How Literature Saved My Life (8 page)

Laurie and I were watching a football game on TV. When the star tailback was badly injured and taken off the field in an ambulance, Laurie said, “I can never watch football for more than five minutes without falling asleep, but as soon as someone is injured, I can’t turn away. Why is that?”

Later on, what was absent from all the coverage of Tiger’s self-destruction was even the slightest recognition that for all of us the force for good can convert so easily into the force for ill, that our deepest strength is indivisible from our most embarrassing weakness, that what makes us great will inevitably get us in terrible trouble. Everyone’s ambition is underwritten by a tragic flaw. We’re deeply divided animals who are drawn to the creation of our own demise. Freud: “What lives wants to
die again. The life-drive is in them, but the death-drive as well.” (Note that he says “them.”) Kundera: “Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo—fear of falling? No, vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us; it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

And the more righteous our self-presentation, the more deeply we yearn to transgress, to fall, to fail—because being bad is more interesting/exciting/erotic than being good. Even little children, especially little children, know this. When Natalie was three, she was friends with two girls, sisters age three and four. The older girl, Julia, ran away from her mother, for which she was reprimanded. The younger girl, Emily, asked why and was told that running away was bad. “I wanna do it,” Emily said.

Tiger needed to demolish the perfect marble statue he’d made of himself: the image of perfect rectitude. We were shocked—
shocked
—that his furious will to dominate his opponents on the golf course also manifested in an insatiable desire to humiliate countless sexual partners. We all contrive different, wonderfully idiosyncratic, and revealing ways to remain blind to our own blindnesses. In the British television series
Cracker
, Eddie Fitzgerald is a brilliant forensic psychologist who can solve the riddle of every dark heart except his own (he gambles nonstop, drinks nonstop, smokes nonstop, is
fat, and is estranged from his wife). Richard Nixon had to undo himself, because—as hard as he worked to get there—he didn’t believe he belonged there. Bill Clinton’s fatal charm was/is his charming fatality: his magnetism is his doom; they’re the same trait. Someone recently said to me about Clinton, “He could have been, should have been, one of the great presidents of the twentieth century, so it’s such a shame that—” No. No. No. There’s no “if only” in human nature. When W. was a young man, he said to Poppy, “Okay, then, let’s go. Mano a mano. Right now.” The war of terror was the not so indirect result. In short, what animates us inevitably ails us.

And vice versa: because I stutter, I became a writer (in order to return to the scene of the crime and convert the bloody fingerprints into abstract expressionism). As a writer, I love language as much as any element in the universe, but I also have trouble living anywhere other than in language. If I’m not writing it down, experience doesn’t really register. Language has gone from prison to refuge back to prison.

Picasso: “A great painting comes together, just barely” (I love that comma). And this fine edge of excellence gets more and more difficult to maintain. I yield to no one in my admiration of Renata Adler’s novel
Speedboat
, which is, I think, one of the most original and formally exciting books published by an American writer in the last forty years (and which now has been reissued on exactly the same day that this book of mine has been published).
And I hesitate to heap any more dispraise upon her much-maligned memoir,
Gone
, which I must admit I still find utterly addictive. Surely, though, the difference between
Speedboat
and
Gone
derives from the fact that in the earlier book the panic tone is beautifully modulated and under complete control and often even mocked, whereas in the later book it’s been given, somewhat alarmingly, absolutely free rein. Success breeds self-indulgence. What was effectively bittersweet turns toxic.

When my difficult heroes (and all real heroes are difficult) self-destruct, I retreat and reassure myself that it’s safer here close to shore, where I live. I distance myself from the disaster, but I gawk in glee (no less assiduously than anyone else did I study Tiger’s sexts to and from Josyln James). I want the good in my heroes, the gift in them, not the nastiness, or so I pretend. Publicly, I tsk-tsk, chastising their transgressions. Secretly, I thrill to their violations, their (psychic or physical) violence, because through them I vicariously renew my acquaintance with my shadow side. By detaching, though, before free fall, I preserve my distance from death, staving off difficult knowledge about the exact ratio in myself of angel to animal.

In college, reading all those Greek tragedies and listening to the lectures about them, I would think, rather blithely, “Well, that tragic flaw thing is nicely symmetrical: whatever makes Oedipus heroic is also—” What did I know then? Nothing. I didn’t feel in my bones as I do now
that what powers our drive assures our downfall, that our birth date is our death sentence. You’re fated to kill your dad and marry your mom, so they send you away. You live with your new mom and dad, find out about the curse, run off and kill your real dad, marry your real mom. It was a setup. You had to test it. Even though you knew it would cost you your eyes, you had to do it. You had to push ahead. You had to prove who you are.

Partial answer to question asked
in previous chapter: we’re the only animal
that knows it will die
.

K
AREN
S
HABETAI
, dead at forty-four.

When you were around her, you sometimes felt like a bit of a jerk, because you knew you weren’t as good a person as she was. You weren’t as generous, as kind, as civilized, as communal, as energetic, as fun (Karen riding the elevator seated atop her bike with her helmet still on). She gave the best parties in Seattle, at least the Seattle that I know. She made belonging to part of something larger than yourself—a discipline, a city, a religion—seem like a possibility. She had the most and best tips for what school to send your children to, what summer camps, where to travel (Rome, Rome, and Rome, apparently), what to see, what to read.

Once, masquerading as a scholar, I applied for an NEH fellowship, and I swear Karen spent more time on the
application than I did (still no luck!). Having her students in my creative writing classes was a distinctly mixed blessing: they were inevitably among the most well-prepared students in the course, but they expected me to be as dedicated a teacher as Karen was. She believed in the continuity of culture in a way that I pretend to but don’t, and one of my most luminous memories is of her daughter, Sophie, playing the violin at a party at their house (Karen’s concentration matching Sophie’s).

It’s important to remind myself that Karen was sweet but not too sweet. The loving and challenging contentiousness between Karen and Ross was and is to me a model of a successful marriage. One night, Laurie and I and Karen and Ross saw
Il Postino
, and afterward we went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant. The waiter at the restaurant was so Italian, so obviously an extra who had somehow (
Purple Rose of Cairo–
like) escaped from
Il Postino
, that Karen and I virtually—no, not virtually; literally—had to stick napkins in our mouths every time he came by to inquire about us. Laurie and Ross were considerably more composed, but Karen and I were beyond rescue.

R
AY
K
URZWEIL BELIEVES
that in twenty years, medical and technical advances will produce a robot small enough to wander throughout your body, doing whatever it’s been programmed to do, e.g., going inside any cell and reversing all the causes of aging by rebuilding the cell to a younger version of itself. If you do that to every cell in your body and keep doing this on a regular basis, you could (theoretically) live forever.

By 2030, Kurzweil believes, most of our fallible internal organs will have been replaced by tiny robots. We will have “eliminated the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the other hormone-producing organs, kidney, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, and bowel. What we’ll have left at that point will be the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain.”

Kurzweil’s father died of heart disease at fifty-eight. His grandfather died in his early forties. At thirty-five, Kurzweil himself was diagnosed with Type II diabetes, which he “cured” with an extreme regimen involving hundreds of pills and intravenous treatments. He now takes 150 supplements and drinks eight to ten glasses of alkaline water and ten cups of green tea every day. He drinks several glasses of red wine a week (gotta love that resveratrol).

On weekends, he undergoes IV transfusions of chemical cocktails, which he believes will reprogram his biochemistry. He undergoes preemptive medical tests for many diseases and disorders, keeps detailed records of the content of his meals, and routinely measures the chemical composition of his own bodily fluids.

Kurzweil, now sixty-four, has joined Alcor Life Extension, a cryonics company. In the unlikely event of his death, his body will be chemically preserved, frozen in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to revive him.

Asked if being a singularitarian (someone who believes that technological progress will become so rapid that the near future will be qualitatively different and impossible to predict) makes him happy, he said, “If you took a poll of primitive man, happiness would have consisted of getting a fire to light more easily, but we’ve expanded our horizon, and that kind of happiness is now the wrong thing to focus on. Extending our knowledge—casting a wider net of consciousness—is the purpose of life.”

He wants not so much to live as never to die.

He seems to me the saddest person on the planet.

I empathize with him completely.

R
OYAL AIR FORCE (RAF) MEDICAL CHIEF:
“All war pilots will inevitably break down in time if not relieved.”

BEN SHEPHARD:
“In the Battle of Britain, a stage was reached when it became clear that pilots would end up ‘Crackers or Coffins.’ Thereafter, their time in the air was rationed.”

DICTIONARY OF RAF SLANG
: “ ‘Frozen on the stick’: paralyzed with fear.”

PAUL FUSSELL:
“The letterpress correspondents, radio broadcasters, and film people who perceived these horrors kept quiet about them on behalf of the War Effort.”

MICHEL LEIRIS:
“If this were a play, one of those dramas I have always loved so much, I think the subject could be summarized like this: how the hero leaves for better or worse (and rather for worse than better) the miraculous chaos of childhood for the fierce order of virility.”

SHEPHARD:
“From early on in the war, the RAF felt it necessary to have up its sleeve an ultimate sanction, a moral weapon, some procedure for dealing with cases of ‘flying personnel who will not face operational risks.’ This sanction was known as ‘LMF’ or ‘Lack of Moral Fibre.’ Arthur Smith ‘went LMF’ after his twentieth ‘op.’ The target that night was the well-defended Ruhr, and the weather was awful. Even before the aircraft crossed the English Channel, he had lost control of his fear. His ‘courage snapped and terror took over.’ ‘I couldn’t do anything at all,’ he
later recalled. ‘I became almost immobile, hardly able to move a muscle or speak.’ ”