Trench love. How romantic does that sound? There is just something basic, something almost sacrificial about that phrase that conjures up images of raw, animalistic passion in the face of death, a sort of odd combination of martyrdom and instinctual reproduction. Who wouldnt want to experience the pleasure of sexual release just one more time before the Luftwatha makes one final, devastating pass? Isnt procreation the last dying wish of every man on a doomed and descending aircraft? To heck with worrying about oxygen masks and floats when you are ten thousand feet over the Atlantic in freefall. Maslows hierarchy suggests that human needs must be met in some order; and sex is number one, everyone; right up there with the need to breathe, eat, shelter, and sleep. So bear with that pitiful creep on the plane and the two Iraqis making out in the afterglow of a roadside bomb in a snipers crosshairs. Maslows hierarchy might just explain the whole trench love phenomenon.
There is a poignant scene in the old, yet unforgettable situation comedy, M.A.S.H. that may best depict our trench lovers. As Hawkeye Pierce and the voluptuous Hot Lips Hullahan are hunkering along the baseboard of some small shack in a remote Korean battlefield, the two suddenly realize that they are uncontrollably attracted to each other and begin to make passionate love between explosions and an occasional tear. Incidentally, there is a basic need to be clothed in Hollywood, so the nudity was omitted in the show, and coitus assumed. Absurd? No. Its Maslowian. According to the pyramid, the two were behaving as Maslow, himself, would have predicted.
This Hollywood scene must validate the hierarchy. Certainly, there are other instances of putting ones safety on the line to satisfy ones basic sexual desire. This scene is natural; it cannot be an ad hoc fallacy. The kissing Iraqis and the plummeting passenger are anecdotal examples, sure, but certainly two of perhaps billions (pinky to lip and eyebrow raised). There is just something disturbing about looking at Maslows evolving pyramid, and reconciling the idea that sexual gratification comes before safety and security. Equally so, the idea that sex ranks first (with food and water and fig leaves), and affection and belonging come third as if sex has nothing to do the latter, is reprehensible. Maybe this explains why there is no outcry when a man cites mismatched libidos as a reason to divorce his lonely wife. Judges understand Maslow. Aha.
Isnt human connection primary? Ask any fetus. But I ask you, the biologist, doesnt loneliness have some potent chemical correlate, like sex has its testosterone? Lets name it now. We will call it Allleftalone. It is produced in the thymus and disappears in proportion to the glands disintegration. That might explain why Maslowians might consider alleftalone less dominant than testosterone, which remains into late adulthood and can always be replaced with Viagra supplements. There is, for the lonely, however, no synthetic alleftalone. The best we can do is SSRI therapy, which might make you suicidal. At least it makes you want to sleep which is a primary "need." Another possibility is injectable amphetamines, which makes you feel like you are surrounded. It is yet and unlikely to be approved because it rots your teeth and, oh by the way, kills you. Dont forget,I am reminded by some screaming inner animal, we are NOT talking about parental love or the selfless love of Christian agape, we are talking about the trench! Damn my id all to hell. He doesnt care if he is alone or with three people or with a beast. Where is Freud when I need him, and where did my superego and thymus go?
So, safety isnt the primary need. Then what is shelter: Maslows safety concubine? We have a primary need for a wigwam, is that it? Or a hut? Is shelter an umbrella? How about the bomb shelter I built over in Jersey at the expense of countless hours at home? Does that qualify as a safety concern, or should I burn my airline tickets when we are invaded and bed down with the spouse? Give me a sexual break! I suppose Maslow would say that I was building an underground sex parlor, not a bomb shelter. Yeah, Baby, he says, with horn-rimmed glasses and an English accent. Maslow can explain why two soldiers, bunkered down trying to evade shrapnel, experience an intense and overwhelming need to procreate, heterosexual or otherwise. But he cant explain my bomb shelter! Wait, can homosexuals reproduce?
Heres the protocol for all us wannabe X-ray techs according to Maslow. 1) Understand where the patient is on the hierarchy and attend to those needs in order. Patients will have concerns about sex and food and whether they are covered. Remind them that lunch is at noon and dinner at five. Make sure they have a gown or gonadal fig leaf. And oh yeah, offer them the yellow pages so that they can look up the number of an escort service assuming they are single and willing, of course. This need for sex is more potent than any fear of falling, so have the yellow pages ready and secondarily, a gate belt and sponges. 2) Every patient comes into Medical Imaging fearful to know and to understand. But wait, this ranks fifth. This is way up the pyramid of needs, somewhere ahead of spirituality. Oh wait, thats not a need according to Maslow, even though Nitzche said that if there wasnt a God, it would be necessary for man to invent Him. Sounds like a need to me. But, I need to make sure their esteem is good. To hell with anyone elses. But, they need to feel belongingness and love, too. Lets see. Belongingness and love has nothing to do with sex or spirituality or other-esteem according to my id, or knowledge, so that leaves 3) polite conversation and aesthetics. Light a candle and have fresh cut glads about the room to make it feel more like home (glads are as resilient to radiation as a Venus flytrap). Wait, I cant probably have fire around 84,000 volts of electricity. If there are allergy concerns about the glads, than pictures will do. Nod as if you care about what is said, just like you do in your recliner when your mate says something unintelligible. Aesthetics is extremely important, right up there with self-actualization, which probably has an autoerotic component. 4) Take decent film, and shield the gonads but not necessarily in that order.
Remember, trench love is in the back of every persons mind. You may need to fend off exhibitionists in x-ray. Just look at the floorboard fire of Major Hullahan and she was a nurse.
We are talking about trench love, so watch your creepy touch. You might just be arousing the battlefield beast within this 400-pound female sumo wrestler. Who doesnt want to experience the intimacy of raw lust in a cloud of pulverized Korean Japanese Maples or in the sterility of a medical imaging room, where that hovering cancer looms like a Blackhawk helicopter? Wait! Intimacy and raw lust probably arent inclusive. Darn it! But ah, it all brings to mind an image of the late Francis Scott Key writing our national anthem while undergoing a Craniogram somewhere in a remote Philadelphia sick ward. How schizoid, yet how romantic.
Final thoughts on Maslow. First, he must have known someone who died from, for lack of a better word, horniness. How awful to die of a ruptured seminal vesicle. How painful to be consumed by a firestorm of raging testosterone? Perhaps though, Maslow was onto something. Could the trench love theory possible explain the phenomenon of death by spontaneous combustion? Voila! He has done it! Human beings can burst into flame from sexual deprivation, just as though they might waste away from starvation. Scary, scary stuff.
But perhaps I have it all wrong. Perhaps I am a victim of my own religious beliefs. Have I made the basic mistake of equating love with sex? Has my religion obliterated the gray area between these exclusive ideals? Was my abstinence a betrayal of my manhood? Is marriage, the context in which I have lumped these two needs, a Euro-Christian convention that has artificially divided my vas deferens from my heart? Will my wife really refuse me this release until I consent to buying her a blindfold and chaps? Wait! Where do blindfolds rank? I can only pray that my overactive id be irradiated, and my mismatched libido doesnt get me in trouble with my shrink, and wind me up in x-ray where some cute young thing with creepy touch threatens that gray area that I hold so dear.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Crazy at 17
If you had an African American friend growing up, did your teacher treat them the same way he or she treated European American students? Victor was my childhood best friend. He was of African descent; he was also the class clown and wore his spankings like badges. Some might say we are only sensitive to our own pain as a child. To an extent, I believe this to be true. This might explain why I dont remember if he was treated differently in school, and why I never reacted much to his being treated differently by my own family. Hes not around to ask these days. Heres my take on interracial friendships.
At age 11, I joined a little league baseball team. That is how I got to know Victor. Our coach didnt treat us any differently. In fact, Victor had privilege. Plain and simply put, he was better then the rest of us. Because of it, he started first base, batted cleanup, and I learned to pitch. Malanowski, in a 2002 NY Times column, talked about the boon of black-and-white buddy movies like Die Hard, Shawshank Redemption, and Men in Black, that pair a white friend with a black one. This is a lucrative strategy for the box office. Incidentally, its one of the nobler aspects of Hollywood to unite different races in a common quest. Whatever the intent, Victor and I were like Danny Glover and Bruce Willis. We played hard, stuck together, and if we had anything to say, would die hard.
I dont remember a Black History Month in grade school. I dont remember any racial education. Brammer wonders if the fact that we dont recall the typical differential treatment of our former black friends is evidence of our own indifference. It was our schools one black teacher who left the most indelible mark on me. She said, Once poor, you will always be poor. It stands out because I remember waiting for her to tell me she was kidding, laugh, or ask me to rebut her. She didnt, and I couldnt. She dismissed me, and that was that. I doubt the rich kids were any more aware of my oppression than I was of similar comments made to African Americans by white teachers. Ignorance or indifference, it possesses the same sting. We feel our own pain best.
About the time of Alex Haleys publication, Roots, which my mother purchased and read to us after PBS aired its made-for-TV miniseries, teachers began offering a few examples of strong African Americans, here and there. Soon, the strong black images were replaced by old, wounded images of Kunta Kinte. Around the same time, it seems like they dropped the simultaneous examples of helpful whites. Gone were the heroic aspects of Kintes struggle and those of the white abolitionist. With such glaring omissions, its no wonder, Beverly Tatum (1999) expounds, the white children sat frozen in a haze of guilt and the black children, uncomfortably in the shame of victimization. She writes,
The Africans who were brought here as slaves were not all passive victims, and all whites were not bad.
She implores the educational system to provide concrete examples of each.
Nearing high school, Victor and I recalled our old days of playing baseball, staying out late, peeping in windows and stealing dirty magazines. We didnt lament our fatherlessness. Like our school paddlings, we glorified our struggles and cursed the wind as we rode on, chiding our mothers for missing so many of our games despite our own sin.
Once, an aunt and uncle pulled into my driveway to drop me off after we had won. Victor wasnt invited, and he walked home. With a mouthful of french fries, I exited the car to see Victors mom running out the back door of our home. Shortly, my mother was receiving the family lecture of dont be seen with them and you wont be bothered by them, referring to the problem we had been having with the neighborhood black boys flirting with my beautiful, blonde haired aryan sister. The only ones I knew that were peeking in windows were Victor and myself.
Rapidly, the truth began to blur into fantasy. My father quit calling, the family stayed away, my mother slept more and missed more games, became more suspicious and more dependent on her family for support. Dorothy stayed away, too.
I once asked my mother, Is Everybody a Racist? The suspicion comes from disappointed expectations. I was disappointed, but I couldnt put my finger on why or in whom. This was a dangerous condition. In my mothers youth, it was as much a symptom of mental illness as a justification for incarcerating us disappointees in lunitic asylums.
My mother answered my question by telling me a story of her own institutionalization. But what did that have to do with racism?
She said her hospital years were the best days of her life. She fell in love, blossomed into a woman, made friends of all colors, found refuge in a way, and strength in herself to have a family. Why she was committed had something to do with why she didnt attend many baseball games. She let it lay at that.
The images of Victors mother running out the back door, like she was a common thief, stayed with me...and remains with me to this day. I resigned myself to believing my mother was just sick like my family had always told me. It was as easy for me to ignore my mothers pain as it was for her to spare me the suffering she endured.
I wanted Victor to ride in the ambulance with me but they wouldnt take him. My Mom wasnt breathing or moving when Victor and I woke up that morning. Perhaps black people didnt ride in ambulances, at least in the front. I didnt know. My family didnt let him ride in their car either. All I knew was I was alone.
My mother used to say that Id be better off with those aunts and uncles. She got her wish. I moved in and soon, Victor and I were separated.
Years later, I had a chance to talk with Victors mother. She told me that she hadnt seen Victor in a long time. She lamented missing his games, and said she missed my Mom. I asked Dorothy why she fled my house the way she had on that sunny summer day so long ago. Always a woman of few words, she said she spent most of our games visiting with my mother because they both needed a friend. She said they couldnt be with each other at the games. I started to ask, Why not? but remembered Dorothys reaction to seeing my family pull in when she was in our home, and the lectures my mom endured.
I wonder if my mother might have had a friend that she stopped to talk to on her way home back in those days before she went crazy at 17.
Brandyberry (1999) implored her white friends to reach out, despite the consequences. Perhaps my mother did so long before it was fashionable. Perhaps she stopped to comfort someone from another race, talk, or share some happy times in her youth, like Victors Mom had with her...and me. Maybe that person happened to be black. Maybe thats why she was committed. I suppose its hard to say, but I can always hope thats the way it happened and be thankful I had a Mom like her and a buddy like Victor. You never bothered me, I told Dorothy, and she hugged me as if I were her own son.
*************
Brammer, R. (2004). Diversity in counseling. Belmont: CA: Brooks/Cole.
Brandyberry, L.J. (1999). Pain and perseverance: Perspectives from an ally. Journal of Counseling and Development, 77, 7-9.
Buckley, W.F. (1994, December). Is everybody a racist? National Review, 46, ___.
Malanowski, J. (2002). Colorblind buddies in black and white. [Electronic Version]. NY Times, Nov.10.
Tatum, B.D. (1999). Its not so black and white: An educators wisdom on teaching about slavery and other race-related issues. Instructor, 108, 29-31.
At age 11, I joined a little league baseball team. That is how I got to know Victor. Our coach didnt treat us any differently. In fact, Victor had privilege. Plain and simply put, he was better then the rest of us. Because of it, he started first base, batted cleanup, and I learned to pitch. Malanowski, in a 2002 NY Times column, talked about the boon of black-and-white buddy movies like Die Hard, Shawshank Redemption, and Men in Black, that pair a white friend with a black one. This is a lucrative strategy for the box office. Incidentally, its one of the nobler aspects of Hollywood to unite different races in a common quest. Whatever the intent, Victor and I were like Danny Glover and Bruce Willis. We played hard, stuck together, and if we had anything to say, would die hard.
I dont remember a Black History Month in grade school. I dont remember any racial education. Brammer wonders if the fact that we dont recall the typical differential treatment of our former black friends is evidence of our own indifference. It was our schools one black teacher who left the most indelible mark on me. She said, Once poor, you will always be poor. It stands out because I remember waiting for her to tell me she was kidding, laugh, or ask me to rebut her. She didnt, and I couldnt. She dismissed me, and that was that. I doubt the rich kids were any more aware of my oppression than I was of similar comments made to African Americans by white teachers. Ignorance or indifference, it possesses the same sting. We feel our own pain best.
About the time of Alex Haleys publication, Roots, which my mother purchased and read to us after PBS aired its made-for-TV miniseries, teachers began offering a few examples of strong African Americans, here and there. Soon, the strong black images were replaced by old, wounded images of Kunta Kinte. Around the same time, it seems like they dropped the simultaneous examples of helpful whites. Gone were the heroic aspects of Kintes struggle and those of the white abolitionist. With such glaring omissions, its no wonder, Beverly Tatum (1999) expounds, the white children sat frozen in a haze of guilt and the black children, uncomfortably in the shame of victimization. She writes,
The Africans who were brought here as slaves were not all passive victims, and all whites were not bad.
She implores the educational system to provide concrete examples of each.
Nearing high school, Victor and I recalled our old days of playing baseball, staying out late, peeping in windows and stealing dirty magazines. We didnt lament our fatherlessness. Like our school paddlings, we glorified our struggles and cursed the wind as we rode on, chiding our mothers for missing so many of our games despite our own sin.
Once, an aunt and uncle pulled into my driveway to drop me off after we had won. Victor wasnt invited, and he walked home. With a mouthful of french fries, I exited the car to see Victors mom running out the back door of our home. Shortly, my mother was receiving the family lecture of dont be seen with them and you wont be bothered by them, referring to the problem we had been having with the neighborhood black boys flirting with my beautiful, blonde haired aryan sister. The only ones I knew that were peeking in windows were Victor and myself.
Rapidly, the truth began to blur into fantasy. My father quit calling, the family stayed away, my mother slept more and missed more games, became more suspicious and more dependent on her family for support. Dorothy stayed away, too.
I once asked my mother, Is Everybody a Racist? The suspicion comes from disappointed expectations. I was disappointed, but I couldnt put my finger on why or in whom. This was a dangerous condition. In my mothers youth, it was as much a symptom of mental illness as a justification for incarcerating us disappointees in lunitic asylums.
My mother answered my question by telling me a story of her own institutionalization. But what did that have to do with racism?
She said her hospital years were the best days of her life. She fell in love, blossomed into a woman, made friends of all colors, found refuge in a way, and strength in herself to have a family. Why she was committed had something to do with why she didnt attend many baseball games. She let it lay at that.
The images of Victors mother running out the back door, like she was a common thief, stayed with me...and remains with me to this day. I resigned myself to believing my mother was just sick like my family had always told me. It was as easy for me to ignore my mothers pain as it was for her to spare me the suffering she endured.
I wanted Victor to ride in the ambulance with me but they wouldnt take him. My Mom wasnt breathing or moving when Victor and I woke up that morning. Perhaps black people didnt ride in ambulances, at least in the front. I didnt know. My family didnt let him ride in their car either. All I knew was I was alone.
My mother used to say that Id be better off with those aunts and uncles. She got her wish. I moved in and soon, Victor and I were separated.
Years later, I had a chance to talk with Victors mother. She told me that she hadnt seen Victor in a long time. She lamented missing his games, and said she missed my Mom. I asked Dorothy why she fled my house the way she had on that sunny summer day so long ago. Always a woman of few words, she said she spent most of our games visiting with my mother because they both needed a friend. She said they couldnt be with each other at the games. I started to ask, Why not? but remembered Dorothys reaction to seeing my family pull in when she was in our home, and the lectures my mom endured.
I wonder if my mother might have had a friend that she stopped to talk to on her way home back in those days before she went crazy at 17.
Brandyberry (1999) implored her white friends to reach out, despite the consequences. Perhaps my mother did so long before it was fashionable. Perhaps she stopped to comfort someone from another race, talk, or share some happy times in her youth, like Victors Mom had with her...and me. Maybe that person happened to be black. Maybe thats why she was committed. I suppose its hard to say, but I can always hope thats the way it happened and be thankful I had a Mom like her and a buddy like Victor. You never bothered me, I told Dorothy, and she hugged me as if I were her own son.
*************
Brammer, R. (2004). Diversity in counseling. Belmont: CA: Brooks/Cole.
Brandyberry, L.J. (1999). Pain and perseverance: Perspectives from an ally. Journal of Counseling and Development, 77, 7-9.
Buckley, W.F. (1994, December). Is everybody a racist? National Review, 46, ___.
Malanowski, J. (2002). Colorblind buddies in black and white. [Electronic Version]. NY Times, Nov.10.
Tatum, B.D. (1999). Its not so black and white: An educators wisdom on teaching about slavery and other race-related issues. Instructor, 108, 29-31.
The Invisible: A Movie Review
Monday, May 21, 2007
The Invisible: A Movie ReviewNick, an aspiring poet and writer whose father has recently died, presents his mother with his opportunity to study writing in London. She dismisses the endeavor without discussion and Nick is left to decide weather or not he will leave his home or remain with her in an unwitting, yet pathetic internal enmeshment. Meanwhile, Annie, whose mother has recently passed, wrestles with the meaningless of a life of crime, violence, and lost love.
The movie opens at a birthday party with Nick Powel, our hero, being toasted by his mother. She presents him with a beautiful watch that becomes a symbol of their relationship, and later, a tangible clue that could lead police to her son’s dying body. I knew I was in for a healthy dose of new Hollywood’s ugly bastard child, Annhilism, when Nick cut the eyes out of his likeness birthday cake, ate them, and then fantasized about swallowing some saltpeter and a couple of spent shotgun cartridges. Nick’s friend, Peter, then gets a fingernail excised by our heroin, Annie, a beautiful high school wannabe gangstress, via Stiletto knife, who wants payment for loaned “merchandise.” Nick meets Annie by attempting to pay Peter’s debt in cash, but the gesture is unappreciated, prompting Nick to whisper, “You are broken!” to the stoic and eerily-detached femme fatale. It is easy to assume she is the either the victim of—or willing participant to—causeless anger—Hollywood’s handsome bastard child, but we find that the whisper resonates in our heroin at a deeper level. Unfortunately, like many of the teens of our time who aspire to paint their fingernails and souls an empty and meaningless black, she lacks the magnanimity to confront her existential malady with something other than rage. We are left contemplating the usual suspects of the origins of our heroes’ challenges: Europeanism, the evil clergyman, patriarchy, and/or the absent father. However, my presumptions were happily wrong! It was the loss of a beloved parent, a trauma portending some existential collision between the grieving children.
Annie and boyfriend/car thief, Marcus, steal a Mercedes and impulsively, Annie decides to swipe some jewels for added pleasure. When Marcus demands to keep the jewelry because of Annie’s growing impulsivity, Annie dissents. Her defiance prompts Marcus to place an anonymous call to police, turning Annie in and setting up the motive for the redemption-impetus—a misplaced revenge. Annie confronts Peter, thinking he had been following her and that he had seen the incident. Believing his friend had flown to London, and fearing for his own life, the beaten Peter provides Nick’s name to the angry Annie. Our hero, who has sought the contemporary counsel of alcohol, agonizes over his decision not to go to London and the possibilities of becoming a taxidermist and opening a Hotel—hints of Norman Bates, the quintessential puer eternus. An anonymous girlfriend finds the watch in his pocket and asks why he is wearing the old watch (given him by his deceased father) instead of the beautiful new watch. Since "everything good is dead," Nick tosses the plane ticket to her breast, and we observe him walking angrily down a darkened street kicking trash cans over as if he is welcoming the fate he has been poeticizing about. Annie and a group of thugs approach him and Nick is brutally beaten and left for dead in a storm drain at the bottom of a wood. Nick soon reappears and quickly discovers that no one can see him, save the dying, and he realizes that he is still alive. He begins the urgent task of working for his would-be killer’s redemption, hence his physical salvation, and the mystery turns on the hand of weather or not the troubled Annie will lead police to the sewer/tomb.
I found the story believable, in a troubling sort of way. One wonders why this teen girl, an Alissa Milano lookalike/fugitive wears a ski cap 24/7, whose long locks are revealed only twice: while showering in the high school locker room (where she has broken into to sleep), and during resolution. The transition from covering one’s locks to letting the hair down could be a visual metaphor for Annie’s spiritual transformation, if it is to occur. Behind this emotional trainwreck seems to be Annie’s unresolved grief of her mother’s recent death, and her father’s relationship to a woman that finds no necessity in nurturing, for example not preparing supper for her or her little brother. Who wouldn’t be troubled with a beautiful girl gouging her bedroom wall with the same Stiletto she’s just ripped a fingernail off with, in sight of her 8 year-old brother as she listens to acid rock on an MP3 player? This is the prototypical annihilist-in-short waiting, who seems to prefer punting a stranger’s head like a football to flying a plane with her little brother.
Fortunately, the line to hell called annihilism is cordoned with a redemptive rope, albeit a heavy one, guarding people from the abyss to each side, of which Heaven--in this case, redemption--lies on distant ground. Annie does go to the trouble to make her hungry brother a peanut butter sandwich before a little nighttime “football.” As well, her tears over her mother’s grave add to her redemptive potential. The guilt over what she has done to Nick also develops as Nick’s body slips closer toward death. Driven by faint ghostly admonitions, Annie seems attune to Nick’s plight, suggesting she herself is near-death. She is merely in line. Still toying with the confessional lifestyle, she breaks into her victims home and rummages through his old photos and papers, displaying her newfound empathy by appreciating the photo of a place where they both spent time with their lost parent. One can almost hear hell’s waiting line shrinking. But, when she realizes she attacked the wrong person, she attempts to correct matters by shooting the real nark, and in quasi-Shakespearean fashion, is shot near the womb as if Satan's sentinals had spotted a runner. In fact, the believability in this series of events is that an insatiable grief can drive anyone to desperation, irregardless of gender, irrespective of religious convictions dare I say; and without discernment, the most accomplished man or woman can fall prey to folly as easily as the troubled teen. This we see most remarkably in Nick’s grieving mother, who must wrestle with her own conscience in the face of losing both husband, and son.
I recommend the Invisible if you are willing to put yourself in the shoes of our troubled teens who have lost someone very special to them and have found themselves in a world where solutions are often dispensed like advice from oracles at the end of some long, sinister waiting line. If the path seems long and the faces exiting, sullen, perhaps one is standing in the wrong line. The angst of living near death is what Heidigger called the Abyss, that empty, forboding space that surrounds each of us at difficult times. Sometimes critics forget that we may be on one side of this chasm, by good fortune of by merit of possessing the rappelling, hiking, and scuba apparatus that was needed to cross. Let us not forget those that have been raised without preparation or warning are the fools that we hate, but their folly is not a death sentence or even a judgment. Confession needs to be made, for the things that we were given that we did not deserve—grace, and for the salvation of those that lacked that which they did deserve—mercy. My prayer tonight is that I be more gracious and more merciful, and for the Annies and Nicks of this world—God help us all out of line and into the Abyss where atonement awaits.
The movie opens at a birthday party with Nick Powel, our hero, being toasted by his mother. She presents him with a beautiful watch that becomes a symbol of their relationship, and later, a tangible clue that could lead police to her son’s dying body. I knew I was in for a healthy dose of new Hollywood’s ugly bastard child, Annhilism, when Nick cut the eyes out of his likeness birthday cake, ate them, and then fantasized about swallowing some saltpeter and a couple of spent shotgun cartridges. Nick’s friend, Peter, then gets a fingernail excised by our heroin, Annie, a beautiful high school wannabe gangstress, via Stiletto knife, who wants payment for loaned “merchandise.” Nick meets Annie by attempting to pay Peter’s debt in cash, but the gesture is unappreciated, prompting Nick to whisper, “You are broken!” to the stoic and eerily-detached femme fatale. It is easy to assume she is the either the victim of—or willing participant to—causeless anger—Hollywood’s handsome bastard child, but we find that the whisper resonates in our heroin at a deeper level. Unfortunately, like many of the teens of our time who aspire to paint their fingernails and souls an empty and meaningless black, she lacks the magnanimity to confront her existential malady with something other than rage. We are left contemplating the usual suspects of the origins of our heroes’ challenges: Europeanism, the evil clergyman, patriarchy, and/or the absent father. However, my presumptions were happily wrong! It was the loss of a beloved parent, a trauma portending some existential collision between the grieving children.
Annie and boyfriend/car thief, Marcus, steal a Mercedes and impulsively, Annie decides to swipe some jewels for added pleasure. When Marcus demands to keep the jewelry because of Annie’s growing impulsivity, Annie dissents. Her defiance prompts Marcus to place an anonymous call to police, turning Annie in and setting up the motive for the redemption-impetus—a misplaced revenge. Annie confronts Peter, thinking he had been following her and that he had seen the incident. Believing his friend had flown to London, and fearing for his own life, the beaten Peter provides Nick’s name to the angry Annie. Our hero, who has sought the contemporary counsel of alcohol, agonizes over his decision not to go to London and the possibilities of becoming a taxidermist and opening a Hotel—hints of Norman Bates, the quintessential puer eternus. An anonymous girlfriend finds the watch in his pocket and asks why he is wearing the old watch (given him by his deceased father) instead of the beautiful new watch. Since "everything good is dead," Nick tosses the plane ticket to her breast, and we observe him walking angrily down a darkened street kicking trash cans over as if he is welcoming the fate he has been poeticizing about. Annie and a group of thugs approach him and Nick is brutally beaten and left for dead in a storm drain at the bottom of a wood. Nick soon reappears and quickly discovers that no one can see him, save the dying, and he realizes that he is still alive. He begins the urgent task of working for his would-be killer’s redemption, hence his physical salvation, and the mystery turns on the hand of weather or not the troubled Annie will lead police to the sewer/tomb.
I found the story believable, in a troubling sort of way. One wonders why this teen girl, an Alissa Milano lookalike/fugitive wears a ski cap 24/7, whose long locks are revealed only twice: while showering in the high school locker room (where she has broken into to sleep), and during resolution. The transition from covering one’s locks to letting the hair down could be a visual metaphor for Annie’s spiritual transformation, if it is to occur. Behind this emotional trainwreck seems to be Annie’s unresolved grief of her mother’s recent death, and her father’s relationship to a woman that finds no necessity in nurturing, for example not preparing supper for her or her little brother. Who wouldn’t be troubled with a beautiful girl gouging her bedroom wall with the same Stiletto she’s just ripped a fingernail off with, in sight of her 8 year-old brother as she listens to acid rock on an MP3 player? This is the prototypical annihilist-in-short waiting, who seems to prefer punting a stranger’s head like a football to flying a plane with her little brother.
Fortunately, the line to hell called annihilism is cordoned with a redemptive rope, albeit a heavy one, guarding people from the abyss to each side, of which Heaven--in this case, redemption--lies on distant ground. Annie does go to the trouble to make her hungry brother a peanut butter sandwich before a little nighttime “football.” As well, her tears over her mother’s grave add to her redemptive potential. The guilt over what she has done to Nick also develops as Nick’s body slips closer toward death. Driven by faint ghostly admonitions, Annie seems attune to Nick’s plight, suggesting she herself is near-death. She is merely in line. Still toying with the confessional lifestyle, she breaks into her victims home and rummages through his old photos and papers, displaying her newfound empathy by appreciating the photo of a place where they both spent time with their lost parent. One can almost hear hell’s waiting line shrinking. But, when she realizes she attacked the wrong person, she attempts to correct matters by shooting the real nark, and in quasi-Shakespearean fashion, is shot near the womb as if Satan's sentinals had spotted a runner. In fact, the believability in this series of events is that an insatiable grief can drive anyone to desperation, irregardless of gender, irrespective of religious convictions dare I say; and without discernment, the most accomplished man or woman can fall prey to folly as easily as the troubled teen. This we see most remarkably in Nick’s grieving mother, who must wrestle with her own conscience in the face of losing both husband, and son.
I recommend the Invisible if you are willing to put yourself in the shoes of our troubled teens who have lost someone very special to them and have found themselves in a world where solutions are often dispensed like advice from oracles at the end of some long, sinister waiting line. If the path seems long and the faces exiting, sullen, perhaps one is standing in the wrong line. The angst of living near death is what Heidigger called the Abyss, that empty, forboding space that surrounds each of us at difficult times. Sometimes critics forget that we may be on one side of this chasm, by good fortune of by merit of possessing the rappelling, hiking, and scuba apparatus that was needed to cross. Let us not forget those that have been raised without preparation or warning are the fools that we hate, but their folly is not a death sentence or even a judgment. Confession needs to be made, for the things that we were given that we did not deserve—grace, and for the salvation of those that lacked that which they did deserve—mercy. My prayer tonight is that I be more gracious and more merciful, and for the Annies and Nicks of this world—God help us all out of line and into the Abyss where atonement awaits.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Bending Rules: An Essay on Gurinder Chadha’s Bend it Like Beckham
Gurinder Chadha’s, Bend it Like Beckham, opened April 12, 2002. The film tells the story of a young soccer enthusiast, Jess Bhamra, portrayed by Parminder Nagra, who battles to play soccer despite her contemporary Sikh family's objections. It was an international and inspirational hit for female soccer fans, and proponents of women’s right. The film raises pertinent questions in the lives of Asian-Indian families, and Indian immigrants throughout the world, struggling to balance the expectations of gender roles, family and religious traditions. We’ll discuss some of these in the context of this fun film set in present-day Great Britain.
Bend it Like Beckham is a libertarian film, poking fun at those who seek to perpetuate the stereotype of the submissive, perhaps subjugated Asian female. Its comedy has brought fresh energy to girls struggling against these stereotypes, in the athletic, vocational, and domestic arenas. But, liberty is a two-sided coin. On the one side is freedom, the other, responsibility. The tension in this movie is played out in Jess’s choice between meeting her obligation to attend her sister’s wedding, or playing in the “big game,” which happens to have fallen on the same day. On a deeper note, and perhaps unscripted, Jess’s father must wrestle with adhering to the fundamental libertarian principles of equality for Sikh women, and the old Indian religious sexism and oppression that writer, Gurmeet Kaur, claims modern Sikh families haven fallen prey to (Kaur, 2004). What father and daughter decide is what drives this movie.
Jess is intrigued with the extraordinary talent of soccer superstar, David Beckham, whose status in England rivals that of Michael Jordan in the US. While thousands of boys and girls dream of being like Mike, the same holds true in England, where thousands of youth dream of bending it like Beckham. The film had the effect of inspiring a generation of young Indian females to start kicking up a fuss, so much so that the first girls football league was established in India in January 2003 (McGivering, 2003).
RELIGION
Religion plays a very important role in the life of an Indian person. Roughly 80% of Asian-Indians are Hindus, yet a substantial number are Buddhist, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, or Taoist. It is unheard of for a Hindu to marry outside their race, much less their religion. In the movie we saw that it would cause uproar if a Sikh would think of marrying a Muslim. This is why arranged marriages are still very common amongst the Indian culture.
This is an apparent contradiction to Sikh history and literature. Sikhism advocates active and gender-equal participation in congregation, academics, healthcare, and military activity, among other aspects of society. Female subordination, the practice of taking father's or husband's last name, practicing rituals that imply dependence, are all alien to the Sikh principles, proscribed by Guru Nanuk (Kaur, 2004). At a 2004 Chicago symposium reflecting on the current status of Sikh women, Kaur lamented the contemporary ignoring of this essential Sikh pillar, stating,
This is a sad outcome that suggests a sad future for girls like Jess. Kaur concludes,
Marriage and religion are very important subjects with the Indian culture. A counselor should be sensitive when dealing with these issues. Counselors should ask questions about their client’s culture or religion if they are not familiar. They should take into consideration the client’s lifestyle and background, especially when dealing with clients who are under age. It will be very rare for an Indian person to seek therapy because they would rather speak to a family member or a friend. Going to a therapist is looked down upon. When working with the Indian population, a therapist should be sensitive to the cultural differences between therapist and client.
FAMILY
Throughout the course of the movie, family was a central theme. This is a family-oriented society and not individualistic. The community identifies persons based on their family, and this has an impact on all aspects of life. This impact is so significant that a marriage can be canceled if a member of the family was spotted in a position contrary to societal norms. It is therefore essential that all members of the family be seen as good citizens and true to their religious orientation. A failure to do this could lead to ostracism, which will bring emotional turmoil to those individuals.
The impact of the family is significant; it affects the choice of career, education, future spouse, and even hobbies of a family member, especially children, as was the case for Jess. A failure to comply with the desires of the family in one of these areas can lead to familial problems. These problems create significant emotional turmoil for the parents, which sometimes result in them blaming themselves for bad parental training, or being evil in their previous life.
Chadha touched on issues of sexuality throughout her script. In Indian culture, premarital sex was not permitted. If people were discovered in this practice, they would reap harsh treatment from the other members of the society. Likewise, due to there strict cultural backgrounds, no room was given for those who decided to live a homosexual lifestyle. Chadha portrayed this intolerance humorously by creating the illusion that Jess was a lesbian, at least in the suspicious eyes of her ever-mindful mother. As a result of this cultural taboo, a young man in the movie remained “in the closet” when it came to his sexual orientation. He knew that he would no longer be accepted in his community if her were “found out,” and thought it better to keep quiet.
It can be said that one’s behavior is not one’s own. What a family member does is a direct reflection on the whole family. Thus it is important to note that people of Indian culture hold family respect in high regard. Children, no matter what age, are to adhere to their parents’ instruction. The father is the head of the household; however the wife plays an integral role in the rearing of the children and the decision-making.
For example, in the movie, the father made the ultimate decision to let his daughter play in the soccer championship game. Counselors and psychologists need to be aware that for the good of the family sometimes one has to sacrifice love, friendships, and career in order not to bring shame on the family; familial expectations supersede individual wants and desires. In this case, Jess’s father acted courageously according the pillars of his religion.
In the movie the parents originally wanted their daughter to go off to a university and get a degree in medicine, when what she wanted was to play professional soccer. In this case, it went against the family custom, therefore, traditionally she would have to give up her dream and do what the family required; however because in the end her family approved, she was able to go and pursue her dream. It is very important that family traditions and customs are kept, but sometimes exceptions are made, such as in the case of Jess’s family.
Appearances are very important to the Indian families because they have a caste system. For instance, depending on what caste a family belongs to, it is important to marry within that caste (Ballard, 1990). In the movie when the future in-laws were coming over for a visit, the mother expressed her desire that when they came, they see their family as not poor. It is important to be financially secure or to appear that finances are not a problem. Having money is a value. Traditions can be seen in the way the marriage ceremony is performed, the dress, conduct, gender roles, and careers.
CAREER
In the Indian culture, choice of career is a big issue. Highly respected careers are medicine, engineering, computer technology, business, and to a lesser extent law. While today, parents allow their children to choose careers outside of these preferred tracks, success in whatever career an individual chooses is strongly emphasized.
Traditionally, parents have chosen the child’s career for them. While this still happens today, children do have more flexibility in choosing their own path, though once gender is added to the issue, the waters become murkier. Gender roles in the Indian culture continue to follow a more traditional path. Men are the primary financial support in the family, while women are the primary managers of the domestic sphere.
In the last 10 to 15 years, however, with the growth of the technological industry and out sourcing, women have been entering into the work force in larger numbers. Their responsibilities to family home life, however, remain unchanged. Women in the Indian culture are expected to marry, above all else, and to care for the children and the home. As such, higher education and the pursuit of a career for an Indian woman is typically only embarked upon after the girl is married, or at the very least, is engaged.
This point was openly illustrated in Bend it Like Beckham, when Jess wanted to attend an American university on a soccer scholarship. At first, the expectation was that she marry or get engaged before she left for school, though her father made the ultimate decision in the end to allow her to leave without an engagement. Like men, women pursuing careers of their own are also encouraged to pursue the same highly desired jobs and are encouraged to attend respected universities (Ballard, 1990).
CONCLUSION
Bend it Like Beckham was a challenge to modern Sikhism. It is a criticism of the outdated stereotype of the submissive, subordinate Indian female. Its success in the Asian female world, and for those aspiring to play a typically male-dominated sport, is a breath of fresh air in the lungs of those struggling against these stereotypes. It was a song traditional Sikhism, not a slap in the face. Less a mockery of her parents for their intrusion, Chadha depicted the tension wrote of so eloquently in Kaur’s piece describing the unfortunate status of many women in the Asian world—Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and otherwise.
Counselors must take note of their biases, their own stereotypes and agendas, be they feminist, traditional, or a mixture thereof. A girl such as Jess may present to a counselor the conflict of acting on her personal desires vs. the expectations of her family, religion, or culture. No easy answer exists, but knowing the history of the family’s religion (in this case, Sikhism), and the culture that surrounds it, may help a counselor work with both family and client to aspire to the greater aims of God’s desire. The goal is to bring families together, to compromise when necessary, and to promote the values of service to others and individual liberty. Jess’s father was able to bend a few rules in this film, make both of his daughters happy, an act of courage, sacrifice, and great wisdom. In the end, he bent a rule for his daughter, who just wanted to bend it like Beckham.
Kaur, G. (2004). Reflection on Mata Gujri Ji in the context of Sahibzada'a Shaheedi and today's status of Sikh women in contemporary society. UNITED SIKHS 12/18/2004 at Chicago IFCAPS Seminar. Online: http://www.sikhwomen.com/equality/essay_status_of_sikh_women_in_contemporary_society.htm
McGivering, J. (2003). BBC World News: Online Edition, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2668147.stm
Bend it Like Beckham is a libertarian film, poking fun at those who seek to perpetuate the stereotype of the submissive, perhaps subjugated Asian female. Its comedy has brought fresh energy to girls struggling against these stereotypes, in the athletic, vocational, and domestic arenas. But, liberty is a two-sided coin. On the one side is freedom, the other, responsibility. The tension in this movie is played out in Jess’s choice between meeting her obligation to attend her sister’s wedding, or playing in the “big game,” which happens to have fallen on the same day. On a deeper note, and perhaps unscripted, Jess’s father must wrestle with adhering to the fundamental libertarian principles of equality for Sikh women, and the old Indian religious sexism and oppression that writer, Gurmeet Kaur, claims modern Sikh families haven fallen prey to (Kaur, 2004). What father and daughter decide is what drives this movie.
Jess is intrigued with the extraordinary talent of soccer superstar, David Beckham, whose status in England rivals that of Michael Jordan in the US. While thousands of boys and girls dream of being like Mike, the same holds true in England, where thousands of youth dream of bending it like Beckham. The film had the effect of inspiring a generation of young Indian females to start kicking up a fuss, so much so that the first girls football league was established in India in January 2003 (McGivering, 2003).
RELIGION
Religion plays a very important role in the life of an Indian person. Roughly 80% of Asian-Indians are Hindus, yet a substantial number are Buddhist, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, or Taoist. It is unheard of for a Hindu to marry outside their race, much less their religion. In the movie we saw that it would cause uproar if a Sikh would think of marrying a Muslim. This is why arranged marriages are still very common amongst the Indian culture.
This is an apparent contradiction to Sikh history and literature. Sikhism advocates active and gender-equal participation in congregation, academics, healthcare, and military activity, among other aspects of society. Female subordination, the practice of taking father's or husband's last name, practicing rituals that imply dependence, are all alien to the Sikh principles, proscribed by Guru Nanuk (Kaur, 2004). At a 2004 Chicago symposium reflecting on the current status of Sikh women, Kaur lamented the contemporary ignoring of this essential Sikh pillar, stating,
"Indian culture has downgraded women in many ways for centuries: They have been deemed unworthy of education; restricted to being child bearers and housekeepers. In general, the male children have received preferential treatment in all areas of life. Women have been subjected to economic, social, cultural and judicial oppression from birth to death. They were regarded as a source of sin and obstruction to a man’s salvation; they were declared devoid of intelligence. Sadly to say, Sikhs have succumbed to the ways of [puritanical] Indian Culture rather than the ideals of the Guru. Equality between men and women in Sikhism has become mere rhetoric. The status of Sikh women is so far from the truth of the Guru’s teachings, that women have become incapable of independent identity without a male figure…inferior in education, and hence not rising beyond traditional roles; and devoid of leadership qualities.”
This is a sad outcome that suggests a sad future for girls like Jess. Kaur concludes,
“The worst part is that subjugation has become so much a part of our lives that we do not even acknowledge that it exists. If Sikhism is to flourish as a Universal religion, a faith of new age, there is a need to break out, untangle the web of culture, and reach to the core of the Guru’s teachings. There is a need for men to step in and do their part.”This is Jess’s father’s dilemma in this film. We believe Chadha’s movie is an attempt to promote the noble aspects of Sikhism. Mr. Bahmraais in a position, therefore, to begin to untangle this web; his challenge is to step away from the old way, at least for a while, and into Jess’s world where dreams can become a reality according to Sikh teachings.
Marriage and religion are very important subjects with the Indian culture. A counselor should be sensitive when dealing with these issues. Counselors should ask questions about their client’s culture or religion if they are not familiar. They should take into consideration the client’s lifestyle and background, especially when dealing with clients who are under age. It will be very rare for an Indian person to seek therapy because they would rather speak to a family member or a friend. Going to a therapist is looked down upon. When working with the Indian population, a therapist should be sensitive to the cultural differences between therapist and client.
FAMILY
Throughout the course of the movie, family was a central theme. This is a family-oriented society and not individualistic. The community identifies persons based on their family, and this has an impact on all aspects of life. This impact is so significant that a marriage can be canceled if a member of the family was spotted in a position contrary to societal norms. It is therefore essential that all members of the family be seen as good citizens and true to their religious orientation. A failure to do this could lead to ostracism, which will bring emotional turmoil to those individuals.
The impact of the family is significant; it affects the choice of career, education, future spouse, and even hobbies of a family member, especially children, as was the case for Jess. A failure to comply with the desires of the family in one of these areas can lead to familial problems. These problems create significant emotional turmoil for the parents, which sometimes result in them blaming themselves for bad parental training, or being evil in their previous life.
Chadha touched on issues of sexuality throughout her script. In Indian culture, premarital sex was not permitted. If people were discovered in this practice, they would reap harsh treatment from the other members of the society. Likewise, due to there strict cultural backgrounds, no room was given for those who decided to live a homosexual lifestyle. Chadha portrayed this intolerance humorously by creating the illusion that Jess was a lesbian, at least in the suspicious eyes of her ever-mindful mother. As a result of this cultural taboo, a young man in the movie remained “in the closet” when it came to his sexual orientation. He knew that he would no longer be accepted in his community if her were “found out,” and thought it better to keep quiet.
It can be said that one’s behavior is not one’s own. What a family member does is a direct reflection on the whole family. Thus it is important to note that people of Indian culture hold family respect in high regard. Children, no matter what age, are to adhere to their parents’ instruction. The father is the head of the household; however the wife plays an integral role in the rearing of the children and the decision-making.
For example, in the movie, the father made the ultimate decision to let his daughter play in the soccer championship game. Counselors and psychologists need to be aware that for the good of the family sometimes one has to sacrifice love, friendships, and career in order not to bring shame on the family; familial expectations supersede individual wants and desires. In this case, Jess’s father acted courageously according the pillars of his religion.
In the movie the parents originally wanted their daughter to go off to a university and get a degree in medicine, when what she wanted was to play professional soccer. In this case, it went against the family custom, therefore, traditionally she would have to give up her dream and do what the family required; however because in the end her family approved, she was able to go and pursue her dream. It is very important that family traditions and customs are kept, but sometimes exceptions are made, such as in the case of Jess’s family.
Appearances are very important to the Indian families because they have a caste system. For instance, depending on what caste a family belongs to, it is important to marry within that caste (Ballard, 1990). In the movie when the future in-laws were coming over for a visit, the mother expressed her desire that when they came, they see their family as not poor. It is important to be financially secure or to appear that finances are not a problem. Having money is a value. Traditions can be seen in the way the marriage ceremony is performed, the dress, conduct, gender roles, and careers.
CAREER
In the Indian culture, choice of career is a big issue. Highly respected careers are medicine, engineering, computer technology, business, and to a lesser extent law. While today, parents allow their children to choose careers outside of these preferred tracks, success in whatever career an individual chooses is strongly emphasized.
Traditionally, parents have chosen the child’s career for them. While this still happens today, children do have more flexibility in choosing their own path, though once gender is added to the issue, the waters become murkier. Gender roles in the Indian culture continue to follow a more traditional path. Men are the primary financial support in the family, while women are the primary managers of the domestic sphere.
In the last 10 to 15 years, however, with the growth of the technological industry and out sourcing, women have been entering into the work force in larger numbers. Their responsibilities to family home life, however, remain unchanged. Women in the Indian culture are expected to marry, above all else, and to care for the children and the home. As such, higher education and the pursuit of a career for an Indian woman is typically only embarked upon after the girl is married, or at the very least, is engaged.
This point was openly illustrated in Bend it Like Beckham, when Jess wanted to attend an American university on a soccer scholarship. At first, the expectation was that she marry or get engaged before she left for school, though her father made the ultimate decision in the end to allow her to leave without an engagement. Like men, women pursuing careers of their own are also encouraged to pursue the same highly desired jobs and are encouraged to attend respected universities (Ballard, 1990).
CONCLUSION
Bend it Like Beckham was a challenge to modern Sikhism. It is a criticism of the outdated stereotype of the submissive, subordinate Indian female. Its success in the Asian female world, and for those aspiring to play a typically male-dominated sport, is a breath of fresh air in the lungs of those struggling against these stereotypes. It was a song traditional Sikhism, not a slap in the face. Less a mockery of her parents for their intrusion, Chadha depicted the tension wrote of so eloquently in Kaur’s piece describing the unfortunate status of many women in the Asian world—Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and otherwise.
Counselors must take note of their biases, their own stereotypes and agendas, be they feminist, traditional, or a mixture thereof. A girl such as Jess may present to a counselor the conflict of acting on her personal desires vs. the expectations of her family, religion, or culture. No easy answer exists, but knowing the history of the family’s religion (in this case, Sikhism), and the culture that surrounds it, may help a counselor work with both family and client to aspire to the greater aims of God’s desire. The goal is to bring families together, to compromise when necessary, and to promote the values of service to others and individual liberty. Jess’s father was able to bend a few rules in this film, make both of his daughters happy, an act of courage, sacrifice, and great wisdom. In the end, he bent a rule for his daughter, who just wanted to bend it like Beckham.
*********************
Ballard, R. (1990). Migration and kinship: The differential effect of marriage rules on the process of Punjabi migration. In Clark, C., Peach, C., & Vertovek, S. (eds.), South Asians overseas: Contexts and communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Kaur, G. (2004). Reflection on Mata Gujri Ji in the context of Sahibzada'a Shaheedi and today's status of Sikh women in contemporary society. UNITED SIKHS 12/18/2004 at Chicago IFCAPS Seminar. Online: http://www.sikhwomen.com/equality/essay_status_of_sikh_women_in_contemporary_society.htm
McGivering, J. (2003). BBC World News: Online Edition, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2668147.stm
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Questing Last Frontiers: Community Development through our Drifters' Dreams
I once told my sister that in one of my future lives—should reincarnation prove true—I wish to settle in a little log cabin at the base of Mount McKinley overlooking a vast expanse of Alaskan wilderness in Monastic seclusion. There, I could meditate away my nights, roaming by day like the Desert Fathers, free to search my soul and lay bare its assets and many deficiencies before God (or in my reincarnated case, before the pantheon of Hindu idols.) Such might have been a wish of Chris McCandless, a 22 year-old traveler, the subject of John Krakauer’s masterwork of Frontier philosophique’, Into the Wild, writing of our reborn, self-cast hero’s moniker, Alexander Supertramp, who met his fate in the Alaskan tundra. Some say he met such a fate tragically with a “stupid, inconsiderate ill-preparedness that reeked of mental illness, family cruelty, and suicidality.” Krakauer disagreed, and so do I. Let’s talk about what Chris McCandless really did, what he wanted, and why the world has a problem with his method.
That fateful summer before his disappearance, Chris McCandless’s alter ego wrote a dreamy, albeit blunt letter to a friend,
In my reincarnation, it’s the year 2068. My dreamy eyes survey the misty-laden landscape of this wish, where beyond a river I spot a caricature of myself—Horace Mountainman—smoking a pipe molded from clay sapped from the riverbank from which I gaze. I can smell the ominous scent of the pipe, and it reeks of death. It’s stuffed with smoking mint leaves, clover, and some poison ivy Horace mistook for thyme (silly me…or him). Alone. Our business, our vaporous lives, and our itchy, ulcerating lungs. No excuses, no explanations, no earthly attachments. Death isn’t a reality; it’s a mental possibility as probable as my likelihood of falling off the edge of the earth. My goal: to become one with God. Chris’s goal: one with nature. Two different worships, four identical outcomes: we all die before our time—Chris, Alex, Tim and Horace--and yes reader, you. Some smoke their way to the grave giving up those precious moments with kin for the high of what may be considered transcendence, dragging the searching part of ourselves with them; some spawn a contagion of calamitous carcinoma contrived in a cumulonimbus cloud of unsmokable ivy. No difference…only different paths that all lead back to potential. We cannot judge a man by his last mistake. We have to consider the heart of a man and his dreams…we have to consider what he wanted to be and the integration of the many noble aspects of our selves that make us human, that give us our potential and define our circularity.
Chris McCandless did not want to die. His moniker’s words appear to foreshadow some darker pre-ordained catastrophe, but Alex Supertramp’s letter was less a warning than sheer theatrics. He was the main character in his own drama. Who isn’t? His omen formed a published preface to what would have been his great escape, his triumphe de majestique'. Consider his final plea, posted unequivocally Chris—undoubtedly desperate, absent of Alex-intrigue:
Though he died fulfilling his dream of living in…and off the wild…he was not a recluse. He liked people; he probably just liked them about as often as I like turkey—about once or twice a year. That was then. In 2068, I see a man who gives thanks everyday, and another with an insatiable appetite for foul, plucking the feathers of a 22-pound turkey for the third time in a month. Without delusion of grandeur, Chris’s calamity does beg the question: Why up and leave without telling your family? What sort of thanks is that if not a thanks for nothing. It’s at least a gross dismissal of one’s primary connections, at best a cogent omission. I think in Chris’s case it was more the latter, for he had every expectation of returning. That was his pattern, and I am sure it was his intention; if the path of the drifter is the circuitous journey I believe it to be, logic dictates such a reunion—it also dictates renunciation, and that means the death and transformation of the self. It can be argued that this process is achieved most ardently and efficiently when no one, save one’s god and one’s self, has knowledge of the “other.” It is this “otherness” that forms the concept of “I,” and gives us separateness. If Chris was an ascetic in the true sense, the renunciation of not only family, material possessions and earthly identification was necessary, but so too was the elimination of the “I”--at least for a while, thus the emergence of his star character, Alexander Supertramp.
The reader doesn’t cast McCandless a lone dumbass…he’s part of a collective. How gracious of the pundit to grant Chris this communal attribute, but how myopic! His judgment: Chris suffered the same delusion of grandeur that inevitably leads to a sort of self-imposed greenhorn annihilism. He continues,
Let me assist. We all make mistakes. One mistake is to become a sheep that believes itself a judge of the lambs. I heard tell of an Episcopalian who preached something of human interaction, defining one’s humanity by one’s connectedness with others. Is our yearning for periodic solitude somehow at odds with God’s divine intention—or with nature? Is withdrawal (i.e. monasticism, asceticism, wandering, drifting, traveling) a mental illness, or is it what I think it is—a requisite counterpart to the basic need to transcend ourselves and a lonely world and make better communities? I believe it to be what it is: an elixir for community that makes interactional harmony possible. Consider the words of Roger Miller, whose song inspired our hero:
Miller was not singing about an alien or some monster. He was singing about the journey of becoming human, and that journey involves travel and transformation. Should we really make a snapshot judgment of people? Haven’t we learned the lesson of the old mental Institution’s collective moral authority by the folly of arresting a man for “uncontrolled passion” and “disappointed expectations”? These were points along Miller’s Road—the continuum of persons’ lives. Arrest of that nature doesn’t create justice, it destroys lives. One may make the case Chris suffered from a possible naivete while simmering in a stew of stubborn idealism, but that’s not mental illness. I didn’t mean to mistake poison ivy for thyme, but I did. If naiveté is the new uncontrolled passion, if dumbassedness is the new disappointed expectations, if bad luck and idealism, the pull to wander, the overestimation of one’s resilience, and the will to come to grips with basic wilderness is mental illness—then I am as sick as they come.
One might offer an explanation of Chris’s cogent omission of any explanation to his family by offering a generic understanding of renunciation. Renunciation is a means of re-centering one’s self through isolation. Alex Supertramp’s isolation seems a banner of finality, perhaps a sadistic goodbye, but it’s little more than a pronouncement of withdrawal pending awareness. We see this withdrawal in all of the notable ascetics, including the great teachers and the sacred divinities of the major religions. We see asceticism in many of God’s followers. Nature’s ascetics, the backpackers, are perhaps a new breed—a neo-tribe of ascetics, but nonetheless, withdrawn to commune in their own way with nature, to recenter themselves in preparation for some better idea of community.
One backpacker describes the mythos of the traveling subculture, her imagined community,
This anthropological freedom—this lack of social, civilized control, is the draw. It, and the community that shares its ideals, gives space and opportunity for what amounts to hybridizing one’s self, to play with and form one’s own identity—one’s own name, even. It could be said that the ability to name one’s self had been recaptured by McCandless, and others like him, a clean psychosocial break that many boys are never able to make—a break that makes them men, that makes them sane.
We all understand the drive. We all just don’t approve of it. It rains in adolescence; it snows in marital strife. It is an eerie calm in what Thomas Moore calls the Dark night of the Soul. We understand it. At times, there is a need to be “somewhere else,” somewhere other than home. There is something to be gained by leaving, be it some knowledge or sheer experience. I call it transcendence. Consider the Papar, a group of 6th century Irish monks set sail from the west coast of Ireland, who risked their lives [and loves]—“and lost them in untold droves—not in the pursuit of wealth or personal glory or to claim new lands in the name of any despot.” Nobel laureate Fridtjof Nansen explained,
Hardly indifferent to their own losses, the journey of the Papar simply took precedence. This need for seclusion and apparent foolhardy venture is all but unimaginable to most men, because most men are metropolitan figures. The Papar, Nansen wrote, “…were drawn across the storm-racked ocean, drawn west past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than a hunger of the spirit, a yearning of such queer intensity that it beggars the modern imagination.” The Papar sought nothing of the world but its sustenance and offered only what they desired in return, peace. This is not only the definition of a healthy community, but a shining example of what is necessary for communities to co-exist..
In the words of James Thurber, “All men should try to learn what it is they are running from, or to, and why.” But, sometimes running, like ascending a mountain, is the point.. The reason is tied up in the inherent and often maligned drive of transcendence—that place at the tip of Maslow’s cute pyramid where we are all trying to reach, but sometimes fail—or simply fail to attempt. Reuss, a young man who attempted the ascent, like McCandless, in 1912 never to return, described the lure of the wilderness much as Krakauer described the lure of the climb and McCandless the lure of the Alaskan trail:
I think there is something exclusive between what is believed to be a normal social expectation of family obligations, obligations to others needs, and this deeper personal quest that cannot coincide always at the same time. This is what Krakauer called the “unbridgeable gulf” that can develop between people—in his case, between his father and himself—and it was the same for McCandless. Krakauer writes: “I believe we were similarly affected by the skewed relationships we had with our fathers. And I suspect we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of the soul.” Do these adventurers want people to worry about them, or are they just indifferent? This dismissal of family, the very people who claim to love you, to know you the best, who have been with you the longest and have cried for you the hardest, is perhaps the great enigma of the loner who seeks to shed the skin of his past—a skin not stained, but wet with the imprint of that family’s tears. McCandless wrote,
This self-destruction was part of his spiritual transformation—part of the character, Alexander Supertramp’s, mythos. To say that renouncing his family—or family in general—was Chris McCandless’s aim negates the process he ultimately came to realize. This can best be described as the circular wandering this author and Ken Kleight describe, of the need to become lost and then to return. Regarding Reuss, Sleight, a self-described “desert rat,” surmises an eloquent defense of this circularity,
Near the end of what McCandless believed was his stay in Alaska, he marked a passage from Tolstoy’s Family Happiness that moved him. Perhaps it spoke for Chris. I believe it bespoke his potential. It read,
Seems an about face, but it’s not.. It is McCandless the Traveler returning to something that he always had, and never lost.. It was the idea of family. It’s Horace the Mountainman recovering from his lung cancer to walk across the river and back to his home and family. Though the idea of family is often tainted and distorted as if it’s a far-away city envisioned from the midst of a hazy, baked desert, the real image is there. When the sandstorm clears and one walks a while, the reality of the concept becomes apparent in true transcendent al fashion. Once clear, the gulf subsides, as well, and the city—as well as its purpose—comes into perfect focus.
Krakauer concludes neither he nor McCandless wanted to die in their ascents, in their journeys home. The driving force to leave was simple, Krakauer writes:
The face of God has always been attractive to man, in all its glorious metaphors, and equally as repulsive. Just as that which drives us compels us to climb, wander, and meditate, it drives one to return to his community and be one with each the other.
I like to think that in Chris’s last days he read Tolstoy and realized the potential of what he could become, and that the smiling picture Chris took of himself in his last days bore the realization that he had come full circle, had realized the importance of family, and held tight to the dream that family would someday realize the importance of the travel. I like to think that his happy expression in that picture was an apology and a gift to his sister.
Carine, upon hearing of her brother’s death, said, “I wanted some answers from God, but I didn’t get any.” Her mother Billie decried, “I just don’t understand why he had to take those kind of chances. I just don’t understand it at all.”
Perhaps there is nothing of peace to offer a grieving family but the mythos that drives the travelers. It is a source of happiness beyond simple understanding. Krakauer’s book is extraordinary because he not only placed a spotlight on an otherwise ordinary traveler, he walked in his shoes and laid the groundwork for a deeper understanding, and dare I say appreciation, for those that want to break ground but can only pretend trailblaze. Sadly, sometimes our dreams cost us. But we cannot deny Chris died doing what he loved. His only regret, I am sure he came to realize, was dying alone.
Wilson, J. & Richards, G. (2004). Backpacker Icons: Influential Literary Nomads in the Formation of Backpacker Identities. In, The Global Nomad: Backpacker Travel in Theory and in Practice. Channel View Publications: UK, Frankfurt.
Miller, D.E. (1977) The Wing-Footed Wanderer: Conscience and Transcendence. Abingdon Press.
Thoreau, H.D. (2007). Walden, or Life in the Woods. Castle Books.
That fateful summer before his disappearance, Chris McCandless’s alter ego wrote a dreamy, albeit blunt letter to a friend,
Greetings from Fairbanks! This is the last you shall here from me Wayne….It might be a very long time before I return south. If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again, I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild. Alex.”
In my reincarnation, it’s the year 2068. My dreamy eyes survey the misty-laden landscape of this wish, where beyond a river I spot a caricature of myself—Horace Mountainman—smoking a pipe molded from clay sapped from the riverbank from which I gaze. I can smell the ominous scent of the pipe, and it reeks of death. It’s stuffed with smoking mint leaves, clover, and some poison ivy Horace mistook for thyme (silly me…or him). Alone. Our business, our vaporous lives, and our itchy, ulcerating lungs. No excuses, no explanations, no earthly attachments. Death isn’t a reality; it’s a mental possibility as probable as my likelihood of falling off the edge of the earth. My goal: to become one with God. Chris’s goal: one with nature. Two different worships, four identical outcomes: we all die before our time—Chris, Alex, Tim and Horace--and yes reader, you. Some smoke their way to the grave giving up those precious moments with kin for the high of what may be considered transcendence, dragging the searching part of ourselves with them; some spawn a contagion of calamitous carcinoma contrived in a cumulonimbus cloud of unsmokable ivy. No difference…only different paths that all lead back to potential. We cannot judge a man by his last mistake. We have to consider the heart of a man and his dreams…we have to consider what he wanted to be and the integration of the many noble aspects of our selves that make us human, that give us our potential and define our circularity.
Chris McCandless did not want to die. His moniker’s words appear to foreshadow some darker pre-ordained catastrophe, but Alex Supertramp’s letter was less a warning than sheer theatrics. He was the main character in his own drama. Who isn’t? His omen formed a published preface to what would have been his great escape, his triumphe de majestique'. Consider his final plea, posted unequivocally Chris—undoubtedly desperate, absent of Alex-intrigue:
“S.O.S. I need your help. I am injured, near death and too weak to hike out of here. I am all alone. This is no joke. In the name of God, please remain to save me. I am out collecting berries close by and shall return this evening. Thank you. Chris McCandless. August ?”
Recluse or Traveler?
Chris was a Monastic, a.k.a Traveler, a.k.a Wanderer. He wasn't revered because he did anything special. There's thousands of him. He is the exemplar in Krakauer's work, and the subject here. Anti-Monastics might as well reveal their prejudices and stop reading here, but I beg your patience because you will see in Chris an aspect of yourself you might have forgotten existed.Though he died fulfilling his dream of living in…and off the wild…he was not a recluse. He liked people; he probably just liked them about as often as I like turkey—about once or twice a year. That was then. In 2068, I see a man who gives thanks everyday, and another with an insatiable appetite for foul, plucking the feathers of a 22-pound turkey for the third time in a month. Without delusion of grandeur, Chris’s calamity does beg the question: Why up and leave without telling your family? What sort of thanks is that if not a thanks for nothing. It’s at least a gross dismissal of one’s primary connections, at best a cogent omission. I think in Chris’s case it was more the latter, for he had every expectation of returning. That was his pattern, and I am sure it was his intention; if the path of the drifter is the circuitous journey I believe it to be, logic dictates such a reunion—it also dictates renunciation, and that means the death and transformation of the self. It can be argued that this process is achieved most ardently and efficiently when no one, save one’s god and one’s self, has knowledge of the “other.” It is this “otherness” that forms the concept of “I,” and gives us separateness. If Chris was an ascetic in the true sense, the renunciation of not only family, material possessions and earthly identification was necessary, but so too was the elimination of the “I”--at least for a while, thus the emergence of his star character, Alexander Supertramp.
Anti-Map, Anti-Civilization, The Longing for a Last Frontier
Communal Monasticism is not for the faint of heart, for before transcendence can occur, it requires a self-reliance common man has become unfamiliar with. This Monastic bias of ours (Alex’s and Horace Mountainman’s) seems to be at odds with the world—as it must naturally be. If one does not follow the ethos of civilized society, if you dare regress to self-reliance—and dare I say renounce the Canon of accumulated human knowledge hefted by all who came before—if you dare to reinvent, to find your own way as our progenitors once had, you are banished—in person and in spirit—as banished as anyone who left civilization of his own accord. No difference…it is all a matter of perspective. There was a first man to discover the secret of making fire. There was a first woman who considered using a tool to do a task. There was an inventor of the wheel. These firsts occurred in isolation and became a sort of Garden of Eden foundation upon which civilization sprang. Just as some men desire a regression to the womb, some desire a regression to Eden, where first things happen and newness is not measured relative to the past—it is pure. Newsflash to you Alaskan pundits basking proudly in the salty broth of your own rustic, self-adoring ancestor-dependent knowledge—Alaska is not the last Frontier—that territory belongs to the imagination. So, and in true tolerance, let’s take a humble step back and pay our respects to the spirit of Chris McCandless and what it was that he tried to do, and to his subsequent ascetic success.Alter-Egos
Chris’s world-depictions create at least two false versions of his character. The first has miscast him a dreamy, half-cocked greenhorn who froze and starved to death in post-adolescent angst. Yes he dreamed. He was a greenhorn by choice. Yes he died in the wilderness no doubt wrestling with an array of post-modernist issues, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Neither does the second, less sympathetic version of his trail-naiveté as described in one reader’s response to Krakauer’s original magazine article on Chris’s death:“Over the last 15 years, I’ve run into several McCandless types in the country. Same story: idealistic, energetic young guys who overestimated themselves, underestimated the country, and ended up in trouble….Hardly unique, there’s quite a few of these guys hanging around the state, so much alike they are almost a collective cliché.”
The reader doesn’t cast McCandless a lone dumbass…he’s part of a collective. How gracious of the pundit to grant Chris this communal attribute, but how myopic! His judgment: Chris suffered the same delusion of grandeur that inevitably leads to a sort of self-imposed greenhorn annihilism. He continues,
“The only difference is that McCandless ended up dead with the story of his dumbassedness splashed across the media….His ignorance, which could have been cured by a…boy scout manual, is what killed him….McCandless’s contrived asceticism and a pseudoliterary stance compound rather than reduce the fault….His postcards, notes, and journals…read like the work of an above-average, somewhat histrionic high school kid—or am I missing something?”
Let me assist. We all make mistakes. One mistake is to become a sheep that believes itself a judge of the lambs. I heard tell of an Episcopalian who preached something of human interaction, defining one’s humanity by one’s connectedness with others. Is our yearning for periodic solitude somehow at odds with God’s divine intention—or with nature? Is withdrawal (i.e. monasticism, asceticism, wandering, drifting, traveling) a mental illness, or is it what I think it is—a requisite counterpart to the basic need to transcend ourselves and a lonely world and make better communities? I believe it to be what it is: an elixir for community that makes interactional harmony possible. Consider the words of Roger Miller, whose song inspired our hero:
Two years he walks the earth; no phone, no pool no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road.
Miller was not singing about an alien or some monster. He was singing about the journey of becoming human, and that journey involves travel and transformation. Should we really make a snapshot judgment of people? Haven’t we learned the lesson of the old mental Institution’s collective moral authority by the folly of arresting a man for “uncontrolled passion” and “disappointed expectations”? These were points along Miller’s Road—the continuum of persons’ lives. Arrest of that nature doesn’t create justice, it destroys lives. One may make the case Chris suffered from a possible naivete while simmering in a stew of stubborn idealism, but that’s not mental illness. I didn’t mean to mistake poison ivy for thyme, but I did. If naiveté is the new uncontrolled passion, if dumbassedness is the new disappointed expectations, if bad luck and idealism, the pull to wander, the overestimation of one’s resilience, and the will to come to grips with basic wilderness is mental illness—then I am as sick as they come.
One might offer an explanation of Chris’s cogent omission of any explanation to his family by offering a generic understanding of renunciation. Renunciation is a means of re-centering one’s self through isolation. Alex Supertramp’s isolation seems a banner of finality, perhaps a sadistic goodbye, but it’s little more than a pronouncement of withdrawal pending awareness. We see this withdrawal in all of the notable ascetics, including the great teachers and the sacred divinities of the major religions. We see asceticism in many of God’s followers. Nature’s ascetics, the backpackers, are perhaps a new breed—a neo-tribe of ascetics, but nonetheless, withdrawn to commune in their own way with nature, to recenter themselves in preparation for some better idea of community.
One backpacker describes the mythos of the traveling subculture, her imagined community,
“There are many ways to choose how you travel around, and that’s the whole point of backpacking, that you aren’t committed, it’s your trip, your decision. The whole point of backpacking is to do whatever you want.”
This anthropological freedom—this lack of social, civilized control, is the draw. It, and the community that shares its ideals, gives space and opportunity for what amounts to hybridizing one’s self, to play with and form one’s own identity—one’s own name, even. It could be said that the ability to name one’s self had been recaptured by McCandless, and others like him, a clean psychosocial break that many boys are never able to make—a break that makes them men, that makes them sane.
The Necessity of the Wanderers
The Traveler Michael Palin speaks of the grander purpose of wandering, in a way cementing Chris’s behavior—not Alex’s—a necessary condition for personal and communal sanity. He writes, “Struggles, peasant pride, redemption through physical pain, the confrontation with nature that strips away sham and compromise. These are what make men sane.” These were necessary for Chris to come to realize what it was that he wanted and re-enter the earth’s inward pull. Chris kept a string tied to his family I have to believe, and it was neither he nor his family who cut that string, but chance itself.We all understand the drive. We all just don’t approve of it. It rains in adolescence; it snows in marital strife. It is an eerie calm in what Thomas Moore calls the Dark night of the Soul. We understand it. At times, there is a need to be “somewhere else,” somewhere other than home. There is something to be gained by leaving, be it some knowledge or sheer experience. I call it transcendence. Consider the Papar, a group of 6th century Irish monks set sail from the west coast of Ireland, who risked their lives [and loves]—“and lost them in untold droves—not in the pursuit of wealth or personal glory or to claim new lands in the name of any despot.” Nobel laureate Fridtjof Nansen explained,
“These remarkable voyages were undertaken chiefly from the wish to find lonely places, where these anchorites might dwell in peace, undisturbed by the turmoil and temptations of the world.”
Hardly indifferent to their own losses, the journey of the Papar simply took precedence. This need for seclusion and apparent foolhardy venture is all but unimaginable to most men, because most men are metropolitan figures. The Papar, Nansen wrote, “…were drawn across the storm-racked ocean, drawn west past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than a hunger of the spirit, a yearning of such queer intensity that it beggars the modern imagination.” The Papar sought nothing of the world but its sustenance and offered only what they desired in return, peace. This is not only the definition of a healthy community, but a shining example of what is necessary for communities to co-exist..
Resistless Quest
Beyond the spiritual inclination of the wanderer, there’s also the sheer physical thrill of travel. Krakauer described his own post-adolescent compulsion to ascend the remote mountains of Alaska and Canada in one simple phrase, “Climbing mattered.” Krakauer wanted to feel, physically, what it felt to balance on the bladelike summit of Devils Thumb, “a huge fin of exfoliated stone, dark and smeared with ice.” Krakauer writes of the ascent,“You learn to trust your self-control. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.”
In the words of James Thurber, “All men should try to learn what it is they are running from, or to, and why.” But, sometimes running, like ascending a mountain, is the point.. The reason is tied up in the inherent and often maligned drive of transcendence—that place at the tip of Maslow’s cute pyramid where we are all trying to reach, but sometimes fail—or simply fail to attempt. Reuss, a young man who attempted the ascent, like McCandless, in 1912 never to return, described the lure of the wilderness much as Krakauer described the lure of the climb and McCandless the lure of the Alaskan trail:
“I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all, the lone trail is the best….I’ll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I’ll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.”
I think there is something exclusive between what is believed to be a normal social expectation of family obligations, obligations to others needs, and this deeper personal quest that cannot coincide always at the same time. This is what Krakauer called the “unbridgeable gulf” that can develop between people—in his case, between his father and himself—and it was the same for McCandless. Krakauer writes: “I believe we were similarly affected by the skewed relationships we had with our fathers. And I suspect we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of the soul.” Do these adventurers want people to worry about them, or are they just indifferent? This dismissal of family, the very people who claim to love you, to know you the best, who have been with you the longest and have cried for you the hardest, is perhaps the great enigma of the loner who seeks to shed the skin of his past—a skin not stained, but wet with the imprint of that family’s tears. McCandless wrote,
“Now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution….No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild. Alexander Supertramp.”
This self-destruction was part of his spiritual transformation—part of the character, Alexander Supertramp’s, mythos. To say that renouncing his family—or family in general—was Chris McCandless’s aim negates the process he ultimately came to realize. This can best be described as the circular wandering this author and Ken Kleight describe, of the need to become lost and then to return. Regarding Reuss, Sleight, a self-described “desert rat,” surmises an eloquent defense of this circularity,
“[He]…was a loner, but he liked people too damn much to stay down there and live in secret the rest of his life. A lot of us are like that—I’m like that…and it sounds like this McCandless kid was like that: We like companionship, see, but we can’t stand to be around people for very long. So we get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again….But him and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.”
Near the end of what McCandless believed was his stay in Alaska, he marked a passage from Tolstoy’s Family Happiness that moved him. Perhaps it spoke for Chris. I believe it bespoke his potential. It read,
“I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet, secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done for them….“[And] then work, which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor—such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps—what more can the heart of a man desire?”
Seems an about face, but it’s not.. It is McCandless the Traveler returning to something that he always had, and never lost.. It was the idea of family. It’s Horace the Mountainman recovering from his lung cancer to walk across the river and back to his home and family. Though the idea of family is often tainted and distorted as if it’s a far-away city envisioned from the midst of a hazy, baked desert, the real image is there. When the sandstorm clears and one walks a while, the reality of the concept becomes apparent in true transcendent al fashion. Once clear, the gulf subsides, as well, and the city—as well as its purpose—comes into perfect focus.
Krakauer concludes neither he nor McCandless wanted to die in their ascents, in their journeys home. The driving force to leave was simple, Krakauer writes:
“I couldn’t resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. The hint of what was in those shadows terrified me, but I caught sight of something in the glimpse, some forbidden and elemental riddle that was no less compelling than the sweet, hidden petals of a woman’s sex.”
The face of God has always been attractive to man, in all its glorious metaphors, and equally as repulsive. Just as that which drives us compels us to climb, wander, and meditate, it drives one to return to his community and be one with each the other.
I like to think that in Chris’s last days he read Tolstoy and realized the potential of what he could become, and that the smiling picture Chris took of himself in his last days bore the realization that he had come full circle, had realized the importance of family, and held tight to the dream that family would someday realize the importance of the travel. I like to think that his happy expression in that picture was an apology and a gift to his sister.
Carine, upon hearing of her brother’s death, said, “I wanted some answers from God, but I didn’t get any.” Her mother Billie decried, “I just don’t understand why he had to take those kind of chances. I just don’t understand it at all.”
Perhaps there is nothing of peace to offer a grieving family but the mythos that drives the travelers. It is a source of happiness beyond simple understanding. Krakauer’s book is extraordinary because he not only placed a spotlight on an otherwise ordinary traveler, he walked in his shoes and laid the groundwork for a deeper understanding, and dare I say appreciation, for those that want to break ground but can only pretend trailblaze. Sadly, sometimes our dreams cost us. But we cannot deny Chris died doing what he loved. His only regret, I am sure he came to realize, was dying alone.
*********************
Utilized and Recommended Readings
Wilson, J. & Richards, G. (2004). Backpacker Icons: Influential Literary Nomads in the Formation of Backpacker Identities. In, The Global Nomad: Backpacker Travel in Theory and in Practice. Channel View Publications: UK, Frankfurt.
Miller, D.E. (1977) The Wing-Footed Wanderer: Conscience and Transcendence. Abingdon Press.
Thoreau, H.D. (2007). Walden, or Life in the Woods. Castle Books.
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