Review of Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett

I really enjoyed reading this play. It keeps you on your toes, and takes a lot of brainwork to get through it and detect the author’s meaning behind the decoy of ‘meaninglessness’. It is an excellent challenge to a simplistic and dogmatic world view. Do you see the hilarity of borrowing traditions that others have established for you but really have become defunct for our time? Do you secretly laugh at the tangle of logic and ideas that philosophers, theologians, and intellectuals bandy around solely in order to impress each other with words and concepts that don’t matter in real life?  Do you find cliché’s to be exaggerated generalizations that are often contradictory though consoling. Do you question the role of logic in emotionally-driven beings? Do you question your part in the human ‘rat-race’, the meaning of the universe in general, and do question your questioning of the meaning of the universe? Then this play will play havoc on your brain, and it’s great fun.

Samuel Beckett wrote plays questioning logic and meaning, and became associated with what was labeled the “Theater Of The Absurd” with some other playwrights of the mid-twentieth century.  In many ways it is a quite understandable reaction to the mind-numbing horrors perpetuated on a scale never before as comprehensively realized and publicized as during WWI and WWII. Restarting the quest to learn the direction and meaning of history, and our place within it, might have been a good place to start. ‘Square One’ can make a lot of sense in the wake of unspeakable tragedy. However, be not deceived you dilettante readers of absurdism, intentional randomness might be more difficult to produce, and therefore more intrinsically brilliant, than patent order. There is much treasure buried in Beckett’s seeming wilderness of thought. This play, is, I believe, genius, but for many passerby’s and the I-had-to-read-that-for-a-class types it may be dismissed as nonsense. Right, and Alice In Wonderland was written by a schizoid. It only goes to show, “To the true alone will the truth be known” (G. Macdonald).

When it comes right down to it, Waiting For Godot is a naked commentary on the phenomena of day-to-day life, our habits and customs, and our normal way of dealing with it. If you’ve ever stopped to ask what it all means, without quickly slurping some religious truism to smother your curiosity, then you may have noticed that there is often a nagging feeling of repetition, banality, and inertia that wells up in the spleen when one begins to question the meaning of existence like only a human can. Staring this nagging feeling straight on, and suffering through it long enough to describe it, is, as author Paul Tillich has put it, a “courageous expression of decay” in that our fear has been magnified, systematically catalogued, and finally reconstituted in illustration to discover if our worry is a chimera, or a ‘real’ nightmare. Attempting to dismiss existential angst is tantamount to denial. The only real way to deal with it, is to deal with it. Beckett masterfully captures the postmodern zeitgeist by creating a scene of sickeningly mundane and purposeless existence which is accepted with minimal struggle by the characters with a passivity, an act of the will however feeble, which succumbs to the overrated force of drift in the material universe.

The play begins at a fresh cycle of another day in which the characters “resume the struggle”, as they will do several times in the play, simply because they feel they have no other option. Of course, we find later that they do have options—they could leave, or hang themselves—but they tacitly decide that to live is better, which tells us that living must not be so bad after all, no matter how hard Beckett tries to convince us otherwise. The story revolves around two guys waiting for someone named Godot to arrive. They actually have no idea as to why they are waiting, who Godot really is, or if he will ever really come. They get caught up in speculation about their life, about things they heard about life, about the past, about the present. They speculate on the meaning of the wisdom they’ve heard in their lifetime from others, including religious teachings. They find all traditional logic to crash at the end. Even their personal logic begins to reveal fissures in their normal conversation, and before they know it, they’ve lost their way back to the original subject that got them talking in the first place. The dialogue is all over the place, and actually quite funny. I was very surprised at the amount of humor. The play’s subtitle is “A Tragicomedy In Two Acts”, but I had underestimated how funny it was going to be. Some of it is vulgar, which was also a surprise (like the moment one character yells out randomly with “who farted?”, to which no answer is provided), but it was well-placed and hard-thought, as strange as it may sound to someone who hasn’t read it. So, again, the reader has to keep in mind not to mistake satire for actual nonsense. I especially loved the rambling monologue of the servant named Lucky which seemed very characteristic of the type of ideas and phrases academics and professionals use in jostling at the trough for prestige.

In the end, the characters are mildly satisfied with a pseudo-answer to the meaning of their lives, as people generally are. “What we are doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come.” The answer practically amounts to ‘because’, which functions as a distraction from feeling the need to search any further. “We have kept our appointment and that’s an end to that. We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?/ Billions./ You think so?/ I don’t know./ You may be right.” It’s pretty evident that Beckett’s “Godot” is a semi-eponym for God (“Do you think God sees me?”). Many people are following after, and waiting for, a God that gives them a sense of purpose, because they would rather have a pat excuse for existence than none (“We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?”). How many people are trying to get through life, waiting for God to come and take them to a better place, because they still haven’t found any other reason for this world other than the fact that God is trying to save us from it? “Billions.”  And what is to be said for this kind of attitude that Nietzsche a century earlier exposed as an ‘earth-wearyness’? The faithful boast in their faithfulness to a God(ot) they don’t see, and may never see, because it frees them from having to think further. Author and psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi summarizes the precarious situation of the religious in his book Flow, “Metaphysical goals may never be achieved, but then again, failure is often impossible to prove.”Living Pascal’s Wager has its cons to be sure.

However, the blind religious are not the only ones who suffer, though they may suffer to a different degree, and I don’t think Beckett felt that the rest of humanity is much better off. We all employ the potency of habit which deadens thought and may save us in the end from over-thinking and over-feeling our anxiety and the confusing ache of our existential meaninglessness, boredom and inertia. Together, habits and a convenient stock of ‘reasons’ keep us moving, and offers us bliss through ignorance regarding our purpose. “It’s so we won’t think./ It’s so we won’t hear./ We have our reasons./ All the dead voices./ They make a noise like wings. / Like leaves./ Like sand…All I know is that the hours are long, under these conditions, and constrain us to beguile them with proceedings which—how shall I say—which may at first sight seem reasonable, until they become a habit.” But habits and reasons only work so well. The suppressed Question regarding the meaning of one’s own existence, which the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre said is the very nature of consciousness in that “it’s own being is in question”, bubbles up again, regardless of the precautions against it. One can’t escape it, and the effect can be maddening. “You may say [habit] is to prevent our reason from foundering. No doubt. But has it not long been straying in the night without end of the abyssal depths? That’s what I sometimes wonder. You follow my reasoning?” The reply offers only a slight ray of hope, “We are all born mad. Some remain so.” Nothing in the play frames the grotesqueness of the human struggle any better than the following lines which is sure to disturb anyone who hasn’t been too deeply anesthetized by habit: “[We come into this life] Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens). But habit is a great deadener.”

The universe is big. The universe has been here for a long time. The universe will be here for a long time after us. The universe provides no easy answers to the meaning of my existence. The universe actually seems at times disposed to resist me and my sense of order. And the universe will not allow me to change its mind about it. Yeah, so what. I am here, and I am the center. All things bend their shape around me. I make things small or big, near or far, here or there, loved or hated, good or bad, me or not me. The universe may be, but there is no color, no hardness, no distance, no weight, no motion without me. “Through me it moves and lives and has it’s being, for it is my offspring.”In Ted Hughes’ poem, Examination At the Womb Door, humanity’s final triumph is put in sharp contrast.

“Who owns those scrawny little feet? Death.

Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death.

Who owns these still-working lungs? Death.

Who owns this utility coat of muscles? Death.

Who owns these unspeakable guts? Death.

Who owns these questionable brains? Death.

All this messy blood? Death.

These minimum-efficiency eyes? Death.

This wicked little tongue? Death.

This occasional wakefulness? Death.

Given, stolen, or held pending trial? Held.

Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth? Death.

Who owns all of space? Death.

Who is stronger than hope? Death.

Who is stronger than the will? Death.

Stronger than love? Death.

Stronger than life? Death.

But who is stronger than Death?

Me, evidently.

Pass, Crow.

Bam. Mr. Beckett, take two of these with water, and you’ll feel much better the next morning.

For those who aren’t comfortable with the post-modern problem Beckett is tackling, I would respond with: are you surprised that we in our era have different questions to answer than did the Egyptians, Romans, or early American pioneers? Our world is different, some old solutions have succeeded while others have failed, and some old problems are continuing while new ones are being generated all the time. It should come as no surprise that new questions are being asked. As long as the boundaries of knowledge and exploration are pushed further back, there will continue to be new problems, and new thrilling challenges. Isn’t that what life is all about: growth? I think it feels exhausting to those who are tired and want to settle, but not all of us are ready to go back to sleep so soon after just waking up from eternity. I want my eyes open and blood pumping for as long as they can. This is my time. I don’t want it to go to waste, and books like this help me to keep asking the questions and pushing forward. For some, Beckett’s characters’ wail of “I can’t go on like this” feels justified. To others, like myself, the reply from his friend is a mot juste, “That’s what you think.”

It probably should be mentioned that the absurdist movement, closely associated with Dadaism in the same period, is an offshoot of existentialism in general, and does not characterize all existentialist thought. While the core of existentialist thought centers on the idea that all of the sense in the world is the sense we make of it, absurdism explores the limits of logic, even the logic of the authors of this very exploration itself. The real heart and power of absurdism is in the protest against the claim of infallibility of any one form or expression of logic and positivism, while existentialism works towards establishing the foundation of reliable experience and deeper intuition that subsume the fluctuating landscape and edifices of human reason. For those interested, Paul Tillich did a wonderful job identifying the redeeming characteristics of existentialism and even adsurdism in his inspiring book, “The Courage To Be.” It is well worth the read.

And for those of you who really dig the play and want to see how it plays out on the stage, or maybe you’re just a glutton for punishment, here’s a brilliant performance of Waiting For Godot:

Part 1-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acXfUGO1f5c,

Part 2-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bn1Sd4j2No.

Review of Zorba The Greek

Some top 100 lists include Zorba The Greek in the best books of all time. Gimme a break. Before reading it, I had several times stumbled upon quotes from this work, like the following, which encouraged me to read it, : “All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven't the time to write, and all those who have the time don't live them!” Not bad. But the seemingly profound, extrapolated statements are absolutely wrung dry and beggared by a literary and philosophical context as poor as any I’ve ever read. Zorba is a sensualist, a completely lascivious man able only to offer intuitive observations about the world which came across to me as childish, offhand, and specious. Also, the narrator portrays himself, perhaps unintentionally, as weak-willed and swayed by every insect-like whim of Zorba. He is convinced that Zorba is somehow plugged in deeply to his human ancestral roots and thus closer to the meaning of life than most. I see nothing of the sort. Zorba is honest, passionate, and strong…but not emotionally/ relationally/ intellectually evolved. Reason has, I believe, made possible a better life for mankind, and even if it hasn’t yet been made to work for some, going backward hardly solves our problems. Zorba’s primitive instincts are easy to understand and consistent, but they aren’t forceful or pragmatic in the long run. I understand that the author is attempting to depict a contrast between Zorba and the narrator, between instinct and intellect, but he falls too easily the side of the destitute animal and not the struggling angel in humanity.

More specifically, Zorba is an undisciplined skirt-chaser who punches his boss without a thought about consequences, rages about trivial events, is driven by hunger, changes him mind about the world every day, relentlessly pursues old widows to sleep with in his travels, and harasses his friend when he won’t sleep around with new women that he meets.  To be frank, I just grew sick of Zorba’s crudeness and never-ending rants about his fondness for seducing, and being seduced by, old women. I can only take so much bruv.

Granted, Zorba is interesting, colorful, romantic at times, and a hard worker, but mostly he is a joke. This guy is a Bohemian flop whose libidinous wisdom is simplistic and, if anything from him seems profound, it is quickly mudded over by a raving tantrum or story that clearly identifies him as the idiot some poor village lost. Mostly his cleverness is accidental or it is a primal, instinctual urge transmogrified into something more insightful by the alchemy of the more enlightened narrator. Which reminds me, I did like the narrator’s bash against Buddha, believe it or not, when he referred to Buddha as a person who cleansed himself of a will to live and no longer loved this life. I, personally, think Buddha was more than that within his environment, as he emancipated his Hindu brothers from the tyranny of an old asceticism and helped his followers realize a new form and interpretation of happiness not dependent on material possessions or sensory pleasure. I also think secular Buddhism has a lot to offer Western thinkers, but the author’s jibe against him was well-played nonetheless.

I kept waiting on the book to change tracks and allow the narrator to pull away from Zorba’s extreme lustiness and intemperance, but it didn’t happen. Good luck mining the few gems out of this one.

Review of Bossypants by Tina Fey

 

Bossypants is Tina Fey’s recollections about her meteoric rise to fame as actor and writer at Saturday night Live, and as actor/writer/producer for 30 Rock.  Some things about her life that I found interesting were:

In kindergarten was slashed across the face while walking home through an alley. To date she hasn’t given any more details than that because she doesn’t want to use it for leverage (making people feel sorry for her).

Her father was a university grant writer, whom she has a lot of respect for.

She got started as an actor with the travelling theater company “Second City”.

She began writing for SNL first, and “After I lost weight, there was interest in putting me on camera." Most famous SNL sketches were Weekend Update and Sarah Palin impersonations.

She began 30 Rock in 2002, and has now finished its final season.

She appeared in films including: Mean Girls, Baby Mama, Invention Of Lying, Date Night, and Admission, the last of which sucked. Sorry Tina.

She is now married and has two children.

She starts off the book with a warning against those trying to moralize from her stories. “If you’re looking for a spiritual allegory in the style of C. S. Lewis, I guess you could piece something together with Lorne Michaels as a symbol for God, and my struggles with hair removal as a metaphor for virtue.” Yeah, she’s not giving anything up easily. Her stiff-arm against over-zealous critics is tantamount to Mark Twain’s famous rebuff for those seeking meaning where he intended no meaning beyond a simple tale to be found, “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. By Order of the Author.” But to the chagrin to all the Tinas and Twains of the world, there’s always a reason a writer writes, and Tina’s is to be found on page 5…sort of. “Why is this book called Bossypants? One, because the name Two And a Half Men was already taken. And two, because ever since I became an executive producer of 30 Rock, people have asked me, “Is it hard for you to be the boss of all these people?” and “Is it uncomfortable for you to be the person in charge?” So Tina spends the rest of the book hilariously describing her journey from being a nerdy, misfit, struggling, improv actress to her current position of a powerful feminist celebrity who is the writer/producer for her own show and a voice for funny, intelligent women all across the U.S….and maybe Bosnia.

Now, I’ll admit that she comes down hard on men who apparently are the cause of all of women’s problems. But, to be fair, our country is still combating sexism even in the workplace, and she has witnessed some pretty pathetic male a-holism in her time. Comedians are such a tremendous forces in any culture, and they have a way of making you laugh at things you wouldn’t normally find funny, and a way of making you see and admit to things you normally suppress. They can make it seem cool to admit that you’re evil, even when you’re not really sure that you’re evil. But kudos to her for being able to make everyone believe that men are pigs. Laughing at stupid people is funny.

Now, to pull a ‘Fox News’ and be ‘fair and balanced’, she also takes shots at superficial women who are photo-shopped into existence. She doesn’t rail against the use of photo shop in general, or being skinny, but she does make jokes at the expense of women who think that people are fooled by their spray-on beauty or who think that being skinny is all there is to happiness. She has been photo-shopped (hardly, she contends) and she has been skinny at times in her life, but she can see through it, and hopes her humanity hasn’t been erased in the cosmetic boost. “You looked forward to them taking out your chicken pix scars and broken blood vessels, but how do you feel when they erase part of you that is perfectly good?”

I will always remember the line I read somewhere, “Humor is just another defense against the universe” (Mel Brooks). True that. It’s worked for Tina somehow, and seems to have preserved a very sweet, intelligent, authentic, and courageous girl against the soul-effacement of success and popularity. Even Einstein said, “With fame I become more and more stupid.”I don’t think Tina is immune to the spirit-sags and wrinkles of celebrity, but she is on guard. Which helps.

Review of Unbroken By Laura Hillenbrand

 

This was one of the most amazing true stories I have read in recent years. It’s almost too over-the-top to be believable: a punk kid turned Olympian, surviving at sea for forty six days, enduring two and a half years inside Japanese POW camps, and later a conversion at a Billy Graham crusade to boot! It’s four books in one, with each part paced extremely well and holding my attention equally. I remember hearing that Laura Hillenbrand’s previous biography of Seabiscuit, a story about an underdog depression-era racehorse and his campaigning team, was significantly shorn of some of its true dramatic details because it was almost too unbelievable and readers would be incredulous. In much the same way, this story was also larger than life, and though I was thoroughly impressed with Seabiscuit, Unbroken outdid it in my estimation. Plus, it was a story about a human hero, and not, well, a horse. It’s the kind of book that renews one’s faith in humanity and pays tribute to the endless and barely tapped potential of the human will. For me, it fulfilled the ideal of the best kind of literature which Nietzsche referred to when he said, “I will not read anything that isn’t written in blood.” If any book has ever been written in blood, this book has.

Louie Zamperini was a rough-and-tumble, strong-willed child that got in a lot of trouble. No one knew what to do with him until his older brother Pete changed history by helping his young punk-of-a-brother discipline himself for competitive running. This was the beginning of an understanding for Louie: he could channel his energy and skills, previously wasted in boredom and domesticated restrictions, and perform incredible feats that would win the hearts of those around him instead of angering and alienating his community. Regrettably, much of what passes for education and ‘good citizenship’ in our society is in effect slashing the tires of pent up ‘inner wildness’ in young people, instead of placing them on the right track for their bent, and letting them take off with the full force of their passion and unbound intelligence. We should mourn civilization’s failure in recognizing brilliance and strength because it is outside of it natural, aboriginal environment in which it might thrive. Louie was a perfect example of the kind of life that can be lived if one finds the right kind of ‘wild’.

Louie went on to became an Olympic athlete, and that celebrity status is likely the reason his story is a bestseller now. When the war hit, he joined the Air Force, and served on a B-24 bomber. After a few successful bombing raids, his bomber went down with its crew, crash-landeding in the sea. He and one friend (Phil) survived in their inflatable raft for 46 days, fighting sharks (literally), watching a friend die, and living on captured birds, fish and sharks, before they neared an island in Japanese territory. It was during this time that Louie made a promise to God that if he was saved, he would dedicate his life to God forever. This would come back to haunt him, but would eventually deliver him from another type of prison.

As they neared the island, they were discovered, brought aboard a Japanese ship, and immediately taken to a POW camp where they were tortured physically, mentally, and emotionally. Over the course of two and a half years he was transferred between a few different POW camps, and somehow survived the inhumane labor and beatings, the personal vendetta of an especially cruel prison official called “The Bird” (he called Zamperini ‘prisoner #1’ because of his high priority on The Bird’s blacklist), sickness, starvation, and the fear of a mental breakdown. The prisoners’ sense of dignity was intricately woven with their hope, and many reported that the loss of one drastically affected the other. Louie admitted that the closest he ever came to feeling truly beaten was the time he was forced to clean out a pig sty with his bare hands. I fail to see how this is worse torment than taking a beating from 250 fellow POW’s forced to stand in line and hit him their hardest, or cleaning out the overflowing latrines with a soup ladle, or being injected with fluids being tested for chemical warfare, or being spat on by hundreds of visiting Japanese…but, what do I know. And I mean that this time.

Spoiler alert. He survived. But it wasn’t over. When he went home, PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) took its toll and drove him to alcoholism and severe rage. He met and married his wife, Cynthia, shortly after his return to civilian life, who stuck with him through his transition back to normal life, but she became concerned and fearful over Louie’s decline. She experienced a spiritual awakening while attending a Billy Graham crusade, and Louie eventually went to a crusade and also experienced a change of heart and mind. He recounts remembering the promise he made to God while in the life raft that if he were saved, he’d dedicate his life to God forever. He was true to his word. It’s actually pretty amazing that he remembers sensing an immediate relief from his hatred and fear, and found peace that he traces back to that moment of conversion. He even ceased to experience nightmares and flashbacks. Louie was back to his stupendous self. He began travelling the world, speaking about his story and transformation, and even spoke a message of forgiveness to former POW camp guards and officials, shaking hands with his clearly recognized torturers. He even started a camp for delinquent youth called Victory Boys Camp, and later reconciled with The Bird, who he had initially determined to hunt down and kill during the first year of his return to civilization. And, get this, dude is still alive and kicking at 96 years old (there’s even a picture of him learning to ride a skateboard at 81) !!!

There is, perhaps, no contemporary memoir that can better illustrate the resilience of the human spirit. The message comes through strong and clear: you can make it through anything, and come out well on the other side. Though a happy life wasn’t the outcome for every person’s account relayed in the book (some of his friends actually died very unluckily and tragically), it only takes one example to blow the lid off of what we think is possible. And besides that, even Louie will one day have to die, and, as G.K. Chesterton reminds us, “Death is more tragic that death by starvation.”The real moral of this story is not that you can avoid tragedy (though you often can) but that some unseen, unknown good can come of sorrow and suffering. Everyone has to come to grips with the fact that life is a lottery that might seem to work for or against you, but every instant we live is unlikely. Every second is an impossibility. What is the probability that I would come to be, and come to think these thoughts and live this way? The odds of every moment are a universe-to-one, and these odds have obviously been in our favor, for we have come to be. What we often think of as misfortune is the lack of continuance of an apparent good, which at some point, is inevitable. But we have to believe deeply that life is lucky in its very existence, though it may appear unlucky in its limitedness. But it is the limit which reveals life and causes us to appreciate it. And if we’ve learned nothing else in this life, it’s that every moment is miraculous, full of potential, and it’s up to us to fully actualize that potential. Louie taught me that. Well, sort of.

And if you want a “Love and forgiveness conquers all” sort of message, it’s here. All through the narrative Louie is sharing with someone. He is sharing his water when he is dying of thirst, he is sharing his rice, he is sharing the fruit which, eating on his own could have helped him, but sharing with 20 other men only contributed to spiritual solidarity. He learned one of the most important lessons of survival as a human being: when you’re alone, you’re dead.

To be sure, there wasn’t a whole lot that was intentionally philosophical, or articulated as such, in the way it was written. The meta-message wasn’t exactly distilled into a concise thought or maxim you can carry with you, like, for instance, my line above, “The odds of every moment are a universe-to-one.” I know what you’re thinking. Let’s say it together, “That is a line I’ll commit to memory.” You’re welcome. There was even one of the most anti-climactic lines I have ever read, though it was mostly me making more out of it than what it was, but let me have my fun. Shortly after being rescued Louie said, “If I knew I had to go through those experiences again…I’d kill myself.” What? Are you kidding me? What are we reading this for if it’s so horrible an incident that the author himself would do himself in rather than face it again? Why am I trading some of my comfortable time taking on the stress of reading his story if even Louie ends up wishing it all away? Okay, I’ll admit, though it was a little unsettling to read after admiring him through the whole story for his courage, I’m definitely being harsh. I think what he was really saying was that he wouldn’t want to repeat the experience, though maybe he’s not quite wishing the original and unrepeatable experience (which all experience is) away with all of its accompanying lessons. At least, I hope that what he meant. Otherwise our takeaway is, “Carry a death-pill with you at all times.”

Looking back on this biography, I’m not sure how intentional Louie was about his life, or how calculated and conscious his courage was. His actions and thought processes seem, as the narrative reveals them, mostly reflexive and instinctual, even his Christian encounter at the Billy Graham crusade. I’m not saying he didn’t make good, strong moral choices, but there’s also no denying that he was a man with good survival genes. And maybe that’s the best thing to have for survival. Of course, if that’s true, his story can’t help me if I don’t have those same genes, but maybe I can intellectualize his earnings and put them to work in my life in a new way to inform and motivate good choices. Whatever made Louie the person he is, worked. He passed with flying colors. And a few scars.

Someone has said, “A crisis does not only make a person, it reveals what a person is already.” This story forces the questions in our mind as we read, “How do we know what we’re made of? How do we test our mettle? How do we prepare for crisis?” Watching Louie show us ‘how it’s done’ is encouraging and inspiring, and deeply soul-searching. It’s a book I wish upon on all my friends and enemies.

Review Of Proof Of Heaven

This book is one of many NDE (Near Death Experience) bestsellers in the recent past, including: Heaven Is For Real, 90 Minutes In Heaven, The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, and, how can we forget, Sylvia Browne’s Life on the Other Side: A Psychic's Tour of the Afterlife (this last one is a joke, but only half mine). ‘Heaven’ in the title of Proof Of Heaven isn’t the traditional concept of heaven, and it isn’t a traditional Christian message, which might lend it more credibility since it isn’t as predictable. In the end, I always think the real-life stories that alternate in these books with the NDE vision are often as interesting, or more so, than the ‘visit’ to the after-life.

NDE’s are fascinating as psychological, not necessarily preternatural, events; and they are especially interesting as poetic/artistic language expressing a person’s deepest desires and darkest fears (“They should have sent a poet!”-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_BYTZVmDHk). I only have minor doubts from time to time about the complete honesty and veracity of these accounts. As we all know, when you’re using words for something that is ‘beyond explanation’, like most of reality, it’s easy to embellish, exaggerate, offer post factum interpretation, and otherwise explain and apply rather than tell. In other words (see, I do it too), if it don’t fit, you MAKE it fit. Into the brain, that is.

Now, I’ll be honest, the nagging thought has fluttered against me many times that Dr. Alexander is fabricating a lot of his NDE because he wants to comfort people with something ‘tangible’ they can hold on to when they lose loved ones. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’d make it all up to sell a book, but… that is how religions are born. For the record, I think he’s being honest, but I know too well the meaning of Nietzsche’s words, “He who does not know how to tell a lie, does not know what the truth is” to think that it is not beyond any man—who, like in the case of Alexander, clearly wants to give others hope beyond this life—to fudge on a few details, or artificially tie up loose ends to make the story more ‘tell-able’. This is actually a fairly normal practice when it comes to retelling one’s dreams, and is known in psychoanalysis as “secondary revision.”

As far as having a credible, reputable, sane person write their story of something nearly unbelievable that happened to them, you couldn’t have picked someone better than Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon with lots of experience. He has taught at Duke University Medical Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, University of Massachusetts Medical School, and the University of Virginia Medical School. He was a former agnostic, and skeptic with regard to NDE’s. When he speaks, people listen. Including Oprah, may she live forever.

The ‘proof’ from his title comes from the fact that he truly believes the E. coli bacteria that caused his meningitis shut down most of his brain, especially the parts that could have enabled him to have dreams or thinking of any kind. He states, “My doctors have told me that according to all the brain tests they were doing, there was no way that any of the functions including vision, hearing, emotion, memory, language, or logic could possibly have been intact.” This becomes the lynchpin for his assertion that “true thought is pre-physical”, and consciousness transcends the brain and is not reliant on it. His evidence is more anecdotal here, but he is very, very passionate about stating this belief. Almost too passionate, maybe even desperate. Do you ever get that feeling that someone is trying to convince themselves more than you? But, then again, it’s hard to dismiss his plea for understanding when he alleges that he believes this experience was as real, and as dear to his heart, as anything in this terrestrial plane, including, I’m assuming, his love for his wife and children.

But here’s the crux of the whole tale: “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.” And, “All is well.” Now, who can possibly have a problem with that takeaway? He says “Love is the basis of everything…it is the reality of realities.” Yes. If people could really believe that, there’d probably be less problems in the world. Imagine if people truly realized they were part of it all, and harm/good done to another is harm/good done to one’s self. And, for what it’s worth, the new world that entertained Alexander’s in his vision/dream/experience was beautiful, if a little boring sounding at time for personalities like mine. Now, for those looking for rest from a life they’ve found to be fatiguing and jading, in this ‘heaven’ they would be able to sleep well for millennia. The other pros to this kind of story being told: Alexander’s family says that he is more ‘present’ now with them than he has ever been, he encourages people with his story to believe that there is hope and the best is yet to come, and his foundation/organization at Eternea.org seems to want to encourage dialogue and critical thought in and between religious-scientific communities. He wants to use his story to do some good in the world. And maybe start a new religion. Which sort-of concerns me. But…other than that…

Not as a rebuttal to Alexander’s testimony, though it may unhinge some of his conclusions about his experience, I have assembled a narrative comparison between statements in Alexander’s book, and Christopher Bache’s Dark Night, Early Dawn, a work about trans-personal psychology and non-ordinary states of consciousness. Bache describes experiences in states responsibly and safely induced by psychedelics, NDE’s, and meditative practices; and the comparisons between some of his personal accounts in the book which he achieved by the use of psychedelics, and Alexander’s account are extraordinary. This, I believe, serves to illustrate that a person need not be brain-dead or literally ‘out of body’ to experience an ecstatic, revelatory ‘journey’ which provides sensory-cognitive stimulation that feels very, very real and profound. See the Narrative Comparison at the end of this review.

I truly believe we all need a sense of our connectedness and indispensability in the cosmos, to feel loved “dearly and forever”; and this book, I’m sure, provides that for many. However, I think that message is available to us in many different manifestations. It would be a pity if the only way to feel a ‘part of it all’ and really be presently mindful and joyful in life would be to die and see the afterlife, or read a book about someone who did. Also, there still is the matter of faith and self-affirmation that we need to help us appreciate the opportunity that life is and every moment in it. Do we loathe our lives, our selves, so much that we’re so anxious to cash it in for what comes next? It sounds so ungrateful. According to every religion, isn’t there a reason we’re here in the first place? And as far as pure materialism goes, there’s nowhere else to be! Let’s not blow it, or one day we’ll be looking back regretting we wasted it wishing we were somewhere else.

 

Narrative Comparisons From Dark Night, Early Dawn by Christopher Bache, and Proof Of Heaven by Eben Alexander.

 

Bache/Alexander—

 Primordial portal

I was first taken back to the primordial beginning before creation and there experienced human evolution in the context of a larger cosmic agenda. (218)

At the time, I might have called it ‘primordial’…as if I had regressed back to some state of being from the very beginnings of life, as far back, perhaps, as the primitive bacteria that, unbeknownst to me, had taken over my brain and shut it down. (28)

Loss of boundaries

Early on I had the experience of the dissolution of boundaries. I was experiencing the physical world, and everywhere boundaries were melting away. [I kept saying] “No boundaries. No boundaries anywhere.” There was not even a real boundary separating the physical and nonphysical dimensions of existence, and I experienced the worlds of matter and spirit as a seamless whole. (67)

I didn’t have a body—not one that I was aware of anyway. I was simply…there, in this place of pulsing, pounding darkness…I was simply a lone point of awareness in a timeless red-brown sea…There was no difference between ‘me’ and the half-creepy, half-familiar element that surrounded me. (29, 30, 31)

Just as my awareness was both individual and yet at the same time completely unified with the universe, so also did the boundaries of what I experienced as my ‘self’ at times contract, and at other times expand to include all that exists throughout eternity. The blurring of the boundary between my awareness and the realm around me went so far at times that I became the entire universe. (160)

Thought-environment control

I discovered, much to my surprise, that the experiential field within the circle was responsive to my thoughts. (67)

I slowly discovered [that] to know and be able to think of something is all one needs in order to move toward it. To think…was to make it appear, and to long for higher worlds was to bring myself there. (70)

Light and unifying being

I was brought to an encounter with a unified energy field underlying all physical existence. I was confronting an enormous field of blindingly bright, incredibly intense energy. Though the energy was not difficult to look at, experiencing it was extremely intense and carried with it a sense of ultimate encounter. This energy was the single energy that comprised all existence. (67-68)

Something had appeared in the darkness…it radiated fine filaments of white-gold light, and as it did so the darkness around me began to splinter and break apart…you could not look at anything in that world at all, for the word at itself implies a separation that did not exist there. Everything was distinct, yet everything was also a part of everything else. (39, 46)

Choice in multiple dimensions

Choice governed all experience. Different beings who were all part of Being Itself had simply chosen these manifold experiences. (68)

Free will is of central importance for our function in the earthly realm: a function that, we will all one day discover, serves the much higher role of allowing our ascendance in the timeless alternate dimension. We—the spiritual beings currently inhabiting our evolutionarily developed mortal brains and bodies…make the real choices. (84)

Higher awareness then, limited clarity now

I simply can’t yet fit the understandings I had into my ordinary, smaller mind. This does not lead me to question or doubt my experience. Even though I have lost large sections of the experience, I retain an unshakable epistemological certainty that this knowing was of a higher order than any knowing I am capable of in my ordinary consciousness. (69)

The problem is finding a frame of reference. The only categories I have available to me are simplistic approximations that can give only a vague sense of it. (72)

The experience I’m struggling to give you the vaguest, most completely unsatisfying picture of, was the single most real experience of my life. (41)

My awareness was larger now. So large, it seemed to take in the entire universe. (95)

It was all so real…almost too real to be real, if that makes any sense. (126)

Now that I’m back here in the earthly realm, I have to process it through my limited physical body and brain. (49)

Conveying that knowledge now is rather like being a chimpanzee, becoming human for a single day...and then returning to one’s chimp friends and trying to tell them what it was like. (83)

It’s like trying to write a novel with only half the alphabet. (72)

 

Nostalgic return

I was overcome by an overwhelming sense of homecoming and felt fully the tragedy of having forgotten this dimension for so long. (69)

You don’t know the place. Or at least you think you don’t. But as you look around, something pulls at you, and you realize that a part of yourself…does remember the place after all, and is rejoicing at being back there again. (39)

On the day that the doors of Heaven were closed to me [in the NDE], I felt a sense of sadness unlike any I’d ever known. (102)

Multi-universe and being

It explained that we had left time…[I] felt like time was simply one of the many creative experiments of the multidimensional universe I was being shown. (70)

I saw the abundance of life throughout the countless universes…I saw that there are countless higher dimensions, but that the only way to know these dimensions is to enter and experience them directly…The world of time and space in which we move in this terrestrial realm is tightly and intricately meshed within these higher worlds. (48)

Love as center of universe

Behind creation lies a LOVE of extraordinary proportions, and all of existence is an expression of this love. The intelligence of the universe’s design is equally matched by the depth of love that inspired it. (70)

Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything…This is the realities of realities. (71)

You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever. (41)

Truth as harmony in being

I learned by becoming what I was knowing. I discovered the universe not by knowing it from the outside, but by turning to that level in my being where I was that thing. (74)

It seemed that you could not look at or listen to anything in this world without becoming a part of it—without joining with it in some mysterious way. (44)

I feel it, laid into my very being. (49)

Speechless communication

[A Presence] communed with me and ‘spoke’ to me in messages that were only sometimes put into words. It was explaining to me what I was experiencing not so much with words as with direct illumination. (274)

Without using words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. (40)

Each time I silently posed one of these questions, the answer came instantly in an explosion of light, color, love and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave. [These answers came] in a way that bypassed language. Thoughts entered me directly. (46)

Freedom from existential limits and rules

This being was setting us free, placing absolutely no limits on our creative abilities. (274)

“You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.” The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it.

 

Review Of Divergent

This is so totally about a fight club for kids. Deal with it. What is it with novels like this, in the same vein as Hunger Games, that make the reader so blood-thirsty to watch children fight? I don’t know, but it’s wooooorrrrkkkking! Probably deep inside we all wish we had what it took to take a punch as a kid, and deliver a wallop back. Or maybe we all long to test our mettle against the hard earth or against the deeper scarring scratch-test of human aggression. That question, “Do I have what it takes” doesn’t merely haunt us, but it inspires us to take on new challenges and develop our raw potential. To that end, the author pushes the characters farther than the reader is often willing to go, but it all ends well. Sort of.

Thankfully, this story goes beyond the theme of kids studying to crush a trachea with a single throat-chop. The mental-spiritual survival, and not mere kill-power, of young people is probably closest to the author’s intention in character/plot development. Much in the same way that the kids in the narrative are run through rigorous training and testing to toughen them up physically and mentally, so the reader is sent through the rigors of self-doubt, constantly prodded with internal questions about one’s deepest fears and preparedness for crisis. Roth wrote the book while studying exposure therapy in the treatment of phobias. Figures. In a very real sense, this book is a form of mild exposure therapy, and the case may be made that the protagonists’ drills in fear stamina and resignation to panic may actually help the reader to understand and form new coping mechanisms with their own fears as they ‘witness’ so many other stories about how others overcame their fear. Her material is solid. The Panic Attacks Workbook: A Guided Program for Beating the Panic Trick by David Carbonell (2004) specifically directs a person to explore their fear, overexpose themselves to it, and ultimately vanquish it by a tactic Roth illustrates in the book time and time again: resigning to, and fully experiencing, the fear episode. It’s counter-intuitive, but—damn it—it works! Provided the fear is confronted in a safe environment, Roth states that the brain can actually ‘re-wire’ itself to disarm the mind’s overreacting fear response. Now that’s a lesson I want my kids to learn.

Imaginative fiction is a gladiatorial arena for fictional personas, and they ‘literarily’ fight to the death of all that is false and evanescent, and what survives is unshakable and can be counted on. The characters are placed in simulated scenarios where their life is threatened, or they lose those they love, or they suffer to the furthest degree of their pain-threshold. The plot oozes with moral themes and practical tools young people can put to immediate use in their lives: Facing your fears, considering your strengths and weaknesses, liking you for you, understanding others’ strengths and weaknesses, facing rejection, asking good questions about motives—why people think and behave differently than you do, and the power of choice in every situation, to name a few. At some point a child is old enough to learn that the baby kitty they dropped off at the animal clinic for peeing all over the house was not being sent to another happy home, but rather, the paper they signed at the time of drop-off was a queue for lethal injections; and it’s at that ripe age (which is NOT my kids’ ages just yet) that parents should seriously consider encouraging their children to read this sort of literature. That is, if you’re running short on pain-and-fear simulators, then this book can function as a mild simulation for youth to see how certain ideas and values play out in fantasy worlds, which, by the way, may not be as far away from our time as we might like to think.

Roth, in the conversation with the author at the back of the Katherine Tegan Books edition, states that she likes her characters to have a quality of ‘agency’—“they take charge of their lives in environments that make it hard for them to do so.” Beatrice, the protagonist in focus, is, according to Roth, “always choosing, always acting, always moving the plot by her behavior”, much like people in the real world create new possibilities and ‘move the plot along’ in their life story. In his book titled Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience, author Mihaly Csikscentmihalyi states something very similar, “Our best moment usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.” There’s no room or time to hope things get better…‘better and worse’ are personal decisions we make on how to interpret and experience the impersonal world. It’s an Agent thing.

The religious overtones of the book are especially intriguing. The Abnegation faction has many parallels to religious people (which, for what it’s worth, I think the author happens to be), and this association is pretty much spelled out in a couple of places. Abnegation types are selfless, deeply committed to their values and the perpetuation of those values, and produce people with strong wills, if not a very bright head. Erudite, the intellectual faction, constantly bucks Abnegation’s mindless acceptance of traditional values (Roth was also studying the fascinating and deeply disturbing Milgram Experiment, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdb20gcc_Ns) and tendencies towards austerity and self-debasement which they force on society at the cost of comfort and prosperity. This sets up the inevitable conflict between factions which makes for a nice ramp-up in the last quarter of the book.

The message is solid: no one can make you into something they want you to be. Labels don’t define you. You are free to choose. And you don’t have to choose between honesty, selflessness, peace, intelligence or bravery. Be them all in the best way you can. It was perfectly stated by Four—one of the characters Roth admits is one of her most 3-dimensional and relatable, and one you can imagine being friends with outside of the book—“‘I think we’ve made a mistake,’ he said. ‘We’ve all started to put down the virtues of the other factions in the process of bolstering our own. I don’t want to do that. I want to be brave, and selfless, and smart, and kind, and honest.’” This sentiment, of how to live beyond labels, will ultimately, I assume, come to a head in the other books in the form of a courage to endure living factionless, and, consequently, often alone. Sometimes the high value placed on community requires one to deny and live apart from a community, so-called, that is destructive or suppressive of the lives and desires of its constituents. Tris’ words near the end closes this part of the series nicely and lifts our expectations to a more advanced revolt in her future against communal conformity, “I am no longer Tris, the selfless; or Tris, the brave. I suppose that now, I must become more than either.” Good form!

Review of 50 Shades Of Grey



First, my synopsis. Anastasia is a nice, smart, simple girl finishing college and working at a hardware store who is seduced by Christian Grey, a powerful, young magnate who is disgustingly rich, invidiously charming (which pisses me off…because I’m not), and is brain-injuringly attractive—which, let’s be honest, if he weren’t, this book would never have been read by anyone…not even me. Dude’s every girl’s Mr. McDreamypantsandsocks. When he finally woos her, he reveals a passion of his: a BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism) playroom. You should have seen her face. He wants a relationship with her that makes her his submissive, and him her dominant, and he wants this relationship to extend to all areas of their lives, not merely sexual, as long as they are together. This scares her, but he slowly warms her up to the idea, and she begins to interact with him with an understanding that it will be temporary. As it turns out—and this is the KEY, the author’s stroke of genius that keeps women reading—he’s been abused as a child, and she feels sorry for him and somehow excuses away his selfishness as a sort of handicap—much easier to excuse, remember, because he so hot that nuns pour their holy water on him to boil the hell out of it. So, Anastasia decides she’s going to do this whole ‘weird’ thing with him because she thinks there’s hope for their relationship, which never existed apart from the fact that, as I mentioned before, he was so hot that she needed to peel his clothes off with a spatula. Finally she ends up realizing he is not going to be over his wanting-to-spank-her-hard anytime soon; and she ultimately gets offended enough after an especially hard spanking (literally), and depressed enough after the especially hard spanking (again, literally), that she determines he doesn’t really love her, and she leaves him. After the especially hard spanking. Again. Literally.

Okay, I laugh, but all you haters have to keep in mind that this book was numero uno on the NY Times bestsellers list for 30 weeks, has been translated into over 50 languages, the trilogy have sold over 35 million copies in the United States alone, and over 70 million copies worldwide, setting the record as the fastest selling paperback of all time, and this writer that people castigate as being inept and amateur made $95 mil last year. We have to keep in mind that this writer, though her fanbase is now mostly middle-aged women (she was mid-forties when she wrote it), began writing the series as a friggin fan-fiction (unauthorized spin-off stories) on the internet for the Twilight saga. Her characters were even named Bella and Edward for the good Lard’s sake! She removed them from the site after complaints about the eroticism, and posted them on her own 50 shades website before publishing. That’s how they started, but there was a HUGE demand obviously for this kind of writing, or it never would have made it anywhere. So when a Sir Salmon Rushdie, may he live forever, says about the book, "I've never read anything so badly written that got published. It made 'Twilight' look like 'War and Peace’”, I respond with a, “Hey, Rushdie’s reading 50 Shades? I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.”

As far as the whole message of the book, apart from the obvious ‘kink’ factor, I would say James is wanting to leave readers with a warning to, simply put, be careful who you give your heart too. Intimacy without trust is fun while it lasts, but ultimately love is about mutual care and concern for each other. If you play, you’ll pay. A quote in the book is sent to Anastasia from Christian, taken from Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, “Why didn’t you tell me there was danger? Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…” That’s the overt message that James would like to be credited for ‘teaching’. But, c’mon, we all know this isn’t meant to be read as a warning. This is a titillating ride, and the stop at the end, though it ends with grief and loneliness, is but an invitation to get back in line and ride it again. The meta-message, even beyond the author’s conscious, intended moral seems more to be this: risky relationships and edgy sex are fun while they last, so don’t be a wuss. Honey, bite that juicy apple! You’ll survive to tell your story, and maybe make $95 mil in the process. Maybe. Or you’ll just ruin the rest of your earth-weary life and call every man you meet a pig.

The religious community and many conservatives have made quite a stink about it, but I’m not sure it’s warranted. Even the Jews put an entire book of erotica in their Hebrew Scriptures to show their support for the genre, which also happens to be in the Christian Canon—Song Of Solomon, which is very graphic and sexually explicit when all the metaphors and meanings are parsed out. And as far as scenes or descriptions that some may find offensive, we need to keep in mind that nearly every single one of us will put up with any number of offensive themes and images in movies, shows, books, and other media to enjoy a good thrill or a transporting drama. My concern would be more related to the cause of the hype surrounding this book, and the reason why so many singles, mothers, and wives feel so bored with their existences that a ‘desperate housewife’ mentality is starting to appear fairly common. I think it’s okay to try new things and explore ways to spice up one’s love life, but while reading this book it became startling clear that this Christian character was extremely selfish in all ways, and completely and utterly devalued and dominated this girl. The ONLY reason she stuck around was because it was fun and he was…did I mention this?... so hot you could cauterize a machine-gunned extremity on his abs. Too far?

So often girls complain about guys who are only seeking trophy-wives for their own self-aggrandizement. With this book, guys have the opportunity to reverse the accusation: there are girls whose wettest dream is to be objectified by guys who seek to make them their trophies. Kind of sad, but that’s what the success of this book might indicate. Or not.