In Theory

In theory everything is perfect, pure. But the creative act means making a choice and, inevitably, sacrificing perfection so that something beautiful might be born.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in an abstract world, where only theories would matter. And in this world, even that utilitarian instrument we call language would become obsolete. Human beings, after all, would no longer be held captive by that base desire to stoop to words.

On certain winter evenings we can approach the outer limits of such an existence. If the snow is falling and people mysteriously disappear from the roads, we have an easier time dissociating objects from their corresponding functions. Street signs and traffic lights, for example, become mere collections of shapes and colors. And during these moments we seem to grasp the essence of things, if only for a time. Even silence has a way of speaking to us, in spite of words.

When I have an idea I think is brilliant, I turn it over in my mind and imagine bringing it to life with an organized array of symbols. Then I imagine what the results would be. Most often the results are extraordinary: I write a bestseller without sacrificing my artistic ideals. Then I turn down talk shows because everyone wants me. Finally I achieve a stratospheric level of fame and fortune. My experience makes me the most sought after dinner companion. I'm cool yet engaged. I'm easy. I live and write by the sea, maybe.

Sometimes, though, our abstract world becomes so complete that the decision to give birth would only contaminate its purity. In other words, the abstract book we have never actually written is indeed written, but written so perfectly so as to destroy our desire to realize it.

In the past I've joked with friends about this phenomenon, which they understand very well because they are also its victims. Before Christmas I had dinner with a close friend, and I was reminded of the time a few years back when he and I discussed our dream of one day owning our own winery. We exhausted ourselves talking about it in the abstract. I told him that we had formulated our vision of a theoretical winery so perfectly that there was no way we could actually construct it. It seemed to us that following through with our plans would only lead to disappointment. We both laughed and agreed that we were probably right.

The plant world does not suffer from such problems. For example, when a tree moves in the wind, it moves perfectly. Perhaps this is because it is not aware it is moving. In opposition to nature, our actions seem contrived, even pointless. It does appear that some things are better explored in theory alone. Football, grocery shopping, and going to work—these are but three examples. There are innumerable others. If only we could rise above the spectacle of grown men in tights, our need to assimilate organic material, renting ourselves to satisfy our need to consume, maybe we could better appreciate the beauty of an abstract world.

In light of our descent into the realm of the concrete, what do we make of our time here on earth? How do we interpret our actions and the shadows they cast? When I am overwhelmed by the masochistic urge to destroy myself, to venture beyond the world of the pure and betray my communion with silence, to give birth to an idea so perfect and so complete by stooping to words, there is one thing that comforts me.

Thrust into the world, we are the concrete answer to a question posed in the bedroom. We have no choice in the matter. We are creatures complicit in our communion with the concrete. Aside from suicide—and even this is a suspect solution—there is nothing we can do to shed this role. And if we choose not to die, then we must choose to live. So why not live as fully as possible?

In theory I want to consume the world. I want to know everything. I want the company of brilliant and beautiful people all day, every day. I want to burn so bright I blind myself. We must accept that life is a work of art that is never fully complete, and a part of it will always remain an abstraction composed of thoughts, desires, regrets. Life only closes in on itself—in other words, ceases to function in part as theory—when it encounters its own finality. Pregnant with our dreams for the future, death is an abortion of sorts—the moment when all of our theories are taken from us, forever.

This is the tragedy we must fight against. This is the theory that must compel us to live.

The Art of Indefatigability

I finished reading Mircea Eliade's Parisian journal earlier this year after many evenings in the park, and it was a transformative experience. There are many facets of Eliade's personality that interest me, but there is one that rises above the rest: his seemingly limitless capacity to consume and create words.

It is clear that Eliade, a prolific writer and religious historian, is an intellectual who simultaneously attracts and arrests. On the one hand, he charms us with his inexhaustible erudition—what is the demon that feeds his genius? In his world, nothing is too obscure for his appetite. He devours books as if they were glasses of water. He possesses the uncanny knack of making connections between what appear to be totally unrelated fields of knowledge. This is the mark of that rare individual who has successfully combined intelligence and creativity into a potent formula for intellectual indefatigability. How remarkable it would be to sit with him and experience the genesis of a single thought.

On the other hand, we are seized in his presence. After all, it's virtually certain he would run intellectual circles around us, and we wonder how he would respond to our inadequacies. Would we embarrass ourselves trying to maintain his stratospheric level of discourse? More important, would our meeting throw us into a state of despair? After all, many of us are simply incapable of devouring books like water. We might be tempted to give up and throw all our manuscripts away.

In "Beginnings of a Friendship," Emil Cioran gives us his own account of Eliade's productive capacity:

Everything negative, everything that promotes self-destruction on the physical as well as spiritual plane, was then, and still is, foreign to him—whence his inaptitude for resignation, for remorse, for despair, for all feelings that imply the bogged-down, the rut, the nonfuture. Again, I may be going out on a limb, but I believe that if he has perfect understanding of sin, he lacks a sense of it: he is too feverish for that, too dynamic, too hurried, too full of projects, too intoxicated with the possible.

Then there's Cioran’s account of Eliade’s lectures at the Faculty of Lectures at Bucharest:

I attended his lectures whenever I could. The fervor he lavished on his articles was fortunately recognizable in his lectures, the most animated, the most vibrant I have ever heard. Without notes, without anything, swept on by a vertigo of lyric erudition, he was a fountain of convulsed yet coherent words, underlined by the spasmodic movements of his hands. An hour of tension, after which, miraculously, he did not seem tired and perhaps, indeed, was not. It was as if he possessed the art of indefinitely postponing fatigue.

When you sit down to read his journals and spend a few hours immersed in his world, your curiosity heightens and you never want to leave. Every word, every gesture becomes a springboard for another thought. Eliade's desire to devour the world is dangerously contagious, and if his musings impel us to move forward, they do so tragically: no matter how hard we try, we will die undone. In the journal Religion, Matei Calinescu provides his own translation of some of Eliade's thoughts from the Portuguese journal:

My capacity to understand culture, in all its forms, is limitless. I wish I could express just one percent of what I think and know as nobody else does. I don't think that a genius of this complexity has ever been encountered—at any rate my intellectual horizons are much vaster than Goethe's.

Intellectual horizons vaster than Goethe's? When I read this, I can only conclude that we are dealing with either a very serious person or a person who is not serious at all. After reading his Parisian journal, I am apt to believe the former.

How can we possibly compete with people like this? Perhaps the answer lies in understanding that everyone—even Mircea Eliade—dies with more work to be done. No one that I know wakes up and tells himself that every task has been completed and every problem has been solved. This is one of the many reasons we might get out of bed in the morning, even if we don't feel like it. And when we die, someone picks up where we left off. There is no way around this.

Eliade is obsessed with time, and perhaps we can interpret Youth Without Youth as his way of dealing with the ever-shrinking space of our existence. The trick is to recognize our journey toward understanding not as a struggle among ourselves, but as a struggle against something beyond ourselves—that immaterial and elusive entity we call time. But the act of naming something does not mean we apprehend it any better. And if you're crazy enough to compete with Eliade, you would be wise to tackle Goethe instead.

Three Great Directors

I thought I would take some time to talk about a few of my favorite directors.

My high school music teacher introduced me to Woody Allen in the spring of 2000. The first Allen film I watched was Husbands and Wives. I watched it with the girl who would become my summer fling before I headed off to Cornell. I don't think she liked the film very much. She's married with two kids now; much can change in a decade. Every time I watch this film, I think of her and that magical summer after graduation. Maybe this is one reason the film has a special place in my heart.

When many people think of Allen, they think of him as a comedian who made funny films. I don't care much for his earlier stuff. I prefer his darker material; e.g., Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands and Wives, and Match Point.

Ingmar Bergman heavily influenced Allen, and many of Allen's films demonstrate this. These direct and indirect references compelled me to explore Bergman's oeuvre, starting with his most famous work: The Seventh Seal. This is probably the best film to start with, if you are not familiar with Bergman's work.

My favorite work by Bergman is a film called Winter Light. Everything about this film resonates with me. The cinematography. The acting. The austerity of the scenes. The bleakness. There is no doubt that most do not have the patience for this film, which makes me love it even more. It is slow and plodding. Nothing much happens in the way of plot. One reason I love Bergman—and Michelangelo Antonioni—is that they were uncompromising and authentic. I remember reading an interview with Antonioni. He said that when he wrote, he wrote for himself. He didn't see the point in writing for a particular "audience," since in his view, there wasn't one. The result is that the films may not be blockbusters, but they will almost certainly affect a small group of lucky people in a very profound way. I consider myself one of those lucky people.

I only discovered Antonioni a couple years ago. I believe I stumbled upon him while reading an article on Bergman. I can't remember exactly. Like Bergman's work, Antonioni's films are often difficult and deal with heavy themes. One interesting difference I have noticed between these two directors is their treatment of God. Bergman relates the disorienting absence of God, while Antonioni avoids God altogether, assuming His nonexistence a priori. Each of these approaches has its merits.

Ironically, both Bergman and Antonioni died on the same day in the summer of 2007. I remember hearing about Bergman's passing on NPR as I drove through Ithaca, NY. The interesting thing is that both Bergman and Antonioni would refuse to give this irony meaning, laughing it off as mere coincidence, as I do.

When I dive into the work of artists, I find myself thinking of them throughout the day, imagining how they would respond to various situations. When you are affected by someone's films (or any type of art, for that matter), you can't help being influenced by them to some extent, developing an intuition about their thoughts and actions even after they are dead. This is also why—after this intuition has been rightfully attained through time and patience—it's worth revisiting previous films and experiencing them on another level. I recently did this with Antonioni's The Passenger.

My favorite Antonioni film is L'eclisse. It's difficult to put into words how this film makes me feel. It contains one of the most beautiful and tranquil scenes I have ever viewed—the Verona scene, filled with the beautiful sounds of Giovanni Fusco.

In sum, I would start with The Seventh Seal for Bergman and then graduate to his "trilogy" from the early 1960s: Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence. For Antonioni, I would start off with his "trilogy": L'avventura, La notte, L'eclisse. But then again, perhaps it's better to start with Blow-Up or The Passenger. I'm not sure.

I have no formal training in film. I've just felt my way around over the past few years. I don't know what is right or what is wrong when it comes to film, or to what extent the idea of a good film is an absolute that rises above subjectivity. It doesn't matter much to me, as long as I keep finding well-known and lesser-known gems that get me through the day.

The Program of Breathing

In order to get out of bed in the morning, we can't think too much. It seems that the ability to do anything at all hinges on a certain degree of automatism. Emil Cioran writes the following in Drawn and Quartered:

My doubts have not been able to get the better of my automatisms. I continue to make gestures to which it is impossible for me to adhere. To overcome the drama of this insincerity would be to renounce, to annul myself.

As soon as we begin to think or even question the motivation behind any action whatsoever, a small rift appears between intention and execution. At first, the rift is barely perceptible, welling up on rainy days or Sunday mornings. But this inchoate awareness feeds on itself until the rift becomes a chasm that spoils everything. At this stage, even the smallest gesture becomes an exercise in absurdity, and words are nothing more than meaningless abstractions.

When it first becomes clear that we feel out of place in the world, a natural reaction is to swim against the current and question ourselves. After all, most of us were raised to believe in something that gives us a reason to do things: family, religion, justice. As soon as such notions become suspect, we might become angry at the world and discover the cathartic power of invective. The pen can do wonders, and there is no doubt that giving form and coherence to our thoughts can quell our most destructive impulses.

But this protracted orgasm of the word cannot last forever. Over time it weighs us down and uses us up. No longer infused with the desire to annihilate ourselves, we begin to recognize the impotence of anger and the supremacy of silence, as Cioran writes in On the Heights of Despair:

After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence.

What do we do when every action feels contrived and useless, when the nature of every response is contaminated by a sense of arbitrariness and contingency? There is no easy answer, and there is no way to rid ourselves of that feeling of torpor that insinuates itself into every activity. At this point, the world becomes nothing more than a stage we use to entertain ourselves.

But we can use this malady to our advantage and shape it in a way that benefits us. First, we must recognize the automatism that underlies our movements and rise above each act by detaching ourselves from the act itself. Each time we get up in the morning, make ourselves a pot of coffee, go to work, we should perform the activity without believing in it and by refusing to lose ourselves in its uselessness. By injecting lucidity into the mix, we shed the automatism and consequently elevate ourselves above the act.

Second, we must learn to see the beauty in every futile gesture, every pointless task. When there is no burden of meaning to weigh anything down, we liberate ourselves from the merry-go-round. By doing this, we also rid ourselves of any possibility of disappointment. This alone is a strong reason to disbelieve in the redemptive power of hope.

Third, we must praise the purifying properties of inaction and defend it against the insults of busybodies. In order to guilt human beings into doing things, humanity deemed sloth an impure state, a problem to be dealt with. We must reclaim sloth as our own and worship it as the virtue that it is. Restlessness lies at the root of every catastrophe, as Cioran writes in All Gall Is Divided:

Violent actions are the appanage of the nations which, alien to the pleasure of lingering at the table, are ignorant of the poetry of dessert and the melancholies of digestion.

Never satisfied with lying still, our species has unthinkingly moved from one calamity to the next—the automatism of collapse, the disease of disaster.

I am most at peace when I contemplate the supreme disorder of things, when I lie on my couch for hours because no reason to rise is worthy of my respect. I may pass the time with a book or a film, but I understand these pursuits are only diversions, little tasks to fill up the otherwise vacuous hours. Suffocated by the senseless, we must be content merely to breathe. This alone must be enough.

Stasis

There is no moving forward, only standing still. When we catch a wild goose, it's not the goose we catch. There is no progress, only a semblance of such.

Dreams beget illusions that are difficult to destroy. Humanity prefers the comfort of a lie to the coldness of a dark truth. But there is beauty in the void, to be sure.

Steeped in illusion, it is rather easy to wake up in the morning. Disabused of all pretense, the task becomes insufferable. And you grab hold of anything—anything at all—to give you a reason to do it all over again.

There is no laughter, only a transient rush of air. When you turn to greet your brother, his smile is not meant for you. There is no happiness, only a ray of light in the void.

Walks

There are a few things in life I genuinely enjoy. Here are some of them:

1. Interesting discussions with close friends.

2. Reading my favorite authors in silence and semidarkness.

3. A glass of dry white wine and a Red House Painters album playing on vinyl.

4. Empty, snow-covered highways under a pink winter sky.

5. Late-night walks.

I really enjoy walks late at night, when everyone is sleeping. In these moments I am able to pretend that the world has decided to boycott action. No one will rise in the morning to perpetuate the vicious cycle of labor and consumption.

The best time might be in the fall. I like the smell of decaying leaves weaving its way through the crisp air. Sometimes I walk by myself; other times I walk with a friend. If I am alone, I might think about the latest book I am reading, or an album I've had on repeat. When I am with a friend, we might discuss films we enjoy or restaurants we should try. When I am walking, I can clear my head and focus on things that really matter.

My walks usually last 45 minutes or so, and during this time I feel invincible. For a few fleeting minutes of my life, anything is possible. With my legs in constant motion, I picture myself seamlessly beginning my next task after the walk is over. When I was writing my thesis and felt fatigued from generating words, I would head outside for a walk. This energized me and restored my fantasy of limitless potential, which would carry me through the evening.

We can sometimes improve our walks with a shot of espresso or maybe even a cigar. The taste of the coffee or the smell of the cigar smoke provides a tangible sense that pins down the moment. And depending on the choice of food, beverage, or inhalant, each walk takes on its own character.

Emil Cioran used to take walks through the Luxembourg Gardens. When I visited Paris, I made sure to do this. I also recreated a walk through certain streets he would pass through late at night. As I walked, I wondered what he had thought about when he was in motion. Did he think much about writing during his walks, or did he even think at all?

When people pass away, it becomes painfully clear that their thoughts and unpublished words die with them. I felt this feeling yesterday when I found out Howard Zinn had passed away. I felt the same way when I visited Emil Cioran's grave. If I am wrong about the future, maybe I will have the opportunity to ask Cioran what he thought about in the Luxembourg Gardens, or if he even thought at all. I would like to do that someday.

Idiocracy and Nuance

Why do we feel the need to dissect every action, every word? Why must we find the motivation behind everything? Why can't we leave things alone? When someone happens to wear a particular shirt that differs from his normal attire, why must we ask why he chose to wear it?

On some level, we're all surgeons well-versed in the art of dissection. We use our scalpels to peel back the layers and probe the minutiae of everyday existence. We parse gestures and phrases. We search for answers. "Seek and you might find," we should have been told. No matter. We seek regardless, and if we find no answers, we contrive our own.

Gossip is the symptom of this sickness—the overwhelming need to speculate, the overarching thirst for confirmation. One day I will parade through the streets with a broom in my right hand. Or maybe I will wear yellow on a Monday. I'm curious to hear the motivation behind a broomstick or the meaning of a random hue.

Moreover, why the need for nuance that drives our words to obscurity? Why can't we just say things? Tonight is the president's State of the Union speech. The television pundits can't wait to devour his words and salivate over every vowel. They will read between the lines, praise his careful choice of words, commend his calculated pragmatism, as they might call it.

In spite of our likely downward spiral into a world only slightly removed from that of Mike Judge's Idiocracy, there is a small tinge of hope in this decline: a retarded species has no need for nuance. It acts on a more basic level, eschewing equivocation for a more direct form of communication. Behold the words of Mr. Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, the president of Mike Judge's world, as he gives his own state of the union speech:

Shut up. Shit. I know shit's bad right now...with all that starvin' bullshit. And the dust storms. And we runnin' out of french fries and burrito coverings. But I got a solution.

[Machine-gun rounds]

That's what I thought! Now I understand everyone's shit's emotional right now, but listen up. I got a three-point plan to fix everything. Number one: we got this guy, Not Sure. Number two: he's got a higher IQ than any man alive! And number three: he's gonna fix everything. I give you my word as president. He'll fix the problems with all the dead crops. He's gonna make 'em grow again. And that ain't all.

[Singing] I give you my word. He's gonna fix the dust storms too. I give you my word. He's gonna fix the "ecomony." And he's so smart he's gonna do it all in one week...

When President Camacho speaks, you know exactly what he means.

In a Slate.com article from today entitled "Speech Therapy," Christopher Beam writes the following:

"Communications failure" is the phrase being used by the White House and assorted commentators to explain the collapse of health care reform and other parts of President Obama's agenda. According to this reasoning, Obama hasn't pursued the wrong goals. He has simply failed to articulate them. And tonight's State of the Union could somehow change that.

President Obama is quoted in the article concerning his failure to articulate: "What I haven't always been successful at doing is breaking through the noise and speaking directly to the American people in a way that during the campaign you could do."

Mr. Obama is definitely on to something there. Maybe he should take a cue from President Camacho.