41: Professor Viola, Peer Gynt, and Me

41 

Professor Viola, Peer Gynt, and Me         

I have a retired high school teacher friend who calls me up every month or so and we talk for well over an hour, sometimes two—or rather, he does most of the talking, as though having a willing ear to listen to him he has to tell me everything he can because it might be a long time before anyone else will be so indulging of his quirky way of thinking; but something he said the last time we talked has inspired today’s spiritual musing.

What he said was simple enough, given the context of our conversation on the subtle nature of spiritual paths to erode one’s capacity for thinking freely (we both belonged to the same spiritual path for many years, which we had outgrown but I left and he didn’t); it was his Faustian conviction that disturbed me. A very talented and resourceful man who built his retirement home in the country that is practically self-sustaining (with a passive solar heating system that he designed himself which a country magazine wanted to feature but he refused because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself), he has made it his life’s mission to be as independent as he possibly can be, especially in his own thinking—among many good words that he has discarded from his vocabulary, he no longer uses the word “God” because it’s too anthropomorphic for his liking and has replaced it with the much safer word “consciousness,” which is fine with me; but the last time we talked he justified his idiosyncratic thinking by declaring that he was simply being true to himself, to which I replied, with a spontaneous ironic chuckle, “But which self are you true to?”

“What do you mean?” he reacted, affronted by my unexpected laughter that always put him on his guard. “We only have one self. What other self are you talking about?”

“Have you ever heard of the concept of the shadow self?” I asked, but he hadn’t; and I had to explain what Jung meant by the repressed side of our personality which has been the dominant theme of all my writing, especially my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway in which I explored how Hemingway’s shadow destroyed his life.

When we finally ended our conversation I left my friend with something new to think about, which in our next conversation he’ll introduce as his own thought (he has a habit of doing this); but that’s just the foraging habit of his survivalist nature. But I love him for it, because he dares to be his quirky self despite what people think of him (he never goes anywhere, even to the grocery store, without his emergency survival kit); that’s why I was inspired to write today’s musing, because the human personality cries out for resolution.

I could have spent another hour or two expounding upon the book I had just written that tells the incredible story of how I found my true self; but The Summoning of Noman would have been too much for him, and I didn’t bother. Besides, my friend is a talker, and not a listener; and I left it for him to figure out the mystery of his own personality.

Strangely enough however, it wasn’t until I came upon a copy of Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt the other week when I unpacked the remaining boxes of books in our basement and stacked them onto the shelves that I thought of my friend’s comment about being true to himself, because Peer Gynt is the archetypal story of man’s inauthentic self that is the very premise of my memoir The Summoning of Noman; and this, I suspect, is why I was called to shed some light on our false personality in today’s spiritual musing… 

I was in high school when I met Professor Viola from Cornell University in the Nipigon Memorial District Hospital one day. He and his wife had an accident with their vehicle as they explored Ontario on their summer vacation, but I don’t remember the details; all I remember is that he was a Professor of Literature and I tried my best to impress him.

I visited him several times and told him that I wanted to go to Cornell University, and he indulged my unfathomable naiveté by telling me to write him when I graduated from high school, which I fully intended to do but didn’t because my destiny called me to another path; a path that Professor Viola foresaw by recommending that I read Peer Gynt. 

I had a passing familiarity with the author Henrik Ibsen (I had read that James Joyce, whose Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I read with fascination, plus some of his stories from Dubliners, learned Norwegian just to write Henrik Ibsen a letter telling him how much he admired his work); but I had not heard of Peer Gynt. I did know that he had written An Enemy of the People and The Master Builder, and I fully intended to read him.

Professor Viola was very kind to me, and so was his wife; but now that I reflect upon my experience, I can’t help but recall the curious smile of his wife’s face as Professor Viola indulged me. Her smile revealed much more than I was capable of discerning.

I guess it was because I was a young Italian boy that Professor Viola indulged me the way he did, knowing very well how hard it was for an immigrant boy from Calabria to make good in a new country like the United States of America and Canada; but the sage advice that he gave me, I failed to act upon because something about Peer Gynt frightened me.

I could never explain what it was, but in my soul I knew that if I read Peer Gynt I was going to learn something about myself that I didn’t want to know; and, believe it or not, I never read one of Ibsen’s plays, fleeing in panic at the mere thought of reading Peer Gynt. But there I was, half a century later in the basement of our new home in Georgian Bay unpacking my many boxes of books when I came across a copy of the dreaded play; and I brought Peer Gynt upstairs because I no longer had any fear of reading it.

I had found my true self. That was my life’s quest, which I wrote about in my book The Summoning of Noman. Peer Gynt on the other hand travelled the world and came home to die never knowing his true self, which was why in his wisdom Professor Viola wanted me to read Ibsen’s sibylline play; but in all my years of reading (and I went through many books) I could never bring myself to read Peer Gynt because I sensed that if I read it I would have to face a truth about myself that I did not want to face, and I had to learn the hard way that my life was just as inauthentic as the quixotic Peer Gynt’s; and once I realized this, Professor Viola’s wife’s kind but curious smile spoke to me: “Oh young man, my heart goes out to you…”

I went online and researched Ibsen and Peer Gynt, and I smiled to myself at Professor Viola’s compassionate wisdom; and then I sat on my front deck and finally read the play that haunted me my whole life. But as I read the play, I thought of my retired high school teacher friend who justified his eccentricity by saying that he was true to himself, and I wondered if the next time he called I shouldn’t recommend that he read Peer Gynt.  

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40: A Little Feng Shui to Ease My Mind

40 

A Little Feng Shui to Ease My Mind     

       

It’s only been twelve years. That’s long enough, one would think, to clear the clutter out of the basement of our new home in Georgian Bay. Well, it’s no longer new; it’s twelve years old now. But when we built it we stored my books in boxes and all my manuscripts and notebooks in plastic containers in the basement, which became the catch-all for everything, including more than a dozen boxes of preserves that we never got to use and had to discard (Penny and I loved picking blueberries when we lived up north); so we had a lot of feng shui-ing to do, and we started with my books.

I have a lot of books. We have two large bookcases in the sunroom, two more in the living room, and five in my writing den with one more to set up, and they are all full; and in the basement I made improvised book shelving out of bricks and ten 8 ft. shelves that I purchased at Home Hardware; but these selves are full and overflowing with books, so I purchased another ten 8 ft. shelves for the rest of my books; but only because a neighbor down the street had some work done on their house and left a pile of leftover red bricks at the end of their driveway for anyone to pick up.

I wheelbarrowed the bricks down to our house and gingerly carried them into the basement, six bricks to an armful, with a few minutes rest in between to catch my breath because of my heart condition, and I set up another 16 feet of shelving five rows high like the other wall; and the following day I began unpacking the remaining books in no particular order because if I stopped to check out my books I’d still be there unpacking. But I confess, some books did catch my eye and I had to bring them upstairs; and as I was doing my books, Penny was cleaning jars for new preserves.

The Ontario peaches and yellow plums were out, and they were on sale at Food Basics in Midland for $2.88/basket, and I came home with baskets of peaches and plums one weekend; so after I unpacked all of my books I helped Penny with the preserves because that’s something that we love to do together. It’s very bonding.

“It’s like going back to our roots,” I said to her, as I poured the hot sugary liquid into the jars laden with fresh Ontario peaches and plums, because it had been twelve years or more since we had last preserved. The yellow plums were easier to do than peaches, which we had to peel and quarter, because we canned the plums whole; and then I attended to burning all of cardboard boxes and hundreds of magazines in our burn barrel (we do live in cottage country), and our basement felt so clutter free that I excitedly said to Penny, “Now the chi can flow freely!”

Chi is the Chinese word for vital life force, and according to the ancient art of Feng Shui, when one’s house is cluttered the chi does not flow freely; and when the flow of chi in one’s house is interrupted by clutter, one’s life does not go so smoothly. So I had another good and ancient reason for uncluttering our basement.

How Feng Shui came into being is lost to antiquity, but the term Feng Shui is composed of two Chinese words: feng (wind) and shui (water); and together the words represent harmony and balance. Wind and water are the two natural elements that flow, move, and circulate everywhere on Earth. They are also the most basic elements required for human survival. Wind, or air, is the breath of life; and without it we would die in moments. And water is the liquid of life, and without water we would die in days. The combined qualities of wind and water determine our climate, which historically has determined our food supply and in turn affects our lifestyle, health, energy, and mood. These two fundamental and flowing elements have always profoundly yet subtly influenced individuals and society.

The essence of these life-giving elements is chi, or vital life force. Wind and water are direct carriers of chi, as their flowing qualities reflect their essential nature. All living organisms are largely composed of these two elements. Thus, Feng Shui is the art of designing environments in harmony with the flow of chi through one’s living space, and this flow supports and enhances one’s personal chi or vital life force. But, of course, this is all a matter of personal belief and not proven science.

I believe in Feng Shui because I believe in the ancient principle of the vital force of life, which for me has taken on far more meaning than simply the energy that sustains all life; it’s also the creative energy of life that every artist taps into with their art, as well as the I Am consciousness of life that nourishes our being and evolving individual identity.

But that’s a thought for another musing. What I wanted to say today is that feng shui-ing our basement has allowed the chi to flow more freely in our retirement home in Georgian Bay, and as tenuous as this may be for the unbeliever, it’s eased my mind and helped me to sleep better, almost as though (if not so), the chi flows more freely in my subconscious (the basement of my mind) and eases psychic tensions. And if this is so, which I believe, then why in the hell didn’t I do this twelve years ago? 

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39: Paragon of Angst at his Jejune Best

39 

Paragon of Angst at his Jejune Best 

“To get excited about life, he had to take a life. How perverse is that?” Penny commented, referring to the new Woody Allen movie Irrational Man, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the self-consumed philosophy professor Abe Lucas and Emma Stone as his awestruck student lover Jill Pollard; and it didn’t surprise me that only three people had shown up to see the Sunday matinee at the Uptown Theatre in Barrie the other day: Woody Allen has lost his relevance as a storyteller of the human condition.

I’ve gone through different phases with Woody Allen movies (he’s made 42), and as much as I used to find his movies comedic expressions of the human condition that sincerely addressed the existential questions of life, his movies have evolved into a self-parody of the perennial Woody Allen condition, suggesting that the iconic director can’t extricate himself from the highly lucrative existential narrative that he has boxed himself into which he defined by having Abe Lucas quote Sartre’s famous line “hell is other people,” and Irrational Man illustrates the paragon of angst at his jejune best.

“Much of philosophy is verbal masturbation,” says Abe Lucas to his students at Braylin, the Rhode Island college where his addition to the philosophy department caused quite a buzz before his arrival—which reminded me why I dropped out in my third year of philosophy studies at university and moved on to real-life experience where I found the answers that philosophy failed to give me in the endless struggle of daily living with honesty and integrity—“he labors good on good to fix and owes to virtue every triumph that he know,” said Wordsworth in his poem “Character of the Happy Warrior,” which became the ideal of my life; but the Kierkegaardian “terror of freedom” still haunted the aging director, if not the man.

“Man is condemned to be free,” said the French philosopher Sartre, which Allen exploits to save Abe Lucas from the dread of existential despair and give his tediously jejune story traction. But again, Woody Allen is consistent; and his story fails to inspire because it sinks into moral turpitude and philosophical justification, which was why Penny said what she did about the movie over dinner at Wimpy’s Diner.

But that’s Woody Allen, a perverse little man who had a sexual affair with his partner Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi that caused the scandal of his life which he veiled in his movie Irrational Man to vindicate himself for what he felt was unfair treatment by the judge who had ruled against him in his protracted legal battle with Mia Farrow; but the creative writer/director took it to the extreme in Irrational Man and played out the fantasy by having Abe Lucas and his awestruck student Jill overhear a woman’s desperate plea in a restaurant and having him murder the judge for his unfair treatment of the woman who was going to lose custody of her children.

“A righteous murder,” Abe Lucas justified, which was a curious thing to say given that he believed much of philosophy was verbal masturbation; but, ironically, it was the thought of murdering the judge that reawakened Abe Lucas’s interest in life and cured him of sexual impotence. An old theme borrowed from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which Allen had drawn upon before for his movies.

When the movie ended, the only other person in Uptown’s Theater 3 with the reclining soft leather chairs, laughed when I told him that I was a philosophy student at university and like Abe Lucas also thought that much of philosophy was verbal masturbation; and the man said, “You should write Woody Allen and tell him that.”

But what would be the point? Allen has made a career out of “milking the udder of despair” who “churns the sour milk of life into pure gold” (this is from my poem “The Guru of Angst” that was inspired by Leonard Cohen, whom I’ve always seen as a sincere poetic version to Woody Allen’s inauthenticity); and besides, after 37 years of psychotherapy, he’s much too old to change his ways and remains a “militant Freudian atheist,” as he described himself, who believes that “the heart has no logic.” A pathetic case of self-absorption that respects no boundaries for the heart’s desire.

So next summer we can expect another Woody Allen movie, if he’s still around (he’s 71); and I’d bet my bottom dollar that we’ll get another variation of the same tired theme of a bored older man and younger woman and all the dread, anxiety, and despair that comes along with it; and if I go to see it, it will only be to confirm my new saying, which was born of hard-won experience and not philosophical masturbation: we can be certain of one thing in life, and that is people will always disappoint you.

Look at what happened to our hero Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s new novel Go Set a Watchman; so I’d like to give Woody Allen the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t. His movie Irrational Man was fun to watch, but ultimately disappointing.         

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