Death and the Madman, A Tragedy of Sorts

On January 3, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche broke down.

Living in Torino (Turin), Italy, while sitting on the Piazzo Carlo Alberto, he cracked. He had long been plagued by migraines, possibly from a suspected illness ranging from diagnoses of syphilis to manic-depression to full-blown psychosis. No consensus has been reached.

In my romanticized version, I believe it was a philosophical crisis that broke him. Since the medical field has yet to come up with a more plausible cause, I will go with that.

I was talking with a friend about this event the other day, regarding the various contradictions of his life, as Nietzsche indeed is a self-fulfilling prophecy when it comes to being misunderstood. He welcomed it as much as he shunned it.

A favorite example of mine is the phrase that Nietzsche is most famous and simultaneously infamous for, that is, “Gott ist Tot!” (God is dead!) This comes from a scene in which a madman is running into a marketplace, proclaiming this shocking news, to which he is mocked and derided for his madness. This is often picked up as “proof” that Nietzsche was indeed the Anit-Christ or that he was an atheist, or it is picked up by angry, all-too-angry young people who don’t quite get the nuance of the situation.

None of them is accurate. Nietzsche proclaimed himself to be the Anti-Christian, in much the same way that his near contemporary Kierkegaard (a staunch believer of Christ, but also Anti-Christian) was against the hypocrisy of the Christian church in Europe near the turn of the 19th Century. Nietzsche wrestled with God, but did not deny It/Him/Her. That would be too simple.

The fuller version of that familiar phase is never, like the motto of Socrates , or at least seldomly repeated, namely “Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet!” (God is dead! God remains dead! And, we have murdered him!). According to Nietzsche, the God of humans was created and murdered by humans, because we can only know what it is to be human, be-ing humans, and thus create a god in our image. Nietzsche was quite aware that there was something bigger, much bigger and more powerful than we are.

However, what he introduced is the oft-maligned, highly mis-contextualized and tragically mis-appropriated by the Nazis (Nietzsche was catatonic from 1889 until his death in 1900, long before the Nazis. His sister Elizabeth is responsible for that connection...though that is for another time...) concept of the Übermensch, or the Superman, though literally the Overman.

In short, for Nietzsche, this meant that humans could be better than what we are, but only one person at a time, and the only person who could better him or herself, was, you guessed it, yourself. No one else can make you better or worse. You are responsible for your self, and you can be better. The name comes from the idea of over-coming your weakness. For Nietzsche, the human being was a work of art in progress and the artist was the individual. He had high hopes, perhaps too high, for humans, and in January of 1889, I believe that illusion had its fatal and chronic consequences.

As the story goes, Nietzsche saw a man beating a tired and sick draught horse on the square. The horse was shrieking, but was too feeble to fight. The man continued to beat the horse mercilessly. Nobody moved to help or intervene. Not my business. Nietzsche is reported to have run to the horse, and embraced it, as it died. Although Nietzsche lived for another 11 years, he never uttered an intelligible word after that incident, and relatively soon thereafter spent his remaining life in a drooling, catatonic paralysis.

I believe that Nietzsche saw man for whom he was, just a man. It was too much. This was not the man who could over-come himself. It was a creature that would beat a dying horse to death with his bare hands while the rest of humanity walked idly by.

Yesterday, just days after having this conversation about Nietzsche’s breakdown, I saw an article in the online Belgium newspaper. It was about a video, which was included and that I watched, from US troops in Afghanistan. It is only thirty seconds. It is nauseating. An infantry man bludgeons a goat to death with an aluminum bat. You can hear each metallic clang, followed by someone saying “what the fuck?” about the damn, stubborn goat who keeps getting up, staggering, twitching and going ultimately collapsing into a seizure. Cheers from young Afghan boys fill the air and “manly” guffaws and encouragement from the Troops goads the assailant on. Finally, the goat stops twitching after several more direct blows to its skull, rounded of by a chorus raucous of cheers, high-fives and hell yeahs.

That is man.

Tragedy originally means “goat song” in ancient Greek as it represented the darkest in humanity, the saturnine, the sadistic, and the satyr.

That is the message that some of our Super-men are sending to the world.  I don’t care if it is isolated. It is part of our reality, as humans, and we need to wonder at what we see.

WTF People?

No, Mind if I Fart?

Kudos to Robert Griffin III and the Baylor Bears for “their” Hesiman Trophy win, but tonight I am thinking about another Waco person, namely the comedian Steve Martin. Although Martin was raised in California, it is somewhat comforting to know that at least he was born in a town called Wac(k)o. Martin was the definition of American comedy of the late 70s and early 80s, along with Eddie Murphy, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Robin Williams, and many others of the vintage SNL era.

And, what better line to remember Martin’s wit with than the classic response to someone who asks you if he can smoke in a restaurant, “No, mind if I fart? It’s one of my habits.”

To me, that sums up quite a bit. As I get older and crustier, something that I notice quite a bit about people is that they don’t really want “to go there” even if they initiate the conversation. I have heard many times in my life, “can I ask you a personal question?” or “can I ask a frank question?” Well, my answer is simply, “Absolutely, if you can handle a frank answer.” Most people can’t, I have learned, because I can give an answer frank-er than Sinatra...wait for it...

Like Martin, we (and, yes, I include myself in that “we”) want to initiate, but when it comes to the response, when it is something that perhaps we don’t want to hear, we become uncomfortable, we hesitate, we stall. We want to smoke, but we don’t want others to fart. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson from A Few Good Men, “we can’t handle the Truth.”

I have spent the greater part of the last week having one, long, frank discussion with a very dear friend of mine whom I have recovered and re-dis-covered from the obscurity of the past. There was no mediation, no pretense, no guard. Nothing but exposure. To be frank. 

Being an American here in Belgium and recently also in India, I am somewhat exposed on a different level, whether I want to be or not. People have ideas about us and US, again, like it or not. Stereotypes exist, and we play into them, confound them, or confirm them. I also had an interview with a potential client this past week as well at a high-level international organization, in which there were certain stereotypes about being an American I felt inclined to either dispel, or at times embrace. We do have the ability to chose, to be frank, and to be honest, but most often we opt out for the softer, easier way.

That is a shame, but I’ve been there. I know the sham comfort of crawling behind platitudes of clichés and habits and hiding behind a mantle of denial and distrust, both of myself and others. But, over time, the moths eat away that mantle, exposing the frailty of the fabric we once believed to be so strong, so permanent, so real.

However, when we can release that fear of exposure, of casting off the cloaked illusion of security, we can have breakthroughs, we can learn to live again. To, in essence, be re-born, a word that my sister put into my mind, and to suggest that the word for next year be just that, a Re-naissance.

After I dropped off my friend at the airport in Brussels and had come back to Antwerp to meet my apartment, seemingly so empty and alone again, I later went to the local Buddhist “club” to listen to a guest speaker. She was to speak on “emotions” as I found out upon arrival. What she opened with, I found to be interesting is that for the most part, when we see such a title, we immediately think of our negative emotions, those that hinder, that bind, that hold us down. Instead, she wanted to talk more about those that release and free us from suffering. Although the talk went downhill from there in my eyes, that thought did stick with me. What emotions can indeed free us?

Given that I have gone through the full range of my emotional gamut in the past days, I realized that it does not really come down to the emotion at all, but rather what Martin gave us, honesty. That’s it.

Mind if I Fart?

That is about as honest as it gets, slapping us in the face with the force of one hand clapping against our skin. But, can we handle that honesty when the tables are turned? Can we hear what we have been telling ourselves, but what happens when it comes from another person?

What I have learned is that if I’m not willing to have someone fart in my general direction, then I had better not idly blow smoke in his or her eyes.

To be frank.

Entanglement

One of my “hobbies,” for lack of a better word, is to read so-called popular science books, specifically on the New Physics of String Theory and the like such as Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, whom I find to be incredibly accessible, yet gets the most difficult concepts across without being either condescending or flippant.

However, there was a book some time ago that I read about a concept that has never really left my mind, perhaps because it is somewhat beyond comprehension, even to the most sophisticated physicists and über-mathematicians, usually from Hungary for some reason. It is the concept of Entanglement (from Amir Aczel’s eponymous book), which, if it truly is a phenomenon, blows away any possible conception of the universe as we know it out of the water, not the least the concept of a constant speed of light being the limits of a transfer of energy from one point to another.

Entanglement, which as the name indicates, involves at least two entities becoming entangled, but at such a profound level that it truly defies any laws of physics known to humans, way beyond even the fantastic concepts of String Theory, which in themselves have the most astute mathematicians and physicists scrambling for a GUT, or Grand Unifying Theory, the ultimate quest of Einstein’s entire corpus of work, a quest that left him alone towards the end of his life as even his most staunch supporters began to question his quest for such a Holy Grail.

Whether String Theory becomes the GUT to end all GUT’s, or merely the Emperor’s New Clothes, remains to be seen, and what role, if any that Entanglement may play out in this quest is also unclear, yet as with all modern physics, all roads somehow end up leading to Einstein, either to prove or disprove him.

Just this week, yet another headline appears, “Was Einstein Wrong?” as it goes on to explain that 15,000 test runs have shown that the previously elusive neutrino may in fact be caught with a speeding-faster-than-light ticket on the super-conductor highway. Apparently, such particles can arrive faster than a light particle, suggesting that they can, as seen in many Feynman diagrams, theoretically go back and forth in Time, and thus arrive before they depart, or other such funky scenarios. Yikes, and once again, Truth may well be stranger than even (Science) Fiction.

In order for Entanglement to be possible, likewise, there must be the possibility of a transfer of energy, in this case, information, at a speed that exceeds that of light, but not by billionths of a second, but something even more sinister...without Time elapsing at all, thus SIMULTANEOUSLY. In other words, there is a transfer of information that does not happen over Time, irrespective of Space as well.

Here’s the skinny. When two particles become “Entangled,” then neither Time nor Space can interfere. Particles have Spin and weight. Let’s two particles are then “Entangled,” then if one changes Spin from positive to negative, then the other will also change from positive to negative Spin at the EXACT same Time. Fine, you may say, interesting enough, but show me the money. Now, the kicker is that they can be at opposite ends of the Universe (we won’t go into Finite vs. Infinite there for simplicity sake), and they will still change Spin simultaneously, if it were to be able to be recorded as such. And, for all intents and purposes, they will remain entangled, again, irrespective of either Time or Space.

So, you may be thinking, why has Robert gone off on this obscure, yet to be proven, much less explained concept?

For one, reading that article reminded me how much I love reading about this, but it also reminded me of the philosophical concept behind “Indra’s Net,” in that within the Net, every intersecting jewel infinitely reflects every other, simultaneously in Time and over infinite (not going into that...) Space. It is the concept of the Universal Atman self-containing the individual Atman that upon the surface appear to be separate, yet are ultimately merely parts of a greater whole, something that I obviously place great stock in with my own philosophy of life.

Furthermore, it made me think about the various physical “jewels” in my life, namely my friends, family, and you (yes, I’m talking to you, dear Reader), that we might very well be reading this post, or another, at the exact same moment, being somewhat entangled if you will. Or, via email and other electronic communications, that how rapidly we can communicate in comparison to just a few years ago, further making the tyranny of distance a thing of the Past to some extent.

Just this weekend, I corresponded directly in writing with a number of people in a variety of locations in Belgium, my friend in Brighton, UK, my friend in Tirunelveli, India, my Irish friend who was traveling in Spain, my sister who lives in Chicago, my mother who lives in Texas, but was traveling to New Mexico, two of my very dear friends  (having finally found one of them recently) in different places in Texas, a client who lives in Russia, and a friend who lives in Arkansas, all from the comfort of my armchair in Antwerp.

Big deal, right?

But, isn’t that amazing that we can just shrug our shoulders at that, so quickly? If I had written that 10 or 15 years ago, it would have been shocking, or at least pretty darn amazing. Today, yeah, big deal...

Do I have a point here? Not really, except to say that perhaps we should remember that it is a big deal that we are able to be virtually entangled because mediums such as Facebook have made it a commonplace, quotidian event, but like the poor high school student (and a large part of the remaining population for that matter) at the cash register who can’t add or subtract whole numbers to make change when the power goes out at the grocery store, what would happen if the lights go out on The Net? Where would you be in your means of communication? Would the “entanglement” then suddenly be just a sham, the Emperor’s New Clothes? Where would all of those dozens (or hundreds) of “friends” suddenly go if you couldn’t post your status with the click of a button and you actually had to make a physical, concerted effort to contact them? How many jewels in your Net would you have left if the system failed? 

Waves Roll

Water, Water Every where, nor any drop to drink...so laments the albatross-haunted voice of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Sitting on the bank of the Schelde the other day, I noticed an interesting phenomenon while trying to focus on the rolling waves of the river. I have noticed this often while at the ocean, most notably when I was at Kanniyakumari where three different major bodies of water come convene, causing the most amazing currents I have ever seen, but it was very apparent with the river’s coursings as well.

Try to focus on a point in a body of moving water. It is not easy. The natural tendency of our eyes is to follow the water, not remain locked in on the point of interest, especially if there is a piece of flotsam, jetsam, or sundry detritus bobbing along, much less a lazy seagull. The gaze follows the motion.

There was a cautionary buoy of sorts some fifty yards or into the middle of the river. That was a completely different experience then, to focus on a non-moving object surrounded by total movement. Both were hypnotizing to say the least, and I became engrossed and entranced by each over Time, losing myself indefinitely in the inertia and the inertia.

Being abroad, I sometimes wonder, what makes it “abroad,” and for me, the answer is simply, water. I am abroad because I am across the Atlantic Ocean from my native land. I was abroad abroad in India because I was across the Arabian Sea across the Atlantic Ocean or across the Indian Ocean across the Pacific Ocean. Six or one half dozen. I was exactly halfway around the globe in either case.

Yet, I have never made one of these trips per boat, oddly enough. I have always flown, as we live in the jet-age, so why should I? I have many times heard the story of how my mother, when she was eight and her brothers merely 2 and under traveled across the Atlantic in the dead of the deadest of deadliest winters to come join their father, traveling with my grandmother who had like many on the trip, fallen ill. My mom has described this trip, and it made me realize how impressionable that must have been. Huge, dark, ominous, unforgiving waves rolling and smashing against the hull of a transport ship lurching across a nearly frozen ocean, as the English Channel itself did freeze that winter!

That was a journey. That was a passage.

Now, we jump on an airplane and are magically transposed from point A to point B, with no real liminal space in between. Sitting by the river on Sunday, it was hard for me to imagine that just a week and a half before I was sitting in a boat, contemplating the ephemeral nature of life on the Ganges , watching bodies burn in a chain-smoking row of bonfires, and now, here I was, alone along the banks of the Schelde, contemplating...what?

I am content to be back in Antwerp, yet the disjunct between Belgium and India is so great at times, jolting, and the journey back was so sudden. I am confident that the next time I make such a journey, I will find a way to go by boat, or at least by a slower medium than the 747 that carried me from Mumbai’s Chatrapi Shivaji to London’s Heathrow.

I recently read online a list of ways to travel “differently” from the Lonely Planet publications. One of them was to “return slowly.” I believe that that is merely one half of the equation. I would like to next take a journey that I “go slowly” and where the journey itself is the destination. To roll along the waves, surrounded by water, water everywhere, desiring no-thing but the passage itself.

Not So Innocently Abroad

Here is a piece from a very good friend of mine, Professor John Pedro Schwartz at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. John Pedro is a so-called “late-bloomer” in academics and has never slowed down once he got his wings. I am constantly blown away by the verve and detail of his writing, though not losing the essential message.

JPS, as I am wont to call him, sent me this piece a couple of weeks ago while I was still in Madurai, and I was yet again blown away about what he is writing about and how. He has the ability to render a highly socially conscious piece, without being biased or didactic. A true gift. Not to mention that he is quite funny, both in person and on paper.

Two days ago, after I had returned to Antwerp and was beginning to read the various newspapers online again and seeing the events in Syria, I could not believe the real impact of JPS’s words. He then sent me an email with “Published” as the subject line and this link as the body of the mail.

So, here it is. Important stuff from Lebanon.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/11/04/highway_to_homs 

In a Sense, Abroad

When I was nineteen, I had “dropped out” of college and was working as a bus boy/bar back at a seafood restaurant in Austin, Texas. I had rather long hair, or at least for me as mine grows very slowly, and was reading more than I ever had before or have ever since. I had small cairns of books all about my apartment, most of which shaped my thinking from those days onwards. The only difference is, now I am beginning to understand them.

My good friend Tom and I were living a Bohemian life, across the board, as he shared my apartment most of the time as his relationship with his girlfriend had gone South and he was stuck without a place to live for a Time. We had conversations til the break of dawn on a daily basis about everything from the inability to understand women (yes, cliched, but valid), the inability to be understood ourselves by women (ditto), and the gamut of “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” that nineteen year-old guys talk about. Tom and I were dreamers, and for the most part, armchair philosophers. We would stand on the balcony for hours opining the world away, though between the two of us had very little “world” experience, though he more than me at least.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my life. I had left a decent private school because I had quit the swim team and did not want to be in that environment any longer, but was not sure that I wanted to be back in school either. I have had a lifelong struggle with education, as I love learning more than anything, but have been disappointed with educational institutions. This is nothing new, as I used to protest at a very, very young age about my “need” to go to school. The irony of course is that I learned that dissatisfaction by becoming more educated within those institutions. It is in fact what made me decide to dedicate my life to teaching, to instill a sense of questioning, yet also to teach the rich traditions of the humanities. This has caused much commotion in my life as most people usually take one or the other (challenge or tradition), but I believe that the traditions are only made better by being tested sufficiently by questioning, thus yielding yet a stronger alloy of thought tempered by the fires of dissent and scrutiny. The wheels turn.

So, I was becoming the “self-taught man,” the autodidact, reading all what I could like the character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, though not in alphabetical order. But, ending up more like “Jude the Obscure,” I felt on the outside of the ivoried towers of knowledge, not being taken seriously like those who had gone to the ivory-covered halls of learning. The University of Texas loomed liked Kafka’s Castle over me...taunting my lack of erudition, refinement, and authenticity as a thinker. I was just a punk kid who liked to hang out in coffee houses and read books, argue over things I didn’t even comprehend, and write novels that more than a handful of people have yet to read, (though of which I plan to edit with a vengeance once back in Belgium from India). I had big dreams, big ego, big delusions of grandeur, and a big open hole in my culture. There’s a hole in my culture dear Liza, dear Liza, there’s a hole in my culture dear Liza, a hole. I need to fill it, so I thought I would set out to Europe.

I booked a Eurail pass, which at the time where cheap, made a deal with Tom to take over my apartment, bought an orange Let’s Go!, and, so I left.

I flew into Amsterdam like many Americans do, though did not visit those coffee houses as it was not my drug of choice, though did enjoy the beer. That was the beginning of a three-month trek across 17 countries/territories/principalities and more hostels than I can remember. I met dozens of fellow travelers and in those days Americans used to actually backpack across Europe, which is nearly a rarity these days. The ubiquitous Maple would be proudly stitched on Canadians’ packs, being certain to distinguish themselves from their less-liked southern neighbors.

It was a grand Time, and a grand tour. I was young, stupid (though thought I was brilliant), naïve, daring, resourceful, and ready to take on the world, or so I thought I was doing that. What I have come to realize is what a laughably small part of the world I had and still have actually seen.

But, I was young, and with youth comes a dose of great confidence, a strong tincture of folly for good measure.

Having traversed the continent, shedding books, clothes, and pounds along the way, I ended up in Greece for the last three weeks. My eldest sister and her then husband were stationed on Kreta at the Knossos site as he was an archaeologist. By that point, I had felt like I had been initiated as a traveler, passing from a mere tourist that I had been the first time I had been off of the North American continent for the same sister’s wedding in Great Britain.

No, this time, I was not a mere tourist, but indeed a traveler. However, I was a traveler without a cause. I had passed the initiation, but was stuck in a disjunct. I wasn’t European, but neither did I feel American any longer. I did not feel like a “kid,” but wasn’t an adult. I wasn’t in school, was not in a relationship of any kind, and had had almost no contact with anyone from the United States for the entire trip as this was pre-email and pre-cell phone. I know if you are younger, you may have just gasped that anyone could be that old...

In addition, I was no longer “The Swimmer.”

I was in limbo, and I did not see a way out.

Backpacking across Europe in the late 80’s was seen as nearly a rite of passage for American teenagers. Go East, sort of, and sow your wild oats. Come back to America and make a fortune and become a doctor, lawyer, corporate raider, because, “Greed is Good,” as Mr. Gecko hissed into our impressionable ears.

I missed the memo.

What the trip was, was indeed a passage of rites, and it was to be one of the biggest steps in my life towards “Know-ing Myself.”

While on Santorini, the famed island in the Cycladaes group, and which is the island photographed as the face of Greece, I was staying on one of the many black sand beaches as Santorini is a volcanic island and is the Greek island. You know, the one with the blue houses and whitewashed stucco buildings? That’s the one, and it is the only one of the dozens of Greek islands that actually looks like that.

I love to swim, and when I can, in the ocean or sea. So, I swam each day while there. One day, I decided to keep swimming, not sure why, but I did. I just put my head down, and swam, not looking back. When I did look back, I was in for a bit of a shock. I had swum out about 2km and could not even really see the beach any longer. I was on the periphery of the island, threatening to be pulled into the general current of the Adriatic.

I turned and began to swim back in, but made very little progress as the sea didn’t feel like giving me up at that point. It was the first time in my life that I realized I might not have any control over my own life due to bigger things. I kept swimming and eventually through a series of panic, fear, anger, and finally resignation, I thought that I might not make it. Nobody knew I had gone out as I knew nobody there. It would be ten hours before the beach would be cleared and my lone towel found. I stopped and bobbed in the water, and thought about a lot of things for a while.

That day, though, I chose life. I have at times foolishly and childishly cursed my life, asked God, “why me?” like an arrogant blasphemer, but, I always knew that there is a way out. That is the odd thing about choice and what Sartre has called the true existential question, suicide.

I could have turned back out and kept swimming. I was at a crossroads. I did not know what I was going to do when I got back to Austin. I was already on the path to what would be a lifelong series of decisions that many people in my life would kind of look at me and say, “huh?” to. I had no plan. I had no “ambition.” I had not identity that distinguished “me” from the masses. I was no-one.

But, I chose life, and have ever since, despite that feeling of not always fitting in. I continued swimming against the outward pull of Poseidon’s realm and kept swimming. After what indeed feel like an eternity, I was able to make it back to the point where the wave starting rolling in, and I felt a natural forward movement. I crawled back onto the beach, and collapsed on my towel. 

Small, small Big World

This weekend, on the last day of shooting the Bishop Sargent movie that I have been working on in Tirunelveli, India, I accidentally knocked this hymnal book off of a desk. My friend, Handel, the cameraman, picked it up and happened to look inside.

This is what we saw....

Apparently, Caroline, Handel's mother and the director, had gotten this hymnal book for their congregation from a shipment of books from America that came in through Chennai.

I don't think I have to tell you that the odds of this are beyond comprehension that this is the town that I graduated from high school in to see in a town in southern India halfway across the globe on a film that I was working on by chance.

Stranger than fiction...