Suicide

In The Myth of Sisyphus  Camus wrote “There is only one serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” Camus himself committed at the age of 46 in a car accident, but his famous line is most often seen as a distant homiletic. You envision hands being raised in a classroom, as students rifle through underlined pages of the essay. Yet when the act hits you squarely in the face as it’s done this past week with the suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, it’s hard to take a philosophical attitude. Suicide is a little like death itself. No one can know death unless you’ve been there and once you have crossed the line, you’re no longer going to be able to report back. Is suicide a message or simply a search for ultimate relief? Is it an act that's rationally taken or is the possibly copy cat nature of Bourdain's act, for instance (both Spade and Bourdain had daughters and both died by strangulation), the result of insanity, temporary or otherwise?  Obviously there’s no generalizing, but the fact that the two cases in the news represented particularly successful people who had every reason to live and people to live for makes it all the more difficult to understand. Severe depression can be an almost ineffable juggernaut which crushes the spirit, but the average person finds it easier to understand an existential predicament, such as that of the cab driver who recently took his own life ("A Taxi Driver Took His Own Life. His Family Blames Uber’s Influence," NYT, 5/1/18). The 104 year old Australian scientist who journeyed to Switzerland to die also is a case that is on the surface more easy to absorb (“David Goodall, 104, Scientist Who Fought to Die on His Terms, Ends His Life,"NYT, 5/10/18). Still in all, whatever the motivation, the reasons for this pulling down the blind, turning off the switch or lowering the curtain is something which suicides take to their graves.

#MeToo or Not To

What hash tag to use if you are opposed to the #MeToo movement? #NotMeToo or #MeToo—Not? You’re going to lose your job, your friends and most likely your significant other. So why not get your message to the right audience before you lose everything? You don’t want your Tweet to be for the birds. #NotMeTwo immediately stops the reader in their tracks. It’s like someone belching in your face. You’re going to recoil from the blatancy of the gaffe. On the other hand #MeToo—Not is very cagey. #MeToo is so ubiquitous that even if you don’t agree with the movement, you welcome the familiarity the way you do the McDonald’s “M” when you’re cruising into a stranger mall. #MeToo is our lingua franca. People may not like things about it and they may have had their problems over the treatment of Al Franken or Garrison Keillor, but in general it’s become the meat loaf or the cherry pie (as in H. Rap Brown’s “violence is as American as cherry pie") of liberal America. You don’t really care who anyone is voting for as long as they have a #MeToo posted outside their house next to the alarm company sign. It’s like the plastic security card used to get by the turnstiles of an office building. #MeToo is your “Advance to Go (Collect $200)” from Monopoly. Now that you’re in, you can do what ever you want, including negate everything the movement stands for—which, if the behavior of New York State’s former attorney general ("Eric Schneiderman Resigns as New York Attorney General Amid Assault Claims by 4 Women," NYT, 5/7/18) is an indicator, is what is happening across the board.

Have You Ever Snubbed Someone Who Doesn't Know You Exist and Other Pyrrhic Victories?

Have you ever snubbed someone who doesn't know you exist? It’s a sublime pleasure that’s reserved for a select group of Don Quixote like windmill chasers and Iceman Cometh pipe dreamers. Pretending that you have no interest in a person who would obviously be very interesting to you in terms of Freud’s two primal categories of love and work is the ultimate Pyrrhic victory. You emerge triumphant while being able to savor the results of defeat at the same time, having come away with nothing more than the frustrating feeling of punching your way out of a paper bag. But what if you gave into your true desires and walked over to a coveted object of either beauty or potential opportunity and found that you were providing gris for somebody else’s mill and that you were fueling feelings of triumph and superiority that were even more enduring due to the fact that they didn’t merely derive from punching air? What if you introduced yourself as Jane Doe and explained that you were always a great admirer of Mr. or Ms. Big’s company, artwork or simply face and found that the reaction was one of an indifference bordering on disdain? Would you then try to convince yourself that you would have been all the more happy if you hadn’t tested the waters and could continue to enjoy the fact that the ball was still in your court and that you had the final say? The answer is probably yes.

Existentialism For Dummies

Do you ever feel you’re living this preternaturally long existential moment that’s on the edge of parody? You’ve been saying “what does it all mean?” ever since you were an impressionable adolescent reading L'Etranger. No, the burning sands of Amagansett are not equatable to the hot streets of Northern Africa. Staring out at a bikini clad girl while sipping on a warm can of Diet Coke is not the equivalent of the war time experiences that Camus had a fighter and editor of Combat, the newspaper of the French resistance. The Graduate may have been another formative experience. However, the alienation you felt when one of your parents friends advised you to go into some practical profession  does not put you in the same league with the author of The Myth of Sisyphus who declared, “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Having an ingrown toenail is not the same as Saul (aka the Apostle Paul) having a vision on the Road to Damascus. It’s not to say that things aren’t either difficult or bothersome. It’s just that an important aspect of being a grownup is realizing that it’s not useful to hyperbolize and globalize. Despite tomes like Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, which deal with the metaphysics of the mundane, everyday misery is not a problem that's either worthy of or soluble by philosophy.

First Reformed

Imagine two houses of worship with the names First Reformed and Abundant Life. It’s a little like the old Jerusalem and Rome dichotomy as the two impulses might manifest themselves in the Protestant church. Those are the spiritual homes that Paul Schrader employs as props in his latest movie. Ethan Hawke plays Reverend Toller, the troubled leader of a 250 year-old ministry that had once been a stop on the underground railway, but whose pews are now empty. One of the film’s central themes is isolation. Schrader frames his shots emphasizing the narrowness of the church, the single bed in which his minister sleeps and the solitary desk at which he writes. The absence of furnishings resonate the spiritual void and the feeling of isolation is underscored by Hawke’s interior monologue. As if to add insult to injury, Toller finds himself nursing souls which cannot be healed—one of which is an environmentalist, out to destroy the very thing he seeks to preserve—human life. “This is about your despair, your lack of hope, the sickness unto death,” he says invoking Kierkegaard. Unfortunately, he’s not preaching to the choir; even he himself is not convinced. Schrader is a famous student of his own medium and early in his career wrote Transcendental Style in Film. Bresson was one of the directors he dealt with and there may be a tendency to compare the film to the French director’s iconic Diary of a Country Priest particularly due to the journaling and the feeling of constriction that define the film. But there are also intimations of Bergman’s Winter Light, the first in a spiritual trilogy which included The Silence and Through a Glass Darkly, particularly in an outburst in which Toller tells Esther (Victoria Hall), an Abundant Life staffer who loves him, that he “despises” her. Eventually, by the way, Toller is saved by a character named Mary (Amanda Seyfried) who’s hardly a virgin.

Poetry in Motion

Johnny Tillotson (MGM)

One can be prosaic which refers to a deficiency of poetic transcendence, but prosody actually refers to the stuff from which great poems are made. In Shakespeare’s plays people speak in poetry which is often filled with similes, metaphors and other figures of speech that Elizabethans would unlikely have used in their everyday speech. Few murderers in any age summon up the eloquence of Lady’s Macbeth’s, “Out, damned spot! Out I say!” Marc Anthony’s “Friends, Romans and Countrymen, lend me yours ears” from Julius Caesar is often sighted as an example of the bard’s use of iambic pentameter. Imagine if Donald Trump had had an inspiring English teacher at the New York Military Academy and instead of simply discountenancing the matter of collusion with the Russians was able to reach to poetic heights in his Tweets. Of course, sometimes very beautiful passages from novels are referred to as poetic and when Roosevelt sang “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he was rendering a speech that soared to Shakespearean heights of poetry as did Churchill when he said "Never was so much owed by so many to so few.” Everyone has their own private language, which is more often than not tantamount to the kind of doggerel produced by Ogden Nash like for example,  “the cow is of the bovine ilk, one end is moo, the other milk” and people lull themselves into a kind of benign stupor with dirty little ditties like “pee pee comes out of my big fat snout, it comes out of my snout no doubt.” Remember Johnny Tillotson's “Poetry in  Motion” which was a big hit in l961?

How to End This Story

It’s very hard to figure out the end of anything. Stories are difficult and lives just happen and even people with a low opinion of themselves still consider that they are going to defy Eliot’s words and go out with a bang. When you look at it the Western conception of God is of a creative. He is called the creator, so if there is a God he is in the writing or storyboarding business if film is his chosen medium and he, she or it has the odious task with trying to figure out the ending of stories everyday. The British critic Frank Kermode wrote a tome called The Sense of an Ending. However, God probably doesn't have time to read it considering all the submissions including the King James edition of the bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita which come his way. So writers and artists in general are kind of in the position of God, thought they, to some extent, have a freer hand. A novelist, short story writer, or long form poet is basically free to do what he wants, yet God, if we are to take the Old Testament to heart, is dealing with a creature who is born with the gift of free will. It’s as if someone started your story for you and then told you to figure out the ending, with no recognition of the setup and foreshadowing that are going to bring about a satisfying denouement. People die all the time and it’s rather anti-climactic. To quote Thoreau they "lead lives of quiet desperation," thinking there will be some ultimate piece of punctuation that will make sense of all the run on sentences, and lo there’s nothing—few survivors in this day of bare bones nuclear families and not even a decent turnout at the funeral.