Ambition, the ‘Dangerous Vice’ and ‘Compelling Passion’

In reviewing William Casey King‘s Ambition, a History: From Vice to Virtue (‘Wanting More, More, More‘, New York Review of Books, 11 July 2013), David Bromwich writes:

Machiavelli thought ambition a dangerous vice…for Machiavelli ambition was also a compelling passion—a large cause of the engrossing changes of fortune that happen because “nature has created men so that they desire everything, but are unable to attain it.” All men, the grandees and the populace alike, are implicated in the “nature” that created this unreasoning desire….Francis Bacon was deeply influenced by both Machiavelli and Montaigne….a useful “means to curb” the ambitious, says Bacon, “is to balance them by others as proud as they.” The dry realism of that suggestion would be echoed by Madison in Federalist Number 51: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”…Bacon made his acutest observations on ambition in another essay, “Of Great Place.” Men in great places, he writes, are servants of the state, of fame, and of business:

They have no freedom; neither in their persons, nor in their actions; nor in their times. It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.

The path to great place may involve base actions and so “by indignities, men come to dignities.” They buy their power at the price of their own liberty. There is a freedom of the spirit, Bacon seems to say, that has nothing to do with political leverage or social success.

The terrible irony of ambition, which Machiavelli and Bacon so perspicuously capture, is that the same drive that can make us happy by spurring us on to great, hopefully fruitful effort, can be the source of the greatest unhappiness as well. Not for nothing is it said that the time of the greatest melancholia in one’s life is when we come to realize we must downsize our ambitions, cease our endless prospecting, give up our illusions, and look around for a suitable bower on which to rest our heads and begin the process of reconciling ourselves to a life unfulfilled. The greater the original ambition, the steeper the fall into the darkest recesses of gloom.

Ambition does not just make the ambitious unhappy, of course. All those singed by its flame suffer: sometimes those who support the ambitious and are then cast aside; sometimes those whose ambitions must give way in the face of a greater one.

If ambition is to be a virtue, then it must be infected by yet another one, that of moderation. But the balancing of ambition with realism, the tempering of our drives, the recognition of the presence of the reality principle in our lives, is not an easy task. For we remain haunted by the worry that we might have simply fallen prey to weakness of the will, to laziness and indolence, and sought the easy way out. Homilies like ‘obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off the goal’ don’t help. This cognitive dissonance might be even more painful than that caused by the dousing of the flames of ambition.

Bacon and Madison’s remarks about balancing ambition suggest a possible means of amelioration: when giving up one ambition, replace it by another, just as great. The ambitious artist may then, for instance look elsewhere, perhaps inward, considering himself a work in progress, or perhaps outward, finding in some other work a potential reward as great as the ones that drove him previously.

So, there might be no getting rid of ‘ambition,’ but that might be because it may only be a compound description of a host of other, necessary, life-sustaining drives.

Of First and Second Languages – I

Costica Bradatan‘s essay ‘Born Again in a Second Language‘ made me think my own homes in the two languages I speak: English and Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani.

Because I grew up in India, English is often termed my ‘second language.’ I, however, describe English as my ‘first language’ because it is the language in which I posses the greatest fluency, vocabulary, and reading and writing proficiency. My reading and writing fluency in Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani is on a sharp decline; I have not read a book in Hindi nor written more than a line in it for over thirty years now.  As I noted in a post here some time ago, one of my reading projects is to read three novels in Hindi by the great Indian novelist Premchand; they sit there on my shelf, waiting for me to muster up the courage to approach them.

I grew up in a mixed language household; my parents spoke a mixture of English and Hindi to each other; my father spoke predominantly in English with my brother and myself; my mother, who had a graduate degree in English literature, spoke in both English and Hindi with us, but the latter often took precedence.  The language of the streets around us was Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani but our social milieu, made up of Air Force officers drawn from all over  polyglot India, relied on English. The language of instruction in the schools I attended was English; we learned Hindi as a language in a separate class. The movies we watched in theaters were in English; the weekly Sunday movie was in Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani.

So I grew up bilingual, but the combinatorial explosion of language that takes place in a child occurred, for me, in English, because it was the language of instruction in school, the language in which I was introduced to bookish knowledge, and as such, the language in which I began to read outside of school. It became the language in which I dreamed, fantasized, speculated, wondered and schemed. I spoke Hindi with some family members and English with yet others; I spoke Hindi with some friends of mine and English with others; but, when I was by myself and my books, which was a great deal of the time, I thought  and imagined in English. It became, very quickly, my ‘first language.’

I stopped studying Hindi in the tenth grade.  I had, through sheer tenacity, improved my Hindi reading and writing skills to the point that I secured, after years of embarrassingly bad performances, a decent grade in my last school exam. It was my last hurrah; from then on, I stopped reading Hindi, other than signage and the occasional newspaper.

Over the years, I have learned a semester of German (the grundstufe eins), a smattering of Spanish (how could you not, living in the US?) and acquired some proficiency in the language of my ‘home state’, Punjabi.  I dream of attaining fluency in all three and will describe my struggles with them in future posts.

In the meantime, I continue to speak Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani with a certain colloquial fluency (I can certainly curse in it with some elan). But my primary language for communication remains English; it’s what I speak, it’s what teach, read, and write in.  I enjoy switching back and forth between the two, but I know where my home is.

More on these languages, and my relationships with them, soon.

Edward Mendelson on Anthony Hecht and the Palliations of Poetry

In writing on Anthony Hecht‘s poetry in  (‘Seeing is Not Believing‘, The New York Review of Books, 20 June 2013), Edward Mendelson remarks:

In a familiar paradox of art, Hecht’s poems got their structure and strength from his irrational judgments and defensive vulnerability. But Hecht did something deeper and more complex than finding compensations in the perfections of art for the faults of life. What is uniquely unsettling about his poetry is his insistence that its aristocratic poise is helpless against the inner terror that gave rise to it. As he suggests in ‘A Birthday Poem,’ he finds in art ‘a clarity that never was,’ a clarity outside of time that offers only an illusion of escape from the tangled misery of actual and specific moments, naming as an example ‘that mid-afternoon of our disgrace.’

These statements need some untangling.

First, I think Mendelson means to say that it is ‘a familiar irony of art.’ There is no contradiction here.

Second, it is not entirely clear what Mendelson has in mind when he talks about ‘finding compensations in the perfections of art’. Does he mean the compensations are found in the acts and processes of creation, or in the contemplation of the finished work of art? (It is also not clear what Mendelson means by the ‘perfections of art’ but I’ll let that slide for a moment.) To use the taxonomy of palliative measures that provide relief from life’s miseries that was suggested by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents, the former might be considered a deflection, the latter a substitutive satisfaction. The former is a re-channeling of our desires into domains where their satisfaction is more tractable, more easily attained. Freud included in this category scientific activity and other methods of professional achievement (the world of business and finance, for instance). By their grounding in the everyday and their engagement with other forms of human activity this method of escape from the trials and tribulations of life retains the most connection with reality. The latter is a form of compensation for lack of pleasure elsewhere. Freud included in this activity all forms of illusion or fantasy: religious fervor, day-dreaming, the enjoyment of artistic products such as music, sculpture and painting.

It should be clear why the former is a deflection; even in the act of creation, the artist may be confronted with the familiar frustrations of life and unblinking presence of the reality principle–the blank page or canvas, the long torturous path from conception to final product–but expressed in a form that he has the means and resources to combat. In the latter, we are merely consumers of art–we may not be artists ourselves–giving ourselves over to the enjoyment of the work before us.

Mendelson, of course, is suggesting that Hecht’s poetry makes the claim that these palliations do not work, that their relief is illusory. But this should not be ‘uniquely unsettling’; such a notion is present in the very idea of a palliative measure itself: it does not cure, it merely provides temporary relief.

Skyler White, The Anti-Muse?

Yesterday I wrote a short response to Anna Gunn‘s New York Times Op-Ed about the negative reaction to the Skyler White character on Breaking Bad. I want to add a couple of points to that today.

Some of the adverse reaction to Skyler finds its grounding in her instantiation of an archetype that I alluded to yesterday: the domestication, and hence taming, of the artist. Walter White is an auteur, a maven who marries science and art to produce the purest crystal meth possible, who worries incessantly, and proudly, about the quality of his ‘product.’ This is a man obsessed, like all good artists are, about whether his vision has been realized, who is capable of endless ‘revision’ and ‘drafting’ to get things to come out just right. His pride may be his downfall, as in when he cannot stop himself from bragging to Hank about how Gale was a mere child compared to Heisenberg, but it is a justified pride: his work is just that damn good. Skyler, however, is no such thing. Remember that in the first season we are told that she writes short stories and sells items on Ebay. The former activity marks her not as creative but as delusional, like all those people who imagine they will write the next Great American Novel, the latter as a not particular edifying combination of a hustler and parasite. Later she becomes book-keeper for Beneke Fabricators.

The contrast is clear: in one corner, creativity, innovation and enterprise, in the other, dull, stodgy, mundane beancounting. And more significantly, the brilliant male artist, bought to heel by the cackling, nagging, domesticity of the home and hearth, his rising star brought back to earth by the dead weight of the home. An old joke has it that one mathematician wrote to his colleague after his marriage, ‘Congratulations, you can do more mathematics now’, but in general, the received wisdom is that the artist’s work suffers after marriage. He is called away from his easel, his desk, because of the calls from the kitchen and the nursery. Skyler is thus the sand in the wheels for Walter’s artistry; she gets in the way of his work. she prevents him from realizing his potential. We are invited to see her as a millstone and barrier.

There is an interesting visual grammar to the contrast drawn between Skyler and Walter. As the show progresses, Walter becomes sharper: he loses his hair, starts dressing in black, speaks with gritted teeth, delivers his lines with barely controlled violence, and his actions follow a trajectory of decreasing compromise (like all good artists’!). His rough edges are smoothed, he becomes menacing, not just in his deeds, but in his appearance as well. Compared to him, Skyler appears rooted in the ordinary. indeed, for a while, she is visibly weighed down with pregnancy, viewed here not as fertility, but rather, as a symbol of the artist’s enslavement.

It is little wonder Skyler provokes such visceral reactions; her character carries the burden of many pernicious tropes.

Skyler the Shrew?

Anna Gunn has an interesting Op-Ed in The New York Times today, detailing her response to the almost universally negative, vitriolic, misogynistic response that her character on Breaking Bad—Skyler, the wife of Walter White–has evoked. In it, she writes:

My character, to judge from the popularity of Web sites and Facebook pages devoted to hating her, has become a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, nonsubmissive, ill-treated women….As the one character who consistently opposes Walter and calls him on his lies, Skyler is, in a sense, his antagonist. So from the beginning, I was aware that she might not be the show’s most popular character. But I was unprepared for the vitriolic response she inspired….I finally realized that most people’s hatred of Skyler had little to do with me and a lot to do with their own perception of women and wives. Because Skyler didn’t conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender.

Much of the Skyler-hating finds its roots in the first season depiction of her and in Walter’s gradual decline into moral depravity.

In the first season, Skyler is undoubtedly depicted as a quasi-shrew, a woman deluded about her mediocrity. She seems to have emasculated Walter, sucking from him his creative and sexual energies; if this brilliant scientist is now a mediocre high-school teacher, then part of his decline can be traced to his domestication at the hands of this seemingly bored and brittle housewife who cannot even be bothered to give him a decent handjob. (Her overreaction to Walter smoking weed does not help; this was a poorly written section of the show; it’s hard to imagine such a puritanical over-the-top response in their milieu.) Conversely, Walter comes across as a desperate man, striving–foolishly and recklessly perhaps–but striving nonetheless, to do the best by his family. His moral and spiritual decline is not immediately apparent, and only becomes apparent later in the show. By that time, as Skyler’s strength’s become most apparent, most viewers’ impressions have already congealed. There are still, unsurprisingly, those who consider Walter a ‘total bad-ass.’

Skyler might also have been the victim of a backlash triggered by the usual ‘violence OK-sex bad’ moralizing that afflicts our culture at large. Her infidelity to Walte via her liaison with Ted Beneke made her the target, I suspect, of a pompous ‘look at this bitch, sleeping with another guy, while her cancer-afflicted husband struggles imperfectly to take care of her and her kids’ reaction. Walter’s mistreatment and destruction of Jesse Pinkman did not evoke such a visceral response. Perhaps there was a shaken head or two, a rueful ‘man, that’s fucked up, but a guy’s gotta do what he’s gotta do.’

And that, in the end, is it. A man does what he does; the world is harsh and tough choices have to be made. Imperfection is a badge of honor, a sign of having made it through the gauntlet. A woman, however, has to fight mightily to keep bitch-hood at bay; her imperfections brand her guilty forever. The tribunals that judge her are considerably more exacting.

Stop and Frisk, Jersey City Style

This horrifying story of TSA overreach prompts my post today. It has nothing to do with the TSA but everything to do with the abuse of power.

Almost twenty-five years ago, while attending graduate school in Newark, I visited Jersey City to meet a good friend of mine. I was accompanied by two other friends of mine. They–J__ and R__–were Cuban-American and brothers; J__ was an undergraduate at my graduate school, and R__, his handyman brother. We arrived at my friend’s apartment building and found him not present. On asking around, we were told he might have gone to a nearby bar–on Monticello Avenue– for a drink.  We walked over, looked for him, didn’t find him and decided to walk back to our car and head home.

As we walked back in the fading light, a dozen or so men came running at us, shouting at us to stop and show IDs. Suddenly, we were surrounded; it’s no exaggeration to say that ‘we were jumped. I think I might have seen a badge or two flashed at us. Presumably, these were plainclothes cops. I had no idea why we were being so accosted. But my guess is that because Monticello Ave often featured drug sales, we were regarded as potential customers, returning from a deal.

I produced my college ID and driving license, hoping that the sight of the former would help. I was searched, quickly and roughly. Unfortunately, R__ carried no ID. As the cops shouted at him to produce one and pushed him,  J__ said, “He doesn’t have ID, let him be.’ The policeman rounded on J__ , told him to shut up, and said they would take R__ to the precinct for questioning. J__ protested again. Both brothers were then summarily shoved–perhaps handcuffed, I cannot remember–into the back of a car and driven off.  As they did so, I told them to sit tight, that I would come get them.

I stared at the receding car, stunned, by the turn of events. What had we done wrong?

I quickly ran to my friend’s apartment and checked to see if he had returned. M__ had.  I told him what had happened and asked him if he would accompany me to check in on J__ and R__. We drove to the nearest precinct and asked to see our friends We were told they had been taken to another station for fingerprinting. Fingerprinting? For what? Had they been arrested and charged with a crime? No one seemed to know.

We drove to the station we had been directed to. They were not there. When we inquired further, we were told they had left. I then asked how they could have left when they didn’t have a car, and when I had told them that I would pick them up. This query was met with a shrugged shoulder or two.

M__ and I left, and drove around on the surrounding streets, looking for the two brothers. There was no sign of them. We drove back to M__’s apartment building, hoping they might have somehow found their way back there. No luck. Finally, M__ and I gave up; he went home and I drove back to Elizabeth, New Jersey.

The next morning I received a call from J__; after their fingerprinting had been completed, the two brothers had been placed in separate cars, driven out to a dark, deserted stretches of highways–for R__it was the Belleville Turnpike–and dropped off with an admonition to never return to Jersey City.  They were left to walk home–to Arlington–from there.  It was the final twist of the blade, a little reminder of just who the bosses were.

Presumably, J__ and R__ were busted for ‘disturbing the peace.’ They were, however, never charged with any crime. I suppose the war on drugs made it all worthwhile.

Drop The Whistle; Shoot A Black Kid Instead (or Torture Prisoners)

Chelsea Manning has been sentenced to jail for thirty-five years for committing the heinous crime of whistleblowing. Manning knows that she didn’t just commit a crime, she committed the wrong sort of crime:

Manning spoke to reporters after the hearing, to admit his disappointment at the sentence, telling those gathered, “I look back to that fateful day and wish I’d just left those files on my computer and gone out and shot a black kid instead….my life would be a lot less complicated if I’d only taken the life of a young person from a different ethnic background, instead of sending some documents to a website.”

Legal experts have expressed support for the 35 year sentence given to Manning, by explaining that members of the public don’t actually understand how the law works. Former lawyer Simon Williams explained, “Illegally taking information you don’t have the right to access, and using it for your own purposes is only ‘properly’ illegal if you’re not a government agency. Governments can do what they like with information they’re not allowed to have – if nothing else, Prism has taught us that.  Whereas absolutely anyone can shoot a black teenager to death, obviously.”

Manning has learnt these simple facts the hard way but that doesn’t mean that those young folks who have been following her trial have to as well.  They will, in particular, have hopefully internalized the following facts about the system of justice prevalent in this great nation of ours.

First, a career in high finance can ensure the penalty-free satisfaction of desires, even if their fulfillment runs afoul of ethical and legal consideration. If unbridled earning with no regard for the immiseration of others is your thing, then young folks will do well to pay attention to the so-called financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath.  Giddy, reckless speculation, irresponsible and unregulated banking will never, ever get you sent to jail. This career option is best for those seeking to maximize income, while not being unduly worried about penalties. Indeed, this might earn you the admiring sobriquet of ‘indispensable’ by government officials.

Second, if finance seems dull, and big bucks seem passé, and your taste in pleasures are influenced by Sade, then consider a career in law-enforcement or counter-intelligence instead. Brutal interrogations, torture, and unchecked surveillance can induce sufficient frisson to satisfy even the most jaded. As before, there will be little fear of moral disapproval or legal penalty. This career choice, while not as lucrative as banking, does provide admiration from those who will regard you as a defender of their liberties and a fighter for freedom everywhere.

Lastly, if your career options are settled and you are looking for easy entertainment, then as Manning indicates, consider shooting black teenagers instead, especially those that wear clothes which, despite being worn by countless white teenagers, will always be regarded as symbols of black criminality. This course of action might even net you a book deal, or a moonlighting gig as spokesperson for the National Rifle Association.

Parents would do well to inculcate these principles early in their children.

Note: I have edited this post to use Manning’s name and pronouns of choice. Good luck to her.

Miranda July’s Little Gem

Miranda July‘s Me and You and Everyone We Know–she wrote, directed and acted in it– is a little gem of a movie. (I have no idea how I missed it for so long; it was released in 2005; thanks Netflix!) It’s the kind of film you could describe as a ‘quirky indie’–for it wears that genre’s aesthetic quite prominently on its sleeves–and you’d be right. There is a plot of sorts, some very talented young actors, and a wry humor–part visual, part verbal, part physical–that suffuses most of its frames. It begins slowly, finding its way tentatively, and the viewer struggles to find his bearings at first. A few minutes later, you realize you are watching a movie with great comic potential and heart, and you settle in for the ride.

It’s a gentle one, punctuated by moments that are ostensibly outrageous but which, because of July’s deft touch–both behind the camera and in the script–never  seem overstated. (Having once seen Me and You and Everyone We Know you’ll certainly never think of ‘back and forth forever’ and the brand new emoticon ‘)) <> ((‘ in quite the same way again; those that frequent chat-rooms for a little virtual sexual adventure or two might have their universe of ‘who could it be at the other end’ expanded.) These moments–which earned the movie an R rating from the unsurprisingly prissy MPAA “for disturbing sexual content involving children,”–are also quietly hilarious, because they tap into some simple, yet universal, facts about humans: that children, both teens and pre-teens, like it or not,  have a sexual sense and are infinitely curious about it, that adulthood does not always bring sexual satisfaction and completion. You will squirm a bit, giggle too, and in the climactic scene–no pun intended–laugh out loud.

But Me and You and Everyone We Know is ultimately a movie about love: the variety that goes bad and more importantly, that kind which seeks to blossom.  Because it begins with the former and ends with the latter–in not just one, but perhaps two venues–it is a hopeful movie. It showcases the central oddity of love: that it may blossom in the strangest of locales, bringing together odd pairs of fellow travelers in the strangest of ways. The awkwardness and gentleness of the encounters between the ‘couples’–Pam (JoNell Kennedy) and Richard (John Hawkes) (love gone bad),   Richard and Christine (Miranda July) (love coming good), and Sylvie (Carlie Westerman) and  Peter (Miles Thompson) (proto-love, maybe?)–are testaments to the way love can make fools and angels of us all.

A few days ago, I wrote a scathing review of an expensive, bloated, ponderous, big-budget, 3-D action movie–Prometheus–that wanted to claim for itself a piece of the cinematic philosopher’s pie and thus raise itself to the level of a serious intellectual statement. Me and You and Everyone We Know doesn’t aim that high but it still shows that that can be done for far less money and with much less pretentiousness if the essentials of good cinema and storytelling are followed.

The Revealing Game of Time Machine Travel

For some time now my favorite ‘after-dinner game’ has been to ask my respondents the following questions: If you had a time-machine, where and when in the past would you go? And when you arrived, would you rather be a fly on the wall that merely observes the action or would you want to jump in and be a participant?

I find the answers to this question–and my asking of it so that time travel is restricted to one direction–revealing in more ways than one.

First, there is the National Geographic answer: I want to see dinosaurs walk the earth; I want to see sabre-toothed tigers and mammoths go at each other.  I suspect this group of respondents likes the idea of a human-free earth and wonders what it was like before homo sapiens queered the pitch; the time machine enables its inspection. Perhaps we imagine a pristine, unspoiled state; perhaps our minds bear the impress of the archetype of the Garden of Eden and hanker after it.

Then there is the History Channel or the ‘Seeing Great Folks in Action’ answer: I’d like to pay witness to Napoleon directing his marshals at Austerlitz, to life in Constantinople during the glory days of the Ottomans, or to Michelangelo hard at work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  I’m an enthusiastic subscriber to this line of thinking: I would like to attend the courts of the Mughals, see a wartime camp of Genghis Khan’s, or witness the great air-sea battles of the Second World War. These answers seek to bring to life the imagined contents of history books; its respondents pride themselves on a sensitive appreciation of their offerings and seek to make real the metaphorical travel afforded by their contents.

In both kinds of answers those who participate in these fantasies of mine prefer to be flies on the wall; they are aware, I think, of the impossibility of being able to ‘participate’ in any meaningful—or safe–way in the times they are visiting.

But the most interesting kind of answer to my frivolous questions is provided by those who suggest they would use the time machine to engage in personal archaeology: to visit their home-town before their birth, to see their parents on their first date, and perhaps most exotically, to visit a younger version of themselves. I’ve provided variants of this kind of answer: I would like to see my father at work as an air force pilot flying into combat, my mother attending classes in her university days, my grandfather in our ancestral village in that part of Punjab which now belongs to Pakistan. And so on.

These answers are not merely nostalgia-mongering, the sentiments underlying which are sometimes revealed in the urge we may have to jump into and through an old photograph. Rather the space-time locales we indicate as our destinations in time traveling reveal an abiding fascination of ours for getting to the root of ourselves, perhaps as clue to present behaviors of ours that we find inexplicable, as solutions to enduring conundrums created by our lack of transparency to ourselves.  So time-travel becomes a means of self-discovery, the latest addition to the ever-expanding quivers and arsenals of tricks and weapons with which we imagine and understand ourselves.

To travel backward in time is to engage in a form of speculative discovery familiar to those that spend much time in the clinic, on the couch, accompanied by the therapist, holder of the mirror that reflects our autobiographical confessions. The advantages of supplementing or perhaps replacing the fifty-minute paid-for session—controlled by Svengali-like figures—are tempting. Those long, rambling, tentative tramps through our memories—while we worry about whether we might be engaged in an elaborate self-serving fiction—could be replaced by the empirical verification made possible by time travel. This is how it happened, this is what ‘really’ took place; and so, I whip out my lab notebook and scribble notes, filing them away for future reference, recall and guidance.

A strong desire for personal archaeology may be prevalent in parents who have become aware–thanks to the birth of their children—that they are likely to remain mysteries to their offspring. This disconcerting thought in turn evokes the mystery associated with their own parents. What were my parents like—independent of being those who gave birth to me? Conversely, there is the great mystery of childhood memory: we know so little of the period when we were at our most formative, when the seeds of our origins were taking root. What was I like as a child? Did I cry as much as my own child, seem as terrified, cause as much bother and anxiety?  The most fascinating mysteries might reside within, and in those closest to us. Sometimes they may only be solved by being eyewitness to the events that lie at their heart.

So it may be that the most interesting histories for us are not the ones that talk of brave kings, beautiful princesses, and tales of valor and bravery on bloody battlefields, but rather, the much more mundane stories of our own lives, which add up to the history of our times. I suspect this ‘revelation’ is like discovering a good documentary can be as riveting as a feature movie; the time machine is our way for viewing the documentary of our lives.

Some of the fascination with the time machine should be a familiar one. We are, after all, chroniclers of our lives: diaries, photographs, autobiographies. When we peer at photo albums we are fascinated by images of ourselves, struck by the mystery of the person whose body we currently inhabit. The urge to inquire into its provenance is   irresistible. In response, our memory aids are ever more elaborate. Besides ourselves, we videotape our children; we photograph them. Most children in first world industrialized democracies have extensive photographic records and large video libraries of their lives available to them. Soon, with digital storage easily and cheaply available it will be possible to make an entire childhood available on high-definition streaming video: a movie of one’s life for on-demand watching. The time machine is but a viewer of sorts for this unmade movie of our life.

There is a wrinkle to the fly on the wall behavior the time machine permits. Consider for instance that I might want to travel back to my father and mother’s lives as a young couple, perhaps recently married, to witness their interactions, to listen into their conversations as they plan the decisions crucial in my family’s history. This is a distinctly voyeurish desire. My parents’ lives were their own; they were constructing their relationship in their expectation of an intimate space. My acting like a Peeping Tom seems like an inappropriate intrusion, a gratuitous violation of their privacy. Our use of the time machine might need to be tempered by norms of a type sensitive to its powers.

If the answers provided by my respondents in this ‘game’ are revelatory, so is the asking of the question that prompted them. For in trying to elicit responses, I seek to inquire whether others are as perplexed as I am by the bits and pieces that make up my life, and don’t mind a little fantasizing as antidote.

Note: This piece is an extended version of an older post titled ‘Time Travel and Psychotherapy.’

The ‘Anxiety of Influence’ and Scientific Discovery

In his essay on scientific discovery, ‘Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science’, Oliver Sacks writes:

Darwin was at pains to say that he had no forerunners, that the idea of evolution was not in the air. Newton, despite his famous comment about ‘standing on the shoulders of giant,’ also denied such forerunners. This ‘anxiety of influence‘ (which Harold Bloom has discussed powerfully in regard to the history of poetry) is a potent force in the history of science as well. One may have to believe others are wrong; one may have to, as Bloom insists, misunderstand others, in order to successfully develop and unfold one’s own ideas. (‘Every talent,’ Nietzsche writes, ‘must unfold itself in fighting.’) [links added]

The persistent worries–in science and elsewhere–about being ‘scooped’ and the unending desire to be ‘original’ are reinforced, of course, by romantic notions of the ‘author’ and ‘creativity.’ In the aesthetic and moral domain that is engendered by such concerns, no sin is more unforgivable than to permit the provenance of one’s work to be visible; its traces must be kicked over and buried. Novelty is the aspirational peak; the discovery or invention must represent a singularity of sorts. An unoriginal work is irredeemably sullied.

The modern political economy of academic work–the structural apparatus of universities, grant agencies, promotion and tenure–has not helped either. It still sets much store by ‘originality’ and, what, for lack of a better word, one must describe as ‘individuality’: the notion that co-authored work is somehow inferior to ‘solo’ work, that it betrays an inferior work ethic, that only ‘lazy’ people need ‘help’ in producing their work. In this regard, the multi-author publications now so common in science reflect a welcome trend: they have acknowledged for a long time now that science is a collective enterprise. (Those who read biographies and histories of the early Nobel Prize winners in the sciences will often find awards made to those who headed groups of researchers.)

The desire to be original that is genuinely productive and which Sacks, Bloom and Nietzsche allude to above means that in the struggle to fight against influence, against one’s artistic and intellectual forebears, the writer, the artist, the scientist can seek out new directions of inquiry that may lead to ever more fruitful and interesting endeavors. This still may not  result in something ‘original’ for the putative explorer might only stumble onto yet another beaten path. But so long as he is ignorant of this, his anxiety may cease and permit the unveiling of his work.

Note #1: Quoting Nietzsche above reminds us of Freud’s ‘anxiety of influence’:

According to Ernest Jones, biographer and personal acquaintance of Sigmund Freud, Freud frequently referred to Nietzsche as having “more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live”. Yet Jones also reports that Freud emphatically denied that Nietzsche’s writings influenced his own psychological discoveries.

Ronald Lehrer’s Nietzsche’s Presence in Freud’s Life and Thought (SUNY Press, 1994) provides a detailed analysis of this famous relationship.

Note #2: Sacks excerpt taken from Hidden Histories of Science, Robert B. Silvers, A New York Review of Books Book, New York 1995.