Good People and Gadamer

David Lindsay-Abaire

A couple of months ago, with my brother, Gav, and friends Jasmina and Donna, I went to see an excellent production of Good People, a play by American playwright David Lindsay-Abaire. The play is a very recent work, first produced in 2011. We saw it at the Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre in Melbourne.

Good People is about a middle-aged man and woman who grew up together in a rough neighbourhood of Boston. The woman is single, still living in “Southie” and struggling to hold down a job and support a disabled daughter, while the man has moved up in the world. He is a doctor, living in middle-class comfort with his beautiful, much younger, academic wife and a healthy child. As the plot unfolds, the audience is led to make an unstable, shifting set of assumptions about why the lives of the two teenage lovers have turned out so differently.

A central theme of the play is the question of responsibility for an individual’s worldly success or failure. Is a person’s social and economic standing a consequence of personal choices and hard work or laziness? Or is it a matter of “luck,” reflecting a complex set of systematic societal influences, over which an individual has little or no control? The play doesn’t limit itself to this right-wing/left-wing alternative; it also suggests that where personal choices play a role, those that lead to worldly success are not necessarily worthy of respect or emulation, since they may involve adapting to systems that demand and thrive on ruthlessly selfish behavior. But stereotypically “good” self-sacrificial choices are equally laid open to interrogation: are such choices really good if they leave the individual who makes them in a miserable situation, and saddle the successful with a corrosive burden of guilt? What is missing in this portrait of a society dominated by the rhetoric of personal choice (and its shadow: a vision of total subjugation of the individual to impersonal systems) is any reliable possibility of mutual care and trust, or political solidarity across differences of class, race and gender. This absence seems to make any convincing form of personal goodness either simply unattainable, or incompatible with worldly success.

Despite the weighty issues at stake there are plenty of laughs in this play, as the characters make clever digs at each other and themselves. But even while you’re laughing, you can’t help noticing that suspicion, resentment, insecurity, and self-loathing seem to form the consistent emotional backdrop to this contemporary liberal drama of personal choice.

Olga Makeeva, Andrea Swifte and Jane Montgomery Griffiths in Good People

I was recently reminded of this play and its message while thinking about a very different approach to the question of how to assess or give meaning to our lives and the way they unfold. In his theory of understanding, twentieth-century German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer gives a lot of emphasis to the notion of “play.” As he describes it, playing involves abandoning any strong sense of personal choice or control, since play “fulfills its ‘purpose’ only if the player loses himself in the play.”

‘Purpose’ is placed in inverted commas here, because for Gadamer, playing is a purposeless or non-intentional kind of activity. It is an activity, but one that shades into passivity: “all playing is a being-played. The attraction or fascination that a game exerts consists precisely in the fact that the play tends to master the players.” This carries a risk which is also a lure: we may become so engrossed in the game that our identity is transformed. Such transformation is not a matter of personal choice or responsibility, since the action or agency of play is located not “in the player, but in the game itself; the game is what holds the player in its spell, draws him into play, and keeps him there.”

For Gadamer, human play finds its “genuine completion” as art. In engaging with an artwork, or allowing it to play upon us, we experience a lucid form of play, a bit like lucid dreaming. We know we’re playing, but we also continue to play, or be played.

What if we were to think (lucidly) of our lives, or episodes in our lives, as games or artworks, in Gadamer’s sense, rather than the rational, inevitable working out of personal choices for which we must bear responsibility? Particularly when things go wrong, either for us or for people who are connected to us, we tend to think or feel that this is a product of choices we made earlier and could or should have made differently. This way of seeing things seems to give us the power to act differently in the future, but it can also lead to a powerful sense of self-recrimination. We can add a lot of intensity to our suffering with these kinds of thoughts.

Mightn’t it be kinder, and closer to experience, to suppose that our lives are shaped not by isolated personal choices, nor by impersonal social systems, but by the games that attract and fascinate us, the different forms of play in which we lose ourselves and are transformed, for better or worse?

Most games are social; you can’t play on your own. That’s why you can’t control or take complete responsibility for the outcome of a game – responsibility is shared. And it is the game, rather than the players, that determines the possibilities of play. On this way of seeing things, if we really desire change, we need to find or create space for a new game to play (or to play us), rather than letting obsessive concern with personal choices keep us blindly involved in the one that’s currently got us in its grip.

As my little niece Scarlett often says to me, with the insistent wisdom of a two-year old, “Let’s play!”

Meditation for Fiona

This photograph was taken by Tom Sangster, a new Melbourne friend of mine. Among the many lovely images he captured while travelling in Spain, this one especially caught my eye.

A solitary chair stands against the high wall of a cloister with well-defined shadows creating a frame for it – an architecture of light and dark that speaks of gateways between life and death, and a moment of reckoning, or contemplation at the point of passage.

The three-leafed pattern stenciled in strong sunlight at the top of the photograph evokes the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, but it also calls up more pagan associations especially since the angle of the photo has slightly elongated the lower petal of the trefoil, or triquetra. If this shape were scrawled on the wall by a graffiti artist, rather than produced by the decorative elements of monastic architecture, it would let us see the fertile force of sexuality present even in this orderly, peaceful place.

Triqutra on one of the
Funbo Runestones in Sweden

This seems appropriate since the triquetra is originally a pagan symbol. It appears on ancient runestones in Northern Europe, and is used by contemporary Germanic Neopagans and Wiccans to represent the division of the world into the realms of Land, Sea and Sky. They also use it as a symbol of triple goddesses such as the Morrígan, goddess of battle, strife and sovereignty.

These associations led me from this luminous image to thoughts of a friend of mine, Fiona, who died in January, just before I went on the yoga retreat which preceded my impromptu flight into the desert. It was a violent death: she threw herself in front of a train. For years she had struggled with mental health problems, which were exacerbated by the side-effects of medication she took in attempting to overcome her suffering. Her death brought back memories of another death that greatly troubled me, that of a young woman who did a doctorate in philosophy at the same university as me. This woman, Mairead, threw herself off the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Like Fiona, she was highly intelligent, attractive and sensitive. She was also suffering from side-effects of medication which had been prescribed to help her sleep.

On the morning of the day I left for Alice Springs, I felt I faced a turning point, or a decision like the one demanded of the reader at the bottom of each page in a choose your own adventure book. Each option is equally available, but will lead to quite different versions of the story. I had three possibilities. I could take an early flight and arrive back in Sydney in time to attend Fiona’s funeral. Or I could catch the afternoon flight I’d already booked and paid for before hearing the news of her death. This way I would miss the funeral, and simply continue along the pre-established track of my life. Or I could embark on an adventure that would take me across a vast, almost shadowless landscape, and give me a sense of opening myself to the intense pleasures, if also the dangers of life. I could live for a few days like a mythical goddess, traveling in a great white chariot, driven by a stranger who fortunately turned out to be a capable and trustworthy charioteer (albeit one who was highly dissatisfied with his chariot, but that’s another story).

I thought that Fiona would have approved of my selection of this third option, or at least empathized with it. But no doubt it was, to a greater degree than either of the options involving air travel, a form of flight. Eventually, I would need to stop, find a seat in a quiet, sunny space, and let myself face the fact of my friend’s death and the difficult emotions it provoked in me.

This finally happened over the Easter long weekend, when I did a meditation retreat at Vejjasala, a healing centre in the Southern Highlands. This is a lovely, tranquil place, recently opened by the Association of Engaged Buddhists, led by a wonderful monk and very dear friend, Bhante Tejadhammo. On this retreat, the first to be held at the centre, one of my fellow retreatants happened to be a psychologist who specializes in grief therapy. At one point we had a discussion about grieving. What I took from it was the idea that to grieve properly, or to help someone else to grieve, you need to let yourself feel the suffering caused by the loss. But to do this without becoming overwhelmed or reacting against the suffering requires a certain amount of equanimity, or peacefulness.

Peacefulness is what we are seeking when we turn to drugs to pacify our anxieties, but I doubt that drugs can ever produce real equanimity. Too often they only dam up the pain, which then accumulates to a point where it must eventually break the increasingly fragile barriers that hold it in, sometimes with terrible results. Equanimity, on the other hand, gives you the strength to let yourself feel the pain, and let it subside, or give way naturally to the next emotional weather pattern.

Bhante Teja mentioned that one of the Buddha’s images of equanimity is that of a mountain standing in the sea. Whether the water is moved by ordinary tides, churned into crashing waves, or unusually serene, the mountain continues to stand there, accepting whatever comes, never running from or refusing any experience. To cultivate this kind of solidity and ability to stay with whatever is happening is a central goal of meditative practice. It is the necessary support for the other practices of love taught by the Buddha: loving-kindness, compassion and sympathetic joy.

This suggests another interpretation of the triquetra, which is often shown with a circle entwining the three interlinked petals. The circle would be the profound peacefulness and solidity of equanimity, which allows the three more active aspects of love to flourish in response to the pleasurable, painful and ordinary conditions of human life and death.

 

A Gaelic Blessing

Deep peace of the running wave to you.

Deep peace of the flowing air to you.

Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.

Deep peace of the shining stars to you.

Deep peace of the gentle night to you.

Moon and stars pour their healing light on you.

R.I.P. Fiona Gwynne, 1970-2012

Arrietty and the arctic banana

Last Saturday night I went to see Arrietty, a Japanese animé film produced by Studio Ghibli. It’s based on a novel from 1952, The Borrowers, by Mary Norton. Its a title that evokes vague, fond memories from my childhood – probably from the book but maybe also from one of the various tv adaptations. I saw the film at the beautiful old Astor cinema in Windsor, Melbourne, with my friends Jane and Libby and a gaggle of assorted relatives. The occasion was also memorable for my daring choice of choc-top: arctic banana. Jane commented that I was very adventurous, that she, for instance, would never… It was a risk, admittedly, and not every adventure comes off. But anyway, on to the film.

The borrowers are a family of tiny people who live secretly in a house of “human beans” and discretely “borrow” tiny quantities of things they need. In the course of the story, a friendship develops between a human boy and the tiny, agile Arrietty. They help each other, but must part at the end – the boy to face a heart operation, and Arrietty to flee with her parents to find a new home. The borrowers are decamping because the house they are living in has become unsafe. Too many “human beans” have become aware of their existence and a hostile cook (whose foiled antics provoked by far the most laughter from the children in the cinema) is planning to have them trapped by a pest control company.

In keeping with Ghibli’s philosophy, the main message of the film is ecological – in a rather heavy handed speech the boy tells Arrietty that her species is destined to die out, just as many other species have done. The environmental message is also more gently communicated through beautiful drawings of plants and some very endearing insect “extras.”

The film also made me think about how “little” relationships – contacts with others that are brief, apparently random, a bit magical and seemingly inconsequential compared to “big” relationships with “significant others” – can be quietly transformative. Childhood encounters, but also travelling friendships - relationships formed outside of the usual run of life - are sometimes like this. They change you, or open you up, in ways you only become aware of later. Memories of such fleeting connections remain vivid, and their impact clear, perhaps because the time spent together is short, so the impressions you form don’t get blurred under the palimpsest of repeated contact.

In the film, there is a sentimental farewell scene between the boy and Arrietty (which doesn’t appear in the book). Arrietty gives him the peg she uses to put up her hair as a memento, and the boy makes a speech about how Arrietty has given him the desire and courage to get through his operation and to go on living. Although they must say goodbye, he will never forget her - she is a part of him now.

Usually, you don’t have such touching scenes of parting from the borrowers in your life. They appear, they “borrow” something, something they need, something you have plenty of, and then they disappear off into their own lives. When you realise what’s happened, it can be tempting to get upset about what’s been taken from you (your pride and sense of control, mostly), and even to think of such people as pests that ought to be eradicated (or more sweetly, as highly questionable varieties of icecream). But the truth is that you’re sorry to see them go, and fortunate to have been altered a little by what they took and what they gave.

Road trip to Alice

Some of you may be wondering what became of me during my two month absence from this blog. The most remarkable thing I did during that time was go on an impromptu road trip from Melbourne to Alice Springs. Here’s how it happened.

1. It all started with a massage. I felt I needed a bit of nurturing so I booked in for an hour’s massage with Kaylan Rha. She’s based in Leura, in the Blue Mountains. On the phone, she let me know that it might take a bit longer than an hour, because since I was a new client, she’d like to take some time to talk to me and explain her approach to healing. I was with her for three hours. No exaggeration. She only charged me for an hour, and gave me a discount because it was my first treatment with her. Not only this, but it was the most powerful massage experience I’ve ever had. Before she got me on the table, Kaylan asked me to set an intention. She suggested that I take three breaths and let something come up, rather than impose an idea. The thought that emerged was “opening.”

2. Before I had the massage, I had already decided to flee the rain and mist of Katoomba, and take a little trip to Melbourne. I texted my new Melbourne friend, Antonia (previously introduced to you as the yoga goddess/fashionista), to ask about the dates of a retreat she was going on around this time. I wanted to make sure that she wouldn’t be in meditative silence the whole time I was in the city. She texted back saying that there was one space left on the retreat and she’d booked it for me. It turned out that the retreat was a yoga retreat, and she was leading it. Post-massage, I was open to that.

3. I was hoping to catch up with Antonia before the retreat started, but she was busy. I remembered that last time I’d been in Melbourne, a similar situation had resulted in my going out to dinner with her flat-mate, a German doctor called Arne. I got in touch with him. This time he took me to a fancy tapas bar. It was very Melbourne - stylish and delicious. Particularly the oysters. I found out that Arne was about to move to Alice Springs, and would be driving there in about a week’s time.

4. After the yoga retreat, Arne sent me a text which included a memorable reference to ‘desert flowers.’

5. I had dinner at Lentil As Anything with some good friends of mine in Melbourne who happened to have been to Alice Springs last year. They strongly encouraged me to pursue an idea that had hatched, or budded, shall we say, in the by now very open field of my mind.

6. I met Arne for lunch, and asked him if he would let me come on the road trip with him. He looked astonished. He said he’d sleep on it.

7. He called the next day to ask when I was coming over. We left for Alice Springs that afternoon.

The trip was wonderful. We drove in an enormous land cruiser that Arne had purchased for his time in Alice. Before we left Melbourne, we stopped at a shop that sold stuff for enormous land cruisers and similar vehicles. It was an exclusively and seriously masculine environment. By the time we drove away with an extremely heavy car jack, I had come to see my role as a kind of fluffy accessory that came with the car. Arne had acquired about as alpha male a vehicle as a civilian man could, so it seemed no surprise that a girl (me) had turned up to hang out in it with him. I couldn’t stop laughing about this for several kilometers.

Pretty soon we were out of Melbourne, and the landscape distracted me from my role as land cruiser Barbie (well all right, not entirely, but there’s no need to go into that). Watching the country gradually change from rural land to desert as we made our way across Victoria to close to Adelaide, and then straight up the middle of Australia, was a wonderful experience. The colours were mesmerising – often subtle – and very varied and beautiful.

Once we got into the desert, there was a rhythm to the landscape, too, rising very gently and falling again, like long, slow waves. Often I had the impression that we were about to come over a rise and find the sea glittering in front of us. But of course, we were moving further and further from the ocean. Somewhere near Coober Pedy, I felt slightly panicked at the thought of this, and wondered if it would feel oppressive to stay in a place like Alice Springs, so far from the sea. But when we finally drove into Alice, we discovered a whole new landscape.

The town is ringed by beautiful ranges of ochre-coloured rock, and divided by a wide, pale yellow river bed full of magnificent gum trees. After a bit of rain, grass springs up in soft, unlikely abundance everywhere. The light is warm – and although the sea is far away, there are ridges like cresting waves in the rock formations. You could imagine that you’re bathing in an ocean of light in this place. (Honey-coloured light and oceanic feelings are not all there is to Alice Springs – there’s also an intensity of suffering, and a rawness here that can be very confronting. But that’s another blogpost.)

The fact that we’d driven here, to the centre of Australia, in just over three days, made this country seem much more intimate and accessible to me. I’d always thought of Australia as incredibly vast, a whole continent, practically impossible to traverse. Yet all it had taken to get me to the centre of this great land was an open heart and mind, a friend with a land cruiser (and a generous spirit of adventure to go with it), and a few wonderfully free days.

Esoteric utilitarianism

Peter Singer and an unidentified goat

Last week I went to a talk by Australian philosopher Peter Singer at the University of Melbourne that got me thinking (the lack of activity on this blog for the last couple of months might suggest that I needed the stimulus…). He spoke about an “esoteric” form of utilitarianism.

Utilitarians aim to bring about the greatest possible cumulative happiness or well-being. Some have argued that that in order to pursue this goal most effectively, it is necessary for committed utilitarians to keep quiet about their true beliefs about what morality requires. Rather than provoking resistance with ideas that would be likely to seem too demanding to non-utilitarians, they should publically proclaim a less demanding standard, suggesting that a person could fulfill their moral duties by donating 10% of their income to reputable international aid organisations, for instance, when they privately believe the figure should be closer to 50%, say.

The genuine utilitarian beliefs then become “esoteric,” that is, shared only among the initiated, while any public statements are carefully modulated to produce the best achievable outcome, taking into account the psychological traits and points of resistance in the people they aim to influence. Esoteric utilitarians will praise outsiders for actions that fall short of what utilitarian morality requires, and refrain from blaming them for their failure to meet utilitarian standards if this is shown to be counter-productive. Only a level of blame that actually causes the desired changes in behavior will be employed.

One member of the audience pointed out that this approach conflicts with the Kantian moral standard which holds that to tell the truth is a primary and universal duty, which should never be compromised in order to achieve desired ends, however laudable. Singer responded by saying that he is comfortable with this conflict. He doesn’t accept Kant’s view that one should never lie, even if a murderer is asking you about the whereabouts of his next victim. Sometimes you have good reasons, moral reasons, to lie. For a utilitarian, these reasons are tied to the consequences of the lie: the morality of any action is to be judged by examining its consequences, not by comparing it to any list of absolute (or deontological) duties.

Henry Sidgwick, 19th century
English philosopher,
defender of esoteric utilitarianism

I had a worry about Singer’s approach that was similar, but not tied to Kantian morality. My concern was that the tactics of esoteric utilitarianism seem manipulative, particularly in using praise and blame to attempt to influence people’s behavior. I asked Singer if there wasn’t a conflict here with the spirit of utilitarianism, which asks us to think through the consequences of our actions, and act accordingly, even if this means going against commonly held ideas about what is moral or in other ways socially endorsed (which typically requires resisting social pressure exerted in the form of praise and blame). When it emerged in the Nineteenth century, utilitarianism was designed precisely to challenge the power of esoteric elites like the aristocracy and the Church, and promote policies based on the idea that in the utilitarian moral calculus, everyone counts, and everyone counts equally. 

I also suggested that taking up praise and blame as tools to influence others seems a risky strategy for the utilitarian. If people are encouraged to allow such influences to determine their actions, this may reinforce their vulnerability to other "esoteric" sources of praise and blame which are likely to be much more powerful than anything utilitarians have at their disposal – for instance the forces of advertising in the service of consumerism, which urge you to give up to 50% of your income to your mobile phone company, say.

Again, Singer couldn’t see any problem. He repeated the basic argument that for the utilitarian the end justifies the means. He didn’t seem concerned that in this case the consequences of the strategy might include weakening people’s moral characters, or at least reinforcing a tendency to allow social approval and disapproval to override any more rational or independently thought-through motives for action. Singer is happy to adopt the strategies used in advertising – this is a powerful, effective way to influence behavior in contemporary society.

He gave an example: a television ad to promote work safety practices which (if I remember his description correctly) shows someone coming to a family home to break the news that the father of the family has been killed in an accident at work. The ad is highly emotive, depicting the distress of a young child at this news. Singer said that since it has been screening, work safety incidents have declined appreciably. The technique used to achieve this may be emotionally manipulative, but it works, and the outcome is good.

This reminded me of a similar ad I saw at the cinema in Paddington in Sydney, last year. It was about the consequences of speeding, posing questions like: what would you choose, to be late for a meeting, or to end up as a paraplegic? The audience laughed – the combination of the choose-your-own-adventure style with such obvious scare tactics was too much for us. This reaction suggests another problem with using emotionally manipulative means to pursue utilitarian ends – if people are not naively drawn in by the technique, they will see through it, and tend to resist or dismiss the message even if they might otherwise endorse the end it seeks to promote. No one likes to be patronized. Even if the end justifies the means, the use of manipulative means may end up discrediting the end, or the theory behind it.

The Skin I Live In: Almodóvar meets Seneca

Elena Anaya and a blurry Antonio Banderas in The Skin I Live In

This week, with my friend Selena, I went to see the latest film by Spanish director, Pedro Almodóvar, The Skin I Live In. On my way by ferry to the cinema, I read a short essay on the Stoic philosopher, politician and playwright Seneca, who served the emperor Nero as tutor and advisor, and was ordered by him to commit suicide in 65 CE. As chance would have it, this turned out to be the perfect prelude to viewing Almodóvar’s film.

Most critics have not known quite what to make of The Skin I Live In, admitting that they enjoyed it, but at the same time complaining that it seems cold, and lacks the compassion that usually characterizes Almodóvar’s work. It seems to me that this confusion clears if The Skin I Live In is read as a drama in the spirit of Stoic tragedy. It is not designed to elicit compassion, but rather to generate what the Stoics called apatheia. In doing so, it is a salutory alternative to mainstream cinema that stickily endorses revenge rather than letting us see it, clearly and even joyfully, for what it is.

The apatheia cultivated by the Stoic is an attitude of happy indifference toward external events, designed to free one from passions, particularly anger and grief, that might otherwise arise in the face of undesirable changes in fortune. Seneca tells us that the person who achieves this emotional control is rare; the Stoic sage is like a phoenix, appearing perhaps once every five hundred years. He gives us no portraits of such exemplary figures in his tragedies, but swings to the opposite extreme, depicting the extremes of human passion, cruelty and suffering, to the point where some readers, including Erasmus and Diderot, have (mistakenly) speculated that playwright and the philosopher must have been two different men.

A contemporary rewriting of Seneca’s drama, Thyestes is showing as part of the Sydney Festival – the story involves bitter sibling rivalry for power, sexual infidelity, murder, and, the pièce de résistance, cannibalism, with Thyestes lured by his brother, Atreus, to unwittingly consume the cooked flesh of his own children. This might be read as a heavy-handed moral warning about the dangers of giving in to the lust for power (or haute cuisine), but Seneca’s dramatic style is far from such earnest didacticism.

There are didactic Stoic voices in his plays: nurses and advisors counsel Stoic dispassion – but their message is typically distorted and thrown back in their faces by the passionate and the powerful. And the spectator can only feel grateful for this, since his gory tales of greed, deception and violent revenge are undeniably enjoyable. As we see outrages, betrayals and acts of violence piling upon another with the kind of flamboyant excess that was later imitated by the playwrights of the Elizabethan era in England, the mood in the audience typically becomes increasingly cheerful and serene.

Perhaps Seneca is training us in Stoic indifference, not by providing us with impossibly tranquil models to imitate, but by parading extreme fluctuations of human emotion at such a rate that we cannot sustain a passionate response ourselves, but let go of any personal distress and settle into an engaged, but calm and light-hearted mood. This, it seems to me, is close to the apatheia the Stoics sought, which is misunderstood if it is seen as involving cold detachment from worldly life.

by Louise Bourgeois

Almodóvar’s film achieves a similar effect. It tells a fantastical tale about a plastic surgeon who uses transgenesis to create living skin, and experiments with it, illegally, on an extremely beautiful and flexible young woman who is living as a prisoner in his house. The story proceeds, and turns back on itself, via narrative twists involving rape, madness and murder, and secretive, violent family relations. As in the Thyestes, a major motive for the characters’ actions is the desire for revenge, which is depicted without moralistic judgment or justification. This being Almodóvar, there are also fabulous clothes, beautiful people, quirky jokes, gender puzzles and many appreciative references to the work of other artists, particularly that of the French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois.

In suggesting that Almodóvar’s film, like Seneca’s play, is likely to produce a response of apatheia, it should be clear that I’m not suggesting that it will put you in an ‘apathetic’ state – the connotations of the English word are quite different. It would be more apt to wonder whether the pleasure to be had from watching family members destroy one another isn’t uncomfortably close to the disreputable emotion of schadenfreude – malicious joy taken in the suffering of others.

A disturbing amount of contemporary film and literature seems to depend for its impact on stirring up nasty emotions, particularly that of morally justified vengefulness: we are encouraged to take pleasure in the suffering of certain characters because they “deserve” it, and to share in the vindictive joy of the ultimately triumphant hero, or often heroine, as she takes her revenge – I’d put Verhoeven’s film Black Book in this category, to take just one example. But such moralistic vindictiveness is not schadenfreude, and it is at the other end of the emotional spectrum from apatheia.

Schadenfreude is not moralistic. On the contrary, it is an amoral, even a guilty, or at least naughty pleasure. We know that morally, we’re not supposed to react to the suffering of others with delight; schadenfreude is never self-righteous, it is a joy that bubbles up, often in spite of efforts to appear more appropriately sober and sympathetically concerned. It can have a malicious, even sadistic edge, but it can also be quite innocent, the kind of spontaneous joy that makes us laugh at slapstick – or take pleasure in watching events driven by the worst elements of human nature unfold with relentless, unstoppable logic, on stage or on screen.

In part, such pleasure may come from feeling that we are safe on the shore, watching a shipwreck in the distance – most troubles of our own are mere soap-bubbles in comparison to the suffering of Thyestes. But if the Stoic playwright succeeds, then our enjoyment will extend to include our own suffering, regarded as part of a grand spectacle that can be watched with interest and calm delight.

After seeing The Skin I Live In, I left the cinema in high spirits. My book of Seneca’s essays remained unopened on the ferry ride that took me back across the harbour. Instead of reading, I sat outside and let the wind blow my hair about while I admired the delicate, luminous shades of lilac and purple produced in the evening sky by gleams of late, golden light between the clouds, and their undulating reflections in water stirred into wide ripples by the movement of the ferry. I felt a buoyant and expansive pleasure in the beauty of nature, an enjoyment that strangely enough – and Stoically enough - seemed connected to having just watched a stylish film about the hyperbolic suffering wreaked by the human desire for power and revenge. 

Louise Bourgeois 1911-2010

The Magic Mountain

Something odd is happening to me. I have started reading Thomas Mann’s great work, The Magic Mountain, or to give it its original title, Der Zauberberg. I’m told that the adjective “zauber” has slightly different connotations to the English “magic.” There are no cute, Disney-influenced overtones to the German word. Rather, it implies sorcery, possibly of a menacing kind.

Early after beginning the novel, I was overcome by sleepiness, and ended up dozing away most of an afternoon, waking flushed and groggy, feeling rather unwell. I forced myself out of the house for a short walk, did some meditation at a nearby Buddhist monastery, and took a longer walk through the bush to get home, enchanted by the magical sight of a fluffy baby lyrebird on the way. Feeling better after this excursion, I presumed I had just been exhausted after Christmas and New Years revels, and that the heat of the summer day had finished me off.

But the next day, when I took out the novel, something similar happened. I didn’t sleep so long this time, but woke with a strange pain in my left shoulder. This time, I thought some more strenuous exercise might be in order, so I went to the local swim centre and did my usual twenty laps in the outdoor pool. Towards the end of my swim, I started to feel congested. There was a sharp, prickling sensation in my chest. The sky clouded over and started to spit at me. I had to interrupt a lap to cough.

Having looked up the word “sputum” in the dictionary earlier in the day (it is of some importance in the novel) I wondered, while continuing to swim, if I was bringing up sputum, or merely phlegm. Would I soon need to carry around a flat bottle with me for the purpose of collecting samples for later examination by medical experts? It was a whimsical, if also disgusting thought – I was imagining myself as one of the consumptive patients living in the sanatorium described in Mann’s novel, set in the German Alps, a good deal higher than the Australian Blue Mountains where I live.

The routine of (largely horizontal) life in the fictional International Sanatorium Berghof is constructed around mealtimes, of which there are five daily: early breakfast, second breakfast, dinner, afternoon tea, and supper. The food is sumptuous and beautifully prepared. At the table where the main character of the novel, Hans Castorp is seated, the dishes are served by a dining attendant who also happens to be a dwarf.

Thomas Mann

I write this having first consumed my own “second breakfast” for the day, which consisted of an omelette with fresh sage and goats curd, à la Bill Granger, and a roast dandelion soy latte, with honey. I prepared and served this meal myself, which suggests that I am playing both the role of hero, or anti-hero (Castorp is defined by his mediocrity, supplemented with a penchant for philosophical musings – about time, mostly), and that of the dwarf who serves him. This confusion, or amalgamation of roles, can be put down to the fact that I am living in the early twenty-first century, under conditions of advanced capitalism and liberal democracy, whereas Mann’s characters belong to the period before the First World War.

In his novel, the appearance of a dwarf waitress is cause for a slight shock, and heightened politeness on Castorp’s part, quickly fading into simple acceptance of her presence as part of the peculiar status quo in the Berghof. This detail in the novel reminds me of stories I heard a few years ago about how a law firm in Sydney hired dwarves to serve the drinks at its staff Christmas party. I wonder if the organisers were aware that in light of Mann’s famous novel, this suggested that the partners of the firm were not only morally decadent, but likely to be ravaged by internal disease, beneath their flush, rosy-cheeked exteriors. Kim Kardashian might also like to take note.

At this point, I feel a certain obligation to come up with some incisive philosophical observations, supported by cogent historical examples, about the changing symbolism of illness, perhaps drawing on Susan Sontag’s contrast between the spiritualization of consumptives, who were seen to draw closer to God as their illness progressed, and the more recent attitude toward cancer patients, who are likely to feel blamed for their own illness, in line with what I would not hesitate to call the hyperbolic concept of personal responsibility that dominates contemporary Western culture. I might add to this analysis some consideration of AIDS and its interpretation via discourses of sin, messianic catastrophe and redemption (as illustrated in playwright Tony Kushner's Angels in America), and spare some thought for those forms of illness which remain unfigured in any major cultural tropes, negative or positive, and consequently fail to attract significant research funding leading to better treatment… 

But I find that lassitude is overtaking me, and realise that I have only a short time to wrap myself in a blanket (the weather here in the mountains having once again turned unseasonably cold) and take a quick kip on the couch before it will be time to meet my friend Nigel for lunch.