Hemingway: A Golden Calf in a Mythic Golden Age

It has forever been the preoccupation of man to idealize the ways of the past, as history has a way of highlighting modern values in their "purest" forms. This is the mythology we tell ourselves in an age when Biblical stories are regarded as parables and those who cling to them are regarded as nutty. But then there's the truth: there was no Golden Age. There was no time when things were done perfectly. Cultural memory becomes selective and occludes those facts that might threaten our lionized account of history.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

We are raised to be discontent, as Duryodhana exclaims in the Mahabharata. We are reared to be self-deprecating. We are acculturated to compare ourselves to others -- to size others up -- even if they're no longer living. What do they have that we don't? Which of their characteristics do we admire and how can we cultivate them in ourselves? Why is it so much harder to attain those qualities today than it was back then? The stories we tell ourselves condemn us to misery.

In an article lamenting the lost manliness and braggadocio of Ernest Hemingway, author Marty Beckerman illustrates this false nostalgia well. He paints Hemingway as a man's man, both a knower and go-getter -- the perfect combination of sophistication and ruggedness. Every civilization has its gods; and the gods of the postmodern era are no more real or false than those of foregone civilizations. But their veracity or fictitiousness never mattered; what matters is what it tells us about their followers and consequently ourselves.

Despite the compelling nature of Hemingway's larger than life persona, psychologists and biographers have deconstructed him to who he was rather than who he portrayed himself to be. This isn't to say that who he portrayed himself to be wasn't who he was... it's just half the story. However, reconciling these two constructs is hardly my point. Rather, my point is to illustrate the suggestive nature of the stories we tell ourselves and our predisposition for gullibility and the lack of relevance of authenticity in them. The Golden Age. Gods. Idyllic romance... our map is not our territory.

The very idea of a golden age is embedded in and founded on principles of discontent. It supposes a fall from grace or a degeneration of how things once were. But Duryodhana's claim that "only discontent leads to happiness" is not founded on an idealized past, but an idealized future. He seeks to gain for himself an unrivaled kingdom and forge his own history, rather than seek to revivify a time past. The idea of a golden age is thus only helpful so far as it provides models for one to emulate one's actions after; but we would do well to note that even these models are simulated constructs manipulated by historians, the media and those who would seek to rediscover them. If we maintain that a golden age has passed, then what hope have we for which to reasonably look forward? It is therefore better, I think, to imagine a golden age only as it could exist, not how it may have existed. Otherwise, we condemn ourselves looking backwards to reliving history, at best, rather than developing the future.

The Story Never Ends

For a while now, I've had the random, recurring urge to watch the 1984 movie Never Ending Story. It must have been 15 years since I last saw it and it left little impression on my memory as a child except for having a boy who rode a flying white dog. Last night, some friends came over and after a couple drinks, I got the urge again. So I pitched it to them as follows: "Would you like to see a movie that will blow your mind?" It was a compelling enough ploy to cover up for my complete ignorance of the film. We watched it, and much to my unsurprised dismay, it was terrible. Poor dialogue, abrupt and poorly rationalized plot developments, and the cheesiness of the whole thing caused us to cut it out 2/3 of the way through and go to bed. The next day, however, I watched the remainder of the film and was blown away – not by the film itself, but the creative framework in which the writer constructed to communicate several very profound ideas that are worth sharing.

In the storyline, a boy picks up a book and begins to read it, thus framing the rest of the narrative. The Nothing, a seeming placeholder for a diabolical destructive force – imagined as a hurricane of sorts – encroaches on the world of Fantasia, the Alice-in-Wonderland-meets-Middle-Earth mythological realm of the story's setting. Only the empress can stop The Nothing from destroying the world, but she is sick, so a young warrior must venture out to find the cure for the empress that the world may be saved. That's the plot, and its execution is rather boring, in my opinion. What is fascinating, however, is the symbolism employed and to some degree explained at the very end.

The Nothing is explained to be the metaphysical manifestation of the lack of hope and imagination in humanity. The implication is that because people are reading less, they lead dull and unimaginative lives. Fantasia is revealed to be a composite land of the the human imagination, and so the encroachment of The Nothing signifies the death of human imagination and capacity to dream. While it's a brilliant allegory signifying the take over of the technological age and the eschewing of classical pastimes such as reading, the kicker is even better.

The first lair of the kicker is that boy reading the book is as much in the book as every other character, and the feels all the emotions and thoughts of the characters. This is a wonderful and rare Western rendition of one of the themes in the Mahabharata, that the reader is every character in the book. Not only that, but the reader can influence and interact with the story to the extent that the empress at the end reveals that she can stop The Nothing if the boy will but give her another name. As inane as this sounds, it signifies the reader's admonition that he is not just a passive observer, but an active participant in the story. By acknowledging this in the act of orally naming the empress, the boy accepts his role in the story.

The second lair of the kicker is that the reader is the writer of the story itself! This goes further than simply imagining what the words play out in unillustrated pictures, but that the story being read is but one of as many stories as the boy chooses to imagine. This message is signified when the boy finally yells out the name of the empress, all goes dark, and the boy continues to converse with the empress as he was struggling with her suggestion that the story was in fact real and the boy, Bastion, could therefore impact it. As the light returns, the empress and the boy continue talking for a few moments before the boy realizes that she materialized in front of him – rescued from her immanent destruction. The implication I draw from this is in the power one has in imagining the possibilities. The empress then presents the boy with a grain of sand – the last remnant of the realm of Fantasia – and tells him to make a wish. He asks how many he can make, and she says as many as he wants. The half-stated implication of this is that we all live never ending stories so long as we're willing to imagine new adventures and possibilities.

It's a thoughtful lesson of which America would do well to be reminded.

Lastly and as more of a tangent, the film reminded me of the power of names. While the old Shakespearean query comes to mind – "What's in a name? Were a rose called by any other name would it not smell just as sweet?" – we see in this film why it doesn't hold true. As I learned in studying Hinduism, names convey power, often in the form of access. By this I mean that when you see something and don't know what it is, and then it is named, you suddenly can place the object or event in an existing schema from which you can draw upon to understand the already learned properties of the object or event. Put differently, let's say you have a cough, a slight fever, and several other symptoms. You then search online for illnesses that match your symptoms, and upon finding the name of one, can then look into treatment for it. Similarly, in many mythologies, knowing a character's name gives you access to the reputation and lore of that character. The more names a character has, the more powerful and important he or she tends to be. Sometimes characters also have secret names that, when learned, give access to some vulnerability or control over them. In Never Ending Story, every character is named, and with each name we learn something about them. When the warrior reveals his name to the wolf, the wolf acknowledges his mission to kill the warrior, and so attacks. More tellingly, when the empress beseeches Bastion to name her and he does so, the acknowledgement of the act of naming brings forth a reifying power that saves the empress from destruction. It is romanticized, to be sure, but the trope of the power of names is a valuable and often overlooked literary device embedded in the narratives of our lives.

Siddhartha's Modus Vivendi

All things change. Nothing stays the same. All things return. As I have finally come around to re-reading Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha a second time, its chain of existential inquiry resonates differently than before. The first time I read it, I was filled with ideas of aspiration, possibility and fellowship. This time, I have been emptied of all of it. It seems the delusions promised simply by imagining their existence have dried up, much like the American Dream unrealized. The moreness – the +1 – the historical materialism draw an asymptotic projection of attainment that is – without the data to support this – inversely proportionate with happiness. Perhaps Biggie said it most eloquently: "Mo Money, Mo Problems".

Toward the end of his life, reunited with his childhood friend, Govinda, Siddhartha reflects on the direction his life has taken. From a Brahmin's son, to a sadhu, to a successful merchant with a beautiful consort, to a possessionless wayfarer who ferries people across a river, he has come a long way from his roots. He abandoned his family, his friend, and his consort all in the search of Enlightenment. Finally, alone and in possession of the greatest gift – himself in full freedom – he reveals his truth to Govinda, who beseeches Siddhartha to offer a kernel of wisdom to aid in his search for Truth. Siddhartha replies that the reason Govinda is discontent is not just because he set out on an unachievable goal, but because he has a goal at all. Remove the goal, and one can simply live in the present. (Note, there is a strong irony in the fact that Govinda is a disciple of the Buddha at this point, so it would have made sense for him to abolish any desire he had long ago...) As pragmatic as it sounds, could this simple solution work in American culture today? Can we forgo goals and just... "be"?

The answer is an uneasy yes and no. No, so long as we honor the obligations of the social contracts we were born into and must uphold through an enslaving capitalist system designed to in-debt us and hook us for life (more on that another time). We cannot just "be" when we have bills to pay and a family to take care of. But what if we didn't? How would that be possible? Not having a family is imaginable, but one will always have bills so long as one honors the social contract thereby participating in society. The only solution to achieve the level of presence Siddhartha did and advocates is to opt out – must like Henry David Thoreau did with his experiment at Walden Pond.

But this will never happen in America. Sure, there may be a few social deviants – the Emory student on which the movie Into the Wild is based, as an example – but psychologically the vast majority of us are so hopelessly attached to the system, so interdependent, so oblivious to how to subsist without it, that even though subconsciously a return to Eden of sorts is desired, people wouldn't know where to begin or would simply be too afraid to act on their alienated (fill in the blank). It's not that we as Americans are hopeless – though we are – but that there was an asterisk next to the opportunity we were promised that clearly stated we would effectively be selling our souls in order to attain from the sweat on our brows. Unfortunately none of the immigrants could read the language of American sophism, so cleverly disguised with the inviting words engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor..." Yes, give them to us, so we might enslave them for our utility. Shameless Americans. We've been exploiting our population since our independence. My only question to America is: was it worth it to get where, or become what, we are today?

Siddhartha was right about goals being the undoing force precluding happiness, but few of us if any will ever have the opportunity to test his hypothesis.