The Closets Are Still Full

It doesn’t seem to matter how many closets we have or how big they are.  They are always full.

I wonder if the same isn’t true about unhappiness, desire, disappointment. We always want something we don’t have, or complain about the latest disappointment. And if things change to give us what we want (or thought we wanted), it doesn’t take long at all for us to fill up that closet with something else we want and are deeply troubled or disappointed that we don’t have.

The brain is an amazing organ. We’re beginning to understand its awesome power to interpret and filter huge amounts of data into useful concepts, ideas, perceptions.  If it isn’t useful, the brain conveniently filters it out so that we can focus on what might truly ‘help’ us.  I can’t help but wonder if there is such a thing as objective reality out there, or do we simply create what we need out of thin air.  Sometimes we create a version of reality that we desperately need at that moment, even though that version is clearly unreal in many aspects.  But it gets us through the day and on to the next.  Or so it seems, anyway.

If the brain can do all that, it must be burdened with considerable overhead from the stresses of continually constructing and reconstructing a useful reality.  Somewhere we do know more about what’s really out there, and it takes effort to keep it from our conscious thoughts.  We know but we don’t want to know.  Maybe the brain necessarily has its own agenda; maybe that agenda is the source of its power and its limitations.

Perhaps part of that agenda, or part of the resulting overhead from the burden of creating and executing the agenda, is a fixed space for unhappiness.  Maybe we need someone or something to blame.  Maybe we need something to strive for.  Or maybe the construction and continual maintenance of the conscious reality we build is so costly that we’re just plain tired and need relief from the work.  Do we just long for a rest from the burden, a time when we can just be?  And perhaps that longing is deeply unconscious, so much so that we feel compelled to pin assorted aspects or our ‘reality’ onto it so that we can at least have a way of naming it.  If so, it would make sense that if the superficial need or desire is fulfilled, we would just replace it with others.  The closet of unhappiness remains full.

Full at least until we give ourselves a break from constructing and maintaining our conscious reality.  Religion can help us trust in the unknowable and relax a bit in our faith.  Just getting old enough to realize that almost all of life is ephemeral can also help.  If our reality construction job has to proceed, fine, but maybe we can go about it with a healthy dose of cynicism and with less short-term desperation than we did when we were younger. All the world's a stage, so let's do our best to enjoy the show.

It’s all artificial, and once we realize that we can invest our energy a little more wisely. The closets will indeed be full, but perhaps we can be less troubled by that.  Maybe that will free us to act more compassionately towards others because we realize that our own unhappiness may be inevitable but is also quite livable, and maybe even has its own charms.  It’s part of who we are, and we can learn to embrace it.

Or is this all my own peculiar brand of self-deception?

Objectivity? Funtoosh!

I’ve never been strongly attracted to Salman Rushdie’s books, so it was with more hope than enthusiasm that I picked up ‘Midnight’s Children’, the much lauded 1981 novel that put Rushdie on the map.  The novel deals in part with the history of India after independence.  I am a big fan of  Jhumpa Lahiri, Monica Ali, Vikram Seth, and Amit Ghosh, so it seemed logical to go back to early Rushdie, who in some ways paved the way for these writers.

‘Midnight’s Children’ was a challenge for me.  It’s not short.  I did get bogged down a few times and it took some willpower to get back to a steady reading rhythm.  I’m glad I finished it, but my feelings about the book are mixed.

The story tells the life story of an Indian man who was born at the exact moment when India became an independent country.  Rushdie has this character tell his own story in a fanciful and attractive way.  The style of narration borrows quite a bit from Dickens, but without the clear moral compass that is part of just about every Dickens work.  Rushdie’s use of language is fun and creative.  He includes many words from Hindi and Urdu, from slang Indian English, and he also just plain makes up words when it suits him.  No Queen’s English here, and the resulting informality is both charming and entertaining.  ‘Funtoosh’ is slang for ‘finished’ or ‘done’.  Rushdie here clears a path for Amit Ghosh, whose use of dialect is even more radical and fanciful. 

But language is not the only area where Rushdie denounces objective standards and objective truths.  Rushdie also implies that in history as well there can be no single standard or truth.  Instead multiple truths coexist and comingle in complex and confusing ways.  The lack of a simple truth may be the only simple truth.  There is room for a rich interplay between memory and fact, between perception and reality, so much room that objectivity itself becomes an old-fashioned and quaint concept.

That being said the vast sprawl of the plot is both the book’s strength and its weakness.  At times it’s the Pickwick Papers of the sub-continent: very entertaining, but sometimes incoherent.  If the defense is that coherence is in itself necessarily arbitrary and artificial, so be it, but this is clearly dangerous territory.  For me it did make for difficult reading at times.  Best to savor the myriad of wonderful details and trust that the larger picture will somehow take care of itself.  Trouble is that for me sometimes it just didn’t.  Probably my shortcoming.

While I know a little something about the history of modern India and Pakistan, I certainly don’t know more than the average educated American, and that puts me at a distinct disadvantage.  Rushdie’s intentionally distorted and sometimes satirical view of events is probably somewhat lost on someone who isn’t familiar with the details of the traditional textbook account of events.  I’m sure I missed the intended significance of many references and images.

Rushdie also relies on magical realism as a plot element.  He draws on techniques from novels like ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ to clearly differentiate the narrator’s tale from a more objective approach, and to fancifully connect the history of an individual with the history of a nation.  In this way the novel is very different from Vikram Seth’s ‘A Suitable Boy’, which is much longer but very traditional in plot and concept. I think I understand Rushdie’s approach in concept, but I’m not so drawn to reading it. Seems like he wants us to have it both ways: a view of real history, but one that makes up its own rules as it goes along.  Again, that’s in part the whole idea.

A movie version is set for release in early November of 2012.  Rushdie himself wrote the screenplay and does the voice-over narration.  Mixed reviews.

There’s considerable literary bravura and writer’s ego on display here.  Be prepared.  If you’re ready for lots of ‘godknowswhat’ and a view of the world that is ‘updownup’, go for it.  I’m a little dizzy after reading it. 

Memoirs

I don’t read many memoirs; the genre is often problematic for me.  An author may be among the least qualified to write about himself.  Political memoirs are often primarily an opportunity to spin for the historians and settle old scores.  Then there’s the credibility factor of many modern personal memoirs.  The bar has been set so high in terms of exaggerated suffering, kinky relationships, and horrific abuse that publishers seem to demand more and more startling confession, less and less good storytelling. I’m not a big fan of the Jeannette Walls books.  Sorry, but I just don’t believe her.  I do better with more casual memoirs that loosely connect memories, books that just try to tell some first-person stories in an engaging way.  They don’t try to drive home key points about the meaning of life.  Try ‘Stuffed’, by Patricia Volk.  In broad terms she takes the approach of one chapter per major figure in her life.  No consistent chronological line from beginning to end.  It’s more along the lines of “Here are some things that happened to me and people that matter to me. You make sense of it. I won’t even try.”

So while 'The Tender Bar' came highly recommended to me, I confess to picking it up with some trepidation.  On the whole, though, J.R. Moehringer has written an engaging book that hangs together pretty well.  Born in 1964, Moehringer published the book in 2005 at the age of 41.  The book deals with his life up to the age of 25.  Pretty early to be writing a memoir.  I’m not sure I can make much sense of my life now at the age of 60. At 41 my vision was even more limited. But nonetheless Moehringer does his best to weave some strands that hold the book together.

But it does make me appreciate the sublime artificiality of fiction.  Blank slate. The author can make up whatever he pleases.  He has so many resources at his disposal:  plot, character, language, tone, structure, etc.  As long as it makes sense on its own terms, fine. Reality be damned. Readers are the real winners.

So let’s start with the title, 'The Tender Bar'.  Play on bartender, of course.  The central place in the book is a specific drinking hole where the author spent lots of time as a young adult.  But it was anything but a tender place. A place that ‘tended’ to him?  Maybe.  I guess.  Seems a bit of a stretch to me.  Could have done better, I think. Seems awkward. What am I missing?

Alcohol as father stand in?

There are a some themes that run through the book: missing and disappointing father; struggling but admirable mother; alcoholism; extended family populated with intelligent but under-educated and under-achieving adults; the usual coming-of-age struggle to find the right place in the world. The father theme was most compelling to me.  At 25 he finally understood that while he was entitled to need what he needed from his father, his father was simply incapable of filling those needs.  Keep looking for that person in his father or accept that his father was in many ways a screw-up.  A lose-lose proposition. His father would never be the person he needed him to be.  To fool himself into thinking that his father was that person but was somehow unavailable was not productive.  Ultimately, accepting disappointment and heartbreak is the only key to freedom. But it sucks.

The writing is just fine, but ultimately a little precious for my taste.  Most chapters have that little tie-up at the end that’s a little forced.  Reads a bit like a collection of college application essays.  Trying really hard to come across well.  (The film rights have been purchased.  Do I want to see this as a film?)

Moehringer is clearly a gifted journalist.  I haven’t read the Agassi book, but from what I hear it’s pretty daring.  Agassi read 'The Tender Bar' and immediately thought: this is the person to ghost-write my memoir.  That’s impressive.

There’s a new book of historical fiction about the bank robber Willy Sutton.  Probably worth a try.

And on a personal note, I’m so pleased to see that Janice Van Horn’s memoir ‘A Complicated Life: My Life with Clement Greenberg' has been published.  She’s an old friend and neighbor from New York, and a terrific person.  I so look forward to reading it.