A Tragic Sense of Life

Miguel de Unamuno 

At 71, I am starting to grasp what might be meant by a “tragic sense of life.”   The phrase has puzzled me ever since college, when I looked at the book by Miguel de Unamuno with that title.  I had no idea what he was talking about.  For me, tragedy was something to be avoided, not cultivated or brooded over.  Armed with youth, good looks and education, I hoped to leap over the pitfalls of life, and let others come to grief.  

In literature class we learned about the tragic hero.  This was said to be a great man undone by a flaw in his nature, unwittingly brought down by a catastrophe that was, in some way, of his own making.  I found it interesting but not that relevant, since I didn’t have any major flaws.  I did have an inkling of something universal in the stories of Oedipus and Lear, a cold wind blowing through all of existence.  My goal was to stay out of its way.  

Fast-forward fifteen years and find me undone, in the ruins of an early, supremely self-confident marriage.  I began to understand that I did have hidden flaws, and they did cause me to suffer.  But I thought they could be fixed, the damage repaired, and a tragic end averted after all.  To some degree I was able to improve myself; I learned to listen and consider another person’s feelings, so my second marriage succeeded where the first had failed.  Still, I was left with my original tragic flaw, which ran much deeper than the ones I had supposedly fixed.   

I was left with my original tragic flaw because in every way it appeared to me to be a virtue.  It was, and is, an excessive, irrational mixture of optimism and joy, a craving for life that picks me up out of bed every morning and propels me out the door to explore the known world and the unknown, that fills my head with music and makes me want to dance.  Starting at about age 55, my tragic flaw began to harm me.   

Bored with my job, and inspired by all the stories of elderly people who succeed in new ventures or go back to their first loves, I decided to go back to ballet class.   I had studied ballet on the side for a few years in my twenties, and got just far enough to feel the intense pleasure of disciplining the body into an instrument, and the ecstatic sense of taking it into the air.   

I told my colleagues I was coming in late one day, and took a beginner-level ballet class at nine a.m.   I came out laughing like a man suddenly released from prison.  I could still do it!  I was rusty but my body had not forgotten, the teacher even complimented me on my knowledge.  And the class ended with leaps across the room, two by two.  It was ecstasy to keep pace with the pretty girl dancing next to me.    

I had planned to take one class a week, but this was so much fun that I went back two days later.  This time I came down from a leap and felt a pain as if I had been shot in the leg.   I hobbled off the floor -- someone asked me if I was all right.  Oh yes, I gasped, it’s just a cramp.  It turned out to be a torn calf muscle that took six weeks to heal.   

As soon as it healed, I went back to ballet class. This was the first of a series of injuries that dogged me for the next ten years.   My wife told me I shouldn’t be jumping.  My response: “jumping is my life.”    

My first ballet class was the beginning of the end of my working career.  Three years later my employer declined to renew my contract, and the boss said he didn’t think my heart was in it any more.  He was right.  My heart was in ballet class, where I continued to jump, and come down in pain, until I finally gave up in my mid-sixties.  Do I regret going back to ballet, with all the pain and loss it caused?  On the contrary, I feel it saved my life.  The body-memory of a releve at age 60 with arms fully raised, back straight, and every muscle and bone engaged in soaring higher, will be my inspiration until I die.   It was my tragic flaw in action.  What makes it tragic is that it can't be fixed,  it’s in my DNA, both my joy and my downfall.    

Once I sat with a delirious man dying in a hospital.  He was stretching his body upward the same way I did in that releve, babbling nonsense, reaching for heaven.  He looked beautiful -- his arms balletic, his face angelic.  The nurse came in and yelled at him.  “If you don’t stop that, I’m gonna restrain you!”  

The world takes it as a duty to restrain people from acting out their tragic flaws, but it is mostly a hopeless task.  If you visit the School of American Ballet in New York, you will see some teachers crippled for life by their dancing days, leading eager children down the same path.  The dancer will dance, the actor will act, the lover will love, the glutton will feast, the saint will give, the tyrant will oppress and the courtier will curry favor, until they expire.  We can give up many things for our health and well-being, but we can’t give up life.  And we die from having lived.   

--   Copyright 2013 by Tom Phillips

My Back Pages

                                    “I got no future, baby, I know my years are few.

                                    The present’s not that pleasant; just a lot of things to do..” 

                                                                                    L. Cohen  

Every summer you learn something about yourself.  It’s the time of year when structure breaks down, when you drift off to different places, some boring, some exciting; you do new things, you do the same old things, but sometimes they come out different.   This summer I learned that I can no longer dance every day and night.  

I’ve been going to dance camp with the Country Dance and Song Society nearly every summer since 1976.  The first year it was American Week at Pinewoods Camp in Massachusetts.  We did Appalachian clogging, contras and squares, plus I took a fiddle workshop and sang early American hymns.  This took place in the woods and went on all day and half the night.  It was the total opposite of my life in the city, working in a tense newsroom, visiting my children on weekends in a broken home.   

I got so high at Pinewoods – on nothing but dance, music, women partners, a black pond and country air – that I could hardly sleep.  I would stand outside my cabin in the dead of night and vibrate in the wind, shaking with a continual attack of energy, howling silently through the trees. 

Lucie Hopkins in a sword dance

I got married again in 1979, to Debra who I met dancing, and now we go to Family Week in New Hampshire with grandchildren from that first marriage.   This year I came up lame after three days of dancing day and night.   Again I could hardly sleep but this time it was from pain, rather than excitement.  My greatest thrills were watching my grandchildren in a sword dance, a morris dance, a mummers’ play.  

I was a semi-invalid for two weeks after we got back, and to stay conscious I spent some time living in the past.  I used to find this uncomfortable; I was always rating my performance, judging whether I had succeeded or failed, whether I had done better than someone else.   But now I think if you give up praising yourself for past success, you can also give up blaming yourself for failure.  It’s all one, very little of it has to do with personal effort or choice.  You were what you were, you are what you are.   

I’m enjoying the past, at least the exciting times of it, the times I felt part of what was happening in the world.   This week I read through old issues of Crawdaddy!, the magazine of rock that appeared briefly and memorably in the late 1960s.  At that time I was writing occasionally about popular music for mainstream publications, but my point of view was shaped by what I’d read in this underground magazine, put out by people younger and more radical than I was, people who believed rock and roll was the template for a new culture, a new way of life in America and beyond.   

I believed it, at least in part, and for a very short period it seemed to be true.  The April 1968 issue of Crawdaddy! brings it all back.  This was the sweet spot of the late 1960s, post-Sgt. Pepper and pre-Woodstock, when the answers were no longer just blowing in the wind, but broadcast on the radio, on mainstream stations, in everyone’s ears.  “All You Need Is Love.”  Americans were still dying every day in Vietnam but here at home, a peace movement was gaining strength, with an anti-war candidate successfully challenging the President, driving him out of the race for re-election.   

Rock and roll was not a unitary phenomenon but a cultural wave, crossing all racial, social and political barriers.  The April issue of Crawdaddy! was on it across the board:  an interview with Jimi Hendrix, a review of Bob Dylan’s pivotal album “John Wesley Harding,” an analysis of the curiously conservative pop art of the Bee Gees, an account  of Brian Wilson’s creative process with the Beach Boys, a review of  the masterful and hypnotic “Notorious Byrd Brothers” – and a concluding editorial by executive editor Paul Williams, in which he held out hope that the music industry could be a vehicle for peace and reconciliation, as well as great art.  “I believe we are on the threshold of a whole new level of mass communication,” he wrote.  “I think that the dreams of both businessmen and artists can be realized, but only to the extent that they both recognize each other, only to the extent that we think of ourselves as all being people, working toward common human goals.”   As Jon Landau pointed out in his review of “John Wesley Harding,” Dylan had cast off his image as a one-sided protester, and was saying the same kind of things.  In “Dear Landlord,” he addresses his adversary:  "If you don’t underestimate me, I won’t underestimate you.”    

That was April 1968.  Two months later, reconciliation went out the window as the presidential campaign became a horror show.  Robert Kennedy, who had entered the primaries trying to push past Eugene McCarthy as the peace candidate, was assassinated in Los Angeles.   Later that summer President Johnson called out the National Guard to defend the Democratic National Convention, and Chicago police went on a riot, attacking anti-war protesters in the streets.  The democrats nominated vice-president Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Nixon was elected in November, with a “secret plan” to end the war that relied heavily on carpet-bombing.    

Rock and roll mirrored the collapse, as the 1967 “summer of love” was succeeded by fear and loathing.  The Beatles floundered, the Beach Boys broke down, the Byrds took refuge in ersatz Country-Western.   Hendrix died, as did Jim Morrison, and others.  Williams left Crawdaddy! and it faded as a critical voice.      

Early 1968 was like our “Arab Spring,” an opening that seemed to look out on a new age of moderation, rationality, peace and love, if only we could get over the hump.  (“Dump the Hump” read my home-made sign as I stubbornly protested and campaigned for McCarthy in the days after RFK’s assassination.)  But we couldn’t get over it, it just kept growing.   

Yet I remember that spring fondly, and I don’t write it off.   If I’m going to enjoy my dotage, I will enjoy it with the thought that someday – not in my lifetime, probably, but maybe in my grandchildren’s, another spring will come, and this time we will find a way over the hump.  Perhaps foolishly, I feel the same way about Tunisia, about Egypt, about China.  I was there during the Tienanmen Square protest that spread to every major city in China, and I don’t believe the Chinese authorities have the power to repress those memories, or the hope the people expressed.  

Remember the “Prague Spring” of 1968?   The Soviet Union sent in tanks to end it, but 20 years later it was back, and this time it was the Soviets who didn’t have the strength to resist.  And a playwright, a Frank Zappa fan, a former prisoner, was elected President of Czechoslovakia.  Proving what?  That rock and roll will never die.   

For people who insist that the end of an essay return to the topic with which it began, I offer this: unable to take my usual outdoor activity because of an inflamed hip, brought on by exercise I can no longer manage, I have just spent several days reading, thinking and writing about my own past, and the future of others.  There are worse ways to grow old.   

 

Copyright 2013 by Tom Phillips

Beauty, Truth, and News

-- By Tom Phillips  

When John Keats wrote “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” it was probably a romantic outburst, the final inspiration of a masterpiece, rather than a thought-out philosophical statement.   But a few years earlier,  the great philosopher Immanuel Kant had laid the groundwork for just such an outburst.  Truth is "the indispensible condition of fine art,” wrote Kant in his “Critique of Judgement.”   Kant saw beauty as the great vehicle of truth and goodness, communicated not in concepts but directly to the senses, available to all.   Beauty has a universal appeal, and for Kant it was the means for moving ideas up and down the social ladder, bridging the gap between an educated elite and the common people, creating a unified culture.      

We experience beauty in nature as well as art, but Kant predicted correctly that in the modern age, art would take the leading role.  In the early years of the industrial revolution, Kant foresaw that “nature will ever recede further into the background,” and future ages will have to search for truth and goodness without a daily experience of it.  Art, he said, will bear the burden of civilization, expressing moral and philosophical ideas in beautiful form.   

That was written in 1790.   In the 20^th century, the fine arts rejected the ideal of beauty, and so lost touch with the people.  Modern art, contemporary poetry and conservatory music may be conceptually brilliant; they don’t speak to the masses.   Still, beauty has a life of its own, it is everywhere in the works of humanity.  It finds its way, and we find our way to it.   

After reading Kant and Keats in college, I graduated thinking I was a poet.   Instead I spent much of the next 50 years writing the news for radio and TV, possibly the lowest form of literary work.   But in my own mind at least, it was a way to serve art and beauty.     

Newswriting is not a fine art.  In Kant’s terms, it lacks the essential element of freedom; one is tied to the facts, and there are strict limits on the imagination.   Still, there is an art to newswriting, and it has exactly the same goal as the highest poetry – to render ideas in terms of the senses, in terms common to all.    

To that end you employ definite, specific, concrete language, whether writing about a street fight or an argument before the Supreme Court.  And it has to sing.  People who listen to the radio expect music.  Every sentence needs to scan, and you dress them up with metaphors and similes, internal rhymes, alliterations, and quotations, preferably with a twist on their original intent.   

Time is precious in broadcast news, and especially on a show like the CBS Evening News, where we used to try to write the first draft of history every day, packed into about 20 minutes of airtime.  Later, when I tried to show students how to do it at the Columbia School of Journalism, one said “this is like writing haiku poetry.”   My favorite lead sentence ever was written by a student, Joanmarie Kalter, on a local story.  Somewhere in upstate New York in November, they cut down a big evergreen to be that year’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.  She wrote:  “A tree fell in the woods today..”   

The golden age of newswriting seems to be in the past.  At CBS, vivid writing was once the stock in trade, and you might still hear some echoes of Edward R. Murrow on the Evening News.   But original voices like Charles Kuralt and Andy Rooney are gone and irreplaceable, and a new generation of TV journalists is more interested in the arts of digital imagery than in creating pictures with words.  Most news today sounds like it was written by robots, and some of it actually is.  But beauty-and-truth is always out there somewhere.   These days I look for it in the lyrics of wry, cryptic young song-writers on college radio stations, in independent films and videos, and in the writing of a new crop of essayists and bloggers.   Where do you find it?   

-- Copyright 2013 by Tom Phillips  

P.S.  If anyone wants more of my thoughts on the art of newswriting, I spoke about it at length in a 2001 PBS interview, which they later turned into a lesson for high-school and college students.   You can read the interview at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june01/phillips_06-27.html

References: 
Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Kant, "Critique of Judgement,"  translated by James Creed Meredith.  Oxford World's Classics, 2007.   See Ch. 60 "Appendix"  page 182-3.  

Unfamiliar Quotations

-- By Tom Phillips

Like most people I have my familiar quotations – the 23^rd Psalm, the Lord’s Prayer -- but I rarely use them.  I rely mainly on a small collection of private quotes, proven effective for getting through the day.  None of them shows up in a google search – these are stray quotations, scraps of poems or conversations, possibly misquoted or misattributed, but tried and true.   So here they are:

1. “Most mistakes that people make aren’t that important.”   

This humble truth I remember as the last line of a poem, a lost poem from a defunct magazine of the 1960s, written by a teacher of mine.  The poem was about a bric-a-brac shop full of useless items.  It ended something like, "We should be grateful for these things, because they teach us / Most mistakes that people make aren’t that important.”  The author was Sheldon Zitner, professor of English at Grinnell College.  A Brooklyn native sojourning on the prairie, he later drifted north to the University of Toronto where he became known and loved as a "Canadian poet," though he was about as Canadian as an onion bagel.  When I knew him he was an intense young American poet and playwright, and a brilliant teacher of literature.  For Sheldon every class was a performance – a meticulously prepared improv with students serving as props, foils, dunces, and occasionally co-teachers.   One day he seemed to be holding forth as usual when he suddenly slammed his fist on the desk and apologized --- “I just can’t teach today.” Somehow he felt he was having an off-day, and was furious with himself.   He couldn’t abide anything less than brilliance. The poem may have been an act of kindness to himself – forgiveness for not being perfect.  So when I'm furious with myself in that way, I mumble the last line, savoring its calm rhythm, its modest internal rhyme, its soothing sentiment.  

2.    “Now is not the time to be in a great hurry.”   

This is from another beloved teacher, Zen Master Soen Nakagawa from Japan.  In the 1970s he would fly in periodically to lead intensive retreats for the Zen Studies Society, bringing wisdom and spontaneity to the often solemn and plodding practice of American Zen students.  I loved the personal interviews he would give during retreats at our Zendo in the Catskills.  His dokusan chamber was on the second floor; we would line up at the foot of the stairs, and go up one by one as he rang his little bell.  At one sesshin I had so much to say that I would tear up the stairs as if the place was on fire, making a terrible racket.  On the last day, I tore upstairs again.  But this time he sent me back, and made me walk up calmly and quietly.  “Now is not the time to be in a great hurry.”  

3.    “He knows the heart for the famished cat it is.”  

Here is another fragment of a lost poem, also from a little magazine in the 1960s.  All I remember is that one line and my image of a cat foraging in alleyways, desperate for food.  I remember this while walking the streets late at night, with my chronic recurring deficit of unmet needs, “desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope, with what I most enjoy contented least..”  I can’t remember who “He” is in the poem, except that he knows the heart for the famished cat it is.  That lets me know I’m not the only one, in fact we are legion.  “Everybody’s got a hungry heart,” says the pop song, but I prefer my feline image: inarticulate, driven, not just needy but desperately so, famished.      

            

4.  "Steer in the direction of the skid."   

This is from Driver Education in high school---what to do if your car slips out of control on ice or snow.  It was re-purposed by Alan Watts as a way to deal with temptation.  When you feel drawn to one of the seven deadly sins, don't try to yank yourself back in the right direction. You'll just continue to skid, or spin out of control.  Instead, set out to fulfill your desires -- and you will immediately see the consequences you'd been trying to ignore.  Only then can you make a reasoned decision---to sin or not to sin. 

5.  "There is nothing in the world so beautiful as a healthy, wise old man." 
Here is a Chinese proverb, from a culture that respects old age.  I've seen old men whose wizened features glowed with vitality and joy.  Sometimes I feel that way; it's all in the eyes.  W.B. Yeats makes a carving of two ancient Chinese men come alive in his poem Lapis Lazuli:  "..One asks for mournful melodies;/ Accomplished fingers begin to play./ Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,/ Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay."   

5. "What do poets do between poems?  We prepare for our death." 

This last one I associate with Gilbert Sorrentino, another Brooklyn poet from the 60s and 70s.  He was asked that question at a cocktail party, and gave that answer.  The radical simplicity of this lifestyle -- he doesn't even mention eating, drinking, or sleeping -- feels uncompromised.

The founder of Soen’s teaching line, Hakuin Ekaku, had an even briefer, breathtaking summary.  I saw it in an exhibit if Hakuin's calligraphy at Japan Society, a one-word koan, the character for “death.”  

That's all he wrote.  

-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips

Passion and Action in Holy Week

-- By Tom Phillips

Homeless Jesus  -- Cathedral of St. John the Divine

Why do we call it the "Passion" of Jesus Christ?  The answer surprised me.

I always thought "passion" referred to the strong emotions Jesus felt during the last days of his life. But according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word originates in Christian theology, and its first meaning is simply “the suffering of pain.”  Its second definition is “the fact of being acted upon, the being passive.”   

In “The Road to Daybreak,” the late Catholic teacher Henri Nouwen wrote that the moment of Jesus’ arrest in Gethsemane is “a turning point from action to passion. After years of teaching, preaching, healing, and moving to wherever he wanted to go, Jesus is handed over to his enemies. Things are no longer done by him, but to him. He is flagellated, crowned with thorns, spat at, laughed at, stripped, and nailed naked to a cross… From the moment Jesus is handed over, his passion begins, and through this passion he fulfills his vocation.”    

In 1985, In the middle of a successful career as an author -- after teaching divinity students at Yale and Harvard -- in middle age Nouwen found a new home at the L'Arche community in Toronto, living with and learning from people with mental disabilities. At L'Arche, Nouwen realized that though most people think of their lives as what they do, what is done to them is really a much greater determinant.  In the case of poor, imprisoned, enslaved or disabled people, what is done to them is nearly all of life. Their only freedom is how they respond.    

Jesus was a poor Jew -- powerless politically and economically within the Roman Empire, which almost casually crucified him as a troublemaker.  The gospel stories agree that he offered no defense to the charges against him -- that he had called himself a King, thereby disrespecting Ceasar.  His response was not to dispute, but to declare the existence of a greater Kingdom -- one "not of this world."

In doing so he placed himself beyond the reach of Ceasar -- and his victory over earthly tyranny is part of what we celebrate in the Resurrection.  The African-American theologian Howard Thurman wrote that Jesus recognized "anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys to his destiny...  It is a man's reaction to things that determines their ability to exercise power over him."     

Thurman saw Jesus in the poor, disinherited masses of the world -- people who live with their "backs against the wall."  Jesus was a poor Jew, lacking status or even citizenship in the Roman Empire. Like Black people in America, the Jews of Palestine were a small minority in the midst of a dominant and controlling empire.  Their essential problem was survival -- not just in terms of life and limb, but as a culture, a civilization, and a religion.  

Jesus rejected both armed resistance and subservience to Rome, preaching instead a radical change in the inner attitude of people.  He told his disciples to be prepared for persecution, torture, and death -- and that none of this could defeat them.  

Fast forward to today, and Black Lives Matter, even lives that have ended in torture and death at the hands of the authorities.  After the resurrection, Jesus spoke to his disciple Peter about the kind of death he too would die:  “When you were young you put on your own belt and walked where you liked; but when you grow old you will stretch out your hands, and somebody else will put a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” (John 21:18)  

Thinking about our own lives in terms of passion rather than action puts them in a new light.  The test of character is not so much what we've been able to accomplish, but how we respond to what happens to us.  

-- Copyright 2013 by Tom Phillips

Just Say What?

-- By Tom Phillips

When I was a little boy, my mother told me about a sacred syllable with mysterious psychic powers.  “Om” or “Aum” was said to be the sound of all sounds, rolling up from the deepest recesses of the throat, echoing through the cave of the mouth, then closing with a meditative hum as the lips closed, sealing in its secret wisdom.   

In my twenties and thirties, at the Integral Yoga Institute on 13^th Street, I chanted “Om” assiduously.  The instructors said chanting it could produce a state of perfect peace, and it seemed to work, at least within the confines of the yoga institute.  However, the effect faded as soon as you hit the street.  I tried walking on 42^nd Street, the busiest, noisiest, most colorful and seductive street of all, looking neither right nor left, inwardly chanting “Om.”  It could be done, but it felt stupid.  This was a way of willfully devaluing the hubbub around me, and clinging to my calm center, but it didn’t really block anything out, just placed me at a psychological distance from my surroundings.  It was the aural equivalent of navel-gazing.   

As a Zen student in my thirties and forties, I chanted Buddhist sutras and prayers in circular, repetitive form.  These greatly calmed the mind, and invoked powers of compassion and insight, and determination to drive on toward enlightenment.  But given the great complexity and subtlety of Buddhist philosophy, there could be no one syllable that said it all.   

As a harried worker and anxious father in my forties and fifties, I copied Homer Simpson’s “D’oh!” This provided temporary relief when frustrated or exasperated.  It was like an explosion, a blowing off of the whole impossible situation.  It amused my co-workers, but had little or no spiritual value.   

During these years I was not consciously looking for a one-syllable answer to life’s problems.  But something in me was still scanning the vast universe of sounds and letters, like a beachcomber waving his metal wand over the innumerable sands, searching for a lost gold ring.  And one day, reader, I found it.

Cuisine Soignee a la Brigitte

-- By Tom Phillips

My wife is a Presbyterian minister, the solo pastor in a thriving, active suburban church. Many days she comes home from work in late afternoon, then heads out again across the George Washington Bridge for an evening meeting.  My job is to keep her nourished, healthy and happy, and let her know how much she is loved and appreciated at home.  All this can be accomplished with a delicious home-cooked dinner, dished up on time.  I take this as a duty and a delight, in the spirit of the woman who taught me most of what I know about cooking, and who blessed our marriage from the beginning, in more ways than she knew.  

If you think I’m talking about my mother, you couldn’t be more wrong. She hated to cook, and never learned how.  “Food is fuel,” she fumed, refusing to put any more than minimal thought and care into her meals.   No, the woman who taught me was Brigitte Catapano, proprietress of Chez Brigitte at 77½ Greenwich Avenue, the smallest restaurant in New York, where I dined alone most evenings in the 1970s.