August: Osage County

For years I've been hearing my friends sing the praises of a certain Tony award-winning play that I missed during its Broadway theatrical run. I was encouraged to go see it, not just because it was such a wonderful play, but because it takes place in my home state of Oklahoma. Now the play has been made into a film with a dreamlike cast of powerhouse actors, and I finally had the chance to see it last night.

August: Osage County was a masterfully written and beautifully acted story of despair, addiction, self-delusion, alienation, competitiveness, greed, cruelty, perversion, desperation, resentment, lies, secrets, shame, anger, manipulation, betrayal, vengeance, rage, hatred, disease, decrepitude, psychological breakdown, and suicide.

A perfect Saturday night date movie.

Meryl Streep was nominated for yet another Best Actress Academy Award for her performance in this film, and I can't argue with that. She is a force of nature who never fails to impress, and in this film she delivers the goods. The rest of the cast, too, was amazing. The story was well-told, and as someone who grew up in Oklahoma I felt they got the atmosphere right. And the story's inherent bitterness was leavened with just enough skillful black humor to make it possible to swallow the whole pill.

But afterwards I found myself asking: why is it that we are so drawn to such miserable, discouraging, demoralizing stories? Why do we bestow the highest accolades on tales of such utter hopelessness and emotional violence? What is it about them that attracts us so much?

When I was younger, I felt a stronger pull towards these kinds of stories. In high school and college I went through a phase of complete obsession with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a film of comparable emotional violence and hopelessness about the human condition. It was a story that, at that time in my life -- full of youthful anger and rebellion -- resonated for me on a very deep level. It was appropriate to my life stage.

But the older I get -- or maybe it has less to do with my age than with my spiritual practice -- I find myself yearning for stories that demonstrate humans being basically decent and kind to themselves and to each other. I don't long for sugar-coated, Hollywood narratives that look away from conflict or from the darkness within us — for we cannot pretend it isn't there — but I do long for more stories that at least point towards our capacity for stepping into the light and helping others to do so. I'm increasingly turned off by stories that show people dragging everyone around them down into their personal pits of darkness and stabbing them with verbal knives and kicking them when they're down and bleeding.

Rob Brezsny's essay, "Evil Is Boring," very accurately describes "the perspective of many modern storytellers, especially the journalists and novelists and filmmakers and producers of TV dramas…"

"They devoutly believe that tales of affliction and mayhem and corruption and tragedy are inherently more interesting than tales of triumph and liberation and pleasure and ingenuity.

"Using the juggernaut of the media and entertainment industries, they relentlessly propagate this covert dogma. It's not sufficiently profound or well thought out to be called nihilism. Pop nihilism is a more accurate term. The mass audience is the victim of this inane ugliness, brainwashed by a multibillion-dollar propaganda machine that in comparison makes Himmler's vaunted soul-stealing apparatus look like a child's backyard puppet show. This is the engine of the phenomena I call the global genocide of the imagination.

"At the Beauty and Truth Lab, we believe that stories about the rot are not inherently more captivating than stories about the splendor. On the contrary, given how predictable and ubiquitous they are, stories about the rot are actually quite dull. Obsessing on evil is boring. Rousing fear is a hackneyed shtick. Wallowing in despair is a bad habit. Indulging in cynicism is akin to committing a copycat crime.

"Most modern storytellers go even further in their devotion to the rot, implying that breakdown is not only more interesting but far more common than breakthrough, that painful twists outnumber vigorous transformations by a wide margin." — Rob Brezsny

The thing is, I've watched movies about vampires and demonic possession that demonstrated more interest in basic goodness and human decency than August: Osage County. And I'm not saying that makes it a bad film, because it isn't. It's extraordinarily well-crafted and emotionally compelling, and it will probably win at least one Academy Award.

But I guess, like Brezsny, I'm growing bored with narratives that express what he calls a "devotion to the rot" — stories that do nothing but revel in the darkest shadow material and emotional violence that they can possibly dig up (unless, like 12 Years a Slave, they are historical narratives, which have a pedagogic purpose).

I walked away from August: Osage County thinking how important the shadow is in the human psyche, and how we ignore it at our peril — but for God's sake, it's not the sum total of who we are.

Boredom is Unacceptable

I wouldn't say that I'm immune to boredom, but it's not something that I experience much -- and when a feeling of boredom does crop up in my mind, I try to send it packing pretty quickly. For many years -- since long before I started practicing meditation -- I've held a low opinion of boredom and of those people who talk a lot about being bored. Boredom, it has always seemed to me, is a state of almost criminal ignorance, a willful turning of a blind eye to the fundamental truth that what is happening in the present moment is never uninteresting.

I tend to get a lot of suspicious glares and skepticism from fellow Buddhists when I talk about this. Buddhists, apparently, hold the concept of boredom in some kind of high regard. Chogyam Trungpa, the great Tibetan meditation master, spoke about boredom as being a core part of the spiritual path, and described two types of boredom: "hot" boredom, the type that is so strong and uncomfortable that you almost can't sit still, and "cool" boredom, a more realistic mindset that you settle into when you begin to transform and overcome your "hot" boredom through consistent meditation practice.

When I tell other Buddhists that I don't really experience boredom, they look at me as if I were mad, or merely deluding myself. Perhaps, they think, I just haven't really gotten down to the real stuff yet, the nitty-gritty. They look at me with pity and assure me that I'll get there sooner or later. Perhaps they are right. But it has always seemed to me that boredom springs from a state of mind that completely misses the point.

This is not to say that I don't experience what other people might call boredom. I am restless and easily distracted, and the resistance my ego puts up towards practice is sometimes so fierce that even staying on my cushion for an entire session is a battle between two opposing wills within myself. (This is the blessing of group practice: my choices are reduced, and I'm compelled to sit there because I don't want to disturb other people.) I suspect those experiences are what Chogyam Trungpa meant by "hot" boredom. But if I am reluctant to call a duck a duck, it is because I don't see even my most extreme moments of restlessness and resistance as moments of boredom. If I really look at them, even those moments are, in all their hotness and discomfort, fundamentally interesting and mysterious -- even fascinating. How could the question of boredom enter the picture?

Boredom is the little temper tantrum the ego throws when the present moment doesn't satisfy its demands and doesn't provide sufficient entertainment value. It is an inherently childish, petulant emotional state that can operate only when we choose to depreciate and devalue -- which is to say, to ignore -- the moment that is right in front of us. Boredom arises because we think "nothing is happening," but this is a deeply unrealistic and jaundiced view of our actual experience. Each moment of consciousness, whether it meets the demands of the ego or not, has arisen from a complex web of interrelated causes and conditions stretching across the entire universe. It appears before us for this single instant only, and disappears again as quickly as it arose. And it will never be repeated. Never. Boredom can arise only when we are deluded enough to believe that the same moment, the same experience, is repeating itself.

"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it," Alice Walker wrote in "The Color Purple." But isn't this just what we do when we are bored? We fail to notice the beauty and the details of ordinary experience because we distort them with broad, dumb labels and concepts: "Field." "Flowers." When we slow down enough to actually *see* purple flowers in a field, to actually see and take an interest in the details of our experience beyond concept, we find that everything, at all times, is vivid and shocking in being just what it is.

So I'll plant my flag in the ground and state my case clearly; Buddhists can give me all the flack they want, but I'll stick to my guns on this (at least for now). Boredom is a totally unacceptable and frivolous way of relating to our human experience. It's morally repugnant, and it's for dummies. It's time we all grew up and put boredom away, along with our imaginary friends, our belief in Santa Claus, and other childhood coping mechanisms.