Once again, I'm stuck in Asia when the Oscars roll around.
I've missed them the last, what, six years, having been in Japan and Cambodia without cable. Now I have cable, true, but I think the show's airing taped, a couple of days after the event. (Incidentally, cable in Cambodia is weird -- you get channels from Italy and the Philippines and Taiwan and Indonesia and Thailand and Malaysia and Singapore. Rich Cambodians can even watch selected Canadian dramas, should they so choose. Nobody in Canada watches Canadian dramas, so I'm not sure why Thai TV carries them, but...)
I'll get to see the show, I guess -- just not live.
That's when Chris Rock works best.
Chris Rock is, I think, one of the funniest stand-up comedians I've seen in the last decade. Probably the funniest. Because he tells the truth.
Notice I said 'stand-up'. On Saturday Night Live and in the movies, Rock comes across as rather stiff and uncomfortable. Not a good actor, I don't think, although the movie he directed, Head of State, had its moments. They were few and far between, but when they hit, they hit.
Chris Rock live, however, no-holds barred, is a sight to see. He is blunt and political and nasty. He stalks the stage like a panther looking for its kill. More importantly: he's funny. Laugh-out loud funny. Sometimes piss-your-pants funny. Sometimes silly, often crude, always blatant. Seinfeld says what we're all thinking; Rock says what he's thinking, which is always riskier. And usually funnier, too.
(At the same time, I don't think he oozes comedy. Guys like Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy and Martin Short and Mike Myers -- if you think they're funny, that is -- seem to me to be touched by the comedic gods. They are comedy personified. And, yes, three of those dudes are Canadian, but I'm not nominating them for nationalistic reasons. I swear. Look, we guys also gave the world Celine Dion, so I know we're not perfect.)
Rock works for his jokes. He gets that wild look in his eyes as he stalks out the laughs before slaying them, and us. They are, quite often, pointed commentaries on racism in American society. I can't vouch for their accuracy, not being American, but I can vouch for their impact. He's funny.
(Not that he's only about race. Funny is funny is funny, and he's funny no matter what he's talking about. He's got a quick, agile mind. I saw him on Regis once talking about his newborn daughter: "I just hope she doesn't end up on the pole." Regis asks him what the 'pole' is. Rock says: "The stripper pole. If your daughter ends up on the pole, you have officially failed as a father. End of story.")
The Academy Awards, God love 'em, can be a bit stuffy, though. I have no doubt Rock's jokes will be clean. I have no doubt they'll be funny, too. I just wonder if some kind of comedic disconnect will take place, because everybody's so uptight and waiting and wondering if they're going to win that little bald and golden trophy, and then they have to sweat it out and listen to Rock try and slam the industry that they're a part of. If the audience's not into it, if they wait a little too long to laugh, that silence might seem really long and really deep as it passes on through the TV screen.
But good luck to him. Chris Rock tells the truth (as he sees it), and he seems to me to be in the tradition of Bill Cosby and Bob Newhart and Jerry Seinfeld, who were all reporters whose primary beat was life itself, the small stuff and the big stuff. Fundamentally, the human stuff.
Let's hope Rock rocks so he'll keep on having a forum for telling the truth for as long as we want to hear it.
Friday, February 25, 2005
AS TIME GOES BY: JOANIE LOVES CHACHI, INEVITABLY FALLING ICE CREAM CONES, AND WHY NOT TO CHEW GUM ONSTAGE AT YOUR HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION
I refuse to believe it's February just because the calendar says it is, not only because it's bloody hot and freakin' sunny out, as it is all day, every day, but also because I'm convinced that time has sped up since I've graduated university, that the universe itself has undergone some radical shift in temporal distortions, unless it's only now, on the cusp of thirty, that I'm finally realizing how life works.
Kurt Vonnegut knows how life works. He's simultaneously the funniest writer I've ever read and also the most serious. Don't know how he does it, but he does, and in one of his older books I'm reading right now, Palm Sunday, he often returns to the idea of time, of how all of us are mere newcomers to this world, of how, when children accuse their parents of being screw-ups, the best one can say is, essentially: "What do you want from me? I just got here!"
It's true, isn't it? We all just got here. I'm (supposedly) going to be thirty this year, but I can't quite believe it, because last week I was in Grade Five, standing at the front of the class giving a stellar speech on why comic books are the greatest known things in the history of mankind, and just the other day I was graduating high school, chewing gum while I was up on stage the whole time before getting chewed out in turn by Mrs.Forgeron when I went to go pick up my coat at the end of the night: "Scott, you were chewing gum up on stage the whole time!"
(The moral is: Don't chew gum during really important events, because your high school English teacher will rip you a new crevice for doing so.)
And I've never seen Mrs.Forgeron since that night, and, while that isn't particularly strange, one not having seen one's high school English teacher since, well, high school, it does kind of make me sad, because that's the last thing I remember of her, and it's a funny moment, a human moment, and it's imprinted in my psyche, that single point in time before time itself started to rocket forward, with me in the caboose, hanging on for dear life.
So, yes, we all just got here, and guess what? We're all leaving here soon, too.
A morbid thought?
Not necessarily. As Woody Allen once said (far funnier than I will), not only is there no God, but trying finding a plumber on a Sunday.
In other words, the practical aspects of life are often more of a pain-in-the-butt than the cosmic questions. And death is certainly a pain-in-the-butt, but you can't get more everyday than that, or more mind-blowingly, galactically incomprehensible, either.
And they're the same thing, in any event -- the daily life and the cosmic. It's all tied together in this impenetrable, unfathomable spiral of space and time that scoots us along. We hang on and go for the ride. I'm trying to figure out how to survive Phnom Penh one day at a time, while the solar system continues to expand and contract, or do whatever it does.
(Not that I can understand all that, either. Like space -- how come there's no up or down? Can someone explain it to me in a way that actually sounds logical, or plausible, or even possible, 'cause I just don't get it. Whenever someone accuses me of writing a story or a blog that isn't plausible, I just point up at the moon and say: "Is that freakin' orb plausible?" Okay, I don't really say that, but I've thought about it.)
I think the best thing do is hope and plan for a long and healthy and happy life, understanding that it's going to go by in less than a blink of an eye, that disease and death are all we have to look forward to, and that all of our random acts of kindess and violence, our Valentine's Day cards and Christmas hugs, our stabs-in-the-backs and momentary moments of heartfelt reconciliation are all merely candles in the wind, as transitory and meaningless as Joanie Loves Chachi. (Not their love, which I'm confident is eternal and bursting with meaning, but their show, which was actually pretty good, if my seven-year old self can be trusted. So maybe there was some meaning in its demise, after all, if only because it allows me a fond memory of me and my best friend Mariano, both age seven, laughing with glee on the porch of my old house at a Mad Magazine parody of the show, Joanie Loves Chooch it was called, where Joanie spent the entire story plotting to kill Chachi with a kitchen knife. I remember so much of that moment, that stupid and wonderful childhood memory, and I refuse to believe that it happened twenty-two years ago. Not possible. Didn't that show just get cancelled two years ago or something? Seems like it...)
And don't discount or discard those strange, fleeting moments of bliss, those seconds of happiness that suddenly pop up when you're combing your hair, or stepping out of the shower, or watching a three year old drop his ice cream cone onto the floor as his eyes grow wide in disbelief at the unfairness of the universe. (Get used to it, kid.)
They're all we've got, those moments.
Maybe they're enough.
Kurt Vonnegut knows how life works. He's simultaneously the funniest writer I've ever read and also the most serious. Don't know how he does it, but he does, and in one of his older books I'm reading right now, Palm Sunday, he often returns to the idea of time, of how all of us are mere newcomers to this world, of how, when children accuse their parents of being screw-ups, the best one can say is, essentially: "What do you want from me? I just got here!"
It's true, isn't it? We all just got here. I'm (supposedly) going to be thirty this year, but I can't quite believe it, because last week I was in Grade Five, standing at the front of the class giving a stellar speech on why comic books are the greatest known things in the history of mankind, and just the other day I was graduating high school, chewing gum while I was up on stage the whole time before getting chewed out in turn by Mrs.Forgeron when I went to go pick up my coat at the end of the night: "Scott, you were chewing gum up on stage the whole time!"
(The moral is: Don't chew gum during really important events, because your high school English teacher will rip you a new crevice for doing so.)
And I've never seen Mrs.Forgeron since that night, and, while that isn't particularly strange, one not having seen one's high school English teacher since, well, high school, it does kind of make me sad, because that's the last thing I remember of her, and it's a funny moment, a human moment, and it's imprinted in my psyche, that single point in time before time itself started to rocket forward, with me in the caboose, hanging on for dear life.
So, yes, we all just got here, and guess what? We're all leaving here soon, too.
A morbid thought?
Not necessarily. As Woody Allen once said (far funnier than I will), not only is there no God, but trying finding a plumber on a Sunday.
In other words, the practical aspects of life are often more of a pain-in-the-butt than the cosmic questions. And death is certainly a pain-in-the-butt, but you can't get more everyday than that, or more mind-blowingly, galactically incomprehensible, either.
And they're the same thing, in any event -- the daily life and the cosmic. It's all tied together in this impenetrable, unfathomable spiral of space and time that scoots us along. We hang on and go for the ride. I'm trying to figure out how to survive Phnom Penh one day at a time, while the solar system continues to expand and contract, or do whatever it does.
(Not that I can understand all that, either. Like space -- how come there's no up or down? Can someone explain it to me in a way that actually sounds logical, or plausible, or even possible, 'cause I just don't get it. Whenever someone accuses me of writing a story or a blog that isn't plausible, I just point up at the moon and say: "Is that freakin' orb plausible?" Okay, I don't really say that, but I've thought about it.)
I think the best thing do is hope and plan for a long and healthy and happy life, understanding that it's going to go by in less than a blink of an eye, that disease and death are all we have to look forward to, and that all of our random acts of kindess and violence, our Valentine's Day cards and Christmas hugs, our stabs-in-the-backs and momentary moments of heartfelt reconciliation are all merely candles in the wind, as transitory and meaningless as Joanie Loves Chachi. (Not their love, which I'm confident is eternal and bursting with meaning, but their show, which was actually pretty good, if my seven-year old self can be trusted. So maybe there was some meaning in its demise, after all, if only because it allows me a fond memory of me and my best friend Mariano, both age seven, laughing with glee on the porch of my old house at a Mad Magazine parody of the show, Joanie Loves Chooch it was called, where Joanie spent the entire story plotting to kill Chachi with a kitchen knife. I remember so much of that moment, that stupid and wonderful childhood memory, and I refuse to believe that it happened twenty-two years ago. Not possible. Didn't that show just get cancelled two years ago or something? Seems like it...)
And don't discount or discard those strange, fleeting moments of bliss, those seconds of happiness that suddenly pop up when you're combing your hair, or stepping out of the shower, or watching a three year old drop his ice cream cone onto the floor as his eyes grow wide in disbelief at the unfairness of the universe. (Get used to it, kid.)
They're all we've got, those moments.
Maybe they're enough.
EITHER WAY
Sometimes I think it would be nice to move back to my hometown and get a small apartment and find a job at the arena where I used to play hockey as a kid, Bill Burgoyne Arena, where I could work in the concession stand, serving Cokes to parents who wait patiently for their kids to emerge, stinky and sweaty, from the after-game calm of the dressing rooms, as my parents once waited for me. In the downtime I could read books, jot notes for my own book, observe a place and a time that was once simply part of my life and is now only a memory of life. I could get reacquainted with the city and the people that made me. Not a bad gig, really -- the cold of the arena, the sounds of slapshots and whistles, the faces of the kids. I could take a skate every now and then, I'm sure. Hot chocolate whenever you want. There are worse places to work.
And then I think no, no, Matsue is the place to live, because Matsue is this small town in Shimane Prefecture in Japan, along the west coast, where I once visited because the great writer Lafcadio Hearn, Greek by origin, lived there, writing his thoughts and observations on Japanese life and culture in the nineteenth century, which helped me formulate my own (probably wrong) theories on Japan, and I wanted to see what he saw, feel what he felt. I went and visited his house, the house that he lived in over a hundred years ago, the house where he wrote many of his books. Very cool (to someone like me). It's a nice town, quiet and near the ocean, and not so small that you would become lost in your own foreignness. There's a few English schools there, and even though I vowed that I wouldn't want to teach English in Japan again, it wouldn't be all that bad, all things considered. A change of pace from the Tokyo suburbs and the Phnom Penh lunacy. There would be the ocean relatively nearby, and temples, and I could work on my Japanese. I'm sure there's lots of local festivals throughout the year that would bewilder and fascinate me.
I think I could carve out a life, either way.
And then I think no, no, Matsue is the place to live, because Matsue is this small town in Shimane Prefecture in Japan, along the west coast, where I once visited because the great writer Lafcadio Hearn, Greek by origin, lived there, writing his thoughts and observations on Japanese life and culture in the nineteenth century, which helped me formulate my own (probably wrong) theories on Japan, and I wanted to see what he saw, feel what he felt. I went and visited his house, the house that he lived in over a hundred years ago, the house where he wrote many of his books. Very cool (to someone like me). It's a nice town, quiet and near the ocean, and not so small that you would become lost in your own foreignness. There's a few English schools there, and even though I vowed that I wouldn't want to teach English in Japan again, it wouldn't be all that bad, all things considered. A change of pace from the Tokyo suburbs and the Phnom Penh lunacy. There would be the ocean relatively nearby, and temples, and I could work on my Japanese. I'm sure there's lots of local festivals throughout the year that would bewilder and fascinate me.
I think I could carve out a life, either way.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
ISN'T THAT CLEVER?
So super-canuck Keanu Reeve's next movie is about a lonely guy living in an empty house who ends up exchanging letters with Sandra Bullock, who also somehow lives in that same house, only two years in the future, see, so they have a long-temporal relationship going on, not merely a long-distance one.
Clever.
And Brad Pitt's new movie will be about a young actor (played by Pitt) who looks exactly like the hot young film star 'Brad Pitt', thus experiencing daily humiliations and frustrations as he's constantly compared to his better-known, better-paid lookalike.
Also clever.
That's the problem, though.
So much of modern storytelling is obsessed with being clever.
If something's not wacky, zany, odd and weird, it won't get made, or it won't be considered good, or it won't be considered, period.
So we have the movie Adaptation, which was all about the screenwriter of Adaptation writing a movie that turns out to be...Adaptation.
And we have movies like the recent Kevin Spacey directed Bobby Darin bio-pic Beyond The Sea, which is a fictional movie-within-a-movie kinda thing, where Spacey plays Bobby Darin directing a movie about himself, in which he interacts with his younger, boyhood self.
Oh, and then there's The Village, which has a big twist I won't tell you about that others guessed, but I didn't, cuz I'm not that swift, but it, too, is, altogether now, 'clever'.
Don't get me wrong. I actually really liked all of the above movies. (Even The Village. Scared the bejesus out of me. Not that I had much jesus in me anyways, but...)
It's the trend that scares me. The impulse to move beyond other aspects of storytelling, things like character, and theme, and mood, and into the more transitory, isn't-that-an-awesome realm of cleverness.
It's a matter of space and time, I think. Movies exist in two hour blocks, right, and so you better say what you gotta say, quick, or else everyone's going to lose interest. (Kind of like a blog.) That's why Norman Mailer, the great writer, once said that sportswriters are faced with the burden of being clever. Meaning, a novelist has space and time in abundance; he or she doesn't have to rely on being clever (which usually means snide) to hold someone's attention. A sportswriter's gotta prove his literary worth right off the bat.
You ever read David Foster Wallace? His mammoth novel Infinite Jest is damn clever, but it's cleverness stretched out to thirteen hundred pages. It's fiction, but there's footnotes, and when you check the footnote at the back of the book, you'll often find fifty or sixty more pages of the story, continued. So what do you do? Read the footnote, and lose track of the main text, or read the text, and wonder what the hell the footnote was all about? Clever. And genius, too, because he had the space (and the balls) to provide a not-altogether-comfortable cushion of depth to that cleverness. (Incidentally, I saw Wallace give a reading about nine years ago at the Toronto Harborfrount literary festival. As I was waiting in line for him to sign my book -- or, rather, his book -- a photographer took a picture, a flash picture, a bright picture. "If you could get that so the flash would fill my entire field of vision, that would be great," Wallace said. Clever.)
So what I'm advocating? Originality, yes. Innovation, of course. But also the other, more rounded parts of stories. The stuff that can't be pitched in a, um, pitch.
Go watch Osama, about a young girl in Taliban Afghanistan. I'm serious. I know, I know, you've seen so many Afghani movies recently, and they always disappoint you, but this one won't. You must see this movie. It's blunt and brutal and beautiful. Nothing 'clever' about it. It focuses on a girl, and her country, and her life.
I'm thinking of Cambodia. Of the street kids I see every day. Of what their lives must be like, their mornings and evenings, their childhoods and (hopefully) their adolescents. Wow. What a story it would make. Your heart would have to break.
I read and watch and love all kinds of stoires, but there has to be a foundation centred on something real and lasting. Stories have got to emerge from people and places, not from cheap gimmicks.
Now, having said all that, I've got this really cool idea for a ghost story, where the ghosts travel through not only space and the bridge between life and death but between time, too, so you'd have this situation where a new father's lying in bed, right, sleeping beside his newborn baby, barely six, seven months old, and then he sees his bedroom door slowly open, and who should enter but the ghost of his still-living child, only the ghost is a four year old boy, not a baby, so he now knows that his kid only has three more years to live...
Kind of clever, no?
Clever.
And Brad Pitt's new movie will be about a young actor (played by Pitt) who looks exactly like the hot young film star 'Brad Pitt', thus experiencing daily humiliations and frustrations as he's constantly compared to his better-known, better-paid lookalike.
Also clever.
That's the problem, though.
So much of modern storytelling is obsessed with being clever.
If something's not wacky, zany, odd and weird, it won't get made, or it won't be considered good, or it won't be considered, period.
So we have the movie Adaptation, which was all about the screenwriter of Adaptation writing a movie that turns out to be...Adaptation.
And we have movies like the recent Kevin Spacey directed Bobby Darin bio-pic Beyond The Sea, which is a fictional movie-within-a-movie kinda thing, where Spacey plays Bobby Darin directing a movie about himself, in which he interacts with his younger, boyhood self.
Oh, and then there's The Village, which has a big twist I won't tell you about that others guessed, but I didn't, cuz I'm not that swift, but it, too, is, altogether now, 'clever'.
Don't get me wrong. I actually really liked all of the above movies. (Even The Village. Scared the bejesus out of me. Not that I had much jesus in me anyways, but...)
It's the trend that scares me. The impulse to move beyond other aspects of storytelling, things like character, and theme, and mood, and into the more transitory, isn't-that-an-awesome realm of cleverness.
It's a matter of space and time, I think. Movies exist in two hour blocks, right, and so you better say what you gotta say, quick, or else everyone's going to lose interest. (Kind of like a blog.) That's why Norman Mailer, the great writer, once said that sportswriters are faced with the burden of being clever. Meaning, a novelist has space and time in abundance; he or she doesn't have to rely on being clever (which usually means snide) to hold someone's attention. A sportswriter's gotta prove his literary worth right off the bat.
You ever read David Foster Wallace? His mammoth novel Infinite Jest is damn clever, but it's cleverness stretched out to thirteen hundred pages. It's fiction, but there's footnotes, and when you check the footnote at the back of the book, you'll often find fifty or sixty more pages of the story, continued. So what do you do? Read the footnote, and lose track of the main text, or read the text, and wonder what the hell the footnote was all about? Clever. And genius, too, because he had the space (and the balls) to provide a not-altogether-comfortable cushion of depth to that cleverness. (Incidentally, I saw Wallace give a reading about nine years ago at the Toronto Harborfrount literary festival. As I was waiting in line for him to sign my book -- or, rather, his book -- a photographer took a picture, a flash picture, a bright picture. "If you could get that so the flash would fill my entire field of vision, that would be great," Wallace said. Clever.)
So what I'm advocating? Originality, yes. Innovation, of course. But also the other, more rounded parts of stories. The stuff that can't be pitched in a, um, pitch.
Go watch Osama, about a young girl in Taliban Afghanistan. I'm serious. I know, I know, you've seen so many Afghani movies recently, and they always disappoint you, but this one won't. You must see this movie. It's blunt and brutal and beautiful. Nothing 'clever' about it. It focuses on a girl, and her country, and her life.
I'm thinking of Cambodia. Of the street kids I see every day. Of what their lives must be like, their mornings and evenings, their childhoods and (hopefully) their adolescents. Wow. What a story it would make. Your heart would have to break.
I read and watch and love all kinds of stoires, but there has to be a foundation centred on something real and lasting. Stories have got to emerge from people and places, not from cheap gimmicks.
Now, having said all that, I've got this really cool idea for a ghost story, where the ghosts travel through not only space and the bridge between life and death but between time, too, so you'd have this situation where a new father's lying in bed, right, sleeping beside his newborn baby, barely six, seven months old, and then he sees his bedroom door slowly open, and who should enter but the ghost of his still-living child, only the ghost is a four year old boy, not a baby, so he now knows that his kid only has three more years to live...
Kind of clever, no?
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
ANOTHER HAND, NOT MY OWN
About twelve, thirteen years ago I woke up in the middle of the night, rubbed my eyes, turned over, stretched out my right arm to grab my pillow and, instead, felt another hand, not my own, and I sure as hell knew that there hadn't been anybody else sleeping beside me when I crawled into bed, but there it was, the hand, and my fingers roamed downwards, against my will, and there was an arm attached to that hand, and I thought it was a dead body, was sure it was a dead body, until, suddenly, a strange but familiar tingling sensation emanated from this mysterious arm, transferring its energy into my own flesh, and I just about screamed before I realized that this energy was, in actuality, my energy, that this unknown arm was my arm, that my left arm was, in fact, asleep, and while it had felt like my left arm was align with my horizontal frame, that was a lie, a trick of the mind, because my left arm had actualy been lazily sprawled outwards, and now the feeling was coming back, not the gone-to-sleep feeling but the normal-arm feeling, and with it the realization there was only me in that bed, me and no corpse, and within moments the feeling was back, my arm was back, independent no more.
(Which made me kind of sad, because nobody likes to sleep alone.)
(Which made me kind of sad, because nobody likes to sleep alone.)
THE (NON-EXISTENT) BEST MOVE IN CHESS, or WHY ENVYING PAULY SHORE IS ACTUALLY A REALLY GOOD THING
How can we learn to know ourselves? Never by reflection, but by action. Try to do your duty and you will soon find out what you are. But what is your duty? The demands of each day.
-- Goethe
Unless you don't have a shred of empathy for your fellow human beings, living in a country like Cambodia forces you into some heavy-duty existential inquiries, most of them centred upon your own mobility as a reasonably healthy, reasonably wealthy westerner, crossing paths, on an hourly basis, with some of the poorest people on earth.
Why am I here? Why are they there? We inhabit this same earth, we breathe the same air, and we are all mortal. (To crib from J.F.K.) But we ain't equal. What's it all about?
I'm reading this book right now called The Doctor & the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy by Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and creator of logotherapy, which essentially puts the 'soul' into psychological therapy. It's very readable, understandable, credible. All the answers you need to know about life's problems in three hundred pages. And for three-fifty American.
A precis:
1) Why are we here?
As Neil Peart, the brilliant drummer and lyricist from the Canadian rock band Rush put it: "Why are here? Because we're here. Roll the bones."
In other words, we are here to do the tasks before us. Period. If we have a task before us, a task worth doing, then we have found our meaning and purpose in life.
2) Why is life not giving me what I want?
The question is phrased backwards; it is not what life is not giving us -- it's what we are not giving life.
We tend to view life as this swimming pool that we're wading through -- not even swimming, usually, just wading, as if it's separate from us, as if it is remote from us.
When things go wrong, we lash out at life itself.
Ain't gonna work, according to Frankl.
It is not what we are demanding from life that's crucial -- it's what life is demanding from us. What are we putting back into the biosphere? What are we not living up to? When you invert the question, the onus comes back to us, and our own responsibilities towards those around us.
3) What if I consider myself a loser, a has-been, a good-for-nothing yahoo who makes
Pauly Shore look like Kofi Annan?
Not to worry, says Frankl. Feeling this depressed and wretched is actually a good thing.
Why?
It's proof that you have an ideal in your head, an image, an oasis of sucess and prosperity that eludes you.
Ah, but the image is there, you see. It exists. It emanated from inside of you.
And once you have that kind of picture in place, you now have a task before you -- the
ideal that you wish to move towards. If you have a task, you can now have a responsibility. If you have a responsibility, you can take action. You may not ever reach those ideals, but
so what? You know what they are, and you know what you're striving towards.
4) What's the meaning of life?
I now quote Frankl, 'cause he's more educated than me. He didn't watch as many episodes of Who's the Boss or Growing Pains as I did, no, but his analysis still tops my paraphrasing:
...In the light of existential analysis there is no such thing as a generally valid and universally binding life task. From this point of view the question of "the" task in life or "the" meaning of life is -- meaningless. It reminds us of the question a reporter asked a grandmaster in chess. "And now tell me, maestro -- what is the best move in chess?" Neither question can be answered in a general fashion, but ony in regard to a particular situation and person. The chess master, if he took the question seriously, would have had to reply: "A chess-player must attempt, within the limits of his ability and within the limits imposed by his opponent, to make the best move at any given time." Two points must be stressed here. First, "within the limits of his ability"; that is to say, the inner state, what we call temperament, must be taken into consideration. And, secondly, the player can only "attempt" to make a move which is best in a concrete situation in the game -- that is, in relation to a specific configuration of the pieces. If he set out from the start with the intention of making the best move in an absolute sense, he would be tormented by eternal doubts and endless self-criticism, and would at best overstep the time limit and forfeit the game...To ask the meaning of life in general terms is to put the question falsely because it refers vaguely to "life" and not concretely to "each person's own' existence...
Couldn't have said it better myself.
All the answers to life, it seems, in the paragraph above.
So:
Life is meaningless, pointless, filled with endless human suffering -- a logical conclusion, after almost two years in Cambodia.
Ah, but there is no such thing as 'life' -- there is his life, and her life, and your life, and that guy over there's life.
There is a person, at a point in time, in a specific place. The meaning is found based on the specific tasks faced before them. If they have the means to radically invigorate their life, this could be known as creative. If they are stuck there, against their will, this could be experiential. If their situation is terminal or life-threatening, it is attitudinal. Even when you have nothing at all left in life, when you're on your way to the gas chambers, as Frankl was, you still have the ability to judge how you react to it; you still have the capacity to choose your view.
Impossible to boil life's insanity down to all of these platitudes, isn't it?
But they makes sense to me.
They have a form and a shape, Frankl's words, that I can grasp.
They allow the petty demands of each day to acquire a meaning and resonance that not only explains life, but justifies it, too, allowing all of our duties and actions to be seen as what they are: expressions of will, and grace, and direction.
-- Goethe
Unless you don't have a shred of empathy for your fellow human beings, living in a country like Cambodia forces you into some heavy-duty existential inquiries, most of them centred upon your own mobility as a reasonably healthy, reasonably wealthy westerner, crossing paths, on an hourly basis, with some of the poorest people on earth.
Why am I here? Why are they there? We inhabit this same earth, we breathe the same air, and we are all mortal. (To crib from J.F.K.) But we ain't equal. What's it all about?
I'm reading this book right now called The Doctor & the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy by Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and creator of logotherapy, which essentially puts the 'soul' into psychological therapy. It's very readable, understandable, credible. All the answers you need to know about life's problems in three hundred pages. And for three-fifty American.
A precis:
1) Why are we here?
As Neil Peart, the brilliant drummer and lyricist from the Canadian rock band Rush put it: "Why are here? Because we're here. Roll the bones."
In other words, we are here to do the tasks before us. Period. If we have a task before us, a task worth doing, then we have found our meaning and purpose in life.
2) Why is life not giving me what I want?
The question is phrased backwards; it is not what life is not giving us -- it's what we are not giving life.
We tend to view life as this swimming pool that we're wading through -- not even swimming, usually, just wading, as if it's separate from us, as if it is remote from us.
When things go wrong, we lash out at life itself.
Ain't gonna work, according to Frankl.
It is not what we are demanding from life that's crucial -- it's what life is demanding from us. What are we putting back into the biosphere? What are we not living up to? When you invert the question, the onus comes back to us, and our own responsibilities towards those around us.
3) What if I consider myself a loser, a has-been, a good-for-nothing yahoo who makes
Pauly Shore look like Kofi Annan?
Not to worry, says Frankl. Feeling this depressed and wretched is actually a good thing.
Why?
It's proof that you have an ideal in your head, an image, an oasis of sucess and prosperity that eludes you.
Ah, but the image is there, you see. It exists. It emanated from inside of you.
And once you have that kind of picture in place, you now have a task before you -- the
ideal that you wish to move towards. If you have a task, you can now have a responsibility. If you have a responsibility, you can take action. You may not ever reach those ideals, but
so what? You know what they are, and you know what you're striving towards.
4) What's the meaning of life?
I now quote Frankl, 'cause he's more educated than me. He didn't watch as many episodes of Who's the Boss or Growing Pains as I did, no, but his analysis still tops my paraphrasing:
...In the light of existential analysis there is no such thing as a generally valid and universally binding life task. From this point of view the question of "the" task in life or "the" meaning of life is -- meaningless. It reminds us of the question a reporter asked a grandmaster in chess. "And now tell me, maestro -- what is the best move in chess?" Neither question can be answered in a general fashion, but ony in regard to a particular situation and person. The chess master, if he took the question seriously, would have had to reply: "A chess-player must attempt, within the limits of his ability and within the limits imposed by his opponent, to make the best move at any given time." Two points must be stressed here. First, "within the limits of his ability"; that is to say, the inner state, what we call temperament, must be taken into consideration. And, secondly, the player can only "attempt" to make a move which is best in a concrete situation in the game -- that is, in relation to a specific configuration of the pieces. If he set out from the start with the intention of making the best move in an absolute sense, he would be tormented by eternal doubts and endless self-criticism, and would at best overstep the time limit and forfeit the game...To ask the meaning of life in general terms is to put the question falsely because it refers vaguely to "life" and not concretely to "each person's own' existence...
Couldn't have said it better myself.
All the answers to life, it seems, in the paragraph above.
So:
Life is meaningless, pointless, filled with endless human suffering -- a logical conclusion, after almost two years in Cambodia.
Ah, but there is no such thing as 'life' -- there is his life, and her life, and your life, and that guy over there's life.
There is a person, at a point in time, in a specific place. The meaning is found based on the specific tasks faced before them. If they have the means to radically invigorate their life, this could be known as creative. If they are stuck there, against their will, this could be experiential. If their situation is terminal or life-threatening, it is attitudinal. Even when you have nothing at all left in life, when you're on your way to the gas chambers, as Frankl was, you still have the ability to judge how you react to it; you still have the capacity to choose your view.
Impossible to boil life's insanity down to all of these platitudes, isn't it?
But they makes sense to me.
They have a form and a shape, Frankl's words, that I can grasp.
They allow the petty demands of each day to acquire a meaning and resonance that not only explains life, but justifies it, too, allowing all of our duties and actions to be seen as what they are: expressions of will, and grace, and direction.
Monday, February 21, 2005
SHARE IT
I just read on the net that 'gonzo' journalist Hunter S. Thompson pulled a Hemingway and did himself in. Gun to the head. Literary immortality guaranteed.
Never read much of Thompson -- his stuff was too topical, too of-the-times for me to get into very much. His work kind of slipped by me, like the Beats, who I've still yet to read. He pioneered a kind of reckless journalistic style that shook things up and took the government and American society to task for all their moral failings. He was played in the movies twice, by Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and by Bill Murray over twenty-five years ago in a film (unseen by me) called Where the Buffalo Roam.
Thompson wrote for www.espn.go.com until his death, and his last article was about 'shotgun golf', a new, more-than-slightly lunatic idea of his that he talks about with Bill Murray. It's a strange article, and fun, and, in light of what's happened, creepy and sad, too.
Suicide is one of those things that can't be explained, rationalized, figured out. Doesn't matter if you're a famous writer or the snowmobile repairman down at the garage, the one with the lazy right eye; the end result is the same, and the resulting sorrow and confusion is just as intense for those left behind.
But it's also kind of a taboo in our culture, isn't it? We don't like to talk about it all that much, yet it exists, and it's real, and it's daily, in Canada and Cambodia and Japan.
Speaking of Nippon, the suicide rate over there is freakin' huge; just today, I read that an executive of Seibu, one of the big rail companies in Japan, did himself in in light of some investigation into the company's wrongdoings. If you've done something wrong, it's the noble thing to do in Japan, offing yourself; it gives you a dignity in death you lacked in life.
I used to wonder why there were so many mirrors looming over the railway tracks in Tokyo, until I read that it was done to prevent people from jumping in front of the trains; psychologists believe that if you see your own reflection before you take the leap, you might think twice. (The trains would always be delayed because of suicide jumpers, and the families of the victimes would be presented with the bill. There was even an announcement that if you were going to kill yourself, could you please kindly not do it at rush-hour, thereby saving the inconvenience of thousands of passengers?)
So now another famed writer has been added to that infamous list headed by Hemingway and Mishima and Plath. A sad club to a part of. We won't know why Thompson decided to do it; we never do. People have reasons that even reason can't persuade.
But let me just say this: If you ever, even for a moment, for whatever reason, even contemplate joining that list, stop. Take a breath. Pick up the phone. Switch on the net. Check your e-mail. Call your friend. E-mail me, even. Breathe again. (Oh, but that won't happen to me, you think, and you're probably, most definitely right, but I'm just saying: thoughts are things of their own, with their own erratic orbits, so you have to be prepared for where they may lead. You have to guard against your own levels of tolerance.)
Nothing's gained when someone loses like that, loses the only game we're all playing, all the time, like it or not. The world always unknowingly mourns and contracts when death comes via this method. It's like a law of nature or something, this galactic sense of futility.
There is always someone out there to share your pain. There is always someone out there to listen to your voice. There is always a way up, even if you don't believe that, and you don't even have to believe it; it's enough to believe that others believe it, and they can pull you up, one yank at a time.
Immortality is not guaranteed, no, and neither is the moment after next, but what you do have is this moment, right now, in your hands. Don't be afraid to share it.
Never read much of Thompson -- his stuff was too topical, too of-the-times for me to get into very much. His work kind of slipped by me, like the Beats, who I've still yet to read. He pioneered a kind of reckless journalistic style that shook things up and took the government and American society to task for all their moral failings. He was played in the movies twice, by Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and by Bill Murray over twenty-five years ago in a film (unseen by me) called Where the Buffalo Roam.
Thompson wrote for www.espn.go.com until his death, and his last article was about 'shotgun golf', a new, more-than-slightly lunatic idea of his that he talks about with Bill Murray. It's a strange article, and fun, and, in light of what's happened, creepy and sad, too.
Suicide is one of those things that can't be explained, rationalized, figured out. Doesn't matter if you're a famous writer or the snowmobile repairman down at the garage, the one with the lazy right eye; the end result is the same, and the resulting sorrow and confusion is just as intense for those left behind.
But it's also kind of a taboo in our culture, isn't it? We don't like to talk about it all that much, yet it exists, and it's real, and it's daily, in Canada and Cambodia and Japan.
Speaking of Nippon, the suicide rate over there is freakin' huge; just today, I read that an executive of Seibu, one of the big rail companies in Japan, did himself in in light of some investigation into the company's wrongdoings. If you've done something wrong, it's the noble thing to do in Japan, offing yourself; it gives you a dignity in death you lacked in life.
I used to wonder why there were so many mirrors looming over the railway tracks in Tokyo, until I read that it was done to prevent people from jumping in front of the trains; psychologists believe that if you see your own reflection before you take the leap, you might think twice. (The trains would always be delayed because of suicide jumpers, and the families of the victimes would be presented with the bill. There was even an announcement that if you were going to kill yourself, could you please kindly not do it at rush-hour, thereby saving the inconvenience of thousands of passengers?)
So now another famed writer has been added to that infamous list headed by Hemingway and Mishima and Plath. A sad club to a part of. We won't know why Thompson decided to do it; we never do. People have reasons that even reason can't persuade.
But let me just say this: If you ever, even for a moment, for whatever reason, even contemplate joining that list, stop. Take a breath. Pick up the phone. Switch on the net. Check your e-mail. Call your friend. E-mail me, even. Breathe again. (Oh, but that won't happen to me, you think, and you're probably, most definitely right, but I'm just saying: thoughts are things of their own, with their own erratic orbits, so you have to be prepared for where they may lead. You have to guard against your own levels of tolerance.)
Nothing's gained when someone loses like that, loses the only game we're all playing, all the time, like it or not. The world always unknowingly mourns and contracts when death comes via this method. It's like a law of nature or something, this galactic sense of futility.
There is always someone out there to share your pain. There is always someone out there to listen to your voice. There is always a way up, even if you don't believe that, and you don't even have to believe it; it's enough to believe that others believe it, and they can pull you up, one yank at a time.
Immortality is not guaranteed, no, and neither is the moment after next, but what you do have is this moment, right now, in your hands. Don't be afraid to share it.
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