for some poor countryman, on iron rations,
than lord it over the exhausted dead.281
‘To philosophize is to learn how to die’ is the English version of the French of Montaigne who took it from the Latin of Cicero who took it in turn from the Greek of Plato. Buddha was there before all of them: ‘I do not use magic to extend my life. Now, before me, the trees come alive.’282
To learn to die is to learn to live. Death is the giver of life. As Elvis warned, ‘It’s now or never.’
Death may even extend life. The monks in the communities on Mount Athos in Greece wear black to remind themselves during every waking moment of mortality, and yet mostly live into extreme old age. So the secret of a long life may be acknowledging that it is short. And if this acknowledgement does not extend life, it certainly improves its quality. There are no cases of Alzheimer’s among the Mount Athos monks.
Acknowledgement is everything. Reactions differ, from the famous rage of Dylan Thomas, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, to the beautiful acceptance of Marcus Aurelius: ‘Observe how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of ashes. So spend these fleeting moments on earth as Nature would have you spend them, and then go to your rest with good grace, as an olive falls in its season, with a blessing for the earth that bore it and a thanksgiving to the tree that gave it life.’283 These reactions appear to be opposites – but both face the unwelcome truth.
And only through this acknowledgement can come the unique flaring, an incandescence inspired by the prospect of extinction. One example is the phenomenon of late style, a flourishing common in the final phase of painters’, composers’ and writers’ lives. In spite of the many differences in artists and arts, there is a common wild impatience – verging on frenzy – that is possessed by obsession, rejects virtuosity, rhetoric and finish, bursts out of conventional form, transcends technique, surrenders conscious control for instinctive power and is utterly indifferent to audience and reception. So these works often shock contemporaries who dismiss them as childish, crude, fragmentary, unfinished and repetitive, the products of deteriorating minds. Only much later can they be appreciated for their exhilarating vitality, what the critic Barbara Herrnstein Smith defined as the ‘senile sublime’.284 And, paradoxically, by working exclusively for themselves, these painters, writers and composers communicate even more directly and intensely. With no desire to please, impress, charm or reassure, depth can speak nakedly and urgently to depth.
The works of Picasso’s last decade, produced in his eighties and nineties, have all these qualities and also a scandalous eroticism. Entirely unreconciled, Picasso could not bear to depart from the paradise of the flesh, and obsessively painted female nudes and embracing couples. The nudes are massive, with monumental limbs, huge wild staring eyes, onion toes and banana fingers, distorted, displaced breasts with large black nipples and, always drawing the eye to the centre, gaping, graffito-crude vulvae. Picasso wanted these women to be so physically present that the startled art lover could smell their armpits and vaginas. ‘You have to know how to be vulgar,’ he said. ‘Paint with four-letter words.’285 There is a work called ‘Woman Pissing’ which fully lives up to its title and another of a woman masturbating with both hands. The paintings of couples are crazier still, with the even more wild-eyed heads and bodies of the lovers merged and the man seeming to wish to devour or strangle the woman. Never has sexual fusion been so intensely portrayed. In the final embrace picture, painted when Picasso was over ninety and close to death, limbs are so enmeshed that it is impossible to identify which belongs to the man or woman, though there are two sets of graffito genitals. There are also late self-portraits. One, painted in his eighties, is of his upper body in a striped top. The torso is painted with cursory violence, the stripes of the top whacked on with a loaded brush so that the paint is encouraged to misbehave and splatter, dribble and run. The head is grim, the eyes two black sockets dead to the outer world and seeing only some terrible inner revelation. And, in the same month as the final embrace, there is a final self-portrait – a gigantic head with enormous wild eyes staring in terror at something close and approaching inexorably closer.
When these last works were exhibited they were almost universally derided; the consensus was that Picasso’s astounding technique had finally deserted him. In fact, Picasso had merely transcended technique. As he himself put it, he had so much technique it completely ceased to exist.286 More perceptive views came from outside the art world, for instance from the Mexican poet Octavio Paz: ‘He paints out of urgent necessity, and what he paints is urgency itself. He is the Painter of time.’287 This identifies the key quality of late style – urgency. Picasso: ‘I have less and less time and more and more to say.’288
Claude Monet’s late works contain no nudes or even people, but pulsate with the same sensual frenzy. He could not bear to leave the physical world, represented obsessively by water lilies in paintings that grew bigger and bigger and were worked over with increasing fervour – he regularly rose at four in the morning and worked all day. These works abandon representation almost completely for an abstract orgy of slashes, daubs and swirls, interspersed with areas of bare, coarse-textured canvas. The brushstrokes make no attempt to conceal themselves but are ragged and uneven, beginning in rich impasto swathes and tailing off in broken patches and long, straggly tendrils – he often deliberately used old, worn brushes for a more irregular effect. Paint exults in being paint, and clumps, clots, ridges and drips. In the macro view everything runs into everything else in a welter of fusing colour, which is his vision of the gorgeousness of the world he has no choice but to leave. Standing in front of these late works, mesmerized, exhilarated and terrified, you wonder how an old guy had the balls to be so mad.
In music there are the late quartets of Beethoven, which are more like ruminating aloud than attempts to capture the attention of listeners. And the same could be said about a musician of a completely different style and era – the jazz pianist Earl Hines. About the only things Hines and Beethoven had in common were playing the piano and growing old. In his youth an entertainer, showman and bandleader in a Chicago nightclub owned by gangsters, Hines was forgotten in his middle years and rediscovered only late in life, when he was invited to give a solo concert at the Little Theater in New York. There he came on stage to inform his audience that he intended to play as if he were in his own living room – and proceeded to astound them with boundless audacity and exuberance. After this, he rejected not only bands but even small groups and played almost exclusively solo piano, a rare and possibly unique development for a jazzman. And, in the recordings of these solo performances of long, dense improvisations full of abrupt tempo changes and jolting counterpoint, with each hand playing things not only unrelated but actually warring, he seems indeed to be in his own living room, arguing eloquently with himself. But there are always individual qualities in late style. The Hines wildness was an irrepressible jubilation that burst through even on ballads and blues. After his rebirth he said: ‘The greatest thing to draw wrinkles in a man’s face is worry. Why should I be unhappy and pull down my face and drag my feet and make everybody around me feel that way too? By being what you are, something always comes up. Sunshine always opens out.’289
And in literature there is Shakespeare, whose late plays burst out of the constraints of the play form, in particular its unity of time and place. The late works – The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, Pericles: Prince of ‘Tyre and The Two Noble Kinsmen – are known as romances but aspire to the freedom of the novel. And their language is equally impatient – urgent, compressed and dense, syntax twisted out of shape by the pressure of new ideas crowding in on the old. Shakespeare just couldn’t be bothered with the tedium of padding out sentences. When, in The Winter’s Tale, Leontes cries, ‘Stars! Stars! And all eyes else dead coals’290, we have to work out that, in these eight words, he is comparing his wife’s eyes to stars and tha
t, in turn, compared to his wife’s eyes, those of all other women seem like dead coals.
With Tolstoy, late urgency made him break out of literature completely into works with baldly questioning titles such as What Is Religion?, What Is Art?, What To Do? and, even more relevant in the contemporary world, ‘Why Do People Stupefy Themselves?’ And, when he did write fiction, the stories are full of bitter, questioning characters bewildered in the face of extinction. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a study of the consequences of denial. Ilyich is a magistrate who has lived only for status and comfort, ‘pleasantly’ and ‘decently’, insulated by habit and banality, but is struck down by an unexpected fatal illness and is obliged to die alone, excluded by the conventional life he himself has always espoused. His wife and daughter can’t wait to get rid of him to resume their social lives and his colleagues see his death only as a promotion opportunity. Entirely lacking outer or inner resources, Ilyich dies ‘after three days of incessant screaming’.291
In poetry there was W.B. Yeats whose late subjects included ‘A Crazed Girl’ and ‘The Wild Old Wicked Man’, who claimed that only lust and rage could spur the old into song and who posed the rhetorical question, ‘Why should not old men be mad?’ As with Picasso, Yeats’s imagination grew stronger and wilder as his physical powers declined:
What shall I do with this absurdity –
O heart, O troubled heart – this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog’s tail?
Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an eye and ear
That more expected the impossible – 292
In one of his finest late poems, ‘Lapis Lazuli’, Yeats ponders on three old Chinese men carved in stone: ‘Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes ⁄ Their ancient, glittering eyes are gay’.293 Always solemn and humourless, Yeats himself could never abandon the grand manner and be gay, but he recognized that gaiety was an inspiring feature of Eastern culture. The Western late style is most often angry, discontented and bitter, even despairing, but the Eastern version, while just as defiantly rejecting convention and cherishing independence, prefers humour, zest and delight.
Here is the painter Hokusai, a major influence on Monet, who owned one of his works and took from him the idea of the obsessively repeated subject (for example in One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji): ‘At seventy-three I learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence when I am eighty, I shall have made more progress, at ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at a hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvellous stage; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it but a dot or a line, will be alive. Written at the age of seventy-five by me, once Hokusai, today Gwakio Rojin, the old man mad about drawing.’294
What an anthology could be compiled of defiant, zestful, self-sufficient Eastern old age! For instance, Tu Fu’s ‘Returning Late’:
Holding a candle in the courtyard, I call for two Torches. A gibbon in the gorge, startled, shrieks once.
Old and tired, my hair white, I dance and sing out. Goosefoot cane, no sleep…Catch me if you can! 295
PART V
The Happy Ending
14
The Happiness of Absurdity
Among the many disturbing discoveries of the twentieth century was the revelation that life is essentially absurd. Kafka was the first to develop this idea. In his quest stories, the quest hero is constantly frustrated, always unable to gain admission to the Castle or the Law, but equally unable to abandon the quest. In other words, the search for meaning will never find meaning but must continue even so.
And, while Kafka was developing this theme in literature, physicists were coming to the conclusion that, at the weird subatomic level, nothing exists unless it is observed. So the search for the nature of reality revealed that in fact there was no reality. Werner Heisenberg, discoverer of the uncertainty principle, declared in despair that nature itself was absurd.
In philosophy Camus compared the human condition to the fate of Sisyphus, condemned to push a rock up a hill again and again for all time. An absurd fate – but Camus insisted that Sisyphus could be happy.
Then Beckett added a new twist – a quest saga without a quest. In Waiting for Godot his pair of tramps, modern men, are too lazy and incurious to go on a journey in search of meaning. Instead they just hang about waiting for meaning to come to them. Godot was bound to turn up soon, they repeated endlessly, while knowing in their hearts that he never would. For Beckett this absurdity was hilarious.
And mordant laughter seems the only possible response. There is no way back to certainty, simplicity and innocence, only the way forward into confusion, uncertainty and knowingness. The gasp of wonder becomes the sardonic bark of disbelief. Absurdity is the new sublime.
The good news is that, while other resources are dwindling, absurdity is multiplying and flourishing and filling the earth. There are ever more bizarre ways of passing the time while waiting for Godot. For instance car-park attendant Bob Prior honours the quest from the comfort of his own home by devoting all his spare time to making Star Trek sets and characters from Rice Krispies packets.296 It’s the Rice Krispies detail that makes this story sublime. Scorning mere scale models, Elvis-impersonator James Cawley has given ten years and $150,000 to building a full-sized replica of the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in his garage.297
For sporty types demanding engagement and spectacle, there is competitive eating, a new sport but with its own official body, the IFOCE (International Federation of Competitive Eating), which establishes world records and rankings and oversees contests, disqualifying any competitor who has a ‘Roman incident’ as a consequence of ‘urges contrary to swallowing’. As Brazil dominates soccer, so Japan dominates competitive eating and the current world champion is Takeru ‘The Tsunami’ Kobayashi who has eaten 53 hot dogs in 12 minutes (and 18 pounds of cow brains in 15 minutes). Other top gastro-athletes include Carl ‘Crazy Legs’ Conti who downed 168 oysters in 10 minutes, Oleg Zhornitskiy who got through four 32-ounce jars of mayonnaise in 8 minutes and Don ‘Moses’ Lerman who consumed 7 quarter-pound butter sticks in 5 minutes. Just to think about this last feat could give the average eater a Roman incident. But even Competitive Eating has its paradox – all the top eaters are slim. Kobayashi weighs only 131 pounds.
For those of artistic temperament, contemporary art offers splendidly absurd opportunities. Major publicly funded institutions have paid an artist to exhibit his girlfriend’s used sanitary towels, another to hire sprinters and organize a series of them running through an art gallery every thirty seconds, and a third to film himself abseiling down a studio wall, naked except for a titanium ice screw in his rectum. Tate Britain has invested over £30,000 of taxpayers’ money in ‘Monochrome Till Receipt (White’), which is a supermarket shopping receipt for items such as boil-in-the-bag rice, pickled eggs, sanitary towels and swing-bin liners. Though the bin liners may be artist’s materials. One of the artist’s enigmatic previous works, possibly a self-portrait, was a black bin liner filled with air.
For the politically minded, there is the possibility of becoming the leader of the Western world by saying things like, ‘They mis-underestimated me’, ‘People say I’m indecisive, but I don’t know about that’, ‘One has a stronger hand when there’s more people playing your same cards’ and ‘I know the human being can coexist peacefully with fish’.298
Who would not rejoice to live in a century where such things are possible? Lord, what fools these mortals be!
Surely business at least is too hard-headed for absurdity? Not a bit of it. Major corporations have paid large sums to a management guru who describes himself as ‘the leading world authority on creative thinking’ and claims that, ‘without wishing to boast’, his latest system is ‘the first new way of thinking to be developed for 2,400 years since the days of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle’. Know
n as the ‘Six Thinking Hats’, this system requires managers to don a red hat for proposing a project, a yellow hat for listing its advantages, a black hat for its disadvantages and so on. But, as well as coloured hats, investors in the system get the aphorisms of the greatest thinker since Socrates: ‘You can’t dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper’, ‘With a problem, you look for a solution’ and ‘A bird is different from an aeroplane, although both fly through the air’.299
Inspired by this wisdom, the entrepreneur can discover many absurd ways to make money. For instance, by selling dirt. Not the figurative dirt of pornography – actual dirt. Alan Jenkins, an Irish immigrant to the USA, has become a multimillionaire by selling 12-ounce plastic bags of Official Irish Dirt. Like all astute businessmen, Jenkins offers substantial discounts for bulk purchasing. For instance, he has provided a Galway-born Manhattan lawyer with enough Irish dirt to be buried in – for the very reasonable round figure of $100,000 – and, for only $148,000, he has delivered to a Corkman several tons of Irish dirt to serve as a secure foundation for his new American home. It seems that the twenty-first century has added a new stage to the immigrant experience: after getting established and sending for the family, send for the native dirt. Jenkins now has a Jewish counterpart in Steven Friedman, founder of Holy Land Earth, which imports Israeli dirt bearing an official seal of approval from Rabbi Velvel Brevda, director of the Council of Geula in Jerusalem. There is an obvious opportunity for importing Islamic dirt from Mecca – but a true visionary will see the global possibilities and set up International Sacred Soil to send dirt from everywhere flying to everywhere else.
And clear-headed science is as absurd as hard-headed business. The search for the nature of reality leads ever deeper into absurdity. It is difficult to know now which is more absurd – the micro or the macro, the physics of the atom or the physics of space.
The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) Page 22
