Tragedy Etc Monday May 23, 2005
To be born is to suffer, said the Buddha. You probably wouldn’t invite him to your party to enliven it and make it more fun. We build small lives where we experience relative comfort and security with friends, family, work, hobbies etc, so on a daily basis we are relatively immune to the problems of the world. Occasionally an event like 9/11 is so horrific it shocks us awake, and we see these problems with greater clarity. I think I had a mild psychological depression in relation to current affairs, after the time of the twin towers. I always knew the world was full of entrenched hatred, divisions and ideological conflict, but 9/11 put another sickly complexion on Planet Earth. There are destructive forces trying to kill and destroy, thus revealing the delicate balance and vulnerability of human society which has developed over thousands of years and although flawed, also contains codes of conduct and mutual respect that allow large numbers of people to enjoy normal civil lives. I’m as cynical and intellectually anarchic as it gets in relation to politics, ideology and society, but I think we need some kind of consensus and moral unconscious that stabilises and affirms the world against forces of hatred and dissent. There’s creative rebellion and there’s pathological destruction, and although the will may be similar the emotions, motivations and goals are radically different. Which is why I regard terrorism as pathological in the extreme, and was not sympathetic to the self-examination some people proposed by asking ‘why do they hate us so much?’ I would prefer that terrorists examine themselves, asking the question ‘what kind of human being am I?’
My favourite course during my first (literary) degree was called Philosophy and Literature, conducted in the philosophy department. We read texts like Hamlet, Voltaire’s Candide and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, and then discussed the philosophical ideas they contained. I also enjoyed a generic course called The Tragic Play where again, we read a variety of texts and discussed them thematically in relation to the traditions and principles of tragedy. We began with some old school Greek theory, looked at The Oresteia and The Bacchae, then moved on to Shakespeare and modern works with only questionable tragic status. Dostoyevsky once said he would not accept a God who allowed innocent children to suffer, and I found that a powerful remark. It’s the extreme example of a fucked up world incapable of protecting its small people against aggression they cannot even comprehend. If children are the hope for the future, what kind of future do we have when they are victimised by the adult world? And his remark further questions the religious conception of deity when it is supposedly endowed with omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. Some photographs, like the Vietnam girl running away from napalm, sear into your memory like the burning you see in that famous image. ‘I will not accept a God that allows children to suffer’. Dude, I hear you. And in fact, Dostevevsky’s remark could be used as the basis for some hard-hitting philosophical enquiry.
Two or three years ago the adult Kim Phuk met with the US airman who was responsible for that napalm attack and her gracious attitude made it a memorable and healing occasion. She’s now a Canadian citizen. It was a devastating moment for the soldier and he completely broke down when the repressed guilt of past decades was finally released and she forgave him for what, ultimately, he was not responsible for. He knew what he’d done, she knew what he’d done, but he was no more than a pawn following orders in a greater and chaotic theatre of war and politics. This is what we need: maturity, communication, resolution.
I gravitated towards the tragic aesthetic because it seemed to make sense of the world and provided an elegant philosophical framework. Then we read some comedy and I wondered if it was actually more sophisticated and mature, because it shows you suffering can be resolved. You don’t have to rage against life like Shakespeare’s King Lear, or agonise over its imperfections like Hamlet. There are ways of relaxing, laughing, being less serious and melancholic and enjoying life, as depicted in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – not my favourite play but as with all Shakepseare’s comedies it has a lovely, playful, celebratory warmth to it. I felt that the tragic disposition was perhaps an initial stage, a psychological beginning, from which you could move onwards. Comedy is thus a more philosophical aesthetic than tragedy: lightness is more elevated than weight; it acknowledges heaviness but is not pulled down by it. At the very least, the tragic-comic investigation offers a few guidelines for emotional balance in relation to an imperfect world beyond your control. This is how we live for most of the time: resolving problems and finding relative comfort and happiness. But the key word here is relative because, as Buddha also said, the suffering into which we are born derives from impermanence. Ultimately it makes no difference at all whether we live on a private island or in a cardboard box under Westminster Bridge, because no one gets out alive. We are born, we suffer, we struggle and thrash around finding different kinds of security and satisfactions, time passes, we thrash around slightly less and just begin to sense that it’s all impermanent when we consider our inevitable mortality…and then we fade away and we’re gone. Who’s idea was this? What kind of Plan is that?
Maybe we should invite Buddha to the party after all.
