Tag: memoir

Still Crazy After All These Years

Two related questions have nagged at me during one of those inescapably bad weeks.  To wit:  1) Does an individual life have any pattern, theme, or meaningful narrative?  2) Does anyone ever really change their basic nature?  These are eternal questions, posed by thinkers from Saint Paul to Pogo.  I ask myself these things as I inexplicably continue to make the same kind of mistakes I have always made.  Has living a long time taught me nothing?  Sometimes it seems so.

Our culture has a penchant for Bildungsromans, stories about the coming of age of young people. These youngsters (usually lads) go through scrapes and adventures and learn lessons along the way.  One might think of David Copperfield or Catcher in the Rye in this regard.  But these books often end when the protagonists are young adults (and usually with marriage if the character is a young woman), and I doubt anyone that young has ever learned anything really important (look around).

Then there are the less common Vollendungsromans, tales of the coming of old age and death.  Again, lessons are learned, the principal one being how to die.  One might think of Robinson’s Gideon or Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent.  The point of all these life stories – young or old – seems to be that life has some kind of meaningful narrative and we discern patterns and “better ways” as we gain years and experience.  And yet in my old age, I – like Saint Paul – sometimes wonder why “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15).   There are certainly times when, at three in the morning, I cannot help but think that my life is not a meaningful narrative, but simply a vicious rerun of my most egregious character traits.  (As I said, it has been a bad week.)

One person who pondered the nature of the life story was Arthur Schopenhauer.  He authored an essay with the weighty title: “Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual.”  (Maybe it sounds more interesting in German.)  It is, nevertheless, a fascinating piece of work.

Schopenhauer starts out by admitting that almost everyone believes that:

…the course of an individual’s life, however confused it appears to be, is a compete whole, in harmony with itself and having a definite tendency and didactic meaning, as profoundly conceived as is the finest epic.

He finds this true in almost all cultures.  In some societies, this “course of life” is ascribed to fate or providence; in others, it is seen as the inevitable result of maturation, education, and goal setting.  But, in the end, Schopenhauer thinks that it is mainly a matter of inborn character:

The systematic arrangement, here mentioned, in the life of everyone can be explained partly from the immutability and rigid consistency of the inborn character which invariably brings a man back on to the same track.

What is not determined by character is determined by outside events – which then interact with character.  Some 2,500 years ago, Heraclitus observed that “character is destiny.”  Schopenhauer seems to agree.

As a person who keeps a journal and believes writing one’s life “story” is therapeutic, I find this unsettling to think about.  Maybe Schopenhauer was right.  What, perhaps, we are trying to discover in our life review, are simply those permanent traits of character which make us keep playing the same scenes over and over again.  Rather than living out a comprehensive life plan, these traits might simply keep us, as Paul Simon puts it, “still crazy after all these years.”

Or maybe I’m wrong.  Ask me again when things in my life are going better.

Meanwhile, I also drafted a short story on this subject, provisionally entitled “Life Stories.”  Don’t take my chatter too seriously – I am as capable as the next person of seeing my life as an ongoing epic (or soap opera).

Empty Boats, Mark Salzman, and Life Without Narrative

I have been reading various novels and memoirs by Mark Salzman – all of which I recommend highly.  But the one that has stayed with me longest is his last book, The Man in the Empty Boat, about a devastating year in Salzman’s life and the epiphany that he experienced at the end of it – with the help of a flatulent dog.

Our author explains the Zen parable of the empty boat, which I had remembered from a dharma talk long ago.  It is worth reprinting here:

If a man is crossing a river
And an empty boat collides with his own skiff,
Even though he be a bad-tempered man
He will not become very angry.
But if he sees a man in the boat,
He will shout at him to steer clear.
If the shout is not heard, he will shout again,
And yet again, and begin cursing.
And all because there is somebody in the boat.
Yet if the boat were empty.
He would not be shouting, and not angry.

If you can empty your own boat
Crossing the river of the world,
No one will oppose you,
No one will seek to harm you. – Chuang Tzu

It is a story worth thinking about, but like most wisdom it probably cannot be internalized unless it is experienced. After a memoir of serious life experiences (births, deaths, success, and failure) – in which our author exposes a fantastic ability to describe such experiences, but a limited capacity for coping with them – Mark Salzman gives us his epiphany as he realizes that his dog is not releasing gas to annoy him, but just because he is… a dog.   The author shares his experience of realizing that all dogs are just dogs, and that all the boats are empty:

My normal sense of being the author of my life-narrative gave way and was replaced by a sense that I was the audience for it.  The author, I felt, had to be the cosmos as a whole, the vast matrix of who knows what and where and why, of which human consciousness is one part.  From that point of view, I could no longer believe that we determine what happens to us or choose who to be; we find out what happens to us.  We do what we must as we fall through time, which means – this is the feel-good part again – that we are doing the best we can, always. (146)

And, perhaps, we should treat everyone else as if they are doing the best they can.  We need to cope with life, of course, but the key lesson is that there is nothing/nobody to get angry at.  The boat is empty. Salzman laughingly calls himself a futilitarian. The interesting thing is that the author’s wife (this is a memoir, remember) refuses to let him teach their daughters about his epiphany – he can’t “deny the existence of human freedom and responsibility in front of the girls until they’ve finished high school.”  Hah!

And then there is this: Salzman’s life-narrative gave way.  Human beings love narrative – when there seems to be no narrative in a situation, we create it.  I have written about this before (insert title), but it seems that old people particularly like stories, narrative – they like to construct stories for their lives in retrospect.  We want it to make sense, and we especially want a happy ending.  Did fairy tales teach us to expect a happy ending?  Because, surely life did not.

So, we look for the happy ending in books, be it novels, spiritual guides, or the latest how-to-fix-your-life from the best seller list.  Salzman says in another wonderful book (The Laughing Sutra), “Enlightenment cannot be found in books.  It must be experienced directly!”  Ironically, of course, he say this in a book.  But for those of us who may have spent our lives trying to find answers in books, the likelihood that this is true hits hard.

Salzman wrote a number of books before he wrote The Empty Boat in 2012 and has published nothing since.  He must be in his sixties now – did he indeed find the answer and give up writing books?  I want to know if his epiphany stuck – I want to know if any epiphanies survive in the face of what life dishes out.   Where are you Mark Salzman?  You might not have all the answers, but you give me something to think about!

Does Life Have a Plot?

The title of this blog – “When I Come to Be Old” – comes from a list of resolutions that Jonathan Swift compiled as a young man about how he would behave in his old age. It is a litany of the things he finds annoying about the older people around him and includes the reminder not to “tell the same story over and over.”  We old people tend to tell stories to others and to ourselves.  We are trying to make sense of our lives.  Boring those around us with repetitive stories is definitely to be avoided, but is trying to make stories out of our lives a good thing or a bad thing?

We want to make sense of things.  We want to believe that things happen for a reason.  Whole religions are built out of this.  When we wonder why “the wicked prosper,” Christianity moves the end of the story to eternal life.  Buddhism and Hinduism and other religions of karma and reincarnation assure us that it all works itself out over many lifetimes. Whether we believe this or not, however, we want things to make sense now.  We want to be able to read the stories of our lives to a satisfying conclusion.  So we make the past into a story.

Not everyone thinks this is a good idea.  The philosopher Galen Strawson thinks that our culture encourages people to construct continuous narratives of their lives over time, while life might be better understood as “episodic.”  Things happen and then other things happen.  Lives do not necessarily make sense.  Freud gave us the idea that everything was rooted in our childhoods; if we could just follow the thread we would understand.  Maybe.  But there are random events like illnesses and weather and which roommate you were paired with as a college freshman.

In Swift’s time, it was common to talk about life in seven years segments.  Swift’s mentor, Sir William Temple (one of the old men Swift is talking about in his resolutions no doubt), wrote that “mind and his thoughts change every seven years, as well as his strength and his features.”  The seventh year (7,14, 21…63, 70) was seen as “climacterical” and having significance as a turning point.  (Climacteric is now a term we use synonymously with menopause, but that is just one kind of change.)  This theory assumes definite differences between your old self and your new self.  And surely, none of us can understand all of the decisions we made forty or fifty years ago.  And yet we try to connect the dots.

But life is not entirely in our control (another lesson we might not learn until old age), and bad things happen to good people for no apparent reason – and vice versa. The Bible contains the most significant story of a man whose life does not make sense – Job.  The last chapter of the Book of Job (where he gets new riches and new children) is thought to have been tacked on at some later date to make us all feel better.  Mostly it makes us wonder, does God really think children are replaceable?

We want it all to make sense.  In some cases it seems to for a while.  People who work hard do well – but not always.  Good parents have good children – but not always.  Love begets love – but not always. As we get old and look back on our lives – what holds it all together?  What part of my eight-year-old self endures (besides some unreliable memories)?

Autobiographies written in old age reinforce the cause-and-effect route.  Benjamin Franklin wants to convince you that he plotted out his life and developed his character according to a set of guidelines which he developed as a young man and is hoping to pass along to his poor son.  On the other hand, Penelope Lively entitles her memoir Making It Up, and by following the forking threads of decisions she made and things that happened to her, makes it clear that it could have gone another way.

Galen Strawson thinks the human population is divided into diachronics (those who see life as a continuous narrative) and episodics (those who remember events but do not forge a link). He intimates that the latter have an easier time seeing each day as a new beginning.  One might think of the Greek differentiation of time as chronos (linear calendar/clock time) or kairos (special experiences outside of time). Old age is a time for episodic reminiscing, which is often followed by an attempt to make sense of the episodic sequence.  Maybe this is a fool’s errand.  Surely it is beyond our ability.  Among the questions the Buddha said were “inconceivables” and should be “put aside” were questions as to how karma worked. 

So, when you sit down to write those memoirs or family histories, please consider that your life is not a novel.  You do not need to find a plot (or to invent one).  A number of my short stories are about people who read the wrong narrative into things (try “The More Loving One”).  But maybe reading any narrative into things should only be done provisionally.

More on Writing a Life Review, Spinoza, and the Blind Turtle

My last blog was about the “how-to” of writing a life review, a memoir, an autobiography. But I have a little more to say. First, let me reiterate that you must write such a memoir for yourself – if you have any other audience in mind, it will not work. It took me a while to realize this, but now I realize that everything I write (including fiction) is in order to teach myself something, to memorialize something for myself, to figure out something for myself – and mostly the latter. Even this blog. It makes “viewer” statistics less important (good thing), and it makes me more honest.

Second, I dealt very lightly with what we should do with the bad things that surface, memories and emotions we have tried hard not to think about for so many years. If you have ever gone on an extended silent meditation retreat, you know that long periods of silence bring these memories back with a vengeance – and so does writing about the period in which they happened. Bad things caused by natural events or other people are, on the whole, easier to deal with than disasters we prompted with our own actions. And the worst are situations we caused that harmed others. But let’s go back to my favorite philosopher Spinoza – the one who told us that cheerfulness (refer to earlier blog) was the highest good – and hear what he has to say on repentance or regret: repentance is not a virtue… instead, he who repents what he has done is twice wretched. This is not to say that we should not learn from our mistakes through “true reflection or reason.” It is only to say that we should not let it take away from our power to live. He says that it is bad enough that we made an error in judgment; the second error would be to let it impede us forever. It is akin to the Buddha’s “second arrow”:

The Blessed One said, “When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two arrows; in the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental. (Sallatha Sutta)

The point of a written life review is not to shoot the second arrow; it is to pull out the first arrow and become reconciled to the scar it leaves behind. I am not saying this is easy, but I think it is worthwhile. Again the object is to bring reason, words, to bear on the unbearable and to move on with Spinoza’s “cheerfulness” and power.

Writing a memoir, life review, should not be a chore. It should be a joy. In All Passion Spent, Lady Slane calls “looking back on the girl she had once been” as the “last, supreme luxury…. She could lie back against death and examine life.” Old age has many benefits (yes, it does), but among them is that “last, supreme luxury” of reflection. Putting the words on paper is necessary for me so that they do not just glide away among the jetsam of my wandering mind. I recommend it.

And one more very important thing. Don’t think for a minute that your life is not worth examination, not worth telling. In the Chiggala Sutta, the Buddha tells the parable of a blind turtle swimming around in an endless sea. On the sea floats a yoke or ring (think life preserver). The blind turtle surfaces once in a hundred years, totally randomly. What are the chances that he will poke his head through that ring as he surfaces? Those are the odds of existence as a human being on the earth – a precious and unique opportunity, according to the Buddha. Your life is to be valued. Your tale is worth telling. We have all made mistakes; it is part of life. And, as the manager of the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel says, “Everything will be alright in the end so if it is not alright it is not the end.” It’s not over yet.

For a story about repentance, regrets, and the truth of the matter, you might try “The Iscariot.” Or you might look at your own life.