Chapter 3
The Soundtrack Inside My Brain
I begin one of my Man’s Search for Meaning lectures by drawing two large circles on the board. One circle begins at the outer margins of the board and goes inward in concentric circles, moving in a centripetal trajectory. The second circle begins in the center and moves outward in a centrifugal direction. I ask the students to choose the circle that best represents the kind of life they desire. Ninety percent of them correctly and instinctively choose the centrifugal circle or what I call the Viktor Frankl Circle. This is the circle of change. You begin at the center of the circle and make a radical transformation so that you can enter newer and newer phases of your existence. I tell my students this is the circle that is made in the overwhelming majority of Hollywood movies. I mention the Star Wars trilogy. We begin with Luke Skywalker who transforms into a Jedi. Americans love centrifugal movies.
The other circle represents stagnation. I call it the Rodney Dangerfield Circle. You begin with certain traits, which don’t change; they merely intensify over time. In other words, you become more and more of the same person you always were, your life path moving in concentric circles as your freedom to break free from the concentric circles dissolves into the abyss.
Hollywood is reluctant to make movies that feature the centripetal direction because Americans don’t go to these movies. Take Leaving Las Vegas in which Nicolas Cage begins the movie as a drunk. By the movie’s end, he is a dead drunk. Movies like that can ruin careers.
I then tell the students I fear I am of the centripetal type. I am a certain way and over time I become a more intense version of my original personality traits. For example, my head is contaminated by a certain kind of musical soundtrack. The soundtrack is pessimistic, self-pitying, melancholy, and defeatist. I dare say it may even have a tinge of the narcissist.
This soundtrack has been playing inside my head for decades and it’s essentially the same three songs, “Alone, Again, Naturally,” by Gilbert O’Sullivan, “Aubrey” by Bread and “Careless Whisper” by Wham. Not only do these songs play inside my head, they become, as my wife calls them, “ear worms,” compelling me to whistle the tunes at all times of the day and night, prompting my wife to tell me to “cut out the crappy soundtrack.” She says the “grating violin of sadness” animates my life and it’s time to replace the old soundtrack with a new one.
I am in complete agreement with her. In fact, it sounds crazy, but there is a part of me that despises these songs. I find them to be pathetic, lugubrious and schmaltzy, unworthy of my musical obsession, unworthy of even being listened to on occasion, yet they exist underneath the fundamental foundation of my psyche and define my self-pitying spirit.
I start thinking about the soundtrack in my mind. It’s been playing so long, I can’t even imagine a better soundtrack out there. Living inside the same soundtrack is a form of imprisonment and blindness. Part of me longs to breath the fresh air of change to my soundtrack or as the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once wrote, “Hope is a new garment, starched and stiff and glittering, but it has never yet been worn.”
The human condition, I tell myself, is people learning how to get rid of their despairing soundtrack and replacing it with a new, hopeful one. To fail to do this is to be doomed to a spiritual death, to become a member of the walking dead.
As I recoil at the thought of becoming one of these defeated ghosts forever walking the earth to their Soundtrack of Death, I think of Viktor Frankl. While in the concentration camps, he saw people become despondent and hopeless, seeing their lives as defined only by survival, a “provisional existence” without meaning. He observed that once a person lost belief in meaning, that person was doomed to falling into a chasm of despair in which there was no reason to endure suffering. For some, it was easier to give up and die in the camps or to commit suicide.
Frankl watched people give up on life and observed his own will to live, based on his conviction that he had meaning: helping others survive in the camps and surviving so someday he could lecture others on the importance of finding meaning, which he indeed did.
The Soundtrack in Frankl’s Mind was one of hope and meaning. Mine is of sadness, desperation, and futility. Could I incorporate the principles in Frankl’s book to change my soundtrack? I teach his book after all. I’ve got kids. I’m married. Don’t I owe it to my students, my children, my wife, and myself to make a soundtrack change? But as I write this, “Careless Whisper” is getting louder and louder. I feel desperate, anxious, nearly too paralyzed to go on.
I hope it doesn't sound schadenfreudian to say that I'm enjoying these chapters.
I couldn't help but think, as I read about your Frankl vs. Dangerfield circles, that we are both, although to what degree differs. Perhaps the key is not to become Frankl over Dangerfield, but to balance the two. I mean, I like the fact that you're morose and melancholic - it gives you character, makes you "real" in the sense of the Velveteen Rabbit, but at the same time we can certainly be happier with who we are.
I personally feel of late that the key, or at least a major--even central--component is what Hillman calls the daimon or acorn, an inner sense of destiny and actualization that is uniquely our own. To the degree to which we embrace and engage the "daimonic," is the degree to which the Frankl circle is alive within us, and the degree to which our life feels meaningful and thus we feel alive, happy, fulfilled.
I'd frame Hillman's daimon/acorn within Maslow's hierarchy of needs, as the need for self-actualization - engagement with one's unique potentials. The other needs are important, too, but when they're basically fulfilled, the self-actualization need aches with a vengeance. A result of middle class ennui, I suppose.
A technical question: would you prefer responses here or on Herculodge?
Posted by: jonnybardo | 02/10/2014 at 08:25 AM
I'm with you on the balance of the two circles. Comments here are fine since is the quest for meaning blob.
Posted by: herculodge | 02/10/2014 at 08:29 AM
Nice little slip there: "the quest for meaning blob." Ha ha.
Feel free to tell me if I become too overbearing or wordy (self-indulgent). I'm probably just writing the words I need to hear, but don't want to drown out your signal with my noise.
Posted by: jonnybardo | 02/10/2014 at 08:37 AM