The Eyes Have It

I have spent the week writing about emotional turmoil, and I am ready for a release. Unfortunately, art and life cannot be separated in practice, and one always balances the other. A written high often precipitates a lived low; writing about grief builds a pressure that begs me to live its catharsis. The inner and the outer worlds interflow: ultimately, they are one. I must balance a book internally, while also balancing it against my own life. I wobble about balancing two worlds at once. My girlfriend is a saint.

The difference between a good writer and a great writer is that a great writer lives out what he writes, and then writes what he lives. Tim Winton is a very good writer, but not a great writer. He has written essentially the same book several dozen times over the last few decades, which indicates to me that there is a ceiling to his self-analysis. He writes up to the same level of discomfort. His books don’t dig deep enough into him to precipitate a change.

Goethe, by contrast, was a great writer. The difference between Werther and Faust is immense. Goethe seemed to come at his writing with a question - the writing answered the question - he lived the answer, until living brought him to a new question. The Sorrows of Young Werther is about the sickness of obsession with one’s own projections. It is about the futility of wanting to possess that which blesses us - the delusional self-absorption of trying to possess the spirit. From what I understand, the book disgusted Goethe, and he spent the next ten years working on the war commission at Weimar, as well as overseeing the construction of mines and highways, and acting as the Chancellor of the Exchequer. As far as I’m aware, he barely wrote a fictional word in anger.

I sense that I am coming to my Werther moment. I have one book to finish, one book to write, one book to publish, and one book I suspect I will leave open-ended for a while. Then I will have exhausted the subject of my life. All of my books until now have been about balancing the inner world with the outer. I sense we live in a painfully unbalanced world, and my life and writing for ten years have been about trawling back through my upbringing, and bringing it into balance. But now I feel balanced. I feel myself emerging from my chrysalis. New desires are emerging: a desire to speak and be heard, a desire to dig my oar into the substance of the world. At twenty-one I was exhausted and disillusioned; at thirty-one I have dug a channel to the stuff of life. For the first time in my life, I feel confident in myself.

The book I am writing is about Tommy, a young man on the cusp of life. The book starts with him rejecting the formulaic life offered him by society, discovering love, joy, and creativity. Slowly he realises that creativity in itself is no end, or rather that creativity is not something that can be pursued in isolation. There is no glory in churning up a shallow private pond. One must cut deep enough into life that fresh springwater bubbles up. Creativity is the urge to dance with life; it is the opposite of escape. Tommy, in a way I have not yet worked out, has to fuse creativity onto life in the world.

There is a reconciliation coming. Tommy will drive off with Damien (his roommate, a figure of uncompromising idealism) to see Tommy’s grandfather, the only character in the book who is wise. I don’t know what Tommy’s granddad will say. I think it’s something about living close to life: that one does not find meaning by chasing after stars, but by being so intent on one small part of the galaxy that you sink into it, and universes explode out the other side.

Damien has one more speech in him. He has already had his climax in the book - he invited himself to Tommy’s work dinner, then made a speech lambasting Tommy’s older colleagues for having the eyes of rats. And it is true. If you look at a lot of powerful men and women, you do not see lions; you see rats with megaphones. Some prominent Australian politicians even have murine features. If you look into the eyes of conventionally successful people, often you will not find successful eyes. You will find eyes trapped in a face; fear, agitation, dread. Then occasionally, just wandering through life, you meet someone with eyes like pools of bliss. Damien’s life advice is to find the eyes you would like to live behind, and learn from the person who owns them.

So one does not find success simply by pursuing the trappings of life. One does not find success by being ‘better’. That is a challenge I am facing now. I see friends shooting to prominent positions, buying cars and houses I may well never be able to afford. I feel myself longing to be acknowledged as a person of tremendous importance, but I sense that’s a dead-end. It’s better, perhaps, than being unimportant, but it’s not everything I long for. In itself it is only a consolation. I want something more than just esteem; I do not reject success, but I also must be mindful of not putting the cart before the horse.

I think we all long for the fullness of life. In India they would call it Shakti, which is sacred energy. Wealth is Shakti (Wallace Stevens famously said that money is a kind of poetry), health is Shakti, creativity is Shakti, love is Shakti, breath is Shakti. We want to feel the amplitude of life. Many people long for their youth back, because their youth was full of life. But there is no natural law that says we should not feel more Shakti as we age; only that it is not in our body. Our material society denies us the full breadth of experience. Colin Turnbull reported that the pygmies of Africa found it absurd that Westerners consider childhood the most joyous time of life - what was the point of life, they asked, if not to be ever more joyful?

But there is no joy in merely escaping a stupid society. I have met many people in spiritual communities all around the world who had the eyes of the trapped. Spirituality must be honest, and unfortunately many people pollute it with undigested psychological problems. And spirituality solves those problems, but slowly, and only if one wants to solve them. I myself find a tremendous anger in me: an anger against symbols of repression. I have found myself in recent years feeling furious about anything that embodies pig-headed commitment to stifling mediocrity - furious to such an extent that sometimes I have to scramble to remind myself of the good qualities of the people or things I am angry at. The anger finds vent at doctors, institutions, inflexible old people, news stations, the police, etc. I feel the anger, left to its own devices, would happily destroy my life. I feel I could sabotage anything. I would happily ruin myself in an act of defiance. Then again, I am aware of this anger, so I can work with it. It will unfold. It has validity, and it is a tremendous Shakti. In a way, it exults me. Many people get addicted to their anger as they grow older, because it is the only part of them that remains intense.

I am contemplating two quotes for the inside cover of my book. The first, by Mirabai, is the one Damien is rooting for: “Don't forget love: it will bring all the madness you need to unfurl yourself across the universe.” The second, by Marie-Louise von Franz, is probably more Grandpa’s tune: “It's easy to be a naive idealist. It's easy to be a cynical realist. It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.”

I have met a few men in my life who were really men in the way I would like to be a man. Or rather, I have met the parts of myself. I think that the man I would like to be is what I am trying to explain in the character of Grandpa. He is capable and composed; he has met the challenges of life squarely, and advanced beyond them. He is Jung’s “modern man.” But he is also possessed of a deep inner joy, a profound and mystical love, an inner commitment to God and beauty, which radiates from him like a perfume of bliss. Outwardly, he is extremely sober. Inwardly, he is a drunken devotee. His centre is unified, and within. I have seen all these parts, over the years, in different men I have met. I suspect the point of my life is to put them all together, and make them one. You will judge my success at this by looking into my eyes.

Ramana Maharshi