Stand Up and Be Counted!

How many times have you picked up a book or gone to a movie and read about or watched a character and said, “That is me,” or better yet gone to a museum and looked at a portrait or a sculpture, say Michelangelo’s David or Rembrandt’s portrait of his son Titus, and said, “Yup, that’s me”? Are you Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit, are you Alyosha Karamazov, are you David Copperfield? Are you Sherman McCoy from Bonfire, are you Jamie from Bright Lights, Big City, are you Gatsby, or Dick Diver from Tender is the Night? Are you Yourcenar’s Hadrian, are you Bardamu from Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, or better yet are you Robin Vote in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood? OK, let’s get to the point, are you Jake Barnes or Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises, or a little of both? Are you Casaubon or Humbert Humbert, Ulrich from The Man Without Qualities, or Franz Biberkopf from Berlin Alexanderplatz? Are you Hans Castorp from Zauberberg or Leverkuhn from Doctor Faustus? Alas, are you Swann? Are you Vronsky or Levin from Anna Karenina? Come on, tell the truth. Are you Pierre or Andrei from War and Peace? Eventually you’re going to have to make a choice. Are you Molly, Leopold or Stephan from Ulysses, or Gabriel Conroy—yes everybody, man, woman or beast, has a little bit of Gabriel Conroy in them. Isn’t that Joyce’s achievement? Just like there is a little bit of Odysseus returning home unrecognized by all except his faithful Argos in all of us who have ever left and returned. Have you ever dreamt you were Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus, Antoine Doinel from The Four Hundred Blows, John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman, or James Dean’s Cal in East of Eden (and even Health Ledger’s Joker if we’re being totally honest)? There’s a little bit of Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan in all of us (who hasn’t given some thought to holding a .357 magnum?), a touch of Meryl Streep’s Silkwood, and naturally we all want to stand up and be counted like Marlon Brandon in On the Waterfront. Or maybe you just want to accept the benign indifference of the universe like Estragon, who inaugurates Waiting for Godot with his famed pronunciamento, “Nothing to be done.”

The Naked Ape

“Analysis of Neanderthal Genome Points to Interbreeding With Modern Humans” was the headline of a recent Times piece (5/7/10). In philosophy, a tautology is a phrase like “the red dress is red.” Isn’t the above headline a tautology? Was it it really necessary to fund this research? Should scientists set out to prove the oft-stated proposition, “men are dogs”? It seems obvious that at some point in evolution a Pegasus-type situation occurred, in which either a man accidentally impregnated a dog or a dog impregnated a woman. Cross speciation is not common, but it’s been known to occur, and this anomaly turned out to be naturally selective. In American law we are deemed innocent until proven guilty, but the Napoleonic code is just the opposite. Taking the a posteriori evidence of experience in both our own backyards and in such far-flung places as Bosnia, Chechnya, Somalia, Burma and Rwanda, we would have to conclude, employing the Napoleonic code, that man is guilty of being more beast than human. The cerebral cortex is a wonderful device which in fact enables us to think about the structures of our own brain and about questions like whether we exist or not, along with right and left matters, like ratiocination versus intuition. But far too much has been made of this development in brain structure. What seems to be causing much of our current suffering are expectations. We expect our fellows to act like men, while more often than not they behave like beasts, as Desmond Morris pointed out in his classic tome, The Naked Ape. Men have brains enough to argue about the nature of the self, as Locke and Hobbes started to do during the Enlightenment when Hobbes, perceiving the untamed side of human nature, proposed checks and balances to deal with animal appetite. But thinking is delusive. Cogito ergo sum. However, cogito doesn’t release us from the desire to hump thy neighbor’s wife.

Little Death in Venice

Now it’s time to return to a painful subject: the decline of furtive browsing. Back in l992, John Gross wrote The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life Since 1800. But no one has yet produced a history of the decline of the X-rated section at newspaper kiosks, nor has anyone attempted to document the stinging feeling of shame inflicted by the withering glances of prudish news agents, whose forbidden merchandise served as an incubator of male desire. Playboy, Penthouse and even Hustler are still sold in independent drugstores and in most newsstands, but they have become lifestyle magazines that are an accepted feature of mass culture. Back in the heyday of newsstand sex, magazines like Gent and Sir were printed on cheap paper stock, which actually blurred the images of the models, whose lurid poses were rendered with shabby photography. The layout of the shots in the old editions of Gent and Sir had an extemporaneous quality, as if they were taken on the run, in the kind of scruffy motel rooms to which the reader might retreat after being chased away from the newsstand for stealing free looks. The Internet, with its free and easily accessible pornography, has killed one of the great coming-of-age experiences that defined adolescence for the American male. Fallen women in lacey lingerie have been replaced by emboldened vixens whose high-definition sexuality has denuded fantasy of both its privacy and its mystique. Where will the male libido find the guilt and transgression that had previously been the hallmark of tortured adolescence, and incidentally of great works like Lolita and Death in Venice? There was a brief period before the death of porn magazines when a whole new bevy of publications, Cheri, Club and Club International, emerged to carry on the tradition of fetishistic objectification. The Notorious Bettie Page, Mary Harron’s 2005 film about the famed bondage model who later became a devout Christian (and her Henry Higgins, Irving Klaw), was a swansong for the great age when the fumes of the tobacconist were the madeleine of illicit desire. When Ronald Reagan was a television announcer, he  declared, “At General Electric, progress is our most important product.”  In the case of pornography, progress hasn’t improved anything.

Sisyphus, in Fact

It all starts with “no pain, no gain.” That is the modern version of the Fall. Eve is tempted by the fruits of motivational therapy, by the coaching movement, which attempts to remind people of what they already know. The bottom is falling out of the dollar and the Euro, but Western man is confronted with the reverse of doomsayers. No doubt there will be someone reading the most updated version of The Power of Positive Thinking or the millionth edition of The Road Less Traveled as space ship Earth, long freed from the gravitational pull of mother sun, is finally swallowed up by a black hole. The problem with all these motivators, with their dumbed-down view of brain structure, is that they’ve made free will the knight in shining armor against fate and destiny. It is unlikely that too many of the current crop of career coaches have read Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life. Freud said dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, while late night infomercials tell us real estate is still the royal road to quick money. Where does Lear fit into this scenario? How does one break the news of imminent dissolution to the motivational speaker who offers you a host of powerful-looking chaps to solve all your tax problems, if  you can only get to them before the IRS gets to you. No motivational speaker, no coach is going to take “the rest is silence” for an answer. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” and “he who hesitates…” and the famed “one day at a time,” which is the mantra of the recovery movement, are used to counter the human urge to give up. Yes, Sisyphus kept trying to push his rock up the hill, like Atlas, who stands opposite Saks Fifth Avenue in front of Rockefeller Center, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Mr. S, keep at it! Maybe that is why Camus called his philosophical treatise The Myth rather than The Fact of Sisyphus. Better yet, Sisyphus, in Fact.

The Baggage We All Carry

Let’s talk about why Faisal Shahzad got on Air Emirates when he was supposed to be on the no-fly list. Actually, there isn’t much to talk about. Most seasoned fliers can probably provide the answers to the questions that international security services, from the CIA to the Mossad, will be asking in the days ahead, though the answers are likely to be more anecdotal than statistical. Ask how many parents of toddlers who have ordered the chicken nuggets happy meal on the flight to Frankfurt have received instead a series of kosher or vegetarian selections, including the none too happy-making hummus and baba ganoush platter. Or, let’s discuss communications regarding another star-crossed flight, the Northwest Airlines plane carrying passengers to Detroit on Christmas Day. And what about the earlier blunder allowing Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to get on a KLM flight in Lagos in the first place? By the way, Faisal’s and Umar’s fathers could join the same support group in that they are both prominent citizens, one a banker and one a former high ranking Air Force officer, in their respective countries. They would inevitably have something to offer in a discussion about how lives of privilege lead to Taliban membership. Come to think of it, it would make a great Oprah. But we are digressing. Any investigation that deals with why people who shouldn’t are getting on planes must go back to asking the question of why certain pieces of luggage are not getting on planes when they should.  Why have so many of us found that our luggage has inadvertently made it onto an unintentional no-fly list? Let’s talk about checking a bag from Kennedy to Nice with a stopover in Paris. Let’s talk about the valiant Alitalia baggage personnel in Florence who located said bag as it was refused entrance to yet another country. “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars,” but in the baggage we carry. Discover all the lost bags that never made it on planes and you’ll find the explanation for all the terrorists who did. And what about the baggage we all carry around even when we’re not flying?

World in a Tangle

                                  
     It is like the flowers falling at spring's end,

                   confused, whirled in a tangle.

     “Exile’s Letter” by Ezra Pound 
     (from the Chinese of Li Po)

Deliquescence is the opposite of inspissation,which is a form of viscosity that derives from dehydration. Does this have anything to do with the 0th Law of Thermodynamics, which mandates the transfer of heat between systems in a state of disequilibrium? The answer is no, though the facility of movement is really the question. It’s like cold war politics, in which the Wall inhibited travel between East and West. In oil pipes and on freeways, flow is constricted by a thickening of the mass that is attempting to move through a narrow space. The problem takes on Malthusian dimensions when it is bodies that are causing the constriction. Bodies fill the narrow streets of Little Italy during The Feast of San Gennaro, making it practically impossible to walk. So many cars are needed to accommodate all the bodies heading out to the beaches of Long Island on Fourth of July weekend that the Long Island Expressway, the Grand Central, Meadowbrook and Northern Parkways become like J.F.K., where the number of planes taking off for England, France, Germany and points East exceeds the capacity of the runways, creating long queues and delayed departures. Of course arrival in London or Paris via Heatherow, Charles De Gaulle or Le Bourget will be no improvement, as there simply is not enough road space for the landing flights. This is also true in Barcelona, Milan, Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna and her sister city on the Danube, Budapest, and it is sometimes no easier to travel between Buda and Pest than it is to navigate through the West Village on Halloween. Inevitably, the proliferation of matter creates a black hole that belies the Milesian notion of flux.

Prenuptual Bliss

Actuaries put a monetary value on life. Insurance rates are computed on the basis of life expectancy, and it wouldn’t be at all surprising to find out that there are those who hedge their bets in derivative markets based on whether life expectancy is going up or down. Friday’s Times reported that a market had actually been formed to bet on the fortunes of Lloyd Blankfein, the beleaguered Goldman Sachs executive, speculating not on his life expectancy but on the length of his tenure (“Think Blankfein Will Resign? Want to Bet?” NYT, April 29, 2010). The firm that handles these wagers is called Intrade and hails from Dublin. It’s apparently still a long shot that Blankfein will be deposed because of the financial instruments Goldman created to deal with mortgage crisis, in particular the now-infamous Abacus 2007-AC1.  There is something faintly reassuring in knowing that all the questioning about the fate of the individual and the meaning of life undertaken by existentialist philosophers like Albert Camus (who argued, “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide") can be reduced to tables. For instance, one wonders if Intrade has created any markets for Reed College or Sweden, both of which at one point were considered leaders in suicide rates among campuses and countries, respectively. Will Intrade be able to deal with such subjects as depression rates and recidivism among criminals? Which brings us to the subject of divorce, a truly pregnant area when it comes to prediction. Prenuptial agreements are not only commonplace, they are as American as apple pie and as Western as Plato’s Republic. What about the market in prenups? Let’s say that instead of choosing a lawyer, you go to your Harvard Law School educated Goldman investment banker for the prenup. Though it’s a happy occasion, he won’t be able to stop himself from contemplating the risk. It’s something that comes naturally to him. Don’t be shocked when he advises you to short the prospect of your own happiness. You’ll be thanking him when the credit default swap written against your marriage turns trauma to profit.