I'm no longer using this Vox. You can find me either at A Mindful Distraction (on Vox) or at Dance of the Mind (on Wordpress). See you there!
Sorry to go back several books, but I've been reading Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death (and following Dreyfus' lectures) and found the correlation between the Karamazov brothers and Kierkegaard's levels of despair fascinating.
Kierkegaard says that all human beings are in despair (which seems a lot like Buddha saying all life is suffering). This takes three forms:
- There are those who don't know they are in despair because they spend their lives distracting themselves by doing geometry alone in their rooms (as Pascal complained about Descartes), playing computer games, being chatty, absorbing themselves in sports, work, hobbies, etc. - you get the picture. That's Dmitri.
- The second level is a negative despair which arises from individuals trying to negate one conflicting aspect of themselves: either the divine (soul, etc.) or the material. (In antiquity, Plato pushed for the negation of the material in favor of the soul and Lucretius pushed for the negation of the soul in favor of the material.) That's Ivan.
- The third level is a positive despair which arises in individuals who recognize that both the soul and the body must be synthesized, but for the life of them can't figure out how to make it happen. (According to Kierkegaard, it is impossible to achieve this integration on our own volition). That's Alyosha.
When you really start digging into Buddhism, you realize that Buddha didn't say all of life is suffering. Life is suffering when we get caught up in desire. But desiring not to be desirous is still desire. And wanting to be enlightened is desire and so will not deliver enlightenment, only more suffering. It is possible to transcend the suffering if we follow the "middle path". Anything willful will simply create more suffering because will is desire. We have to allow the way out to arise spontaneously without clinging to one side or the other.
It seems to me that this is what Kierkegaard is saying - but in a far more abstract Judeo-Christian way (especially since the split in we Westerner's is so large thanks to our Greco/Judeo-Christian orientation which cannot be synthesized.)
But I must keep reading...
Slaughterhouse-Five is supposedly semi-autobiographical. Vonnegut was an American Prisoner of War in Dresden during the Bombing of Dresden . This bombing which took place through traditional air attacks by the Royal Air Force and was aided by the Americans, killed more innocent people than did the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. (According to Slaughterhouse-Five, 135,000 people died as a result of the air attack on Dresden. American air attacks on Tokyo killed 83,793 people on March 9th, 1945. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 71, 379 people.) Vonnegut was assigned to dig up the rubble to find bodies.
He said he had been trying to write this book for quite some time but couldn't find words for it until someone told him that they were all children fighting WWII. That was when he was finally able to make the book work - it was subtitled, "The Children's Crusade".
Now onto the...
****SPOILER WARNING!****
I was disappointed that the Jewish mother at the very end of the film who is willing to help find people to take Nolte away to be held for war crimes doesn't show the same understanding of his need to do this as was expressed in the book. In the book, I had the sense that there was an element of compassion from the woman toward Campbell's need to be tried. In the movie, it felt far more like revenge. In the book, you also sense that tinge of revenge, but it's tempered a bit. It's as though she realizes that Campbell's trial would not only offer the Jews who were devastated by his role some sense of justice, but that it would also offer Campbell a sense of justice as well.
I'm currently about half-way through Slaughterhouse Five. I was given the book a few years ago by a friend who claimed it was one of her favorites. I'm really enjoying it and Campbell has made an appearance in this book, too!
I finished reading Mother Night today and really enjoyed it. I couldn't put it down last night. But it didn't really strike me in any strong way so I'm very interested to see what other people got out of the book. I think the moral Kurt Vonnegut introduces in the beginning of the book is excellent - "we are what we pretend to be" and I thought that fit quite nicely with MatchPoint.
A few quotes I highlighted;
The experience of sitting there in the dark, hearing the things I'd said, didn't shock me. It might be helpful in my defense to say that I broke into a cold sweat, or some such nonsense. But I've always known what I did. I've always been able to live with what I did. How? Through that simple and widespread boon to modern mankind - schizophrenia. (p. 179)
Totally agree with this. It's become the way of the civilized world to separate reality from pretense. (We think the pretend is just pretend but it isn't. It has an effect.)
And just a little further down the page...
...Krapptauer's sort of truth would probably be with man kind forever, as long as there were men and woman around who listened to their hearts instead of their minds.
Beautiful. The Nazi's think it is a compliment but it isn't. I'd just maybe say it differently. I don't think it is people's hearts that make them so narcissistic and racist. It is warped thinking - brainwashing. Not heart! If people listened to their hearts more, there would be far less bigotry and hatred in my opinion. But I still thought this was very cool. We know what Vonnegut is saying even though the people listening to the eulogy do not.
I had taught myself that a human being might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair.
That's a result of the schizophrenia. Or maybe as Kristen says, Kitsch?
Very cool book. Glad it was recommended. Interested to see what other people think.
(I've already started Slaughterhouse Five.)
The most recent volume of Spiritual Cinema Circle includes a short film by Scott Cervine entitled The Miraculous Collision. The basis of the short film is Woody Allen’s film Match Point which greatly troubles Cervine’s character (who always dreamed that one day he would single-handedly wipe out world hunger) in the film. He claims the movie is all about chance; that life is just full of chance, nothing more. And we can’t handle that. So what we do is make things up and pretend we create our own reality to make ourselves feel better about it. He said he walked out of the movie theater thinking maybe that’s what he had done with his belief that all is right with the world. He just made it up. And more, he made up an encounter with his dead father because the rest of life just wasn’t happening for him.
At the beginning the film, he dreams his dad is on the ceiling writing something like, “Your only limitation is the voice of fear”. When Scott (I can’t remember his character’s name) goes on a quest, he experiences the voice of fear personified as himself. This voice tells him - “It is all chance. If you could truly impact your day to day existence, it would be heaven, not earth. Life just is. Your only chance for peace is to accept your limitations.”
The rest of the film is about Scott slashing through this voice of fear and reconnecting with his father which is apparently metaphorical for “all is right with the world”. It’s not just about chance - we can trust that all is right with the world.
So - after watching the short, I went back and watched Match Point (which I briefly reviewed previously here).
***Contains spoilers***
It begins,
“The man who said I’d rather be lucky than good saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependant upon on luck. It is scary to think so much is out of one’s control. There are moments in a match when a ball hits the top of a net and in that split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward and you win or maybe it doesn’t and you lose.”
The main character is Chris Wilton who, in the beginning of the film, tells Chloe (Chris’s love interest) that he wants to do something special, to make a contribution. Nola (Chris’s lust interest) claims that Chris is aggressive but Chris says he is simply naturally competitive. I had the sense throughout the film that the ball keeps going forward for Chris but that this isn’t because of luck. It’s because he is controlling.
During a dinner conversation, Chloe brings up the fact that she doesn’t believe in luck, she believes in hard work. Chris makes the comment that science is confirming that all existence is here by blind chance - that there is no purpose or design. Chloe responds by saying that she doesn’t care - she loves every minute of it. Chris claims he envies her for this.
This is sort of a typical Woody Allen theme. The naive people of “faith” in his films are those whose lives are the happiest. Allen himself has said that he wishes he could have their faith but doesn’t think it is a reality. He considers being bestowed with faith as “luck”. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, he says of the rabbi who is going blind, “He’s blessed and lucky because he has the best gift anyone could have. He has genuine religious faith.” While Chloe isn’t necessarily religious, she does have religious sensibilities and talks about doing “the right thing” just as the blind rabbi did in Crimes and Misdemeanors. (Allen himself claims the universe is at best indifferent. And reiterates, “At best!”)
In continuing the conversation, Tom (Chloe’s brother and Chris’s friend) quotes their pastor: “Despair is the path of least resistance”. Chris counters this by saying “I think faith is the path of least resistance”. Chloe immediately changes the subject.
Clearly, despair is very attractive to Chris. He loves tragedy and is dumb struck by Nola who is almost the personification of despair (the despairing actress) and has the tragic life history to go with her despair. As the film plays out, it does appear he is correct. There is a sort of predictability that exists within the faithful that does not exist within those who are despairing. The truly faithful will most likely do “the right thing”, but there is no telling what someone in despair will do. Nola, in her despair, threatens to break up Chris’s marriage and becomes uncontrollable. Chris, in his, commits premeditative murder. And again, according to Allen, if you are bestowed with faith, it’s simply because you are lucky. While Chloe absolutely loves life, Chris sees life as tragic.
Chris is calculating. I had the sense throughout the film that everything was sort of like a poker match or something. That Chris is continually playing people and calling their bluff in order to insure that luck stays on his side.
So here is where Cervine might be on to something. If you believe all is right with the world, then there is no need to control events. You can simply experience them. And if it is all about experience, might as well focus on the positive (which he discovers is not the same as denying the negative). On the other hand, if you think life is all about luck, this is likely going to make you extremely controlling (or despondent). It’s more about making things go your way than about trusting that all is as it “should” be.
When Nola gets pregnant, Chris explains that it is incredible bad luck. Nola says it is a child conceived out of passion and that she is pregnant and Chloe isn’t because he doesn’t love Chloe. But when confronted with the ghost of Nola about having killed his own child, Chris quotes Sophocles - “to never have been born may be the greatest boon of all.” (I had to look up boon. It means blessing.)
After Chris kills Nola, he does feel incredibly guilty for what it is he’s done. But part of that guilt is associated with “luck”. (He makes the side comment that he just hasn’t gotten lucky yet). The officer investigating the crime assumes that Nola was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and got in the way of a robbery. He says that Nola simply picked the wrong time to come up - that some people don’t have any luck. But the reality is her murder wasn’t “bad luck”. Her murder was premeditated, not accidental. Chris killed her because she threatened to break up his marriage (which would end the lifestyle he had grown accustomed to).
When Chris encounters the ghost of Nola and the old woman, Nola tells him that he will pay the price - that his scheme is full of flaws. Chris replies that would be good because it would offer a small justice, some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning.
But in the end, when Chris is throwing out all of the old women’s jewelry he took to make the motive look like robbery, her wedding band “hits the net” and falls back rather than forward. It falls backward. And a man who later commits a murder in the same neighborhood is found with the ring in his pocket and Chris is off the hook. That the wedding band fell backwards when Chris threw it seems to indicate that Chris is unlucky.
I saw this differently the first time I watched it and Kristin referred me to her post after she saw it at the theater. At first I thought it was like Crimes and Misdemeanors - where you commit murder and get away with it - both in terms of nobody finding out and in terms of your own conscience. Just give it a little time and life goes on just as it was. That the ring falls backward does seem to indicate that Chris hasn’t gotten by with it. But I’m not sure that what he regrets is having committed murder. I think what he regrets is that he received no proof whatsoever that life is anything but luck. But maybe that’s the same thing? Chris loves tragedy and this is truly tragic.
I’m not sure I agree that Woody Allen had a change of heart since Crimes and Misdemeanors, however. I don’t think Chris’s regret points to any sort of justice. Just the opposite, actually. I think Woody Allen would claim that the reason people believe Chris’s regret points to justice is because they are attempting to create meaning where there is none. I don’t necessarily agree with this, of course. But on a second watching of the film, I didn’t come away with any sense that Woody Allen has come to believe the universe cares. I definitely could be wrong, however.
I bought two books tonight: Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. I went to the bookstore specifically to get Vonnegut's book and caught out of the corner of my eye on another shelf, Le Guin's which had been recommended to me several years ago by Nacho of WoodMoor Village Zendo. I've just read both introductions and found something interesting...
Vonnegut writes of Campbell in the Editor's note to Mother Night:
To say that he was a writer is to say that the demands of art alone were enough to make him lie, and to lie without seeing any harm in it. To say that he was a playwright is to offer an even harsher warning to the reader, for no one is a better liar than a man who has warped lives and passions onto something as grotesquely artificial as a stage.
And, now that I've said that about lying, I will risk the opinion that lies told for the sake of artistic effect - in the theater, for instance, and in Campbell's confessions, perhaps - can be, in a higher sense, the most beguiling forms of truth.
LeGuin writes in the intro. to The Left Hand of Darkness:
...Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying....Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, to speak it, to serve it. But they go about it in a devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!
They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalizable region, the author's mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society as ever trusted its artists?....
I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor....
A metaphor for what?
If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these word, this novel; and Genly Ali would never have sat down at my desk and used my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination."
My Groups
-
The Analogical Imagination Updated: Yesterday
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
Recent Comments
-
Curlysalamander said:
Ah yes, diving deep into despair. That's the Kierkegaard I remember from college. I somehow forgot about his more uplifting... read more
on Brothers Karamazov and Kierkegaard's Levels of Despair -
Laura said:
Oh - and we can only achieve it through our despair, not in avoidance of it. (Paradox.) read more
on Brothers Karamazov and Kierkegaard's Levels of Despair -
Laura said:
OK - just posted a comment and I have no idea where it went. He says we must have an... read more
on Brothers Karamazov and Kierkegaard's Levels of Despair -
Curlysalamander said:
How does Kierkegaard suggest that we achieve body and soul integration? read more
on Brothers Karamazov and Kierkegaard's Levels of Despair
on Brothers Karamazov and Kierkegaard's Levels of Despair