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Saturday, October 31, 2009

What is Character?

12:29 AM | Posted by Marvelous | Edit Post




James Toback has just given us an incredible documentary on Mike Tyson, the youngest Heavyweight Champion to ever win the World Title. My fascination with Toback's other films, such as Two Girls and a Guy and Black and White, eventually grew into a fascination with Tyson, because Toback himself was fascinated with Tyson.

In the movie, Black and White, Tyson appears briefly, strongly contrasted by another one of Toback's favorite actors, Robert Downey Jr. It is an interesting scene between the two. Robert Downey Jr. plays a closeted homosexual and actually comes on to Tyson, who is playing himself. Tyson appears startled, afraid, and agitated by turns. Then his characteristic rage comes out, and you know he is not acting.

What is character?

There are some words in the English language that contain multitudes. And then there are some words that want to contain multitudes, but they cannot hold the weight of their meaning.

In the beginning of the documentary, Tyson is describing his relationship to Constantine "Cus" D'Amato, his first manager and trainer . . .

Tyson spent much of his early adolescence in juvenile penitentiaries. His family moved to Brownsville, NY from Brooklyn when he was ten years old, a neighborhood he describes as "gruesome" and "promiscuous". His mother died when he was sixteen years old, and Constantine D'Amato became Tyson's legal guardian.

D'Amato, in his late seventies, felt a deep affection for the young Tyson. In footage from the documentary, the older man says that the boxing prodigy gives him motivation to live. Tyson recalls his relationship with Cus:
I did everything he told me to, and I won. I won every championship at the amateur level--and I started believing in this old man . . .

I turned my whole life over to boxing. He brainwashed me so much. I was like his dog. If he told me to bite, I would bite.

It's like a father and son relationship even though he is my manager and trainer.

Cus trained me to be totally ferocious.

He spoke with me every night about discipline and character, and I knew that nobody--physically--was going to fuck with me again.
Tyson lived with the D'Amato family in a fourteen bedroom Victorian mansion in Catskill, NY. His entire focus was on becoming the youngest Heavyweight Champion of the world. He studied boxing. He practiced. He trained. Every night from the ages of 14 to 21, he watched fight films that dated back to the early days of boxing. D'Amato had a collection of them and the young Tyson would pore over the great fighters. He knew their every punch by heart.

A poignant moment in the documentary comes when Tyson is recalling what D'Amato used to tell him about the different fighters in history, and what made each of them great in their own way.
I have a great deal of respect for Cus--I believe everything he said. His word in boxing is Bible to me. When he described fighters, he talked about their good points. He talked about Jack Dempsy's ferocity, he talked about Rocky Marciano's will and dedication; when he discussed Muhammad Ali, he talked about character. He said that's the only reason why Ali is the best--because he had more character. I thought that was funny--I was a young kid. As I grew older, I realized what he meant.
Most definitions of the word "character" emphasize moral strength. But "moral strength" is only slightly less conceptually vague than the word "character". What does character really mean?

Character embraces the whole person, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. Character seeps into the physical person as well, blending fluidly with the emotional, becoming habits, tics, and what we call "characteristics".

Character is the person's root in this earth, their essence day to day, and over a lifetime.

There is nothing greater than character; only destiny. And a sage once pointed to the connection between character and destiny.

Let me be concrete now. Writing this essay about character, the one you are reading right now, was not a choice for me. For days, I will go without a single igniting flame in my mind, and then, I'll watch a movie or read a passage in a book or have a conversation with a stranger, and suddenly, I must write. There are ideas wildly ringing in my ears, connections and metaphors that were not there the day before.

Writing is my form of boxing. From my earliest memories of childhood, I was writing. My father disciplined me to read classical literature and write on a regular basis. I wrote ferociously through high school and college. There was this root of my personhood that needed to be expressed in writing.

Now, I pick up electricity in the world, in the things I read, in my experiences and relationships, I pick up the current of whatever happens to be rushing though my reality in a given moment, and I express those ideas for people to read, for myself to understand. This is what the Blog of Innocence is all about. It is about bending raw, open questions into language.

But I want to try to answer this question, "What is character?" Because I believe that some of us, like Mike Tyson, have enormous talent, skill, and intelligence. Remember D'Amato's words, "Each great fighter has something different; something that makes them great."

To answer this question, I hold up two icons of boxing, Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali as examples.

Mike Tyson reached the pinnacle of boxing fame before he was 21 years old. In art-world terms, he was the Basquiat, who I write about in another essay . . .

After this enormous staggering success--a result of Tyson's many years of rigid apprenticeship under Constantine D'Amato, a string of tragedies unfolded. The death of his father-figure and trainer, a divorce, a rape conviction.

Under the new circumstances of his life, Tyson could not be the same man, the same fighter. No reality is permanent; and Tyson's reality dramatically shifted into a complex web. His character was tested on a grand scale.

A boxing match provides an illuminating metaphor for spiritual fitness.

Literally, you must be healthy to fight; you must train hard; and prepare yourself.

Spiritually, the outcome of the fight depends on the strength of your character in a single moment of your life.

You may win the World Title, as Tyson did. You may win it again, and if you are lucky, another time too. People will venerate you and you will feel, as Tyson did, like you are on top of the world--

But for success to happen once or twice, for victory to occur, does not imply greater character. Character endures over time, and brings success and victory full-circle. And your greatest successes are always your future ones; because your wins keep getting bigger, more unfathomable.

But let's be honest, who can stay on top forever? Nobody can. Which is why those with the most character stand out from the crowd--and this is not the usual crowd--this is a crowd made up of Presidents, Olympic record breakers, and world champions of every stripe from chess to literature.

Lincoln. Mahatma Gandhi. Muhammad Ali. Nelson Mandella. We know them by heart, their stories are woven into our national histories.

In the world of boxing, Muhammad Ali was a three time World Heavyweight Champion, and "suffered only five losses (four decisions and one TKO by retirement from the bout) with no draws in his career, while amassing 56 wins (37 knockouts and 19 decisions)."(1)

Character.

D'Amato: "The only reason why Ali is the best--he had more character."

Now I think about my life and how quickly things change. States of emotion, my outlook, my thoughts. And, it seems, every day is different from the last one. Like Tyson, there is turmoil in my life, and I wonder if I can still fight like I once did.

How can I continue to fight?

How can I continue? This existence?

I'm not even talking about suicide. I'm talking about being unable to fight, unable to win anymore. You need character to win. You need character to fight every day, and then to do it again the next day.

We each have our struggles. We've all been on the razor's edge before . . .

But if I've learned anything from my past, it is that there is life after death. I may sink into despair because of the choices I make. I may be unable to enjoy the most basic things, sleeping, eating, loving . . .

All it takes is a series of unlucky events, like the events that destroyed Tyson's career, to knock one of us out of the ring--

But character is what lives through all of that. If the self dies a hundred times in one lifetime, if the self dies a thousand times, one's character grows with every death. It is the thread that cannot be broken.

And we remember the person by that thing which cannot die--even long after they are dead.

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Monday, October 19, 2009

The Man Without Qualities

8:37 AM | Posted by Marvelous | Edit Post

1. The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil

This book expanded my understanding of what a novel can do. As a writer, there has been no greater influence.

I've read it three times from beginning to end, and I return to passages regularly. The Man Without Qualities is a three volume work, left unfinished at the author's death. The serial chapters continually open up the novel to new possibilities and new story-lines. Musil calls this the "open architecture" of the book.

The titles of the chapters read as follows:
From which, remarkably enough, nothing develops

If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility

In a weak moment Ulrich acquires a new mistress

A chapter that may be skipped by anyone not particularly impressed by thinking as an occupation
The chapters are short, often digressive, and typically witty. The plot is less important. More important is the vivid characterization and the novelistic treatment of "history".

This reviewer sums up the novel quite nicely:
On the one hand, Musil offers a highly entertaining satirical portrait of Austria-Hungary right before the First World War. His detached hero Ulrich meets all kinds of bizarre people, who happen to be members of the ruling class of the country. Like a vivisecteur, Ulrich analyzes the philosophies and ideologies of his time. On the other hand, he dreams of a kind of new mysticism, an emotional purity that is opposed to the dross surrounding him; together with his sister he embarks on quest for 'the other state of being'.
The narrator of the Musil's opus, Ulrich, a mathematics professor with a bent for philosophy, has a charisma and intelligence that is hard to resist. He's the supreme objective observer and the supreme subjectivist at the same time. You feel as though you are listening in on the thoughts of the most brilliant man on earth.

Musil's motto was "Soul and Precision." This statement applies to life and art, and it implies the harmony and synthesis of the logical, analytical faculty of the mind, and the emotional, spiritual soul of the individual. "Soul and Precision" runs through the three volume work as a motif in the narrative and as a philosophy behind the writing about the writing.

While the work contains elements of satire, there is a real force of sincerity and earnestness about it. The narrator is not merely mocking the ruling class of Austria-Hungry, but also seriously trying to understand people's motives and eccentricities.

The world, according to Ulrich, may be absurd; but it is not worthless. There is still a mystery to be sought after, a spiritual reality. . .


Deep philosophical reflection is embedded within highly-visual, almost hallucinatory scenes. These scenes are filled with lively characters and charged by a kinetic, quasi-mystical language.

Here is an example from the chapter entitled, "Clarisse and Her Demons":
The next instant, Clarisse and Walter were off like two locomotives racing side by side. The piece they were playing came rushing at their eyes like flashing rails, vanished under the thundering engine, and spread out behind them as a ringing, resonant, marvelously present landscape. In the course of this ride these two people's separate feelings were compressed into a single entity; hearing, blood, muscles, were all swept along irresistibly by the same experience; shimmering, bending, curving walls of sound forced their bodies onto the same track, bent them as one, and expanded and contracted their chests in the same breath. In a fraction of a second, gaiety, sadness, anger, and fear, love and hatred, desire and satiety, passed through Walter and Clarisse. They became one, just as in a great panic hundreds of people who a moment before had been distinct in every way suddenly make the same flailing movements of flight, utter the same senseless screams, their gaping mouths and staring eyes the same, all swept backward and forward, left and right, by the same aimless force, howling, twitching, tangling, trembling. But this union did not have the same dull, overwhelming force as life itself, where this kind of thing does not happen so easily, although it blots out everything personal when it does. The anger, love, joy, gaiety, and sadness that Clarisse and Walter felt in their flight were not full emotions but little more than physical shells of feelings that had been worked up into a frenzy. They sat stiffly in a trance on their little stools, angry, in love, or sad, at nothing, with nothing, about nothing, or each of them at, with, about something else, thinking and meaning different things of their own; the dictate of music united them in the highest passion, yet at the same time it left them with something absent, as in the compulsive sleep of hypnosis.
It's clear from this passage that Robert Musil had a gift for conjuring the emotional states of human beings, and with his remarkable command of the language, he approaches metaphysical description, the territory between feeling and God (or spirit).

The translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike is the authoritative one, but I'd like to add that I first read a translation of The Man without Qualities by a translator who I no longer have the name of, but found the same, incandescent experience while reading--and in some cases--more profound. I wish I knew the name of this translator. It's been said that Musil translates well into English, but the original language is German, and there is probably a major gulf between the poetry of the original and the translated versions.

If a three volume work seems too daunting, you might want to check out Musil's first novel, Young Torless. This is an easier book to read, more compact and digestible.
This post is part of a series of posts on 25 Profound Works of Literary Genius.

Image Credit: Musil Illustration
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