Danke

Growing up I watched a lot of Indiana Jones movies and read a lot of history books, because I was an energetic boy, and most energetic boys, no matter how peaceful and loving they may grow up to be, tend to be fascinated by fighting and wars.  The “great war”, a misnomer if I ever heard one, was World War II, because it was the clearest battle between good and evil ever, even though the “good” in that fight were pretty good at being evil too.  Whatever it was, WWI, WWII, or Indiana Jones, the Germans were the bad guys.  Once I remarked on how Indiana always fought the Germans, and my sister said, “The Nazis, he fought the Nazis.  Germans are different.”  Then she told me that we were actually related to Germany, because our Grandma Barbara had German heritage.  I thought that was the coolest thing ever for some reason.  When I was fifteen we got a German exchange student named Linda, who was awesome, and always correcting my sarcastic limited world view.  Then my sister’s obsession with languages brought her to the study of German, and then the study of charming German boys, and eventually Germany, where she met her future husband the night our grandfather died.  I thought that was a magical sign even back then, but she and her husband are very reasonable and rational, so they like the words “chance” and “timing.”  Whatever it is, that’s what bonds them and made their love work in the first place, so I’ll leave it up to them to explain how it happened.  

I first visited Germany when I was 21, a few months after they met.  It was my winter break in college, and Germany was even colder than Ithaca, New York.  If you know Ithaca, that’s saying something.  I had a great time at New Year’s watching all the drunken Germans shooting roman candles out their windows while other drunken Germans shot fire crackers in the street.  Folke cheered me on as I danced with and kissed a woman on the dance floor later that night, especially after it turned out she was clearly in her 30s.  Later in the visit I went out for a delicious German beer with Folke, one-on-one, and talked about the future.  I was really worried about making my mark as a writer soon.  He’s five years older, and was still a graduate student at the time.  He thought it was hilarious because I was so young.  Looking back, that is hilarious.  I had no idea how much I had to experience and learn and practice.  Besides that, I was very depressed by Germany because it was so cold and gray, and it turned out that my new winter jacket my mom had given me for Christmas was actually an autumn coat.  On top of that, I read R. Crumb’s illustrated Kafka on the flight there, and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch on the way back.  Sorry Burroughs fans, but I just didn’t get that one.  And Kafka wasn't exactly an uplifting cultural entry point for central Europe.

The next year I moved to New York City and got my hands on my first amazing German writer, Hermann Hesse.  I read Siddhartha, about an Indian man who goes on a spiritual quest to experience everything he can.  I think I finished it on the subway riding north to Washington Heights before attempting to walk Manhattan from tip to tip, which is all eleven miles from north to south, the best spiritual pilgrimage I could think of at the time.  I gave up at 14^th street because I realized it was already 9 pm, I was out of clean clothes and the Laundromat closed in an hour.  Lame, I know.  I finally completed it two years later with my enthusiastic cousin Dan, and we finished it in four hours.  I recommend it to any resident of New York.  You get a sense of just how amazingly diverse that city really is.

But before I did that, I still had to get through my first year in New York, and to do that I had to read a lot.  Thus my second Hesse masterpiece, Steppenwolf.  It’s about an intellectual who feels like an outsider and just can’t get in step with a modern world that appears consumed by shallowness and poor taste, and has to learn to “listen to the radio music of life.”

There was once a man, Harry, called the Steppenwolf.  He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the Steppes.  He had learned a good deal of all that people of a good intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow.  What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life. (Hesse 40)

At the beginning of my third and final year (for now?) in New York I read one of my favorite thinkers of all time, the German Carl Jung.  I loved him instantly, regardless of how much my pre-med friends trashed his inability to “prove” his ideas when we read him in Psych 101 freshman year.  I read Memories, Dreams & Reflections, which he wrote in his 83^rd year after a lifetime of studying the human mind and all of its strangest phenomena.  It finally felt like someone had lived what I was going through, even if his field was specifically psychology:

What we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis, can only be expressed by way of myth.  Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science.  Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an individual life. (Jung 3)

We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct.  Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives.  If we had, we would know everything—but at most that is only a pretense.  At bottom we never know how it has all come about.  The story of a life begins somewhere, at some particular point we happen to remember; and even then it was already highly complex.  We do not know how life is going to turn out.  Therefore the story has no beginning, and the end can only be vaguely hinted at.  (Jung 4)

Toward the end of the year I decided to go on a huge adventure in Asia.  I didn’t care where, as long as I went somewhere new, faced challenges and found magic and mystery along the way.  Maybe I’d meet my soul mate, maybe I would die.  Who knew?  As long as I made it out alive, I would have a story and a soul that had grown.

Nevertheless it may be that for sufficient reasons a man feels he must set out on his own feet along the road to wider realms.  It may be that in all the garbs, shapes, forms, modes, and manners of life offered to him he does not find what is peculiarly necessary for him.  He will go alone and be his own company.  He will serve as his own group, consisting of a variety of opinions and tendencies—which need not necessarily be marching in the same direction.  In fact, he will be at odds with himself, and will find great difficulty in uniting his own multiplicity for purposes of common action.  Even if he is outwardly protected by the social forms of the intermediary stage, he will have no defense against his inner multiplicity.  This disunion within himself may cause him to give up, to lapse into identity with his surroundings. (Jung 343)

Three years ago today I was in Germany.  My sister lives in the hip part of East Berlin, Prenzlauerberg, with her excellent German husband, Folke.  They were two weeks away from getting married back at our home in New York.  I had been traveling on my own alone for over half a year when they greeted me at the airport in Berlin.  They were the last faces I saw at the airport in New York before I left, and they had been totally encouraging and positive about the whole thing.  The last face I saw was my sister’s, glowing and dancing and singing, “Ben is so great!” which I needed more than ever as I entered the great unknown on my own.  I had no idea what I was in for.

They were also the first familiar faces I saw over half a year later when I flew to Berlin from Cairo.  I’d just come from a star-studded night in the Sahara Desert and a mystical experience at the pyramids in Egypt, which involved absolutely beautiful music from two of the greatest Germans ever, Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven.  I had finally found contentment, within myself.

After six months away from everyone I knew and anyone they might have possibly known, I completed my magical mystery tour of the east and was back in the land of reason and rationality.  If my sister hadn’t read me all those damn Beatles biographies on inescapable car trips down to Baltimore in the Nissan Quest, I probably never would have tried pot, mushrooms or LSD and begun to view the world less rationally and more mystically, not to say I had abandoned the former.  The world’s opposites hold it together.  You can’t express emotion without some sort of technique.  After all, a pyramid combines the mystic imagination of three and the rational square of four.

My sister and her husband, who I love and respect very much, have a very different view of how the world works, and are very skeptical of most things related to the words “magic” and “mystical,” mostly because they associate it with organized religions oppressing people and limiting responsibly harnessed imagination that can benefit the quality of humanity.  I understand that, but I don’t like missing out on any quality, wherever it may be.  Ironically, back in the day, as Grandpa Simpson would say, I was the one with a haircut “you could set your watch to,” always arguing for logic and reason while my sister wore her hair down to her waist and wrote creative offbeat hippie poetry.  Now she writes a blog using academic language and a lot of technical terms regarding equality and gender issues, and I go wild with magic mysteries.  At least Emily has a loved one to share her views.  I’ve only got Carl Jung and other mostly dead men expressed in a wisdom packet:

Rationalism and doctrinarism are the disease of our time; they pretend to have all the answers.  But a great deal will yet be discovered which our present limited view would have ruled out as impossible.  Our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity, and there is therefore a wide field for minor and major deviations.  In view of all this, I lend an attentive ear to strange myths of the psyche, and take a careful look at the varied events that come my way, regardless of whether or not they fit in with my theoretical postulates. (Jung 300)

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The last movie I watched with my dad before I hopped in the car and drove west to California in my German "Wagen Wheel" was Good Will Hunting:

Sean: Do you have a soul mate?

Will: Define that.

Sean: Someone you can relate to, someone who opens things up for you.

Will: Sure, I got plenty.

Sean: Well, name them.

Will: Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Frost, O'Conner...

Sean: Well that's great. They're all dead.

Will: Not to me, they're not.

Sean: You can't have a lot of dialogue with them.

Will: Not without a heater and some serious smelling salts.

Sometimes I identify with Will.  I’m not a math genius, and my dad didn’t beat me, but I spend a lot of time figuring out the world, working in jobs that don’t help me realize my full potential and living in rough places, whether it’s on the ground or where people call the cops to sort things out.  And I’ve got a lot of demons that I think are my fault.  I saw something in the pyramids, and even though it was in my own mind, since I was participating in reality, I knew that my imagination was at least partly responsible for everything experienced by humankind…

“The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.” -Nietzsche

As my travels have shown me, the world can be a pretty horrible place.  Emily and Folke know that, and not just because they live in the place where some maniac almost succeeded in wiping out an entire human race.  They’ve experienced the pain and the loss and the bigotry and intolerance.  Where’s the magic God when all of that goes down?

Maybe my sister and I balance out the universe with our continuously trading viewpoints.  The Tao of the world always at work.  We’re very similar compared to those outside our family, but we’re both so good at arguing and contradicting each other that there’s always another point of view.  Back then it bothered me because I was fresh off my amazing journey, but looking back, what better place to embrace the positive and negative which unites all of space?  Germany is the home of Adolf Hitler and Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse and Otto Von Bismarck, Carl Jung and the Berlin Wall.

Regardless of world views, Germany gave us Bach, Beethoven, Linda, Folke, their families and all of their friends, continually adding joyful characters to the lovely human symphony that never ends.  And they all bloomed in a magical land where there is something instead of nothing, which is easily the greatest miracle of all.