The corollary is that many of Griffin's victims had also been monsters or, more kindly, snitches, bullies, rats, grovelers at the seats of power. A little girl curries favor with a cruel friend by pouncing on a weaker one. A Jewish woman tries to escape deportation to Auschwitz by turning in other Jews. The tortured look up to their torturers.
Sometimes they become torturers themselves.
"What you've got to understand," I told my kids-- few of them were older than 20--"Is that people are horrible."
They looked shocked. Somebody giggled.
Given all the other ways I might have put it, I thought I was being mild, but we shouldn't underestimate the degree to which Americans want to believe that they are good people. We have been told we are since childhood.
But the truth is that people are terrible. Americans are no worse than anybody else, just more cosseted and deluded.
The great project facing all human beings is the project of transcending their essential awfulness.
There are various means of achieving this:
.Human beings can create works of art that are better than they are. Some works are so dazzling that they blind us to the flaws of their creators. The productions of Shakespeare
and Bach, to name just two, seem to issue from someplace beyond personality.
Other artworks somehow incorporate their makers' flaws into their design. In the novels of Dostoevsky, you can see all his hysteria, his Jew-hatred and drunken religiosity.
Frida Kahlo's paintings pulse with narcissism. Narcissism gives them their peacock brightness.
Kurt Cobain's songs might emerge from some dedicated organ of self-loathing. They're still great, and some of that greatness comes from their nakedness-- or, say, the blatancy of the suffering from which they are distilled.
.Human beings can escape their native selfishness long enough to do something truly unselfish. Most of us can only do that for a moment or two before our moral gravity reasserts itself. A very small number succeed in being selfless for the greater part of a lifetime. When someone does this it's as if a dancer were to leap into the air and remain floating there long after the other members of the company have landed and taken their bows, and all the lights have gone up, and the audience ceased clapping and filed out of the theater, into the cold and dark. While inside, in the darkened house, one dancer still hovers, so absorbed in the leap that she doesn't realize that it has yet to end.
.Human beings can strive to raise children who will be happier than they are. Not richer or more successful. Just happier. This is what Sophocles has in mind when he has Oedipus
enjoin his daughters, "Pray that . . . your life be happier than your father's." To appreciate how humble this hope is, consider that one of those daughters will be put to death for daring to give her slain brothers a proper burial. Still, Oedipus gets his wish. In the end, Antigone is happier than he was. She gets to suffer for something she believes in.
.Teaching combines some elements of the last two enterprises. It offers selfish people the opportunity to act unselfishly and aging ones a chance to pass on the little they know to younger ones. Most students won't recognize that anything is being passed down to them at all, but some will. Some will even value it.
Traditionally people think of art and children as ways of achieving immortality. But immortality is impossible. Rather, it's unverifiable. Who can know what part of him will survive his life?
An alternative is to think of immortality as release from the other part of our condition, which is not death but brokenness. Some parts of us die before others, and we carry those dead parts with us and inflict them on our fellows.
"'Are you a weak creetur," Dickens's Mr. Bumble asks Mrs. Corney, this being his idea of a come-on.
"'We are all weak creeturs,' says Mrs. Corney. And Dickens adds that she is "laying down a general principle."
6 comments:
Hey Peter, I'm starting up my own blog soon ("NC State of Mind") and I decided to take a look at yours again--I love your range of topics.
Crumb for instance is a comix artist that too often gets overlooked nowadays for the fancy, shiny new graphic novels :( Have you seen his documentary? It's fascinating, especially the very end where his brother and mother are talking about children in their house that don't really exist. I think he painted the id better than anybody.
But, you have some great points about human flaw. I just finished reading a lot on classic Greek tragedy this semester and I've come to some understanding about hamartia and what it really means to be a tragic figure (and a hero).
Well, I'll have more for you later, but it's always a pleasure.
Until next time.
Kyle,
It's nice to hear from you, and I'm eager to see your blog. Can you send me the URL?
I grew up with Crumb and spent much of my adolescence trying to draw like him, with mixed success. One of the things I like about him is that his figures are at once recognizable and grotesque, like human beings. Artists like Frank Miller et al belong favor the idealized mesomorphs of action comic books. If anything, they're MORE idealized than, say, Jack Kirby's. I saw the doc. I remember getting in a huge fight with my girlfriend of the time, who was repelled by Crumb's sexism and the blatant dysfunction of his family. I saw someone who had probably written and drawn his way out of craziness. "He painted the id"-- that's exactly it. That to me is the opposite of tragedy-- using the broken part of you to produce something larger and, maybe, beautiful, inasmuch as you can call anything Crumb makes beautiful. It's a variant of that Leonard Cohen line: There is a crack in everything/That's where the light gets in.
You speak some clear no-bullshit stuff here and I love the examples you give; the image of the dancer mid-leap will stay with me. I'm a little embarassed today at how deperately I've clung in the past to the conviction that humans are essentially "good." Still, I wonder if it isn't making an equal mistake to state that humans are horrible. Aren't we, just like the universe that made us, an equal mix of light and dark forces, in perpetual struggle? I resonate deeply with what you say about the art that comes from the broken part of us... and Cohen's lyric is one of my silent mantras. Thanks.
I was exaggerating for dramatic purposes, and because I sometimes like to fuck with students. The truth is probably more that people occupy some moral rung whose exact position on the scale between saintliness and brutishness is beyond my power to measure. Their awfulness is more striking for the same reason that newspaper headlines feature more stories of grotesque crimes than of little old ladies adopting homeless families. Or, for that matter, kittens.
I don't mean to sound cynical. It can be a tic for me.
I, on the other hand, believe in basic goodness. It's a belief that's equal parts stubborn practicality and blind faith; a belief in a goodness that transcends the dumb human judgments of right and wrong and moral rectitude; a belief that results more from an essential trust in the benign grace of the universe than from any examination of human history. This does not mean that we're not all simply awful, too, but for me it's a different sort of awe that defines us. No one human can fully understand another, and there is something tremendous and awful about this.
I wouldn't presume to say what people really are-- I mean how their souls balance on Osiris's scale. My personal experience is that the beauty of the human soul manifests itself mostly in small, quiet ways, and in intimate moments, while human hideousness is scrawled across the landscape in a towering script of cinders, blood, and shit. And it may also be that, like so many people, I'm more drawn to monsters than to saints. There are more movies about serial killers than about do-gooders, and the latter usually star Robin Williams at his hairiest and most earnest.
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