The Useless Tree

The Tao of "The Tempest"

     We went to see a performance of Shakespeare's The Tempest last night, put on by the students here at Williams.  It was a fine performance.  Prospero was aloof and callous, Caliban was Gollum-like in his torment, and Ariel was airy and angular.  The drunkards stole the show. 

    It had been a long time since I last encountered this play, and I noticed anew last night the Taoist resonance in Prospero's lines in Act 4, scene 1:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

 The image of the insubstantial dissolving brought Chuang Tzu to mind (no, not the butterfly dream...):

We set out like ingenious machines declaring yes this and not that.  Or we hold fast like oath-bound warriors defending victory.

We can say that to fade away day by day is to die like autumn into winter.  But we're drowning, and nothing we do can bring any of it back.  We can say this drain is backed up in old age, full and content, but a mind near death cannot recover that autumn blaze.

Joy and anger, sorrow and delight, hope and regret, doubt and ardor, diffidence and abandon, candor and reserve; it's all musing rising out of emptiness, mushrooms appearing out of mist.  Day and night come and go, but who knows where it all begins?  It is! It just is! If you understand this day in and day out, you inhabit the very source of it all.

      Of course, much - indeed, most - of the story is rather un-Taoist in the play of ego and revenge and manipulation.  So maybe someone who knows Shakespeare better than I can answer me this: why is it that Prospero turns away from being an "oath-bound warrior" and forgives those who deceived him in the past?  How is it that he is able to get free from his anger and rage and inhumanity?

Frost/Nixon

    While in the city last week, I went to see Frost/Nixon, a Broadway play about the 1977 interviews done by David Frost with Richard Nixon.  It was a great show.  Frank Langella, who played Nixon, was masterful, as was Micheal Sheen, the British actor who portrayed David Frost.  It closed on Sunday, sadly; but is supposedly being made into a movie.

    The main theme was selfish uses of power and fame.  This was the core of Nixon, after all.  His Watergate fall was all about his inability to accept mistakes and take responsibility.  He obsessed over his historical legacy, yearning, after his disgrace, to be "rehabilitated"  (sounds like something out of Chinese politics).  And his obsession is what ultimately kept him from achieving that goal.    As a character in the play reminds us, we still reserve the suffix "-gate" to define significant instances of political corruption.

     But Frost was also swept up in his own selfish pursuits.  He was using Nixon to advance his own career, just as Nixon was using Frost as a vehicle for his desired media make-over.  Although Frost "wins," insofar as Nixon came off looking bad and the interviews did not advance his political agenda, his victory signaled the transition to the age of hyper-mediated manipulation of political discourse.   It was all about the performance, the image, the sound bites.  Substance, analysis, deliberation - these take too much time and do not transmit well in the mesmerizing visuals of television.   In a way, Frost was the precursor of Michael Deaver, the man who crafted Ronald Reagan's image.   And, in that way, Frost's "victory" over Nixon set the stage for Reagan's win over Carter in 1980.

      But Nixon was the center of the play, particularly in one scene that Langella carried with extraordinary power:

...This makes him [Frost] the ideal listener in the show’s high point, a late-night phone call Frost receives from a drunken Nixon, on the eve of the last of their series of interviews. 

The moment is one of the few in the play that is pure fabrication. Yet it rings ineffably true. It makes us feel, rather than only register intellectually, the extent to which these two mismatched men are emotional mirrors.

Throughout the production Mr. Langella’s Nixon has come across as a man of quick intellect, maudlin sentimentality, vulgar wit and studied social reflexes that have never acquired the semblance of natural grace. You are always aware of someone who struggles to conceal not only a defensive self-consciousness but also a cancerous anger and fear.

That’s what comes to the surface, like black bilious lava, in the phone-call scene. And it’s one of those great moments, which only theater affords, when acting takes on the tidal force of an operatic aria.

    "Cancerous anger and fear" - that captures the Nixon I remember.  And it also reminds me of Nixon's inability to grasp the Taoist point, expressed in passage 24 (with similar sentiments in passage 22, not quoted here):

Keep up self-reflection
and you'll never be enlightened.
Keep up self-definition
and you'll never be apparent.
Keep up self-promotion
and you'll never be proverbial.
Keep up self-esteem
and you'll never be perennial.

 Nixon could never let go, and he died without the fulfillment he desired.

Narcissism

 This review in the NYT caught my eye just now:

Vacuousness and self-absorption, it appears, never go out of style. In a new play with an unpublishable title, Michael Domitrovich introduces five 20-somethings who are awash in both — irritating people who could be from a Warhol posse or a Gatsby party but, alas, are present-day East Village types. New century, same narcissism.

 It's a play, with the odd and profane title, "Artfuc*ers".  Perhaps there is something redeeming about it, but I, for one, tire very quickly when confronted with depths of bourgeois angst.  This was always a problem I had with Woody Allen.  Who cares if he is neurotic and repressed? (though, in his case, the humor can carry you through).

    It seems the reviewer tired of this play as well:

Over all, though, the play has too many dishonest notes to feel genuine...
And a dismaying confessional collage late in the play, in which these insufferable characters blame their parents for their faults and behaviors, makes Mr. Domitrovich seem as if he’s too consciously writing for a 20-something audience, giving it what it wants to hear.

 So, I wish narcissism would go out of style.  Or, maybe better, I wonder if we could make an anti-narcissistic comedy out of passage 22 of the Tao Te Ching:

Give up self-reflection
and you're soon enlightened.
Give up self-definition
and you're soon apparent.
Give up self-promotion
and you're soon proverbial.
Give up self-esteem
and you're soon perennial.
Simply give up contention
and soon nothing in all beneath heaven contends with you.

 Maybe this is what Napoleon Dynamite was suggesting.  In the end, the Taoist gets the girl.

UPDATE: This seems to be a theme in the news today.  Here's a story from the London Times:

...If Narcissism was a town, LA would be twinned with it. If you threw a soyburger on Sunset Boulevard, you’d hit a narcissist. Telling a jury that a psychiatrist in LA is a narcissist is like breaking the news to them that the Earth is round...

   And then there's this piece on today's AP Wire, Study: College Students More Narcissistic:

Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."    

     Reminders all of that sad truism of modern life: it's hard out there for a Taoist.

AND HERE'S ONE MORE, from the LA Times on the "narcissism report:"

Other trends in American culture, including permissive parenting, increased materialism and the fascination with celebrities and reality TV shows, may also heighten self-regard, said study coauthor W. Keith Campbell, psychology professor at the University of Georgia. "It's part of a whole cultural system," he said.

     It's bigger than all of us!

Broadway Tao

      Last week was my daughter's thirteenth birthday - the first teenage year.  I took her into Manhattan, as I have done each of the prior three years, to see a Broadway show.  In fact, we saw two, a matinee and an evening performance (the half priced tickets are great).  In the afternoon we saw Chicago, which was fun, in a purposefully over-the-top sort of way.   After dinner with some friends - her Godmother, who gave her a first iPod - we saw A Chorus Line.

    I had seen this show more than thirty years ago, in its original Broadway incarnation, and it had all sorts of resonances for me.  We had great seats, fifth row, center orchestra on the aisle. Almost exactly where I remember sitting all those years ago when I went with a girlfriend, who died about eight years ago of a rare cancer.  Her memory - her smile and laugh and frustration at the end of her all too short life - faded in and out of my mind as the evening unfolded. 

     My nostalgia was heightened as I read the program and discovered that a fellow I went to high school (we were in the marching band together!) and college with was playing the bass in the band.  After the show my daughter and I waited by the stage door; she collected autographs from the actors as they came out and I waited for a man I had not seen in twenty five years.  When he emerged, I accosted him, he let out a yelp of recognition and we started to catch up.  We wound up in a bar on 8th Avenue (it was my daughter's first foray into a bar - she had some french fries and a Coke); over a couple of beers we relished the unexpected reunion. 

     It was, then, a night of coincidences and remembrances - aimlessly wandering, unstuck in time, through scenes of my life.  My recollections were stirred even further in the midst of the show.  I had forgotten what a lovely tune "What I Did for Love" is.  It brought Aidan to mind, his effect on us, our love for him, especially this lyric:

Kiss today goodbye,
And point me toward tomorrow
We did what we had to do
Can't forget,
Won't regret what I did for love.

 It has a Taoist quality to it, like something Chuang Tzu might say: let go of today, move on to tomorrow, do what you have to do, and don't regret.  Thoughts like those very much shaped my life with Aidan, especially the bad days.  I don't forget or regret any of it.

There's Only This

    I went to see the musical "Rent" today with my twelve year-old daughter.  I know it has been around for a long time, and I have heard a lot about it, but I never had the chance to see a performance.  This one was a touring company, which put on a good show. 

    I was moved by it.  "Seasons of Love," the show's most famous song, was the tune that Maggie chose to have us play at Aidan's funeral.  When I hear it, he comes back to me.  The death of the character Angel, a central element in the plot, also made me think of Aidan: Angel's death made the other characters see their lives in a different light; he gave them a gift of sorts.  Something like Aidan's gift.

     What also struck me was the Taoist undercurrent of the show.  This was most striking at the end, when the cast is singing:

There is no future
There is no past

Thank God this
Moment's not the last

There's only us
There's only this
Forget regret or
Life is yours to miss

No other road no other way
No day but today

I can't control
My destiny
I trust my soul
My only goal

 Made me think of a passage from Chuang Tzu.  He is describing the way in which a person has transcended grief at the death of his mother:

He's lost track of what it is to live and what it is to die.  And he's lost track of which comes first, which last.  Like any other thing inhabiting change, he simply waits for whatever unfathomed transformation may come over him next.  He's changing and yet he knows the changeless.  He's changeless and yet he knows the change.  You and I, on the other hand, we're dreaming: we haven't even begun to awake.  His body may fear for its life but his mind remains unperturbed.   (97)

    It's not exactly the same.  The "Rent" characters are more emotional, more rooted to their sense of themselves and each other.  But that sense of "there's only this" is there.  There is no future or past but only the next  "unfathomed transformation" that will come over us.   And, I think, Chuang Tzu would conclude in the same manner as "Rent:" Live in the moment; live for today.