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By:
PJ Reece,
on 7/2/2015
Blog:
PJ Reece - The Meaning of Life
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If you’ve been reading my deep travel tales, you’ll know how un-smart I am.
Count the times I’ve been run down on the road less traveled!
I was barely home from my travels in Africa and Asia when the gods pulled a U-turn and made roadkill of me yet again.
I was filming in the Canadian Rockies
I was shooting a film on the geomorphology of the high country. Think erosion. Even solid granite breaks up over time and washes to the sea. Everything disintegrates, including the human psyche.
Especially mine.
After an exhausting day filming on scree slopes above a chain of turquoise lakes and then debriefing the tapes over dinner with the sound tech we drove to Lake Louise to be closer to our next location. It was midnight by the time we found a tent site on the perimeter of a campground.
We pitched our tent and fell asleep.
I woke at dawn with rain drubbing softly on the sagging canvas.
I heard something else.
I crawled half out to peer around the tent—
Grizzly! Not six feet away from me.
Front paws on the picnic table, she sniffed our cooler, our food supply. Last night we had unloaded the jeep and then hastily secured one end of our pup tent to the table before passing out.
I’m sorry! I told you, I’m not that smart!
The bear took a second to fix me in the cross-hairs of her cold gaze.
I nudged Ken and whispered, “Grizzly.” He wanted to see. I shook my head furiously. He stuck his head out, withdrew, looked at me: “Three cubs.”
Worst case scenario. Now what?
Now what?
The tent collapsed.
The weight of the cooler and everything spilling out—bacon and steaks and yogurt, and bread, coffee, apples, raisins, nuts and milk and a week’s supply of Snickers Bars—it flattened the tent with us beneath it.
Four bears were sitting on us, eating. And not quietly, I might add.
While we lay still as death.
I thought of Fred.
Fred and I had played hockey at university. He was 6-3 and damned good-looking before he met the grizzly who left him minus one hip, a broken back, no scalp, half a face, and a chewed elbow, and those were just the physical injuries.
I was eroding inside, already.
I’d been here before, my life stopped dead in its tracks. (The cheetah comes to mind, remember?) My granite sense of self becoming “Fred,” I couldn’t muster the necessary thoughts to convince myself that life had meaning.
There was nothing left to obscure the fact that life has no meaning.
There was nothing left.
Hold that thought.
If you’ve read Story Structure Expedition, you’re familiar with how I recruited authors more eloquent than myself to do the heavy explaining through moments like this. Well, here we go again:
John Gray (The Silence of Animals), he sounds like he’s been under a grizzly’s picnic tablecloth:
“Accepting that the world is without meaning, we are liberated from confinement in the meaning we have made. Knowing there is nothing of substance in our world may seem to rob that world of value. But this nothingness may be our most precious possession, since it opens to us the inexhaustible world that exists beyond ourselves.”
That’s it! What every crisis has taught me.
If Mr. Gray moves over we can squeeze physicist, Alan Lightman, into this dilemma:
“In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. Underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.”
Lightman is describing the fictional protagonist waking up in the Act II Crisis.
At the heart of the story, heroes see the world as it really is.
Un-smart like me
I’m not saying I’m a hero, but I certainly have been serially un-smart. My talent for not being too smart for my own good has earned me the moral authority to enter the Act III of my life.
And now, writing from the perspective of the final act, I want to share with you some of my discoveries (however arguable they might be):
- The meaning of a human life is to realize—by whatever means possible—that nothingness is our most precious possession
- The best fictional protagonists do just that
- Which aids and abets our own struggle to see the world as it really is
- And that’s why we read fiction
- And perhaps why we write it.
CUT BACK TO ACTION:
Behind the falling rain, low voices. The canvas was suddenly snapped back to reveal a uniformed park official standing over me with a rifle. He shook his head in dismay, or disdain.
I know, I’m an idiot, I’m sorry.
Mama lay in a heap, tranquilized, while her three cubs found refuge up a tree. Campers, soggy in the early morning rain, watched in disbelief.
I know, I know, I’m sorry! It’ll happen again, I assure you.
Because:
Good writers—like good protagonists—are never too smart for their own good.
[POST SCRIPT: All this “meaning” business notwithstanding, I didn’t sleep well in a tent for a few years after that.]
“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?
A writer buddy of mine phones up and tells me to meet him on the first tee in 45 minutes.
Say no more.
I love hanging out with writers. I love their lack of common sense, their desperation, their vulnerability, their implausibility. Their impossibility!
Who in their right mind would be a writer?
I especially love watching movies about struggling writers.
Joe in Sunset Boulevard, and Roy in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and Henry in Factotum, and Charlie in Adaptation, and The Ghost Writer, and of course Miles (Paul Giamatti) in the film Sideways.
Miles (introvert, pessimistic, depressed) spends most of the story waiting to hear from his literary agent. The news won’t be good. Writers don’t show up in stories as symbols of success. They are setups for failure.
Someone should make a movie of my life.
Forget the first 40 years, they were altogether too glamorous. No, my life more truly started when my 13-year-old son called a meeting to say, “I’m in Grade Seven, Dad, and I’ve attended fifteen different schools.”
I said, “Wash your mouth out with soap,” but it turns out he wasn’t exaggerating.
“Pops, I want you to settle down,” he said.
So I quit shooting films, traded camera for keyboard, and decided that henceforth I was a writer. It was great. I soon became so broke that my son’s mother sent support payments from Hawaii.
Once, I forced my son to accompany me to the Welfare Office. They gave me so much money it was humiliating—rent, medical and dental care, bus passes, food vouchers, extra cash. I had to cut them off.
Though I soon acquired a stable of clients, every November it seemed I was scrambling to pay the rent. I sucked up my pride and hit the streets to sell door to door. Water filters, home insulation, sports videos, memberships, you name it, even vacuum cleaners.
I spent eight hours performing a demo for an Italian household. The extended family showed up to watch and applaud as my machine hoovered that mansion top to bottom. I thought they were going to adopt me. Alas, no sale.
I remember one cold, dark and stormy night somewhere out in Vacuumland huddling in a phone booth, demo machine in one hand and phone in the other as I listened to my agent promise me my script was all but sold. Alas, optioned three times, it’s yours, cheap.
One day the Revenue Department came snooping around to deny me my business expenses. It didn’t take her long to realize she couldn’t squeeze blood from a stone. Lost for words, she said, “Well, Mr. Reece…keep writing.”
Thank you, Ms. Klenck. And I did exactly that.
I entered writing competitions—the 3-Day Novel Competition, Short Story Challenges, Screenplay Competitions, and Pitch-a-Plot workshops. But it is with special fondness that I remember the “24-Hour One-Act Play Competition”—all of us wannabe playwrights sequestered into one room.
Twelve hours into my scenario about a kid who is abducted off a golf course (well, they tell you to write what you know), I thought it would be wise to review what I’d written. I pushed back from my typewriter (that’s right, a typewriter!) and unenscrolled the paper from the rollers.
I was typing onto dot-matrix computer paper, you know, a continuous feed. I separated the sheets along the perforations and made a nice little stack which then fell to the floor. Thirty-five UN-NUMBERED sheets all helter-skelter.
I couldn’t organize the pages, couldn’t find the continuity, couldn’t put Humpty back together again. If I didn’t bolt from the room I was going to cry. It was 4:00 a.m.
Walking the streets, I was Miles and Roy and Henry and every fictional writer who ever agreed to let their creator thwart them to the point of despair and even self-loathing. Why weren’t the cameras rolling?
At a convenience store I suffocated my existential crisis with anchovy & garlic pizza. That I was a writer caused the proprietor to reflect on his own life, roads not taken, etc. Lamenting his lack of courage to lead an art-committed life, he said something along the lines of:
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
I knew there was a reason, besides my son’s ultimatum, why I was a writer.
At the same time I realized why I love movies about writers. As symbols of failure, writers depict Everyman at the brink of surrender. The struggling writer shows us what deep down we fear most—that the meaning of a life is to leave our old selves behind.
To be a writer is to have the courage to become unselved.
Spirits bolstered, I returned to the drama den—and damned if my abduction story didn’t win First Prize.
My words since then have earned me a million bucks, which, admittedly, spread over twenty years is a modest living. But I’m proud to count myself as someone struggling to bring forth what’s in him.
Who in their right mind would be a writer? I think that being a writer indicates nothing but right-mindedness.
But getting back to my son—I’d ring him for a golf game except the kid is doing so well that he’s off playing Pebble Beach. Last year it was The Old Course in St. Andrews. Next month Augusta National, it wouldn’t surprise me.
I might have to tell him to settle down.
I’m going to tell you a story about a piano player.
I told it recently on The Artist’s Road in support of a discussion about “perseverance.” The blog’s author, Patrick Ross, replied to my comment:
“PJ, that was a fantastic story you shared there about the piano player. I hope you’ve written that somewhere before, as an essay or a chapter in a craft book? It’s worthy of wider distribution.”
Thank you, Patrick, but, no, I’ve never shared the story. Which is strange, because that event changed my life (or so goes my personal myth).
Here’s part of what I posted on The Artist’s Road:
“I was ten and playing tag around a friend’s house, and stopping in my tracks as I passed the open bedroom door of my friend’s older brother. There was this teenager working at a piano, composing like a maniac, tinkling the keys, then making notations, oblivious of distraction, of football, of the sun shining outside. I saw in that moment what an artist was.”
Now, I’m curious—what exactly did I see through that doorway?
I should add that my friend’s brother was always at that piano, so that’s where “perseverance” comes in. He spent his youth in his bedroom with that piano and working so hard and with such focus it was frightening. Even still, what was it about a teenager at a piano that could so impress a ten-year-old that fifty years later the memory still serves to inspire me?
The music?—no—the jazzy phrases likely irritated my young ears. I remember the way he leaned forward to jab his pencil at sheets of paper propped on the piano. I recall an urgency. To get somewhere? No, he was already there! You see, he was somewhere else. He lived beyond the everyday world in which the rest of us ran in circles.
I wanted what he had.
His name was Tommy Banks. He went on to own the music scene in Edmonton, Alberta. His TV talk show went nation-wide. Eventually they honoured him with an appointment to the federal Senate in Ottawa. I owe Mr. Banks a huge debt of gratitude, as you can imagine.
Or perhaps I haven’t made that clear.
You see, that mental image of Tommy working at his piano has served as a beacon for me throughout my life. Guiding me toward what, exactly? Art of some kind? Yes, but certainly not music, no, I’m remarkably unmusical. So, what then? I don’t know. A way of being?
Standing at that open bedroom doorway, the ten-year-old is arrested by a possibility.
Imagine that—a pre-pubescent kid understands he has a choice of how to be. Among life’s possibilities, here is one that soars above the rest.
If I had ever wondered about the meaning of life, and I had, well, here is an answer. The teenager at the piano is the answer to my earliest existential quandaries. Here is someone who lives in this world but who ignores much of it. And look how alive he is!
The answer infects my entire life.
From then on I’m alert to artists and poets and mystics who make it their business to frame up that same answer. Leonard Cohen for example, musing on his own escape from the person the world expects him to be:
“Even though he was built to see the world this way, he was also built to disregard, to be free of the way he was built to see the world.”
That ten-year-old playing tag was stopped in his tracks by a glimpse through a doorway—a glimpse of a way to move beyond.
To be free of the way he was built to see the world.
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.
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:
“We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness…”
Joseph Conrad’s famous tale concerns an expedition up the Congo River. The mission: to repatriate a company agent. And with each bend in that jungle river, the protagonist’s belief system proves increasingly unreliable.
The Heart of Darkness…the perfect metaphor for the hero’s journey.
And the writer’s.
I don’t know about you, but I begin Page One with no idea how I’ll feel when the ordeal is over.
I don’t write to explain—I write to find out.
The narrator, Marlowe, is dispatched upriver to investigate a rogue ivory trader named Kurtz.
And who is this mysterious Kurtz? We don’t learn much about him. That’s okay because Kurtz is only the goal.
Only the goal?
The goal sets the quest in motion. The goal is the hero’s excuse for getting out of bed in the morning. But the quest is…
The hero’s journey to the truth about himself.
Up the Congo, Marlowe finds “truth stripped of its cloak of time.” Losing his cultural and moral coordinates, Marlowe must…
“meet that truth with his own true self—with his own inborn strength. Principles won’t do.”
Up the Congo, the narrator’s conventional scruples are exposed as mere “acquisitions”. He likens his principles to…“clothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at the first good shake.”
Marlowe’s precious belief systems are…
“Incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckily.”
Lucky, yes, because the underlying reality is shocking.
“We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster [European society], but there—the
A poet dies.
Is it dust to dust and that’s it? Or is there such a thing as a lasting legacy? What can we learn in the aftermath of an art-committed life?
Does a life have meaning?
Andy Suknaski grew up in Sitting Bull country in southern Saskatchewan. He remained there, in his shack, working at his kitchen table, writing drafts on brown Safeway bags:
…this is my right
to chronicle the meaning of these vast plains
in a geography of blood
and failure
making them live.
Suknaski’s Wood Mountain Poems has been described as a “timeless classic of Canadian literature”.
The memorial service meant a 1500 mile journey to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, but never mind. Nor am I a poet, but never mind that, either. I would forever regret missing the celebration of this beloved artist’s life.
“He spoke of himself in the lower case.”
“He always spoke of eternal things,”
A dozen people stood up at Suknaski’s memorial to savour his memory. A portrait emerged of a loner, fierce and sincere, demanding but above all, generous.
Meeting Andy, he’d enquire, “What are you reading? What are you writing?” He cut to the chase. He would examine you over his tinted aviator glasses. I’d had the pleasure, myself.
Years ago, I shot a National Film Board documentary about Suknaski. I remember that stare. Yikes! No, he wasn’t finding faults, it was worse than that! Andy was looking for the best.
He seemed to be taking responsibility for the enlightenment of those he lived among.
“Knowing Andy, I got a sense of what it was like to live the life of a poet.”
Sukna
Do the Work by Steven Pressfield. Just released. Amazon is giving away free e-versions.
What is it? Pressfield might be surprised to hear what I think it is – an anatomy of a human metamorphosis. Never have I stumbled upon more gritty grist for my “meaning” mill.
Written as advice to writers—with obvious relevance to all creative projects—Pressfield’s “how to” manual helps us outwit Resistance (yes, Capital-R). Resistance arises as surely as the morning sun. It is the shadow of our higher nature. It’s the psychopathic gatekeeper at the doorway to creative expression. “Resistance wants to rattle that faith,” says Pressfield. “Resistance wants to destroy it.”
Do the Work is a high-octane strategy for knowing the enemy — then slaying it — this bully, this saboteur, this terrorist!
Here’s what you do — if you’re conscious of being the hero of your own life, you summon every ounce of determination to call its bluff. You carry on “doing the work”. Easier said than done.
Easier said than done!
Fast-forward to the end of the book—we learn that Resistance will successfully conspire to thwart our goals (every time) unless our commitment is total. Unless there is no question of turning back. Why am I (fill in the blank) writing a novel, circling the globe in a wheelchair, starting a company, searching for the Holy Grail?
Answer: Because I have no choice.
An answer like that comes from no place Resistance has any knowledge of. “We’re poised on the doorstep of a higher plane,” says Pressfield. Once across this threshold, Resistance has no purchase on us anymore. Once through that “choiceless” doorway we begin to see what the Self (yes, large-S) is all about. For starters, a life would appear to be in the service of the species as a whole.
But this is my reading of the book, you understand. This is what Pressfield is saying to me.
Meanwhile, in straight-ahead language, Pressfield is convincing us that a war rages within the human organizm. The combatants: any act that derives from our higher nature – versus – the Resistance that wants to destroy it. But Pressfield’s manual has the perfect jujitsu solution:
Because Resistance consistently takes up a stance in direct opposition to our evolutionary urges, “we can use it as a compass,” says Pressfield. “We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us… The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.”
I’m excited about this little book—excited that someone has defined the human condition as one that necessarily involves struggle toward our ultimate well-being. And I’m excited therefore that the book is being given away. (To charge for it seems such an obstacle in the dissemination of the idea, don’t you think?)
Do the Work is the perfect writer’s companion—an amulet against the fo
Last week I left you with a ship hanging precariously over the edge of the known world. On board were the mavericks Herman Melville and Helen Keller. Joining them is the American writer and iconoclast, Henry Miller:
“One’s destination is never a place but a new way of seeing things.”
Now he tells us!
With Miller is a relative newcomer to the world of crazy wisdom, Rick Lewis. Mr. Lewis signed on to this journey of discovery in order to support the evolution of the species. While acknowledging that he’s not the first to send e-postcards from the edge, he wanted to see for himself what’s out there. Here’s part of his dispatch:
“From an evolutionary perspective, whether or not something has happened or not before, whether it has ever been done before, is not the issue. The issue is whether we ourselves are risking, experimenting, leaning forward into “our own unknown”.
As long as I’ve known Lewis he’s been leaning, juggling, tight-rope-walking, inventing and generally horrifying people by making them ecstatically uncomfortable. What I did not know before now is that his risk-taking has been in the service of “the greater cause of invention and ingenuity”, as he puts it. But I’m damn glad to hear it because it presents us with the possibility of… that’s right, folks… MEANING.
Lewis is one of the few people out there talking about an individual life having meaning for the species as a whole. Or for universal evolution generally. Here he is again:
“When anybody tries something without knowing if it will work—in their own experience—they’re…liberating atoms of courage into the atmosphere for the rest of us to inhale.”
In other words, courage is infectious. Expressed another way, courage is a vibration, and one that we may begin to resound with. Is it possible that other organisms draw benefit from those same sympathetic vibrations? Some mystics say so.
Speaking of whom, can you see Miller at the rail of the ship? He’s gazing over that horrifying scene as if he were standing on the very edge of the miraculous. He’s saying something to Lewis:
“The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.”
I’d love to be the fly on mainsail if Henry and Rick are going to start arguing about “meaning”.
“Meaning of life? Oh, please, PJ. Puh-lease!”
Here we go again—compelled by events (feedback) to justify my beating on this subject which nowadays “only mystics and comedians” are licensed to discuss. That’s my segue to The New York Review of Books and the author of that observation. In an article titled “What Is a Good Life?”, he distinguishes between “living well” and “having a good life”. He qualifies a good life as one that’s “not simply pleasurable but good in a critical way.” His treatise concludes:
“Living well is not the same as maximizing the chance of producing the best possible life.”
The implication is this: that attempting—and failing—to “maximize the chance” is better (more ethical) than coasting through life counting your blessings. The distinction is made between a life of least resistance (though it may be moral), and a life hell-bent on seeking the best kind of life (more ethical). Ethics trumps morality because it includes morality.
So, to repeat: though our attempts at maximization may lead to ruin, they constitute a critical success by virtue of the extreme effort. To make the most of a life. To plumb a life for its potential. To be the best possible steward of this life we’ve been given.
It doesn’t sound at all contentious to me. Yet people turn their backs on the idea of a life having meaning.
It would seem that early in our lives we abandon the philosophical question of meaning because we conclude that the accomplishments of any single person can’t possibly amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world (what to say about an infinite universe?) Or else meaning gets wedded to the religious business of earning favour in the eyes of our chosen god. End of discussion.
In either case, meaning concerns my! life. It’s a concern entirely self-centric.
But with a little objectivity, meaning applies to the species or to the planet (throw in the universe if you want). Is it too much of a stretch to believe that an individual life could play a role—subtle though it must surely be—in the evolution of things?
That’s where the mystics come in. Or, used to. Now it’s physicists as well. People speak of our consciousness as evolving, a process that banks on individuals, one by one, doing the work of waking up. People are speaking about this expanding consciousness as the primary hope for our species.
Rather than step any further out of my depth, I take refuge again in the The New York Review of Books and another insightful comment from Ronald Dworkin:
“We cannot release ourselves from our responsibility to live well.”
If that’s true, then the purpose of a life is clear – to yield to that which wants to happen through us. How difficult can that be? Well, there’s the rub. It would seem to be all but impossible. But possible.
Indeed, inevitable.
So, take your pick—which is it going to be—mystic or comedian?
Word of mouth generated by Eat Pray Love is that it’s a film you love to hate. I had to see it.
In fact, all films are an education. See how the writer crafts a protagonist with a strong ‘object of desire’. See how she establishes the story’s central question. I recall Liz (Julia Roberts) lying on the floor beside her bed and saying to her lover, “I don’t know how to be here.” In that tell-all confession, the film finds its heart.
“How to be” is certainly a question worthy of being the story’s centre of gravity. And knowing that the answer lies in acceptance of ‘what is’ doesn’t make the question any less profound. Despite warnings against obsessive “seeking after fact and reason” (see my last post), accepting ourselves “as is” is not something our minds are wired for. It would appear to be true what they say, that it’s easier to die than to accept ourselves as imperfect beings.
Yet, fictional protagonists (as a rule) rush headlong into such a crisis at the end of Act II—emerging like the butterfly from the cocoon to take the story to its triumphant conclusion. You’d think that fictional heroes were all infected with some kind of evolutionary impulse. (Indeed I do believe that.)
Liz’s escape to Italy-India-Bali in search of eating, praying, and loving with the passion of a Zorba (and/or the peace of a Buddha) would suggest that she, too, has surrendered to this strange upward gravity that characterizes a fictional hero’s ‘awakening’. She’s been trying hard to levitate, but (if you ask me) her enlightenment is a few lifetimes away. Even as the film ends—fresh from her final tete-a-tete with her toothless guru—we find her once again rushing headlong after the solace of meaning.
“Off-balance in love, this brings balance in whole life,” the teacher told her.
Liz is meant to accept the uncertainties that come with a relationship. But she doesn’t strike me as being wise enough to understand that the larger balance of which the guru speaks may concern the whole cosmos, not her puny life. Can she live with that? Can anyone? Can we accept that our own life may need to be off balance in order to serve the greater good?
That’s a tall order. On the human level, perhaps we can’t do better than Julia Roberts’ big fat gastro-religious pilgrimage. Eat pray love and then we die. Maybe it wasn’t such a pointless film after all.
This week, while house-sitting on BC’s so-called sunshine coast (it’s raining as I write), I devoured a biography of George Gurdjieff. You don’t know G.G.? The Greek-Armenian mystic? Established a ‘mystery school’ in Paris in the 1920s? No? Don’t worry. You’re not alone.
Gurdjieff: Making a New World (by J.G. Bennett), describes Gurdjieff as someone whose life’s mission was to point to life’s purpose. Even back then, Gurdjieff’s ideas didn’t find many takers. They seemed to emanate from ancient teachings from the misty past. People just didn’t get it. Gurdjieff would seem to have been born to late, or perhaps too early.
And now, a hundred years later, are we ready? And if so, then what is this ‘purpose’ he spoke of?
Since you’re not going to read the book (just a hunch I have), it behooves me to give you the briefest of briefings.
First of all, it’s necessary to view the planet as a whole, a unity. (Whoever can’t grasp that concept should come back in another hundred years.) Various levels of energy, from basic (heat) to subtle (thought) to extremely subtle (compassion, for example) all feed on and off each other. It’s one system. As we feed and love and die, we transform energy. A plant, for instance, transforms sunlight and carbon into chlorophyll. An animal’s stomach transforms chemical energy into heat and then mechanical energy.
Rocks, plants, animals, humans…everything is involved in an ongoing energy transformation that not only sustains the earth, but plays a part in its evolution.
Now, here’s the tricky part: Gurdjieff suggests that humans alone have the power to transform energy into the kind of high-level vibration that supports the evolution principle. If this is so, then it would seem immoral in the extreme for anyone to withhold his or her participation. Wouldn’t it?
According to Gurdjieff, we humans play a part whether we want to or not. As we die, uniquely subtle energies are released. I’ve always thought so, myself. I’ve long imagined that at death, when there’s no need to wear a mask or assume postures, our psychic energies might be available for transformation into pure consciousness. Even if only for an instant. It makes sense, doesn’t it? On our deathbeds, we tell the truth because we see the truth. And we die with a smile on our faces.
Well, how about a smile before then?
Exactly. We can participate in this energy transformation while we’re alive and kicking. We can participate in this evolutionary project by being conscious as we live. The more conscious we are, the more accurately we perceive reality as it actually is. We are wise, far-seeing and useful contributors to the unified system of energy on planet earth.
This is the unique contribution that humans can make to the system.
To grow our awareness, our consciousness, so that we can participate in the evolution of the entire system… that’s what I call meaning in a human life.
Anybody still with me?