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What Wills Will Not: Randomness As Muse
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 12/25/03
The other day
I was in a bookstore, thumbing through yet another of the endless books on how
to get rich quickly, & I was struck by the notion that the real impetus to
foist these sorts of scams upon people was not only about trying to rip people
off, but to try to assuage people that ‘luck’ or ‘randomness’ is not as
pervasive as we all know it to be in our lives. I believe this is also 1 of the
pillars of religious nonsense, but the urge to deny or diminish randomness is
spread across the whole of modern life.
This book had
the typical advice to eschew hard work & indulge in hedonism, do not get out
of debt, but in debt. Now, this will not be an essay on economics, but any
financially intelligent person knows that these schemes are just that. Most rich
people are rich by happenstance, not through any real ‘accomplishment’ of
their own. Bill Gates stole computer code from rivals, then crushed his
competition- has he really contributed anything to the world that will outlast
his lifetime? No. Oprah Winfrey- for whatever reason- cored in to a tv niche
& stuck- is this evidence that she’s a particularly insightful
interviewer? No. Pro athletes make it out of pure luck? Think Michael Jordan was
the best basketball player on the planet? No. He was lucky enough to avoid major
injuries, be in the right spot when scouts came a-calling, & be drafted by a
team in a major market. If any of those things had not been his net worth would
more likely be about $200, not $200 million. Think of all the Infomercial &
online scam artists who try to sell you things or ways to improve your life. Do
you think Julia Roberts is the best actress or prettiest woman on the planet?
No. Are there not actresses better than her in 1 or both categories? Sure. But
circumstances simply got in the way.
We all know
people for whom little goes wrong, & when the wrong stuff hits they easily
turn it into something good, anyway. My best friend Joe is 1 of these people- be
it in his profession, marriage, or personal life, little ever seems to slow him
down- even though the man (& I love him) has the motivation of a ground
sloth. I, on the contrary, am full of drive, & need it merely to tread
water. This has been true in my love life (pre-marriage), my working life, &
certainly so in the arts- despite manifest excellence I live just skimming above
life’s hardships, while poetasters like a James Tate, Adrienne Rich, or Maya
Angelou make 6 figure incomes from teaching, granting by friends, & paid
lecturing. Is this envy? No. Just a recognition of the truth.
We obviously
know life is not fair. Most of us would settle for it not being malicious. But
most of you reading this are not in either boat occupied by me or my pal Joe.
The ratio of failure/success to your own personal habits is fairly consistent.
Where it really starts to frustrate is when you deal with people who seek
to have ‘influence’ in life. For most homo sapiens this is accomplished
merely by breeding. We’ll hope our kids or grandkids do something noteworthy.
But political leaders, scientists, thinkers, & artists, are that breed for
which (amongst the best) there awaits a posthumous fate. The innovations made,
& barriers forced outward become examples that inspire future generations of
innovators & rebels who slowly help lug the rest of society’s useless
weight along with them. But, to a degree, randomness infects even this realm of
person & activity. I’m a great poet & writer, & it’s usual for
those people great at certain things to eschew praise by modestly stating it was
hard work that helped achieve those things. This is not entirely true. For
example, as of this writing I’ve been to well over 1200 or so poetry events,
encountered 5-6000 poets, heard 3-4 times as many poems, & from all that can
state there were probably only 3 or 4 dozen people who I think had as much or
more raw talent than I did as a poet. Of that, none has come close to me, &
only a few have ever maximized their potential. I’d like to say, or think,
that the others’ failures were solely based upon their lack of will &/or
initiative, for it would portray me as not only superior in making, but also in
intangibles. Yet, I know that things happen that can distract. The very reason
I’m a great poet rests on many factors, 1st off deciding on trying
poetry to woo a high school heart throb of mine, then discovering Walt
Whitman’s poetry & knowing I could do better. My blasé love life also
played a part. Had I married when young & reproduced I probably would not
have the time to practice my art. Had I been a little better off, financially, I
may have gone to college & never pursued writing, etc. All of these myriad
things which have nothing to do with skill or will had to have happened for me
to achieve my current status. But, I do realize that without the will I would
not have gotten great either. But that will is merely another dependent &
contingent part of life. By itself it is not enough to guarantee success- no
more than Oprah’s ability to fake concern, or Bill Gates’ anti-worker
abuses, would be to guarantee their successes.
At a more
obvious level, how is it that someone like heiress/vapid blond/tramp Paris
Hilton has such an easy life while millions of far more worthy human beings duke
it out every day with the real world? It’s luck- pure & simple. There is
no reason to things. Life just is- the key is to keep moving. If you only have a
1% chance of success, better to do the shark thing, keep moving, & increase
the odds of getting there. But that increase is only a shot, just as raw talent
only increases your odds in life’s crapshoot, just like being born with
physical beauty increases the odds on happiness- but it’s no guarantee. But,
let me return to the idea of ‘influence’. This is what most people who can
think (a small but debatable %) desire in their life. Let’s also look at the
nubile Miss Hilton- reportedly worth in excess of $300 million dollars. Since
she has little real world experience the chances of that $ ever doing any good
is negligible. Give me 3% of that & I’ll change the poetry world forever.
I believe my verse & influence will do so in the long run, anyway, but big $
could speed things up by decades- + allow me to introduce more great writers
into the culture. But, what happens? $100 million is thrown down the crapper in
a grant to a magazine that has not published anything of worth for nearly 40
years- Poetry!
So why not
attempt to get rich, so I can change poetry anyway? Well, virtually all
rags-to-riches tales involve inordinate amounts of time spent to the $-making
process. When would I have time, in my prime years, to do the best art I could?
There is the rub. Add in the fact that most businesses go belly up. The reason
is not, however, that the majority of flops are less industrious, less
visionary, etc., but that they simply did not have the luck the ‘success’
did. If you read the bio of almost any financial titan you will see that the
person either had some fortuitous once-in-a-lifetime circumstance that
guaranteed victory, or they had a friend or connection or inside tip that
removed randomness from the equation. This is true of Bill Gates, Andrew
Carnegie, Howard Hughes, the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, etc. The common threads
throughout all of these lives is not perseverance, or talent, but luck. The
average person truly has little better shot at getting rich via industriousness
than they do playing the state lottery. The truth is that ‘winners’ in life
are freaks. In the world of poetry I am a freak- simply by virtue of my artistic
success. But, so is an Adrienne Rich or Maya Angelou- it’s just that their
freak status comes from making huge sums of money off of poetry.
Last year
there was a great little film that came out that dealt with the subject of
randomness better than any film since Woody Allen’s ‘Crimes And
Misdemeanors’. The film was Jill Sprecher’s 13 Conversations About
One Thing. The title refers to a small set of characters coming to grip with
that 1 thing- randomness. Most reviewers mistakenly took the 1 thing to be
happiness, but it’s not. Few of the characters seek happiness, but all are
struck by randomness, & all the characters deal with the fallout of that
imp.
For example,
in the film a college physics professor named Walker (John Turturro) is a life
study in opposition to randomness. He constantly strives for order. But, chaos
theory is not his pet. 1 day he is mugged, & he embraces randomness as a
lover (along with a colleague he begins an adulterous affair with). In 1
hilarious scene he thanks his new lover for helping him embrace randomness &
destroy order, then promptly schedules their next tryst for the following
Thursday, same time.
His midlife
crisis has him move out on his wife & buy a sports car. The fellow he buys
it from is a guilt-stricken rising young star in the Manhattan DA’s office.
Troy (Matthew McConaughey) is selling the car as penance for hit & running a
woman he left for dead, despite prior bravado over a need for law & order.
He begins a masochistic assault on his own body & mind to punish himself. In
a world where the rich & powerful can get away with a crime (like he does)
there needs to be punition. & if the cosmos lacks a punitive, or justice,
agent, then he figures he might as well assume the role, to stem chaos &
ensure that randomness is not free to infect all. Yet, randomness works
positively, too. Troy, late in the film, finds out his victim has survived,
& the desire to make amends forestalls his soon-to-be-suicide.
The woman he
hit, Beatrice (Clea Duvall), however, likewise has to deal with the random
nature of things. Why was she hit? Why did a shirt blow out of her hand &
precipitate her running into the street in the 1st place? Before the
accident she had been upbeat & always looking ahead, for things change. She
had survived a near drowning as a child & saw it as a ‘sign’ of her
special nature, not just a series of random events- 1 bad, 1 good. But no good
can be seen from this latest accident. He body is broken, she is reduced to
moving back in with her mother, her job is gone for she has been wrongfully
accused of theft, her co-worker & best friend have drifted apart. Like Troy,
she is near suicide, & wanting to end it all, until 1 day, while ready to
cross a street, at a traffic light she is planning to jump in front of a car,
she sees a very happy man across the way, whose smile buoys her in to believing
that not all is dark & forlorn.
The happy man
is a man the film has shown also is the victim of randomness, but whose
boundless Pollyanna obviates any talk of such a topic. He has a great job as an
office supply salesman, gotten by the guilt of the ex-boss who fired him-
jealous over his happy nature. The happy man, Wade (played by William Wise), was
fired by Gene (Alan Arkin) from his job as an insurance claims adjustor. Even
when fired Wade sees the best side in things & people- never realizing the
disgust & loathing Gene feels toward him. Nor does he reason out that it was
a guilt-ridden Gene who got him his new job with his ex-wife’s husband’s
office supply company. Randomness is not recognized in Wade’s world- his new
job was just a providence he’s not even sure he deserved. But, Gene is not
alone in his misery at the office- another adjustor, after years of abuse from
Gene, up & quits when he hits the lottery (the actual defining metaphor for
the film), only to come back, later, groveling after family, friends, &
moochers leach him of every penny. Gene, too, is eventually down-sized after
hopes of promotion to a vice-presidency vanish. At a bar, with his buddy, he
runs in to Troy, whose sense of purposiveness has yet to be diminished by the
hit & run. Gene regales Troy with tales of the utter chance nature of life,
but realizes it is only those at the other end of the tunnel who will listen,
& by then it’s too late.
As he leaves
the bar, Gene is left pondering of what might have been in his failed marriage
had just a few little things gone differently, of his drug addicted criminal son
who has squandered all the material advantages Gene has slaved years for, &
who rejects him. As he sits lonely on a subway he sees a despairing woman. The
audience knows who she is (Patricia- actress Amy Irving), the cuckolded wife of
Walker, despairing over her failed marriage- ended because of her husband’s
mugging leading him to damn randomness, be unfaithful, & leave a clue to
this in his belongings, that she finds. As he leaves the train all Gene can do
is weakly grimace & pitifully wave to a woman he does not know, & will
probably never see again. Her husband, meanwhile, has ended the affair because
his lover realizes he does not love her- she was just an instrument in his
newfound war on order. Meanwhile, a student of his who seeks order, is rebuked
by Walker, then commits suicide.
The stories
intertwine in a non-chronological fashion, but it all makes sense. What Beatrice
says to a child who asks her why she was hit by the car serves as a de facto
epigraph to those accustomed to the prow of fate, ‘I was in the way.’
Things happen
with no rime nor reason- it’s only the human ability to go on which
retroactively allows for anyone to even tentatively ascribe meaning to them. Why
did I lose a job? Because some boss had a bad day, or did not like me? No matter
how good & hard-working a person is it all comes down to chance, luck,
randomness. Even the making of a movie like 13 Conversations is a hell-mell
process. Its greatness could have been aborted before conception- at any
juncture from a short-sighted ‘suit’, to a poor performance, a mediocre
script, poor distribution, the pullout of funds. That I can reference the film
is, itself, a manifestation of chance.
Rewind the
4.5 billion year history of earth & if any of the countless nanoseconds were
just slightly off I might not exist, or the human race might not, or I might be
a famous film star, or an aardvark! Director Jill Sprecher perfectly
encapsulates that greatest of human fears- not DEATH, but CHANCE- into 1
incredibly poignant, cogent, & literate film which shows that all the
algorithms in the world cannot guarantee that that butterfly which fluttered in
Brazil 60 years ago was or was not the cause of the most recent disaster in your
life, community, or world.
It is
only by accepting that we have so little control over things that real happiness
can come. The cosmos is indifferent & purposeless. Human beings are not. I
will still continue to write as many great poems as I possibly can until death
seizes me, not because it guarantees me influence, but because I am a better
person for the effort. I will still seek to better myself in all respects, not
out of vanity nor a Sisyphan urge, but because it increases the odds for all who
might stumble across my existence to know they are not the only 1s, not the 1st,
to soldier on. Randomness may be the rule, but nothing guarantees that
conformity leads to success, either. No wonder scam artists don’t write books
about that!
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