Indirect Communication: La Vie Folle

What a flurry this week has been! The academic calendar is now in full swing and my intellectual and creative energies have been fluctuating back and forth between the extremes of total lethargy and mind-blowing madness, though these factors ultimately have more to do with the schedule imposed from without rather than the mind housed within. For the most part, fortunately, the highs have fallen at appropriate places and the lulls during times I could rest, at least more or less. It does not help matters that the courses I teach are on different schedules or that no single day in my week starts and ends at the same time or involves the same things. The element my week this week has most lacked, however, is inner quietness; busyness is a known spiritual killer, and I fear that in spite of our thoughts in the last issue, we are in for a more cerebral journey today: one has to work with what one has, I suppose, and leave the results in more capable hands. I wish especially to thank Karen for her help in proofreading and offering suggestions this week, my own mind splintered in a thousand directions.

Of the two classes I teach this semester, on Wednesday the second class read Jeremy Rifkin’s short essay “Biotech Century: Playing Ecological Roulette with Mother Nature’s Designs” published in The Presence of Others; the other class will be reading it in another week. Rifkin is the author of seventeen books, most of them dealing with the environment, economics, and marketing and global trends with bestseller titles ranging from the The Biotech Century (1998) around which the aforementioned essay revolves, The Age of Access (2000), The Hydrogen Economy (2002), The End of Work (1995, revised 2004), and the recent The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream. Rifkin has an impressive site, and though the streaming videos are only of low MPEG quality (and thus very grainy)—and while they are effectively informericials—nevertheless, some sense of his lectures can be gained by streaming the longer of the two videos found under his picture. Many of these works revolve around the changing world in which we live. A brief history should help frame some of these considerations.

Obvious change could be seen with the advent of the Industrial Age, characterized by coal, steel, and steam; the locomotive that emerged transformed the nineteenth century. Electricity in turn revolutionized the first part of the twentieth, the computer the latter half, and the Internet continues to affect the world with its decentralized structure—its very concept—in which billions of persons are interconnected. Marketing itself has taken notice, dealing less with goods and more with services in part because it is now freed to do so and in part because of the new Internet-age concepts: even companies with goods now increasingly favor and develop networking models based around decentralized hubs. For a good many people, all this increase in efficiency is leading to something like, to borrow Rifkin’s title, “the end of work,” at least as we have known it. There are more and more people with less and less survival-related work to do. This change has not occurred without its consequences, however. What are we to do with ourselves in such a world? Rifkin speaks of the American dream of “hard work plus perseverance equals financial success,” suggesting that the American ethos has been “live to work.” However, he claims that the more sensible Europeans “work to live” and enjoy better lifestyle standards in many ways because they focus more on quality of life (the subject of his most recent book).

These observations are indeed thought-provoking, but I am tempted to problematize even this apparent solution. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, yes, but what of an excess of play with no real need to work? What happens when the majority of jobs seem to have little ties to any kind of necessity? There is a sense in which spiritual poverty and ennui can be an outgrowth of excess; when all one ever does it sit on one’s hands (rather than momentarily resting), purpose and meaning can so easily become nebulous concepts. One could correctly argue, of course, that there is still much productive work, especially on a spiritual level, to be done in the world; perhaps even more of it to be done as times change. And perhaps that is Rifkin’s point: Americans need to take their cues from Europeans in examining just what exactly a high quality of life entails—really entails, just as Europeans, as he argues, need the American dream with its emphasis on personal resolve and accountability to temper and strengthen it. Rifkin seeks nothing short of a global dream, able to be shared by the entire world. The idea alone is sobering.

At the same time that I have been presented with—and have been presenting—these at-times startling ideas of our changing world and some of their possible implications, I have also been reading Leo Tolstoy’s classic War and Peace. Added to the week’s influx of ideas, the Philosophy Club presented Camus’ essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” followed by Professor Emeritus Dr. William Brown’s commentary and audience interaction. And now, I am just walking through the door this evening after being to a concert at the local hall of performing arts featuring traditional Chinese music performed by a group of first-rate musicians. (As most of you know, I am an aficionado of world music, inept in knowledge perhaps but not lacking in enthusiam.) Let’s see if we can make any sense of these seemingly disparate sources, hopefully arriving at some kind of insight or awareness in the process.

The World Wars of the first half of the twentieth century were ugly. So too were the Napoleonic wars that form the backdrop of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Certainly war has always been a part of human society; from the earliest recorded record of human events we see clashes between peoples and entire cultures being blotted from the pages of history. But cultures and societies have not remained static, continuing to grow, flourish, and battle one another with increasing ferocity. At the time of the Russian conflicts with Napoleon, record numbers of men lay slain: in fact, apparently more men perished in these battles than died in the Vietnam War in our own century. However, the world was not prepared for what was to happen next with World War I, World War II effectively an outgrowth and extension of the first.

Americans were relatively unaffected by the events, an ocean separating them from the heart of the conflict; Americans joined late and if anything got a boost in economy and ego. That was not true, however, for many of the Europeans, Germany and France being among the most affected. Now if we consider France for a moment, the Catholic Church had been the central organizing structure for centuries. By the time of Napoleon, French intellectuals were increasingly turning away from Christianity and for many atheism became something of a fashion statement. If we consider that a young lad was born during the Napoleonic conflicts and was celebrating his sixth birthday when they reached their culmination, we can further understand something of the stage being set. This young man’s name was Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882), and his conceptions of the world, combined with the growing sense of foment and change of the Industrial Revolution, together with social contract theories of government and the Protestant Reformation, left the European world spinning, the familiar soil beneath their feet slipping away.

We have spoken of France: when the World Wars came, God had already been emptied from the skies for many intellectuals. Now hell on earth broke out in proportions never before seen, whatever soil remaining underfoot now fully crumbling away. Everything France held dear and valuable, the centuries and centuries of Catholic influence: for a great many, all gone with nothing to takes it place. The world was absurd; the very things that had furnished it stability and meaning for so many years were now gone, gone, gone.

A Frenchman known as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) made a name for himself by articulating a way of dealing with this meaningless universe; he dusted off ideas proposed from, among other persons, the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard who preceded him by half a century (1813–1855), dying fifty years before Sartre was born. Yet whereas Kierkegaard was a passionate believer, Sartre was not: like a France emptied of the Catholic influence, Kierkegaard’s philosophy was emptied of its God. These ideas we know today under the heading of existentialism: a philosophy in which rugged individualism is prized and a man carves his way in the world with a stiff upper lip and offers no apologies for anything he does: in a world in which man is “condemned to be free” and every action, including the absence of action and the refusal to choose, is a choice. Mankind is free whether he likes it or not, always and forever free: he has no choice but to choose. He must choose, he must choose, he must choose, every day in every way he must choose and thus his freedom itself keeps him in fetters. He must make a tabernacle of his choices if he is to make a tabernacle for himself at all.

And when young Sartre was only eight, another man was born—none other than Albert Camus (1913–1960)—an Algerian whose second home was France. Many call Camus an existentialist, and though the two men knew of one another and read one another’s work, he did not propose a philosophy quite like that of Sartre’s rugged individualism. Instead, he highlighted the absurdity of life. For what is a man’s life? He is born into a world in which there is no god and no obvious meaning. His life consists of dull routines, he grows old, and then he dies and is forgotten. Yet within every human being lurks a heartfelt need for meaning and purpose. What purpose can a man find when all that he has held dear is taken from him, not least of which the faith of his ancestors? What meaning can he find in such a world, what purpose? This question kept Camus occupied until his untimely death in a car accident in 1960. It is often said that what Camus took to be the central inquiry of philosophy was not metaphysical; in actual fact, it was profoundly so. For Camus, the central question of philosophy was to be or not to be: for Camus, the central question was, literally, a question of suicide. Perhaps for this reason, biographers have been known to highlight the fact that the car accident was not self-inflicted. For what do we live for in a world without answers or meaning, a sky emptied of its God, an earth teeming in rivers of red, the blood of its children?

Inspired by the Greek myth of Sisyphus, Camus wrote both The Myth of Sisyphus and an essay by the same title; it was this essay that we read Thursday evening. The various versions of the myth are recounted in the Wikipedia entry, but the short of it is that Sisyphus was a mortal man known for his craftiness, and when he foiled the gods by refusing to return to the underworld after being granted a temporary leave of absence, he was punished for his impudence by being condemned forever to roll a boulder up a mountainside, only for it to roll back down again, over and over, forever and ever. At least as Camus tells the story, the gods believed that the absurdity of this punishment would drive Sisyphus mad. However, Camus pictures Sisyphus, at the point in which he has climbed back down the mountain and is prepared to again roll the boulder back up, as being happy. Why is he happy? Because he has chosen to embrace the absurdity and thus it is no longer absurd. And what kind of happiness? Neither I, nor any of the guests, nor the Philosophy Club could answer that question, though we agreed that it must have some sense to it of inner character, acceptance, strength, resolve, even perhaps tranquility. Sisyphus looked his fate full in the face and accepted it and in facing his fate head-on, he discovered some kind of happiness:

Camus went on to write The Stranger, a novel in which one of the least remarkable among persons is the anti-hero: a man named Meursault. He is indifferent to his girlfriend, he is indifferent to his best friend, his life is not outstanding or exemplary in any way. Each day he wakes up and goes to work, he takes lunch at the regular time: he appears indifferent to all things around him; even his mother’s death is met with indifference. Then one day he murders an Arab man and is put on trial in which he again expresses indifference. Life in prison is not much fun, but he uses his time to recall everything in his life prior. Required to see a priest, he rejects what the priest says, refusing to take on a belief in God as a crutch. Instead, he rejects both the priest and his God, grabbing the former by his clerical collar:

Like Sisyphus, when Meursault abuses the priest, he sees with utter clarity the absurdity of it all and is paradoxically thus enabled for the first time to find happiness as well by embracing the absurdity of his life of drudgery. It took the priest to act as a foil, to sharpen and concentrate the utter absurdity of his life by rate of the contrast painted: he knows goodness by knowing evil. And having seen his life in contrast to what the priest represents, he believes he sees himself and his reality clearly. Like Sisyphus, his consciousness is what makes his fate tragic, yet his consciousness is also what enables him to be the tragic hero; his consciousness is at once boon and bane, the blade that slices him and the blade by which he slices.

As we gaze at the sheer bleakness of these images, we are also prompted, almost involuntarily, to supply them with meaning, to fill in the empty spaces. Kierkegaard, whose philosophy inspired Sartre at least in part, spoke often of “indirect communication.” In effect, this meant for Kierkegaard painting a picture on the face of a puzzle for which the only possible solution was Christ, and then, leaving the God-shaped piece the only one absent, made conspicuous by its absence, forcing the reader to fill in the missing space by psychological necessity.

In a like manner—at least the kinds united in the Western ethos—atheism and theism are mirror image answers to the same theological question. There is a real sense in which the path chosen by Meursault is a spiritual pursuit in which the dark and ugly things of life are first accepted and then transcended. And there is also a sense in which the commonality of all human beings shows through, for no matter the theological frameworks or their opposites, there is still a sense of struggle and survival and a universal quest for meaning culminating in a final acceptance of the inevitable. Neither the atheist nor the theist knows what, if anything, lies beyond, though both are united in their quest for purpose and meaning. If either has given even half a thought to life, the questions of heartache, sorrow, and apparent meaningless and futility have to be acknowledged and dealt with in their own way. In this sense, all people are children of God, sons and daughters united by a common lot. It should not surprise us then to learn that though Camus never did embrace the God of Christianity, his later works showed clear signs of being influenced by Christian themes and Christian virtues. It is as though “The Myth of Sisyphus,” the book by the same name, and The Stranger presented one possibility of finding meaning in an absurd life and his later works hinted that it was not perhaps the best one at that: perhaps, at the very least, brotherly love and kindness are better alternatives to creating—and finding—meaning.

By contrast, War and Peace is of course written by a Russian who had long been gravitating toward Christianity and who would soon enough fully embrace the faith. It contains scenes of both war and peace, life and death. It spends a great deal of time in the chamber rooms and mansions of the nobility, but manages to bring in all classes of persons from the rough soldiers to the unruly peasants. A great many of its characters are on a quest for meaning, and at least three of its central characters are in varying stages of spiritual journeys: Princess Mary is a devout believer who takes her faith so seriously as to seem naive to a watching, cynical world who can find no sense in her actions: though her features are plain, she has an inner spiritual beauty that only those with eyes to see may discern, though her eyes and the depths within leave an impression on most everyone. Her brother, Prince Andrew, adopting the atheism of their father, achieves some kind of spiritual awakening through the different events of his life, and namely his close encounters with life and death. His friend and perhaps the most central character of all, Pierre Bezukhov, adopts the fashionable atheism of his class but first becomes awakened to the possibility of God after conversing with a Freemason. In the sections I finished this week, Pierre finds his greatest happiness and sense of meaning and purpose when he is captured by the French and lives a life of privation, his rations meager and marching with no shoes in the bitter Russian winter. Though he is a gentleman—a member of the landed aristocracy, part of the gentry class—he finds his truest happiness living this life that resembles that of a peasant; in fact, his “teacher” during this time is a peasant named Platon Karataev whose spirit of life totally captivates Pierre. That should not surprise us, for Tolstoy himself saw in the Russian peasants the heart and the soul of Russia, and like much of Russian literature, the idea is that true spirituality is forged in the fires not only of affliction, but of suffering. Here too is an embracing of life’s conditions on its own terms and a willingness—whether willed or not—to be molded and shaped by it.

There is much more that could be said regarding War and Peace—it is a remarkable novel in many ways, even if it does beat Tolstoy’s theory that no man controls history into the ground; he is greatly opposed to the so-called “one-man theory” of history. The first nine hundred times one reads these extended polemics in his prose they are pleasant enough, but by the nine-hundredth-and-ninth time, one is ready to grab Tolstoy by the throat and shake him vigorously. However, these passages seem a small sin easily enough forgiven, especially when you consider the otherwise brilliance of the two-thousand-some-odd-page novel and the fact that unless you are reading it for a graduate-level English course, you are always free to skip over those passages that most offend by excess of zeal.

Whatever else we might say of War and Peace, Pierre’s privation—the hardship and suffering of a man who previously did not ever have to raise so much as a finger to do a bit of meaningful work—seems apropos to the world Rifkin reminds us at the beginning of the newsletter. Like Pierre, a great many people in our own day do not have to do any obviously productive work. Almost all of us, by rate of contrast to generations gone by, live lives of relative opulence and ease. While this admission may hardly be cause for self-flagellation, it carries with it its own liabilities. All men everywhere are in search of purpose and meaning: even the apparent cynic would be silenced if it were not for this fact, for what is cynicism if not disillusioned idealism? The cynic is the one who secretly thinks the world ought to be a better place, and finding that it is not to his liking, rains down torrents of bitterness and criticism. The cynic feels entitled, yet what gives him this idea? It is his own yearning for purpose and meaning. Feeling emptied of the very things he seeks, rather than lighting a candle, he curses the darkness. He may have no steel and flint himself, but perhaps if he complains loudly enough and bitterly enough, the darkness will wearily give way and light will again shine. Even the cynic longs for meaning: perhaps especially the cynic of all persons is haunted by its apparent absence.

The cynic is in all of us to some degree, yet the cynic is the extreme. The mass of men, as Thoreau writes, lead lives of quiet desperation. Most of us are more like Pierre: we can do most anything we want, our bellies are full, we travel freely and without hindrance. We search for meaning, picking up first this thing and then that, never fully dedicated to anything. As the world continues to change, the standard of living is increasing for most everyone. But now that we no longer have to spend all of our time on the lower rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy, what are we to do with ourselves? Did the poor peoples of the land know something we did not; is it possible that in no longer being required to participate in the basic survival needs of ourselves and our societies, we have likewise lost a sense of perspective of how and where the higher needs should fit? What did the ancients know that we do not, if anything? And Sisyphus and Meursault, however true to Western life, are pathetic characters, leading lives in which the best life has to offer is one-dimensional. These and other things were going through my mind as I listened this evening to the incredible performances of Chinese traditional music. There were no words to the melodies, save the song at the end, and even then, the Chinese words became just another instrument to my untrained ear. Yet I could fancy, even if I fail miserably in capturing it in words, that I understood something of these questions standing there this evening.

All week long, in fact, I have been listening to ethnic music in far larger doses than usual, after finding and adding Calabash Music and their video channel Brightcove to my already nearly constant companion sky.fm. (Admittedly, many of the mainly urban videos on Brightcove are anything but traditional, yet how can one resist the charm of Zuco 103’s video Na Manguera or the kitschy Cambodian Pop of Dengue Fever’s Sni Bong? Colorful is not quite the word for it!) The concert, then, was a continuation of a week immersed in the music of many cultures, adding the dimensions of sight and real-world ambience, not to mention a certain spirit only fully communicable in live performances that even the best studio sessions only approximate. I suspect such things have to do with the chemistry of performer and audience, locked together in intimate embrace, a session of lovemaking never again repeatable in exactly the same way, for the variables will never again fall exactly as they did on that night.

The first part of the concert featured MSU students who have been learning to play Chinese traditional instruments for about a month. These performances were enjoyable, but stripped down, a bit ragged in places, and largely restricted to simpler pieces that would be comparable to folk songs. They were what they were and nothing more needs to be said of the matter. By contrast, the Chinese maestros who had been training them throughout the course of the previous month were nothing short of superb, their pieces long and flowing and finely nuanced, seeming extensions of that peculiar inner quality so characteristic of many Asians. Unlike the intentional pastiche of the Na Manguera video, the music was absolutely beautiful and more than a few persons in the audience wiped hastily away an unbidden tear, hoping no one noticed. For many in the audience, it was probably the first real peace they had felt in a very long time. I thought of happiness—the happiness of Camus’ Sisyphus and Meursault—and I was struck. These pieces were sad and haunting, many of them, and yet as I have so often noticed before, their beauty was healing, cleansing, touching and awakening parts of the soul long since dormant. Why, surrounded by such sad sounds, with tears coursing down one’s cheeks, does one say: “I am, for the first time in a very long time, divinely happy”? Call it happiness, call it what you wish, but there is something wholesome and deeply impacting about the experience.

Further reflection as I listened brought to mind different cultural stereotypes we hold, yet stereotypes that appear to have a strong basis in fact. These performers with their heads of gorgeous black hair, so black that it shone almost blue with health, and thick! exemplified a certain spirit that we tend to identify with the Chinese, at least traditionally before the concrete and steel of the Western world refurbished the natural landscape. There is an inherent dignity in this stereotype, a level of polite reserve and decorum partly borne out of centuries of Confucian philosophy and an association and identification with nature borne of centuries of Taoist teaching. I thought also of wisdom: we tend to think of Asian peoples as wise in the deep things of life. And perhaps for the first time I was most powerfully struck as the pieces were introduced, for many were what might be called ancient tone poems, capturing the beauty of the moonlight reflected in the trickling waters or through the branches of a plum tree. It was as though, in some way, they had managed to capture something of the spirit of nature—of humanity living side by side with the untamed and free and paying it due deference and respect, indeed united with it and a part of it—for we ourselves are part of the natural world no matter how much our technology might separate us from the land. I thought of my own emotions and how I do not understand them much of the time, of how there really is no answer to sadness and sorrow exactly except to endure it as best as one can, passing through it to the other side, aware that in some sense it renders transformations that bring beauty and depth, yet always to be endured, never pleasant, and borne with patience if possible and in any case borne.

I was further struck as I considered African music, which seems continents removed. As a rule, it is very happy music, unbridled, unfettered. Of all the peoples of earth, the Africans alone seem to best embody sheer and utter joy in their music without any discernable sorrow beneath. Yet their lives have traditionally been no less hard, privation as much a rule and necessity for them as for any other and perhaps more. But then I thought of Tolstoy, not so much in terms of the Russian spirit (though historic Russia also has her proud people with their own unique cultural spirit), but in terms of Pierre finding his greatest happiness—actual joy—in peasant conditions. I think now of hearing my mother speak of the cruise she and my father recently took, among other places, to Cozumel and Belize and the bus driver who told the visitors temporarily docked that they, the people of the Caribbean Sea, were a poor but happy people. And I think (now that I am thinking), of Mexican families I have seen with my own eyes, dirt poor, plagued with problems of alcohol, drugs, and other vices, and yet for all of that, happy people, family people, people who seem to have learned something from having nothing, quick to laugh, quick to give and forgive, and quick to treat the stranger like royalty, like the very Son of God.

By comparison, Camus’ writings seem almost narcissistic, yet everyone has to start somewhere, and it seems to me that in his own way, he too has his finger on the same pulse, he just had a different medium by which he expressed his ideas, a medium perhaps impoverished by the relative opulence from which it grew. What does all this mean as we enter into a new era in which work as we know is increasingly becoming eliminated, in which the corporate model is becoming decentralized and networked, and in which the economy is now a global one? I leave those questions unanswered. But it seems to me that each voice, though sounding a different note, is nevertheless sounding in unison, either by what it says or by what it leaves unsaid. None of us tells the complete story, but put us all together into an orchestra of the earth, and the sad, somber notes will complement the brassy and bright and in the composite picture, the glory of God will be revealed.

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