Was Rafael Nadal Suffering from Hubris?

Oedipus at Colonnus by Jean-Antoine-Theodore Giroust (1788)

What happened to Rafael Nadal, in his loss to Fabio Fognini  in the third round of the US Open is what everyone is afraid of: falling from a great height. It, in fact conforms to Aristotle’s definition of tragedy which is the fall of a man of high position. In modern life we have revised the Aristotelian view to conform to the tragedies and indignities of everyday existence in which lives are cut short by unforeseen events like diseases and accidents. But the loss following a 2-love lead exemplify the notion of hamaria or tragic flaw, one of whose most common elements is hubris or excessive pride. Did Nadal underestimate his opponent once he took the lead (though he’d already had losses to a player, he'd once easily dispatched, earlier in the year)? Was the rest of the match a working out in microcosm of what happens when a champion thinks he has it in the bag with a big lead or reputation and then comes a cropper? That’s what happened in the famous fight in which Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson in Tokyo. Nadal told the Guardian, ("Rafael Nadal’s biggest loss is the aura of invincibility that has defined him," 9/5/14), “The sport to me is very simple, no? If you are playing with less confidence and you are hitting balls without creating the damage to the opponent that I believe I should do, then they have the possibility of attack.” When you think about it, classic tragedy has it right. Too much success goes to your head. Whether Tiger Woods' philandering was ignited by his success or vice versa, success creates a feeling of impregnability, what analysts term narcissistic megalomania. When you are one of the titans it’s easy to throw caution to the wind whether in the match or in the behavior surrounding it. And once a champion begins his or her fall, it’s a long and often Sisyphean road back to the top.

Rome Journal XIV The Fall of Rome

Edward Gibbon by Sir Joshua Reynolds

The experience of being in Rome is that of descending into a wormhole that leads to antiquity. It’s not just the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Baths of Caracalla. It’s every courtyard, balustrade, archway and balcony that connects you to the past. Sometimes it feels the set of some movie which has been restored for tourists to 20th Century Fox’s back lot. You almost have to be awakened to the fact that you’re not witnessing a rehearsal and that you're on the equivalent of a walking dig. Two thousand years later when Imperial America has long fallen, will the new inhabitants of New York still be living their normal lives in the shadow of the kinds of monumentality evidenced by the Altare della Patria (often described as the "wedding cake") that runs from Rome’s Piazza Venezia to the Capitoline Hill? London, Athens, Paris all have their precincts of pastness. In Peking you visit the Forbidden City, in St. Petersberg, the Hermitage. You read about the library that Alexandria once had. But the prospect of Rome is daunting. Historians write about the ascendancy of the Ottoman Empire centuries later. We know the facts, but seeing how resplendent Rome is and how much of it remains, one still marvels that this empire could have been eradicated? Aristotle defined tragedy as the fall of a great man. But what about a civilization? What form of theater would the philosopher have given to describe the end of an entity like Rome which once emanated the illusion of imperturbability? What will be the swan song of Imperial America or of the earth when it’s vaporized by an expanding sun? Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But beyond raw history, is there a play or poem which could create a dramatic arc, which could create a metaphor for such destruction?

The End of Genius and the Rise of the Compassionate Artist

Cesare Pavese

In his recent Times Sunday Review piece “Love People, Not Pleasure" (NYT, 7/18/14), Arthur C. Brooks quotes the Buddhist Dhammapada to the effect that “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life…Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.” In the piece Brooks deals with the need to seek external pleasures (fame, money, sex) “to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction but it never lasts and it is never enough. And so we crave more.” The Brooks article segues neatly into another piece in the same issue of the Sunday Review, Joshua Wolf Shenk’s “The End of ‘Genius'” (NYT, 7/19/14) Shenk writes, “The lone genius is a myth that has outlived its usefulness. Fortunately, a more truthful model is emerging: the creative network, as with the crowd-sourced Wikipedia or the writer’s room at 'The Daily Show’ or—the real heart of creativity—the intimate exchange of the creative pair, such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney and myriad other examples with which we’ve yet to fully reckon.” Getting back to the Brooks piece can we conclude in the age of networking, of the hive mentality, fame will no longer be one of the illusory pleasures available to creative and others who seek to accolades as an analgesic to emptiness?Abstract expressionism thrived on this once highly touted notion of fame. Rothko, Pollock, De Kooning were larger than life figures who spun their own mythologies and whose eccentricities were tolerated for the sake of talent. They were given the license to venture where angels feared to tread. The path of destruction they left behind was excused as the price paid by genius. Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Cesare Pavese and John Berryman paid an even more severe price, if the cultivation of an aloof and self-consciously alien artistic persona is at all connected to their suicides. Self-destruction and the destruction of others didn’t seem too high a price to pay for the sake of Art. But was it or is it ever worth the cost? The moral philosopher Ronald Dworkin dealt with a similar problem in his final book Justice for Hedgehogs. Can the pursuit of good really be justified when it results in extreme self-sacrifice (that ultimately entails the destruction of the self)?  How great is greatness? How exalted are the productions of so called great men? Beauty may be truth and it may be mind blowing, but it’s like planned obsolescence. It has a certain expendability. Great artistic endeavors may be immortal but they’re also human and by definition corruptible and imperfect. Without the qualities that mitigate against ultimate greatness, we would not be able to see ourselves in them. Art would be food for gods, rather than men. For good or bad, in the 21st century artists, writers, and poets have received a demotion and are looked at as craftsmen who satisfy our need for works that are beautiful and edifying. Nowhere in the Poetics does Aristotle outline society’s need for superior individuals who create oversized reputations bought at the price of their own well-being and those closest to them. Flaubert said it best, “be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work." 

Train in India Hits Elephants

Photograph: The Daily Mail

“Train in India Hits Elephants Crossing Track” (NYT, 11/15/13) may be the saddest story reported this year. There have been many terrible stories. Certainly the carnage following the typhoon in the Philippines is a constantly unfolding Pandora’s Box of horrors. Add to that the case of Ariel Castro (“Death in Prison of  Man Who Held Ohio Women Captive Prompts Investigations, NYT, 9/4/13)  and the kidnapped girls in Cleveland, the young woman recently shot in the face in Chicago (“Fatal Shooting of Black Woman Outside Detroit Stirs Racial Tensions," NYT, 11/14/13), the 9 year old boy killed (“Boy, 9, Is Killed by S.U.V. in Brooklyn,” NYT, 11/2/13) when a SUV jumped the curb in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, the twisters that recently reeked havoc in the Midwest. Add to that the suffering that still lies in the wake of Sandy and the fact that there are people in New York and New Jersey whose lives have still not returned to a semblance of normality (one displaced family was reported eking out an existence cramped into a Times Square hotel room where they have subsisted on fast food). Rob Ford continues to provide comic relief as North American’s resident Falstaff and George Zimmerman keeps getting arrested. The power of poetry is that it contains eternity in a finite number of words. The elephants are like poetry. The image of them being destroyed epitomizes both the sentiments of helplessness and senselessness which is the essence of pure tragedy. In addition elephants are large and stately, fitting the Aristotelian view of tragedy, which alludes to the fall of a person of greatness. What could be a greater representation of the greatness itself than the elephant? There was one female elephant who the Times said literally “fell into a ravine below the tracks." The Times quoted a statement Hiten Burman West Bengal’s forestry minister gave to the Associated Press to the effect that “The herd scattered but returned to the railroad tracks and stood there for quite some time before they were driven away by forest guards.” The image is awful and yet also creates its own brand of awe. “More than 26,000 elephants are believed to live in India, where they are closely associated with the Hindu god of wisdom,” was how the Times writer Hari Kumar began his concluding paragraph.

The Designated Mourner

Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

In Wally Shawn’s The Designated Mourner currently revived at the Public Theater, under the direction of Andre Gregory, neither Jack (Wally Shawn), self-described as “a former student of English literature who went downhill from there,” nor Judy (Deborah Eisenberg) his wife, nor Howard, Judy’s father (Larry Pine), who has written a book called The Enemy and who flies “each day on wings of scorn” talk to each other. They speak all their monologues as if the others weren’t there and what interactions that do occur are replays of scenes from the past. In one sense the very form of the play which might be subtitled Strange Interlude For Smarties tells the whole story. The Designated Mourner conforms to the Aristotelian unities to the extent that there is unity of time, place and action (the central action being the downfall of Western civilization), but the comparison to Aristotle, perhaps the greatest and most powerful symbol of the western esthetic, ends there—since in the most profound sense The Designated Mourner has no beginning, middle and end. That’s the genius of the play and its problem as it takes the form of a Socratic dialogue/monologue that could go on forever. What are the subjects? Them and us (“the disemboweling of the overboweled”), hi and lo brow, and most particularly the nature of the self. At one point Jack has an affair with Peg, a girl who operates a lemonade stand. “Jack I love you,” she says. “Is she talking about me,” Jack remarks. “My name rang oddly in my ears.” Of course the disembodied self is a theme that might have appeared in Beckett, albeit with different syntax. If The Designated Mourner were a horror film, then Oedipus would have been the creature that Dr. Frankenstein created. The first half of the play is all about triangulation in both its sexual and historical forms with the second “act,” which suffers from its share of redundancy, having to do with the downfall of the Holy Trinity of Howard, Jack and Judy,  as Western Civilization meets it’s maker. The father dies just in time for the son to lose his hard-on. “My dick lay limply in my trousers like a lunch packed by mother,” Jack comments, as he relieves himself of Judy and relieves himself (and defecates) on a volume of John Donne’s poetry.