The Enigma

If works of art have manifestos, they are revealed in their first moments and their last. An artist with a fine ear can suggest the breadth and the wholeness of the work to come in the first line, the first shot, and return us to that wholeness in its final moments. The Wrestler begins with an orgiastic array of newspaper headlines, rave flyers, and then a sequence twenty years later in which we follow the heaving, weathered wrestler through narrow halls into a high school gym. What intrigues me here is not what we see, but what we don't see - his face. Then, a fan appears, tells him he was his first match, and the camera tilts to reveal the hint of a profile - ah, I think, the fan melts him a little, here we get to see the man - but the moment passes, and the camera focuses again on his back, following as he walks out, walks on.

The movie falls into the perennial category of the biopic, a genre that all but promises to show us the hero's highest and lowest moments, his worst humiliations and his most private epiphanies. We see all of these, but still the camera returns to his back again and again, reminding us, maybe, that we are no closer to the man than the spectators who line his ring. We see him, in a long unbroken shot, walk from the staff bathroom of a grocery store through a depressing series of rooms and staircases to arrive at an open doorway: the portal to his new life behind the deli counter. This scene, powerful in itself, gains in significance when placed in the context of another, famous scene: the long unbroken shot in Scorcese's Goodfellas that follows Henry and Karen past the long line outside a nightclub through a back door, down a long staircase and right to the edge of the stage, the best seat in the house. Henry is a new initiate into the mafia, and here the camera shows us the ease with which things fall out of his way, the peripherality of the world when Henry and his girl are at its centre. In The Wrester, the walk becomes a long, anonymous descent into shame.

We see, maybe, things that his fans don't see - this moment, his many rejections at the hands of the few he cares to love, or thinks he loves - but does this mean that we know him? Almost all movies are based on the premise that we will understand and feel that we know these characters enough to care about what happens to them; this is both an explicit goal of writers (make your characters real) and a draw for audiences. But if we think of these characters as real people, as we are meant to, then isn't there something arrogant at the heart of the whole enterprise, that we can enter a theatre for two hours and say that we know the full measure of another person? We see what we are meant to see, but this does not mean that we know, and above all we have not gained the right to say we deserve to know.

Why should the wrestler tell us more than we need, or more than he wishes to divulge? The ending of The Wrestler cuts us off at a point where we may most want to know more, and this, understood along with the movie's opening scenes, becomes the source of its incredible poignancy and emotional power. For however involving a movie may be that shows us a character's naked interior, far more involving is a movie whose central character holds something back, out of dignity and pride. For the first time, the act of leaving the theatre felt, to me, somehow genuine - we do not know this man, we have only encountered him, and now we all exit our seats and return to our own, private lives, knowing little more than we did when we entered.

A fine balance

Some words are more interesting than others. I was reminded of this forcibly when I saw the trailer to the new movie Disgrace, based on a J. M. Coetzee novel. Single-word titles are always a tricky situation, because a writer’s craft is essentially one of arrangement – the true but annoying phrase “the music is between the notes” can equally be said of words. When you have a title with just one word, there is nothing you can do to add to its poetry, and so the task becomes one of selection rather than arrangement. Can your single word carry a book? Not all of them can.

Disgrace is a word I always thought I knew, until I saw the trailer. Putting a single word into a title is like putting it under a microscope, or hitting it with a floodlight – it becomes disassociated from other words, and bares itself for inspection. For instance, until now, I never thought of “disgrace” as a word with a prefix; it was just a single unit, like “honour,” which my thesaurus tells me is its antonym. But now I look at its two parts, “dis” and “grace,” and the word changes completely. It now becomes a word that means through negation, like “unnerve” or “misplace” – it has no definition, but rather un-definition.

The word itself continues to propel us down this path. Understood this way, “disgrace” is a negation of “grace,” which I find surprising. Have you ever thought of disgrace as the opposite of “grace”? What is grace? I want to steer clear of etymology and dictionary definitions as much as possible. It may be that they will help clarify, but I’m interested in my personal experience with these words and the strangeness of their meaning. Honour may be personal, but disgrace as its opposite strikes me as a social construct – disgraced by your family, your community. Grace is a much more interesting word than honour, I think, because it’s harder to pin down. To me it suggests elegance, simplicity, and what I can only describe as a profound awareness of mortality. To dis- a word whose definition is so fragile and ephemeral is almost a violent act, a collapse of all its subtlety of meaning into a monochrome negative.

But the negative, too, is interesting, because dis- is only one of many such prefixes. What if the word was not disgrace, but ungrace? Un is flat, neutral, mathematical – hinge/unhinge, wind/unwind, do/undo. It passes no judgment, adds no further meaning; it’s like a switch. Mis-, as in place/misplace, apprehend/misapprehend, always has a sense of mistake to it, of something not gone right. De- implies a reversal, a kind of rewind through time – deconstruct, desensitize – and is a less personal prefix than mis-. Which brings us to dis-. Dismantle, displace, disembark. There is something wilful about the prefix, a sense of human agency that doesn’t come through with the others. A useful comparison is misplace and displace – one is an accident, the other is a deliberate act, and I can’t help but think of the word disturb, which lies at the heart of all these dis- words.

What does it mean, then, to disgrace? The more I think about the word, the more unsettled I feel. I’m not exactly sure what grace is, but I know it’s a quality that I should aspire to. There is a rightness, a fineness and a beauty to it, that is smeared by that most deliberate and therefore cruel of prefixes; witness the sounds of the syllables, the “dih” and the “gray” both washed out by sibilance. The word is a terrible smear, terrible because it is personal and wilful, and gives us the intact word “grace” in the second syllable but shatters its sense with the first.

I am constantly amused and annoyed by single-word titles of romantic fiction novels, like Heartbeat or Lightning or Bittersweet or what have you (these all generated by an Amazon search for “Danielle Steel”). They pale under the spotlight, reveal their clumsiness and lack of depth. You delve into them, and hit a wall. A word like disgrace, by comparison, invites deeper and deeper listening. A title is always a risk, but a good writer, one that is sensitive to the musicality of words, can sort through the thousands of words that are dumb and find the one, the right one, that speaks.

Rehearsal

Daniel Barenboim may be more music than man. I wonder what it would be like to grow up in an environment suffused with music, in a culture that takes music as its spine. He performed the complete Beethoven piano sonatas in concert I think at the age of 17. Yes, he must have had the technique and the musical genius, but you need more than that to take on the full Beethoven cycle. Music has to be your constant companion. For a musician, music might be the most important thing in life. For Barenboim, I suspect that life is simply an interesting offshoot of music, which is the foundation.

I know enough about music to suspect that it has endless depth, that it can be as deep as you are deep. The more you bring to it, the more it will reward you. This is what is at stake if you forsake a career that is depthful, be it music or teaching or writing or some other art. The depthful careers are those that are bottomless, that appear to have no end, because they become a kind of surrogate for life, for the process of life and of living. The self-questioning that a depthful career demands of you, the way you are forced to struggle with your hang-ups and weaknesses and apply your creativity and discipline toward change, this is all essentially a rehearsal of what happens outside, a process that is as long as our lives are long. Life is too large to hold in our palm; and so we hold some other, and that in turn reveals to us life's hidden mechanism.

Of all the surrogates for life, music may be the most apt, not least because it happens in time as we happen in time. Barenboim says that the act of performance is akin to the span of a human life. In the beginning there is nothing. The first note is not just a first note - it is a willful act on your part to bring sound into a soundless world. This, in itself, is miraculous. During your performance, there is an obligation to your audience to keep going. A break would mean disaster, though we don't quite know why - we just feel it innately to be so. All along, we pass measures, musical events that come to us in time and then become memory, until we come to the end and, lingeringly, or triumphantly, we let go of the last chord and collectively acknowledge a silence, a return to the nothingness with which we began.

To be sure, this is superficial resemblance, but all of my thinking and doing in music has confirmed for me the deep parallels between performance and life, which is really the greatest performance of all. Because of this, working on a surrogate such as music becomes a way to work on yourself. Here are some of only the most obvious lessons that a performance can teach. When you begin, begin with a statement; don't wuss out. Sing every line, through every moment. Strive for clarity. Don't be afraid to experiment in the moment; pursue every idea to its fullest expression. Be elegant, rather than harsh. When you return at the end, your music changes; remember all that has come before, and end fittingly. The moment after music, if done well, is loneliness and ecstasy.

This is all well and good, but to be honest I have always had a serious problem with music as an analogy for life. In music, you can prepare for months, or years, before a single performance of a piece. You are given all the time you need to ensure your fullest readiness, and in performance it is possible to be mature and confident from the first note to the last. Life, by comparison, offers you no prep time. It's like walking onstage to play a sonata, except you were just born so of course you don't know how to play the piano! You're expected to learn as you play. This has always struck me as a profound unfairness. Hey, I didn't even realize I was alive until after being on the planet for something like five years. Thus the final tragedy (but also apotheosis) of Charlie Kaufman's Synechdoche, New York - the moment when we finally figure it all out, when we finally learn how to live life and how we want to do things, may be the moment right before we die.

And yet the rightness of music as metaphor continued to stick with me, forced me to grapple with it, until I thought of the idea of life as a series of present moments. A moment is a difficult thing to take hold of, because it is so fleeting - but what about a day? Our lives are also a series of present days, of todays rather than yesterdays or tomorrows. Let me begin again with superficial resemblances. We awake from sleep, and come into consciousness. Can you ever remember in what position you woke up in the morning, which wall you were facing? Studies show that in the first thirty minutes after waking your brain capacity is at a point lower than if you are drunk. If we consider a 16 hour day, and an 80 year life span, then half an hour equals the first 2.5 years of life. But soon enough you achieve clarity and your full brain capacity. We plan our lives around days - or, more precisely, around sleep, which is impenetrable. We make plans for the day, and then evaluate how well we have kept to our plans. A day is a span of time that comes out of nothingness and then disappears into nothingness, as our consciousness comes out of nothing and then disappears into nothing. The final hours of a day never go exactly as we plan. You may feel yourself to be tired, and decide to sleep early. Or, through tenacious will, you may decide to hold on a few hours more, and devote yourself to some task until early in the morning, fighting increasingly cloudy thought and blurriness of motion until the task is done.

So, a day may look like life, but what does it mean? Have you ever watched an older person behave a certain way, and wonder if you would behave the same if you were in their position, or decide differently? When you encounter a fifty-year-old in a low wage job who has always dreamed of starting a bakery, do you wonder if you would have the balls to act where another might remain safely stationary? Perhaps another question might help: how do you act when your evening is shot to hell, it's 1 am and you still have much to do? Do you find it in you to break your momentum and start as if anew, or do you resign your tasks to another day?

Possibly this is simplistic, and even facetious, but I don't think so. I asked earlier why we have no rehearsal in life, but if the living of a day tells you what your life looks like, and your life is rewritten every day, then we can understand the individual day as both a rehearsal and the complete performance. It is rehearsal in the sense that you can learn and change from day to day, challenge yourself and experiment with how you do and approach things. At the same time, whatever your life is in the moment is what your Life is - it is only the present moment that matters. What does it matter what happened a moment before, or what might come in the next, if right now, right now, you are the fullest expression of how you wish to live, which is synonymous with what you wish to be?

Here is a way of articulating what I mean that may be unfamiliar, and which even surprises me at times. Life is generous; it is a testing ground. Every day presents a new opportunity to evaluate yourself, to see how you will fare in the larger manifestation. If you wonder how you will behave in your last days on this earth, look to how you spend the waning hours of your day. They will be painfully honest. But, if you are concerned with what you see, remember that every day rewrites not only what comes later but what comes before. Which is why finding your answers in the last moment of life may seem like the greatest injustice and, at the same time, the only possible way. All of your days are a rehearsal for that last day, where your accumulation of experience and wisdom seeps back through your life and rewrites it all.