Death and Murder

How can anyone in their right mind not fear death? I agree that working five days a week for a new car is a meaningless affair, the elements are out to get us and there is nothing more beautiful than the world of dreams and visions. But life is the only thing we’ve got! I must admit I’m fascinated by people with enough conviction in their beliefs to fly a plane into a ship. Indeed, I wish I knew what those beliefs are. Perhaps to the devout I sound like a heathen suffering from the pangs of a misdirected heart, but I believe such bold beliefs as an afterlife—in the physical sense—are reserved for the young and the ignorant; and isn’t it mostly the young and the ignorant who are out there duking it out on the battlefield? If one takes the time to listen to the elderly, one will hear a different story—one devoid of glory, often tainted with uncertainty and generally dealing with the theme of tiredness.

Nevertheless, one of the most toxic delusions art fosters is the idea that death doesn’t kill, for there is nothing worse in life than death. We would like to think of it as a release from the pressures of existence, but this is a fatally mistaken thought: it is the ultimate culmination of those pressures. Fantasies of rebirth and transformation into an elevated sphere rarely consider the pain of entry and never provide a view of what lies in store for us when nature decides to blow out our candle—indeed, how does one provide a view of blackness?

What percentage of the population commits murder—and from that number how many do it voluntarily and how many do it under orders or for a cause? It would not surprise me if this number is quite low: let’s say 5% and from that perhaps 1-2% do it voluntarily. That means 95% of us don’t commit murder during our lives. (Please oblige me here. I know full well that I’m building an argument with absolutely no scientific foundation—but, at the risk of stating the obvious, I’m not a scientist. So what I’m trying to say is this:) I believe the power of people like Martin Luther King, Gandhi or Jesus Christ lies in the simple fact that they speak what 95% of us feel: hurting someone else is bad. This collective pacifism presents a formidable threat to two groups of people: (1) those who murder, and, more relevantly, (2) the greedy who exploit them. Indeed, it means nothing less than the end of their way of life; and, accordingly, these complicit groups invariably strike out against the vocal pacifist. They strike with a vengeance, and that’s how martyrs are made.

How does a pacifist avenge the murder of a loved one? All too many of us dream up heroic scenarios, laced with violent images of us over our enemy. So what happened when those jets went crashing into the World Trade Center? Where were the heroes? By no means do I want to undervalue the torment of any victim, nor do I want to deny the valor shown by individuals under such circumstances. I merely want to point out that reality is less charming than our perception of it. And, if I may speak in the broadest generalizations, I believe most of us when confronted with horrific reality cower before aggression and avoid violence at all costs.

So, let’s say that 95% of us don’t murder. How come people vote for war? Because more than half of that 95% are greedy, and, as long as they’re never put in the position to experience real violence, they are willing to let that 5% do its dirty work. To my mind these people are pathetic: they constitute the multitude of slobs with beer cans balancing on their paunches, gazing at TV sets showing reruns of propagandistic war films, half-baked westerns, football games, and imbecilic cops and robbers serials—and, for the record, I’m not speaking of Americans here, I’m speaking for the world: the monosynaptic Muscovite, the dingbat from Deli, the hick from Hong Kong, and the Parisian peon. Do I really mean to be offensive? You bet!

And while we’re on the subject, I’d like to point out a trap that arises from this situation. Apart from greed, another vice that we, the 95%, suffer from is curiosity. It is not because we want to kill, but because killing repulses us that the majority are fascinated by the few bad apples who do; artists, journalists and scientists are no better and, in fact, they understand this—exploit this—and accordingly offer the public a negative product, because, as Kirk Douglas’s character in the film “Ace In the Hole” (1951) declares: “Bad news sells and good news is no news.”

There is nothing wrong with being fascinated by the dark side of life, and ourselves, but woe to those who think this is representative of reality. All too many of us sit in our homes watching TV, falling prey to the delusion that the world is getting worse. If these sorry individuals spent more time meeting their neighbors, they’d discover that 95% of their peers are fine people. 2,500 years ago, Aristotle declared that: “Poetry is truer than history”—and he was right. For in contrast to the battles, coups and putsches that constitute “the grand march” of time, poetry speaks of the human condition, from the individual perspective, and the message is one of love, or the pain when it fails.

Polemic on Middle Class Life

Outside of psychology, I find the subject of children boring, and, as you surely know, I find the world of football games and picnics equally bankrupt. I work hard developing myself (through reading, writing, travel and the arts) so that I may have more to discuss with people than kids. For the world of the petty bourgeoisie interests me little: Actually, I detest the idea of living in a world where everyone is competing with one another based on material wealth and, by extension, fertility.  Do you think I care if John Doe, Dan Smith or anyone else has bought a new car or had another kid?

There are a million mediocre men out there who can’t amount to anything more than working at a dead-end job, are losing their sense of attractiveness (not to mention hair), and who are willing to jump into a marriage, or an affair, for the sake of finding some meaning in their vacuous existence. There are a million more men who are so spiritually inane that sitting in front of a TV watching sports, visiting a strip bar now and then, drinking beer, and going to their kid’s baseball game is enough to keep them going. (Their wives are just as ugly, the only difference being they watch talk-shows instead of sports.)

Walt Disney and daughters

But don’t get me wrong: I believe it’s possible to have children and live an artistic life (Walt Disney and Stanley Kubrick did it), just as I believe children can enhance life immeasurably. My problem is not with children, but with middle-class, suburban existence, which revolves around child rearing and materialism. I reject the idea of following in my children’s footsteps: children should enhance my lifestyle, not end it. I hold the same views of marriage. Let’s be clear about it: I don’t give a damn what other people think of me, my work and my private life. It’s none of their business—and I refuse to succumb to the insecurity arising from peer pressure. Unfortunately, this is what I think of anyone who challenges me for not having developed in the “right” way. To hell with them! Show me one of these people who isn’t neurotic in his or her secret hours, plagued by the feeling that life is insignificant.

Marriage vows spoken to the tune of a biological clock is risky at best, and, in my opinion, to take this route is to head down a path of stress: get married (but it didn’t turn out like you hoped), have kids (but it didn’t turn out like you hoped), buy a house (the same), get a new job (the same again) and so on and so forth. I believe that happiness stems from physical and spiritual health. Physical health is easy: run a few laps around the track everyday, eat right and sleep deeply. Spiritual health is less easy: it demands the constant stimulation of the intellect, which must be fed from both abstract sources (books, films, music, etc.) and real sources (travel, people, laboratory, etc.).

Abraham Maslow

Writing about education, the psychologist Abraham Maslow said: “You ask the question about the courses you took in high school, ‘How did my trigonometry course help me to become a better human being?’ an answer echoes, ‘By gosh, it didn’t!’ In a certain sense trigonometry was a waste of time.” Basically, I disagree with him here, although I can understand why he said this. He means to say that book learning (i.e., empiricism and positivism) is insufficient for spiritual development. “Far more important,” he says, “have been such experiences as having a child. Our first baby changed me as a psychologist. It made the behaviorism I had been so enthusiastic about look so foolish that I couldn’t stomach it anymore.” And yet one of life’s paradoxes is that those who reach self-actualization (or at least get near to it) are in the minority. Despite his pique over the limitations of science as a tool to learn about people, if Maslow has fulfilled his creative potential, it is not from having a baby.

“Far more important…” I deny that, and we had better argue about that. Human knowledge is collective, and to rely on personal experience as a means of enlightenment is to miss out on humanity’s greatest achievements: books, schools, movies and the Internet—that is, the external sources of information that do not derive from instinct and intuition. Because it is flat out impossible to think on your own, to think without the thoughts of others. Creativity is based on synthesis. How do you make music without notes? And how do you think without books?

The problem with reading is that it costs time and energy—unlike sex, it is not deeply imbedded in our consciousness—and thus it remains a minority that has time to enjoy it and benefit from it. The profound experience of childbirth does not produce profound people. If this were so, the guy with ten kids would be a prophet and priests would be out of work.

Comments at the Czech Film Cafe, Wroclaw, Poland

I recently finished Milan Kundera’s novel, Ignorance, which I now understand is meant to refer to the Spanish word añoranza (meaning nostalgia or homesickness) as much as it is meant to refer to a lack of understanding. How have I survived so many years without his books? I must admit my knowledge of him was restricted to having noticed his name on the movie The Unbearable Lightness of Being when I saw it in Paris in 1986: a critical year in my development, and, perhaps, if I attempt to look back on that time, the moment of my break—or, to put it in Kundera’s words, the birth of my ignorance.

Let me clarify that: the two years I spent in Paris gave birth to my nostalgia for California, a longing to return that unbeknownst to myself was chipping away at my memories of that place (the place from which I wanted to escape). Unlike Kundera who was forced to flee, in my case, it was not a divorce, but rather a separation. The problem is that Californians generally prefer an amicable divorce to an ambivalent separation. Be that as it may, I didn’t give much thought to the idea that, in my own humble way, my situation was not so different from Kundera’s (he left his home for Paris—albeit under threat; I left my home for Paris—albeit as a voluntary quest) and I suspect, even under the drastically different circumstances which brought us to that city, he would agree with me that it’s a marvelous place.

In his case, the specter of an unfriendly government forced him to stay in the most beautiful city in the world. In my case, I was free to come and go as I pleased, and that is just what I did. Today I am not living in Paris, I am not writing in French— Kundera is. His crisis occurred in 1989 when the Iron Curtain was drawn, the borders were opened, and all the émigrés and asylum seekers were welcomed home with great fanfare. On that day, Kundera must have acutely felt the joy of living in Paris, which now, perhaps for the first time, he was responsible to declare with the same naïve verve as little Tony Marais, who when asked why he wanted to stay in Paris would surely say: “Because it’s great!” (A tangent: The soundtrack to Baghdad Café, which I saw in Paris about the same time as Unbearable Lightness is now playing in this café—thank you, Poland. In a movie or a book, this sort of coincidence would never work. But now I must ask you to believe me.) Anyway, as I was saying: Is the novel Ignorance just an excuse for not going home? I would say no, it is not. Kundera has offered up a heartfelt meditation on subjects (absence, emigration, memory and identity) which imposed themselves on him, not the contrary.

And what about me? Where do I fit into all this? I come from California. No one forced me to spend all these years abroad. From the start, I had no excuse. This is the reason you may not sympathize with me. It’s remarkable how people who act of their own volition get no sympathy. Anyone who has attempted to write a novel has dealt with the problem of rallying readers around the protagonist. It’s easier said than done: probably because we as writers experience total freedom and the world hates us for it. That’s why we’re compelled to hurl misfortune upon our characters in the hope of creating the illusion of fetters. Only then does envy slip away, and sympathy takes its place. I suspect this will be the greatest hurdle my generation must face: until George W. Bush came into office we’ve had no real contact with war or economic hardships. What’s the result? Despite our freedom we seek out stress and misfortune anywhere we can find it.

Learning

The older I get, the more conscious I become of the limited time we have to invest in learning, and more importantly the problem of choosing what to learn. Let us presuppose that the vast majority of people are smart—yes, I’m an optimist in this regard—and learning to become a mechanic requires no more innate cognitive skills than that of a surgeon.  I’m of the opinion that we are dazzled by what we can see, and those who are hailed as geniuses are just those people who are able to show us something we’ve never seen before.

For the record, I don’t believe in genius. For me, the category should be thrown into the same bin as “experts,” “authorities,” and other personality types resulting from insecurity—indeed, the only thing worse than an academic hiding behind a diploma is an artist cloaked in genius. What is this word “genius”? The term is too relative to be trusted: in theater it’s the bag of sand that lifts the curtain, because anyone with the courage or ignorance to simply be themselves on stage will find this label tacked onto them.

Thomas Mann

Novelists have it tougher. Their product can be counted in pages, and readers are sensitive to vocabulary and rhythm. Thanks to Thomas Mann and Leo Tolstoy that unique essence that is you must be accompanied by a thousand-plus pages of labor before the world grants you that elusive epithet called genius. Moreover, it has always been a minority who read demanding books, so novelists shouldn’t count on the awe of family and friends to boost their egos—at least not until their work has been adapted for television. I don’t mean to sound cynical—I am not—but rather I would like to point out the importance of subject matter in learning.

Tridacna Adze Fragments

What I am about to say is entirely subjective: my deepest, most fulfilling joy in life comes from what I call: learning about the world in which I live. Granted, this is an expansive category of information, but it is not, in my view, all encompassing, and, more to the point, some kinds of information fulfill this objective better than others. As one treads along the narrowing path of specialization, there is a moment when the focus becomes so sharp that the background blurs away. For example, when I say “a tridacna adze fragment was collected from within the hearth and a Polynesian Plain Ware sherd was collected within the stained area,” although within its context it may be relevant to an archaeologist, these twenty-two words are at present not telling us much. This is technical information laid down by scientists to provide the foundation for learning about the world in which we live.

Laborers

In this way technicians are martyrs. They spend those precious few hours a day—when we are not eating, sleeping or making love—using up their energies to generate information that someone else will analyze, synthesize, summarize and, most importantly, share with others. And if technicians are martyrs, laborers are victims. For they end up with even less energy to use for learning and less information to share at the end of the day; inevitably their conversations get trapped in a cycle of talk-show topics and ghetto gossip. Beer may help ease the pain of this tedious existence, but in the end boredom consumes the soul like a cancer and nothing can stave off the nefarious sense of loneliness and failure that ensues. It is heart wrenching to witness the humble bits of experience these individuals grasp on to in a forlorn and belated attempt at happiness. Dramatically, such scenarios call forth great pathos and emotion, but in reality there is nothing charming in such a life.

Technicians

Here a question arises: whether it is better to devote one’s time to mastering a skill than to acquiring general knowledge, or the reverse. The answer is, of course, that it would be best to have both; but since the two rarely come together, anyone compelled to choose will find greater satisfaction in acquiring general knowledge. I suppose this is not the answer you were expecting. It goes without saying that mastering a skill engenders a sense of satisfaction, but the feeling is ephemeral and dissipates once on the plateau of competency; because this kind of satisfaction is directed toward yourself (and the ecstasy of an inflated ego is apt to blow up in your face), whereas the investment of learning about the world is repaid in love—a love of the world, a joy of living, which is permanent and will last till the grave.

This is the reason I take movies so seriously. If you meditate on the amount of free time you have everyday—think about it: how much free time do you have today?—it becomes clear just how precious that hour-and-a-half is. I mean: what have you learned today? Did the information you receive expand the bounds of your universe in any way? It is for this reason that I am obsessive regarding my choice of films to watch. I need to go someplace when watching a movie; I need to experience a new emotion, gain a new perspective of life, or delve deeper into the fantasies of the collective unconscious.

Bird of Paradise (1951)

That’s why I’ll be traveling to Hong Kong tonight in The World of Susie Wong. Tomorrow I may visit San Francisco in Vertigo, and after that perhaps I’ll take off into outer space with Forbidden Planet. Everyone has seen a beach, but to experience I Walked with a Zombie is to have had an encounter with Caribbean culture that will unite your soul to this dark and beautiful part of the world. I spent seven years of my life in search of the mystery of Polynesia. I found it: in Bird of Paradise with Louis Jourdain. Each time I watch one of these films my world gets a little bit bigger, my understanding of humankind gets a little bit deeper, and my frustrations with life and its problems get a little bit milder. This is what I want to learn.

Achievements

In the film “8 1/2,” by Federico Fellini, the character Guido seems to mirror its author. He is a director who has just made a hit, and is expected to produce an equally successful follow-up. But the content of this sequel to top all sequels is kept secret. All we get is a glimpse of a fantastic structure, a monstrous undertaking that suggests a colossal prop. The curiosity is too much for the world to bear and, finally, after having been hounded by everyone from his wife to his producer, Guido is cornered and forced to reveal his forthcoming movie. His answer is simple: “That was my movie!” And then the credits roll.

This is precisely how we should live our lives. The world demands that we grow up, that we choose, that we settle down and fulfill our responsibilities; ultimately, that we produce our own colossal prop. After decades of evading this mad pursuit, like foxes on the run, springing over mound and ditch, zigzagging between trees and hiding in bushes, when the world has finally caught up with us and demands an explanation, wave your hand, wink and say: “That was my life!” And then die.