My Writing Self

As Descartes almost said, existence is a slippery thing.

A trip to the theater will bring that idea sharply into focus. What you think you see on the stage when you see Othello entering Desdemona’s bedroom in the fifth act of Othello are two people, a man and a woman—real people with real Social Security numbers and real home addresses—dressed up to look like two other people, neither one of whom actually exists at all. But what is really happening has nothing to do with any of the above: what is actually afoot is that a playwright dead and gone from the world for a cool four centuries is somehow managing to overcome the natural limits of the possible to speak from the grave directly to the fully-alive people sitting in the audience. That’s a lot of people involved, only some of whom exist. Even that doesn’t sound that complicated, not really! But saying exactly how many people in that complicated equation are real is more daunting a task than it feels like it should be. Here’s a tip: don’t answer too quickly!

The actors exist, but their real identities are completely submerged under the personae of the characters they’ve been hired to play on stage. So they exist in some theoretical, yet fully invisible way. The characters in the play that the audience sees on stage are wholly fictitious: no matter how talented Glenda Jackson may be, she’s still not really King Lear, who, like Othello and Desdemona, is a wholly fictitious character. (Even Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a fictitious character, at least in the sense that the real man of Roman antiquity never said any of the lines the Bard put in his mouth. He didn’t even speak English! Ditto Antony and double-ditto Cleopatra.) That leaves the people in the audience and the playwright to consider. Shakespeare is dead. (He died in the spring of 1616, so it’s been a while.) But even if the play in question were to be by a playwright still among the living, that living person is not actually talking to anyone in the audience other than through the magic of his or her art, and is certainly not really present in the room in the way that two people engaged in direct, dialogic conversation have to be. So that leaves the audience. They, obviously, do exist! But it’s only they in this complicated pas-de-six that do so unambiguously and in a way that does not require elaborate explanation. No wonder I always feel so existentially exhausted after an evening at the theater!

What’s true about the theater is also true about the movies and about TV, which is why I find it upsetting when a character on the screen leaves the dramatic context in which he or she was conceived and in which that character solely exists to turn to the audience in the theater and speak directly to them. (Joan says this is a sign of being a crazy person, but I really do feel this way.) When the Kevin Spacey character in House of Cards, for example, turns to face the camera and address the audience watching at home, it’s at best confusing: the guy on the screen speaking to me isn’t the actor divested of his role in the show (since he’s still in costume and on the set, and he’s reciting lines someone else wrote), but he also isn’t the character he’s portraying (because he seems suddenly to exist in the real world that I myself exist in, which makes no sense since only one of us is real). No wonder I feel ontologically aggressed against when that happens—and, yes, I felt that way even when Matthew Broderick does the same thing at the end of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and, stepping out of the film but somehow not really into the real world, tells the audience that the movie is over and that they should all go home. (Or do I mean when Ferris Bueller does that?) You see why this is upsetting! At the very least, it’s confusing. But since I am someone who finds it upsetting to be confused, it all comes down to the same thing.

Why I don’t find third-person novels irritating is a good question. They too, after all, feature narrators who aren’t the author (since they live in the fictitious narrative and seem to be on the same existential plane as the people they’re describing, none of whom exists in the real world) but who also aren’t characters in the story (since they are rarely named or identified, and almost never play any sort of actual role in the plot as it unfolds). Maybe it’s precisely because they are such wan personalities, these all-knowing unidentified narrators, that I don’t find them that upsetting. But it’s also true that I generally like first-person novels much better: when Ishmael opens the book by turning to me, the reader, and telling me what to call him, I like him already. He’s not Melville. But he’s also not a voice-of-God narrator who magically seems to know everything about the story the author-who-is-not-him is about to tell. What Ishmael is, is a character in the book, and that is the case even if he seems able to transcend his own context and speak to me personally and directly. For some reason, I can live with that in a great book. And I feel the same way about Huck when he starts right in by telling me that Mark Twain only mostly told the truth about him in Tom Sawyer. And about Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. And, of course, about Scout as well. (Doesn’t everybody forgive Scout her non-existence and welcome her willingness to tell us her story directly as though we somehow actually could encounter each other on the same plane of existence?) So I’m a little inconsistent. What can you do? My favorites among my own stories are also all first-person narratives. But you probably guessed that already!

And now it turns out that the great stage of human folly and promise that is the Internet also features real/unreal players…and to an extent I hadn’t realized until just recently. There was a startling story just the other day in the Times, in fact, about the degree to which “virtual influencers” have become such a staple of digital advertising that it feels unnecessary to waste time wondering if they are people or digitized sales-avatars. (To see the article, written by Tiffany Hsu, click here.) I do realize that neither Betty Crocker nor Aunt Jemima actually existed either…and that they didn’t do so long before anyone could have imagined the Internet. But they were basically drawings on boxes who occasionally appeared in magazines to encourage the purchase of their products, not faux people with whom consumers could conceive actually of having a relationship with, of listening to, or of caring about.

And that brings me to my own avatar-issue. Because, for me personally at least, my writing self—for all it is obviously allied strongly to the real me—has also come, at least to a certain extent, to exist independently. And as June draws to a close and I conclude now my thirteenth year of writing weekly letters to you all, this seems a point worth pondering. (There has been a lot of room for growth too: this week’s is my 465^th letter since the first went out in the fall of 2006, a number that seems unreal even to me.)

To prepare the series of “best hits” among my letters that will appear during the weeks I’ll be in Israel, I’ve been looking through the files and noticing how my writing has evolved over the years…and how I myself also have in the course of all these weekly efforts to speak directly to my readers about issues that seem relevant and interesting. Without planning to do so in advance, I note how I return over and over to certain themes in my writing, trying always to flesh them out slightly more provocatively and to refine more accurately the precise way I feel in their regard. These themes—the nature of heroism, the symbiotic relationship of history and destiny, the relationship of Jewishness to Judaism, the flawed reasonableness of the democratic ideal, the relationship of church and state in America and in Israel, the sanctity of Jerusalem and the great adventure of owning property there, the ultimate compatibility of science and religion, the relentless vulgarity of so much of Western culture, and the specific way I have responded to specific books I’ve read and wished either to recommend or not to recommend to my readers—will be familiar to all. I’d like to think my prose style has evolved over all these years in a positive way. But more interesting, at least to me personally, is noticing how I have somehow evolved a writing voice that feels to me distinct from my preaching voice or my teaching voice, how the weekly commitment to writing these letters has allowed me to evolve an identifiable addition to my collection of other selves, how I have been able intellectually, emotionally, even spiritually, to evolve and to grow through the medium of these weekly letters.

I remember reading somewhere that you should never been pleased when someone you haven’t seen in ages attempts to compliment you by saying that you haven’t changed a bit in all that time. Life is growth! But growth requires a medium, a context, a setting. And you, my faithful readers for all these many years, have provided me with that setting, with that context. And for that I am truly grateful. 

I wrap up, then, this bar-mitzvah year of writing to you all with a simple wish: may God grant that we all have many years to write and to read, to agree and to argue, to allow the written word to function as the specific arena in which the ideas I put forward in these letters are allowed to incubate so that we can all together see where they go, and where we go as well. Whether there really is no noise when a tree falls to earth if there’s no one present to hear it is one of those high-school truths that feels hard to square with the way the physical world appears actually to work. But what I do know to be true, and unequivocally so, is that no written word truly exists without readers to read it, to test it, to respond to it, to react to the invitation to dialogue or to debate embedded in it. And that makes me very grateful to you all for the opportunity you’ve afforded me over all these many years to write and, because of you, to be read as well.

Awakenings

For some reason, I’ve always been drawn to Rip Van Winkle-style stories about people who fall asleep for one or many years and then wake up to find themselves in whole new worlds. First of all, there’s Rip himself—a fictional character who first made his appearance in Washington Irving’s collection of stories and essays, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., which came out exactly 200 years ago in 1819. The book has long since been forgotten by most, as unfortunately also has been its author: one of the true giants of American literature in his day, Irving has for some reason not joined the authors he himself encouraged in their careers—writers like Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—in the pantheon of American authors still read other than by people to whom their books have been assigned in American Literature classes. And he really was one of the greats! I believe that I’ve read all his stories, certainly most of them, and “Rip Van Winkle” is one of my favorites. His other still-famous story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” turned into a whole series of Hollywood movies—most memorably Tim Burton’s 1999 film, Sleepy Hollow—and television shows, is also a terrific piece of writing that deserves to be more widely read in its original format. But I digress: I wanted to write here about Rip van Winkle himself and not the author who dreamed him up.

The story is well known and easily retold. One day while wandering deep in the woods near Sleepy Hollow to escape his wife’s endless nagging, Rip runs into the ghosts of the sailors who in their day manned Henry Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon, and promptly joins them in a game of nine pins and in drinking a lot of liquor, whereupon he falls into a deep sleep. Then, when he awakens twenty years later, he discovers that his son is now a grown man, his wife has died, and that he missed the entire American Revolution while he slumbered away. He makes his peace with being a widower easily enough (the Van Winkles don’t seem to have had too happy a marriage), finds it more challenging to abandon his native allegiance to King George, and finally ends up settling in with his grown daughter as he tries to figure out the new world and his place in it.

There are lots of parallel stories to Irving’s tale. Third-century (C.E.) Greek philosopher Diogenes Laëterius, for example, wrote about a man named Epimenides who fell asleep for fifty-seven years and then had to negotiate an entirely new world when he awakened.  Jewish literature has its own version of both Rip van Winkle and Epimenides in Honi the Circle-Drawer, a wonder-working rabbi of the first century (or thereabouts) who fell asleep for seventy years and awakened to find a man tending to carob trees that Honi himself had witnessed the man’s grandfather planting just (it must have felt like) a day earlier. Other cultures have their own versions, but what makes them appealing—and also slightly terrifying— is the fantasy that this could possibly happen to us readers, that we too could possibly get into bed tonight, turn off the light, drift off into sleep…and then awaken not tomorrow morning but a century from now. Nor is it hard to explain why this is such an arresting theme to so many. We all like to think that the world is so sturdy, so substantial, so there, after all…and then an idea like this takes root and suggests that it’s all a chimera, all a fantasy, all an elaborate illusion played out against an equally illusory dreamscape, that what feels so real is only an elaborate set that the stage crew will take down the moment we breathe our last. And why shouldn’t the theater of life mimic the way things work in real theaters? The show closes, the crew strikes the set, the actors return their costumes, and everybody goes home. And, on Broadway, that is that! 

And now it turns out that it really is so that people fall asleep and awaken decades later. Some readers may have noticed a story in the paper a while back about one Munira Abdulla, a woman from a small town in the United Arab Emirates, who was in a terrible automobile accident in 1991 when she was only thirty-two years old. She fell into a coma, but was kept alive by her family in the hope that she might one day awaken. And she did just that, awakening, apparently on her own, after twenty-seven years. Technically speaking, Ms. Abdulla was in the state technically called “minimal consciousness,” which is less bad than being in a full coma (i.e., in which the patient shows no sign of being awake) or in what’s called a persistent vegetative state (in which the patient appears to be awake but shows no signs of awareness). It is, however, still extraordinarily rare for patients possessed of minimal consciousness simply to awaken.

It’s happened closer to home as well. Terry Wallis, for example, was nineteen when his pickup skidded off a bridge near his hometown in Arkansas, which accident left him in a persistent vegetative state. Doctors told his family that he had no chance of recovery. But then he somehow managed to move up a notch into the same state of minimal consciousness that Munira Abdulla was in. And there he remained for nineteen years, domiciled at a nursing home near his parents’ home. And then one day in 2006 his mother walked into his room, whereupon he looked up and said “Mom” out loud, the first word he had uttered in almost two decades.

Donald Herbert’s is a similar story. A Buffalo fire-fighter, Herbert was injured on the job in 1995 when debris in a burning building fell on him and left him in what doctors called a state of “faint consciousness” for a full decade. And then, in 2005, after a full decade of silence, he opened his eyes one day and asked for his wife.  

These are rare stories, obviously. Most comatose people—including people possessed of faint or minimal consciousness—do not suddenly wake up and start talking. Indeed, in every real sense, these people I’ve been writing about are the rare exceptions to an otherwise sad rule. But the fact that such people exist at all is very meaningful: even if the overwhelming majority of comatose patients do not spontaneously wake up, some apparently do. And in that thought inheres the huge problem for society of how to relate to the somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 Americans who exist in states of partial, faint, or minimal consciousness. Most will never recover. But some few may.

Many readers will remember Penny Marshall’s terrific 1990 movie, Awakenings, starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, and based on Oliver Sacks’ 1973 book of the same title. (Less well known is that Harold Pinter wrote a short play, A Kind of Alaska, based on Sacks’ book as well, which is often performed as part of a trilogy of the playwright’s one-act plays.) The story of the book and the movie (and presumably the play as well, which I’d like to see one day) is simple enough: a doctor working in 1969 at a public hospital in the Bronx is charged with caring for a ward of catatonic patients who survived the world-wide epidemic of encephalitis (specifically the version called encephalitis lethargica) in the 1920’s. The doctor, very movingly and effectively portrayed by the late Robin Williams, somehow has the idea to try using L-Dopa, a drug used to treat Parkinson’s Disease, on these patients and gets astounding results; the movie is basically about one of those patients, portrayed by Robert De Niro, whose “awakening” is depicted in detail. It doesn’t work in the long run, though; each “awakened” patient, including the one played by De Niro, eventually returns to catatonia no matter how high a dose of L-Dopa any is given. The movie thus ends both hopefully and tragically: the former because these people on whom the world had long-since given up were given a final act in the course of which they sampled, Rip Van Winkle-style, the world a half-century after they fell asleep; and the latter because, in the end, the experiment failed and no one was cured in anything like a long-term or fully meaningful way.

Why do these stories exert such a strong effect on me? It’s not that easy for me to say, but if I had to hazard a guess, I think I’d say that the concept of dying to the world briefly and then coming back to life to see what happened while you were gone is what draws me in. (Fans of Mark Twain will recall Tom Sawyer’s wish to be “dead temporarily.” But even Tom and Huck only manage to be gone from the world long enough to attend their own funeral and enjoy the eulogies they hear praising them, not to vanish for decades and then come back to life.) I’m sure there would be surprises if I were to go to bed tonight and wake up in 2089. Some would be amusing—seeing what model iPhone they’ve gotten up to or what version of Windows, or if anyone even remembers either—and some would be amazing: if the President of the United States in 2089 is sixty years old, then he or she won’t have been born yet.  But mostly it would be chastening, and in the extreme, to see how all the various things that seem so immutable, so permanent, so rooted in reality in our world, have all vanished from the world, as will probably also have all of the houses in which we live today, the banks in which we store our cash, and even the shore lines that mark the boundary between the wine-dark sea and the dry land upon which we live in safety or think we do. Depending on a wide variety of factors, that thought is either depressing or exhilarating. But in either event, it makes it easier not to sweat the small stuff or allow our own anxieties to impact negatively on the pleasures life can offer to the living.

I will bring all these thoughts with me as I prepare for Israel in a few weeks’ time because the Rip Van Winkle and Terry Wallis stories are Jerusalem’s own as well. The vibrant center of Jewish life for more than a millennium when the Temple was destroyed in the first century, the city was suddenly emptied of its Jews by its Roman overlords who renamed it and forbade Jews from living there. And yet…some small remnant always remained in place while the city slept. And then, just when the Jewish Jerusalem’s faint consciousness seemed poised to flicker and die out entirely…just the opposite happened as Jews from all over the world built a new city on the outskirts of the old one and breathed consciousness and life itself into its ancient alleys and byways. As the patient came back to life, she didn’t only re-enter history either—she began to be a player in her own story, stepping off the stage to become her own play’s playwright and director. It felt like a miracle then and it feels like one to me today too.

When I’m in Jerusalem, I myself feel my consciousness expanding and becoming in equal parts rejuvenated, reconstituted, and revivified. I never run out of things to do, to write, to read, to experience. I can’t imagine being bored in Jerusalem, even on a hot day in mid-summer when I could just as easily be on the beach in Tel Aviv. I love the beach! But there is something about the air in Jerusalem, and the light, that is the spiritual version of L-Dopa that Robin Williams gives his patients in Penny Marshall’s movie. Except that it doesn’t wear off with time and, if anything, only gets stronger and more powerful as the weeks I spend in Jerusalem pass one by one until the time comes to come home and begin a new year in this place we have all settled.