Innocence Blog

I've been prompted this morning to wake up early and have my breakfast at a local bakery (Panera Bread). It's already the end of the week and I'm seized by that terrible feeling I could have gotten more accomplished. So I launch my morning in a final attempt to squeeze the juice to the last drop. At 9:30 a.m.--when I'm usually sitting at my computer and checking email in my boxer shorts--I'm at the library ready to work.

Last night I watched a clip on YouTube with my girlfriend. I'd seen this clip the night before but because it made me think I wanted to see it again. In this short video, Alan Watts, a British philosopher and student of comparative religion, asks the question, "Is it serious?"

By "it" he means the drama of human existence. And this is a question that has lurked in the back of my mind for some years now. I've wondered about the illusory nature of reality; I studied Buddhism for awhile. I've questioned my deepest struggles and asked whether they were basic or essential, or simply an involuntary creation of my emotions and my ego.

Ask my girlfriend, I am not an especially serious person, and I can even be downright nonsensical at times. I am however very goal-oriented and I take great pleasure in getting things accomplished. In addition, I'm a writer and it seems that writers have to prove themselves before anyone takes them "seriously". Which means, by extension, I have to take myself seriously.

Mr. Watts points out the distinction between work and play. Work tends to follow a linear path; we are working toward a certain end point, even if that end point is the beginning of more, perhaps different, work. In contrast, when we play we have no destination in mind, and the object of play is play itself.

Where does my rigid mentality toward life come from? Was I taught this attitude of seriousness? At times even my play feels effortful and self-conscious. In the last chapter, Autumn Unfolds, I talked about how nature unfolds rather than works to become the different seasons. The leaves fall without effort, not a moment too early, not a moment too late.

I've lost touch with my internal clock. It may be in sync with the seasons but I'm not in sync with it. The clock that I bow down to is the external one on my dashboard. I need to keep an eye on the hour so that everything gets done in a day.

Should there be a point to everything? Should there be a destination?

I've forgotten about the journey. The journey has completely slipped my mind.

Let me tell you a story. In my junior year of college, I dropped out of school. I was on drugs and my parents wanted to send me to rehab so I went to a fancy rehab center in Tuscon, Arizona. After twenty eight days in rehab, they said I wasn't done yet so I went to live in a half-way house in California.

While I was supposed to be getting clean, I was fantasizing about a journey. I wanted to run away from the halfway house and travel around the South West. It depressed me that I was stuck in a house full of ex-junkies and that my day was strictly regimented, drug classes in the morning, work in the afternoon, AA meetings at night. It angered me that I had to sweep the floor, cut the lawn, pull the weeds, and clean the toilets. There seemed to be no end to these menial jobs. My life had become all work and no play.

One afternoon I bought a bottle of whiskey and drank it in the parking lot behind the liquor store. They tested us for alcohol every week, and so I got caught. They asked me to leave the halfway house. Finally, I had the perfect excuse to go on my journey. Like Don Quixote, I set off to an unknown land. Instead of a skinny horse I took a battered Greyhound bus; instead of chasing windmills I went to Las Vegas.

During this erratic wandering, I didn't have a goal in mind. Without a destination or even a purpose for leading an existence other than to have adventures, I immersed myself in a sort of dreamworld. The people I met would enter into my Novel of Life and become instant characters.

I traveled from Las Vegas back to Tuscon and then I hitchhiked through Arizona, where I was picked up by strangers on the highway, and on some nights I slept in the desert. Looking back it seems there was more "play" during this time of my life than any other. My undisciplined mind exulted in breaking the rules of a serious life and "playing" with the limits of reality. Doctors and psychologists had a hard time talking to me because I turned everything into a performance. I also suffered from delusions of grandeur.

Today, almost ten years later, I find myself confronted with the opposite extreme. Too much work and not enough play. I am living the regime of the halfway house without the halfway house itself. My adolescent self understood something that not even my adult self can grasp. If somebody had played the Alan Watt's clip for me, I would have recognized the philosophy as my own. Back then, it was my job to undermine seriousness. I mocked authority figures who seemed to represent a culture of goal-oriented freaks.

While it's true I've become one of those goal-oriented freaks, I do understand that play is not simply a wild rampage. Play is more nuanced than I once thought in my adolescence. The drama of existence may not be serious, but on the other hand, it is also no joke. Therein lies the paradox.

Let me describe what I see in front of me:

the Sunday edition of the NYTimes, Tricycle (a Buddhist magazine), a book of poetry by Emily Dickinson, The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang, The Energy of Delusion by Viktor Shklovsky;

and underneath the coffee table, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, and Tom Jones by Henry Fielding.

I am reading all of these books at the same (or sections of them)--in addition to the newspaper and magazine.

Lin Yutang talks about the "histrionic instinct". I have quoted extensively from his book in the previous post. He talks about our human drive to perform for others. He talks about how we are hardwired for the approval of an audience. Let me quote him once again:

"Consciously or unconsciously, we are all actors in this life playing to the audience in a part and style approved by them."

Right now I am blogging. There has been a recent explosion in blogging. The Internet is a suspended audience. You know people are watching; you just don't know how many or who these people are. The audience becomes more elusive. But it is only the promise of someone watching that we need. A virtual audience will do just fine.

In Las Vegas, eight years ago, I had an experience.

I became an actor in my own life. Was I imagining things? I deeply believed that my actions were central to the world. I adopted a persona based on these beliefs.

In adolescent psychology, this is called "imaginary audience." Another characteristic of adolescent egocentricism is the "personal fable". Professor Boughner of Rodgers State University writes: "adolescents imagine their own lives as mythical or heroic" and "they see themselves destined for fame or fortune".

These ideas seem closely related to what Lin Yutang calls the "histrionic instinct".

Eight years after my experience in Las Vegas, I set out to write my history. You can call this history my "personal fable".

The novel is called Lethe Bashar's Novel of Life.

Lethe Bashar is me eight years before, in Las Vegas. What defines Lethe's character is the "histrionic instinct".

My adolescence was a dream. I was under the spell of my own play-acting. I created a persona to feel important, to feel unique. (Could I be doing the same thing now? Writing the novel?)

I am writing the novel to understand the character and the dream. And to know the spell has truly ended.

Can the actor awaken from her performance at the end of the day?

The theater lights have turned off, the audience has gone home. The actor is still up on stage.

At a certain point, the role the actor plays can become self-destructive. The imagination fuels her sense of power as well as her sense of defeat. According to adolescent psychology, the actor thinks that she is invincible. Imagination becomes dangerous, a weapon. There are consequences for incessant dreaming. Sometimes this is called "idealism".

I compare my alter ego, Lethe Bashar, to Don Quixote. Lethe Bashar takes drugs and acts out an imaginary role as poet/writer. Don Quixote reads too many books and acts out an imaginary role as knight errant. Both go on journeys. They leave their homes.

The novel by Cervantes is a violent novel. It is funny, but it is also violent. Nabokov writes, "Both parts of Don Quixote form a veritable encyclopedia of cruelty. From that viewpoint it is one of the most bitter and barbarous books ever penned. And its cruelty is artistic."

What I have described to you is adolescent psychology. But couldn't we say this is adult psychology as well?

Lin Yutang writes, "The only objection is that the actor may replace the man and take entire possession of him."

The actor degenerates into a fool, a nutcase, like Don Quixote. We have seen many of these characters on reality television, on American Idol.

The audience laughs instead of cries. And yet somewhere inside we can relate to this foolishness. We empathize with Don Quixote.

There are many books at my house. Gazing at my library solidifies my sense of self. I surround myself with books, extensions of myself.

If I am an actor, books are my props. At the beginning of this essay I described to you "the set".

You are my audience right now. Your applause strengthens my purpose.

I cannot see the writer or the artist. I can only ruthlessly act out his needs and desires. The role is my destiny and my pre-destiny.

Destiny gets created somewhere.

Lin Yutang says that beyond the fear of God and the fear of death is the fear of one's neighbors.

In other words, society.

The audience is society. A child's first society is her mother and father.

I first started reading classical literature to my father when I was in middle school.

I hated it.

But he would make me go downstairs and sit with him on the couch. We would read for one hour. He had a collection of leather bound books that arrived in the mail each month.

The books literally cracked open they were so new. Each new edition had a frontispiece portrait of the author. The manila pages had illustrations. Under a block of letters that read, "PUBLISHED EXPRESSLY FOR THE PERSONAL LIBRARY OF," my father signed his name.

I couldn't understand what I was reading and that's why I despised reading with my father. It felt like a cruel joke.

For five years I read with my father almost every night.

Lin Yutang says the actor is seeking approval of the audience. The audience is society.

I really believe in my role as a writer. I don't know who I would "act out" instead. It's not easy to pick up another role.

We become who we are through sedimentation. Years of repetition. We work with the old drafts constantly, rewriting the ego. The future seems to hang on the success or failure of a single part.

I omitted the first line of this essay. I was making revisions. I will include that line here:

"I'm making discoveries about myself that are unsettling."

The unsettling part of a dream is not the dream itself, but discovering the dream is unreal.

Can I escape my role as a writer? Do I even want to?


CRA 5-28-08

I return to my initial question: the Sorrowful Knight's object. He is at war with Freud's reality principle, which accepts the necessity of dying. But he is neither a fool nor a madman, and his vision is always at least double: he sees what we see, yet he sees something else also, a possible glory that he describes to appropriate or at least to share. Unamuno names this transcendence as literary fame, the immortality of Cervantes and Shakespeare. Certainly that is part of the Knight's quest; much of Part II turns upon his and Sancho's delightful apprehension that their adventures in Part I are recognized everywhere. Perhaps Unamuno underestimated the complexities involved in so grand a disruption in the aesthetics of representation. Hamlet again is the best analogue: from the entrance of the players in Act II through the closure of the performance of The Mousetrap in Act III all the rules of normative representation are tossed away and everything is theatricality. Part II of Don Quixote is similarly and bewilderingly advanced, since the Knight, Sancho, and everyone they encounter are acutely conscious that fiction has disrupted the order of reality.

. . .

The aesthetic wonder is that this enormity (DQ as a "veritable encylopedia of cruelty"--Nabokov) fades when we stand back from the huge book and ponder its shape and endless range of meaning. No critic's account of Cervantes' masterpiece agrees with, or even resembles, any other critic's impressions. Don Quixote is a mirror held up not to nature, but to the reader. How can this bashed and mocked knight be, as he is, a universal paradigm?

From Harold Bloom's Introduction to Don Quixote
(bold mine)