The First Law of Emotional Thermodynamics: Longing is Directly Proportional to Self-Hatred

first edition of Chekov’s Three Sisters (1901)

Before you plunge down the black hole of longing, consider that desire, particularly for an unattainable object, is directly proportional to self-hatred. You want only what you can’t have because you hate what you have. You have to want what you have is the other side of the coin. However, there's something delicious about this search for phantoms. If self-improvement had been all the rage during the 18th and l9th centuries, the romantic movement might never have gotten off the ground and The Sorrows of Young Werther might have been rejected by Goethe’s publishers. On the other hand there wouldn’t have been any copycat suicides by jilted young lovers—since people would have fallen for love objects within their ken and in the absence of self-loathing suicide itself wouldn’t have been an antidote to anything. Self-esteem might be a nice thing, but it’s a killer of a whole literary oeuvres. Flaubert famously said “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” but if Flaubert hadn’t experienced a hatred for himself and everything around him, if he hadn’t entertained the notion that there was some kind of new found land that was worth hurting himself and others to attain—as is Emma’s plight—would he have been able to write the book? There are no Emma Bovarys in utopia. Yes it’s nice to live in the present and develop the Zen way of thinking in which you treasure every moment, neither regretting the past nor living for some unattainable future, the Moscow Chekhov’s Three Sisters dream of as they slog through their dreary provincial existence. But let’s face it, that kind of level-headedness can be boring too.

"Established By the State"

                                                        photo: Pete Souza

"Established by the state,” are the four words that could kill the Affordable Care Act (“Four Words That Imperil Health Law Were All a Mistake, Writers Now Say,” NYT, 5/25/15).  But let’s take a look at some other words that have been of crucial importance to both Americans and mankind in general to see how these four stand up. In his first inaugural address, March 4, 1933, Roosevelt said, "So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." Kennedy famously supported the West Germans when he said, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” His grammar was wrong (the correct German is “Ich bin Berliner”), but let sleeping dogs die. Critics of the health care plan might call upon Polonius’ famous advice to Laertes, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”  After losing the California gubernatorial race in l962 Nixon said,  “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” “Where’s the Beef?” is what an infamous Wendy’s commercial asked. John Donne said, “No man is an island, entire of itself.” Speaking of fast food the Digital Underground were responsible for these iconic lyrics from “The Humpty Dance.”  “I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom.” Goethe said, “the eternal-feminine lures to perfection," Camus, “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” And then there was Santayana’s famous, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” However, in his address before the Democratic Convention in l936, Roosevelt also said, “this generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny." With all the great locutions made in the service of progress, redress and regress, could the rather lame “established by the state” really usurp America’s destiny? Oh and there’s one last quote which is always applicable in matters of jurisprudence, “while the cat’s away, the mice will play."

The Immortal

A Borgesian conundrum awaits the reader at the end of Stephen Cave’s opinion piece in last Sunday’s Times Week in Review (“Imagining the Downside of Immortality,” NYT, 8/27/11). “The Immortal” is, in fact, the title of a short story by Borges. Playing off the Starz/BBC series, “Torchwood: Miracle Day,” Cave postulates that the real problem of immortality is not Malthusian, but that immortality would devastate us for other reasons. “Our culture is based on the striving for immortality,” Cave says. “It shapes what we do and what we believe; it has inspired us to found religions, write poems and build cities. If we were all immortal, the motor of civilization would sputter and stop.” At the end of Faust: Part Two, Goethe famously states, “The eternal feminine lures to perfection.” Yet Faust makes his bargain with Mephistopheles, who is an agent of the devil or death. Heidegger would later state that those who were not aware of death lived an inauthentic existence. But, in a way, Cave’s point is more practical and has to do with time-management and ultimately boredom. “Suddenly we would have nothing to do,” he writes about the imagined Armageddon of eternal life, “yet in the greatest of ironies, we would have endless eons in which to do it. Action would lose its purpose and time its value. This is the true awfulness of immortality.”

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?

Grandmaster Flash

Sampling, in which old songs are spliced into new musical numbers, is not only the province of rap and hip-hop, where mythic DJs like Grandmaster Flash have embellished its notoriety. It has also occurred through the history of world literature. For instance, James Joyce’s Ulysses is an essay in sampling, primarily in its exploitation of Homer. Shakespeare sampled Holinshed big time, and then there are those influential anonymous works of world literature, from the The Book of J (which Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg depict as the antecedent to the Old Testament) to Beowulf (which recently was reinterpreted by Seamus Heaney) to La Chanson de Roland. What parts of Indian culture did Herman Hesse sample in Siddhartha, and where did Goethe’s Faust and Marlowe’s Faustus, titles that are part of the vocabulary of human thought, find their common roots? Talking about provenance is a little like asking when being actually commenced. Oh yes, there was a documented Big Bang, but if time existed before matter, where do we place the idea? Did something actually come from nothing, or must there at least have been the idea of something? And if we believe in a subjectivity freed from any possible object, can it only exist if we accept the notion of the divine? All of this is a long way of saying that there is nothing new under the sun. As people used to say about perversion, “If it’s been done, it’s been said, and if it’s said, it’s been done.”

Omni Faust

Despite the strains of Puritanism, Calvinism and Transcendentalism in American life, money still has an allure that can corrupt. Money brings with it power and the illusion of immunity to mortality. Money, as the song goes, “gets you what you want.” Certainly money is frequently confused with love. Success in making it or getting it is enough to make some people feel loved, or unloved, depending on their luck. Money is subject to the pathetic fallacy, and nature can seem threatening or unthreatening depending on the condition of one’s pocket book.

But it is not only money. Even if we get enough money, we certainly never get enough time on earth. Who would be willing to ascribe to actuarial statistics that suggest that his or her time is up? The person who dies at 50 is cheated by current standards, but those who live to be 75, 80 and 90 still want more. Who knows anyone—except those whose aging has extinguished their ability to enjoy life—willing to give up their life in the name of fairness?  Who is going to hand over their heart to a younger person who needs it, when they are still fit? Of course there are suicide bombers and Tibetan monks who set themselves on fire, but at least in the case of the former there is some degree of belief that the sacrifice will lead to a payoff in the life to come.

   

In short, Faust lives on in all of us, whether we are talking of Marlowe’s version or Goethe’s. To what lengths will we go to attain the secrets of life, both material and metaphysical? Who, when offered power and knowledge and the ensuing fruits that they bear, would not be willing to sell his or her soul?  The Faust Syndrome is like the Oedipus Complex, an indelible and insurmountable aspect of the human condition that only loses its potency when Homo sapiens cast their gaze over the world for the last time.

Helen

There is a woman who is a modern day Helen of Troy. She realizes the power she has over men, which is to get attention by giving it. Despite the transparency, her victims are totally prostrated by her dark gaze. There is a bit of mockery in that gaze, a sense of déjà vu, an unearned familiarity. Marlowe described Helen in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus as “the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Illium.”  Men of great experience are willing to relinquish everything for nothing. They are totally conquered by her, and would easily make Paris’s mistake, sacrificing their own lives and those of their comrades for a phantom. They literally fall for her.

   

Helen travels up and down modern skyscrapers and plies her charms amidst jihads, health plans, and G20 talks, amidst sophisticated wine tastings and designer fittings, amidst Esalen hot tubs and wilderness rehab sweat lodges, amidst particle accelerators and Hubble telescopes, amidst securitized mortgages, TARP funds, and credit default swaps.  Her perfumed fingerprints grace the legacies of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses alike.

Wagner’s Bayreuth and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater are monuments to the power of the demiurge, what George Bernard Shaw called the Life Force. Goethe said at the end of his Faust, “the eternal feminine/ lures to perfection,” though this latter-day Helen plainly lures man to disaster, the same way the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis lured the unwary traveler in Odysseus’s day.

   

This Helen lives on among proficiently demystifying sexperts who ascend the mountain of safe sex, a testament that certain longings have not entirely passed from the world, that science is not totally triumphant, and that disenchantment has not overtaken the multiverse. Helen makes no sense, yet armies of her admirers still fall both for her and the Trojan Horse.