The Inward Gaze (Part I), and “My Dinner With Andre”

The position Andre takes in My Dinner with Andre is a despondent one of privilege. He’s so conscious of his despair that it seems a thing of study, a project, and he comes off much like a maudlin Woody Allen character. Wally points this out to Andre, but in the process he becomes almost strident, and defensive, while Andre maintains a cool unflappability. For all of his despair--and outrageous experiences that verge on the implausible--Andre is the one we are meant to perceive as a sage. (Let me just say up front--I have always loved this film.)

The movie has much to say about the evils of capitalism, which, by virtue of its obviousness, you might think yourself crass to not immediately drop everything to go trek into the woods to live. This critique of capitalism is a position I am familiar with, and have found indispensable at certain periods of my youth. Yet seeing how entrenched society is, I have come to resist my old railing against the system in favor of the inward look, the solace of, for lack of a better notion, poetry (not poetry explicitly, but poetics, perhaps, the search for apt words, the struggle to speak, to articulate; this does include poetry, of course).

Brian Eno believes it is all inside of us--by which he means god or the divine, as does Jung (“...who looks inside, awakens.”), and I want to agree. It’s that which I give to myself that grows rich and spends me (Rilke). I don’t know when, or if, I have ever really had to go looking outside of my own passionate engagement with my creativity in search of something, an answer, a cure-all--though I’m sure I’ve made the effort; particularly when it was asked of me. Or expected.

Is the inward gaze an apt countermeasure to the perceived evils of our technologically driven society, or is it akin to apathy? I worry this attitude might be false contentment, or cold comfort: the world is going to pieces while I’m navel gazing. I recall a friend pulling the phrase out (“cold comfort”) in a way that made me think he was a tourist observing his own neurotic tendencies, as he seemed to have a new diagnosis every few weeks or so. This, again, is the privilege of the intellectual, the social commentator, the crank--the Luddite? That’s what I sense from Andre in the movie, that his despair is a pose bundled into a convenient cultural criticism that allows him to be clever, and self-regarding about his diagnosis.

For many of us, I suspect, observation and comment can seem like the only and main comfort. Is this any different than tweeting or sending text messages to cohorts? Is the resort to social media a quick fix--is the careful delineation of thoughts posted for an unknown audience in any way approximate to the inward gaze? Maybe only in terms of one being private, while the latter is public. The use of social media is often only a quick fix. It’s often merely reactionary.

To my own argument I’ll say, my expositions here don’t require the jittery feedback of an immediate response. My work is more on the slow burn of accumulating thought. I’m not looking to deaden my senses; the work I do is to awaken myself to the possibilities inherent in language. I consciously make the choices I do with my time. These activities are, to me, not escapes; of course, I can conjure the voice of an Andre saying, “You do not see them as this, but that’s what they are.”

I consider the plight of Andrew Sullivan, who laments his dependence on technology in a recent New York magazine, and imagine that for him, what he complains about is actually his bliss: his mind being sapped for a constant hit of dopamine. How is my presumptive bliss--this, writing, reading--any different? Isn’t the loss of our mind to a fictional world for hours at a time no less of a concern?

I think back to Mihaly Csikszentmialyhi’s essential book, Flow, which first established for me the importance of maintaining that inward gaze. There’s a popular class at Stanford, and now a book (Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life), in which the authors have utilized these concepts to help people figure out their true calling in life. Frequently, I try and fail to find flow in my work, but I’m not going to trade in the search to follow some daily stream of nonsense on a screen. I don’t have a smartphone to keep myself entertained. (Not to seem too virtuous, but I do have periods of my youth spent at mindless screens (video games), and later, mini-web rabbit hole searches; but I always resurfaced, and never stayed with these activities for long). Maybe this is the key to flow: ultimately, I find my own creative process more stimulating and satisfying than the soporific feed of the web.

I’m aware of how lucky I am. Maybe my concern be more of a concern for my fellow men, who may not have the same wherewithal. I tend to presume that everyone has enough self-restraint to wise up and take care of themselves to put their devices away when the muse beckons; I can’t complain about a lack of willpower.

In My Dinner With Andre, Wally reckons with the panic that he can’t still his mind--this film was made in 1982, long before we became immersed in the web 24-7, so this is prescient--and for a lot of technology junkies, a moment of quiet within one’s own mind is a difficult breach, possibly far more dreadful than anything imaginable. I believe I know this fear, also, but if anything have learned how to turn it into a tool for my writing; indeed, I think it’s the only way writing gets done.

What if this condition of the unquiet mind is as rampant as it seems to be, or we are led to believe? I sometimes suspect it is far worse than I can imagine; that the mass of men (and women) really do live lives of quiet desperation. Maybe this is the present form of quiet desperation: the immersion of our devices, another app. Is this why it can seem that people turn to technology for the next quick fix, much the way Andre goes hopping among pseudo mystical retreats in search of an answer?

I try not to imagine a bleak technological future, and maybe I’ve convinced myself that I remain at a safe, self-imposed remove. I neither feel a need to shout among the train riders engrossed in their devices, nor do I salivate for the next gadget.

Insistence On Persistence

This is maybe an echo on the last post, which I put out hastily, but with no elaboration. This is the elaboration.

Reading the Wallace Shawn interview in the latest Paris Review, I thought, it’s hard to imagine this writer would not be doing what he is and have become good at it, if he was merely pompous. Which is apparently what Wallace Shawn is accused of being, pompous.

Barring a stable set of readers, I realize I’m not going to appear to a random reader to have anything new to say--and maybe I’m not. But if my work touches one person, it must be worth the effort. Then again, you have to overcome a lot of skepticism to deign to believe you can add to the conversation.

That’s one of the first steps in being a writer, and maybe it’s too falsely achieved--that quality of believing you have something to say. We’d sometimes like to accuse others in the struggle that they should consider if they really have anything of worth to contribute, but we could heed Wallace Shawn here:

“. . . without writers, humanity might be trapped in a swamp of idiotic, unchanging provincial cliches. Yes, there are writers who merely reinforce people’s complacency, but a writer like Rachel Carson inspired the activism of millions, and writers like Lady Murasaki, Milton, and Joyce have recorded people’s brains! And for any writers to exist at all, there must surely be a tradition of writing. Maybe in order for one valuable writer to exist, there must be a hundred others who aren’t valuable at all, but it isn’t possible at any given moment for anyone to be sure who the valuable one is.”

(Wallace Shawn, The Paris Review, #201, The Art of Theatre No. 17)

Who am I to say whose efforts aren’t worthwhile--including myself?

I like to think there is something to persistence, on the other hand there’s the notion that if you repeatedly keep trying to do something and repeatedly fail at it, that this is the definition of crazy. I’d also sometimes like to believe that I don’t have a set tolerance level, that I’ll keep trying to achieve an elusive (seeming) goal without ever calling the attempt into question. But I’m guessing tenacity pays off. Every story or piece of writing didn’t exist at one time, and after it did, it maybe will have taken dozens of attempts to get it noticed (i.e., published). Writing, in this way, becomes the penultimate illustration of this theory. I’d already more or less given up on many stories (not with cause) simply because I spent years sending them out to no avail, and by some fluke I sent one out two or three years after I’d given up on it long enough to come back to it, take it off life support, and send it flying into the void again--for no discernible logic--not that I ever stopped believed in in said story. Another self-serving notion I cop to is that “it just wasn’t time,” or, “maybe next time,” which are really ways of persisting at something even though, clearly, there is no apparent justification for the hope.

Unless the fact of the story eventually finding a home is one.

The kicker of this is that I still try. I still doubt I should, or say I’ll give up, but as time passes, I write more that gets me excited again, and while sifting through the new pile, I find something buried in the old pile. I’ll think, this hasn’t been sent out in two years, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it (hubris has no place in the determination to get published)--in fact, I could just change it here and here, and I’ll send it out. To date, that’s how most of my published fiction got picked up. So even if I had to spend a lot of time going through the slog of postage, contest entry fees, grosses of 20 pound 96 bright paper and countless unenlightening trips to the office supply store, I can’t really say it wasn’t worth the effort.

So, maybe I’m feeling particularly resilient these days, or am trying to coddle myself into thinking I am this way. I just don’t know if I would get anywhere if I wasn’t at least paying lip service to this theme of indomitable persistence.