Capote's Law

“Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck,” says the Dalai Lama.

Of course it doesn’t feel that way when it happens. I can’t count the number of times in life that I’ve cried and wailed with disappointment when something I wanted failed to materialize, or slipped out of my grasp.

But with time and perspective, I see that in many cases it would have been disastrous for me if things had gone “my way.”

I’m thinking of the college lover whose dream was for us to move to Lagos, Nigeria to teach English. This seemed like a perfectly reasonable life plan when I was a sophomore. I even spent time in the university library teaching myself basic phrases from an Igbo language primer, preparing for life in Nigeria. But it wasn’t meant to be. That relationship soon dissolved, and with it went the dream of moving to Lagos.

“More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones,” wrote Truman Capote. It isn’t difficult to imagine how Capote’s law could apply here. Just look at the kidnapping and murder rates in Lagos, and Nigeria’s attitudes towards gay men, and you start to get a sense of the myriad ways our plans might have gone wrong.

This perspective only came later. At the time, I mourned the loss of that relationship, put away the Igbo language primer, and scrambled to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Not having things work out the way I wanted was a slap in the face, and it stung. But in hindsight, I’m grateful for it. That wasn’t the right relationship for me to be in, and moving to Nigeria to teach English was not in my star chart. Sometimes we need life to give us a compassionate slap in the face to wake us up.

There’s a famous story about an old man who lived on a small farm with his son and a horse. One day the horse ran away and the neighbors came to express their sympathy, telling the farmer, “Oh, that’s so terrible.” The farmer replied, “Maybe.” A couple of days later the horse came back, bringing another wild horse with it. This time the neighbors exclaimed the farmer’s great good luck at getting a new horse. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. The next day, the farmer’s son fell and broke his leg while trying to tame the new horse. The neighbors came again to express their sympathy, but the farmer brushed it off with another “Maybe.” A couple of weeks later, the army came through the village, looking to conscript any able-bodied young men for a new war. The farmer’s son was passed over because of his broken leg, which prompted the neighbors to exclaim the farmer’s great good fortune. “Maybe.”

You get the point. We never really know. What looks at first like good fortune may be setting us up for a disaster, and what looks like bad fortune may be saving us from something even worse. Life brings us to a fork in the road and then forces us down a path we didn’t choose. We shed tears over the road not taken, but later come to see that the path we wanted to take would have led us off a cliff. We can appreciate this lesson because hindsight is 20/20, and time heals old wounds — but in the moment, when we don’t get what we want, we are blinded by disappointment.

Every now and then, it’s good to look back at our disappointments, our misplaced hopes, the dreams that didn’t pan out, and consider the possibility that life was actually trying to bring us something better than what we wanted. “Maybe we even find redemptive value in our apparent lapses,” says philosopher Rob Brezsny. “We come to see that they saved us from some painful experience or helped us avoid getting a supposed treasure that would have turned out to be a booby prize.”

Here’s to booby prizes, to disappointments, to the dashing of misplaced hopes, to the roads not taken, and to the eventual triumphs that come to us only through failure.

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.