It’s Not a Rehearsal

Photograph: J.W. Taylor

Expressions like “sounds like a plan,” “I can’t complain” and “being on the same page” are the stuff of which small talk conventions are made of. But the expression “it’s not a rehearsal,” it being life,  though falling into the same category of taunting mediocrity seems, like cream, to rise to the top. We all have had our comeuppances with idiots who have used this against us, but it turns out to express a truth. One day you’ll come home, pay your bills and die. Now that’s the awareness that Heidegger was referring to when he talked about living an authentic existence. Even the most hopeless individual holds within him or her the faint dream of being discovered. Maybe he’ll become the subject of a reality TV series called “The Most Uninteresting Person Who Ever Lived.” Reality TV of course opens many possibilities to the extent that it functions like abstract painting does for people who say “my kid could do that" when they see a Pollock. At the very least he might make history by winning a big Powerball. Perhaps this is the Heart of Darkness Kurtz found--that there was no great come and get it day and that what you are is what you will be. If you’re disappointed then you might go against the advice of some recovery programs and give up before the miracle. Fitzgerald was being sociological in his over quoted “there are no second acts in American lives.”  “One door closes and another opens,” is the popular homily that is used to console those who have been fired from a job or rejected by a lover. But to quote the artist Hallie Cohen, isn’t it more accurate to say,  “one door closes and another closes”?

When Bad Things Happen to People

How do people deal with bad experiences? If you are an artist or writer, such events may have a subsidiary value to the extent that they can be turned into art. No one likes to experience loss. But for the writer, destruction may turn into the next “Tintern Abbey,” despair into The Sorrows of Young Werther, a failed relationship with a parent into Kafka’s Dearest Father, madness and insanity and failure into the next Tender is the Night, political repression into Doctor Zhivago. If Dostoevsky had not had a near-death experience in front of a firing squad, would he have written The Grand Inquisitor chapter?  But what do people do who can’t turn the bad hands they’ve been dealt into creative activities? How do they deal with the myriad ills that are part of life—loneliness, unfulfilled desire, loss of health, loss of loved ones? The bible says “the last shall be first,” and religion has always provided an anodyne, teaching us to love our enemy, to turn the other cheek. But what about the mass of men, the ones who lead lives of quiet desperation without art or belief? How do they get through it all? The one pitfall of the writer, artist or poet is that he or she, always one step removed, is too busy expropriating reality to fully avail him or herself of it. When all of existence becomes a palette, a certain immediacy and unselfconscious love of the present can be lost. However, the question remains, what do good people, who are not  artists, writers or poets, do when bad things happen to them?

Diasporic Dining XXV: This Side of Paradise

Go to the end of the Long Island Expressway (Exit 73), meaning you haven’t gotten off the highway at Route 105 Manorville leading to Route 27, which is the road to the East End of Long Island and the Hamptons. Instead you will end up in Riverhead, with its long line of retail chains and car dealerships leading to a traffic circle that shoots down Route 58 to BJ’s Club. The relief from the crowded Hamptons is belied by a road that seems like one long shopping mall. But keep going. You will come upon a big neon sign with the words Modern Snack Bar. Right away you will be able to tell that Snack Bar is a misnomer, since the gray shingled building houses a rather large restaurant that serves things like crispy roast duck, clam chowder, lemon chiffon pie and soft-shell crabs (and the avuncular looking owner will tell you just when they came in if you ask). The uniformed staff is cheerful in an almost therapeutic way, and when you see the prices and the unhurried atmosphere you might think you are reliving the famous “A Stop at Willoughby” episode of The Twilight Zone. Of course the utopia that the show’s protagonist ends up in turns out to be death, while the Modern Snack Bar is very much alive, standing on an old country road alongside farms stands and modest white cottages. It’s a matter of faith. You have to keep going. Just when you thought you’d ended up in the depersonalized hell of consumerism, you come to a little piece of yesterday that, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words, is “this side of paradise.”

Gorillas

Biographies of V.S. Naipaul and Arthur Koestler, by Patrick French and Michael Scammell, respectively, have recently been released. Both produce portraits of great thinkers and writers who were sadistic and predatory in their relationships with women. The myth that a poetic sensibility is somehow related to sensitivity has never been much more than a myth. The great author of Childe Harold may have attracted enough women that his name became an adjective to describe a hearty appetite for promiscuous sexuality, but Byron’s romanticism was never related to his ability to apprehend human character. However, prose itself can be deceptive.  It is hard to imagine the author of the The Enigma of Arrival, the wonderful recollection of Naipaul’s development as writer, being the same person who beat his devoted mistress so severely that she suffered disfigurement. It is also difficult to imagine the author of Darkness at Noon, a novel about tyranny and oppression (at least in their ideational form), being as manipulative and cruel with his wives and lovers as Scammell’s portrait of Koestler describes.  Koestler was in fact accused of rape by Jill Craigie, the wife of the English politician Michael Foot, though the accusation didn’t come from his purported victim until she was 82, and the facts of the incident have since come under question. It would appear that there is a kind of iron curtain between agent and object.  A writer can be wonderfully analytical about others, while remaining blind to himself. The perfect metaphor for artistic blindness is of course F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Dick Diver, a psychoanalyst who is a thinly veiled portrait of the author. As someone who treats others, Diver knows a great deal; about himself he can do nothing to allay the catastrophic turn of events that his name symbolically evokes. The N word (narcissism) comes into play, in the form of narcissistic grandiosity. Intellect can be deceptive. Add social approbation and you have created a lethal cocktail, in which brilliance becomes a license for destruction. 

Rubber Band

Cruisin’ east on 495 to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”

Is resistance the only means by which the forces of inertia are overcome? Is it like a rubber band, which must be held in place against a countervailing pull in order to produce force? Without resistance, the human project fails. Caligula refused to resist his desires, and ended up exemplifying the corruption destroyed the Roman Empire. All the jokes about women saying no to sex recapitulate the history of the demiurge, as well as Newton’s Third Law of Motion—for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

   

Is it the tendency of all matter, including inanimate objects, to differentiate? If there is a higher order of being, would it necessarily occupy itself with the condition of man? That would require too many calls to the field. The circuits would burn out. The switchboard would close down. And then there is the desperate motif of Bruegel’s “Triumph of Death”: pleading is not believing.

   

News reports that there is water on the dark side of the moon give hope to residents of the New York metropolitan area whose urban ambitions have been thwarted by skyrocketing rents in the once inexpensive outer boroughs. The moon will be Australia, and a whole new class of convicts will give birth to the Nicole Kidmans of tomorrow. But what will it be called—Up Above as opposed to Down Under? And who will be the Crocodile Dundee of the moon? The moon will beget its own problems, its own vacation resorts, where pleasure is disappointed, and its own universe of therapy, including the lunar hour, roughly equivalent to 45 minutes.

    

There may be "no second acts in American lives," as F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted, but the English writer Penelope Fitrzgerald embarked on her estimable oeuvre at age 58.

Dreaming about Luciano Pavarotti singing James Brown Live at the Met.