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“Every story is an escape story.”
I’ve taped that slogan to the wall of my work station.
It clarifies my character’s trajectory.
It helps my story “come true” because it acknowledges a fact of our human condition:
We are all escaping something.
That notion hijacked my brain after a decade of professionally assessing and writing film scripts. I found myself emotionally invested in characters who were trapped. And it remains the case in every good story I encounter.
Here’s what I continue to discover:
All the best protagonists are trapped within the gravity field of an idea, a relationship, or any situation that makes life not worth living. Naturally, they’re going to escape. Or die trying.
Three great escapes:
The Great Escape—Steve McQueen is a prisoner of Stalag Luft III. Of course, he escapes.
A Room with a View—Lucy Honeychurch, on holiday in Italy with her chaperone, tries to escape the company of man to whom she is unsuitably attracted.
In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart is a prisoner of his self-pity. If he doesn’t put his broken heart behind him, audiences will demand their money back.
Three stories, three kinds of prison—a concrete jail, a relationship, a belief system.
Three kinds of escape dominate most story plots.
#1. Escaping a prison or place
Prison stories depict characters whose goal is a physical escape. O Brother Where Art Thou, for example. And the futuristic Escape from New York. And the current The Maze Runner.
Escape or die trying!—it’s box office gold.
In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy yearns to escape Kansas for a place “where troubles melt like lemon drops.” Once she lands in Oz, the story is all about finding a way back home.
In Casablanca, which is essentially a love story, almost every character is preoccupied with escaping the Nazis by flying to Lisbon and onward to freedom in America.
The escape to greater freedom—it’s a condition of our human condition.
A more subtle and more common escape theme in fiction is…
#2. Escaping a Relationship
Love affair, job, family—these are relationships from which it’s never easy to walk away. A prison break is nothing compared to escaping some relationships.
Fatal Attraction depicts a happily married man who risks a one-night-stand. Big mistake. His partner in infidelity assumes a relationship from which our protagonist struggles to extricate himself. He’s lucky to escape with his life.
In the Booker Prize winning novel, Hotel du Lac, a bride on the way to her wedding instructs the taxi driver to “Keep going! Don’t stop. Pass the church! Whatever you do, keep driving!” She escapes the wrong man and goes into hiding. Close call!
Once again, in Casablanca, Bogey has escaped to the ends of the earth in hopes of never crossing paths with the woman who broke his heart. Who hasn’t felt the need to escape a relationship? Yikes! Let’s not even go there.
But the most subtle and most significant escape theme concerns…
#3. Escaping Oneself
From On the Waterfront, to Moonstruck, to Good Will Hunting, to Silver Linings Playbook, the protagonists are on a trajectory toward escaping their own self-destructive attitudes and beliefs. Casablanca! Again. The protagonist is engaged in all three escapes.
The hero’s redemption (and ultimate victory) hinges on their transcending their self-concern. And it rarely happens unless the writer brings the hero to the point of despair.
It’s another fact of life—and fiction:
“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.” ~ William S. Burroughs
Why do we need to escape ourselves?
Because we are all liars. By necessity.
“We tell ourselves stories that can’t possibly be true, but believing those stories allows us to function. We know we’re not telling ourselves the whole truth but it works, so we embrace it.” ~ author, Seth Godin
The delusions that underpin our human condition—and our equally human yearning for the truth—drama depends on it.
It’s as if fiction exists to remind us that we are born to escape.
Born to escape.
If it’s true that we’re born to escape, it’s one of the juiciest facts of life. It may explain why we read and more importantly (for writers), why we are driven to write fiction in the first place.
This week, check it out for yourself—the films you watch and the novels you read—see if it’s not true that:
EVERY STORY IS AN ESCAPE STORY.
If you’re writing a story and creating a protagonist—can you identify the prison they’re trapped within? What kind of escape is he or she engaged in?
Any thoughts? Share them in the “Comments” below.
Wherein I visit an artist who marches to a different dromenon.
Dromenon, an old word that might change the way we make art.
Dromenon: art done right.
Art done so right that it not only provokes the gods but leaves them with no choice but to show up at your launch.
Meet artist Ramon Kubicek.
Ramon Kubicek believes in all this dromenon business. Or so I discover when I bust into his studio as he’s buzzing around in preparation for an upcoming exhibition.
I’m met with bees.
“Bees of the Invisible,” says Kubicek. “It’s my theme, borrowed from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.”
Sure enough, bees are depicted in many of the images. Bees and humanoids and cityscapes and maps and collage and black holes and deep seas and all of a colour palette that’s deceptively happy.
“Bees make us think of the sweetness of life,” says Kubicek, “so I’m hoping we’ll ask ourselves what we’re doing with our own lives. What is our contribution? What do we produce?”
One honey-coloured canvas Kubicek calls “Melissae,” who in Greek mythology were bee-priestesses, nymphs that nursed the infant Zeus not on milk but honey. Melissa means Queen Bee.
Kubicek explains that Rilke saw artists as bees gathering experience from the material world and then returning with it to “the great golden hive of the Invisible.”
Feelings, imagination, and spirit—that’s the hive—the inner life of the artist.
The invisible inner life of the artist
“Working with materiality until it becomes a part of our inner lives, and then offering it up to the world as “honey” or “art,” is not about making money or a big social splash. It is about receiving, and then giving to others, to the gods, a gift.”
Since our creativity is a gift, we artists are obliged to gift our works back to the gods.
Art returned to the source—that’s art done right.
That’s dromenon.
The best art is transformative
The ancient Greeks believed that dromenon compelled the gods to come down from the mountain and mingle with the hoi polloi. Think about it—wherever people gather to appreciate good art—at exhibitions, live performances, book launches—the sacred is present.
“What a wonderful basis for the making of art!” says Kubicek.
Kubicek is sincere. I have long known him as a writer and artist who believes in the transformative power of art.
“People went to the Greek drama festivals to see their favorite plays,” Kubicek says. “And in the process they might experience catharsis and healing.”
And why not? Rubbing shoulders with the gods, something might actually rub off. A little godliness, perhaps. Whatever godliness means to you.
What does godliness mean to you?
To me it means taking myself less seriously. Not taking things personally. And seeing the big picture. All in aid of transcending human pettiness. Or as I like to say, to unselve myself.
I show up at the opening reception at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery to see if Kubicek has provoked the gods with his art.
I ask a white-haired gentleman if he’s a god. “Farthest thing from it,” he says. So I hang out near my favourite canvases hoping for a god-spotting.
I like “Ship of Fools.”
I see people in boats, things floating on water—or is it air?
“It speaks of a voyage,” Kubicek explains. “We sense a journey, physical or spiritual.”
Kubicek points out people left behind. “The most beautiful moments are about loss,” he says. “The best moments are fleeting, such as a child growing up, or a sun setting.”
Meaning what?—that loss and transience are blessings?
“Bees of the Invisible” features an ominous vortex.
“It’s the dark centre of something where we might vanish and be transformed,” says Kubicek.
I see strange letters in the composition. “The Aramaic alphabet,” he says, “the language of Jesus.”
All very mysterious, leaving me scratching my head, as if life itself had a secret centre we are not meant to easily comprehend.
This is Kubicek’s “honey”—a vivid and mysterious yet playful take on our transient existence.
Says Kubicek:
“I like Rilke’s articulation—art and honey. It might be easy to see each as non-essential, until one imagines [bees] gone from the world. Today, we live in a time of ecological stress and our heedless treatment and killing of bees threatens both the natural world and our own survival. This mistreatment exists in parallel with our loss of inner life and our confusion about the role of art.
”
I’m still looking for any sign of the gods.
Am I missing something?
Let me know if you see one.
And whoever this creature is — does anyone have her phone number?
But I leave the art gallery buzzing with a certain sweet contentment.
Gods or no gods, Kubicek has done something right.
From Africa I flew to India.
I would return home through Asia, circumnavigate the globe, prove the world was round, see it with my own two eyes.
Bombay. Wow! The smells. The crush of humanity! A beggar with no arms or legs.
My god, he had no face, either.
His begging bowl—if you can picture this—he nudged it along the street with his forehead. I couldn’t look, I couldn’t not look.
For a second I couldn’t breathe.
Have you ever been so far from home that your brain wouldn’t compute?
I don’t know how many rupees I dropped in his bowl, probably a lot, because suddenly and inexplicably I felt more alive. I swore to never again bitch about anything, and isn’t that what travel is about?
Travel puts distance between us and our tired old way of seeing things.
What if you could travel twice as far from home?
What if someone approached you in the lobby of your Bombay hotel with a promise to take you twice as far from home? Would you listen to his pitch?
He is tall and impeccable and impossibly smooth-talking as he invites you to sit down so he can make his case. You’re all ears. Where is this place? How do I get there?
“Very easy, my friend,” he says. “Firstly, you allow me to con you out of all your money.” He is joking, of course, this Mr. Patel. “You have traveler’s cheques, yes? Very good. May I see them? No? All right, later perhaps.”
He hails a waiter and orders wine. “In any case, once you have been fleeced, my goodness, you look in the mirror—are you sick?”
“Depressed, I would think, for sure.”
“No, no, I mean sick, sick. You most certainly need a doctor. Here, I can give you his phone number. He confirms that a parasite infects your blood stream. Perhaps you have been exposed to stagnant water. In Africa? That explains everything. I’m afraid it can be fatal. You must be treated soon. But without money you are going nowhere.”
The wine arrives, a Bordeaux, for goodness sake. Who is this Mr. Patel?
“You cannot escape the heatwave we are having here in Bombay. The humidity in advance of the monsoon is unspeakable. But a cheap hostel is all you can afford, a bare mattress upon which you are lying spread-eagle. You are clinging to it for dear life. Otherwise you would run to the window and hurl yourself onto the street below. Such is your despair. Such is your remorse. You have been such a fool! You no longer trust the thoughts that arise to resolve this calamity. I’m afraid to say, sir, that you thoroughly hate yourself.”
Patel raises a glass in a toast. “You cannot travel farther from home than that, my friend.”
I take what must look like an unsophisticated glub of wine.
“But I can see you are not sold on this expedition. And I understand perfectly. It is not part and parcel of the human condition to collude with one’s own demise. We must go unwittingly. Kicking and screaming as it were. Ha, ha! So be it.”
I have no memory of Patel saying any such things, although I do recall the Bordeaux and that he was a businessman in need of foreign currency for an overseas trip, more than bank regulations allow. He offered me a handsome premium on the face value of my traveler’s cheques, leaving me with cash to convert to currencies for my onward journey.
“We will transact this business over a meal at the Taj Mahal Hotel, yes?”
How to travel too far—be gullible, be greedy, be an idiot!
The Bombay Taj, like most 5-star hotels, smells of money. Money having been spent and money being squandered everywhere you look.
Patel threw a heap of rupees at martinis there in the posh mezzanine lounge—and at various kebabs and little lamb chops and chicken tikka—so it didn’t seem inappropriate for me to hand over my traveler’s cheques for his inspection. It seemed appropriate that his uncle, the hotel’s comptroller, should want to verify the cheques. That Patel should confer with his uncle alone sounded suspicious, so I tagged along as far as the elevator where I lost him!
He slipped into an elevator behind doors that closed in my face.
I bolted down the grand marble staircase of the Taj Mahal Hotel to Reception where I learned that no such money manager existed. Three Patels were registered at the Taj and I hammered on each of their doors in vain.
Deep travel—are we there yet?
I applied for a refund at the American Express Office and was told to check back in a week, by which time I would have examined the mug shots of every criminal known to the Bombay Police. By then I could no longer ignore strange fluids leaking from my body. A doctor prescribed antibiotics and a flight home.
Broke but for the cash in my pocket, I downgraded to a hotel without air-conditioning. I remember lying on my bed naked and sweating under a feeble fan and gripping the mattress in mortal fear of having traveled far too far.
I decided to escape Bombay—to Delhi by train.
If Bombay was a sauna, the Rajasthan desert was a furnace. You opened a window at the very real risk of burning yourself. Every whistle stop along the way provided an opportunity to rehydrate, but instead I gorged on ice cream thinking it would cool me down, and I was right. I began to shiver feverishly. And vomit and retch until my muscles seized and I lay on the wooden floor of the 3rd-class carriage as hopeless as a leper.
A leper without arms or legs!
How far from home was I? I had passed self-loathing hours ago. I was going to die and the sooner the better. I was Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. “Go ahead and shoot me,” he tells Ingrid Bergman. “You’ll be doing me a favor.”
This is where the fictional hero bottoms out. If only! If I were a fictional character, my writer would save me here at the heart of my story. But this is a true story and I have no one to blame but myself. What do they call this in India—karma? How much more was I supposed to suffer? How much more could I take?
What was I supposed to do—push my begging bowl with my forehead?
If that’s what it takes, okay!
I heard someone mention the Taj. We were passing through Agra, home of the real fucking Taj Mahal, one of the so-called Wonders of the World. I didn’t have the wherewithal to throw up. There was nothing left. There wasn’t much left of me. I didn’t think I would survive till Delhi.
I had never felt—and I have never felt since—so far gone.
To be continued…
Have you ever gone too far? WRITE A STORY ABOUT IT!
We are all starving for stories about people who are greedy for life.
[NOTE: If you don’t want to miss any posts in this travel series, please SUBSCRIBE at the top of the page.]
I’m not saying that The Two Faces of January is a great movie.
But the Viggo Mortensen character serves to show how many good stories end.
It goes like this…
And love has its way with the world.
You don’t hear it, no one says it, it’s the subtext. It’s even more “sub” than that. It’s what the audience feels in themselves:
And love has its way with the world.
The protagonist has his way for most of the movie. He may be charming but he’s self-centred, misguided, and self-destructive. (I’m talking about most fictional protagonists.) His way with the world has created mayhem and misery. It’s called the plot.
Now at the end, having failed utterly, what else can the protagonist do? He disowns his game plan…
And love has its way with the world.
Contrary to popular belief…
You know that happy-ever-after feeling—well, this is it. Think about it. The feel-good feeling rarely has anything to do with heroes winning or successfully manipulating people or events. Nobody achieves love. It’s transpersonal, isn’t it? Love is a grace.
Love does us.
Audiences feel good because their virtual heroes are done to.
Check it out for yourself—your favourite protagonists are probably those who finally get out of their own way so they can be done to by a force beyond their power to manipulate.
We’re talking about escaping from our “second nature.” It’s the one that prevents us from knowing the first.
Marcel Proust identifies this second nature as the heavy curtain of habit which conceals from us almost the whole universe.
CUT BACK TO:
The Two Faces of January and Viggo Mortensen lying dying on a street in Crete…
[SPOILER ALERT! Not really. Students of story aren’t concerned about spoilers. We consume fiction to better understand it! We want to know how fiction works. But I digress…]
Viggo Mortenson has been an incorrigible swindler, con man, and liar, and here in the final scene, with a bullet in his back, he has one chance to come true. And he better be quick about it.
Viggo has one chance to prove the film’s title—The Two Faces of January.
Janus is the Roman god of transitions, the god of gates and doorways, of endings and beginnings. Janus is depicted with two faces, one looking backward, one toward the future.
Viggo is Janus at the threshold.
Viggo’s second (bogus) nature is evaporating in the blinding light of his first nature. He’s glimpsing almost the entire universe. At the very least he probably wishes he could take back a whole lot of unfortunate history.
But of course it’s too late do anything more than die in truth.
Protagonist dies and yet audiences feel good—what just happened there?
Answer: Freedom trumps death. How does that work?
Answer: Because love is finally having its way with the world.
I’m falling in love…
I’m falling in love with this turn of phrase. It slipped out while I was writing the final chapter of The Writer in Love. My protagonist is likewise caught in a dead-end where he surrenders his game plan. He is Janus at the threshold of a new beginning.
As are most good protagonists.
As are we all in a moment of crisis.
Deep down I know that if only I would quit deluding myself, love would have its way with my world, too.
Isn’t writing fun!
“The superior virtue is not to be free but to fight for freedom.” ~ Nikos Kazantzakis
I know writers who would argue, “That’s just a man talking.”
Seriously, you’d spend $12 to watch a movie called The Valley of the Happy Free People?
No one has made such a movie and for good reason. Audiences don’t pay to vicariously experience being free, but rather to suffer the personal crises that open us to freedom.
Which explains why screenwriters write movies like Zorba the Greek, Casablanca, Thelma & Louise, and Good Will Hunting.
And American Beauty, Moonstruck, A Late Quartet, A River Runs Through It, Up in the Air, Out of Africa, The Artist, A Room with a View, and A Passage to India.
And Rocky, Sideways, Nebraska, The Matrix, Disgrace, Ordinary People, Of Gods and Men, On the Waterfront, The African Queen, Silver Lining Playbook, American Graffiti, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Labor Day.
Labor Day I saw just last night.
If you’re like me you don’t just watch movies, you examine them for how the writer does it. Does what? Frees the protagonist.
It happens in all the best fiction.
Every protagonist is on a trajectory toward freedom.
Let’s look at Labor Day.
Josh Brolin plays Frank, an escaped convict. Ask him about freedom. His bid for freedom will intercept the lives of a mother and son living in small town USA.
Kate Winslet is Adele, who has lost all faith in herself in the aftermath of a divorce. She’s a prisoner of the belief that she’s an utter failure. She can hardly get out of bed. Don’t ask her anything.
Henry is Adele’s adolescent son. Since Henry is not the protagonist, he is not required to behave as though he were fighting to be free. However…
Henry has to bring his poor depressed mother breakfast in bed, for goodness sake. Ask Henry if he’d like to be free of the responsibility that weighs so heavily upon him?
Labor Day is unique for depicting a trio of characters who each find freedom early in Act I.
Most stories depend upon a merciless plot to beat the hard-headed protagonist into an awareness of how to solve their problems, but in Labor Day the miracle takes ten minutes.
Five minutes into the film, Frank shows up to kick-start the story. Injured from his leap out a prison hospital window, Frank politely but firmly inserts himself into the lives of Adele and Henry. The violence and trauma you’d expect to characterize an abduction are quite unnecessary in this case.
Adele blows convention out another window by acquiescing almost immediately to this stranger’s demands. She wants nothing more than to escape her sorry life. Perhaps to end it.
(To die and be reborn—there’s a freedom trajectory!)
Frank, Adele, and Henry foresee their salvation in this strange and sudden togetherness. But wait! They haven’t arrived in Freedom Valley yet. Not only would that be utterly boring, but it ignores Kazantzakis’ aphorism:
The superior virtue is not to be free but to fight for freedom.
The manhunt!
Kazantzakis will be happy to know that the police are closing in on Frank. The story becomes a fight to escape the forces that would annul these newfound freedoms.
Suffice to say that Adele, Henry, and Frank must remain freedom fighters into the foreseeable future. And I think that’s an accurate portrayal of the human condition.
However many jail breaks we execute, the walls of our human condition keep us under house arrest. The fight for freedom is an ongoing battle.
Which explains why The Valley of the Happy Free People strikes us as a bogus premise.
Freedom isn’t a place, it’s an attitude. Good fictional protagonists earn this perspective only after the plot has beaten the apathy right out of them. Now we realize that there are two ways to live, just as there are two ways to die.
“Free or not free—this is our choice in every moment.”
And that’s a woman talking, by the way—Pema Chodron.
Just had a thought…
Why doesn’t someone write a story about an escape from Happy Valley?
When a drama rings true I want to cry.
I do, it’s true, I confess, I’m hopeless, when the story rings true I just can’t help it.
But in my defense let me put a finer point on this “ringing” business—I’m starting to say that the story has come true. The protagonist has come true. He or she has had a radical change of heart.
There’s a word for that—METANOIA—look it up. It really means a profound “change of mind.” A no-going-back-to-the-way-things-were-before shift in worldview. A new way of seeing things.
Take The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. (What, you haven’t seen it?)
An extreme narcissist is dragged (literally) through the Siera Madre mountains of Mexico to his agonizing undoing in the film’s penultimate scene. It is so truly acted that there is no doubt in my mind that I am in the presence of the human organizm experiencing a universal repentance—a metanoia.
Here is a character so utterly disillusioned, so emptied of his personal bullshit that he finds himself escaping the gravity field of his small self. I’m sorry, but when I am present to anyone (virtual or not) breaking free, I weep with joy.
Now, you might want to argue about how growth occurs. It’s the old geological issue—evolution by infinitesimal increment over millennia, or through cataclysm. Well, both as it turns out. But the notion of sudden, terrifying, and radical metanoia is relatively new, and it still challenges many writers.
Of course, explosive change is nothing new to Eastern traditions. Zen monks, by their austere practices, cultivate the essential condition of “emptiness” that invites a new way of seeing things. Even Christian mystics claim that true poverty of spirit “requires that man shall be emptied of god and all his works.” ~ Meister Eckhart
My new best friend, the famous American Trappist monk Thomas Merton, went spelunking into this emptiness and returned with an appreciation of the mysterious Tao.
According to Merton, we can’t begin to understand the nature of this charitable void “without a complete transformation, a change of heart, which Christianity would call metanoia. Zen of course envisaged this problem, and studied how to arrive at satori, or the explosive rediscovery of the hidden and lost reality within us.”
Discovering their hidden selves, always painfully, this is what the best fictional protagonists do. And by doing so—by freeing themselves—they make the human story come true.
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada came true for me in a scene I can’t forget.
The narcissist (and who isn’t one, really?), on his knees, emptied of his outmoded self, opens his arms to accept whatever punishment or grace existence may have in store for him. This kind of surrender—whether explosive or discreet—is where we’re all headed.
When I am witness to anyone breaking free, I am in profound sympathy with them. It’s happening to me, there’s nothing vicarious about it!
So let me ask you this—what if this was fiction’s function—to give us a taste of our own story coming true.
A new Guinness ad and discussions of the forthcoming "Anti-Bullying Week" have collided to dust off the trusty blog. Blog, I've missed you. I have some things to say.
First of all, if you haven't seen the now-viral Guinness ad, take a moment to watch. Go on. I'll still be here on the other side:
A good deal of praise has circulated for this ad on the trusty Interweb
tm, and rightfully so. It departs from traditional beer ads--yes, these are big, tough, men, but they aren't acting stupid or belligerent or sexist. There are no bikini-clad models here. Just dudes playing ball and enjoying beers afterwards.
Now some have suggested it isn't an appropriate or sensitive portrayal of a disabled person using a wheelchair. (See
"Just One of the Guys" on Emily Ladau's blog,
Words I Wheel By, as an example.) Here's the thing--and this is my opinion based on my life experience--this ad wasn't about disability or wheelchair users. Its intent is to sell beer. Even the famous
Nike ad featuring NWBA star Matt Scott from a few years back was designed to sell Nike apparel. Neither of these companies can surely believe they are
advocates for disabled rights, can they? Both use a man in a wheelchair to foster emotional appeal because emotional appeal works. Ads sell products--but sometimes they do so with dignity and respect and make us feel good.
I love an ad which can make me feel positive without deriding anyone. Nothing in the Guinness ad puts down the man in the wheelchair--in fact, he says "You guys are getting better at this," before the others step out of their wheelchairs. It's a beer commercial which shows guys being guys without negative stereotypes, oafish behavior, sexism, or other negative "guy" stereotypes. In fact, it promotes something I wish could become a "guy" stereotype: camaraderie. Friendship. Being good to each other--not
pity for the guy in the wheelchair (I didn't read pity in the ad at all), but genuinely being good to each other.
Bullying has been on my mind quite a bit lately. It's a large part of my job as guidance counselor and a large part of life for too many kids, boys and girls alike. Beer ads are often bully ads, the cool kids (usually oafish, over-muscled men) drinking the right beer and landing the hot chicks. Beer ads often encourage the worst in us. Beer ads are notorious for being "generally pretty juvenile" as Aaron Taube at
Business Insider explains in
his discussion of the Guinness ad. I don't celebrate the Guinness ad because it includes a man in a wheelchair. I applaud it because it is about positive stuff--the good stuff--friendship, loyalty, hard work...
For me, the ad isn't about the disability; it's nice to see men who don't have to be ignorant, insensitive, sexist jerks enjoying beer. That is all.
Life should fulfill me. I never ask what life expects from me. Do you?
Here I am stopped in my tracks by our town’s “Before I die…” public art installation. I am impressed, as you can tell. Seriously. Young people would appear to have dug deep to chalk up their hopes and dreams.
Walk the Camino
Travel the world
Make amends
Conquer all my fears
Take care of someone who doesn’t have a home
Etcetera…
Ignore “BBQ a cat” and “Have a light-sabre duel”, for the most part this anonymous wish list reveals the yearning for meaning.
“Before I die…” originated in New Orleans. It has since spread around the world, but the aspirations are similar:
See equality
Be completely myself
Understand why I’m here
Live for today
Etcetera…
Some of these dreams could be bumper stickers, but so what? I see no reason to believe that the responses are insincere. In fact, I feel as if I’m peering into the open heart of a generation.
Sigmund Freud would have us believe that we are victims of our instincts, trapped in orbits of sex, power, and survival. But look again—most of these confessions aren’t subject to that gravity field at all.
Expand my mind
Find my purpose
Understand death
Viktor Frankl (another Vienna psychiatrist) became convinced that the most human among us are concerned with something or someone beyond our conventional desires. He should know. He survived Auschwitz. Says Frankl:
Pity and fear, Aristotle said…are the great emotional engines for tragedy. ~ from “Hit Lit” by James W. Hall
Pity and fear—I’m often surprised when I learn what makes a good movie worth watching.
“The Artist”, fired up the twin engines of pity and fear and took off with this year’s Oscar for “best picture”. The protagonist, the silent-era movie star who can’t cope with the advent of “talkies”, becomes disillusioned to the point of blowing his head off.
Tragic.
The guy can’t adopt a new worldview. His belief system won’t allow it. He loses everything, including his self-respect, all the way to self-loathing. And we loved every minute of it. (See, The Artist: a case for killing George.)
“John Max, a Portrait” is a documentary that again illustrates our appreciation of tragedy. A once-revered photographer, Max loses his chops, his confidence and (arguably) his grip on reality. It’s a classic display of…
The tragic power of a belief system.
Max lives alone (obsessively-compulsively rolling his own cigarettes) amid a chaos of photographs, equipment, chemicals, magazines, books, boxes, pots and pans. He’s become a hoarder. He believes he’ll get his act together—revive his darkroom and start printing again—but he never will.
The City tags his premises as a no-go zone. His friends rally to help him clean up, but Max won’t cooperate. After he’s slapped with an eviction notice, Max continues to behave as if divine justice will somehow prevail on his behalf.
The clock ticks down.
Friends try to wake him to the facts of life, but Max interprets truth as negative thinking. Terrified, he chain-smokes those roll-your-owns as he retreats deeper into an Eastern philosophy of “non-doing”.
As reality charges toward him like the Orient Express, it’s clear that John Max is in a dead-end from which he’ll never escape. He’s living in a by-gone era. His friends (as discreetly as possible) pack up his life and haul it away…
While returning to his car in the Walmart parking lot, a friend of mine was struck by lightning—in the form of a thought:
“Everything is always in a state of irreconcilable difference with itself.”
Now, there’s a notion in motion!
I like fluid propositions. I love a good paradox. “You can’t step in the same river twice.” How fluid is that! Contrarily, I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of the concrete conventional wisdom that rules our lives.
“Stick to your guns,” is classic advice. Lies like that must be installed in our heads to protect our fragile belief systems. We sure don’t want to hear Somerset Maugham say, “Like all weak men, he laid an exaggerated stress upon not changing one’s mind.”
Sticking to our beliefs protects us from the truth. It’s an untenable situation that has given birth to Drama. It accounts for the folly of our “human condition” rife with unguarded moments that invite such thought-bombs as:
“Everything is always in a state of irreconcilable difference with itself.”
I can’t make that thought sit still. For that very reason, Zen monks invented koans. You know, little mental quandaries such as, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” A koan is meant to stop the mind, because a mind stopped sees that everything is in constant motion.
“Everything is in a state of flux.”
What parking lot was Heraclitus walking through when that thought struck? (Or was it Robert Byrne, the billiards champ?) Now, here’s the interesting thing—this observation has been co-opted by conventional wisdom. We deploy it without thinking about it, without pausing to consider that it might pertain to us? We trip through all the Walmarts of our lives enthusiastically blind to the nature of reality. Flux? Fiddle-faddle. We are fixed entities, solid identities. No wonder we believe that…
“It’s easier to die than change.” (My wife was visited by that realization that while traversing the Starbucks parking lot.)
Despite all the koans and all the lightning, we have convinced ourselves that many things are true. And so we live uncertainly between the fluid facts of life and our protective delusions. Every so often,
I guess I should start this post with a gigantic...
*SPOILER ALERT*
...in case you're in the US and haven't watched any of the UK episodes of Being Human yet (I say yet because seriously I suspect our Being Human kicks your Being Human's ass - hey where'd everyone go!) or haven't caught up with last night's episode.
So it was the first episode of season four, that is, the season without the dirty pretty Mitchell, and George was leaving too, so would I love it as much as previously? So far, that's an unequivocal yes, but... George was still a major part of the episode until the end (sob!). Good death scene (you who just hit the screen - I told you to read no further) for George. Appreciated the humour surrounding the supporting cast of vampires. Not so certain about the whole girl from the future thing (thought she was Eve, guess she isn't), George's replacement is okay (used to him from the last series), not certain about the new vampire yet, didn't like the new ghost at all. Looking forward to the next episode.
*End Spoiler Alert*
Consider this: what if dreams were meant to ruin us?
I’m not talking about snooze-dreams, but rather our deepest yearnings. “I have a dream!” kind of dream. What if these dreams that lurk inside us were luring us to the perfect defeat? The kind of defeat that gives us what we’re really after.
Where do dreams lead? Where are they meant to lead?
My dreams, for instance, have taken me to Africa and India, to ashram and witch doctor and to careers in hydrology, filmmaking and writing. But that’s only the glossy part of the story. My adventures all end in disillusionment. When they don’t, I probably haven’t ventured far enough.
Every trip includes a coming home – the longer gone the more unsettling the return. My returns usually end in culture shock. (This culture is pretty damn shocking!) What good’s a trip if it doesn’t wake us out of habit and conventional thinking? What good’s a career if it doesn’t teach us the ultimate futility of being a know-it-all?
What good, ultimately, is succeeding, if it only leaves us content with where we are?
We nurture our dreams, believing that our destiny lies on their far side. Which is true. But we get attached to the dream and remain unconscious of its empty aftermath. In my experience, aspirations end in emptiness. (You can kiss my aspirations!)
If we keep our eyes open long enough, all our efforts ends in emptiness. I call that the perfect defeat.
It would appear that not everyone recognizes this paradoxical end-all of ambition. We don’t like defeat, nor do we really understand paradox. It leaves us in uncomfortable limbo. So let’s take it a step further:
The perfect defeat puts us “beyond defeat”. It takes the duality out of things.
You likely don’t know this but the “PJ” in PJ Reece derives from “Parajayo”, which is the Sanskrit name given to me a long time ago by an Indian teacher.
It means “beyond defeat”.
I remember when he gave me my name, he said, “Now, who is there to be defeated?”
If it’s true what that old man said, and if it’s true what I’mtrying to say here, then all our efforts have a more profound goal than we ever imagined.
And it gives delicious new meaning to the old adage:
“Beware of what you wish for.”
I’m struggling to make sense of the UK riots. If you are too, then follow along as I think this through.
While ferociously pessimistic, the rioting and the rebels don’t seem to be entirely without a cause. Here’s a UK journalist (writing for the Globe and Mail) getting inside a rioter’s skin:
“You don’t fear being arrested if you don’t think you have any future that being arrested could ruin.”
A similar sentiment is found in the newly published “El Sicario”, a confession by a Mexican assassin. This long-time killer for a drug cartel is trying to atone for his sins. He fears for Mexico and a breed of disenfranchised youth who chose to “live hard and die”. Convinced they’ll be dead by 30, these kids are hell-bent on taking all they can.
After all…
“You don’t fear being arrested…if you don’t think you’re part of society in the first place.”
So, who’s to blame for this state of affairs? Is it hopeless? Have modern societies dug their own grave for having marginalized too many people? And is there a bright side to this mess?
Wrap your mind around this:
We’re all trying to maximize ourselves. Obviously, we go out and earn as much as we can. We gain as much experience as possible. Who doesn’t want to see more, do more, be more? “Only everything is enough.” More, bigger, upwards.
We wake up in the morning (if we’re not clinically depressed), to make the best cup of coffee we know how. Why would we do otherwise? We show up at work. We stand up and deliver so that we matter. We speak up to be understood. And even if we boast, it’s because we strive to present the best face to the world. We may even know it’s a mask. The point is, each of us tries to maximize our self, even if it’s illusory.
(I know – “up, up, up” – it sounds like I’m trying to be semantically clever, but I hope there’s more to it than that.)
We’re upward seeking creatures. Everyone yearns for an improvement on their state of affairs in this world. However, what’s maximum to you may not be my maximum. It depends on our unique perception.
What I’m saying is that these UK rioters, in their regrettable way, are trying to maximize their being-in-the-world. It’s the only truly human way to look at it – and ultimately the most deeply logical.
Rebel – this is what the upward-seeking human does when he sees himself without a future in this society. Our maximum will always be somewhere beyond a less-human (or even inhuman) here and now.
I’ll hold to that story until someone convinces me otherwise. Meanwhile, my comments box is open for business.
To celebrate his 50th birthday, a friend of mine attempts a standing back-flip in a public plaza.
He hasn’t performed this stunt in fifteen years. For six months he trains hard to regain the strength and coordination that underpinned his comedy act as a younger man.
Come the big day (last Saturday)… he almost makes it.
Instead of landing on his feet like a Nadia Comaneci, Rick winds up on his knees like a peasant in the rent collector’s courtyard. Then, in the blink of an eye, he’s on his feet, hands in the air, “Tad-da!” As gymnasts do.
Of course, people applaud. Of course, Rick is disappointed. Because, of course, he has come up short. He has (in his own mind) failed.
I know, I know – big deal. An over-achiever learns his limits – so what? But wait… freeze that frame. Actually, let it run a few more seconds…
To the part where Rick is digesting this “failure” amidst the applause. To where he’s become aware that his flip-flop has not broken any laws of nature or society. The only thing slightly damaged is his self-esteem. Well, he’s 50, for goodness sake. You can’t turn back the clock. The flip was probably near-impossible, anyway. Is that what the audience finds so compelling?
Look at the crowd – drawn like moths to the flame of sheer audacity, sheer determination.
Look at Rick – he seems to be getting it. How can this be failure? he’s asking himself. And even if it is, So what? He seems to be okay with these new facts of life.
“It occurs to me that I might be growing up.” These are his words.
What we have here is a failure that looks more like a triumph. Better yet, call it a liberation.
Here’s Rick Lewis reflecting later in the day on his blog:
“So now I’m sitting here on Day 1 of my 50th year with a feeling of joy, anticipation, and, yes, liberation, looking forward to trying many more things that may or may not work and joining the ranks of those whose exploration, discovery, and striving is not limited to the sure thing, or perhaps even the probable.
“Getting older ain’t half bad, especially if it provides opportunities like this to get more human. I suspect there is much more to come.”
All I’m trying to say here in my blog is that “growing more human” pretty much defines the Art of Life. And if that sounds trite, just try it – try to stay conscious while failing. See what it has to offer.
Don’t need to attempt a back-flip, but a springboard of some kind is essential. We need to launch ourselves out of our comfort zone.
We’re victorious before we even hit the ground.
“The soul is no traveller.”
This bit of apocryphal nonsense comes to us from the venerable Ralph Waldo Emerson, who goes on to talk about the “superstition of travelling”.
The benefits of travel are imagined? If that’s the case, I’ve wasted my life. Passport stamps are pretty much my biography.
Emerson criticizes his fellow Americans for rambling abroad to soak up culture. If we had any “self-culture”, he said (over 150 years ago), we wouldn’t clamour for a fix of Rome or Montmartre or Epidaurus.
The essays in Emerson’s (recently republished) “Self Reliance” preach hard against imitating. A person is a country unto himself, he says. We ought to grow a culture unique to the needs of our own inner and outer geography. Existence wants us “as is”. But we don’t trust our own “isness”. We hold up Olde English, or Tuscan, or Classical Greek as the ultimate “isness”. “But,” says Emerson…
“Those who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth.”
Culture evolves around those who stay in one place, who insist on being themselves, says RWE. This would be the creative crucible for originality in music, architecture and food. England-Italy-Greece: cheddar-parmigiano-feta. Is that what Emerson is saying? And the soul much prefers its own cheese – so why leave home to nibble on other milk products, however well they might be cultured?
Fine – I get the point – authenticity arises from within. What I don’t buy is that soul has preferences. Soul is more like a quality of being (anywhere). It signifies a state of awareness. Just like meaning, soul isn’t a “thing”. It’s not some cheesy substance, and therefore…
Soul cannot be the subject of a sentence!
The soul is no traveller? That’s nonsensical. Yet we continue to eat up all this soul-talk. We desperately need a radical switch in perception.
Soul is the journey observing itself. (It’s more like a verb.)
From Berlin to Byron Bay to Buenos Aires (or staying right here in the West Coast rainforest), soul is recognition of the underlying truth of things. It’s the acceptance of that truth. If we insist on subjecting the S-word to nounhood, let’s call it our “spiritual self-confidence”.
And what better way to develop such a thing than by breaching the barriers of our comfort zone.
By hitting the road.
A weird halogen light tailgates us from the darkness
as we drive west on Highway 45…
At the wheel is prairie writer, filmmaker and iconographer, Harvey Spak. He calls this poem “Meteor Landing”, one of 43 prosy pieces assembled into a collection called: “The Reign of the English Cowboys IS OVER!” Self-published, it arrived in my post box the other day. Spak and I shot films together in the 1970s.
But back to the poem:
then a storm of blue and green light
and suddenly the entire Vermilion River valley’s
awash in daylight
as if from some great arc-welder.
Three seconds, then darkness.
This meteor sighting made news in the fall of 2008. A celestial blast like that is sure to kick-start a deep thought. Especially in the mind of a mystic.
I say to my wife: according to near-death experience
lore, we’re dead.
But the only dead thing’s a mule deer
riding low in the back of our truck.
Two weeks of seeing nothing till this morning
when a herd of whitetail broke from a coulee
like a phosphorous burst and charged up the hill
to a fenceline some three hundred yards away. I fired
a shot but the bullet just grabbed air as the herd
dispersed into the brush.
A mystic is all about “near-death”. The mystic’s maxim: “Die before you die.” There’s method in their mad search for truth as darkness descends – the unprepared are blinded by the light.
That afternoon we wake from a nap in
the truck and my wife says: Walk south towards
that gap in the ridge.
I take her advice and half a mile later I see a mule deer
buck picking his way through a small ravine. He steps
into the open and stands broadside; a gift from St.
Nicholas the Wonderworker to whom I prayed as I
walked.
Spak is a Christian mystic. Mystics of any tradition scorn dogma. As radicals, as existential scientists, they live with as much presence as possible, as close to death as possible. Which is why some of them take out a licence to kill.
My wife brings the truck round and helps field dress
the deer. It’s the first time she’s seen
a fresh kill and she says: I think I’d like to hunt too.
The next day we drive to the Co-op Hardware in
Vermilion and I buy her a .243 Savage Arms rifle with
a scope and some ammo.
But getting back to the mule deer…
Here’s the genius of Spak – he ends his poems on a note that shifts our perspective. These final words, some of them aim for the heart, but others, like this one, strike higher:
But getting back to the mule deer buck. Did he see a
barrage of white light
when my bullet burst his heart?
If you’d like to hear more of Spak’s odes to prairie life and death, please leave a comment.
I’d rather you didn’t waste your time reading this post. Rather, save yourself for:
http://www.breakarule.com/blog/author/admin/
That’s right, MOL goes on hold to alert you to the adventures of Rick Lewis.
Yes, the same character we met on board my previous post , the one who advocates “leaning into our own unknown”. Well, in the last few days, Rick has found himself venturing farther into his own dark side than he anticipated.
Let me explain:
Rick soon turns 50. Author, Zen aficionado and physical comedian, Rick decided he’d celebrate by turning 30 again…and by executing the perfect back-flip. Just like the good old days. His blog is a diary of his training regime and all the mental chitchat that accompanies the pain, the promise, the doubt, and the lessons and meaning (or not!) behind it all. But in the last few days an injury has put his mission in peril. Not one to quit, Rick is wondering if the whole idea has been vanity—nothing but the ego’s folly?
Rick’s blog has become nothing less than the anatomy of a hero’s crisis and metamorphosis. With a real-time, play-by-play commentary! You don’t get that everyday!
I tell you all this without fear of crippling Rick with self-consciousness. Rick is already conscious—and for that very reason he is able to record the details of his own foolishness. Not that I think he’s being foolish at all. When conscious people speak of their own folly, we find ourselves grateful for the opportunity to gaze through their window into the human condition. In the face of which we naturally and oh-so-soberly see ourselves.
We see ourselves, folks!
If you`re still reading this…I can tell you that for months now I’ve been pointing to the critical moments in drama (sometimes in real life) where the hero meets the wall. Where failure finds itself abandoned—alone with nothing but the raw passion for life. It is death and resurrection. And here it is delivered daily to your e-mail inbox.
In my mission to explore the MOL, I sincerely and humbly send you over to the rare experience that is Mr. Rick Lewis. Let him know you’re tuning in.
And I’ll see you in a few short days.
Help me out here…
Charles Darwin—in his 1859 publication called On the Origin of Species—made a hugely convincing case for the advantages of adversity. His thesis would point to:
“…the pivotal role of the struggle for existence as a mechanism for evolutionary change.”
So…then…why don’t we value struggle more than we do?
Is it because we believe that evolution is behind us? That it’s history? That we humans incarnate fully evolved? I believe that yes we do indeed believe that. Therefore, let’s spend this incarnation believing in something else. And we do. We believe in happiness, success, God, etc. Why on earth would we believe in struggle? Struggle is up there with schizophrenia and wrinkles as things most passionately to avoid. What’s more, even if we agreed that struggle may be ultimately good for the species, when would you or I see the results? Not in this lifetime. Struggle simply makes no sense. Is that it?
But just a minute…happiness usually occurs in the aftermath of hardship, doesn’t it? Likewise, success. It seems to me that we should be worshipping whatever makes life challenging. After all, a certain amount of suffering would appear to be the catalyst in the transformation of ourselves into happier, wiser (even religious) people.
Forget worship… where is there any discussion about the upside of adversity?
Sure, life coaches tell us, “No pain, no gain.” And we all know it’s good for the soul, yada yada yada. And Buddhists go on and on about the role of dukkha in the scheme of things. And for a century and a half we’ve had the benefit of Darwin’s insight—struggle as evolution’s mechanism. So, again, help me out here…why has “struggle” been relegated to a blind spot in our psyche?
These questions are rhetorical, of course. We’re blind to what’s good for us because that’s the way we’re wired. All I’m trying to do is point that out. Oh, and never mind struggle—it’s anguish that really allows us to see.
Soon I’ll get back to blogging about books and movies and how they dramatize this wonderfully grotesque and essential irony.
Movies prove themselves quickly in our house—or else. McWife and I can smell artlessness within seconds. We become restless spending even ten minutes of a precious evening suffering the failures of a director to establish style and tone…and therefore meaning.
And so it was that we found ourselves under the spell of a good director as Wendy and Lucy began to unfold.
Log line: Young woman en route to summer work in Alaska, breaks down in Oregon.
I remember asking myself—why am I enjoying this? I ask myself this question a lot. Why is there a lump in my throat? What is this anticipation I’m feeling? How did the director do that? I was sold on Wendy and Lucy during the phone call.
Her fortunes proceeding from bad to worse, Wendy phones home. No love from her sister in Indiana. It’s the dialogue, so true to life. The actors must be improvising. Improv can work when the characters are in a situation, and that’s what we’ve got here—a young woman stranded in nowhere, USA. Frightening.
All this bogus jeopardy we see in fantasy fiction these days—forget it. What could be more fatal than finding yourself homeless in the heartless tracts of low-rent America? And what’s more miraculous than the humanity an open heart might find there?
I love to be compelled by a story. I love to be able to say, “what if…?” What if I found myself in that situation? What would save me? What could I count on? What is it that buoys the human spirit in dire straits?
I’m not going to tell you what it is. I’ll only say that this small film exists to allow us to explore that question for ourselves.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo presents a protagonist whose life is disintegrating. Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist, has been convicted of slandering a wealthy industrialist, and will shortly go to jail. Consequently, the magazine he publishes may fail. To occupy himself before he heads to prison, he agrees to solve an impossible mystery. All this uncertainty is key to the design of this and many stories – a beginning that can only be described as hopeless.
What interests me is why readers so willingly engage with hopeless situations. Of course, Blomkvist R Us. Our lives are a painful quandary, so we live vicariously through the struggles of the literary protagonist, yada yada yada. Yeah, we know that already. This is why we keep buying novels and watching films about people in dire straits.
But WHY is failure so compelling? An uncertain state of mind must serve us somehow. This we know instinctively.
We’ve heard it before – heartache inspires art. Adversity spawns adventure. Breakdowns present our best chance for breakthrough. But who besides a few saints chooses to suffer? No, we ignore our instincts to sustain the delusion that we are masters of our fate and captains of our soul.
But our passion for anguished heroes belies all this self-bamboozlement. Books that begin with a Blomkvist serve to connect us to an essential state of mind. One that we’re (understandably) too terrified to face in reality.
And so we read. And so we write.
I’m writing a review of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” for the Vanishing Tattoo website. Author Stieg Larsson has created an unlikely duo that team up to solve the mystery of a long-ago disappearance of a young woman in a lonely Swedish landscape. Blomkvist and Salander couldn’t appear more incompatible – a middle-aged journalist, principled, disciplined and male, in league with a young, brooding, anorexic, rebellious, body-modified hacker. About the only thing they have in common is the brewing and drinking of unhealthy amounts of coffee (on just about every page, I swear it’s true). Soon, though, it’s clear that for different reasons Blomkvist and Salander have something else simmering on the back burner – vengeance.
Never mind the story – what interests me is the device of bringing together such stark opposites. It makes for great dramatic tension, not least because Salander and Blomkvist become romantically involved. It also makes the point that two people can become one super-powered organism. What if we were to extrapolate that to humanity in general?
Recently, I’ve become impressed with my limitations. I am not and never will acquire a talent for figure skating, quantum physics, or navigating FaceBook. Similarly, few people on earth have my unique passion for sounding important in print, collecting old golf clubs, and meditating. Obviously, we can’t all be everything. As a species, though, we are – all together—everything. The evolution of the human species would appear to be lurching, however painfully slowly, toward a secure ontological footing in this fact.
So what?
So this – a vicarious glimpse of wholeness is one of the rewards of reading good literature. Authors aren’t knowingly designing stories with this in mind. They don’t have to. It’s part of a protagonist’s job description to gain a larger worldview in advance of charging into Act III.
After getting sufficiently battered by the forces of antagonism, the hero starts to become disenchanted with all her best efforts and comes to learn that she is ‘only human’. If she accepts that notion, she realizes that she’s part of a larger interconnected humanity. By acknowledging our limits, we simultaneously see the advantages of surrendering to how the whole works together. We see this in stories all the time. Look for it.
By the end of “Dragon Tattoo,” the dark and tattooed angel known as Salander is just beginning to wake up to these facts of life. She has two sequels to look forward to. Two more thick volumes in which to experiment with the nearly impossible art of becoming human.
A recent review of “Roxy” would appear to be suggesting that the subject of teen pregnancy is inappropriate for young adults. The reviewer wrote: “…the heart-warming ending is based on something which is wrong.”
Wrong? Hmm. Gee. How on earth can tears, or a warm heart, be wrong? Oh, before I go on, I should report that the reviewer appeared to sincerely like most of the book:
“It’s a good story – I was very keen to keep turning the pages to find out how things would work out and how the mysteries of Roxy and Maddy’s lives would unravel. There’s a great sense of place too – I swear I could smell the herb fields in Corfu and…” Etc.
In other words, some of life’s problems – teen sex, pregnancy, young motherhood – though valid themes for adults, are too hot for teens. Oh, yes, the reviewer also added that, “Alcohol and pregnancy shouldn’t mix, even in fiction.” Never mind that Roxy, never consumed any alcohol in the story, “…she would have drunk it if she’d liked it,” the reviewer reckoned.
Okay, you get the picture. It’s Roxy vs political correctness. Those of you who know me are bracing for a rant – but no – today I’m leaving my rebuttal in the hands of another writer more talented by far. Colin Higgins.
Higgins wrote that delightfully irreverent little story called “Harold and Maude” which showed up on the big screen in 1978. It’s the story of a romance between a 19 year old boy and an 80 year old woman. He finds her a bit wild, and tells her so. She replies, sweetly.
“Virtue? It’s best not to be too moral. You cheat yourself out of too much life. Aim above morality. As Confucius says, ‘Don’t simply be good. Make good things happen.’”
I think Roxy can fairly be credited for making a lot of good things happen for her damaged family. Her desire to raise a healthy child is not the least of those good deeds.
I often see political correctness as an attempt to cover up an awkward truth – and it troubles me that young people are in danger of falling into denial of the human condition. But it’s a writer’s duty to speak the truth, don’t you think? And by doing so, remain as human as possible.
“Oh, Harold,” she sighed, stroking his hair. “You are so young. What have they taught you?” She brushed away the tears that fell down her cheeks. “Yes. I cry. I cry for you. I cry for this. I cry at beauty – a sunset or a seagull. I cry when a man tortures his brother…when he repents and begs for forgiveness…when forgiveness is refused…and when it is granted. One laughs. One cries. Two uniquely human traits. And the main thing in life, my dear Harold, is not to be afraid to be human.”
'What is Southern Comfort?' (a new campaign reintroduces the brand to young adults. Also vampires' beverage of choice… is Vitamin Water? A funny send up of the enriched water's "New Moon" tie in) (MediaPost, reg. required) (AV Club)
- 'Being... Read the rest of this post
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Agreed! Beer ads, over the years, have pandered to the worst in us. Guys come across as buffoonish louts, governed by lust and gluttony.
The first time I saw the ad (love that sweaty guy who points to the sky as they walk off the court) I smiled huge. I'll buy a pack of Guiness this weekend, and that's a rarity for me.