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The Myth of the Creative Struggle
Late-Night Thoughts from Sisyphus to Sinatra
Myths are made for the imagination
to breathe life into them.
—ALBERT CAMUS, The Myth of Sisyphus
I am sitting in the dark at my rolltop desk and marveling for a few minutes, as I do every night, at our view of Coit Tower at the top of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. The tower glows proudly, throwing light and mystery out over the city, making me think of the old engravings of the Pharos Lighthouse in ancient Egypt.
Moonlight pours into the room, falling onto a book that lies open on the desk, the exquisite Heritage Club edition of Ovid's Metamorphosis that I inherited from my father. The book still has the unmistakable smell of the well-crafted book, an odor of ink and glue that wafts forth each time it is cracked open. I pick up the book, slowly turn the pages, and feel an unexpected shock of recognition. The Hans Enri pen-and-ink drawings of the ancient gods and heroes bring back blushing memories of the first time I saw the lasciviously grinning Zeus, disguised as the swan, coiled around Leda, Once again I feel a pang of joy from simply reading off the pantheon of names in the table of contents: Daedalus and Ariadne, Actaeon and Artemis, Hades and Sisyphus. After all these years they are still powerful figures for me. I have often reread their exploits, which to me is like opening an old scrapbook full of memories of marvelous friends and family.
Each time I return to them I am surprised by how the ancient tales of sudden transformation force me to think about the strange changes in my own life.
Then I come across the story that has been a part of my own story for a long time. Just staring at the word Sisyphus is enough to make my shoulder ache. I can't even pronounce the old king's name without thinking about my own years of pushing the boulder up the hill. It is a living myth for me, vividly reminding me of my own youthful rebellion, my long struggle with struggle itself.
For seven long years after my post-college world travels I raged against the great dragon doubt. I had dreamed of becoming a writer since I was a boy. Other than fantasizing about playing right field for my hometown team, the Detroit Tigers, I never wanted to do anything else with my life. The problem was, as the poet Robert Bly gleefully pointed out in a poetry workshop I attended in the early 1980s, there are people who want to be a writer, and there are people who want to write.
“Which one are you?” he asked, scanning the faces in the room, busting half of us like a literary cop. In fact, I did want to write, desperately. I just couldn't. My years of voluminous reading and protracted travels had humbled and intimidated me into creative silence. I had a writing block the size of Gibraltar and twice as unmovable.
So I did what all self-respecting wannabe writers do. I read and read and read. For seven long years I painted Victorian houses around San Francisco (forty-four of them in all) during the day, and then back in my apartment in Berkeley I read until the wee hours of the morning.
Eventually I formed a little company with a friend of mine that we called “Painter's Palette,” which boasted the motto, “Custom Painting for a Classic City.” To keep my mind alive during the often numbingly repetitive work, I memorized reams of poetry, a litany of limericks, and a passel of French phases that I copied onto white index cards hidden in my overalls. At night, I stared at blindlingly blank paper in my old Smith-Corona typewriter. I saw myself as a paint-flecked version of the frustrated writer in The Shining, as demonically portrayed by Jack Nicholson. Not unlike him, I used to type hundreds of versions of the same short stories and poems, often without changing clothes after work, living on tunafish and beer.
The horrified expression on Shelley Duvall's face in the movie when she peeks at a page of her tormented husband's writing and sees the same sentence—All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy—repeated line after line, page after page, was a little too close for comfort when I saw it in the middle of my own enfeebling torment.
Regardless of how the writing was going, I eventually sank down onto the futon on the floor, picked up a book, and eagerly disappeared down the rabbit hole of another writer's work. During that dark stretch, I read well over a thousand books, some of them again and again, taking prodigious notes, cross-referencing them in large journals, and often writing short reviews of them. Desperate to write, but even more hungry to learn things that had just been hinted at in my wide travels, I had embarked on a kind of self-imposed Ph.D. program on the world classics. I started a novel, a movie script, an epic poem, dozens of travel stories, but all I had to show for seven years of work was the publication of two modest freelance stories in the local newspapers and a few poems in obscure journals.
No doubt about it, I was frustrated by my lack of progress, but proud of my rebellion against the dead-end life I had left behind in Detroit, as well as the traditional form of journalism I had studied in college. I reveled in my bohemian life, meaning a matchbox-sized apartment, an old car, few possessions other than books, and a life I fancied, of Joycean “silence, exile, and cunning.” I even grew to accept the frequent descents into depression and submersions in melancholia.
It was worth it, I told myself; it's just part of the creative struggle.
Finally, one night in the spring of 1983, during a period of increasing despair that often found me curled on the floor unable to move for hours at a time, my brother Paul called me from Pensacola, Florida. The first word out of his mouth was, “Help!” Then he laughed and added, “I've got a term paper due in my mythology class—in a week! Hey, bro,' can you help me?”
“One week?” I asked warily. “Well, what's it supposed to be about?”
“Hey, how am I supposed to know? No, just kidding. I think we're supposed to write about a myth that we think has some relevance today.”
Out of the blue, I blurted, “How about Sisyphus?”
“You mean the guy who was condemned to roll the boulder up the mountain forever? What's that got to do with us?”
“Yeah, same guy. I think you'd dig his story. I recently read an essay called ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ by Albert Camus, the French philosopher, and he said some things that are a helluva lot more interesting than the usual moralistic reading. Camus actually saw him as one of the first rebels, what he called ‘the absurd hero,’ a man who learned how to overcome his fate.”
There was a long pause on the telephone. I ran my fingers through my hair, as I do when I'm nervous, and they got tangled in clots of dried beige paint.
Silence. My brother was carefully measuring my words.
“How did he do that?”
“If I remember right, Camus said that Sisyphus was paying the price for a life of passion, and had learned to accept his ordeal, learned to love the struggle.”
As I spoke those words, I felt a tremendous surge of emotion. I suddenly knew I wasn't just talking about something that happened once, long ago, if at all. By chance, I realized in astonishment, I had stumbled onto a description of something permanent, eternal, in life, my own life.
“Paul, has your teacher told you how Salutius, the old Roman writer, described myth? He said myths were things that never happened, but always are.”
I remember trembling with excitement as I held the telephone. The air around me felt charged, as if after one of those green-skied electrical storms back in the Michigan of our youth. The hair stood on the back of my arms and my scalp prickled. The Camus phrase I had quoted— he “learned to love the struggle”—seemed to hover in the air like the last words of a great stage play. Not only did the ancients adeptly describe the problem; they also prescribed a way of dealing with it.
“That's great, Phil. If you can write down a few of those ideas just the way you told me, I'll do the rest.”
“Write it down?” I muttered, then thought to myself, Easy for you to say. But before I could say something I'd regret, I felt some resolve return to my voice for the first time in a long time.
“Sure, just give me a few days.”
For the next few days, I wrote down a flurry of thoughts about Sisyphus on the blank index cards I always carried with me to the painting sites. Around four o'clock, when the cold fog began blowing in from the Pacific Ocean and made it hard to hold onto our paintbrushes, I packed up and headed home, where I wrote until dawn.
By the end of the week I had a thirteen-page essay to send off to my brother. Afterward, I felt as if an enormous burden had been lifted from my shoulders.
I wouldn't know it for many years, but that serendipitous call woke me up from a long, potentially dangerous slumber. Writing about Sisyphus unleashed years of pent-up creativity. His story was my story; his struggle was my struggle. In those benighted days there was tremendous pressure on me from my family, from old friends and new, to become successful, famous, productive. It's the All-American way. If you choose the contemplative life, decide to drop out for awhile, it tends to trouble the people around you. One girlfriend confided to a buddy that I was “a diamond in the rough,” but she wasn't sure if she could hang around long enough to see me all polished. Another asked me, sotto voce, one day when I was going to grow up and get a real job.
However, I held out, stubbornly. Then one night, I got a package of old Life magazines in the mail from my father. Tucked inside one of them was a postcard asking me to tell him one more time exactly what it was that I was writing because his friends kept asking him what I was doing with my life. I had no idea what to tell him. How could I describe the uncanny feeling of being pulled forward by a dream, an image, a story, even my destiny, for so many years, but had somehow lost sight of it? Well, I couldn't. I sensed he was ashamed and couldn't come right out and say it. Hadn't he recently confided to my sister that he was afraid that I was throwing my whole life away? I felt like an utter failure after reading his cryptic note, and my heart sank like a stone. A stone rolling to the bottom of the hill.
The Shoulder to the Boulder
On a blistering hot day in the fall of 1995 I stood on a hillside overlooking the site of the mythical King Sisyphus' domain, the ancient citadel of Corinth. The old grounds looked as parched as I felt at the ungodly hour of high noon. I was leading a tour around Greece for the Joseph Campbell Foundation. Our Greek expert was an elderly professor named Adrianna. She found a bit of shade for us underneath a gnarled olive tree and began the session with a brilliant history of Corinth, but then delivered a surprisingly conservative version of the Sisyphus tale, tinged with a slight sense of condescension, as if telling a fairy tale to a group of schoolkids she was sure had never heard the myth before.
Adrianna may have had the best of intentions, to simply entertain the group for a few minutes in between the hotel, the ruins, and lunch, but I found her approach to be the kind that had earned mythology its reputation for being charming but irrelevant. Told like this, I thought to myself, a myth is a lie, irrelevant, untrue to the way people live now.
As I stepped forward for my turn to talk, the group shuffled around uncomfortably. A few of them took desultory photographs of the archaeologists at work in the ruins of the old citadel below. Adrianna nervously checked her watch, then clicked at it with her finger, as if to signal me that we were short on time. Remember, she was reminding me, we still have half the Peloponnese to see today.
Unwilling to be rushed, I leaned against the chained link fence that surrounds the excavations of the agora, then began by saying, “Many things change over the centuries, but the one thing that never changes is human character. That's why the old myths are still so fascinating to us today. They reveal the inner meaning of human life, what they used to call ‘the workings of the soul,’ the realm that defies time and space. As I see it, myths like this are metaphors for the dramas of our inward life, and the story of Sisyphus is a metaphor for struggle itself. On the outside, this is a tale of betrayal and retribution, but on the inside, the domain of myth, it tells us something about our attitude to struggle we can't seem to learn any other way.”
Slowly I spun my version of the myth.
Sisyphus, ruler of Corinth, regarded by Homer as the wisest and most prudent in his relationships with other mortals, was also, according to other ancient sources, rather a wise guy in his relationships with the gods.
One afternoon, Sisyphus chanced upon Zeus en flagrante delicto with the lovely maiden Aegina, daughter of the river god Asopus. Before Sisyphus could even conjure up any judgments, he watched as the mighty god abducted the poor girl. As one might imagine, Asopus, the god of flowing water, was inconsolable over her disappearance. Asopus was so distraught he approached the king for help. Sisyphus felt compromised between his loyalty to the gods and the truth he witnessed, but the cisterns of his citadel were dry. So Sisyphus risked everything by trading a divine secret for a perennial spring, chancing retribution for an act of compassion for his own citizens.
The fury of Asopus was so great that when he learned the true source of his daughter's sorrow, he went into a rage. The rivers around Corinth roiled. The banks overflowed, nearly drowning Zeus, who was hiding from his outraged wife Hera, and who narrowly escaped by disguising himself as a large stone so the waters would run off the slope of his back.
Zeus soon discovered who had betrayed his pawky little secret, and he turned to his brother Hades for help, hoping to render Sisyphus invisible by having him hauled down to the underworld. As usual, he wanted to get rid of all the evidence of his incorrigible philandering.
Once immured in the dark underworld, Sisyphus was restless and unwilling to accept the justice of his fate. As his name in Greek suggests, he is “the crafty one” who devised a clever ruse to chain Hades, the Dark One, to his own stone throne. Strange to say, with the god of death literally enchained, the gravediggers were out of work. No one was dying in the world above. This gravely upset Ares, the god of war, whose love of igniting the desire for battle in men's hearts was now thwarted. Zeus soon learned that he had been twice scorned by the pesky Sisyphus, and he reluctantly agreed to allow Ares to rescue Hades from his humiliating predicament.
Meanwhile, Sisyphus called upon Persephone, the half-time bride of Hades, cajoling her with a mournful tale of longing for his wife Merope (who is immortalized as the seventh—and invisible—sister in the Pleiades constellation) and the need for him to fulfill his duties as a husband and father.
“Let me return to Corinth for three days,” he pleaded. “I am a king. Let me arrange a funeral so my family can properly grieve.”
Persephone was either duped by this clever sob story or else simply empathized with a fellow soul who had been unfairly seized and sentenced. She agreed to guide Sisyphus out of the dank caverns of the underworld and back into the overworld, where Sisyphus paid his respects to his wife and family and the people of his kingdom. But once he had escaped the underworld, and as the ancients said, smelled once more the fresh air of the living world, he had a change of heart and refused to accept the terms of parole. When Hades came calling for him to return to the underworld, instead Sisyphus chose the “sun, warm stones, and the sea” to the hall of horrors awaiting him below.
Outraged, Hades dispatched the messenger god Hermes to collar the incorrigible one and haul him before the Judges of the Dead. For his hubris and his scorn, Sisyphus was condemned to suffer the seemingly most futile and hopeless of labors. In a shadow world of skyless space and depthless time, in a place echoing with the cries of the damned, Sisyphus was given the sentence of shouldering a stone—the very same size as the one Zeus took as his disguise to escape the wrath of Asopus—for all eternity, up the forlorn mountain slope in Tartarus.
At that point in the story, I took a long pause, sipped from my water bottle, and then opened up my copy of the Odyssey and read Homer's own description:
With both arms embracing the monstrous stone, struggling with hands and feet alike, he would try to push the stone upward to the crest of the hill, but when it was on the point of going over the top, the force of gravity turned it backward, and the pitiless stone rolled back down to the level. He then tried once more to push it up, straining hard, and sweat ran all down his body, and over his head a cloud of dust rose.
By now the group was rapt. They leaned forward to hear what would happen next, which is the point of all great stories.
This was the true vengeance of the gods, I told the group. Sisyphus was condemned for all eternity to shoulder the boulder up the mountain of hell, and all the while Hades would be watching for the look of despair that would mark the defeat of another mere mortal. But Sisyphus resolved never to allow the gods to see him defeated by despair. He silently vowed that because his fate was in his hands he could be superior to it. That is the genius of the mythic view of this complex image, that this, “the hour of consciousness” as Camus called it, is born out of the beauty that can be heard in the midst of our ordeals.
The myth of Sisyphus is a living myth, I concluded, because it reveals the inner meaning of our outer struggles. And who doesn't struggle? Who doesn't look for meaning in the everyday drama of their life? The myth personifies the notion set forth in models of drama, from Aristotle to screenwriter William Goldman, that growth comes through conflict, change from response to defeat. Moreover, it presages the marvelous thought of the Scottish poet Kathleen Raine about “the mysterious wisdom won by toil.”
The Terrible Beauty
When I finished there were a few flustered looks in the group, as they were pondering the apparent doom of our hero.
“Now don't despair,” I said, trying to be reassuring. “It's not as bad for Sisyphus as it may sound. Remember a living myth is inexhaustible, like great works of art or significant dreams. You don't just listen to Beethoven's symphonies once or look at Vermeer's paintings once or ponder a tantalizing dream once. You go back again and again. It's the same thing with the myths. If you delve into this myth you'll find something new about it—and yourself—every time. There is great pain, but also great beauty, even a rare kind of hope.”
When I was a boy, I told them, going to good old Wayne St. Mary's, a Catholic school run by the blue-and-white-robed sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Conception, they used this ancient tale as a warning. “Look,” said Sister Marie-Walter, “even the pagan Greeks knew better than to insult God. Look what happens when you disobey God. You have to spend the rest of eternity in the fires of hell!” It never ceased to amaze me how worked up those placid nuns could get over the prospects of eternal damnation.
I read the myth again at college, but it wasn't until my discovery of Camus' essay that its power truly touched my life. I described how it had been written at the outset of World War II, as a kind of manifesto for the absurdist movement, and that Camus saw his book as a summing up, “a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.” I admitted to the group that I had read it at a time when I was, as Rollo May describes the plight of Gatsby, someone groping for a new myth that could absorb his “ceaseless failure.” The problem was I didn't know it. Only after I had written about the myth and began to use it in various lectures about the creative life did I come to appreciate the strength of the myth.
I suggested that Camus' mythic vision was seeing how Sisyphus embraced his stone because he came to accept the consequences of his actions. As a man of passionate political convictions, he saw Sisyphus as a fearsome symbol of “futile labor,” but also as a psychologically complex image of transcending the monotony and melancholy of our tasks in life.
The group didn't look convinced, but I plunged ahead.
To some, the tale of Sisyphus may be the usual dish of deceit and retribution, I said, but I'm convinced that it is far more, a fable about the acceptance of one's burden, which makes it as relevant today as it was three hundred centuries ago. At the heart of this story is an image that points to a message that is at the core of the teachings of many great wisdom teachers from Epictetus to William James. It is the moment that Sisyphus watches the boulder roll to the bottom of the hill and turns to walk back down the hill.
“That hour,” I read out loud, from Camus' essay, “is like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”
I paused and quoted from memory Camus’ observation that “the price exacted from him for his betrayal of the gods,” he wrote, “was fair.”
What is implied here is that there is always a price to pay for our passionate convictions, whether we are pursuing love, art, or political change. In the end what matters is our attitude toward our burden.
I asked if anyone knew how Camus had ended his essay.
“Zeus gives him a pardon?” somebody joked.
“He escaped?” someone else suggested, hopefully.
“Hades allowed his wife to have conjugal visits?”
“No, no, nothing that easy. Remember that at the time he wrote this Camus was afflicted with tuberculosis and the Nazis had occupied France. He had no illusions about the struggles of ordinary people. Still, he found a remark in Sophocles' play about Oedipus that he felt revealed the secret Greek attitude toward fate: ‘Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.’ Camus then writes, ‘That remark is sacred,’ and concludes with the stunning thought that One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
I paused for a few minutes and we shared some refreshments. Our Greek bus driver triumphantly showed us the trick of slicing open a watermelon so it pops open like a sprung flower, and the group drank gustily and savored the juicy fruit.
“I think everyone who has a creative urge,” I tried summing up, “from poetry to gardening—can find some solace in this story. It's a great antidote to the reigning myth in our culture that there is only one ascent up the mountain—to marriage, money, or success. That's the kind of fairy-tale thinking that makes it difficult to accept the inevitable descents back down the mountain. And we wonder why we're afflicted with massive depression.”
I wiped my brow, and took another sip from my water bottle, then pointed to the sharply rising mountain beyond the town of Corinth and suggested that the story of Sisyphus may have taken a strong hold on the imagination of the ancients because they could go outside everyday and visualize their ancient king pushing his boulder up the subterranean mountain that was a mirror image of the one in their own world.
But the story carries on, like the voice of the goddess Echo herself, I suggested, because it teaches us something every generation has to learn for itself: It's not what happens to us that matters; what matters is our attitude toward what happens.
At that point, Mary, one of the members of the group challenged me. “Are you suggesting that suffering is noble? I'm an artist and I'll tell you right now that suffering is no fun.”
“The story doesn't ennoble suffering, it ennobles struggle,” I answered carefully. “I'm not saying that suffering is noble, I'm saying that struggle is inevitable and those who learn to perceive it as an obstacle rather than a burden make life a lot easier for themselves. The image of Sisyphus climbing and descending, climbing and descending, seems to echo the basic oscillation of life's backward and forward movements, owing to the diffusion of energy.
“Now it may be heresy to say this in these success-obsessed times, but even failure is noble—if you keep going. I think that's what the story is telling us. It reminds me of the old Australian toast, ‘Press on, regardless.’ Or Thomas Edison's admission that he was the most successful inventor in history because he had the courage to be history's greatest failure, meaning he never allowed defeat to crush him, only to spur him on to try a different approach. I'm saying that I find that the power to resist despair allows us to keep going. That's why writing or painting or composing never gets any easier for real artists. They keep on going back up the mountain, but by different routes, different challenges.”
I paused, and looked for the ghost of Sisyphus on the slopes of the distant mountain, then concluded, “What does it mean to suffer? Wasn't that the great question in the story of Job in the Old Testament? There is no final answer to that parable, as there isn't, can't be, in the myth of Sisyphus. The only answer to the constant question of life and death is your answer, my answer. Remember these stories are mythic images, attitudes not theories, and as far as I can tell, attitudes of awe and wonder.”
Mary sighed and looked away. Something had been nudged inside her, an old image, maybe even her previous personal myth about the creative life.
“Having pushed the boulder up the hill for a long time,” I said, “let me just say that I find a lot of unexpected comfort in this story. I don't find writing getting any easier. Who knows? Maybe it's because I push too hard. But I have learned something invaluable from this story—that the secret of the creative life consists in taking the next step, doing the next thing you have to do, but doing it with all your heart and soul and finding some joy in doing it.”
I paused for a moment, then remembered some lines I had once written down on an index card and taped to my typewriter.
“Henry James described the task of the creative life as well as anyone ever has,” I concluded. “He wrote in his exquisite short story, ‘The Middle Years’: ‘We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’”
When I had finished, our Greek guide stunned me by clapping robustly, and not just to get us back on the bus. Her eyes positively shone with delight, and she said, “I've known that story since I was a girl, but I've never thought of it that way, you know, psychologically.” She paused, looking for the right words in English. Her hands brushed hair out of her eyes, and she added, “I didn't know you could do that to a story. Interpret it, I mean.”
She rooted around in her purse, took out a notebook, and asked me with great earnestness, “Now tell me the name of that French philosopher again.”
Metaphors We Live By
The myth of Sisyphus is more than a cautionary tale that embodies an important realization about ordeal. It is a metaphor—like the stories of Hamlet, Faust, and Quixote—for what the psychologist Robert A. Johnson calls “the evolution of consciousness.” They are the spiritual descendants of Sisyphus. Quixote, the idealistic rebel, is incapable of accepting authorities he cannot see or respect, and he will not accept defeat. Hamlet, the incurable brooder, reveals our capacious ability to live in the dark underworld of anxiety and loneliness. In Faust we see the first modern man who makes peace with his shadow in his soul and does not wait for redemption by the gods, but instead redeems himself by forging his own consciousness.
Together, these modern myths are not just great literature but antidotes to the denial of struggle and the dream of unending, upward, soul-denying progress. In the rich imagery of these Sisyphean stories we find a number of immortal truths. We do have a chance to overcome ourselves, the story says, our phantoms, our persecutions. Quite possibly it may be the only way to find happiness. As the pilgrims walking to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, or the Shikoku poet's shrines in Japan will tell you, it is only through overcoming an ordeal that we are able to find meaning that touches our souls. Wasn't it Leonardo da Vinci who said, “Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields stern resolve”?
I think too of René Daumal's allegorical novel Mount Analogue. In this story of mountain climbers on a mythical island, he writes,
You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. In climbing, take careful note of the difficulties along your way: for as you go up, you can observe them. Coming down, you will no longer see them, but you will know they are there if you have observed them…. There is an art of finding one's direction in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
In Rembrandt's 1652 etching, Faust in His Study, he renders the moment of inspiration as an epiphany, the sudden shining forth of light in the midst of darkness.
Mythically speaking, Sisyphus tells us that to “know” means seizing our fate from the zealous and jealous gods and goddesses—though all hell may break loose, as rendered in the image of Hades flinging off his chains after being freed by his brother Ares. His story may have ancient echoes of the sun's rising and falling, and may even be an echo of a much older tale about the soul breaking free of the cold clutches of death itself. It could be the model for the urban joke about knowing when you're in midlife: You've climbed to the top of the ladder and found it's against the wrong wall!
But for me the power of the image is that it captures the timeless moment when all of us who are trying to break free from the chains of “Death” (read: Depression, Melancholy, Hate, Negativity, Defeatism, Jealousy) have struggled to reach the top of the hill and felt that moment of elation of dropping our burden at our feet.
Read metaphorically, the stone is the potentially crushing weight of being unable or unwilling to leave behind our troubles, our resentments, our grief. The stone is heavy because we won't let go of it. The sorrow of Sisyphus is the weight of our melancholy and the resentful attitude toward our burden on the descent into our soul.
As part of the wisdom literature of the world, the myth of Sisyphus tells us that our descent into darkness, the inevitable realms of pain and disappointment, holds out the possibility of rapture, happiness, if we understand the crucial difference between suffering and struggling.
“We shall descend, descend, everlastingly descend,” wrote Jules Verne at the end of his mythic novel Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The question is, What will we see when we reach the bottom of the sea of life? Will we have the courage to rise again?
“He who fears he shall suffer has already suffered,” said Montaigne. The reason the myths and literature are full of suffering is that we are still searching for a way to understand it, deal with it, learn from it, grow with it. The emphasis on entertainment and escape is an avoidance of the descent and confrontation with mortality that our soul longs for. What the great wisdom tells us is not to fear suffering, but to be afraid of meaningless suffering.
“Although the world is full of suffering,” Helen Keller said, “it is full also of the overcoming of it.” The Buddhists say, “When the heart is big enough, it will absorb (and eliminate) suffering as a river absorbs salt.”
To understand how, it helps to look at the dark with new light.
The Mystery of Duende
In 1938, the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca delivered a spellbinding lecture in Havana. His topic was the ancient gypsy idea of duende, the mysterious dark spirit of the Earth that he believed infused the souls of poets, imbued the hearts of bullfighters with courage, and injected the “black sounds” of the very ground of Spain into the flying fingers of guitar players. At the heart of his talk was an unforgettable image.
Years ago, an eighty-year-old flamenco woman won first place at a dance contest in Jerez de la Frontera. She was competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists supple as water, but all she did was raise her arms, throw back her head, and stamp her foot on the floor. In that gathering of muses and angels—beautiful forms and beautiful smiles—who could have won but her moribund duende, sweeping the ground with its wings of rusty knives.
Once. The old flamenco dancer stamped her foot once on the dance floor. But she stamped with the authority of the lived life. She had lived through dark times and she had loved and she had survived. “A mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains,” as Goethe described the core of Paganini's genius.
The image resounds.
The mythic imagination is an “endarkenment,” bringing us down from our inflations and flights of ego, connecting us, like duende, to the dark and nourishing powers of the Earth and our own souls. Myths are the original soul stories, showing us, as my mentor Joseph Campbell used to say, how to live “with joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.”
The Ultimate Struggle
During World War II the Austrian psychologist Viktor E. Frankl and his wife were imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Like all incarcerated couples they were separated the moment they entered the grounds. For the entire four years of his imprisonment Frankl did not know his wife's fate, but he thought about her constantly, fantasized and dreamed about her, talked to her and wrote imaginary letters to her. He writes in his ambrosial memoir, Man's Search for Meaning,
What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us…. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment…. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny….
When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way he bears his burden…. The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life.
One morning, Frankl was assigned to work in a trench. Something happened that helped him endure what he called the “ghastly moments” of camp life. We never know when and where the epiphany will come.
The dawn was gray around us; gray was the sky above; gray the snow in the pale light of dawn; gray the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and gray their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in the distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable gray of a dawning morning in Bavaria. “Et lux in tenebris lucet”—and the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.
As Northrop Frye noted in The Educated Imagination, “There's nothing new in literature that isn't the old reshaped.” I see in Frankl's account of his descent into hell of Nazi internment a modern parallel with the ancient story of Sisyphus, not in the literal plot or depth of horror, but in the richness of psychological insight. With courage and clarity, Frankl describes not only what happened “on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp,” but what happens, from one generation to the next, from the slaughtering fields of Troy to the burning villages of Kosovo. Like the unknown authors behind the original myth of Sisyphus, Frankl shows us that the will to transcend one's circumstances can be the difference between life and death, literally and symbolically, and in so doing creates the terrible beauty of a modern myth.
Instead of ennobling suffering, ancient and modern myths illuminate struggle by telling stories about the mysteries of change. This distinction needs to be made in every generation, or there can be tragic confusion between the two. It came home to me in dramatic fashion in the winter of 1988, at the end of a long day in an editing room. My close friend Yasha Aginsky and the director Judy Montelle and I were watching the rough cut of her film about the surviving members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the Spanish Civil War. For the umpteenth time we were searching for the “through line”—the dramatic thread that would help us finish, and maybe even give us a title we had been looking for for months.
The spools of film wound around the old editing table. When we reached the interview with Ruth Davidow, a nurse during the war, she said something that suddenly revealed the soul of our film. Speaking of her involvement in the war with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, after being involved in so many other fights against fascism, Ruth looked heavenward, as if pleading with the gods, and asked plaintively, “I said, here we go again. Someone up there don't like me! But then I thought, wait, life is a constant struggle. There is no other way.”
Ruth smiled mischievously and we knew at that moment we had our through line and eventually our title: Forever Activists: Stories from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
A few years later, I was watching Hasten Slowly, a stirring documentary about one of my favorite author-adventurers, Laurens van der Post, whom I had long admired for bringing worldwide attention to the plight of the Bushmen of the Kalahari. I was so struck by something he said I had to pause the VCR and rewind it.
“The Bushmen storytellers talk about two kinds of hunger,” van der Post remarked. “They say there is physical hunger, then what they call the great hunger. That is the hunger for meaning. There is only one thing that is truly insufferable, and that is a life without meaning…. There is nothing wrong with the search for happiness. But there is something greater—meaning—which transfigures all. When you have meaning you are content, you belong.”
Elsewhere, van der Post has written, “Art, poetry and music are matters of survival. They are guardians and makers of the unbroken chain of what's oldest and first in the human spirit.”
They do this by reconnecting us to soul.
The Healing Forces of Myth
In the early 1990s I came across an essay in The New Yorker that deeply influenced my view of the relationship among art, history, and politics. The article was written by Lawrence Weschler and focused on the early round of hearings of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands. This was the first such session since the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. In admirably even-handed prose Weschler describes a lunch with an Italian judge, Antonio Cassese, who had been serving as the court president for two years. Cassese coolly revealed for Weschler “some of the more gruesome stories that [had] crossed his desk, grisly accounts of torture, rape, mutilation, especially those of Dusko Tadic, one of the most notorious war criminals.”
Weschler writes, “I asked Judge Cassese how, regularly obliged to gaze into such an appalling abyss, he had kept from going mad himself.”
The judge's answer astonishes.
“Ah,” he said with a smile. “You see, as often as possible I make my way over to the Mauritshuis museum, in the center of town, so as to spend a little time with the Vermeers.”
Weschler was deeply moved by the inspired choice the judge had made in dealing with his duty to daily gaze into the face of evil. Coincidentally, Weschler had been making his own pilgrimages to see the Vermeers at the Mauritshuis museum, as well as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and had discovered some remarkable parallels between Vermeer's era and ours. In seventeenth-century Delft, where the painter created his luminous portraits, life wasn't as peaceful as might be expected from the serenity achieved in his work. Instead, it was a time riddled with war and natural calamity, including a fire that nearly destroyed his hometown. As the Dutch empire expanded around the world, life in Holland was devastated by social unrest, and Vermeer himself was tormented by the financial woes of raising twelve children on his meager earnings as a painter.
To explain the trial judge's intuitive use of painting as a healing balm, Weschler cited the epigraph by Andrew Foyle in Edward Snow's definitive study of Vermeer:
In ways that I do not pretend to understand fully, painting deals with the only issues that seem to me to count in our benighted time—freedom, autonomy, fairness, love.
The Name of the Stone
On the wall next to my writing desk I have hung an oak-framed print of Vincent van Gogh's Haystacks. It represents one of my fonder family memories. What makes the print special is that it was a gift from van Gogh's nephew to my father after my dad escorted him on a V.I.P. tour around the fabled Ford museums and factories of Detroit in the early1960s. As if illustrating the current Myth of the Web of Life, in which everything is connected to everything else, and everyone is within “six degrees of separation,” the print provides a unusual link to an artist whose life and work have been profoundly important to me.
For me the print is a mythic image because it symbolizes the origins of a significant ritual in our family. Around the time of my father's meeting with van Gogh's nephew, he also came to know the son of the painter Auguste Renoir as well. My father relished telling us of his encounters with these men, acting like a field soldier returning from battle and describing how the generals had touched his lapel one cold morning. Soon after he began to disappear after dinner nearly every evening into the cool confines of the basement. There he would spend hours cutting clippings out of art magazines and pasting them into scrapbooks for himself—and me. For three years running my birthday presents were scrapbooks filled with magazine clippings of famous painters, mostly van Gogh and Renoir.
My eyes rove over the painting's golden slumbered fields. Once again, I feel the rare sense of serenity this painting has always given me, all the more moving because of van Gogh's lifelong struggle with poverty, physical pain, and social exile. Favorite passages from his collected letters to his brother crowd my mind. One favorite line comes from a description of a painting he'd done of a ploughed field that shone violet under a yellow sky and yellow sun: “So there is every moment something that moves one intensely.”
I gaze at the furrowed road in the painting for several minutes. What was my father trying to tell me? Curiosity washes over me like a waterfall. This canvas is painted with almost ineffable affection for someone in such pain, and the courage it took to render so stupefies me. Then I recall the plaintiveness in the voice of a letter Vincent wrote to his brother Theo while describing a small cottage at the end of a road: “I am trying to get at something utterly heartbroken.”
Gazing deeply at the painting, I am convinced that my father, stuck in the modern mythic world of “men in gray flannel suits,” was describing his own deep identification not simply and sentimentally with artists in agony, but with artists who transcend their pain with the courage to create beauty in an often grim world.
This ability is what I think of as “the name of the stone.”
In the myth of Sisyphus, the stone that Zeus transformed himself into is exactly the same size as the stone that Sisyphus is fated to push uphill through all eternity. In the poetic picture language of myth, Sisyphus' decision to risk the wrath of the gods is in exact proportion to his burden. The beauty of the soulful imagery is that Sisyphus transforms fate into destiny when he realizes that the weight of that burden will be measured on the scale of his attitude toward it.
Sisyphus in London
We've all met modern versions of Sisyphus. My first encounter with him was in the spring of 1975, in London. The struggle I witnessed there has haunted me ever since.
I had been working for several months for the Park Lane Cleaning Services to earn my passage to Greece and Israel and Egypt. Cleaning flats was an alternately fascinating and humiliating way to pay for continuing travels, but it did pay better than the demolition work I had already tried. Besides, I could work as many hours as I could handle, as many as ninety a week.
After four months of mopping floors, making beds, and polishing silver, my bags were packed for Cairo and only one last job remained. Fortunately, out of all my clients, who included the goalie for the Chelsea football team, the conductor for the National Philharmonic, a dentist working undercover for Scotland Yard, and a famous madam, the Harringtons were my favorite. They were an unusual bohemian couple for the Notting Hill Gate neighborhood they lived in. Mr.Harrington was a professor of economics and history at the University of London, an ex-M5 agent, and a brilliant classical pianist. Mrs.Harrington was an English literature teacher. For sixteen weeks I had gone to their flat every Sunday morning and been greeted with a cup of tea, chocolate biscuits, and the family wooden cleaning kit. I would set to work vacuuming, watering plants, and scrubbing floors, while Mr.Harrington would play Mozart's sublime 21st Piano Concerto on the grand Steinway in his private library of several thousand books and dozens of exotic works of art from their travels through India, Africa, and Asia.
Those mornings were my introduction to the glories of Mozart, the genteel life, and the devotion of two cultured people. I was mesmerized by the way they treated each other with respect and deference, trading anecdotes from their week, and asking each other for hints to the answers to the London Times crossword puzzles.
On that last Sunday morning, I heard the horses clopping in Hyde Park as I pushed the buzzer of the intercom on their apartment building door. Where I had always heard the opening chords of the piano concerto, this morning I heard a raucous charivari of sounds, as if piano movers were moving the piano across the room.
“Yes, yes, whoever is it?” came Mrs. Harrington's voice over the intercom. Her voice was troubled, constricted.
“It's Phil—”
“What? Didn't the agency ring you to tell you we canceled?”
“No, sorry. I didn't call in this morning”
The Burghers of Calais, by Rodin, in the gardens near the Parliament Buildings, London. A modern Sisyphean image of freedom wrested out of bondage and beauty out of struggle.
“Oh, my, my.” The intercom went dead, then her voice came back on.“I suppose you might as well come up, since you came across town. But you mustn't stay long.”
The door buzzed and I stepped inside to the vestibule of the apartment building, but rather than wait for the open-cage lift to descend, I bounded up the three flights of stairs to their apartment, passing a neighbor in her dressing gown, who muttered to me as I passed, “The woman is an absolute angel to put up with that man. The way he carries on. It's just not done!”
Mrs. Harrington was waiting for me, adjusting her headband, and the brown corduroy overalls she always wore on Sunday when we cleaned. She took my jacket and hung it for me on their antique coat rack.
“There's something you must know,” she began.
I tried to wave her off, as if to say Don't worry, but it was too late.
Her face was carved in agony; tears misted her eyes. In her trembling hand was a glass of sherry.
“Mr. Harrington doesn't know you're coming—”
“Emma, Emma, love. Where are you, my dear?” cried Mr. Harrington in a scotch-slushed voice from the library. His footsteps shuffled across the well-worn wooden floor. “Who goes there, love?”
He appeared, drunk as a fiddler. Up went his arms in a wassailing greeting, spilling his whiskey all over the floor.
“Phil, Phil, my lad,” he slurred. “How good of you to come. I was afraid you would forget to come around to our commodious abode on your final day in London before your peregrinations around the Mediterranean. Bienvenu, mon vieux.”
I was stunned. Mr. Harrington had always been the paragon of reserve and genteel behavior, as far as I knew.
Mrs. Harrington seized me by the arm and dragged me inside and past her husband. She whispered to me, “Just an hour, then away with you. Please.” She was humiliated, and just this side of terrified. She pulled her black woolen sweater tightly around her, and I had the startling image of her as the uncertain Persephone accompanying Hades down into the underworld.
“No work for you today, lad—” Mr. Harrington cried out. Underneath the jolly facade, though, I detected a strain of grief I'd never seen before.
“Desmond, please, love, I can use the help, even if you can't.”
She dragged me away from him and into the kitchen and began to talk uneasily as she loaded me up with her well-burnished wooden box of cleaning equipment. “Since you're here, I want you to understand because I know you are fond of each other. Tomorrow he will be positively shattered that you saw him like this, but he will have to deal with it.” She led me into their bedroom and began picking up his scattered clothes. “Meantime, you should know our arrangement.”
I began making their bed, and my ears reddened as I heard her stress the word arrangement, which struck me as doubly odd because this morning I could still feel the heat of their bodies on the bedsheets and pillows, smell the Glenlivet in the open bottle on the bedside stand, hear the dripping of the shower in the nearby bathroom.
“I told him donkey's years ago that I would leave him if he did. But he insisted on a compromise.” Her voice caught. “So during the school year,” she said, as she hung up their clothes, “he swears to me that he will not touch a single drop of alcohol. But during the school holidays—like Easter this week—he can drink, if he must.”
She pulled her hair back with her hand and sighed, then took a furtive drink from a flask. I tried to appear busy by brushing the velour curtains with a Victorian lint brush.
“We usually hole up here in the apartment all alone until the holidays are over,” she continued, “hermetically sealed away from the world, as it were, for these binges of his. It is just too difficult to explain his struggle to people if we go out. No one would understand. Everyone would misinterpret—”
“What about you, Mrs. Harrington?” I interjected.
“Oh, my word. Not to worry,” she sighed. “I drink to keep the poor man company. Although I detest the whole business.” Years later, I thought of her when I came across Nietzsche's line that “a labyrinthine man never seeks truth, only his Ariadne.”
Suddenly we heard the professor's stumbling steps, then the crash of a vase, followed by a hiss of curses, and moments later, the long slow burble of liquor over ice cubes.
“Are you mad at him?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.
“No, don't be daft,” she snapped. “Look, I'm terribly sorry. I'm not angry with him for drinking himself silly,” she said. “I actually admire him for not drinking the rest of the time. You must understand what prodigious self-control he displays for months on end, and what courage it must take to keep his demons at bay all that time, all the while eyeing the liquor cabinet.”
We moved down the hallway, dusting the family photographs on the wall, and I asked whether he'd ever broken down while university was in session.
“Once. Twelve years ago. He was to teach a class on the War. A lecture on Rommel's campaign with Montgomery in North Africa, I believe. He got dreadfully pissed before the class and tried in vain to lecture. They tell me it was frightful. He could hardly speak a word. The students were mortified, really, for they adored him. The poor dear was warned by the university, which promptly put the fear of God into him.”
Again, there was an ominous silence and worry about what would happen next.
“Anything else I can do for you? Mrs. Harrington?” I asked, anxious to leave.
We began to put the cleaning equipment away into storage.
“Actually, it's not the drinking that bothers me as much as what he's still hiding from me after forty-four years of marriage. Whatever it was that he experienced during the war—well, he refuses to talk about the whole ghastly business. All he ever says is, ‘It's all quite hush-hush, love.’”
She spun away from me in tears, leaving me alone in the shadowy hallway. I stepped tentatively into the library to say good-bye to Mr. Harrington. He looked up from the piano bench, where he was slumped over trying to find some sheet music. Shakily, he got up and approached me and surprised me by handing me a crisp five-pound note, a half-day's wages for me in those days.
“Here, here, take this, lad,” he said, warmly. “Have a drink on me in Cairo, will you? Then keep going. See the world now while you can. You have the right idea. The girlfriend at home can wait. See the world, but see it smart. Careful of the con artists along the road and all the louche travelers, especially the Germans. They're the ones to worry about, the lost souls who pretend to be sophisticated. And read, read, read, lad, as you go. Don't be ignorant. You've been blessed with strapping good health and time—so here, take this and this and this,” he said, piling a number of travel books onto the table next to me. I fingered the leather bindings of his first editions of Lawrence Durrell, Freya Stark, and T. E. Lawrence.
“Oh, and one last thing before you go,” he added.
“Whatever you like, sir.”
“I would like you to polish the Steinway before you take your leave.”
His voice was mellow, tender, hinting at sorrow and apology.
I nodded and returned with the box of supplies whose handle was worn down by years of use and slipped like a leather glove onto my hand. The soft light of noon now dappled the dark black wood of the piano. I took a clean cloth and the wood polish and removed the sheet music from the top of the piano. The lemony odor filled the room like the memory of a lost world.
Slowly, deliberately, I spread the polish in long, interlocking spirals, like the carved spirals in an ancient megalithic tomb, then, playfully, in swirling round dots and slanted beams, like the notes on the sheet music that were before me now.
Carefully, I brought the wood to a bright sheen and I could see Mr. Harrington's face gleaming in it, his glass of scotch absolutely still in his hand, his eyes filled with tears.
He sat down on the bench, placing his drink reluctantly on the piano top in front of him. He stared desolately for some moments, then with considerable effort he raised his hands above the eighty-eight keys to his life. They hung in the air like a matador's hands holding his cape high, daring the bull to charge. On his face was one of the strangest expressions I've ever seen in my life. It was as if he was peering at the ghost of Mozart glaring at him from the sheet music, admonishing him for his disrespect.
Then, he rubbed his eyes, and slowly his hands descended to the keys. Tenderly, he began to play, and out floated the first few sublime notes. The unfathomably beautiful music lifted across the room. I watched the professor play with utter affection, and something he had confided to me months before slowly came back to me.
“I would like to die with the word Mozart on my lips,” he said, “like Mahler did.”
I closed my eyes as the music seemed to hum in my swirling fingertips, and the loneliness of the hour turned inside out with something like joy enveloping the room.
I left him that way, a half-hour later, in a Mozart reverie, and never saw him again.
However, I've thought of him often. For the past twenty-five years it has been a ritual of mine to play Mozart's 21st Piano Concerto on my stereo every Sunday morning. With the first trilling of piano notes I am transported back to London and the sight of Mr. Harrington at his beloved Steinway, mustering up his courage, filling his aching heart with joy. His show of bravado that cold London morning all those years ago helped me understand that Sisyphus lives on. He lives on every time a struggling soul spurns despair and accepts the inevitable struggle of his or her life, and in so doing, creates what Camus unforgettably called “the hour of consciousness.”
Where many have seen grim retribution in Sisyphus trials, I see dogged resolution; where others have seen fatalism, I see silent joy. There is a celebration of freedom interwoven into this ancient tale, the celebration of having connived the burden of one's fate right into one's own hands.
“I see that man going back down,” Camus wrote, “with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end.” Yet, by forging dignity out of his struggle he learned to say, like Sophocles' Oedipus, “Despite my ordeal, all is well.”
In mysterious ways like these I have slowly learned that you have to practice happiness, the way Mr. Harrington practiced Mozart. Every morning you go back to the bottom of the hill and start all over, one note at a time.
If Sisyphus Gould Sing
As exalting as the myth of Sisyphus might be, it can be a disturbing metaphor for courage, rebellion, or the creative struggle, even the loneliness that haunts the American dream.
Unless we delve still deeper.
It's after midnight. I look up at Coit Tower the very moment that the lights flicker off. It's time for my late-night walk around the neighborhood. I shuffle down the hill to Caffe Italia and order an espresso. While mulling over my manuscript I notice a young Italian couple, dressed to the nines, arguing outside on the sidewalk, tussling about what all young lovers argue about moments after the bars close. She is looking for love; he is looking at seduction. She's not convinced, and is going home alone. He's not defeated so easily, and smoothly grabs a half-dozen roses from the passing flowergirl who's working late tonight and slips her a fiver. But his date has already hailed a cab and is gone in a fingersnap, leaving him standing in the cold fog, flowers wilting in hand.
Dazed and disappointed, loverboy shuffles into the cafe and walks straight to the jukebox. In a thick accent, he asks the owners, Giuseppe and Daniella, “Got any classical music, you know, Sinatra?”
“An Italian café without Sinatra, you gotta be kidding me?” says Giuseppe, throwing me a “what are you gonna do” look.
The thwarted lover slips a fistful of dollar bills into the jukebox, takes off his Armani coat, and sits down at a table next to the window. Staring out at the mournful fog, he listens to the lovelorn saloon singer crooning his back-from-the-edge-of-the-abyss ballads. For the next hour The Voice, as he's often called in the neighborhood, spins out that old black magic called love: “Saturday Night Is the Loneliest Night,” “Autumn Leaves,” “Only the Lonely,” “In the Wee Small Hours,” and the young Italian gazes outside, his heart breaking, slowly sipping his espresso, listening to the silky sounds. Eventually, he starts tapping his foot, snapping his fingers, as the moody hits keep on coming: “I Thought about You,” “All or Nothing at All,” and “Summer Wind.” I recall the words of the great music critic Murray Kempton, after Sinatra died: “He was just this little guy telling his story.” Three-verse stories, Kempton called the songs, that reflected an undying belief in eternal love, no matter how heartbroken you are.
By the time the jukebox plays the inevitable last selection, “One for the Road,” a smile is curling over the face of the smitten lover. When the last piano bar notes have faded, he throws his coat over his shoulder and strides out, inexplicably stronger, into the fogbound night.
The Healing Game
No doubt music is a healing force, even a “healing game,” in the words of the great bluesman John Lee Hooker. But once in a blue moon we can see evidence for its strength as myth as well. The night with the café jukebox is a prime example for me of the often-surprising sudden appearance of myth in ordinary life. It also illustrates what can happen when myths collide. That night showed me how the myth of love and romance can go bump in the night when it slams up against the great American myth of loneliness. But as often happens in myth, the question and the answer are found within the same image, the same story.
According to the ancients, Apollo graced Orpheus with a lyre, which he used to enchant wild beasts and make stones and trees moves.
When in doubt, go back, back to the beginning, say the Old Ones in the myths.
That is what I did when I got home the night around the café jukebox. Acting on sheer instinct I opened up my father's battered old copy of Homer's Odyssey, and sure enough, I discovered that Sisyphus had not been totally abandoned by the gods. He was granted one grand consolation. As he labored with his stone, he could hear exquisite music from the flute of Orpheus.
As Sisyphus in the ancient underworld found solace in the sweet sounds of Orpheus' flute, so too we are helped in mysterious ways by the power of mythic music, whether in the records of Miles Davis or the notes of the anonymous saxophonist playing on the lonely street corner or fire escape.
In his inimitable poetry, Homer wrote, “Poor Sisyphus could hear the charming sounds that ravished his ear.”
Imagine the implications of that line. The divine detail is subtly placed. This is no mere coincidence. What it reveals to me is that we can more easily bear our burden if we listen closely for the music of life all around us, the music that is there for the listening, for the solace, for the triumph over our troubles.
For as long as we know music has healed mind, body, and soul. In our own time singers from Billie Holliday to Judy Garland, Ray Charles to Elvis Presley, have often worked in the old tradition of the wounded healer. Their voices soothe the savage beast of modern life. During the past fifty years one of the most effective antidotes to the corrosive burns of lonely urban life has been the tenderly tough voice of Frank Sinatra. His story is an American saga. It begins with the myth of the Italian immigrant, is encrusted with the legends of his beginnings on the road and with Tommy Dorsey, inflamed with the reputed connections to the mythic Mafia, and is even, as journalist Pete Hamill writes, inflicted with “the sorry narrative of the Fall,” the fall from grace and subsequent resurrection.
All of these elements are there in The Voice. As music was the ultimate consolation for him, so it has been for millions of listeners, the voice of reassurance that if he could turn suicidal despair around, so can we.
The myth of Sinatra, like the myth of Sisyphus, is elegiac. It is the soulfully persuasive story of coming back from the dead, as Sinatra did after his disastrous marriage to Ava Gardner and his subsequent bouts with suicidal depression, with music that signals the triumph over fate of heartbreak. In this music, as in great blues, there isn't the slightest pretense of conquering pain and sorrow forever, like you get in escapist movies or confectionery pop songs. Instead, you hear the voice of conviction that the only road back from heartache is to love again.
The mythic message from Sisyphus to Sinatra is that only love can conquer death. Sisyphus risked everything for the love of his wife, of fresh air and light and warm sand, and for his citizens, so they could drink fresh water. Sinatra risked everything to go back into his pain because he believed that music was the best healer, the most sacred thing in his life, the only way to turn pain into beauty.
That Old Black Magic
After the smitten lover left the café that night, I remember approaching the jukebox with something like amused reverence. I have heard memorable concerts at some of the greatest venues in the world, from Paris and Vienna to London, the Baths of Caracalla, the Met in New York. But rarely have I felt the tangibility of music as I did that night in my local café listening to Sinatra's bluesy soulfulness.
So I slipped my own dollar into the jukebox and listened once again to Sinatra's healing game song, “Only the Lonely,” his “Slide on over the couch” cry from the heart from a tender tough guy to his girlfriend. I heard the song as if for the first time, this time as the voice that had tamed the dark shadows along a lonely avenue, a voice to answer the emptiness when there are no words left, only music to express the movement in the heart called courage that will help us back up the hill of love and life one more time.
The existential myth of Sinatra may be the soundtrack for urban loneliness; some say his is the voice of the century, but its power lies in its storytelling as well as its power of music. The isolation of life in our cities has been a generally agreed upon price for the myth of individualism that rules the culture, but it needed a story, a voice. As singer Julius LaRosa told the New York Times after Sinatra's death in 1998, “Sinatra was able to turn a 32-bar song into a three-act play.” With what rock star Bono called “swagger and attitude,” Sinatra did more than give urban life a voice, he mythologized it, made our loneliness and our struggle seem sacred, and triumph possible. The source of that conviction may be found in something Sinatra once said about his early influences, the main one being the old family standup Philco radio. “The music on the radio was our religion,” he said, “it was even shaped like a cathedral.” In tribute, Bruce Springsteen once described Sinatra's music as “synonymous with black tie, the good life, the best booze, women, sophistication, [but] his blues voice was always the sound of hard luck and men late at night with the last $10 in their pockets and trying to figure a way out.”
“Don't despair,” Sinatra replied to Bill Zehme when asked about dealing with defeat. “You have to scrape bottom to appreciate life and start living again.” Talking to journalist A. E. Hotchner in 1955, he said, “Me. I did it. I'm my own worst enemy. My singing went downhill and I went downhill with it…. The only thing that can hurt you is yourself.”
In other words, he made music out of the struggle that is at the heart of life.
It may be a lonesome old town, we may feel blues in the night, but there is some old black magic in the dark that we can turn into light.
The secret is the way you wear your hat, which must be done by lowering one shoulder and raising the other, as if to say you've been to hell and back and you can take on any burden the world wants to throw at you.
At Sinatra's eightieth birthday party, Springsteen gave him a mythic tribute from the stage: “On behalf of all New Jersey, Frank, I want to say that, brother, you sang our soul.”
The myth endures. Music saves our soul. “To sing,” writes Joan Baez, “is to love and affirm, to fly and to soar…” and indeed, “Beauty exists, but must be hunted for and found.”
Many Stories Deep
The world is in utter darkness without stories. We need the courage of the heartbroken man at the top of the mountain to turn and go back down and turn his sorrow into joy. We need to hear the music he heard. We need his stories.
We are like wandering Aesop who discovers he must tell his stories night after night if he wants food or shelter. There is only one way to survive his never-ending travels, and that is to transform everything he sees into a story so soul-satisfying for his hosts that they will gladly feed him and give him a bed. So he learns to turn the enigmas of the day into the fables of the night. Some strangers just bring news and gossip from the down the road; the storyteller dares to bring more.
We are like the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales who are reminded by the innkeeper at the Tabard Inn to tell one story on the way to the cathedral and another on the way home. He has seen and heard travelers come and go for years. He knows that the journey is incomplete, not even a bona fide pilgrimage, without the stories that try to glean meaning from the chaotic incidents along the way.
The Greek fabulist Aesop depicted by the Spanish painter Velázquez (1599–1660) as an itinerant storyteller bearing an old leather-bound book from which he will read his fables and so earn his bed and bread for the evening.
But not just stories will do. The soul demands more.
“Don't be satisfied with the myths that come before you,” said the Sufi poet Rumi seven centuries ago. “Unfold your own myths.”
By that I believe the poet meant to retell them in our own words, mold their lyrics to our own will and purpose—as one music critic described the genius of Sinatra—find what is intimate and personal and meaningful in them.
If we do, we may learn that the eternal struggle from the depths toward the heights “is enough to fill a man's heart,” as Camus concluded, gloriously.
Out of the struggle with ourselves, from the fire in our souls, comes the thing that never existed before—the music, the art, the words that make life endurable, and more, creative and sublime.
