4. Reuniting with West Side Story - an epilogue:
In the original post, I didn’t emphasize the difference in quality between the live show and the movie, you can’t overemphasize it. There simply is no equivalent on the silver screen to seeing the live dancing in person - during which these dancers threaten to spill out from the stage and beat the shit out of you in your seat. No Broadway stage show, before or since, offers a score with this daring in rhythm and harmony. No Broadway show is about such life-and-death issues, both dramatically and sociologically. Rodgers and Hammerstein gave Broadway a mould for how to construct a good stage show, Robbins, Bernstein, and Sondheim constructed a great stage show by breaking it. Much was made of those realistic shots of the New York streets, but why are there realistic New York streetscapes if the characters populating them are completely unrealistic (they dance for chrissake! What would happen to an actual gang in NYC which spontaneously broke out into a Mambo in front of another gang?)? Why are there so many closeups when the dubbing deadens the immediacy of the singing? Why doesn’t Tony speak with a New York accent? Why does Maria’s Puerto Rican accent go in and out? The movie could have been half the length, shot on a surreal streetscape, with charismatic Broadway unknowns who could sing their own parts as well as they could dance them, and it would have been one of the great movie-musicals. Yes, the stage show’s far from perfect, and there were things which improved on the transition from stage to screen, but there is simply no equivalence between the two. One is greatness with some flaws, one is badness with redeeming qualities.
5. The Secret of Abelard and Heloise - Conclusion
Great as they are, there is something more than a bit insufferable about these letters. From the vantage of 2013, it’s painful to read Abelard’s ceaseless lecturing to this woman who ‘tempted’ him to give herself up to God at the expense of her own happiness and talk about how much he hates what she made him do (sex) at the same time that he still loves her. It’s even more painful to read Heloise’s pathetic servility, taking joy in Abelard’s celebrity and accomplishment even though he caused her a life of ascetic misery. She idolizes this man as only a Stockholm Syndrome’d woman could. It’s a bit like the life which Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch might have envisioned for herself, and the misery which would have followed had she gotten what she wished. There’s a kind of delusionally grandiose masochism to the whole booklet. Abelard knows precisely how much suffering he engendered in Heloise’s life, and he constantly berates himself for it even as he entreats her to abide by a code of honor which is plainly... well... medieval. Abelard did not want an equal, he wanted a servile admirer. Heloise speaks like someone who’s only known servility her whole life and feels blessed to engender the attentions of a world-famous intellectual which aids her in getting out from the snare of her obviously brutal uncle, Fulbert. The suffering of this book is outsize, masochistic, and inflicted by grade-A narcissist. Yet it is genuine suffering, to be looked at with compassion because how could these people know any better?
Like it is for all of humanity, the love of Abelard and Heloise was completely absurd and neurotic, full of bad judgement, delusions, and recriminations delivered in the form of guilt trips. It is irrational and full of psychological illogic. But it lasts, oddly enough, because it is a love built on mutual suffering. The best moments in this exchange of letters, the moments which make these letters still worth reading, are the ones when they stop trying to guilt one another into believing the other the more misfortuned and honestly recount the pain of their lives. Here is Heloise in her most revealing moment:
Dear Abelard, pity my despair! Was ever any being so miserable? The higher you raised me above other women, who envied me your love, the more sensible am I now of the loss of your heart. I was exalted to the top of happiness only that I might have the more terrible fall. Nothing could be compared to my pleasures, and now nothing can equal my misery. My joys once raised the envy of my rivals, my present wretchedness calls forth the compassion of all that see me. My Fortune has been always in extremes; she has loaded me with the greatest favours and then heaped me with the greatest afflictions; ingenious in tormenting me, she has made the memory of the joys I have lost an inexhaustible spring of tears. Love, which being possest was her most delightful gift, on being taken away is an untold sorrow. In short, her malice has entirely succeeded, and I find my present afflictions proportionately bitter as the transports which charmed me were sweet.
Anyone who has felt an excess of emotional pain in their lifetimes will recognize this sentiment; the feeling of having, for whatever reason, felt as though life has blessed us, and then robbed us of everything which makes such blessings worthwhile. Life giveth, life taketh away. Blessed and accursed be life. We struggle as best we can to make sense of why life treats us the way it does, we tie our lives into knots of emotional baggage from which we will never be free, and along the way we cause suffering to those who most want to help us. All we human beings can do is to love one another for the dangers we have passed, and love one another that we do pity them. Or at least attempt to do that as best we can, but perhaps it’s precisely that effort which leads us to the greatest possible misfortune.
6. Depression
I am thirty-one years old, but I feel fairly comfortable in stating that my life has not been a happy one, and it would surprise me if the rest of my life knew any greater happiness than I’ve experienced thus far. From eight years old onward, I have experienced waves of massive depression followed by massive anxiety which are almost unremitting; a two-headed black dog whose infectious bite has silenced untold hundreds of millions - whether by suicide, or simply by a failure to live well - and I have an obligation to worry may yet one day definitively silence me. The great joys of my life have been few and far between, and the happy periods were merely less unhappy than the other periods. Life has been a fairly boring experience for me, when it wasn’t agonizing at least. Every new day brings new hopes, and these hopes seem to inevitably fall upon a new set of disappointments, with an occasional humiliation to lower the average emotional state still a little more. I watch friends, acquaintances, and irritants, who go about their lives with petty frustrations and disappointments. Less than a lifetime ago, the world described to me by my grandparents was consumed with a level of war and misery which seems to hardly register to anyone my age. Virtually everyone had more cause for depression than I have. Yet compared to me, virtually everybody I know in my own generation seems massively happy. Maybe I know the wrong (right?) people, but oh how I envy them for the fleetingness of their pains; would that I had theirs a while and they mine.
It certainly saddens me to admit this. I have never talked about it on this blog so bluntly. And I’ve learned through hard experience not to talk about it in detail except with family and my closest friends, and that will not change by my writing about it. It is, for the most part, something I place off limits as a conversation topic, and will remain so. And it has, generally speaking, become much easier to conceal the weight of the emotional darkness which follows me everywhere from others than it was when I was younger. But I can't in good conscience say that it has been less difficult in recent years than it ever was before.
Inevitably, there are many, many things which bring me back to delight in life - there are too many conversations to be had, too much music to listen to, too much food to eat, too many books and magazines to read, too many movies to watch. There are moments, many of them, when I'm truly at the peak of enjoyment and feel as though I love my life, and there is too much of life to understand - even if depression so often prevents active participation - to be depressed all the time. There are even moments when the fog has clearly lifted. I can breathe freely without dread or emotional pain, and a wave of relief comes upon me so intense that I wonder - is this pleasure? Is this happiness? But the truth is that I honestly don’t know. In order to find out, I require, I hunger for, I demand, many more of them - because there simply haven’t been enough to understand even what this feeling truly is. But every time one of those anticipated good experiences is disappointing, it makes me worry that the potential activities which give me the enjoyment I need to keep buggering on become fewer and fewer.
But to my shock, life has always continued. Another day comes around, and another new hope carries me through it. The longing to prove oneself not a slave to fate, to be greater than you’ve been, to show that the rest of your life needn’t be defined by what preceded it, to reinvent your life, to show that all this suffering was not in vain, becomes exponentially more intense. I don’t know how likely it is that depression may one day defeat me, and I know it’s possible.
But not yet.
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