Life is Over

Although I make fun of them later, the second I walk out of a Robin Williams movie I love it, even the retrospectively horrible What Dreams May Come. I enjoy the song "I Will Survive," especially Cake's somewhat lame cover of it. I enjoy novels by Douglas Coupland that end in statements such as "I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love" (Life After God), and then move on to a hopeful immersion in the stream. I even enjoyed the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, when Captain Picard finally decides that life is too short and plays poker with all the young and hip members of the crew. All of these are pop-culture manifestations of one essential thing: the idea of moving on, of consolidating one's life, learning what is truly valuable, and getting on with the business of living. All of these experiences are cathartic: listening to The Wall and hearing him admit that he's been wrong and collapse into the arms of the bleeding hearts and artists is every bit as much an emotional purge as witnessing the noble Oedipus reduced to a blinded shell of a man or seeing a humbled and insane Lear shattered by the death of the daughter he has wronged. We are speaking in a different language today, but we are speaking about the same things as did the Oxford Standard Authors, simply because there is nothing else to talk about.

The question, then, is whether these artistic manifestations of the desire to move on with life represent anything, whether they actually correspond in any way to reality. My response tells me that they speak to something inside me, and presumably inside the other people who have enjoyed them throughout the years: this desire for conversion is something real. Whether it shows itself in the resolve never to let another member of the opposite sex take me for granted again or never to allow myself to lose my focus on what is really important again, the message is the same. We have made mistakes. We don't want to make mistakes in the future. After we see and know our mistakes, we cannot possibly do anything other than avoid them: Pink will never build a wall around himself again, the guy from Cake will truly save his loving for someone who's loving him, Captain Picard will be a social butterfly. Once we know what is truly good, no other course is possible except a pursuit of that genuine good: this is the kind of idea that has made Plato a pillar of Western thought. What none of these things truly do, however, is address the idea of actually living after this conversion. The series is over, the album is over, the song is over, the play is over: life is over when this conversion occurs, at least in the cases I have mentioned. That is why these pieces of art, though they speak to a very real desire in the human heart, are untrue.

What is the truth? That true conversion is absolutely impossible. We all have anecdotal evidence to back this up, but I'll stay with my artistic examples. Pink Floyd's trick of turning their albums into continuous loops is used to brilliant effect in The Wall: fully one minute of the final song is transferred to the beginning of the first song. The same Pink who moments ago would never make that mistake again is suddenly back on the path to making it, in exactly the same way. At the end of the Hebrew Bible, Chronicles follows Ezra and Nehemiah, the story of the collapse follows the story of the restoration, and a short segment of the restoration is tacked onto the end of the collapse: a different emphasis from Pink Floyd's work, but once the cycle is carried out a few times, there's no essential difference. In the same way, at the end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve walk out of the garden bravely, even optimistically, but Adam has already been treated to a complete history of the world, already knows that his own son becomes a murderer and that it only gets worse from there. People can have all the momentary epiphanies they want; Robin Williams can descend into hell to find his wife; Matt Damon can learn for the first time that it really isn't his fault. But at some point they will have to live, and once they begin to live, the only thing they can do is lose, and often lose in the exact same way. We are capable of nothing more, and no emotional high disguised as a purging of the intellect from all untrue and unhealthy ideas can change that.

This is the genius of American Beauty. In the last moments of his life, Kevin Spacey has learned that it is wrong to do nothing but take: he turns down the chance to fulfill his Humbert fantasy and he even turns toward thoughts of his daughter, acknowledging that he has failed her. And he is shot in the back of the head. Life is over. He has succeeded: he has lived to the full, in complete accordance with his conversion, until the end of his life. It is over, and he is perfect, and he carries his enlightenment into the next life with no chance of tarnishing it with the inevitable failure. He has lived a worthless, stupid life, a life in which he wants the least possible responsibility, in which all he does is smoke pot and lift weights, but he dies a saint, perhaps even a martyr. It is the same genius of American History X, where the aspiring young Nazi sees the error of his ways and is shot in the head, the same genius of the gospels, where the thief sees who is hanging next to him and soon has his legs broken and suffocates. Perfection is available only in death, because then it's over: everything has been determined, and change is impossible. Life is over, and that is beauty.

True perfection comes only in death. True conversion is utterly impossible for us. To be human is to fail and to lose, and convincing oneself that that failure and loss is anything other than failure and loss accomplishes absolutely nothing.