my bed this morning feeling those clear, commanding voices reverberating in my flesh, envisioning the conductor’s white hands flutter like choreographed moths from the pit.
I love—love—the opera.
When I finally sat up, believing that nothing could elate me further, I thrilled down to my very toes at the picturesque outdoor scene. It was snowing. Through my black-paned windows, the naked trees were already lightly frosted; patches of a snowy coat, like the first tufts of a teenage boy’s facial hair, had started growing on the roof of the Dean’s house across the street. Through my other window were the Gothic steeples of the Law Quad looking typically stony-cold, softened only slightly by the sparse accumulation of white dust. The pine tree outside the Lawyers Club was firm, tall, correct; flourishing not in the incubation-like warmth of spring but now, during this cold, grey, oppressive season. Opera and snowfall—I could want for nothing more.
A love of opera, along with a child-like love of snow, must be presented slightly tongue-in-cheek, but only to obscure the unseemly earnest experience of emotion that the true lover of opera feels during a performance. I fall in love when the characters fall in love; I fly into rages and burst into tears right along with them; and when someone dies, as someone inevitably does, I die a little too. To be honest, I was a little worried about attending Eugene Onegin with Adam for just that reason. I am taken by opera in a way I am not taken by anything else. I am completely engaged, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, like the true-believer child who sits on Santa’s lap at the mall; I don’t quite know what to do with myself. I sometimes forget to exhale, and I’m often physically sore afterwards from maintaining a rapturous, quiet, still-waters-run-deep attentiveness for three hours straight. Near the beginning of this performance, Adam nudged me meaningfully when Tatyana’s older sister Olga tells her to get her nose out of her books and enjoy their party. I nearly jumped out of my seat; I had forgotten he was there. I had forgotten I was there, sitting in a seat in an audience among other people—such is opera’s effect on me. I don’t know if he noticed my surprise, but he didn’t try to get my attention for the rest of the show.
In some respects, my more-than-appreciation for opera is a little embarrassing. As Wayne Koestenbaum admits in his book The Queen’s Throat: Homosexuality, Opera, and the Mystery of Desire, “Opera has always suited those who have failed at love.” Part of the reason I love opera so much, I’m sure, is that I’m so bad at love. In real life, love is complicated, hazy, difficult to recognize and nearly impossible to articulate. In opera, love is simple. People fall in love immediately, whole-heartedly and without question. They know exactly what it is, and then they spend the better part of three hours quite literally screaming it from the rooftops.
In Eugene Onegin, opera-love strikes twice. First, at the beginning, Tatyana falls in love-at-first-sight with Eugene Onegin, only to be turned away for her provincialism after she bears her soul to him in a letter; then, at the end, Onegin falls in love-at-second-sight with the now-cosmopolitan Tatyana, only to be turned away for her sense of duty to her husband, though she admits she is still in love with Onegin. As operas go, unrequited love is a relatively realistic take on the beast. However, what enchants me about opera-love, what distinguishes it from any love I’ve felt myself, is still present: the love itself is never subject to any scrutiny. It takes other factors, like one lovers’s blindness or the other’s sense of duty, to cause the drama, to get in the way of its realization. The love itself always remains pure, absolute. For the story to be a tragedy, the love between Onegin and Tatyana has to be real. Unrealized, but real.
In non-operatic life, love would rather self-destruct than wait for something else to destroy it. Any therapist worth the paper his diploma was printed on would have stopped the orchestra and drawn that sharp line between love and infatuation for both Onegin and Tatyana. Even to the modern layperson, their immediate declarations of love ring false. This afternoon, people in the audience laughed at the abrupt, romantic epiphanies of both the lovers—I can guarantee that those were not comedic points for Tchaikovsky. But that is what is so refreshing to us opera-lovers, us failures at love: opera makes love simple. Personal, intense, unarticulated, all-consuming. thunderclap love—love as it should be, love as it can’t be. Love sung at a superhuman volume, so we can’t talk over it, in a foreign language, so we can’t talk about it. Love with all its ecstatic, orgasmic pleasures and none of its sober, doubtful pains. Opera gives us a love like that.
If opera is indeed the refuge of those who have failed at love, I sometimes fear that law serves a similar purpose for those who have failed at literature. While we were having coffee a few weeks ago, Adam described an article about how important it is that lawyers read literature to better understand law. Benji, who has done some short-story writing in the past and who fosters a pretty severe infatuation with Vladimir Nabokov, disagreed: “If I were to read literature, it would just make me miss the kind of writing I’d rather be doing.” He was joking, but I, too, on my more cynical days, suspect that people come to law school because they couldn’t hack it—or were afraid to try to hack it—as novelists. His comment and my intermittent cynicism embody a fairly common misconception about the interpretation of law, namely, that its understanding is something wholly separate from the understanding of literature. That there is something purely objective about law, something disembodied, free from the subjective pitfalls of literature, that we can read and unfailingly understand. That legal writing is somehow suspended in time and space because of its eternal truthfulness, and that literature is simply so many words poured out on a page. Upon any sort of reflection, we quickly realize that the Constitution, for its numerous virtues, is just so many words on a page, subject to all of language’s quirky turns and ambiguities. And it’s shorter than any novel ever written. So if you’re having a hard time dissecting Crime and Punishment, imagine gleaning those kinds of complex ideas from a document with about one-one-thousandth of its exposition. While we’re probably not going to crank out the next Ulysses in the course of our law careers, people come to law school because they do have some aptitude for literary interpretation, not because they have failed at it.
Of course, both the conception and the purpose of the Constitution are wildly different from those of any novel. In the law, we come together to try to agree about how we are going to live together; in literature, we, both as writers and as readers, are driven into our own ideas, into an artistic moment that, by definition, is experienced alone. However, they say good literature stands the test of time, and I would venture to say that good law does as well, and probably for similar reasons. For instance, we read Ulysses today very differently than people did some eighty years ago, but that doesn’t make it any less valuable a literary work, any less apt a description of a particular worldview. Reading literature fine-tunes our abilities to understand context and historical considerations, to understand language as a “revealing of the world,” as Heidegger would say, instead of some pure formula to uncover truth. Similarly, good law articulates a philosophy or idea that we either still agree with or that agitates some anachronism, some misunderstanding on its face or in its application that forces us to better define our terms—both are beneficial. Some of the most scorned decisions of the Supreme Court, while legally passable, could arguably be chalked up to poor understandings of words like “liberty” and “fundamental rights”—Dred Scott happened, Bowers v. Hardwick happened, Plessy happened not because of bad legal reasoning but because of bad literary skills. Literary criticism isn’t going to get us the whole way there because literature plays a very different role in society than law, but it’s a tool that must be taken into account. In the article Adam recommended, Robert Pippin concludes that “Literature can help us understand the normative assumptions, the ‘felt necessities,’ behind the law and its practice at a time, but there is little that reading or appreciating can do on their own about such necessities.” Law, then, does not reject literature but mixes and mingles with it, benefits and is benefited by it; law is not a failure but an extension of literature.
A similarly symbiotic relationship exists between atheism and belief, and it starts with the parallel false premise that atheism is a rejection of belief, or that atheism is for those who have failed at belief. Over fall break a month ago, I went to see Bill Maher’s movie Religulous about the various absurdities of the three major religions, capitalizing on certain gems like a Disney-World-esque Holy Land in Florida, Jews for Jesus, and Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor defending his born-again status by pointing out that he didn’t have to pass an IQ test to be elected to Congress. After putzing around these less-than-fully-developed philosophies for a while, the film degenerates into a Kierkegaardian nightmare in which Maher preaches the virtues of uncertainty with such fanatic conviction that I wondered if he watched the clip after he filmed it. Atheism has always bothered me because it exhibits the same sort of religious certainty in its uncertainty as religious fanatics demonstrate in their various gods. After I vented my disgust with Maher specifically and atheism in general to Adam a few days after I saw the movie, he sent me this quote from Zizek: “Atheism is a miserable and pathetic stance of those who long for God but cannot find him.”
The problem with Maher is that he is not content with this longing for but not finding God—he has made God out of his godlessness and yet remains adamant that he has no God. He has found absolute certainty in uncertainty. Annoying for its inner contradiction, yes, but it ultimately reconciles well with Kierkegaard because Maher has taken up his own absolute, his own religious moment, in his doubt. However, we cannot simply reject God or superstition, brandishing instead the sword of reason, and claim that we are free of irrational belief. A belief in reason—which is, we must remember, a socially constructed phenomenon that has taken many different people to many different conclusions throughout history—is still just that: a belief. To call it otherwise can be horridly irresponsible because it blinds us to its limitations. I’m happy to say that our President-Elect illustrates a sensitivity to this tension in The Audacity of Hope (which I stole from Benji and have been reading in ten-page increments whenever I feel like chucking my law books out the window):
The best I can do in the face of history is remind myself that it has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty…I’m reminded that deliberation and the institutional order may sometimes be the luxury of the powerful, and that it has sometimes been the cranks, the zealots, the prophets, the agitators, and the unreasonable—in other words, the absolutists—that have fought for a new order. Knowing this, I can’t summarily dismiss those possessed of similar certainty today—the antiabortion activist who pickets my town hall meeting, or the animal rights activist who raids a laboratory—no matter how deeply I disagree with their views. I am robbed of the certainty of uncertainty...
We can still be atheists, Maher, but we cannot pretend that our choices and our truths are completely unencumbered by thousands of years of history bearing down on just what we think “reason” is. I would venture that “reason” is a better choice than “Jesus” to make decisions, to explain our actions, to make sense of our world, but we cannot call it an absolute. It is, after all, just our belief. Like Obama, we are “robbed of our certainty of uncertainty,” and I think that’s the only sane place to be.
I have tried, so hard, to tease out support for my opera-love, that disinterested emotion with all of the pleasures and none of the pain that comes with the real thing. As so often happens, I have completely doubled back on myself and arrived at some odd, seemingly contradictory conclusions—law does not work without literature, atheism does not work without belief. We do not exist only in an ethical, explainable world; the particular infuses every moment. To be a good lawyer, you have to embrace literature; to be a good atheist, you have to embrace belief. And to be a good opera-lover, it turns out that you have to be a little bit in love—with all its pleasures and all its pains—yourself.
And I loved—loved—Eugene Onegin.
Monday, October 13, 2008
The Amazing Adventures of Jost in Ann Arbor: the law and the arb
It’s like holding someone’s hand through a sheet. You know he’s there. You can feel the warmth, maybe even the light dampness, of his palm through the cloth. You can feel the soft waves of breath pushing his arm against yours. You know he’s near, and he’s reaching out, and you’re reaching back, and you know that almost-contact, that not-quite hand-holding, that failure to fully intertwine your fingers with his, is probably the closest you’ll ever be to another human being in your entire life. It is honest in its uncertainty, beautiful in its inability to be defined, like God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel reaching, always, always reaching.
But never touching.
There is no room in law school for never touching.
Since the beginning of the semester, the Nichols Arboretum has become the wide-open haven for my not-touching, for my uncertainty. The walls are hard in the Lawyers Club, the perpendicular angles of the hallways too crowded, the backs of the benches a little too upright to be comfortable. And so, about once a week, sometimes alone and sometimes in good company, I leave the enclosed property of the Law Quad and walk the six blocks to the Arb, where the ground slopes gently beneath my feet and the trees grow crooked toward the great, wide, unreachable sky. And I can breathe.
Adam Warner and I were walking there recently on a soft October afternoon when he started reciting the beginning of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” He shamed me for not recognizing the verse, and I didn’t realize at the time how perfect his choice was, mostly because he didn’t use the right part of the poem:
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the Arb, there is space for not-touching; there is time for uncertainty. Adam and I sat on a bench by the river on that slow Saturday afternoon, and I stopped talking about how much I liked law school, my days spent touching and defining, and he stopped talking about the progress of his cover-letter- and grant-writing. (“We are so supportive of each other in the Arb,” he reflected the other day after a considerably snippier conversation in my closet-size room four stories about the ground.) Instead, overtured by the soft babbling of the water and the radiant unsureness of the leaves as they teetered between life and death, I could finally speak aloud my frustration with my first formal memo assignment in my Legal Writing class.
“It was like giving birth to a child who has no face,” I said, because in the wild loveliness of the Arb, I could be a little dramatic.
He laughed but agreed, and we could talk, for a while, about how depressing it is to try to be unfailingly communicable, to use “ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life-sap out of living things,” as Lady Chatterley describes it. It was a difficult conversation for two people trying to make their livings out of words, to admit the unfulfilling blandness that is marketable language use, to identify so closely with that line from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” that embodies our inevitable failure to communicate: “That is not what I meant at all./ That is not it at all.”
David Gessner, a writer and assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, mirrors this struggle in his essay “Those Who Write, Teach” in The New York Times Magazine about the dual existence of the professor-writer: “It’s fine for writing teachers to talk in self-help jargon about how their lives require ‘balance’ and ‘shifting gears’ between teaching and writing, but below that civil language lurks the uncomfortable fact that the creation of literature requires a degree of monomania, and that it is, at least in part, an irrational enterprise. It’s hard to throw your whole self into something when that self has another job.” I prize the monomania of language, its unavoidable “irrationality”—John Marshall himself concedes it in McCulloch v. Maryland: “Such is the character of human language, that no word conveys to the mind, in all situations, one single definite idea; and nothing is more common than to use words in a figurative sense”—but there is no place for it in law. As law students, we self-consciously ignore our own gross misunderstanding of language. We touch and define things we know are untouchable and undefinable—because we have to, because there is not time enough to do anything else, because there is no other way—and that internal contradiction cannot echo down the too-upright hallways of Hutchins, lest it reverberate too strongly against the stained glass windows and bring the entire institution crashing down upon itself. It can, however, be murmured on an uneven bench before a swiftly running river in the great wide open space of the Arb, where there is world enough, and time, for such uncertainty.
But is there? I returned, again, to the river this past Friday with Ferrial, a second-year student with whom I share the non-touching, undefined relationship that exists between a gay man and a straight woman. Ferrial had never been to the Arb before and that day, stressed from his ongoing search for an all-important post-2L-year job that will carry so much weight in his future career, he needed some wide open space. He took to the walk immediately—he walked there both Saturday and Sunday this weekend, though he likened the Arb on Sunday to Studio 54 in the 70s. However, as we sat in relative solitude watching the river that Friday, we overheard a conversation that made even me doubt the powers of the Arb.
“My daughter graduated from law school last May,” a woman was telling her friend in a voice that scraped abrasively against the scenery, “and she’s still trying to find a job. For now, she’s a manager at Pier One, and it’s not bad… ”
I could hear Ferrial’s sharp intake of breath through his nose. His eyes had widened in trance-like horror, and I thought, just for a moment, that he was going to hurl himself into the water. Why did that woman have to be so oddly specific? We all face the remote possibility of unemployment after school, but giving it a name like “manager at Pier One” is the stuff of nightmares. Luckily, Ferrial recovered on our walk back to the Quad and, as I indicated, has become a frequent worshipper at the Church of Time and Space. My faith, however, has been shaken.
This week in Property class, Simpson quoted a line from Andrew Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress” to illustrate the fact that people cannot have children after they’ve died, a point important to laws about inheritance and the Rule Against Perpetuities: “The grave’s a fine and private place,/ But none, I think, do there embrace.” I have studied the poem at some point in my education and I remembered that the narrator was trying to sweet-talk his lover into the sack. Looking to be entertained by a re-reading, I recently pulled it up on the Internet and lost my breath at the very first line: “Had we but world enough, and time,/ This coyness, lady, were no crime.” Marvell is telling his lover that life is too fleeting for uncertainty, that they need something real, something concrete, something more immediate and tangible than always reaching but never touching: in short, they need sex. Sorry, Eliot, but for Marvell, there apparently will not be time. Marvell’s poem reminded me of one of Tristan Taormino’s columns in the Village Voice in which she quotes Beth Stevens: “Kissing stops time, whereas fucking speeds time up.” And because time actually does not slow down but instead, as Auden says, “coughs when you would kiss,” we are infinitely more interested in the black-and-white world of fucking, in either sealing the deal or not, than we are in floundering in the shades-of-grey activity of making out. Fucking is self-evident, more easily defined and begs little explanation: exactly the virtues we value in our time-pressed existence.
Later that dream-like afternoon with Adam, when we could recite Eliot and momentarily believe him, when we could commiserate over the tyranny of definitions, we too were unceremoniously dumped back into a world that has no space for in-between, that has no time for things without a name. We stopped for a drink at Good Time Charley’s down the street from my dorm, where he complained about my beer selection and I tried to ignore the hoardes of maize-and-blue customers shouting at the football game on TV. As we continued our conversation, a man interjected, asked if he could use Adam’s lighter and sit and smoke with us for a while. He offered us his cigarettes, and we welcomed him to the conversation.
The man’s name was Jonathan, and he had abandoned his business lunch because everyone else was hammered and wrapped up in the game. He majored in philosophy as well at the University of Michigan, a 2006 graduate now working for a film company in Birmingham. One of the first things he asked us, even before he knew our names, was if we were dating.
Adam and I answered almost in unison: “No, just friends.”
I had said it too, but the be-all-end-all of the title infuriated me: “just friends”. And everything is presumably understood. Black-and-white terms, bleeding all the lovely nuance out of a shades-of-grey—no, a technicolor—world. It’s necessary, of course, all this false certainty, for the sake of efficiency and brevity. At that moment, however, after an endless afternoon constructed by T. S. Eliot, the words “just friends,” our compulsion to touch all these untouchable things, to take something so personal and infinite and try to make it anemic and socially decipherable, seemed dangerous and sad to me. And I thought I could do better.
“Actually, we studied together at Kalamazoo…” I began, and embarked on the history of our friendship, tried to do it some justice beyond “just friends”. But Adam gave me a look, not unlike the look he had when we had our asses handed to us by Milbeck and JW in a game of Taboo, also due to my long-windedness. I wrapped it up, defeated; there was not world enough, nor time.
Our world fucks but never kisses, touches but never lingers, names but does not understand. Even after the most idyllic day in a well-groomed college-town arboretum, still
…all the clocks in the city
Began to whir and chime:
“O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer time.”
So why waste our precious moments in limbo, trying to hold hands through a sheet? It seems to come to this: we either delude ourselves in Eliot’s beautiful fantasy, in which we must incorrectly believe there is both world and time enough to accommodate uncertainty and untouchability, to have space for the curves of a tree trunk and the sloping of the land and nuances of friendship; or we accept Marvell’s truth, deal with the fact that we will not live forever by making crude definitions and forging an artificial rigidity in a wild, psychic desert of a world. It seems clear what we, in our admitted mortality, ought to do.
Just the same, I must contest the supposed finitude of the moments in which we allow the world’s vast uncertainty into our lives, especially relative to our moments of forced certainty. Utilitarian actions and cut-and-dry definitions work very well in their place, but I don’t spend a lot of time pondering a one-night stand or the Rule Against Perpetuities in Property class: they are over almost before they begin. I recognize the need for absolutes, for names and purported truths and right angles, when living in a world with so many other people, so many other things. But those autumn walks in the Arb—the rustle of the not-yet-dead leaves, the smell of cigarettes, the conversation that doesn’t articulate all that it says—I turn those moments over and over in my head, and they seem, at least to me, to last forever. In this sense, there is time enough—time for you, and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions. So, if I lie very quietly at night, I can feel, just barely, a hand on the other side of the sheet, that warm, sweaty hand that almost-but-doesn’t touch mine.
Because I have the time, I don’t touch it back.
But never touching.
There is no room in law school for never touching.
Since the beginning of the semester, the Nichols Arboretum has become the wide-open haven for my not-touching, for my uncertainty. The walls are hard in the Lawyers Club, the perpendicular angles of the hallways too crowded, the backs of the benches a little too upright to be comfortable. And so, about once a week, sometimes alone and sometimes in good company, I leave the enclosed property of the Law Quad and walk the six blocks to the Arb, where the ground slopes gently beneath my feet and the trees grow crooked toward the great, wide, unreachable sky. And I can breathe.
Adam Warner and I were walking there recently on a soft October afternoon when he started reciting the beginning of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” He shamed me for not recognizing the verse, and I didn’t realize at the time how perfect his choice was, mostly because he didn’t use the right part of the poem:
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the Arb, there is space for not-touching; there is time for uncertainty. Adam and I sat on a bench by the river on that slow Saturday afternoon, and I stopped talking about how much I liked law school, my days spent touching and defining, and he stopped talking about the progress of his cover-letter- and grant-writing. (“We are so supportive of each other in the Arb,” he reflected the other day after a considerably snippier conversation in my closet-size room four stories about the ground.) Instead, overtured by the soft babbling of the water and the radiant unsureness of the leaves as they teetered between life and death, I could finally speak aloud my frustration with my first formal memo assignment in my Legal Writing class.
“It was like giving birth to a child who has no face,” I said, because in the wild loveliness of the Arb, I could be a little dramatic.
He laughed but agreed, and we could talk, for a while, about how depressing it is to try to be unfailingly communicable, to use “ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life-sap out of living things,” as Lady Chatterley describes it. It was a difficult conversation for two people trying to make their livings out of words, to admit the unfulfilling blandness that is marketable language use, to identify so closely with that line from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” that embodies our inevitable failure to communicate: “That is not what I meant at all./ That is not it at all.”
David Gessner, a writer and assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, mirrors this struggle in his essay “Those Who Write, Teach” in The New York Times Magazine about the dual existence of the professor-writer: “It’s fine for writing teachers to talk in self-help jargon about how their lives require ‘balance’ and ‘shifting gears’ between teaching and writing, but below that civil language lurks the uncomfortable fact that the creation of literature requires a degree of monomania, and that it is, at least in part, an irrational enterprise. It’s hard to throw your whole self into something when that self has another job.” I prize the monomania of language, its unavoidable “irrationality”—John Marshall himself concedes it in McCulloch v. Maryland: “Such is the character of human language, that no word conveys to the mind, in all situations, one single definite idea; and nothing is more common than to use words in a figurative sense”—but there is no place for it in law. As law students, we self-consciously ignore our own gross misunderstanding of language. We touch and define things we know are untouchable and undefinable—because we have to, because there is not time enough to do anything else, because there is no other way—and that internal contradiction cannot echo down the too-upright hallways of Hutchins, lest it reverberate too strongly against the stained glass windows and bring the entire institution crashing down upon itself. It can, however, be murmured on an uneven bench before a swiftly running river in the great wide open space of the Arb, where there is world enough, and time, for such uncertainty.
But is there? I returned, again, to the river this past Friday with Ferrial, a second-year student with whom I share the non-touching, undefined relationship that exists between a gay man and a straight woman. Ferrial had never been to the Arb before and that day, stressed from his ongoing search for an all-important post-2L-year job that will carry so much weight in his future career, he needed some wide open space. He took to the walk immediately—he walked there both Saturday and Sunday this weekend, though he likened the Arb on Sunday to Studio 54 in the 70s. However, as we sat in relative solitude watching the river that Friday, we overheard a conversation that made even me doubt the powers of the Arb.
“My daughter graduated from law school last May,” a woman was telling her friend in a voice that scraped abrasively against the scenery, “and she’s still trying to find a job. For now, she’s a manager at Pier One, and it’s not bad… ”
I could hear Ferrial’s sharp intake of breath through his nose. His eyes had widened in trance-like horror, and I thought, just for a moment, that he was going to hurl himself into the water. Why did that woman have to be so oddly specific? We all face the remote possibility of unemployment after school, but giving it a name like “manager at Pier One” is the stuff of nightmares. Luckily, Ferrial recovered on our walk back to the Quad and, as I indicated, has become a frequent worshipper at the Church of Time and Space. My faith, however, has been shaken.
This week in Property class, Simpson quoted a line from Andrew Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress” to illustrate the fact that people cannot have children after they’ve died, a point important to laws about inheritance and the Rule Against Perpetuities: “The grave’s a fine and private place,/ But none, I think, do there embrace.” I have studied the poem at some point in my education and I remembered that the narrator was trying to sweet-talk his lover into the sack. Looking to be entertained by a re-reading, I recently pulled it up on the Internet and lost my breath at the very first line: “Had we but world enough, and time,/ This coyness, lady, were no crime.” Marvell is telling his lover that life is too fleeting for uncertainty, that they need something real, something concrete, something more immediate and tangible than always reaching but never touching: in short, they need sex. Sorry, Eliot, but for Marvell, there apparently will not be time. Marvell’s poem reminded me of one of Tristan Taormino’s columns in the Village Voice in which she quotes Beth Stevens: “Kissing stops time, whereas fucking speeds time up.” And because time actually does not slow down but instead, as Auden says, “coughs when you would kiss,” we are infinitely more interested in the black-and-white world of fucking, in either sealing the deal or not, than we are in floundering in the shades-of-grey activity of making out. Fucking is self-evident, more easily defined and begs little explanation: exactly the virtues we value in our time-pressed existence.
Later that dream-like afternoon with Adam, when we could recite Eliot and momentarily believe him, when we could commiserate over the tyranny of definitions, we too were unceremoniously dumped back into a world that has no space for in-between, that has no time for things without a name. We stopped for a drink at Good Time Charley’s down the street from my dorm, where he complained about my beer selection and I tried to ignore the hoardes of maize-and-blue customers shouting at the football game on TV. As we continued our conversation, a man interjected, asked if he could use Adam’s lighter and sit and smoke with us for a while. He offered us his cigarettes, and we welcomed him to the conversation.
The man’s name was Jonathan, and he had abandoned his business lunch because everyone else was hammered and wrapped up in the game. He majored in philosophy as well at the University of Michigan, a 2006 graduate now working for a film company in Birmingham. One of the first things he asked us, even before he knew our names, was if we were dating.
Adam and I answered almost in unison: “No, just friends.”
I had said it too, but the be-all-end-all of the title infuriated me: “just friends”. And everything is presumably understood. Black-and-white terms, bleeding all the lovely nuance out of a shades-of-grey—no, a technicolor—world. It’s necessary, of course, all this false certainty, for the sake of efficiency and brevity. At that moment, however, after an endless afternoon constructed by T. S. Eliot, the words “just friends,” our compulsion to touch all these untouchable things, to take something so personal and infinite and try to make it anemic and socially decipherable, seemed dangerous and sad to me. And I thought I could do better.
“Actually, we studied together at Kalamazoo…” I began, and embarked on the history of our friendship, tried to do it some justice beyond “just friends”. But Adam gave me a look, not unlike the look he had when we had our asses handed to us by Milbeck and JW in a game of Taboo, also due to my long-windedness. I wrapped it up, defeated; there was not world enough, nor time.
Our world fucks but never kisses, touches but never lingers, names but does not understand. Even after the most idyllic day in a well-groomed college-town arboretum, still
…all the clocks in the city
Began to whir and chime:
“O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer time.”
So why waste our precious moments in limbo, trying to hold hands through a sheet? It seems to come to this: we either delude ourselves in Eliot’s beautiful fantasy, in which we must incorrectly believe there is both world and time enough to accommodate uncertainty and untouchability, to have space for the curves of a tree trunk and the sloping of the land and nuances of friendship; or we accept Marvell’s truth, deal with the fact that we will not live forever by making crude definitions and forging an artificial rigidity in a wild, psychic desert of a world. It seems clear what we, in our admitted mortality, ought to do.
Just the same, I must contest the supposed finitude of the moments in which we allow the world’s vast uncertainty into our lives, especially relative to our moments of forced certainty. Utilitarian actions and cut-and-dry definitions work very well in their place, but I don’t spend a lot of time pondering a one-night stand or the Rule Against Perpetuities in Property class: they are over almost before they begin. I recognize the need for absolutes, for names and purported truths and right angles, when living in a world with so many other people, so many other things. But those autumn walks in the Arb—the rustle of the not-yet-dead leaves, the smell of cigarettes, the conversation that doesn’t articulate all that it says—I turn those moments over and over in my head, and they seem, at least to me, to last forever. In this sense, there is time enough—time for you, and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions. So, if I lie very quietly at night, I can feel, just barely, a hand on the other side of the sheet, that warm, sweaty hand that almost-but-doesn’t touch mine.
Because I have the time, I don’t touch it back.
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