Life and Meta-life
(January, 2009) A recent conversation with my daughter (herself a mother, for almost two years now) struck me as worth reporting. We were talking about the experience of parenthood – the creation and sponsoring of another life – and about the experience of creating art: dancing for Maya, aikido and writing for me. Maya was comparing the two modes of creativity – the artist's way, and the biological, human way – with reference to Mozart's The Magic Flute, an opera that we both love, that has one couple (Tamino and Pamina) destined for a life of the spirit, and another (Papageno and Papagena) for a life of the flesh. I was reminded of the time after one class when a student asked me: "Sensei, which is more important: Aikido or Life?" I was staggered, of course. At the time, I answered something to the effect that any practitioner of any art has to answer that question for himself. But in recounting that exchange to my daughter, I thought of Socrates' dictum that "The unexamined life is not worth living," which puts the question in a larger and more difficult context. We can speak of life itself – getting conceived and born, growing up, working for a living, raising a family and dying – in the ordinary human way of things. And then we can speak of meta-life – the experience of doing these things, and watching others do them, and transmuting all this into some form of thought or art. And it is possible to argue with Socrates that it is meta-life, the examination and rendering into thought and art that gives blind life its value. But it is also possible to argue the contrary: that Socrates was an intellectual bully and snob, that examination is a retreat and a defence or, at best, just another aspect of life, and that the value of life must be found, if anywhere, in the fact and experience of existence itself. Kicking these thoughts around for awhile, what my daughter and I agreed on was that the arts are demanding, capricious and cruel, that my student's question was poorly phrased but not foolish, that a rich meta-life of whatever kind makes actual life a good deal more difficult, but also more interesting and meaningful, and that people must decide for themselves what kind of price they are willing to pay for the privilege of serving a muse. I discovered Anne Rice while she was still a struggling young writer – before she began to write best-sellers, found God, and lost my esteem. In fact, I discovered her under each of her three pen names – Anne Rice, Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure – and then figured out, before she 'fessed up in public, that all three were the same person. Apart from the similarity of initials, there is a clue in one of her best books, The Vampire Lestat, when the hero, stalking off, "throws his roquelaure over his shoulder." (A roquelaure, as I found out by looking it up, was a kneelength cloak lined with brightly colored silk and often trimmed with fur
that was worn by European men in the 18th century. But the word is sufficiently obscure that its use by two different writers with similar initials and similar themes, seemed unlikely in the extreme.) I mention this episode because Rice's first two vampire novels, Interview With the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat, make brilliant and conscious use of the vampire legend as a metaphor for meta-life. Think about it for a moment: Vampires are creatures of the night, who feed on the energy (symbolically, the "blood") of the living, who enjoy a peculiar, limited immortality, and who become what they are and reproduce their kind only through an exchange of energy-blood with one who is already a vampire. In doing so, they join the ranks of the 'undead,' just like those unfortunate artists who have had to give up almost the whole of their ordinary lives – either to serve their art, or as a consequence of the passion that drove them to be artists, or both. Fortunately, most artists are not called to such complete sacrifice. Caravaggio lived a demonic life and Van Gogh a haunted one. Thomas Chatterton killed himself at the age of 17 before having much of a life at all. But Bach, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Goethe were more-or-less respectable and successful men with normal physical appetites – unless you feel that Michelangelo's homosexuality was abnormal. For women artists it has been harder, at least till recently. Still, there is nothing demonic or haunted that I know of about the lives of Veronica Franco, Jane Austen or Mary Shelley. Frida Kahlo's life was tragic, but not from any flaw or compulsion of character. There are no rules about this matter. Some artists have straddled the tension between life and meta-life with great success. Still, there is no doubt it's a dilemma.