Jon Bauer

Heat rises. The sunset city brick-hot and sagging. Air conditioner outlets muddying the twilight with their output, car fans blowing hot evening air over hot engines.  

In Carlton the power goes out in the cinema complex, people sat suddenly dumber in their seats, mouths gawking, 3D glasses catching the emergency lighting. The film still playing somehow on the screen, but the sound gone out with the power. Those two storey lips moving and the assembled people looking at one another. Everything suddenly 2D. All of them reluctant to come back to the ordinary world. Taking off their glasses and expecting their husband wife daughter lover mother to have that colourful double halo, the way the people on screen do when you sneak a peek.

Meanwhile the ‘will they won’t they?’ movie kiss is happening in silence. The kiss largely ignored while people saunter unwillingly out of the auditorium. Some still in their 3D glasses. Others standing, looking around. Dumbfounded. Waiting. Bereft. 

One of the actors has them though. On her face.

In Fitzroy a girl glances at the clock, wipes hair from her damp forehead with her wrist, plastic gloves on and a deli refrigeration cabinet full of foie gras and legs of honeyed ham and sun dried tomatoes. Shrivelled olives. A woman takes her turn ordering and the deli girl doesn’t notice them at first, just that this customer’s voice is softer than the preceding orderers. The olives are scooped, the girl looking up at the customer for the first time really, asking if that’s enough. That’s when she sees them.

In Flemington a woman leans against her car -- yellow except for the mauve bonnet which is lifted, a line of water running down the hill a ways and into the waiting mouth of the storm drain. She hasn’t phoned anyone. She has nobody to phone. Nobody stops on the street to enquire. She’s just leaning against her car, arms folded in the sagging heat of the city whilst on the back seat her children intermittently scratch at one another, then stop, feeling dozy, thumbs shriveling in mouths. Little fingers curling over the half-wound down window. The traffic jam oozing by, people feeling free to stare at the woman and her bonnet up, just there, what with the glass car windows between her broken down life and theirs running. Their air conditioners blowing extra heat at the woman.

Heat rises.  

In the empty cinema auditorium in Carlton an older lady has stayed behind. Just her, and the popcorn scattered everywhere like wet confetti still on the church path when a funeral comes.

She sits alone in the glare of the emergency lights and she watches that kiss. Her 3D glasses lit-up squares. Holding the handbag in her lap and a scrunched tissue. The silent screen moving on in the near darkness. Those enormous lips coming together, eyes shut to the touch. The feel. All those empty seats left behind and just that old lady in the darkened auditorium, in silence. 

She has them too, following the gentle corrugations of age.

In Fitzroy that deli customer nods at the girl, embarrassed, points towards the pates and says she’d like the wild mushroom one, the girl frowning to herself for a moment, then holding her hair back as she leans into the cool humming interior of the refrigeration cabinet for the pate. She keeps her back turned then as she weighs the soft, rich package, pulls off the barcode price from the machine and sticks it on. When she puts the pate on the counter though, they’re still there on the customer’s face. More of them.  

And back in Flemington the woman still leans against her broken down car. Her children dozing now in the heat, hair stuck to their little foreheads. The hazard lights blinking. A skyscraper in the city looking like the chosen one with the sun dazzling a corner of it in sunset red. The woman looking at that colour, and wiping her face now. Wiping them away. All that water gone out of her car, into the waiting mouth of the storm drain. 

The heat rising. 

From ‘Cousin Bette’ by Honore de Balzac

To think, to dream, to conceive fine works, is a delightful occupation. It is dreaming cigar-smoke dreams, or living a courtesan’s self-indulgent life. The work of art to be created is envisaged in the exhilaration of conception, with its infant grace, and the scented colour of its flower and the bursting juices of its fruit. These are the pleasures in the imagination of a work of arts’ conception.

The man who can formulate his design in words is held to be out of the common run of men. This faculty all artists and writers possess; but execution needs more than this. It means creating, bringing to birth, laboriously rearing the child, putting it to bed every evening gorged with milk, kissing it every morning with a mother’s never spent affection, licking it clean, clothing it over and over again in the prettiest garments, which it spoils again and again. It means never being disheartened by the upheavals of a frenetic life, but making of the growing work of art a living masterpiece, which in sculpture speaks to all eyes, in literature to all minds, in painting to all memories, in music to every heart. This is the travail of execution. The hand must constantly progress, in constant obedience to the mind. And the ability to create is no more to be commanded at will than love is: both powers are intermittent.

The habit of creation, the unwearying, cherishing love which makes a mother (that masterpiece of nature so well apprehended by Raphael!), the intellectual maternal power, in short, which is so difficult to acquire, is exceedingly easily lost. Inspiration is the opportunity that genius may seize and is not even balanced on a razor’s edge, but instantly in the air and flying off with the quick alarm of crows. Inspiration has no scarf by which the poet may grasp her. Her hair is a flame. She is gone like those rose-coloured and white beautiful flamingos that are the despair of sportsmen. And work is a fatiguing struggle, dreaded as well as passionately loved by the fine and powerful natures that are often broken by it. A great poet of our own times, speaking of this appalling toil, has said, ‘I begin it with despair, and leave it with grief.’

Let the ignorant take note! If the artist does not throw himself into his work like Curtius into the gulf, like a solider against a fortress, without counting the cost; and if, once within the breach, he does not labour like a miner buried under a fallen roof; if, in short, he contemplates the difficulties instead of conquering them, one by one, like those lovers in the fairy-tales who, to win their princesses, fought ever-renewed enchantments; then the work remains unfinished, it perishes, is lost within the workshop, where production becomes impossible, and the artist is a looker-on at his talent’s suicide. 

 

I’ve finished Frankl’s: Man’s Search For Meaning, and could strain something from recommending it so hard. It’s such a little hip flask of warmth against that sometimes cold of the everyday.

Frankl was a neurologist and psychiatrist, and Man’s Search For Meaning is an account of his time in several concentration camps. To read him is to learn what an intelligent, educated man gleaned from surviving a paradigm as reducing as a concentration camp.

Where I have only tried to dismantle life in my mind, he had his life dismantled. This gives him immediate authority, and if he weren’t dead I would prize meeting him over the Dalai Lama or Obama, or Portman.

Maybe not Portman.

His account is written in simple prose and with an admirable absence of blame or anger. Plus he’s managed to convey the lowest conditions of his imprisonment without taking his eye off the highest lessons and the most uplifting moments.

After the narrative is a short treatise on meaning and Frankl’s own branch of psychotherapy: logotherapy (‘meaning therapy’). Frankl agrees that life IS empty of any inherent, catch-all, pre-packed meaning. And anyway, why do we need one so? What’s wrong with our own meaning? It IS our life after all.

For Frankl, even suffering has meaning and his book highlights examples of how, in the void of Auschwitz, when all chattels of identity had been stripped away, people were able to go on with just a tiny slither of their own inner purpose – the final breaking point of a human coinciding with the breaking of their sense of personal meaning or future purpose. In fact, even if someone faced certain death, many found enough meaning in focusing on their deportment right to the end. Even though their death would probably be one indistinct death among millions, often without witness.

For me, this last facet is evidence enough for the power of our own inner meaning, and the case could rest there.

Frankl’s book tells me that when I struggle to swallow life it’s because I’ve strayed from my deeply held purpose or value (that’s for those of us who’ve discerned it). Or I’ve lost faith in how much I can take my own meaning seriously – something I’m simultaneously guilty and not-guilty of. But it is perhaps this failing above all which leads us to look for a greater meaning outside ourselves. A meaning that will never, ever, be found.

If you give up on your own meaning, or if you undermine it, then you wash yourself up on an existential island. And all you’ll have to turn to is that search for an inherent meaning greater than your own life. Cue Religion (hiss hiss boo!)

So, great news! Whilst life is inherently empty of meaning, Frankl says mine isn’t. In fact it’s full of it. And it’s ok to believe my own hype. In fact, it’s critical. Then you just need the courage to live as close to it as possible, and not be swayed by popular opinion or obstacle.

And from this emphasis shift I suppose I might be better equipped to rub shoulders with more diverse others, no matter how different their life might look to mine. Because what makes my meaning better? As if I’ve now got a sort of roadmap for understanding all viewpoints.

Who knows, it may even change the way I go about a difference of viewpoint, or behaviour. Or even the way I debate (boo hiss hiss).

Not that bad behaviour can be condoned. You can’t say, It’s not my fault, man, it’s my meaning. Frankl saw man in what is arguably his lowest context, and he writes of the descent of many inmates to the level of swine. But he also points out that many rose to the level of saint too.

And if they managed that in Auschwitz, then I can get at least a fraction of the way.

Oh and may I end with what Frankl says about happiness, as well as pointing out that I'm not obsessed with him, just temporarily dazzled.

Don't aim at success -- the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your consicence commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run -- in the long run I say! - success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.