“Time Trap”
One of my Manly Watch readers emailed me a jpeg attachment featuring a piece of art work by Lior Arditi—“Time Trap.” The setting is a gloomy, hellish forest, limited to various shades of gray and black. In the foreground stand two demons holding scepters with serrated blades. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of similar demons in the background. The center figure, part human, part frog, part alien, but mostly forearm and wrist to host all his watches, lives alone in the forest hell evidenced by his nearby hovel, a carved out hole in a tree full of watch gears.
Let me try to describe this central character, the watch fiend who is crouching to position himself toward an alluring watch—a watch that sits in the middle of the claws of a bear trap. The creature has pallid gray-blue skin no doubt forever covered by the forest’s canopy of darkness. He has oversized feet tapering to frog-like legs and an emaciated torso suggesting his forest environment, while abundant in watches, lacks basic nutrients. In place of a human neck and head is a serpentine forearm attached to which is a huge hand made into a fist with the index finger and pinkie extended like devil horns. Three thick-cased watches adorn the forearm-neck. The fiend also has human arms and hands, also adorned with watches. One of the human hands greedily hovers over the enticing watch and it’s apparent we on the verge of seeing the creature snapped into the jaws of the trap.
My speculation is that the creature finds a way to free himself from these traps but only after cutting and maiming himself severely. Most depressingly, he never learns his lesson. He is caught in an intractable cycle of getting trapped and freeing himself, only to be trapped again, forever and ever.
The Deathbed Test
For Viktor Frankl, the only cure, the only “way out” for the watch fiend is to find a higher purpose. Without meaning and purpose in life, all we have is our vanity. And vanity breaks us down, leaving us alone, empty, and full of regret. To avoid this life of failure, Frankl invites us to imagine being on our deathbeds and summarizing the essence of our existence. He gives an example of a rich, vain woman he conducted this Deathbed Test with in therapy. The thirty-year-old woman whose life has been devoted to her selfish needs imagines herself much older in life as she spends her final moments on her deathbed during which Frankl asks her, “What will you think of it? What will you say to yourself?” The woman says she had an “easy” life in which she was married to a millionaire, yet flirted with other men. She was a tease who squandered her life on vanity and selfishness and self-indulgence and she concludes that her life was a failure.
Would my own deathbed test compel me to reach a similar conclusion? After all, I am vain and I am easily enthralled by luxury items, “manly” watches and deliciously fast cars, to name a couple. How would I sum up my life on the deathbed if asked to do so at this very moment of my life? My deathbed summation would go something like this.
Once I dug my teeth into something, I was like a pit-bull in that I could not let go of my obsession. During my life, I was like this with all things, materialistic things, religious ideas, books, teaching, my own vain body image, my reputation with others, my desire to make people laugh. My obsession too often made me myopic. I’d get too close to things and lose the bigger picture.
My obsessions often caused me take myself too seriously. I was, more often than not, my own worst enemy. Like many people, I fulfilled the description of human folly set forth by the narrator of Jim Harrison’s novella The Beast God Forget to Invent who says “The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.”
On the other hand, my life isn’t completely vain and futile. I’m passionate about teaching. I’m passionate about the mentorship I do every year through the college. I’m passionate about my family’s wellbeing. Perhaps meaning is closer to my life than I give myself credit for. Perhaps the longing for excitement, for meaning, the possible vacuum that I try to fill with watches is mostly in my imagination. I remind myself of those foolish folk singers the Scottish comedian Billy Connolly ridicules who spend all their days and nights singing and whining about their longing to go back home when they fail to realize they’re already home. And who’s to say I wouldn’t desire watches if my life was absolutely brimming with meaning? As Woody Allen and others have said, “The heart wants what the heart wants.”
In other words, I’m not sure if meaning is a cure for my consumer addictions and therefore I’m not sure if I’m qualified to teach Man’s Search for Meaning. I may be a fraud, a vegetarian butcher, after all.
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